Sheep Guarding Llama

I got up only about fifteen minutes after Dominica this morning and was in the office working before she was out the door.  So I got a good, early start.  Probably about six thirty.  We’ve been moving both our and the kids’ bedtimes forward dramatically.  Luciana is in bed just a little after eight and we were in bed before ten.

We had a dark and gloomy morning.  There was a light rain when I first got up and it got moderately heavy for much of the early morning. Ciana was up before eight and Liesl not long after.  I set them up in the storm-darkened living room with the big screen and let them watch The Fresh Beat Band there which they really liked.

The morning flew by but I wasn’t able to get very much done.  The interruptions were just often enough to keep me from being able to be productive.

Dominica left work at noon and did some shopping before coming home.  I was able to do a little bit more in the afternoon with her around.

Today is dad’s first full day back home in New York.  So far the girls aren’t doing too badly.  But it’s not been very long yet.  We will see how they come, say, the weekend.  Although we are going to Houston this coming weekend so that will distract them until next week.  It is amazing how packed our schedule is, we seem to just have one event running into another.

I was into the office early today.  Worked through lunch.  Back home at a good time.  Mostly uneventful workday.

This evening was mostly hanging out as a family.  We used the new home theater a bit.  We are really liking that, as are the girls.  They are getting used to having it now and Luciana especially thinks that it is really neat.

I am home tomorrow as my work from home day.

I was ready earlier than I had expected to be so started walking and dad picked me up out about half a mile from the house.  So I got a tiny bit of exercise in this morning and cut off an unnecessary part of the drive that he would have to have made to have picked me up.  Dominica and the girls were still asleep so we weren’t going to wake them up anyway – they all said goodbye last night.

It was an easy drive into the airport.  Grabbed my morning Monster energy drinks on the way past the office, since my office is right next to the airport, and got dad in a few minutes earlier than he had been hoping so he had plenty of time for a relaxing, leisurely check in for his day of flying.  He is leaving “no jackets needed” weather to return to the heavy snows of New York.  At least he managed to miss the really big blizzard that hit this year.  That worked out really well.

I got into the office on the early side and managed to leave just a little on the early side so that I could run home, meet up with Dominica and the girls and immediately drive them to Brookhaven for the annual Dallas Zoo Night.  Liesl had so much fun last year that we definitely wanted to make it tonight too.  Luciana is old enough to enjoy it now so we are hoping that it works out well.

We are having a whole day of the Miller Family being early.  We were the very first family sitting down to eat for what was eventually a full house.  We got there minutes before the official start of the evening at five thirty.  The food was quite good and a nice departure.  That’s one of the reasons that I really like making an effort to do the special events is because of the additional food variety.

The zoo show started at six thirty with the same girls from the Dallas Zoo and a few of the same animals, but mostly new ones, from last year’s show.  Liesl tried going up on her own to sit with all of the children but quickly got anxious from there being too many people packed too closely together and came back to sit on Dominica’s lap in the front row of the seating area rather than on the floor with the kids.  Luciana sat on a chair next to me.

It was a nice evening and made it a lot easier for it to be the first day with dad having left as there was plenty of distraction for the girls.

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.