Sheep Guarding Llama

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 🙁

Back to the office today leaving dad and Dominica to take care of the girls.  They went to Home Depot today and picked up projector mounting supplies as well as some pea gravel that we are going to try out on the side of the house against the fireplace where there used to be a dog run before we bought the place.  That side of the house has always been just a mess with out of control bushes, weeds, some old scattered pea gravel and dirt.  It was very haphazard and seem to have no plan.  So, for the moment, Dominica wants to try just putting down pea gravel and see if it makes a difference.  It definitely can’t hurt.

After putting down four fifty pound bags of gravel we can already see quite a difference along the side of the house.  I’m looking forward to getting more gravel and filling that in.  It looks much better and you can actually walk along there without getting all dirty now.  Several more bags will really make a huge difference.

We are looking at the side yard now and trying to determine what to do there.  We are thinking that we will rip out the bushes that are there as Dominica is allergic to them and maybe put in a little cafe table in the corner so that we can use that space for outdoor coffee or reading and make a little walkway garden against the house.  It’s a dark little spot but a potentially nice one.  We’ve been ignoring it for a few years now but it wouldn’t take all that much effort to really make it into something.

We went out to dinner at Brookhaven this evening.  The food was really good but the girls were really exhausting.

Dominica and I had to get up early together today so that we could do a conference call before I left for the office.  So we were up just after seven thirty.  No fun.

I was running a bit late after doing the call, catching up on email, showering and trying to get out the door.  Both girls were awake by the time that I left and dad had already arrived for the day thinking that he was coming in late and that I would have been long gone by the time that he got there.  He has a very long day with the girls today as he’ll be with them all day then he is going to watch them tonight while Dominica comes out to Coppell to go to SpiceCorps DFW tonight which is down near my office.

Nothing to report from work today.  Just a normal day.  A little busy.  I skipped lunch, as I often do, and at two thirty I needed a break from staring at my computer so drove over to Starbucks, grabbed a coffee and sat outside for just a little bit to relax.  That was twenty minutes at most, not a long break.  But it was a break, at least.  Then I hit Racetrac for some almonds and an egg salad sandwich to get me through the day.

Dominica got lost trying to get to my office.  Hard to believe that she has only ever been to my office once and that one time I drove.  I haven’t been at this particular office for that long but still.  She used to come to my old office all of the time but mostly that was pre-Luciana when it was just Liesl and Dominica coming to meet me for lunch.  Not very practical to go to La Cima anymore these days.  So I had to talk her through getting to my office.

We car pooled over across the highway to the Avaya offices.  Avaya is sponsoring SpiceCorps DFW tonight for which we are very thankful as it means that we do not need to clean the house, deal with the aftermath, stay up really late, deal with caterers, etc. for the event.  We like having it at the house but it takes a lot of energy to put on an event like that.  It will be slightly easier once we have the living room set up for automatic projection.

The meeting went really well even though our thirty-two RSVPs plus nine maybes turned into just thirteen people in actual attendance.  That wasn’t cool.  I’m really appalled by the number of people who RSVP but then don’t show up at these events.  It is far too many to be just the people who have something “come up” at the last second and it is getting more and more consistent.

One of the nice things about having someone else host the event is that it doesn’t end up going all night and it only lasted until a quarter till nine and then Dominica and I were able to leave without having to be on the clean up crew.  Dominica was extremely thankful to not have been cooking all day and coordinating caterers and getting everything set up.

We ran over to Subway just up the street to grab a quick dinner before going back to my office to pick up Dominica’s Acadia and drive back home to relieve dad.

We were just too late to help dad with the worst of his fears… one of the girls needing to use the potty without us there.  But he handled it alright.

Dad headed back to the hotel pretty much as soon as we arrived.  He was very exhausted.  We were pretty tired ourselves.  We put on two or three episodes of Grace & Favour, I had a gin and it, we did just a tiny bit of work and we were off to bed.