Sheep Guarding Llama

Last night I snuggled with Luciana as I snuggled with Liesl the night before.  At five this morning Luciana needed me to get up and fetch her some water.  So I went downstairs and got her the water but was then awake for much of the night.  I did not fall back asleep after that.

Most of the family went to Dave’s for breakfast this morning.  I stayed at the house and watched Liesl and Luciana, they do not do well getting up early and going to breakfast.  Liesl was not even awake when everyone left.  I played with the girls all morning.  I even started reading “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” to Liesl which she seemed to like but we did not quite managed to make it through the first chapter before everyone came back home.

There was rain expected today so I got onto the road quite early.  I left just before noon and made very good time, even driving in the rain most of the way.  I listened to “Many Waters” on the drive and am nearly done with it.  Just about an hour left to go.

I got home around three thirty.  It didn’t take too long before I figured out that I had forgotten my phone charger in Utica and have no means to charge my iPhone until Dominica brings it down.  I need to go shopping tomorrow to find one.

Spent the afternoon and evening relaxing at home alone. I started watching one of my all time favourite television shows, “The Vicar of Dibley”, from the beginning again. It occurred to me that this show, which to me still feels like a moderately recent one, is actually celebrating its twentieth anniversary this coming year! Twenty years. This show was being filmed while I was still in high school. No wonder the actors from the show seem to have aged since originally filming it.

I also figured out that our friend Andy in the UK actually lives so close to where the Vicar of Dibley was filmed that I could easily walk there from where he lives.

I was feeling hungry tonight so ordered in pasta from Nonna’s.

I went to bed early tonight. I was pretty tired, having gotten a short night last night and sleeping in the very warm house always leaves me feeling tired. The room that Dominica, Liesl, Luciana and I share stays around eighty degrees all of the time so we are always having a really hard time getting any sleep there. Poor Luciana was soaked with sweat last night. So I turned in early and read some more of “The Arm of the Starfish” before falling asleep.

This morning the whole family got up and went out to the local movie theatre to see Disney’s new movie “Frozen.”  This is Luciana’s very first time going to a real movie theatre!  She has been to the drive in twice but never to a real theatre.  Liesl has been only once or twice and I do not believe that she has ever been with me.

“Frozen” was awesome, a truly classic Disney movie.  Really touching.  Luciana decided to climb directly onto my lap and watched the entire movie with me holding her.  She was so sweet.  Just snuggled up so sweet.  She seemed to really love the movie.  Liesl liked it too.

We watched several movies today. Back at the house we watched the rest of “Wreck It Ralph” that we started last night.  Dominica and I have never seen it.  Liesl has seen it before but was watching it again with us.  It’s cute.

This evening we all watched “Epic” which turned out to be not very good at all.  Very weak story and performance.

After everyone else went to bed, Dominica, Liesl and I stayed up and watched the Doctor Who Christmas Special that aired last week.  It was the final episode with Matt Smith as the Doctor.

It was a cold but clear morning today. I got up a little late and got all packed up for the weekend. After work this evening I will be heading to Frankfort again and will be there until Sunday evening. So need clothes and the CPAP.

On my drive in today I started reading “Many Waters” which I last read in late elementary school, it having been published in 1986 and me reading it shortly thereafter having already been a fan of the series. From my memory, the book was meant more for older readers than the other books in the series. And it does seem to be targeted to a more mature audience, more for high school than elementary school. I forgot, though, just how ridiculous the book was and had no memory whatsoever of there being a “computer in the lab” like something out of a bad 1980s pop movie that can send people back in time simply by typing joke phrases onto the screen or that there are unicorns and manicores and every animal that they meet is something extinct today. In the attempt to be shocking, it is just silly.

Another very slow day today. Everyone is just riding it out until the weekend, I am sure. Pizza lunch today and “make your own cannolo” which was kind of cool and very tasty.

Got out of work at a quarter till six and hit the road.  Traffic wasn’t bad and I had a decent drive, listening to “Many Waters” up to Frankfort.

Slept in a little this morning. Was pretty tired from yesterday (mostly the late evening drive.) Hit the deli on the way into the office. This morning I started reading Madeleine L’Engle’s “A Wind in the Door”, the sequel to “A Wrinkle in Time.” I read this one probably immediately after the first back in my childhood, somewhere around third grade. I really enjoyed these books when I was young. Reading them now, though, they leave a lot more to be desired. L’Engle was a science fiction writer but one who, I now realize, was not really into science that much. So her books are atrociously horrific at the science that she tries to lace throughout the story. One point being that mitochondria, a common and well understood component of cellular biology, she referred to being “so small that a scanning electron microscope can’t see it” and being “sub-atomic.” At some point, failing at middle school level science as a science fiction writer just doesn’t work. Complex science that normal people don’t know, that’s different. But this was pretty bad. At least, in the preface to the Audible recording, the author talks about how she had to learn about microbiology in order to write the book. (The recording that I have is the 1994 one by the author, not the 2012 one by Jennifer Ehle.)

I did find it interesting in this novel that L’Engle addresses, in 1973, problems with the American education system that are still issues today. We tend to always feel that issues are current and new, but really, things rarely change.

Reading “A Wind in the Door” is the second book of my childhood that I am returning to read again now. I hadn’t thought about it when I started reading them, but the “Time Quintet” was written from and is based on Goshen, Connecticut, very close to where I work and live now. I suspect that Liesl will begin reading these in a few years and we will have to take her out there to see where they take place.

Work was incredibly slow today. Absolutely nothing going on at all. Most of the office was empty. I love holiday weeks at work.

I would have gone home early today but as I have no kids at home tonight I stayed so that others could go. No reason for me to be at home today. It’s just me and, since we don’t even have a television, there is very little to do.  So I stayed in the office until six thirty then drove home.

It was over forty degrees when I left the office.  Quite a bit warmer than the last two days have been.

Got home at eight this evening and just spent the evening in the basement. It is a very lonely house when the family is gone. Lacking a television means that there really isn’t even a place to sit and do anything except for at the computer in the basement. I can’t wait until we get a desk set up for me upstairs in our bedroom. If we had that now that is where I would be working when the family is out of town as it is much warmer and more comfortable up there if no one else is around. No need to use the rest of the house at all in that case.

I watched the Vicar of Dibley two part Christmas Specials tonight. It has been quite some time since I have seen those and I did not remember who were the guest stars in them – the Earl of Grantham from Downton Abbey plays the guest vicar and the guy who plays Thorin Oakenshield in The Hobbit! Pretty major “stars to be” from a few years before they both became huge.

I finished reading “A Wind in the Door” tonight. I remember now that even when I was young I did not like this one very much at all. It is a really boring story with, I believe, a full half of the book being all of the characters trapped in complete darkness, immobilized inside of a mitochondria. And the story is not very good overall. It was just extremely weak. But I finished it. I remember other titles being better. Hopefully they are.

Next up on my reading list to start tomorrow is “Many Waters” from 1986. When I first read the Time Trilogy as a child, Many Waters wasn’t out yet so I read it after the first three when they had become the Time Quartet. So I read them in chronological order by their writing. But in the events in the books, “Many Waters” was written to go back and take place between “A Wind in the Door” and “A Swiftly Tilting Planet.” So this time I am changing it up and reading them in the order that the events occur. It is like a less dramatic version of the Chronicles of Narnia. When I originally read them, “Many Waters” was my favourite of the series by a wide margin so I am hoping that I still like it.

Liesl was the first of us to wake up this morning. She had snuggled with me all night in the one bed. Luciana slept at our feet in the little kid bed and Dominica had the other twin bed across the room. Dominica’s back hurts too much if she sleeps in the one that Liesl and I used so I am always in the bed on the north wall and she is always on the south wall. Once we heard the Grice children in the hallway we turned Liesl loose and she was out the door in a shot to go downstairs and see what Santa had brought for her. Luciana was asleep for a little while longer but with all of the commotion was up pretty soon.

During the night it had snowed, turning the warm weather into a truly white Christmas! Perfect for the Grice family who just drove up from Texas and did not think that they were going to get to see snow this year (at least not in New York.)

The adults had breakfast and coffee and we all migrated to the living room and set to opening gifts at about a quarter after nine. It was a slow start to present opening but sped up as the day progressed. Liesl had tons and tons of presents to open because she not only had Christmas stuff but her birthday stuff from the Grices too.

The girls, understandably, got just tons and tons of stuff. I am horrible at remembering Christmas stuff the next day in general and when there is so much and so many kids it is that much harder. I know that Liesl got a lot of really cool Playmobil stuff and lots of video games for her Nintendo 2DS. This was a video game Christmas for all of the little kids. Garrett and Clara both got Nintendo 3DS systems of their own and Mario Kart so that they can race against Liesl online. Garrett also got several PS3 games. They have hit that age.

Dominica’s big gift was a real popcorn machine. Not a huge one (thank goodness, we don’t have much room!) but a cool counter top unit. We are thinking about installing it in the basement so that we can make popcorn right where we watch the movies. We are kicking around the idea of trying to install a small powder room in the basement too, having something on every floor is really nice and we already have the plumbing there, we think. It would probably be pretty minor although it is hard to tell if it would really fit or not, I am horrible with determining space like that.

For Christmas I got Dominica Vera Bradley slippers. That is what shipped to the house yesterday that I had to go pick up for her.

We did gifts until around four. Then dinner and I showered to get ready for going to see the rest of the family and Dominica’s grandfather later in the evening.

We went to Uncle Joe and Aunt Barb’s for the late Christmas evening family get together. We were there probably only two hours as Luciana was tired and not being very cooperative. Liesl was being very good. So we could not stay for fear of a meltdown.

I got back and pretty much immediately got onto the road to return to Peekskill. I had thought about staying tonight but it is too risky as snow is expected tonight and if Luciana doesn’t let me get right to sleep I may have to drive all night in snow after getting little to no sleep. Instead if I left right away I’d only miss half an hour or so with the girls but get home safely and know that getting to work in the morning would not be a huge issue.

Dominica helped me to load up the Spark with whatever we could fit out of the Acadia so that she would have more space to fit Christmas presents into the Acadia for when she comes down next week. Then I was off leaving Frankfort before nine.

The drive back down to Peekskill went fine. No issues at all. Did not see any snow and almost no traffic. The roads were really clear. Probably the emptiest that I have ever seen the New York State Thruway when there was not a blizzard.

On the drive back down I finished reading “A Wrinkle in Time” which I had started yesterday. The book was not as good as I remembered it from my childhood. The characters are flatter and more annoying that I remembered. The Audible edition that I have is the recording recorded by the author which, I think, was a poor choice. Madeleine L’Engle is not a master narrator and I feel that her reading of the story actually detracted from it. Although it is always neat having the author do the reading. The book is written for a younger audience than me, that surely plays into it.

I got home just before one. It took me a little while to relax so that I could fall asleep.