Sheep Guarding Llama

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.

I got up and packed up this morning so that I would be ready to leave directly from work to head to Frankfort as soon as I got off of work today. It was a very slow morning. The office is basically empty, as is expected.

I got released from the office at noon and was ready to go. I had checked online and saw that Vera Bradley delivered Dominica’s Christmas present to the house today while I was at the office so I ran back to Peekskill, which is only slightly out of the way, and grabbed it before driving north to Frankfort. Dominica and the girls left dad’s house at nine this morning so arrived at Frankfort before I got out of Peekskill.

My drive was not bad. Only saw a few flakes of snow the entire way and traffic was not bad. I drove up to Plattekill Service Area and went in there to grab myself some lunch as I did not eat at the office before leaving and it was the middle of the afternoon now. So I grabbed food at Arthur Treacher’s.

I had finished reading “Venice: Pure City” the other day and today decided to do something that I rarely do and reread a book. On the drive north I read the first half of ”A Wrinkle in Time” which I read when I was quite young. I cannot place the reading of the book in my memory so I have no idea if I read it when I was in second grade or high school but my best guess is somewhere around third grade. I remember having read the “Time Trilogy” by Madeleine L’Engle and there were only three books. The fourth book, “Many Waters”, was not written until 1986. I did go back and read that one, but it was later than when I read the earlier books because I exhausted the available titles at the age that I had been reading them. So third grade is my best estimate for my original reading of “A Wrinkle in Time.” There is a fifth title in the series, “An Acceptable Time”, but that was not published until 1989 when I was no longer following the series and was unaware of its writing until recently. I read several of Madeleine L’Engle’s books when I was in elementary school including all or nearly all of the Austin’s and O’Keefe series (the O’Keefe series being the sequel series to the Time Quintet but written contemporary to it.)

The drive from Peekskill to Frankfort is under four hours but pretty close to it. It was just after five when I arrived and everyone had just walked in from mass. We had a relaxing evening for the most part. A bit later on, maybe around nine, we tried to put the kids to bed but Luciana was over tired, we think, and had a really rough time. She kept Liesl awake and caused all kinds of problems. I eventually had to go up and lay down in their room for a while. Even that didn’t go so well. At first Luciana came and snuggled with me and tried to hang out reading what I was reading on my phone. But Liesl got upset because she was being good but wanted snuggles. So she climbed into my bed too. Then, after not too long, Luciana started picking on her sister and eventually got kicked out of the bed.

All in all it probably took an hour or more to get Luciana to go to sleep. She finally fell asleep in her bed and Liesl in mine. Around eleven I had to sneak out without waking up the girls so that I could go down to the living room and assist with the set up of all of the presents for tomorrow. That took, as it usually does, until around two in the morning. I was very tired having gotten quite little sleep over the past few days combined with lots of driving.

I was exhausted this morning and did not get into the office until kind of late.  Slow week so not really a big deal.  I only got a few hours of sleep last night, even so.

Today is my one day alone in Peekskill.  Got in from Ohio late last night and leaving for Frankfort tomorrow after work which, I hope, proves to be a short day.  So I just spent the evening, after I got home from work, hanging out in the basement.  Didn’t really do anything today.  Just used the time to relax.  I caught up on Family Guy while I was home, that was about it.