Sheep Guarding Llama

In the office today.  Had a busy morning working from the house so didn’t get physically into the office until lunch time so just worked through lunch and got out at a good time and came home.

Dominica was home with the girls today.

Got coffee with Doue today.  We went to Starbucks for a change.  It was gorgeous out today, not so warm and heavily overcast with just the slightest rain.  So we sat outside and ended up sitting next to someone from the FAA, Ralph, who regaled us with stories at the coffee shop.

This evening we watched just a tiny bit of Arrested Development and then once Luciana went to bed Liesl and I tried out a new game, since we had finished the last one last night, and started playing Ankh 2 via Steam.  It is a similar point and click adventure game, a lot like the last two that we have played, but with a slightly different interface so she is getting a chance to try learning a new interface so she doesn’t get stuck thinking that things always behave the same.  She picked up the new game almost instantly and is doing really well with it.

Liesl is liking this new game, she can really navigate on her own and I am really letting her drive this time.  She is mostly sitting at the computer on her own from the beginning and I am sitting in the rocking chair.

Dominica and I actually got some time to hang out tonight too.

I am back in the office today.  Dominica had to work today instead of yesterday because of the holiday so I had to take the girls to daycare this morning.

Worked a long day today.  After work I went to Brookhaven and met the family there.  Turns out that the girls were really, really tired, though, and it probably wasn’t the best idea.  They were pretty unhappy during dinner and it was rather stressful.  So maybe not the best idea.  Dinner was good, but we had been hoping to check out the extensive fish specialist menu this week but it turned out that that had been published in error – even the servers were surprised as the were handing out menus and then had to take them back.  But we are excited for when it comes out next week now.

Luciana was straight to bed when we got home.  Then Liesl and I played the end of The Book of Unwritten Tales: The Critter Chronicles which she was really happy to finish.  After this she has now played forty hours of adventure games in the last week or two.

Dominica went to bed and I went out to Redneck to hang out with a friend who is considering a career switch into IT.  He and I ended up talking about his career plans until four thirty in the morning.

Today is Monday but it is Memorial Day so I am home with the family and hopefully because I put in four hours working yesterday I won’t need to be doing any work for the office today, or at least I sure hope so.  I have a lot of test work to do today so I hardly have the day as a free day but I should, again in theory, get to focus on that.

Liesl and I played a lot of The Book of Unwritten Tales: The Critter Chronicles today and made it very close to the ending.  I’m pretty confident that we will be able to finish it tomorrow.  She is getting so good at playing the game that I don’t necessarily even have to sit with her while she plays it anymore.  I can sit across the room, walk around and do other things and just check in on her every few minutes to help her along.  This is a great learning experience for her.

I got a bit of work done today and had some time to relax too.  Back to work tomorrow.

It was eleven this morning when we finally pulled ourselves out of bed.  I was the first one up and I was showered before anyone else was getting up.  So it was probably closer to noon for the rest of the family.  I can’t believe that the girls managed to sleep in so late.  They both got to sleep in the car a lot last night and they both tend to have pretty strong internal clocks that get them up around the same time regardless of how late they end up going to bed, Luciana especially.

Liesl got up and immediately wanted to know when we would be playing “the game” – The Book of Unwritten Tales: The Critter Chronicles – again.  So we started playing that pretty early this afternoon and got several hours in on it today.

For “breakfast” in the early afternoon Dominica was in the mood for breakfast tacos like we get in Houston so she sent me out looking for some.  We got lunch from Fuzzy’s Tacos which is pretty nearby and tried out their breakfast and fish tacos.  They were okay but nothing to write home about.  Except my dad reads this blog, so technically I sort of just wrote home about them.

We watched some of Arrested Development.  We are going back and watching the entire series again from the beginning to prepare for the fourth season which, after being off of the air for a decade, released early this morning on Netflix.  This is a major change of how television is made.  Netflix actually found a show that people loved and that was cancelled for no good reason, bought all of the rights, paid for all of the actors to return many years later and fired the series back up!  It is a major win for consumer-driven television choice and we are going to seriously support Netflix for doing this.  We have high hopes that this will signal a fundamental change to how shows are selected and financed.  This could be, and should be, a turning point for network television.  Never has such a high profile, mainline show been exclusive to non-network television.  The Internet is finally the new mainstream for shows.

This evening we tried to relax a bit but I can paged out and had to put in four hours working on a conference call for the office.  That kind of ruined the last portion of the evening.  Liesl had wanted to hang out in the living room together and I totally had to bail on her.  At least I got to read her her bedtime stories before she went down for the night.

While donig other things, at least, I managed to get completely caught up on SGL today.

We are in Ottawa, Kansas this morning.  This is Dominica and the girls’ first times in Kansas.  I’ve been in Kansas twice before, once just as a technicality with Francesca when we drove over the border just to say that we had been there and then once for SpiceCorps Wichita a year ago.  This is the longest that I’ve been in Kansas and the deepest into the state that I have been.

We got a late check out for noon, got mostly ready to go and then went next door to the Old 56 Restaurant (or something like that) and got breakfast with the girls.  The food was really good.

We checked out of the hotel and drove out to Vassar to make sure that we could find the house.  That really took only about thirty minutes so we had about an hour to kill.  So we went in search of some sun screen for the girls.  Turns out that Vassar isn’t big enough to have a gas station or anything so we ended up back tracking many miles to find a Dollar General so that we could pick up some basics.

Got to the wedding on the early side.  It was great seeing people again.  Steve, John and Joey from York’s class of 94 were all there.  Only four of us from school but considering the distance necessary to get there, that’s a pretty impressive turn out.  Four out of sixty four who graduated in our class is pretty impressive as this is eighteen hours drive from back home and it was eight hours for us.

We had a really good time at the wedding.  The girls loved playing in a bouncy house that was set up in the back.  I got to meet a lot of people and do a lot of catching up with friends I haven’t seen in forever.  Steve and I have barely seen each other in nineteen years!

We stayed as long as we could but really wanted to be on the road around six.  Luciana had essentially no sleep and I had even less plus had to drive yesterday and today.  If we weren’t on the road early the kids would be unbearable.   We didn’t make it out at six.  I was pretty surprised when I realized it was after eight.  So we managed to leave more like eight thirty.  I’m glad that we stayed as long a we did but it made for a really long night.  We had considered stopping in Oklahoma City on the way home and splitting the drive up but really didn’t want to take the time and money to do that so played it by ear to see how the drive went.

The drive went pretty quickly.  Traffic was very light and we zipped down I35 through Wichita and down through Oklahoma City.  We got to see a little of the destruction in Moore too.

It was nearly four when we got home to Carrollton.  Boy were we tired.  Straight to bed for us.  Liesl is still sleeping in our bed.  That’s almost ten straight days of not needing to sleep on her own.  She is loving this.