Sheep Guarding Llama

Got up at six thirty and got moving pretty early.  Worked for a few hours before going into the office.  I remembered to take four boxes of books with me today!  Hooray.  That is so much less stuff being stored in the living room now.  That was $71 to ship all of those books, but it is awesome not having to worry about them.  I have three more boxes to go and all of the books will be out of here.  Dominica is really excited about that.  Those things have been in the way for months.  I can’t believe that $150 will have shipped them all.

I worked through lunch and ran to the post office just after lunch to make sure that the four huge boxes of books made it away.

I managed to leave work a little early and beat rush hour by minutes.  It is amazing how making it onto 635 by 4:55 PM is one experience driving home and ten minutes later is completely different.  Dallas is definitely a “follow the rules, and do everything by the clock” kind of town.  The start and stop times of businesses must be nearly all identical and strictly adhered to to have traffic be so dramatic.

I got home quickly and surprised Dominica who had been planning on asking me to pick up dinner on the way home.  It is best that I didn’t, though, as that would have been a horrible disruption to our diets and this way we are forced to eat healthy food at home instead which is both cheaper and healthier.  I had wanted to go out to Brookhaven tonight but Dominica hurt her back yesterday and is just resting.  She spent the day reading the first book in “The Lord of the Rings” series.

On the way home I stopped by at Game Stop and grabbed the Wii cable that Liesl has been needing so that she can use the Wii that is set up in her bedroom.  She has a 16″ LCD television in there and the Wii and the old AppleTV.  She was so excited to get it finally set up.  She has been asking for months for us to get it working.  So I hooked it up shortly after getting home and Liesl spent much of the evening playing a Sesame Street counting game and a little bit trying to figure out Mario Kart.  She is very happy.

We watched Community much of the evening.  That is a really good show that we recently discovered.  We are about halfway through the first season now.  I find that it is a lot more like community college is that people may realize.  It kind of takes me back to my late ’90s college years at Monroe Community College.

Luciana got us up at five this morning but we managed to change her and get her a new bottle and she fell back asleep – and slept until quite late, maybe even after nine.  A rare parenting win.

Dominica went back to sleep but I decided that it was late enough and that I had enough work to do that I just got up, showered and went into my home office to work for several hours.  That was important as it allowed me to do a ton of catching up on all sorts of things.  This week is my big time catch-up week.  I am so far behind, it is really stressing me out.   I am so anxious for this semester to be over.  The scheduling overhead of taking classes is devastating for me.  There is just so much to be done and no time in which to do it.  But this is it, home stretch.  I am twenty-five percent through my final semester with classes.  I can do it.

Work was so busy that I ended up just working from home.  That was good, I needed the down time.  Dominica took the day off and spent it reading “The Hobbit” from cover to cover.

I ended up working on homework and stuff until nearly two in the morning but I am getting significantly caught up.  Still a lot to go but I am in no way behind on my class stuff at this point and even maybe a little bit ahead.

The weather has been gorgeous.  We have all the windows open and the girls are spending half of their days outside.  They are old enough now that they just go outside together and play.  In the sandbox, under the tree, running around the yard.  They are so cute.

I must have been pretty tired as I slept in until eight.  I got up and got right to work.  It was a while before the girls woke up.  Liesl was up long before Luciana.  Dominica is at work today and left long before the sun came up.

Today is day two of being fully back on my diet.  So far so good.  But it takes a long time to get any real progress.  Last time took me more than a year to really get anywhere.  So this is barely scratching the surface.  Time to really make this happen.  I had a successful diet day yesterday as I knew that we were going to Brookhaven for brunch so I couldn’t fast yesterday.  Today I am fasting as a “kick off” to the diet.  Just a one day fast, it helps kick my body into ketosis.  Only skipping a single meal, in reality.  I’ll be eating again tomorrow afternoon.  Doing the fast helps break me of the “eating food as a habit” thing.

This afternoon, Liesl and Luciana took some snacks – shredded cheese for Luciana and Panda Express noodles for Liesl – out under the tree in the back yard and sat on the rubber mulch and had a picnic together.  It was very adorable.

Liesl asked if she could grow flowers this afternoon.  So I emailed Dominica at work to let her know of the request.  On her way home from work she stopped at Walmart and did some grocery shopping and got food supplies and found a Disney Princess Flower Garden kit for Liesl.  That is going to be perfect.  She’ll be able to grow flowers in her room now.  Very cute.

I had been planning on fasting today but after work Dominica decided to watch The Hobbit again (to get some value from the very expensive iTunes purchase of it on the AppleTV) so she made me a proper Medifast Lean and Green meal and I watched it with her (watching anything like that and not eating is pretty much impossible.)

Late this evening, after Luciana went to bed, Liesl and I set up at the kitchen table and we planted her three little cups of flowers together and put her greenhouse together and set it up on the bookshelf in her bedroom.  We should see something beginning to grow in about a week, according to the instructions.  Liesl is so excited that she was practically bouncing off of the walls.

Dominica is getting up early tomorrow to go running.  It has been nearly a year since she was last running.

Alarm went off at four fifteen this morning.  Was out the door with Nate and Bob on the way to DFW in just ten minutes.  It was a quick run to the airport at that time of the morning.  It was barely five when I got back to the house. Their flight leaves at six thirty so they had plenty of time to get through security and to their gate.

I got back home and knowing that we were going to leave to go to brunch for an eight thirty reservation I decided that going back to bed would not make any sense.  So instead I went to my computer and spent some time getting caught up on homework, Spiceworks postings, SGL, etc.  I’ve been struggling to keep up for weeks and today begins my window to get caught up.  Having three hours of solitary work time was just what I needed.  I even managed to do some cleaning around the house too, although it isn’t bad at all after yesterday’s cleaning effort.

We went to brunch at Brookhaven Country Club and then returned to the house for a minute before the Grice family loaded up and headed south for Houston.

Wow, our house is empty – and, for the most part, clean too!  We are looking forward to our first stretch of empty home in a very long time.  We are worn out.  Very, very worn out.

Although we are traveling to Houston and California in two weeks so we don’t exactly have tons of rest coming our way.

I did a lot of homework and projects this afternoon.  Trying to get caught up.  And trying to keep the house in a good condition too.

I stayed on diet today.  I am getting back into full on diet mode as of today.  Last night was my last hurrah with a baked potato at Brookhaven.  Today was the lean omelet for breakfast and just Medifast meals the rest of the day.  Now another year of diet looms out in front of me.  This is going to be hard.

I slept in pretty late this morning.  I was completely exhausted.  Dominica got me up to help out with the cleaning but the house was already looking really good.  Dominica and Francesca and the kids had been up cleaning all morning and it was really in great shape.  It is amazing considering how much sand had been coming into the house all week from the kids playing with the sand box constantly.  That thing is really popular, at least with the kids.  It is driving the adults completely insane.  The entire house is covered in sand at this point!

Everyone took off to go to Arlington to see Casen at ten or so so I had the house to myself for most of the day.  I spent the day in the office getting caught up, just a little bit, on work and now and then doing a little cleaning around the house.  I didn’t make a ton of additional progress but I did add some improvements throughout the day.  I really did need the quiet time at home – the past several weeks have been so busy and hectic.  I have not had the slightest downtime in forever.

The family returned about the same time that Nate and Bob texted me to say that they were on the DART at Union Station and working on heading our direction.  It’s a bit of a ride for them so it was pretty close to five when I drove down to the station to pick them up.

We hung out at the house for an hour or two.  Bob is feeling pretty sick.  Something that he caught from his daughter before leaving Ithaca.  So he can barely talk and is very tired.

Dominica, Francesca and the family decided to just stay in tonight while Nate, Bob and I went to Brookhaven Country Club to do dinner in the FiveFive lounge.  Nate and Bob wanted to watch the Syracuse basketball game.  So we settled in to the big leather arm chairs their and ordered dinner.

As Brookhaven was closing there was still a bit of game left so we drove up to Redneck and spent about an hour finishing the game there.  It was a slow night and we were all tired so we drove home and got back before eleven.  Even with it being so early everyone else was already asleep for about an hour.  We have to be up at a quarter after four to get them off to the airport, though, so only a few hours of sleep for us tonight even being home early.

Dominica had made up both futons in the living room so the guys were able to just crash there as soon as we came in the door.  Luciana is still sleeping in Liesl’s room and Liesl is still sleeping in our room, which she very much enjoys, and the entire Grice family is sacked out in Luciana’s room which is pretty funny.