Sheep Guarding Llama

Today I did a ton of catching up on SGL.  All caught up now.

I found another old newspaper clipping of myself.  This one presumably from April, 1983 when, like in the other one, I made the honor roll at Pavilion Baptist School.  Very odd that they used to print this stuff in the newspaper.  This one is from when I was in first grade.  Mrs. Duthie’s class.  It is weird to see how much the world has changed, and how much it hasn’t.  If you think posting today on Facebook or on a blog that you were spending the weekend visiting your parents just look at that newspaper where people coming in to visit their family for the weekend actually went through the effort of writing into the newspaper to have it officially published.  Given the incredible difference in effort necessary between making a Facebook or Twitter update versus contacting the newspaper and having something added to the week’s printing and having all that money spent on ink, paper, setting, proofing and delivery it is actually far more amazing to me the minutia that was printed in the 1980s versus what is published today.  And today it is far more private since we can limit visibility or practical visibility of posts whereas the newspaper was totally and completely public, was always archived and now is completely public on the Internet as well.  I can’t believe that there are sections just for little areas like Covington (where I grew up) and Dale (the smallest post office in America back then.)  Also it is kind of sad that both schools mentioned in this paper have long since closed.

In the office today.  Came home over lunch but had a outage at work and had to hop online from home and worked on it from there all afternoon right into the evening deployments.  I was pretty glad that I was stuck at home since the deployments ran until around seven thirty this evening.  It was a long day.

We didn’t do very much tonight.  Dominica didn’t feel like watching anything.  The girls hung out in my office much of the night.

I discovered my name in a random Internet search and found this little bit of my history: my third grade honor roll listing from Pavilion Baptist School in 1985.  It is amazing how many of the people listed in that article I still have on Facebook or Twitter or know how to reach.  Very small world even though I live across the country now.  Looking at the other articles and that old “print” newspaper really makes me feel old.  What a reminder that I grew up in a very different world than the one we live in today.

Dominica was up and off to the office and I got up shortly after she left.  Luciana was up long before Liesl this morning.  Luciana got up around seven thirty and did her thing around the house for hours before Liesl got up.

Luciana watched some Justin Time in the living room and then came in and hung out in the bathroom while I showered.  She played with her ducks and would periodically hand me one while I was in the shower so that they could hang out with me.  I was surprised to find that she figured out how to use the AppleTV remote now so that she can put on the next show on her own.  She has been able to do this with the iPad and PlayStation 3 for a long time but the AppleTV is dramatically more complicated as it has confusing, multi-use buttons, unpredictable on-screen response and the remote is much harder to get a response from since it has to be pointed at the device.

Liesl finally got up around nine thirty – fourteen and a half hours of sleep!  We had to put her to bed super early last night because she was so tired.  Hopefully this means that she will be extremely rested for the D&D game tonight. She loves the game.  She things that everyone that comes is so much fun.  She talks about Morgan coming days ahead of time.  Liesl came running in to tell me that she had taught Luciana how to use the remote and that she was using it on her own.  It is so cute that Liesl gets excited about Luciana learning new things.

I got the girls up to daycare in Corinth on the early side and zipped into the office.  An uneventful day.

As soon as I got home it was house cleaning time.  It still looked pretty good from yesterday but there is always more to do.  Liesl was a great helper and wouldn’t stop cleaning until everyone arrived.  She was determined to help in any way that she could.  She picked up a ton of toys and cleaned all kinds of stuff.

We cleaned and Dominica did food prep.  There is a lot to be done.  Veggie trays, chips and dips, cookies, pizzas, etc.

Everyone arrived a little late, around eight thirty.  Hoping to work on that in the future as getting started is the hardest thing and then we run out of time as we really all want to play much longer than we actually get to do.  Then we set about making pizzas right away and that took us until after ten.  It was fun and delicious but doesn’t work for the game.  We have too little spare time.

We finally got around to starting the game just after ten.  We had our full seven people again and this is our third week.  Everyone who has played D&D seriously in the past is pretty excited because campaigns just don’t go this long, especially with this many people.  Getting a dedicated group that actually shows up consistently and takes the effort to clear their schedules to make it happen is very rare and as adults there are always things that “pop up” that make it really hard.  It requires prioritization to have it really work.  You have to be dedicated to each other and realize that skipping a week impacts a lot of people.  Probably that we are playing as the DM and three couples makes it easier as both members of each couple are dedicated to getting the other one to the game.

We had a good, exciting session and everyone is really interested in where the story is going.  Played until about two in the morning.  Boy this game is wearing us out.

We are discussing making a holiday of the game next week.  Everyone has the fourth off so we are considering maybe getting together on Wednesday evening and doing a slumber party at the house so that we can get in a full session that evening, get some real sleep, make breakfast and then put in a full D&D day.  I can’t remember the last time that I played the game like that.  Everyone was very excited about that idea.  This is a hard core D&D group that we have now.  We are also talking about taking a group field trip to Reaper in Lake Dallas on Saturday to do some painting of our miniatures because they have a free painting day event there on the weekends.

I am in the office every day now as a ton of things have changed at work.  I’m feeling rather depressed these days but everything is fine.  Just not feeling like I’m at the top of my game.  Maybe a lot of it is related to not having the sleep flexibility that I am used to.

Went to the Local Diner with Dan, we just did coffee today and split some onion rings.  Just wasn’t feeling lunch.

Dominica, Morgan, Rachel, Jaiden, Liesl and Luciana all went up to Denton today and hit the Reaper factory (the actual factor, not a store) to seek out cool miniatures for our D&D game.  Then they hit another store to get dice and some random supplies.  So I have new orange D20s and a set of D6s which will make rolling easier.  We all got new, custom miniatures to use now too.  The girls had a great time going to the stores and hanging out with the older girls.  They were exhausted by the time that I got home.

This evening Dominica wanted to the watch The Dictator which was free on Netflix so we watched that and it wasn’t horrible.  Not exactly good, that would be too strong of a term.  But it was not horrible.  Slightly entertaining, I guess.   We did some cleaning tonight too.  We need to get ready for the D&D game that will be here tomorrow and it is really hard for us to clean tomorrow since we both have to be at work all day beforehand.

Dominica baked cookies tonight for tomorrow and made dough so that we will be ready to do home made pizzas for the game too.

Got up before seven, all on my own.  I must be getting back into the groove of having sleep again.

I skipped lunch today.  Don’t even know why, it just happened.  On the way home Dominica had me stop at LA Burger again and pick up take away.  We each got an LA Burger and we split an order of their veggie tacos.

Had a quiet evening, watched the remainder of Rules of Engagement before calling it a night.  We still have a bit of catching up to do from all of the activity last week.

More or less normal day at the office for me.  Had lunch at the Local Diner with the guys.  Pretty uneventful day.

Dominica said that she wanted to go to LA Burger because Jose had recommended it and said that it was really amazing.  So I went home, picked up the family and we drove to LA Burger, which isn’t far away, to check it out.

LA Burger’s tag line is “America’s Favorite Food, with Seoul.”  They are a Korean Fusion restaurant over my the Carrollton Korean district.  Dominica got their veggie tacos and I got a veggie burger and we split an order of their k-fries which are French fries topped with a mound of their in-house kimchi.  The kimchi was amazing.  We love this new place.  This is going to be one of our new haunts for sure.

After dinner we went to Braum’s to get ice cream. They have the best ice cream around.  Liesl and Luciana were really excited to get ice cream.  Braum’s even has soft serve like we get back in New York.  That is the first that we have found that down here.

We got home and pretty soon the girls were off to bed.  Between me getting home an hour later than usual and then going out first to eat and then for ice cream it was after eight when we got home.  So it was basically bed time.

Once the girls were in bed Dominica rented Warm Bodies on the AppleTV because she has really wanted to see it so we watched that.  It wasn’t too bad. Not my favourite movie by any stretch.  Kind of cute, mostly pointless.