Sheep Guarding Llama

Tuesday. It is warm today. It was warm yesterday, too.

This morning was decently busy with work. I ended up talking to an old friend, Phillip, that I have not seen in a few years. We decided to get together for a beer this afternoon after work.

So I had a lot of work to do during the day to make sure that I was caught up and ready to be able to be out for the evening. Rodrigo is feeling sick, so we are already a bit short.

Dominica helped me to clean up the DVD cases that we have in the living room from my huge project two days ago. Once she went through all of the empty cases and verified that they were, in fact, all empty, then I took them all outside and put them into the recycling bin. The bin had been completely empty and I wheeled it up to the house to make this easier and we completely, and exactly, filled one bi-weekly recycling bin to the top with just the DVD cases. This means that if we were to do all of the DVDs, all at once, into the binders (if we had them to do it with) then it would take about two to three months of every single garbage pick up for recycling just to haul away the containers. And that is just the containers. We would have no means of putting out any normal recycling trash that entire time! And under normal conditions, we don’t have enough capacity for our recycling as it is. The only reason that we are able to keep up in any way whatsoever is because we have the fire pit thing in the atrium and Paul religiously burns anything close to cardboard, paperboard, or similar Before he did that, we were always falling farther and father behind.

I got ready at three and headed out the door at three thirty to get up to The Colony where I thought that Phillip and I were meeting at the Lava Cantina. On the way there, I drove up the center of Austin Ranch. I do not believe that I have been there before. What a great area. Too expensive, but it would be so cool to have a house there. Great location.

I got to the Lava Cantina when we figured out that our signals had been crossed and he was at Tight Ends in Plano. So I ran up there and met him at a quarter after four. We split some nachos y queso. I had some Pacifico. Not a great night for my diet. But I did not eat anything all day, so I at least had some calories available to work with. Between the two of us we didn’t finish the chips and queso, so only so bad. And Pacifico is kind of light.

We hung out for a while and had a very good time. Lots of potential business to discuss in the upcoming days.

On the way home I drove down Hebron and stopped at The Halal Guys to get a falafel gyro. I just got it to go and headed back home. This is actually my first time ever eating at The Halal Guys. Pretty close to home, an easy place to stop sometimes. I miss having falafel, good to know that there is a nearby option. Not as good as the food truck in Austin, but it helps with the cravings.

It was almost nine when I got home. Dominica ran to the airport to pick up Paul just before ten. He has been traveling all day from Medellin. They stopped for some McDonald’s on the way home, Paul was craving American food.

Paul got home around eleven. We all hung out for just a little while. He got Dominica a Colombian purse. I got a book about neighbourhood thirteen in Medellin in Spanish. The girls got beaded bracelets with their names on them.

I ended up doing some more work until rather late. Luciana wanted me to read her some of “Squirrel Girl” before bed, so we got a couple of chapters in.

Monday. Today is my forty third birthday. And I am on a diet. So no dinner plans or cake or anything for me.

I worked during the day. A pretty normal work day, a little slow.

This evening around five thirty, for my birthday, we tried going out to a restaurant that looked good up in Little Elm, where we were interested in looking at houses. We did a drive up Josey, all of the way up through The Colony, through Frisco, up to 380 in The Colony. Traffic was horrible. We really experienced rush hour in the northern towns and it was so much worse than we would have guessed. I had no idea that Josey backed up for more than twenty miles! They need a highway running up this way.

We made it all of the way to Crosspoint before it got dark. Then we turned south onto the peninsula in Lake Lewisville and drove south until we got to El Dorado then west east over the bridge to Little Elm downtown. We stopped at a plaza on the Frisco side to try to get some fancy tacos, but it turned out that there was absolutely nothing that Dominica could eat there. She and the kids were starving, so to make things simple we just drove back home and picked up Taco Bell on the way there and ate that at home.

We managed to drive around and see a lot of areas where I am interested in houses, and see how the areas connect through the bridges, how long it takes to get around, what shopping and dining options are like there. Dominica agrees with a lot of my ideas about where houses seem to be a good idea for us. Where we can get the space, what the communities are like, where we would be located compared to now and so forth.

Tonight the girls wanted to watch Camp Rock. Luciana had been asking about it for a week and we had just found it while cleaning out the garage last night. While the girls watched the movie, I did some walking in the house to get exercise. Dominica recommended walking back and forth in the house while carrying weights. It seemed to work pretty well. I did around seven thousand steps this evening.

Sunday. Today was just a very chill day. Slept in until quite late. The kids wanted to hang out and play this morning. So spent most of the morning with them.

Dominica and I spent a bit of time today talking about the housing ideas that I came up with yesterday. I went on Zillow and researched pricing and options and communities. It is looking like Little Elm, Frisco, Aubrey, and The Colony are the most interesting areas. And the prices seem to be okay. A real consideration. We could have so much more space, and we really need it.

This afternoon, Dominica wanted Indian food. So she made homemade paneer, and baked homemade naan. Kristen helped out in the kitchen and after a few hours they had made a full batch of completely from scratch paneer tikka masala with loads of homemade naan and everything. Healthy and filling. It was probably 1100 – 1200 calories for me, but my only meal of the day. So pretty good. And most importantly, it was really filling. So filling that I never got hungry for the entire day.

We watched The Goonies while we had dinner. Liesl tried watching with us and made it about half of an hour but felt that it was too boring and broke our hearts and did not want to finish watching this great, classic movie with us. I have not seen The Goonies for many years. But we watch it from time to time. Such a good movie.

My new DVD case that holds four hundred DVDs arrived from Amazon this afternoon. It is the silliest thing but I am so excited about this. The garage is full of DVDs and I cannot stand how much space it all takes up. So as soon as Amazon delivered the DVD case, I started taking DVDs out of their cases and putting them into the new binder. I did this for about two hours.

I managed to take five DVD boxes out of the garage and get them into this one binder. And I had enough space left over in it that I was able to gather up all of the loose DVDs that I could find in the garage and put them in it too. And still enough space left over to take about half of the DVDs that are on the shelves in the book shelf in the living room area. The impact on cleaning up the garage was huge, and this is just the beginning.

Now that we know that these cases work and are really effective, we will be getting them regularly. I am probably going to need four more of these, but that is okay. They will take half of the garage and make it fit easily on a single shelf somewhere. I cannot believe how well this worked. Such a good idea.

I had a lot of driving to do this evening. But I took the chance having to be on the road to check out several neighbourhoods. I looked at a lot of Frisco, Little Elm, and The Colony. I stopped at CVS and picked up a few things. Then checked out the El Dorado area of Little Elm and went back home.

I really like the western El Dorado area. It seems almost perfect.

Saturday. Today is Rachel’s twenty ninth birthday and Ana-Maria’s seventeenth.

Brian Watson called this morning and asked me to come to a dinner party at his place tonight. Dominica will have to stay home with Liesl and Luciana as Paul is still in Medellin, Colombia and so we have no babysitter.

Today is day two of Dominica and I are on our diets. Watching calories today, within reason (since I have the dinner party tonight.)

Early this afternoon we went out for a walk to get our exercise in. It was great weather for a walk. We almost had to stop because Dominica’s instep was hurting, but I showed her how to stretch her foot and after that she felt better and was able to walk. So we got a full walk in.

We went to WinCo to go grocery shopping and stocked up on what we needed and got supplies to do baked potatoes for a late lunch.

Once home we got right to cooking jacket potatoes. They were delicious. I had been wanting them since last night and the girls even requested them today. So that was great. It has been a while since I had one. Sadly we could find no chives in the house.

By the time that the potatoes were eaten it was later than I had planned and I had to run out to get up to Sherman and pick up Kristen because I was giving her a ride to Watson’s for his dinner party. Dominica wanted to go but Paul is not in the country so we have no one to watch the kids. The drive up to Sherman always takes forever.

It was a long, long drive through the middle of nowhere to get from Sherman to Little Elm up on the lake to Watson’s house.

It was eight thirty when I got to Watson’s house. I’ve not been here in a year or two, I’m not sure when the last time was, maybe the fourth of July party when the girls got to set off some fireworks.

It was a small crowd tonight, just a dozen people or so. Brian was just getting the grill set up when we arrived. He did brats, chicken, and salmon for me (although secretly he wanted salmon too, I was more of an excuse.)

We hung around outside for a while, but it was rather cold. A bit hard to be outside for very long.

Dinner was nice and got to meet some new people. Hung around till about midnight.

On the drive back home via Little Elm I got to see a lot of new construction and developments gonig on in that area that I have not seen in years. It is really coming along up there and looks way more interesting than it did not too long ago.

I am starting to think that maybe the big houses up north might not be such a bad idea. I wonder what the kids would think about that. The prices up north are far lower than down where we are. I had not realized that Little Elm had such nice areas.

Friday. Very rainy this morning.

I had an eleven thirty lunch meeting at Pappadeaux on Frankfort so that made for much of my morning schedule to make sure that I am making it to that. So, of course, day two on the diet and I’m going to a very heavy seafood restaurant. Maybe that was not good planning.

I had to get ready at ten thirty and was out the door by a quarter after eleven. So that was my morning, pretty much. I got to Pappadeaux right at eleven thirty and the guys were already there. They got alligator as an appetizer and I ordered the half shrimp po boy along with a bowl of crawfish bisque for my lunch. That was definitely more than enough food for me for the entire day! But boy was it delicious.

We worked there until it was one forty five and Dominica needed me to get back home so that she could use the minivan to take the girls to the movie theatre where they are going to see How to Train Your Dragon 3 with Isabella and Juancho. I got home right at two, when they needed the car, and just left it running and they hopped in and off they went.

This gave me a couple of quiet hours at home to work in silence.

I ordered a four hundred DVD binder from Amazon today. We are going to test out this mammoth binder approach to see if it will work to consolidate all of the boxes of DVDs that we have everywhere. In theory it is supposed to hold a full four hundred in one binder. If that works, I assume it will take four or five binders to hold the collection. Then they can be packed into plastic and stored without taking up so much space. But four hundred seems impossible, so I am waiting to see if it really works. To me it seems like it would be impossibly large. But no matter what, we need some solution to the garage full of boxes and soon.

Dominica and I went for a walk this evening. We are trying to get into the walking habit. We need regular exercise if this diet is going to work. Nothing crazy, just a loop around the neighbourhood to give us thirty minutes or so of walking time.

I made the girls pasta for dinner. Dominica and I had eggs. Pretty simple meals. Dominica and I are trying calorie counting as a diet plan now. I weighed in this morning, so we will see how this works compared to other things that I have tried.

Brian Watson called, he is hoping to visit Nicaragua in April. We probably talked for almost an hour. He has a 311 Cruise in a couple of weeks that he is going on. Then if he can, a week in Nicaragua. Then, hopefully, he will be attending MangoCon in Irving in May.

Liesl and I watched Castle in the Sky. She has never seen this one, and I have not seen it in a really long time. I have been wondering which Studio Ghibli film it was that had some of these scenes and somehow I had completely forgotten this movie from a title and subject perspective, but once we started watching it, it came back to me pretty quickly. This is one of the really good ones.

Luciana joined us and we watched an episode of Full House before going to bed.