Sheep Guarding Llama

Still working on getting caught up on SGL, but slowly making progress.  It’s Monday today and the car is now getting 35 M/g average over its lifetime.  I can’t believe how well the car is doing.

Normal, quiet day at work.  Came home and just spent time with the family.  Watched Cheers.

Today is our exciting home school trip to the maple sugar farm exhibit day.  It’s Sunday and just us, but Dominica has been wanting to do this as part of a sequence with Liesl so we are treating this as a school day, more or less.

We got up early and were on the road at a good time, probably before nine.  The drive from Frankfort down to Cooperstown is really not very far, under an hour, and is a nice drive through country that I do not know very well.  We drive through the heart of the central Leatherstocking region from time to time but go years between trips.  So that was a nice start to the day and thankfully Cooperstown is on the route back home to Peekskill so it cut our drive for later in the day.

It was a little after ten when we got to the Farmers’ Museum in Cooperstown.  I was surprised that the museum was right in Cooperstown.  I had assumed that it would be out in the country.

The museum was really nice.  It was not expensive as the girls were free.  So only $18 for our whole family and that included our lunch!  The museum has a number of old buildings kind of like a really tiny version of the Genesee Country Museum back home.  It was pretty cold today and extremely windy.  We had thought that it was going to be a little warm but the wind took all of that away immediately.

No one was hungry when we first arrived so we instead started by taking the girls to ride on the Empire State Carousel  which they loved.  They both love carousels.  Luciana has only been on one before at Walt Disney World.  Liesl rode on the one in Montecatini Terme in Tuscany in 2012.  They asked to ride over and over so we did that for a while.

From the carousel we went and ate our lunch, which was really nice.  It was just a cafeteria style breakfast but it was really good.  Pancakes, eggs, potatoes, chipotle mayo sauce and, of course, maple syrup.

We went and learned how maple syrup, and ultimately maple sugar, is made.  That was actually pretty fast but I think that it was good for Liesl.  She and I went and looked at buckets hanging on maple trees to learn where the sap actually comes from, she got to see all the stages of cooking down the syrup.  And we got to eat fresh maple syrup poured right onto snow.

We checked out some of the old buildings and went to see the old farm and the farm animals.  There were chickens, turkeys, rabbits, horses, cows and two young oxen that were nearly arrived.  Then we hit the old fashioned general store where Dominica picked up some candy.

On the way out we stopped by the carousel again.  That was definitely the highlight for the girls.

Before leaving we went to the museum store and got a few things.  Noteably the main items was a  nice book on maple syrup making for Liesl.  We decided that we are going to try to get a book from each museum that we go to to help Liesl make a mental map of her education and remember all of the things that we do.  We already have a nice, similar book from the Lisbon Zoo.  She will build up a library of these from places that she visits.  Since we are homeschooling we will be doing lots of things like this.

Once we left the museum we drove around Cooperstown trying to find gas as the tank was nearly empty.  We were unable to find any way to get gas there and ended up making it all of the way to Springfield before we were able to get gas!  That was a little crazy.  When we did stop we found a weird, all girl gas station on the corner of 80 and 20 (if Aram is reading this hopefully he sees the funny juxtaposition of that intersection) where we fueled up and got a gallon of maple syrup much cheaper than we could back in Cooperstown and less than half the cost of getting it in Peekskill.  It’s cheaper to drive upstate and buy it by the gallon than to buy it back home – the cost savings on one gallon of syrup pays for two or more tanks of gas!

We took the back roads back home through the Leatherstocking southern region and into the Catskill Mountains and past many of those old “Dirty Dancing” style resorts.  It was a nice drive.

Got home in the late afternoon and had time to get some things done around the house and relax a little before calling it a day.  It was a nice weekend and the girls had a great time today.

We all slept in this morning until we were well and rested then it was up and straight out the door.  The drive north was not too bad.  We made the trip well and were up to Frankfort at a good time.

Spent the afternoon just visiting with the family.  I had a lot of posting to do so was on a laptop for much of the day.  The girls were super excited that grandpa went into the attic and found Dominica’s old She-ra toys, of which she had nearly the entire collection, and brought them down for Liesl and Luciana to enjoy.  Dominica had to explain to them all about what the toys were and how they all went together.

This evening we went to the Kitlas for dinner and just back to the house.  Dominica and I took her mother’s new Subaru to dinner to test it out and her parents drove our Acadia with the girls.

I am still really tired today.  I’ve been exhausted for two weeks.  We are going up to Utica this weekend and decided that today we would stay at home tonight so that we could get some sleep and be well rested up and then drive up tomorrow.

Work was busy but good today.  Didn’t get home until late but things went well and we had some time to relax tonight as a family and get to bed at a good time.

We will be on the road as soon as we wake up tomorrow.  I tried getting felafel on my drive home tonight but I was late enough that they had already closed by the time that I got there.

I took the Acadia to the office today. First time that it has moved in a while. We drive it only very occasionally. The Spark is rapidly catching up with it in mileage. Really rapidly.

Overall good day at work today. Very productive and full of good forward movement. I feel like today was a progress towards a slightly lower stress rate.

I left work a little early today, at five thirty, so that I could take the Acadia to get an oil change done. That actually ended up being really easy to deal with doing it on the drive home. As long as I leave just a little bit early I can just stop off on the drive home and there was no wait at all doing it at that time even though I was stopping off, just off of I287, during rush hour. Very handy. We have been needing to get that oil change for a really long time now so I felt very good being able to get that done today. One of those things that has been on my plate for a month. Luckily we never travel so it didn’t matter very much. But we hope to drive up to Utica this weekend so we need the car to be in good shape for the drive.

I got home at a decent time and the drive north along the Hudson was gorgeous and I just felt like going out. So Dominica got the girls ready and I got to the house and loaded up the car with the family and we drove down to the river to go to the Westchester Diner for dinner. Dominica had not really wanted to go out for dinner tonight but the girls both said that they wanted to go get dinner with daddy so she was outvoted.

Liesl, out of nowhere, decided that she wanted shrimp for dinner and since they do not have shrimp on the kids’ menu I got the fisherman’s platter so that she and I could split the meal. This resulted in her getting to try clams too and, surprisingly, she was totally receptive to trying them and declared that she really like them. It has been a while since Liesl has tried anything new. She found them very hard to chew but she liked them. I found that the fisherman’s platter there was amazingly good and one of the best fisherman’s platters that I can ever remember having, anywhere.

Luciana got mac and cheese and Dominica got a veggie burger.

After dinner we just came home and watched a couple episodes of Cheers which, believe it or not, I have mostly never seen. I saw it from time to time when I was young (the show came on in 1982 when I was only six, just barely older than Liesl) but it never caught my interest enough for me to actually sit down and really watch it and I do not remember my parents being much of a fan so I think we only ever saw it when nothing else was on and never made a point of watching it. It is a decent show, I like it. But it isn’t good enough to rivet me to the television.

Got the girls off to bed at a moderate time and read another chapter of “A Horse and His Boy” and Dominica and I even managed to get off to bed ourselves around eleven which was really needed as I have been getting more and more tired recently.