Sheep Guarding Llama

Dominica was off to work at seven and I did my usual waiting for Morgan who comes at nine thirty.  Morgan ended up being rather late because she missed the exit and didn’t realize it until she was on her way to Richardson and she didn’t know how to get back to our house from that direction so ended up driving all over the place trying to get back.  So it was more like ten when she finally got here.

Got into the office rather late, for obvious reasons.  Dan and I went to lunch at Rednecks.  Need to get in there a bit before we move as this is my last chance to see everyone there.  Only a few weeks left if all goes well.  My paperwork for my background check and everything came today.  There was a lot of it so I did a bit of trying to fill it out this afternoon but it was more than I could get done at work.

Got home at a decent time.  Dominica I talked about the paperwork and moving and stuff for a while.  Then just a quiet night at home, we watched Are You Being Server?

Quiet Sunday at home.  Everyone was up by eight, Liesl being the last one up.  Dominica and I were up at seven.  I did SGL catchup this morning and Dominica worked on apartment hunting.  It’s Sunday so I have to work for three hours in the middle of the day.  Only a few more weeks of that, though.  Hopefully I won’t have scheduled work of that nature once we are in Connecticut, at least not regularly scheduled work requiring every weekend to be scheduled around work.  Life in Connecticut is going to be a lot more busy than here in Texas.  I’ve been really fortunate to have a lot of free time and schedule flexibility for the last six years or so.  That will be mostly going away.  This will be a huge life shift for us.  At least a lot of our favourite places are within easy drives of there.  Like Prince Edward Island, Halifax, Montreal and Bar Harbor.

We are beginning the strategy of figuring out what can be donated from everything in the house.  Time to cull the stuff again.

I watched the kids and worked this afternoon while Dominica went to the salon and out shopping at Target.

I did a lot of cleaning up emails today.  No opportunity to be behind on emails after a few weeks.  I really need to be prepared.

Dominica spent the early evening on a cleaning frenzy around the house.  It is going to take all that we have to get the house ready for when we are ready to move out.  We have no idea when that will be but we are playing with the idea of Dominica and the girls continuing to live here until late October when we go to Spiceworld and then to Disney World.  It seems rather foolish to have them move before then as we would be moving up to Connecticut just in time to immediately leave the new place, completely exhausted, and head out for vacation.  That seems like a bad idea.  It will be too much to do in too short of a time.  It would force us to move sooner than we want to and to make decisions too quickly.  That is, unless we get a beach house that starts right away.  Then everything changes.

Liesl and I played nearly to the end of Ankh 3 tonight.  I think that we will be able to complete it tomorrow.  She is getting better and better at these games.  She can do a lot of parts of the game faster than I can now.  I am constantly amazed by how much of the storyline and events she remembers.

Ciana went to bed at nine after I read her some stories.  Liesl went to bed at ten after a few stories too.  Then pretty much straight to bed for Dominica and I as well.  I did a lot of writing today.  Spiceworks was incredibly slow this weekend, the slowest that I ever remember it being.  There was maybe only three or four posts all weekend.  Normally there is more than that an hour.  Something must be wrong somewhere.

We didn’t watch anything today, a nice change.  The house is looking so much better.  Dominica really put in a lot of work.  The entire house has been mopped.  We are really looking forward to the shipping labels arriving for some large boxes of Microsoft and Lenovo gear that was here on demo and needs to ship out.  It is taking up our entire foyer area and making it hard to get around the house.

Madeline is taking Liesl’s old bed and Liesl’s current black dresser that Dominica painted a few years ago.  At some point we are going to figure out how to get those down to Houston for her.  That will help so that we don’t have to deal with those in the move and Liesl won’t be heart broken that her bed is going away.  She is very sentimental.  And we will be happier too.  That was Liesl’s bed that we bought before she was born and it was always there in the Peekskill house, then Liesl used it in the Tuscan Villas apartment and for the first year at this house.  Then it became Luciana’s bed and she has used it ever since until a few weeks ago.  So it has a lot of sentimental value having been the bed of both of our children.  It’s been with us constantly for nearly five years.

Dominica has been getting bags of stuff ready for donation.  One good thing about each move – we cut down on the amount of stuff that we have more and more.  Tons of clothes getting ready to be donated and a ton of toys will be coming up next.  We aren’t planning on taking much of the furniture with us this time either.  That will help a lot.

I am really happy that SGL has been staying up to date a lot more recently and I have been getting content out for SMB IT Journal recently too.  Not a ton, but some.  I was really overwhelmed with everything going on, work and whatnot, for a while and just could not keep up.  Now I seem to be pretty much on top of it and that always makes me feel a lot better in general.  When I worry that SGL is not updated I start to feel like things are piling up and I have a harder and harder time getting other things accomplished.  Keeping SGL up to date and my mailbox as close to empty as possible are key factors in keeping myself productive and sane.

Tomorrow Dominica goes to work early.  I have to stop by her office at some point during the day to discuss the fact that we are relocating and preparing them for that.  Hopefully that goes well.  What they decide to do about that will have major ramifications on how we are handling the house and lots of other things.  I will be going into the office tomorrow, although I am not sure when and for how long.

Dominica was up sometime around six this morning.  I slept in until seven and only then realized how early it was and that she had been up and doing housework for a while.  The plan was for her and the nieces to be on the road at eight so that they could drive down to Centerville and transfer them to Francesca.  So, like last week, Dominica should be back home around one and I am home watching Liesl and Luciana.

We did a bit of cleaning of the house today.  What a disaster it is currently.  That was an all day project.  We also did a bit of looking at apartment and rental options up on the Connecticut Gold Coast.  We are toying with being right next to the office or maybe a place on the beach.  So many options and we don’t know the area all that well.  So we are kind of flying blind and since we don’t really have a great idea of what our lifestyle is going to be like up there we are kind of loss.

This evening we decided to take it easy.  Watched some Rules of Engagement and ate our dinner, which Dominica just made at home, and when the sun went down and it was dark enough for a real movie we bought Star Trek: Into Darkness on the AppleTV and we spent the evening watching that.  Before we started the movie, Dominica ran to Aldi’s to pick up their evily delicious popcorn mix which we ate a ton of while watching the movie.  We also made some cheese bites that been hiding in the freezer.  Not exactly on diet but at least we are clearly stuff out of the freezer to make it go away.

The movie was very good.  Liesl watched it with us and Luciana was up for much of it having taken an early nap around three and sleeping till nearly eight.  So the girls ended up being up very late.

Luciana was not very sleepy but it was getting late.  She had such a long nap.  So tonight, for the first time, she was allowed to take the iPad to bed with her.  We will see how that goes.  It worked great with Liesl at Ciana’s age so we are hopeful.  Liesl slept with us tonight.

Today is the day, got scheduled first thing this morning for “the call” with the news at two thirty this afternoon (central time.)  So most of the day was spent just waiting for that.  Lots of phone calls today, not related to anything in particular, just seemed a really busy phone day both work related and personal.  Was on the phone all morning, it seemed, and all of my deployments today seemed to want to be live on the phone while doing them.

For lunch today I finally, after four years, went to Terra, the Mediterranean place around the corner from our old apartment that we’ve been interested in trying since we first moved to Texas.  The food was quite good, the line was very long.  Too bad Dominica did not get a chance to try it.  I went with Doue and Bryant who were already going there and invited me along.

While we were there Kim called me because she needed help getting Armando’s truck from his work because he had kidney stones this morning and had to be rushed to the hospital via ambulance so he was all drugged up on pain killers and could not drive but his truck was stranded.  So Doue drove me back to work and I grabbed my car.  Luckily it occurred to me that if I didn’t pick up Dominica to help move cars, I’d be stranded too there.  So I called her and sent her home from her long day of thrift store shopping with Emily and I drove home and got her then we went over to Lewisville and picked up his truck and brought it back to our place.

I made it back to our house with only minutes to spare before the call came in officially offering me the job that I have been hoping for.  We got everything that we asked for so the job has been accepted.  I still have to go through a background check so that will take a few days.  Then from there we will determine the start date.  So it will be a minimum of three weeks, four seems quite likely.  But they do want us as soon as is comfortably possible as there is a ton of work to get done and the want me to help to deal with that load right away.

I went back into the office and immediately had the meeting with my boss to discuss the plans for me leaving work.  So they are prepared but don’t have the final date yet.

This is quite the change.  I am leaving a job of nearly eight years, by far the longest single normal job of my entire life.  And we are moving from Texas to Connecticut, which in itself is a big change, but living in our current house is the longest stretch in a single residence since I lived with my parents and being in the general vicinity is the longest that I’ve ever lived in the same area since leaving home.  We were rather settled here in a way neither of us has ever been before.  And Dominica has been at her current job for nearly a year too, which is not a record or anything for her but is nearly as long as almost any job that she has had.

Did deployments till around six thirty.  It was a decently busy evening.  Then came home and we all just stayed in. Tonight is Madeline and Emily’s last evening in Dallas.  Dominica will be heading south with them at eight in the morning.  So all four of the kids were off to bed on the early side, Liesl was the last one up by a bit.  She stayed up to snuggle with me on the couch even after Dominica had gone to bed.

A big day.  I feel pretty tired.  Had to get my iPhone backed up and wiped clean so that Madeline can take it tomorrow.  She is getting it now that I am on the Windows phone on T-Mobile.  We have no need for non-international phones now.

It’s Thursday.  The office was pretty much completely empty today.  There was a major outage last night and a lot of people worked through the night so there was no one in today.  Seriously empty office.

We have been waiting on pins and needles for news about a possible new job.  Waited all day but no news.  Finally this evening, just before reaching home, I got the call that the unofficial word was that everything was set and approved officially but the official call to me was not going to be until later tonight or possibly tomorrow.  So we have to hang tight and just hope that all is well.  Not quite a nerve wracking as before, but still, we just really want this to be official and done and not have to worry about it anymore.  Decision made and start making plans.

So to semi-celebrate we went out to Joe’s Crab Shack for dinner.  The nieces claimed that they had been there before and liked it but Dominica and I have never been to one.  So we thought that we would try it out.  It seemed likely to have good seafood options for us.

Joe’s Crab Shack is right on up 35E in Lewisville, so really easy to get to just hard to find it you don’t know that it is there already.  Dinner was good, there were a lot of options for Dominica and I.  Madeline actually got crab so she had to crack some shells.  No idea why she did that as she hates cracking shells.  All of the food was quite good and there is a lot of stuff that we want to go back and try.  After we were done eating the girls went out and played on the playground for a bit too.

No calls this evening.  Fingers crossed that the call will come in tomorrow.

Came back home and finished watching Ferris Bueller’s Day Off which Emily enjoyed.  Her mother will be proud that we made her watch it.