Sheep Guarding Llama

Today is dad’s last full day in Texas.  Dominica was up early and off to work.  I slept in a bit more though not nearly as late as you would think.  The girls really don’t let me sleep in all that much even at the best of times.

Dad and I got a lot more time to hang out today.  He also got most of our new receiver shelf built and put up in the bar.  We’ll need to finish mounting it and paint it but I think that it is going to work really well.  I am hoping to give a go at running some cables through the room overhang to make the projector connect transparently to the receiver through it.

This afternoon, while Luciana was sleeping, Liesl wanted to play catch for the first time ever.  I had shown her that Dominica had found a velcro mit and tennis ball catch game in the garage on a recent cleaning spree and Liesl was very keen to try it out.  The weather was awesome – bright and sunny and plenty warm.  So in just t-shirt and jeans we all went to the back yard (which with all of the new mulch and tiles is dramatically cleaner than it used to be) and spent quite some time playing Liesl’s first ever game of catch.  That was a lot of fun.

Dominica brought home Panda Express at dad’s request for his final meal.  We were still outside playing catch when she got home.  We watched Grace and Favour while we ate.  Then we hooked up dad’s laptop and we watched a video that dad had made of Jenny Case being interviewed about and then performing a song that she had written about mom. It was incredibly touching and Luciana climbed onto my laptop to watch the whole thing.

After dinner, everyone but me went up to Ikea in Frisco so that dad could do some shopping.  Dominica got stuff too but it was really a trip for dad to check out some furniture options.  This is his first time ever going to an Ikea, so this was a bit of an experience for him.  Dominica got tables and chairs for the girls’ school room and a new shelving unit for the kitchen area to help get some of our non-stop house mess cleaned up.

After that trip dad was pretty tired and wanted to get to the hotel early to be sure that he could be packed, rested and out the door early in the morning.  I’m taking him to DFW airport on my way into the office tomorrow morning.

It’s Sunday and last Sunday’s brunch at Brookhaven with dad was so successful that we decided to do that again as this is his last weekend day in Texas.  We knew to go a bit earlier today than we did last week. So first thing after everyone was awake and dad got over to the house and the girls were ready we headed out to Brookhaven and had our breakfast.  It was very good, as always.  We had a nice time.

Dad worked on the screen more today and managed to get everything set up so that we were actually able to use the theater today.  The screen is powered and brings itself down from the ceiling, the project is mounted, the receiver is sitting on the bar and this evening, while heading to pick up dinner at Eat St., dad and I swung into Target and I picked up a third generation Apple TV for $99 that we are going to use to primarily power the new theater.  The tiny little Apple TV is very different than the one that Dominica and I got so many years ago back when we lived in Newark.  Now rather than relying on iTunes and requiring that movies be transferred to the device before using them, the new system has no internal hard drive and instead is designed around streaming all content.  So our Netflix, Hulu and YouTube will work on it making it unnecessary for us to have a more powerful (and ergo cumbersome) device hooked up for watching shows.

We had dinner at the house and then dad was off to his hotel on the early side because he wanted to be sure to be able to make it in time to watch the season finale of Downton Abbey.  He watched the penultimate episode last weekend in his hotel too.  During the week Dominica and I had purchased the season on Amazon Prime and had watched nearly the first half but were very far behind.

So tonight we decided to forego any real sleep, Dominica rarely can sleep on Sunday nights anyway, and we started watching Downton Abbey from mid season and stayed up most of the night so that we could make it through the entire second half and complete the season!  So it was nearly four in the morning when we turned in for the night which only gave Dominica about two hours of sleep.  She is going to have a long day tomorrow.

The theater is really awesome. The 1080p Optoma projector looks great and is plenty bright on the 103″ screen and the screen really works well in the living room.  The next steps, which are pretty major, are to have the electrical in the house modified to accommodate everything.  We need to add power up front, run speak cables to the front, run cabling from the server closet to the bar, etc.  Tomorrow dad is going to work on putting up a shelf in the bar to hold the receiver and Apple TV (and maybe the XBOX 360) up in the ceiling area to make it as unobtrusive as possible.

Tomorrow is a holiday for me so I am home with dad and the girls while Dominica goes into the office and I don’t have to spend the day working.

This is our last weekend with dad in Texas.  At least I am home now for the next three days.  We get so little time together even when he is here.  My work days are very long.  I managed to be home on Thursday too, but being home when I am working doesn’t give us very much time to hang out.  He is flying back to New York on Tuesday morning.

I mostly tried to get caught up on some work today and dad spent all morning and early afternoon working on getting the mounting ready for putting up the screen in the living room.

This afternoon we went to Denny’s, as we often do on Saturdays, for dinner and then off to Yogurtland for dessert.  Then dad and I went to Home Depot and got additional supplies.  I got a lot more mulch today, ten more bags, plus a little more pea gravel.  We got home and I set about putting all of that out into the yard.  The mulch has finally gotten the muddy back corner that is nothing but a huge pile of clay that they dug out from under the house when we had the foundation lifted prior to buying it more than two years ago.  Finally we have that completely covered in mulch so that we can walk back there.  It looks so much better too.  From the house you can see it and it really makes a difference.  The mulch isn’t just in the corner now either but is just starting to go along the back fence.  We have, for some reason, a strip of dirt that goes along all of the outside of the yard so we really need to encase the entire thing in the mulch to make it look nice and to keep it clean.  That’s why we need to many bags, it is just a little bit everywhere.

We are so happy with the mulch that we are going to use it against the house too where the old bushes used to be.  No grass ever took root there either and it is perpetually a muddy mess.  If only we had the budget to buy fifty bags of the stuff all at once, that would be awesome.  And another thirty bags of the pea gravel, at a minimum.

Long office day for me not getting home till after eight.  Dad and Dominica had a long day too.  Dominica got stuck working most of the day, but at least it was working from home.  Dad was able to catch up on sleep last night so was feeling much better today.

Dad got the project hung under the bar today so that when I came home we were able to see it.  The screen will be getting mounted over the weekend, hopefully, but the project is in place hanging off of the front of the interior “roof” of the bar.  It looks pretty good.  Being white it blends in much better than I had anticipated.  For the moment, the cables just dangle down and that isn’t going to work well but one step at a time.

Came home, had dinner, watched a little Grace and Favour and off to bed for everyone.

Happy Birthday to my niece Madeline who turns thirteen today!

Dad got essentially no sleep last night so I ended up staying home so that he wouldn’t be left alone with the girls.  That would have been too much for him.  They are exhausting at the best of times.

Liesl made me the sweetest valentine’s day card today.  It is a red construction paper card with a big foam “DADDY” and a heart on the front.  Inside it says “I Love You”, also in foam letters that she glued in, and on the left pane it has a picture that she drew.  We brought it into my office after having worked on it at the kitchen table and she showed by the picture and said that it was a picture of me with her snuggling me!  So sweet.

Dominica was home most of the afternoon so I was able to concentrate on work and dad was able to nap.  For dinner we got Panda Express.

Dad and the girls got to play outside a bit together today and I wanted to share this excerpt from dad’s journal that he had posted on Facebook:

The girls and I had been playing in the sandbox and decided to quit. Luciana had gone into the house and Liesl climbed up on my lap. I was sitting on the patio, looking out over the back lawn. Liesl sat with her back against my chest and was looking in the same direction. We started having an “adult like” conversation. It was really interesting. It was interrupted every once in a while with a passing jet or stray crow flying by, which required comment. There were about 4 or 5 birds (grackles) in the tree. I said to Liesl, “do you think those birds are listening to us talk?”. She responded with her typical “Oh, grandpa”. I pushed it further by saying that they weren’t doing anything except sitting there, so they must be listening. “Oh, Grandpa”. Then I said, “Maybe if you sang a song more birds would come, so she started to sing the “Alphabet Song”. It was amazing, immediately birds started arriving from everywhere. The tree was pretty full by the end of the first time through the song. You should have seen her face. She sang it again and more birds came. That tree was PACKED with birds. Now it was “Grandpa, LOOK!” Talk about “Precious”. Of course when I started to sing with her . . . they all went away 🙁