Sheep Guarding Llama

It’s Friday!  It has been such a busy week.  I can’t believe that the Ralstons were still here in Texas on Monday afternoon!  I’m sure that they cannot believe it either.

I got up and went into the office without incident.  Luciana was still asleep in Liesl’s room and Liesl was fast asleep in our bed.

I’ve been falling behind this week after our enormous amount of week last weekend.  So I am pretty exhausted and really going crazy trying to keep up with everything.  Doing test writing, keeping up with my classes, doing my normal work – which is still a heavier workload than usual – is making this a tough few weeks.  And everyone is visiting at once.

Nate and Bob decided that since they are going to the basketball game tonight at American Airlines Arena that they would not worry about coming up to visit tonight and that we would just get together tomorrow evening instead.

Work ended up being a very late one for me. I did not manage to leave the office until just after nine in the evening!  I had let Dominica know earlier that everyone should just eat dinner without me and I managed to grab Subway for myself around five so I didn’t go without food.  I was pretty worn out when I left the office.  Especially considering I didn’t take a lunch break or anything of the sort.  I worked a solid thirteen hours.

I got to the house and it was long since dark, even today after the time change, and nearly everyone was getting ready for bed.  Dominica and Madeline were watching Scream the late 90s thriller movie that I have never seen.  It was pretty cheesy and I only saw the last half hour or so but at least I know what the movie was about now.

After that we put on Clue, one of the greatest movies ever.  Emily actually requested it.  I don’t know why we put movies on at night, no one makes it through them.  I don’t want to watch movies yet I’m the only one bothering to make it through.  Madeline did make it through Clue with me but only barely and I don’t get the impression that she was too interested.  Dominica, Francesca and Emily all bailed on the movie long before it was over.  Liesl did, actually, come out and finish it with us but that actually made it worse since Liesl should have been going to bed instead.

So it was eleven when we went off to bed.  Tomorrow morning we are cleaning the house then everyone is going down to Arlington to visit and leaving me at home to work on homework and writing as I am way behind this week.  Then in the afternoon Nate and Bob are catching the train up from downtown with all of their luggage and coming here to hang out before they catch their very early morning flight back home from DFW.

I was a bit tired when I got up this morning but not too bad.  Got up around seven and got showered but had some issues come up and I had to log in and deal with them before leaving the house.  The morning ended up, as often happens, being so busy that there was no way for me to make it into the office.  It was a crazy morning, I never had a chance to pop my head out of the office except to make another cup of coffee every forty-five minutes or so.  Much of it was spent on the phone so I just kept the office door closed much of the morning.  Francesca actually forgot that I was even there.  Dominica was surprised to find me at home when she got in from the office.

Dominica worked only a half day physically in the office but worked all afternoon from home.  She was taking a shorter week this week because of all of the work that we did over the weekend.  We are all really tired from that.  That was exhausting.

I worked a really long day today.  Starting before eight and not quitting until after seven.

The Hobbit released early to the AppleTV tonight and Dominica could not wait the five days that it takes for it to be available on BluRay.  So after a bit of discussion she bought it so that we could watch it tonight.  The kids did not want to watch it, no big surprise, so Dominica and Francesca ordered some dinner from Joe’s and then ran out to hit up a Redbox to pick up some movies for the kids.  They got back before the food arrived.

At about seven we kicked off The Hobbit on our living room movie theater.  It’s nearly a three hour movie and with a house full of kids the interruptions were fast and furious.  I opened a bottle of red dulce wine and Dominica, Francesca and I polished that off in no time.  Emily played video games on my office computer and Madeline took the kids into Dominica and my bedroom and watched movies with them in there.  Francesca lasted about halfway through The Hobbit before heading off to bed with Clara.

So far I think that this, the first of three installments of The Hobbit is better than I had anticipated based on having read the book and truly not enjoyed it but it also struck me, now seeing it with Peter Jackson’s pacing and the visual aids to put people and places together, just how much Tokien simply took what he had already written and wrote it again as The Lord of the Rings, just written better.  It really is the same story told twice.  Similar characters, similar situations, similar pacing, similar situations, similar storyline… everything.  In many cases it isn’t even that they diverge, many of the characters, even, are the same completely.

So the movie was good, but it wasn’t awesome.  I love the series but mostly because it is done so well, not because I think that Tokien’s writing deserve this amount of care and attention.  There are so many other works that I would like to see done to this scale that just are not treated as well.  It is sad.

Now we have to wait until Christmas before we can see the extended version of The Hobbit and a while after that, I think, before we can see the next film in the series.  It made for a fun evening though and did a good job of showing off our living room theater which performed really well.

I went into the office this morning.  Nate and Bob managed to fly out of Philly early this morning and arrived just after ten this morning at DFW airport.  Their travel time, from the time that they left work to head to the airport until they arrived in Dallas took them almost exactly the same amount of time that it takes to drive the same trip.  Not an impressive feat, really.  It’s amazing how often driving is just as fast as flying, even when going across the country.

So I left work when Nate texted me that they were on the ground and I drove over to the airport to get them.  My office is so close to the airport that I was sitting outside their gate waiting for them more than ten minutes before they even had their luggage!

Once I picked them up I drove them downtown to the Hyatt at Reunion Tower downtown and dropped them off.  We made plans for dinner and I drove back to the office.

I worked until late because there was a lot going on, then ran home, changed and was back out the door in thirty minutes.  Dominica, Francesca and the kids went to Brookhaven for dinner while I was going to be out.  Nate and Bob thought that checking out the Tower Club downtown would be fun.  So I drove down to Trinity Mills station to catch the train.  I hate parking downtown.

I was buying my ticket on the east side of the station when the southbound green line DART arrived.  I bought my ticket as quickly as I could and literally ran the length of the train, rounded the south end of it, ran back up the other side of the platform and dove onto the train as it was ready to pull away.  Thankfully there was a human running the train and knew I was trying to make it.  So the timing was “perfect” and I didn’t waste any time on my journey downtown.

I got to the Thanksgiving Tower a bit ahead of the guys, they were lost wandering around the city.  So I got to wait a little bit for them.  Then we went up and had dinner at the Tower Club.  They were dutifully impressed.  And it worked out well to provide nice views of the entire area.  I went for the striped bass.  Bob had the venison with pumpkin bread pudding on the side.  Nate had the pork chop.  We stayed until after nine just enjoying the atmosphere.

It was a bit early to call it a night and they are sort of on vacation so they decided to ride the train back up north with me and go out for a bit.  So we grabbed the car and drove up to Redneck Heaven in Lewisville and hung out there for a few hours before I drove them back to their hotel and called it a night.  This is our first time hanging out in around four years or more!

It was rather late night for me after driving the guys back downtown to their hotel and then driving back home to Carrollton.

March is just flying by for us.  I still feel like it should be February and March is nearly halfway through.  How did this happen?  We have been so busy and so many people have been visiting us that I have lost all sense of perspective on time.

I spent in a little this morning not getting up until eight thirty.  I need some time to recover from the time change.  I am one of those people for whom the time shift really throws me off significantly.

My left foot is still really bothering me.  Overall I think that it is better today but not my much.  It is only better today because yesterday was so bad.  I can mostly walk but every so often I do something that ends up being really painful.

The Grice Family left Houston really early and drove up for Spring Break.  So our cleaning window between the Ralstons leaving and the Grices arriving was very small.  Dominica did all of the cleaning today.  I had to get logged into work and also couldn’t really walk or be very useful.

Francesca hit some major traffic issues on the way north so it took them a lot longer than it should have taken.  But they still arrived pretty early.  It was before eleven.

Work was heavy today, I was really busy.  I did not get very much time to relax at all.

After work we took the family to Brookhaven for kids night.  That went really well.  Everyone really enjoyed their dinner.

Nate and Bob ended up having their flight delayed and then cancelled tonight, but not until after they had flown from Ithaca to Philadelphia.  So they were stranded in Philly overnight.  I will be picking them up in the morning.

We got Francesca to watch the Doctor Who episode “Blink” which she really liked.  Then Dominica tried to get her into the second season of the show but she fell asleep halfway through the episode.

Today is the big “after day” for the weekend’s exhausting migration.  So everyone but me is at work with Dominica today.  Danielle took in a baker’s dozen dozen of donuts (does that make it a baker’s gross?)  That went over well.  Dominica and Art were able to handle the very few issues that came up without any problem and Art and Danielle were able to head back to the office late in the morning, pack the car and get on the road long before noon to try to make it back to New York as soon as possible.  They were really excited about that, they are looking forward to being home again.

So by noon it was just me at home watching the girls who were both very good today and I barely knew that they were there at all.  Dominica worked a full day and came home and worked some more.  She is really tired but is only going to do a half day yet on Thursday and consider the weekend to be her working hours for most of the week.

I had to work a lot today and this evening we just relaxed for the most part.  This is our one and only night in which we have the house to ourselves for the next week.  The Grices will be arriving around ten tomorrow morning and Nate and Bob are expected to arrive from Ithaca sometimes tomorrow evening.  The Grices are planning on staying until Sunday.

We watched some Rick Steves shows that have recently been added to Hulu Plus.  His seventh season still has not shown up but some of his longer, special episodes have. So we watched his Best Hidden Spots in Europe, Christmas in Europe and his show on Iran which was really excellent.  The first two were mostly made from other shows that we had seen previously but his trip to Iran was all new content for us.  Liesl was very excited to watch the one episode that showed Hallstat in Austria where we spent a few days.  She remembered it and thought that it was great seeing it on the big screen.  This is Dominica and my first time seeing film of Hallstat since being there as well and it was really cool to see houses, boats, restaurants, path ways and more than we knew and remembered well.  That’s not something that you get to do very often.