Sheep Guarding Llama

I slept in a little this morning and was a little later than usual going into the office.  I almost had to go straight to a lunch meeting (it was an early lunch.)

Lunch was at Mediterrano, one of the best restaurants in town.  The food was amazing.  Best meal that I have had in a long time.

Very little news for today.

The temperature dropped more than fifty degrees last night. It was fifty four yesterday and this morning when I checked it was just one degree! It was up to three degrees when I got into the Spark to head to the office. I had to let the car run for quite a while to make sure that it was warm enough to drive. Liesl was up super early so she came down and hung out while I was getting ready for work. She prefers to get up before I leave so that she can give me a hug and a kiss before I go to work.

Even though it was incredibly cold, the roads were thankfully clear. No ice had formed even after the full day of rain yesterday and there is no snow being this cold. The skies are completely clear and there is even bright sun today, all day.

Today ended up being a crazy long day for me in the office.  I had an offsite presentation to attend this evening, that was very interesting, that went until almost seven thirty.  Then, directly from there, I was pulled into a production issue meeting and was stuck, at a more distant location than usual, until nine thirty tonight.  After leaving, even with the light late evening traffic, it was nearly eleven before I was able to get back to the house.

Dominica let the girls stay up just long enough to get to see me before going to bed.  They were all ‘jammied up and ready for bed when I got there.  We got maybe twenty minutes together for them to wind down then I took them upstairs and tucked them in, reading the first two chapters of C.S. Lewis’ “Prince Caspian”, which I like better than “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.”  Liesl fell asleep almost immediately as I started the second chapter.

Once the girls were in bed it was straight to bed for me.  I literally walked right from their room to ours and right into bed.  I did not even read any of my book tonight, just laid down and was asleep pretty quickly.

It is so warm here today. Fifty four degrees today. I can’t believe it. It rained all night and it feels like a cool late spring day today. Going outside to head to work it was so warm that even standing in a pretty solid raid you did not need to be wearing a jacket! Absolutely crazy.

I am back on a strict diet today. Time to get back in shape.

Dominica said that Liesl played her 2DS most of the day. She has several new games for it that she got for Christmas. One of them, that she started playing yesterday, she actually completed today! One day, she beat an entire video game in a single day. And then she started playing through it again. Pretty impressive considering that she is under the age recommended for the game.

I had a pretty solid day of work. On the way home I finished “A Swiftly Tilting Planet” and started reading “Jefferson’s War: America’s First War on Terror 1801-1805” which covers the First Barbary War which was one of the very earliest U.S. military actions. It is one about which I know absolutely nothing so it is pretty interesting reading.

I got home and Liesl was very insistent that she get to play “The Night of the Rabbit” because we did not get a chance for her to play it yesterday. So I spent the entire evening down in the basement with her. Luciana came and went. Dominica worked with her with the Nintendo 2DS to find games that she would be able to play.

Liesl did really well on “The Night of the Rabbit” tonight. She only needed help from me from time to time. She can navigate her way around and knows where everything is so well. She does puzzles and exploration and has conversations all without me. I just sit on the couch and kind of pay attention and from time to time look up something that she might need to do. We are really excited that there is a “dewdrop” thing in this game, kind of like the gargoyles in Fable 2, where there are one or two of these tiny, almost impossible to see dewdrops on each screen that you can collect. I found one and after that Liesl has been amazingly good at finding them on her own. She is loving going around collecting them.

Tonight I read, and finised, “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” for the girls. They really liked it and are looking forward to starting the next book in the series tomorrow. This is so much more fun than reading the little kids stories that we used to do. Now we get to have a story that goes from night to night and is real literature that we can discuss.

Bed early for me today. I was a little tired.

Dominica made one of the famous vegetarian chorizo breakfast scrambles today. That was really good.

The “big project” today for Dominica was working on assembling all of the new storage furniture down in the basement. We have a lot of new places to store the girls’ stuff. We really need it as the house is a disaster with all of the toys all over the place and we have not even moved our stuff from Texas yet! We have no idea what we will do once all of that stuff arrives here which is only about one month away at this point. This helped quite a bit. The house is not so full of toy sprawl as it was. We need a lot more shelves and cubby holes and storage units though. This is just a small start.

Dominica made dinner and while we ate we watched two episodes of the third season of Melissa & Joey which, I was surprised to find, Luciana really liked and asked to keep watching more. After we were finished watching, though, Luciana decided that she was tired and crawled up into Dominica’s lap and fell asleep there. She had been saying that she was tired and wanted to go to bed for much of the day so I guess that she was not kidding. We put her to bed very early.

Once Luciana was in bed, Liesl and I made a fire and brought out the Kindle and did story time for quite a while. Liesl said, “I love that thing that has the stories in it.” I was confused but then figured out that she meant my Kindle, which is where I have The Chronicles of Narnia downloaded. This is the first that I have read to her using something other than a normal, old-fashioned paper book.

It was very cozy reading by the fire. Liesl sat right beside me as I read for easily an hour or more. Dominica sat on the couch listening too. Liesl went and got her Lego kits that she had been putting together with me yesterday. This is just like how it was when I was Liesl’s age. My mom reading The Chronicles of Narnia and me playing with Legos.

After we put Liesl to bed I finished reading “The Arm of the Starfish” and loaded my Kindle up with the next two books in the series and started the first chapter in “Dragons in the Water.”

Before we went to bed tonight it started raining. It had gotten pretty warm today and by the time we were about to fall asleep it was pouring rain that went on for most of the night.

Got up at seven thirty.  At nine thirty Dominica asked me to go get breakfast.  So I drove out to Yorktown Heights to my Kurdish Deli there and got breakfast for the family and some fresh bread.  That ended up taking about an hour.  It’s not fast to get places around here.

Dominica really liked the breakfast that I brought.  And I picked up some food for later in the day too, spanakopita and fresh bread.  Luciana wanted bread and butter over and over today, she apparently appreciates old world style fresh bread over the store bought loaves.

This evening Dominica went out shopping to get storage supplies for the house.  We really need them.  The house is just covered in the girls’ toys and stuff.  Mostly stuff from Christmas.  We have no shelves or storage here of any kind so it is a real issue.  Everything is all over the floors and we are tripping on things and losing things.  It is a huge mess.

While Dominica was out shopping today, Liesl, Luciana and I built all of Liesl’s Christmas Lego kits. They are all very small ones and very cute being homes for small forest animals. They are adorable. Both girls really enjoy them.

This evening Liesl really wanted to play more of “The Night of the Rabbit” that we started playing last night. So we played it a little bit Luciana was really into it so she climbed up on the chair with Liesl and tried to play for almost an hour. This was not particularly fun for Liesl and Luciana is just too young to understand what is going on in a game like this. Although Luciana did surprisingly well using the mouse and making her character walk around. I was impressed. She is only two and a half, I do not remember Liesl using a normal computer this well at that age. So we did not get very far in the game with Luciana controlling it most of the time.

Tonight I read another two chapters in “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.” Liesl is doing a great job of following along and is loving the story.