Sheep Guarding Llama

Monday and back to work. I was really exhausted getting up this morning after having worked so hard over the weekend and especially yesterday. I was really dragging this morning.

On my commute I am now reading Jules Verne’s “Journey to the Center of the Earth”, translated to English of course. So far I am really enjoying it. His writing, at least the English translation of it, is really approachable.

Work felt long and stressful today. It really was not a bad day, just a tough one. Kind of a “blue” day, possibly more related to feeling worn out than to anything that happened during the day. I am easily affected by outside influences and little things can make me have a “blue” day rather irrationally.

I did not leave until late and got home at eight. Dominica had plenty of work queued up for me. We had to prep the mattress for someone to be able to take it tomorrow, do some cleaning in the living room, head up to the attic with more cardboard, etc. Probably an hour of getting unpacking work done around the house.

Dominica took the time yesterday to put our older queen mattress and bed up on Freecycle. She got some hits today so we are hoping that someone will come and get that soon. It is really a pretty decent mattress still and a lot of people pay a lot of money for memory foam mattresses like these. It is still better than most peoples’ beds these days.

We were far enough along today that, for the very first time since we got into the house, we were able to run the Roomba (robot vacuum cleaner) on part of the house. Dominica turned it loose in the girls’ room (the guest bedroom this week) and the hallway. It feels great to be able to do that. It is like we have been fighting a battle and have claimed a small amount of space, some territory that is now ours again. I think that the entire upstairs might be Roomba-able tomorrow.

The girls really enjoyed Star Wars yesterday and today requested that we watch the next one. So we watched most of The Empire Strikes Back, although it was not as exciting for them as Star Wars and Luciana just played with her toys while snuggling on my lap and did not pay attention to the movie at all and Liesl was easily distracted during it. We ended up not being able to quite finish it as we were all very tired and the girls were not able to concentrate enough to make it through the movie. I remember being very young and having a tough time staying with Empire too until I was older. The Hoth scenes are gripping but after that the bulk of the movie is not action. But I think that Liesl will really love Return of the Jedi. That was, by far, my favourite movie when I was seven. It has so much more action and is so much easier to follow than the first two.

We put the girls to bed and I read to them the final chapter of “The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.” That means that tomorrow night we will be starting book four, “The Silver Chair” which is my favourite of the “main line” of the Narnia books. Dad will be able to join us for that. We should, if we stick to it, be able to read all of it while he is visiting.

It is awesome that our girls are now, finally, at the age where they are getting exposed to awesome literature, like the Chronicles of Narnia, and great cinematic literature, like Star Wars. And, to some degree, their video game literature as well.

Dad spends the day tomorrow on the train. He is taking the Lake Shore Limited, number 48, from Rochester to Croton-on-Hudson and should, if the train is on time as is never the case, arrive around six in the evening. The girls are very excited.

Today is our big unpacking day. Not that a lot has not been done already this week but the living room was still a forest of boxes this morning and the upstairs hallway was impassable between the old queen mattress and the load of cardboard still in the hallway. We slept in a little and when Dominica and I got up we set about to a full day of serious unpacking. We were energized and ready for the task before us.

I would venture to say that today was the most productive unpacking day that Dominica and I have ever had. There was so much to be done and we tore through the pile of boxes like nobody’s business. I moved nearly all of the boxes of books down to the basement. That alone was a lot of exercise. We opened nearly all of the boxes and learned where everything was. Much of what we were searching for we were able to locate. We are missing very little at this point. The one really big item that we know has gone missing, and we knew this while still in Texas, is my black camera bag that, sadly, has one of my lenses in it and the remote for the camera and, possibly, the GPS unit for it. It is a major loss as it was a really nice bag as well. We have no idea where it might have gone. It went missing not long before we started packing in Texas and our only guess is that somehow it got moved out to the garage and then, accidentally, packed into a box and taken up to the attic. We have come up with no other theory for its timing of disappearance and everyone has been on the lookout for it starting a bit before the packing began there.

We tracked down the Netgear ReadyNAS that we use in the house for our movie and music collection. We have been hoping to find that soon. That is one of the major pieces of technology that we use around the house. We have been using the Synology-based IOSafe for a while but that is going to move to the Ralstons’ soon now that we have the smaller ReadyNAS available for use at the house. We have hundreds of movies ready to go on our ReadyNAS and, from time to time, like to make use of them as there are many more awesome movies there than there are on services like Netflix. With the girls getting older we want them to have access to more really good media so having that is important. I think that really soon I am going to need to acquire larger drives for the ReadyNAS. I can’t remember how much storage it has, either two or three terabytes, which would be pretty amazing considering how old that unit is. Three terabytes is still very large for a drive purchased today. I hope to upgrade it to six terabyte drives soon because we use so much storage in the house.

We must have gone through half of all of the boxes. The house was totally transformed. Liesl and Luciana went down to the basement early in the morning and set up camp there. They have the room just full of toys, as they usually do, but are just crazy excited about the new boxes of toys that get delivered down from time to time. It is like Christmas for them. They keep finding things that they have not seen in months. They are having a grand time. Liesl was trapped in the basement for much of the morning because her skin got dry and her baby toe split open on her. I put on Neosporin and a bandage and she sat on the black couch in the basement for many hours playing with toys there. She had me bring her a newly discovered box of toys and set it at her feet so that she could explore it without getting up.

So the girls were great about being out of the way today. They did very well. Later on in the day the two of them came upstairs and played games hiding in amongst the boxes.

We got enough moved around that we were able to move the side board table over to where it is going to go in front of the white couch. That allowed us to start using both it and the television stand upon which it had been setting since first we unloaded the truck.

Dominica did tons of work in the kitchen. She reorganized everything and packed up things that we know that we will not use in this house and got them ready for attic storage.

After a full day of serious work we decided to take a break, hook up the ReadyNAS and finally let the girls watch Star Wars which Liesl has been looking forward to seeing for a while. Everyone was very excited about that. They settled in to start watching it and I took the opportunity of a quiet house to move the cedar chest up to our bedroom, another major unpacking win.

The girls both loved Star Wars. They thought that it was great fun. Liesl is just barely the age that I was when I first saw it too, I believe. She might be one year older, I am not sure. I know that by age six I had watched it twenty-four times! Liesl struggled to follow the story some but overall did pretty well.

After the movie Dominica and I decided to move the big, corner desk up to our bedroom and assemble that. We have been trying to figure out what to do both about the desks that we have and about what to do with the space in our bedroom for a while. But it has become apparent that having the basement as the only serious work space is not going to work at all. I need a means of escaping when I need to work and the basement is the movie area and the girls’ primary play space. So having that be where I can go to work conflicts with the general usage of the house. And not having another work area is a waste of the resources that we own too since I have a very nice desktop computer and a pair of excellent monitors that, if not used there, will simply go to waste. So we gave up on trying to keep a computer out of our bedroom and are putting my desktop there and leaving Dominica’s down in the basement. For the moment I will only have wireless access up in our bedroom but hopefully soon we can run some wiring and have CAT5e run up there too. The house needs updating with new wiring anyway just to modernize it.

We talked about it and we think that, once the bedroom computer is set up, we might add a television in our bedroom since all of the electronics to support it will already be installed there and in the perfect place for a television too. We might as well take advantage of the situation rather than ignore the possibility. It is just too easy to install it once everything else is done. My computer will have the speakers there already as well. So really ideal.

By the end of the night both bedrooms were in great shape. The girls’ dressers were in place and their closet cleaned up. Our room is nearly ready, although the electronics have not been brought up yet. The house is really coming together. It is starting to feel like we really live here and we can see the possibilities once again. It has been a rough four months, to be sure.

It is the weekend. Dominica and I did some light unpacking today, it is hard to get into the groove of getting that done. There is just so much to do and the house is so full of stuff that every time you turn around you are cornered by other boxes.

This morning Dominica had a salon appointment, her cruise is only a few days away, and then she went shopping as we were getting desperately low on groceries and supplies. So she was gone for several hours while I hung out with the girls.

We watched some Keeping Up Appearances this afternoon. Dominica had been wanting to watch that because we love the “cruise” episode where they take a Baltic cruise on the Queen Elizabeth 2. It is probably the most classic episode of that show. We watched three episodes while the little girls played quietly over on the side of the room together. They were so adorable. We are loving that Luciana is now old enough that she completely takes part in the imaginative play that Liesl has always done and the two of them play together in ways that I never played at all. They will spend hours in some game together with their toys in near silence. If you listen, however, you can hear the murmur of conversation as they act out scenes with the toys.

The girls got restless and requested that we play Deponia again tonight. Both girls enjoy it. Luciana might ask for it more often than Liesl does, in fact. So I agreed to play with them and we put in a few hours doing that. Luciana got tired, though, and had to be put to bed early on her own. Dominica was feeling tired too so she went to bed. Liesl should have gone to bed then but we determined that there was only about one hour left in the game and she really wanted to play it. So I stayed up with her and we managed to get to the end of the first title in the Deponia series.

Overall Deponia was nowhere near as good (or as long) as The Night of the Rabbit, but the girls still enjoyed it and want to play more. Liesl and I looked at some of the other games that we have ready and waiting for her and she is interested in many of them but she wants to stick with Deponia for now and we already own the second one in the series, Chaos on Deponia. So we will start that one soon, but maybe not until after dad has visited.

It is Friday! It was a busy day in the office, meetings galore. I managed to leave the office at a really good time today, though. On the drive home I finally finished reading Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita” ready by Jeremy Irons via Audible. I am trying to fill in my background in classic literature of which this is one of the most famous. It is certainly well written and an impressive work although I am unable to establish a clear opinion of it. Creepy and weird but well written. There is much about it that is difficult to ascertain if it is a style of the author that is poor or the author’s excellent portrayal of the insane fictional author through whose lens the writing is skewed. Much of the result sounds, to modern ears, like a pretentious French version of Dora the Explorer with pointless lapses into French for no added value other than to point out the ability to say single words or phrases in another language. Let’s go. Vamanos.

I had a few minutes after finishing that book so started reading “Journey to the Center of the Earth” which, from a quick listen, sounds like it is going to be a good book. I have never read any Verne so am very interested to see how it is.

I stopped at the deli on the way home, which has become a custom, and got our falafel for dinner. I got home and we watched Doctor Who with the girls before reading “The Voyage of the Dawn Treader” and going to bed.

Our weekend will be filled with unpacking. We need to get a lot of it done as dad is coming on Tuesday to stay for the week. Dominica leaves on Thursday for her cruise to the Bahamas with Katie. A busy week for us.

It is Thursday. Due to the very heavy snow fall, yesterday was a “snow day” and I worked from home, my first time doing so since coming up here. It worked pretty well. Today the sun is bright and while it is still quite cold there has been no new snow and it should be fine to drive into the office.
I got outside early and worked to clear the car. This proved to be a monumental effort. I got the car started early to warm it up but the snow was six to eight inches thick encasing the car and that snow itself was encased in solid ice. I spent at least half an hour trying to get the car clear. I was in and out of the house repeatedly both warming up and getting two liters of hot water at a time to bring out and pour on the car. The snow was so thick and the ice so solid that even pouring that onto the windshield did effectively nothing to clear the car. I used just gallons and gallons of hot water and was still digging through inches of solid snow that was not budging on the car.

Having a Wednesday be our snow day was awesome. A nicely broken up week with only two days in the office on either side. A nice change of pace. The kids really enjoyed that, getting a surprise day with daddy midweek.

The drive in and back were fine today. No problems at all.

The weather was nice the rest of the day and it was clear and crisp this evening. I arrived home at eight to the two little girls waiting for me right in the doorway. They get so excited when I get home.

Tonight was a snuggling night. We all camped out on the couch and finished watching the first half of the seventh season of Doctor Who, up until the end of the episodes with the Ponds. Then it was off to bed with the girls at ten (yes, my evening lasts only two hours) and I read them a chapter in “The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.” We are nearly to the end of it. Only a day or two left.