Sheep Guarding Llama

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.

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.