Sheep Guarding Llama

It’s Sunday.  We got way too little sleep last night.  And we are super soar today.  Both Dominica and I after working out yesterday.  Our legs are just burning like crazy.  We can’t walk anywhere or do anything.

AJ is planning on coming over sometime tonight to stay with us at the house as he was attempting to sleep on the pull-out sofa bed at his parents’ hotel room but it was not comfortable at all, surprise surprise, so he is coming to use our guest room.

We slept in all that we could this morning but that is never very late and last night my old CPAP, the one that I got in February of 2005 while living in Geneseo and working at Wegmans, started to die and I had to switch to my backup and it gave me a bit of a sinus infection and soar throat.

I had to do my regular afternoon Sunday conference call.  Can’t wait to not have to do that any more.  Only a few left, fingers crossed.

Dominica went out to do some shopping this afternoon.  She worked a lot of the morning in Luciana’s room trying to get it ready for AJ to move in there this evening and she had the Acadia loaded up with stuff to donate to Goodwill.  Tons of toys, cloths and miscellaneous kid stuff that we don’t need anymore went there.  We are trying to donate as much as we can as quickly as we can.  We really don’t want to move anything unnecessary back up to the northeast.

It is really hard because Liesl and to some extent Luciana have a really hard time letting go of their old toys.  Just in cleaning things up Luciana was demanding to play with old things that she has not seen in a year.  We had to sneak a lot of stuff out of the house.

She dropped off the donations then went to the learning store to get school supplies for Liesl.  We have determined that even though she is pretty young Liesl is ready for kindergarten level classes so is going to start them this week with Dominica.  And then she hit Aldi as well as we needed some food in the house.

AJ came over this evening rather late.  We hung out at the house for a bit.  This is our first time meeting AJ even though he has worked at NTG for about ten months.  The girls were, of course, over excited and had to play with him for a while.

AJ and I went out to grab a bite and he watched the Dallas v. Giants football game that I could not possibly have cared less about.  I am certainly not sad to be moving to a state that has no football team.

Today AJ is driving from North Carolina to Texas but isn’t going to stay with us tonight as originally planned but is going to crash at a hotel till later in the week.  We got updates from him throughout the day.

I was supposed to hit the gym with Chris early this morning but he had some clients shift around so we ended up working out at the Rosemeade Community Complex at noon.  I did a pretty good lifting workout.  I was pretty worn out after that one.

Did some work this afternoon while Dominica worked on getting school stuff set up for Liesl.

Chris came over this afternoon and Dominica helped him with some arm modeling for his iPhone wrist band device.  Then she did some lifting too.  We are going to both be pretty soar tomorrow.

I went out to Redneck for a little bit this evening with Bryan that I haven’t seen in months.  Didn’t hang out for long.

Chris came over this evening and babysat after the kids went to bed so that Dominica and I could go out tonight.

Had to be up at six this morning so that I could quickly shower and zip into the office to support non-farm payroll announcements this morning.  It was a good announcement today, more jobs and lower unemployment.  It continues to be a very slow, decade long economic recovery, of a sort.  Now if housing prices could just keep improving in Peekskill!!

The office was busy enough today that we did not manage to get lunch.  I had to work through lunch as did pretty much everyone else.  A very long day considering that many of us started really early.

I left work as soon as I could which was actually at a pretty decent time.  I had called Dominica and we had discussed dinner options and had decided that we should see if we could maybe take the girls out to the Rainforest Cafe again as they had such a great time there down in San Antonio a few days ago and while we live in Dallas we have one only minutes away next to my office at Grapevine Mills.  We were afraid that it would be really busy as it is a Friday night.

I got home, picked up the family, and we drove out to Grapevine Mills Mall.  So weird that one of the few Rainforest Cafes that there is is located in one of our local malls.  Liesl was so excited when she saw the logo and realized what it was but was confused because we were not in San Antonio.

Dinner was very good and the girls had a blast, again.  This is probably their new favourite restaurant.  They love the mac and cheese there and they love all of the moving animals, the light shows, the ambiance.  It really works well for them.  We were not as close to animatronics this  time and it kept Luciana from being afraid so that was good.  I took them both for a walk to go see the tigers.

That made for a nice evening and happy children.  It was a good idea to take them out for something special.

Woke up at 5:40 this morning and just decided to get some work done.  Dominica was up getting ready to go into her last regularly scheduled day at the office and I had a seven o’clock conference call this morning so decided to just get up and head to the office in the house and get some work done since I was awake anyway.

Worked from home all morning.  Was pretty productive.  Was there will around ten.  Morgan is watching the kids, as usual.

Just before I was about to head into the office Chelsey messaged me needing me to get her socks because she showed up to work with cowboy boots and no socks and was going to be nothing but blisters by the end of the day if she didn’t get socks but she didn’t know anyone in the area.  So I ran over to Target and picked up a pair of socks for her and ran over to Redneck to drop them all.  Luckily it is basically on my way into the office so it wasn’t a big deal at all.

Into the office for a few hours.  A little busy today, not too bad.  Then around one Dan and I went up to Redneck for lunch.

Back to work and worked a little late, then home.  We watched Are You Being Served? while I worked from my laptop all evening.  The girls were out of control climbing all over me and Dominica and the couch and screaming and being crazy rambunctious.  Not sure what Morgan gave them but it must have been sugar, food colouring and caffeine.

Finally got the kids to bed.  Dominica was in bed by nine, even before I could get Liesl to bed.  I went to bed at twenty till ten.  Boy I feel old saying that!

Tomorrow is non-farm payroll so I am up at six.

Back to work and normal life after our little tiny mini-vacation.  Was not looking forward to returning to the office today, I was enjoying my around the clock family time.

I got up and worked from home for a bit this morning because I was paged out at six in the morning.  So I started my day pretty early.  Went into the office around ten having worked a four hour morning already.  I took two dozen Round Rock donuts into the office with me today.  Turns out that Minh, whom I haven’t seen in nearly nine months, was in the office yesterday for the first time at our new office but I missed her.

I ended up working through lunch but was very productive today.  I got tons done and caught up on Spiceworks which was important.  I was hundreds of posts behind after being away all weekend.  Luckily for me, things slow down considerably when I am not there which makes it easier for me, than for other people, to catch up.

I worked in the office till around five thirty then came home.  Dominica cooked dinner, one of her lean zucchini dishes that I really like.  We watched some of Are You Being Served? while we ate.

After dinner we decided to watch Disney’s The Sword in the Stone for Liesl to get her ready for Walt Disney World.  Dominica is putting her on a Disney movie marathon to make sure that she knows all of the characters and stuff before we go.  She liked it.  That was one of my favourite Disney movies when I was young.  That was one that dad used to get on real to real film back when I was about Liesl’s age.  I remember watching it a lot back then.  The wizard’s dual was one of my favourite scenes from all of the Disney archives, that one and the soccer match from Bedknobs and Broomsticks.  That is one that Liesl needs to watch soon as well.

Got Luciana off to bed at a good time.  She needed it, she was very tired.  Liesl decided that she wanted to go to bed at a quarter till ten but we couldn’t let her go right away because Luciana was still awake and struggling to get to sleep.

Dominica and I worked on the toilet in our master bath again tonight.  Today the flapper broke.  If it isn’t one thing it is another with that stupid toilet.  We are tempted to replace the whole thing.  What a pain it has been.  At least we did manage to get it fixed tonight.  Not the week long ordeal that it was last time.  That was really awful.  But we have AJ coming to stay with us this week so having the toilet be broken is not an option.