Sheep Guarding Llama

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.

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.