Sheep Guarding Llama

Dominica is still recovering from her trip this weekend.  We spent our time just relaxing.  We’ve been very busy with so much that I am just falling farther and farther behind on SGL.

We noticed that Liesl’s tooth, which had fallen out, is coming in today.  We can see her first adult tooth!  Very exciting.  She is growing up so quickly.

Normal Friday at the office.  Relatively uneventful day.  On my way into the office this morning my gas mileage average improved again and I am now getting 34.8 MPG average over the entire lifespan of the Spark!  I am so impressed.

I got to not rush too much this morning.  I was on a special project all day at the office today which, like yesterday, made for a nice change of pace.  Nothing of particular interest today, but overall a decent day. A really long one, though, by the end of it.

I did not get to leave work until quite late and on the way home I had to stop off at Walmart to pick up Liesl’s chocolate milk drink as she had run out of it and that is the bulk of her food supply, still. In reality, while it seems kind of annoying, I think her fortified health drink addiction is probably awesome as it keeps her on a steady, incredibly healthy diet all of the time. Her other food can vary dramatically but as long as we stay steady on that she is getting a well rounded, vegetarian, very healthy base of nutrition.

Luciana was not listening well tonight and ended up getting sent to bed nearly an hour before I managed to get to the house which was not until after nine! Very late. We watched one episode of “The Mindy Project” with Liesl and then one more while she was getting herself ready to go to bed.

I read Liesl a chapter of “The Silver Chair” and she was off to bed.

Had to get up early this morning, heading out to a farther office today and need to stop by my desk first to pick things up. So my drive in was long today. I was in the office before eight and then out to the other one by eight thirty. It was a nice change of pace. Being at the other office means spending the first part of the morning doing “meet and greets” with some of my clients and then did a project with them until the middle of the afternoon. So a completely different day than my “every day” work which was really nice. Even though I probably did a lot more work than an average day today, it was completely fresh and different and that made it a lot more fun and relaxing.

I was over at the alternative site until two in the afternoon. Then back to my office where I had a few meetings and a very busy rest of the day.

I got home and Liesl and Luciana were busy playing with their Lego blocks. Liesl has had some Lego house kits since long before we left Texas but they were always too hard for her. Dominica worked with her today on them and she had a whole Lego setup going in the living room that she played with all evening.

Dominica and I talked about cruise options. She really wants to take the girls on a cruise sometime and we were trying to figure out how that would make sense and when we could do it. We are thinking that maybe a cruise to the Lesser Antilles would work. So much Caribbean cruising is just lame. We want to go to interesting places.

The evening flew by. All we did was discuss cruising and watching one episode of “The Mindy Project.” We got the girls off to bed later than we had intended, being after ten. I read “The Silver Chair”. I think that this story is harder for the girls to follow and is losing their interest. I am not sure but I don’t think that Liesl is keeping up with the story like she did with the last ones.

Liesl was sneaky and climbed into bed with Dominica and I around midnight after Luciana had fallen asleep and after we were too tired to make her go back to her room.

I got up around five thirty. We went to bed so early last night that I managed to sleep well and still get up at a good time. I showered and got ready to go to work. I heard something around seven from the girls’ room so I went in there and discovered Luciana awake watching “Blues Clues” on the iPad. They went to bed so early last night that this was not surprising.

I told Luciana “You know, Liesl is snuggling with mommy, you can go snuggle with her too.” And she said, in the cutest voice, “I can?” and so she ran in there to spend the morning. Then when she saw me getting ready for work she asked “Why are you getting dressed?” and I explained that I had to go to work and she got all sad.

Dad was already up when I went downstairs. I went right outside to warm up the Spark and to begin cleaning off the Acadia which has been encased in ice for a week. I can’t remember the last time that it actually moved. The ice was so thick on it. Dad came out to help me after five or ten minutes and we spent at least forty-five minutes together trying to get the car free. It was seriously stuck in the ice. The one entire side was ice from ground to roof and most of the way down the other side. There was no approach to the front of the car. It was really something.

I finally got off to the office much later than I had planned and on the way in finished reading “The Moon By Night” which, like the other books in the serious, I have not read in two and a half decades. Next up will be “The Young Unicorns.” I am really tearing through my backlog of Audible titles with this really long commute.

The drive in was fine until I hit the Connecticut line. Then the roads got really slippery. By the time that I was in the office the snow was coming down very thick. That probably lasted for two hours.

Dominica took dad to the train station for Amtrak at Croton-on-Harmon at ten for his Amtrak Empire Service train 281 to Rochester. Official departure time was 11:06. If all goes well he is due to get to the Rochester station at 4:59PM although that is very unlikely. The train was on time getting him this morning but it is always on time northbound this far south in the Hudson Valley. Our stop is only the first one outside of Penn Station in Manhattan.

Dad had all kinds of train issues today. Before he even got to Albany the engine of his train just “lost power.” The engine died and they were stranded. He had to wait for another train to come “rescue” them and carry them on home. So instead of an empty train he ended up on a very full one.

But that was not the end of dad’s train troubles for the day. Shortly after he got moving again, a cargo train ran a red light and preempted them on the rails delaying them even more.

Danielle came down to New York City last night. She was supposed to come down today but the weather got bad and she had to take a quick flight down last night. Originally she had thought that she would probably stay with us but she decided to just grab a hotel in SoHo last night and tonight so we did not see her.

Dad eventually made it home. It was a very long day on the train for him. Dominica is completely exhausted and the ground is still moving for her.