Sheep Guarding Llama

Wednesday. I had to be up by eight and watch an hour of video training to prepare for a nine o’clock meeting that we had this morning that ran until ten. So the first few hours of the morning were all dedicated to that.

Today is forty two years to the day that the crazy Blizzard of 1977 hit Western New York, when I was just about to turn one year old. “The start of a five day event that shut the region down. Snowfall totals reached 100 inches in some areas, wind gusts peaked at 69 MPH and snow drifts towered 40 feet high. The devastating winter storm resulted in 23 deaths in Western New York”, according to dad.

Dad had a very good visit with his oncologist today, but had a very scary drive home. He said that it was the worst driving conditions that he’d driven in for the past twenty years.

Work was not too bad today. We got some bad news that we did not get a big contract that we had been hoping for, however. But work was generally good and I was at my desk until evening.

Around six thirty I knocked off of working at my desk and came out to watch Star Trek: Voyager with Dominica and Paul. Paul was cooking his dinner as we started, then I cooked for myself and Liesl who had decided, after having tasted one of my hamburgers a week ago or more, that she would have one for dinner. So I made her an Earth Grown Soy Burger. I had to make it with mayo on the bottom side and ketchup on the top side because she likes both but is not okay with them touching, even on a sandwich. I accidentally included a slice of cheddar, but I don’t think that she noticed, she didn’t say anything. I even toasted the bun for her. She liked it and let Luciana try it and then she wanted one as well.

So I ended up cooking through two episodes of Voyager for the girls until just after eight. We were out of that kind of patty so Luciana got an East Grown Soy Cheese Burger with cheese included in it. I have not tried this variety yet. I made hers with the same mayo and ketchup, and with double cheese on a toasted bun.

This is amazing as neither girl has ever been willing to have a hamburger previously! This is a big step. So many more food options opening up for them. We eat this kind of stuff so often and have a fridge full of it and they always refuse to even try it. I am so excited. They both said that they were okay, but neither really liked it all that much. But it is a major step.

Luciana did not finish her burger, but she did like it. She found it very hard to hold together.

Tonight Ciana requested donuts and asked if, since we can’t get them tonight, if I wouldn’t go out in the morning and get them for her.

Dominica and I watched some Golden Girls before bed.

Tuesday. Today was a crazy busy day with MangoLassi. It was wild posting going on all day, it has been a long time since I have seen it get so busy. That kept me engaged all morning, very little time for anything else. But it was good, great to see this kind of activity.

I had a noon meeting that went well. Then right back to the busy day of posting.

We have a huge winter storm hitting the whole country over the next few days. We will get cold down here, but it is supposed to be really insane farther north, including back home in New York.

This evening, Dominica and Paul went out and I watched the girls. I made the three of us homemade pizzas and we put on Full House all evening. It was really nice, the girls were very happy.

We discovered that Netflix has remade Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego and that it just released. So Liesl has asked that we watch that together really soon.

Monday. Back to work. Nothing very special happening today. Kids were back to school and work went well. My really boring and entirely pointless Monday afternoon meeting has been removed from my scheduled which is awesome. That was a lot of time spent and nothing getting done. I don’t mind it, since customers pay for it, but it still is a lot of wasted time and something that I always have to schedule around.

Dinner tonight was salmon. The girls love their fish and Luciana asks for salmon regularly. It is one of their favourite foods. We watched Star Trek: Voyager while we ate.

Dominica and I watched some of The Orville tonight.

This evening the girls decided on a long shower and I read two chapters for them in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. We are almost one third of the way through the book now, we are around Chapter XIII where Huck and Jim are about to start raiding the steamboat that has been caught up on a rock in the river. It’s quite a struggle for them to follow the story, but they are doing such a good job trying and they are enjoying the book even so. I am constantly explaining what is going on to them. So many words, culturisms, and accents that they can’t follow. One really confusing part is the use of the texas and texas deck as parts of a ship.

Sunday. Slept in this morning. Then got up and spent the morning hanging out with Dominica watching television in the living room. We hung out for a few hours.

Rachel called around one thirty and asked if I wanted to go LARPing in Denton today. I said no, lol. But she asked if I would go and just hang out at least while she LARPed, so I said okay. Then she surprised me by being right around the corner. She picked me up and we drove up to Denton, also a surprise. She was like “I captured you for the day.”

We drove up to Denton, picked up William, then drove to the park. There were nearly one hundred and twenty people out in the park today. I had no idea there would be so many. It really was like a scene from a movie.

I was not expecting the scale of the event at all. They told me that normally it was closer to fifteen to twenty people, nothing like this. It was a decent day, chilly but the sun was out. Rachel and William got right into the event. I hung out and watched. Totally not my thing, but they were having fun.

It was interesting to watch in person, but I am familiar enough with LARPing that none of it was really surprising. It was all that I expected, just with a lot more people. Although I do have to say that I had no idea that people had bow and arrow sets for this stuff, that was interesting. Also got to see a guy take an “arrow” to the temple and get completely knocked out from it.

We LARPed till five thirty. Then we stopped by Fuzzy Taco and got food to go to take home with us. We had all been crazy Fuzzy Taco all afternoon. I got my usual tempura fish burrito, of course.

We headed over to East Side for a super fast beer as Rachel needed to do a “check in” on her beer app. I got a “strawberry shortcake” which was decent. It was a very fast stop.

We dropped off William, who lives right in Denton, and drove back to the house. Dominica and Paul were heading out to shoot pool and we ready to go as we pulled up. So we tagged teamed out and took over watching the kids.

I had managed to finally talk Rachel into watching Harry Potter and she is finally at the house early enough to make it happen. Luciana had been asking to start watching it again, so the timing was perfect.

I hate my burrito while everyone was getting ready for the movie. Then we fired up Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone and made it all of the way through it. The girls really wanted to go on to the second movie tonight, as did I, but Rachel did not feel that with her ADD that she could sit through it and pay attention. So only one movie for tonight.

Liesl and Luciana went off to their room, then, while Rachel and I watched a couple episodes of The Haunting of Hill House which were less scary, but way more sad, this time. Rachel could not stay late, though, as she had work to do yet tonight and needed to get back “home” to where she is staying with Megan and Daniel.

Saturday. Today was pretty slow. Put in some time in the office working. And spent a bit of time just hanging out with the family watching some Hulu and Netflix.

This evening I went out to see Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds which I have never seen before. This is a weird one for me to have never seen as it is such a classic and has been shown on television so many times, but that is probably exactly why I have never seen it. Growing up without cable, many of the shows that are standard cable movies that “everyone saw” are exactly the ones that I missed because no one ever watched them in any other context because they were burned out seeing them on cable.

The showing was in Bishop Arts at the Texas Theater. Before the move the Dallas Neo Classic Ballet did a performance based on the movie that was… interesting. It was a two dancer ballet that I can’t really explain. It was a good experience and not very long, maybe twenty minutes. It was two or three dance numbers followed by a short film.

The Birds was decent, although overall it was really just a high budget B movie. The plot didn’t exist, it was mostly just a cheesy zombie film that didn’t even bother to try to explain anything, leaving the entire thing as just a huge plot hole. Super lazy writing, no one felt like they had a good explanation for the events of the movie, and so they just didn’t make any. Nor did they address how things would progress, they just gave up making the film and it ended. I like Rod Taylor and he did an okay job in the film, and that’s about the highest praise that it earns. The effects were probably okay for the time, fake dead birds are pretty cheap. The setting was uninspired. The gas station fire scene was good for the time, effective.

Overall, I am glad that I watched the movie. But I definitely do not need to see it again. It was tolerable but drawn out, poorly paced, and just cheesy. Not a strong artistic piece, nor entertaining without an artistic element. Just an extremely cheap film that would today be considered nothing more than a mediocre low budget student film.