Sheep Guarding Llama

Dominica was up and gone early this morning.  I worked from home for a little bit.  Morgan arrived just after nine.  Liesl was so excited.  I had Liesl dressed and Luciana changed just as Morgan arrived and got her set up and I was out the door by nine fifteen.

I had to swing by Dominica’s office for a few minutes on my way in.  That went really well.  She is off for four day – she doesn’t go back in until Monday.

Got into the office and had a pretty relaxing day.  The market closed at lunch and pretty much no one was getting anything done today.  A nice day to be in the office.

For lunch Dan, Doue and I went to Masala Wok but it wasn’t very good.  Then we got froyo before going back to the office.

This afternoon my desktop supplier swung by the office and dropped off four Dell Optimplex 780s for me to get to Dominica.  Dominica was very relieved to know that I had them in hand.

I came home a little early today although I was pretty much the last one in the office.  I got home and Morgan was still there.  Dominica had just gotten home because of a huge accident that closed down Trinity Mills for a while.  I had been stuck in the traffic there too.  So we all hung out for about an hour then she ran home to try to wrangle everyone up for D&D tonight.

While everyone was out I went on a liquor run to restock.  Found a ton of really awesome stuff. This was a record restocking.

It ended up being really late before we were able to get started.  Kyler was over pretty early, around eight, arriving just minutes after I had gotten home.  Rachel and Jaiden arrived almost three hours later!

While we were waiting for everyone else we introduced Kyler to Dr. Who and managed to watch almost three full episodes before anyone arrived!  Rachel and Jaiden were the first to arrive. Because things were taking so long to get started Morgan and Jose ended up going to Addison’s Fireworks display.  So our first evening was having a really hard time getting started.

We did as much with our characters while were had the time and were ready when everyone was finally in one spot around midnight.  We got into the game and played until after four in the morning when we decided to call it a night and get a little sleep before we get up tomorrow to play all day.

Liesl slept in our room tonight and Luciana slept in her own room.  Everyone else camped out in the living room.

Today is the last normal work day of the week.  It is an odd week with the celebration of July 4th actually being held on the Fourth itself even though that is a Thursday.  So tomorrow is going to be a short day, Thursday is a holiday and then Friday starts early with non-farm payroll at seven in the morning but nearly everyone will be out of the office so it will be, as far as I know, just me covering it, at least covering it physically from the office.  That’s going to be odd and the office is guaranteed to be effectively empty all day.  Today is also Dominica’s only day at home as she is going to go into the office tomorrow instead of Thursday and Morgan is going to come and stay at the house with the girls tomorrow which we are not telling Liesl about until tonight because she will be so excited that she won’t be able to stand it all day otherwise.

I got into the office this morning.  I left before anyone else was even out of bed.  I worked all morning, nothing special, and skipped lunch today.  I ran down to South Irving to see if I could find my friend selling computers as we have been looking for him for weeks and Dominica’s office is getting into a little bit of a panic about not having them.  So I drove down there just hoping that I could catch him and low and behold, I did!  What a stroke of luck.  So I was able to sit down with him and order some computers.  Dominica was really thrilled that I managed to track him down for her.

Came home a little later than usual today.  Had a bit of work to do at home this evening so mostly was in my office working for a while.  While I worked Liesl came into my office and sat at her desk behind me, fired up her laptop, went into Netflix, found Le Ballon Rouge and watched it again, on her own!

Tomorrow Morgan is coming to watch the girls so we told Liesl that she had to help clean the house so that Morgan could come.  Liesl easily put in a dedicated hour and a half cleaning like crazy to make the house look nice.  She did an amazing job.  She really is a great helper and really knows how to clean!  I can’t believe how big she is getting.  She really did serious cleaning.  This was the first time that she really did a major chore and even when we told her that she had done enough she kept right on working.  I was so proud of her tonight!

 

Today I discovered that my monthly page hits for SGL are at roughly four hundred thousand!  That seems excessive for my personal blog.  But pretty exciting.

Today is Monday.  I got up and took the girls up to Corinth.  Luciana has been getting better and better about being dropped off.  It wasn’t too many weeks ago that she would just cry and cry when I went to leave her.  She was so sad.  She has been slowly improving and today I just sat her down and she ran off with the kids to play in the other room – never sad goodbye to me or anything.  Perfectly happy.

For lunch today Dan and I checked out Taco del Mar which is new and opened right around the corner.  It was okay, they were still getting the hang of things so that might have been part of the problem but the food wasn’t amazing either and I’m a die hard fish taco fan.  It wasn’t bad, just not exciting in any way.  They did mention that they would have a bigger fish selection soon.

We had to make a run down to South Irving to see if we could find out about some desktops but did not manage to make connections.  So it was a wasted trip.  Dominica is in a bit of a panic to get some computers for the office so I was trying to help out.

This evening Dominica decided that she wanted to go try out the Genghis Grill.  So I got home, we did a little work for mayb half an hour, and then we packed up the girls and headed out to the Mongolian BBQ.  The food was pretty good and healthy.  I don’t like the mob of people picking out their ingredients, it is a little too frenzied for me and very confusing.  But the results are good.  Glad to know of a place that does tofu.

After dinner we hit Braums for some ice cream.  Luciana got a soft serve twist.  Liels got one scoop of birthday cake and one of strawberry short cake.  Delicious.

Luciana went to bed and then Liesl and I watched the 1956 French classic Le Ballon Rouge.  This was Liesl’s first time watching a movie in French, although she has spent time in France so that’s only so exciting.  She really enjoyed the movie. We snuggled on the couch and watched it together.

Going to bed tonight my CPAP mask ripped.  I now have no way to sleep.  Wonderful.  Going to be a long night.

We were feeling pretty tired this morning after our late night at the drive in.  It was a light day for us.

We started off by heading down to the end of Trinity Mills to try to get breakfast at Norma’s Cafe but the line was ridiculous so we drove around and ended up going to Pete’s Cafe down on Beltline in the Branch which was excellent.  Really good food. Dominica and I both go migas.

We did a little grocery shopping on the way home from breakfast.

This afternoon Dominica and I spent a little time on TrainSignal going through some Network+ training.  I am working on learning the TrainSignal training style to make sure that I know what they are looking for and we are using it as an opportunity for Dominica to get some additional training that she has not gotten before.

After the kids went to bed, Chris and I went to Redneck for just a little bit.  Salad and a beer.  It was a nice night so we were able to sit outside.

Luciana got me up at seven this morning and Liesl got up around eight.  No sleeping in with these two around.  I had some early morning work to do for the office anyway, nothing major maybe twenty minutes of work.  Actually, that was the plan, it actually turned into a few hours because of other problems.  But not too serious.

Dominica really wanted to try out the drive in theater down in Ennis, Texas this evening.  We’ve been driving past it for years but have never taken the time to stop there and watch anything.  It is nearly an hour away, rather a long drive to go see a movie especially when you need to get there an hour or more before the movie starts and you watch a double feature so that it is quite late before you head back home.  We really miss the Silver Lake Drive In back home, though, and really wanted to go try it out. Tonight Monster’s University was playing and we thought that the girls would like it so we figured that it would be a good chance to go.

We had to leave the house around seven to get down to Ennis in time to be comfortable getting into the theater and getting a decent spot.  The drive wasn’t bad, nearly zero traffic tonight.  We got to the theater which is really in the middle of nowhere but on the frontage road onto Interstate 45 southbound.  It actually looks like it was built behind a junk yard.  A bit surprising.  The upscale drive ins in New York are quite different than what they have down here.  No wonder in New York the drive ins are thriving and in Texas they are dying.  Completely different experience.  The place felt like it was mostly built out of scrap lumber, mostly plywood, mixed in with rusting remains of carnival snack stands.  Quite depressing and a little scary in a way.  The people were friendly but the site itself would put you in mind of actually being in a horror movie.

We got some pizza and popcorn for Dominica and I and cotton candy for the girls.  We had taken the Acadia so we set up the back with blankets and stuff so that the girls could hang out back there.  We didn’t want to face the car backwards in case there were mosquitoes although I don’t think that that would really have been a problem.  The pizza was okay but just grocery store frozen pizzas and the popcorn wasn’t good.  Nothing like the Charcoal Corral. We are really spoiled with having real restaurants that people actually want to eat at even if they are not going to the Drive In.  This food was weak at best and instead of making good food that people might want they instead run a long ad on the screens explaining that they need the money and begging people to buy the awful, overpriced food from the snack bar.  Not a good business strategy.  I was quite a bit less than impressed.  It really didn’t appear that they cared about the place at all.  It might as well have been abandoned from how it looked.

The first movie was Monster’s University which was pretty good.  Nothing special but a good prequel to the 2001 original.  I barely remember the original and probably have not seen it since it was originally in theaters or shortly thereafter.  The girls enjoyed it and just barely managed to stay up for the whole thing.  They had both fallen asleep in the Acadia on the ride down to Ennis, it is just far enough that staying awake is pretty hard for them.  So by the time that this movie was over they were having a tough time keeping it together.  They mostly took turns alternating between Dominica and my laps making it really hard for us to watch the movie and also very hard to stay cool as running the air conditioning for any length of time really was not an option.

Liesl had been super excited about seeing Iron Man 3 which was the second movie but before it came on she asked if she could go in the back and go to bed with Luciana so she never even saw the movie start.  She was out like a light.  Luciana fought sleep for a while and was up probably an hour after Liesl.  She needed to sleep but was delirious and had given herself insomnia so she kept climbing into the front for snuggles.  I didn’t like Iron Man 3 at all.  I kind of liked the first one but this one really felt like the writers were sick of the franchise and had given up.  Really weak and completely boring.  Dominica liked it but I think she likes it for the characters that she knows from the comics and not for the movie itself.  On its own it didn’t even make any sense.

One of the downsides to the drive in being in Ennis that we had not really thought through was that it was about two in the morning when we got out of the movie was we were already exhausted and had a long drive back to Carrollton in bar traffic.  At one point we were literally caught in Dallas gridlock at two thirty in the morning with drunk idiots everywhere.  It was a traffic mess.

It was after three when we finally managed to get to bed.  I don’t know how anxious we will be to go to the drive in again.  I think that the girls enjoyed it but they didn’t have to put up with all of the things that we did nor did they have to pay so much for it.  We are going to be awfully selective of going back there, that is for sure.  Not something that I really want to do again.  If it was just for me, I’d avoid it completely.  But I suspect that Liesl will be asking to go back again.  Hopefully we can make it to the Silver Lake Drive In in Perry enough to keep her happy.

We are constantly amazed that there are not drive ins all over Texas.  It is the perfect thing for Texas weather.