Sheep Guarding Llama

Today ended up being my only day in the office for the week. The last two days were just too busy to go in and early tomorrow morning I am leaving for San Jose where I will be until Saturday morning.  Two days of hanging out and consulting with Pertino.  AJ is heading out as well, flying in from Syracuse.

I worked from home a little this morning and was in the office by mid morning.  Doue had said last week that lunch was on him today so at one he, Dan and I went to Mooyah to get lunch.  The weather was great today, probably ninety two outside, so we sat out on the patio and ate there.  Funny to think that ninety two is nice and cool to me now.  That is so not me.

We got back to the office and got back to work.  But it wasn’t long before we had an emergency announcement come over the loud speaker that just said that we were having an emergency and that we had to evacuate the building.  Um, okay.  So we did, everyone piled outside into the parking lots.  We didn’t have enough notice to tell anyone that we were abandoning the building so no one knew to pick up work from us.

Since it was late and we were completely useless outside I just got in the car which was right out front and ran home and worked from there.  Once again demonstrating that being in the office was pointless – no matter what the intentions are, the amount of work completed while at the office is fractional compared to what is done from home.

After I wrapped up work for the day Dominica made herself dinner (because I already ate) and we watched the last two available episodes from this current season of Hot in Cleveland, one of our favourite shows.  The next to last episode had an awesome reunion of the girls from the cast of the Mary Tyler Moore show.  I’m so glad that they managed to do that while they are all still able to do it.

Then we watched more of the second season of The New Girl.

Luciana slept much of the day.  She has been sick, possibly since Friday.  She threw up in the car on the drive down to Houston but we thought that that was because she had chocked on a fruit snack but now we are not too sure.  She was definitely under the weather by Sunday and had a fever by Monday.  She still had a slight fever today and at some point during the day she got sick on our bed but we did not discover it until this evening when she finally woke up and came out to see us.  But by then she had had twice her normally sleep and her fever had broken.  It was never a high fever but she seems much better after that.  She mostly spent the entire evening just snuggling on the couch with us, though.

Dominica was starting to feel sick today, she probably caught was Luciana had.  Liesl, so far, has escaped any signs of it.

We tried out best to get to bed on the early side.  The girls did not want to go to bed nearly as early as we did.  It took some fighting to get us into bed by eleven.  That only leaves five hours of sleep for me before tomorrow when I have to be up early for my flight to California.

Was planning on going into the office today but it just did not happen.  Too much to do.  I worked all morning and then in the early afternoon had to go into Dominica’s office to help with some stuff there.  That went well but went later than I had anticipated.

Luciana put herself to bed this afternoon, she has a fever and is not feeling well.  So Dominica said that Liesl and I should just go to dinner at the club on our own and just bring home food for Dominica.  But I got home and started getting Liesl ready when Luciana woke up and came out to see us.  She said that she wanted to go to dinner so Dominica and Ciana got ready and we all went to the club for kids’ night.

Realistically tonight was probably our last time to go to the club.  Maybe we will make it next week but we will be so busy that it seems unlikely.  I’d really like to make it to La Cima before we completely leave but I don’t know when we could do it.   Only a few days left before I head north to Connecticut.  Still trying to work out those plans, too much up in the air.

Dominica’s back was hurting her tonight so we couldn’t hang out at Brookhaven as long as the girls would have liked.  They love that we have discovered the “activities table” that they have for the kids there.  Liesl eats her food quickly and asks to go colour and do crafts with the ladies that run the school at Brookhaven.  They are getting to know her.  She has so much fun doing craft projects with them.  Luciana does too but mostly just colours and she does not eat as fast, I think that she forgets that if she gets her food done that she can go do fun things.  So Liesl finished and disappears and Luciana wonders where she has gone.   The girls would have been happy with another half an hour at least but we had to get moving.

Quiet night at home since Dominica just needed to sit and relax.  We watched two episodes of Hot in Cleveland that we had not seen yet and then we put the girls to bed.  Once they were in bed we popped in Prometheus that I had gotten on BluRay a few days ago.  This is the first of a trilogy that together, in theory, functions as the prequel to the Alien Quadrilogy.

Prometheus was pretty good and they seem to be doing some interesting things with the Alien mythology and playing off of some Greek themes.  Ridley Scott did a great job as always.  There is a rumor that the sequel might be in the works soon.  We hope that there is, we want to see where the story is being taken.

Dominica’s last official day in the office is today.  She might end up needing to go in for something yet over the next month but today is the last day that she is scheduled and that we know for sure that she is going to be going in.  She is working with Ross today, his second day and first day working with her.  They have not met yet.  She was off at seven.  She is really looking forward to not needing to go to the office.  She likes working there but does not like being away from home and the girls and definitely does not like getting up early.  She has been so busy with homeschool stuff for Liesl recently who has been doing her kindergarten stuff for a couple of weeks that that is really exhausting her.  They are doing all kinds of school stuff every day now.

I worked from the house in the morning.  Morgan was over to watch the girls.  I had several conference calls this morning so I had to lock myself into the office at the house so it was a lot like I was not home at all.  It’s handy having Morgan there because I can’t take care of the girls when I need to be on calls and they don’t understand not to come into my office screaming on their own.

Once my meetings were over it was well into lunch time so I drove over to LA Burger, got lunch for Dominica and I and delivered it into the office as a surprise treat for her.  They have the most amazing burgers.  We are very sad that we only recently discovered them and now we are moving away.  It seems that one of the biggest things that we miss when moving away from an area.  We get used to places to eat and food that we like and then we leave and have to find all new food to enjoy.

I had meetings at Dominica’s office this afternoon.  It has been really busy there this week.  Lots going on and surprisingly almost none of it is related to Dominica’s departure.

I got home about forty five minutes before Dominica did.  This is Morgan’s last “normal” day of watching the girls although she and I have spoken about maybe she will watch the girls a bit over the next month to assist Dominica in getting things ready as Dominica is not going to be able to handle the girls, home schooling, packing, etc. all by herself.

Got to sleep in quite a bit this morning.  I am the only one at the Grices’ house and knew that everyone was just sitting around watching the kids down the street so wasn’t in any hurry to get moving.  I took my time and got partially packed up before heading over.  I passed Bennie as he was pulling onto the street having just left the Toccos’ house.

We hung out for a few hours at the house while the girls all got picked up and taken home.  Then it was time to get on the road.  Lots to be done.

The drive up to Dallas wasn’t bad at all.  The rain stopped today and the sun was out.  Rumor is that the rain is returning next weekend.  Texas really needs it, the lakes are all very low.  Just too bad that it has to come all at once and cause flooding rather than getting it steady.  But we will take what we can get.

On the way home we ordered take away from Eat St. nearby so that we could just pick it up as we went by to make things quick and easy since we were all tired from yesterday and all of the driving and Luciana is not feeling all that well.  But when we stopped to pick it up, they had no record of our order.  It takes them easily an hour to make food there so we gave up and left.  We just went home and had subs delivered from Joe’s instead.

Once the girls were off to bed we rented World War Z which Dominica has been dying to see (for no reason that I can imagine.)  This falls into that category of movies that seem obvious that she will not like but someone tells her that she will like and she just has to see and then doesn’t like.  And it lived up to expectation.  It’s a not very well known, but decently big budget, Brad Pitt movie but it is a zombie / horror movie which she hates.  She does not handle horror very well or heavily intense movies and I don’t generally enjoy them even though they don’t bother me.  It’s got to be pretty amazing for me to want to watching something in that genre.

WWZ started off way too intense but did improve into a moderately decent, but poorly thought through, zombie (or to be completely accurate I am told, infection) flick.  There was some okay action and some interesting takes on a global zombieism outbreak scenario but, as with most movies of this genre, the suspension of disbelief part was a bit much and it was clear that there wasn’t as much thought put into the logic of the film as there should have been.

The rain was still coming down this morning after raining all night and all day yesterday and some the day before.  So much rain.  We are definitely getting all of the water that we have been missing all summer.

I got up at six fifty and got a lot of work done this morning.  Quite productive working from my laptop.  Only Garrett was awake when I got up.  He played on his iPad all morning while I worked on the laptop.  Francesca, Madeline and Emily were all volunteering at the food bank early this morning and were gone even before I woke up.

Updated my iPad 2 to iOS 7 this morning.  Everyone has been talking about it.  I guess it is time to check it out.  Dominica did her mobile phone yesterday.  I had to plug it in to charge it, though, so I won’t actually get a chance to see it until later.

At one this afternoon we went over to the Toccos’ for Emily’s twelfth birthday party.  Just the close family today, not too many people.  It rained all day yesterday and all day today.  It was a warm but raining day in the pool.  It rained very little this evening so it was not too bad and thankfully the thunderstorms never came so everyone was able to swim all day without any problems.

It is a slumber party so all of the girls are staying over night.  We stayed until around one.  Everyone else crashed at the Toccos’ but I needed my CPAP and there were not enough places to sleep anyway so I went back to the Grices’ house alone and spent the night there.  Probably gave me a better chance to get good sleep anyway.