Sheep Guarding Llama

With the girls going to bed so late last night we did manage to sleep in just slightly this morning but only slightly.  Luciana is on a natural schedule and never sleeps in all that much.  It just means that we are in for a grumpy day.

Today’s big project was to go out into the garage and really get down to cleaning.  We brought probably ten big plastic bins of stuff into the house and sorted through them.  That’s a major job considering how much we have gone through previously in a similar fashion and that a lot of this stuff was filtered through before it ever left New York.  The project went really well, though, and we have a large pile of stuff ready to go to Goodwill and we have many bins freed up to put toys into which are going to return to the garage to be stored there instead of cluttering up the house which is what is happening now as there are so many that the girls cannot do anything with them due to the sheer volume of toys to wade through.

We made massive progress today and are thrilled with the garage now being almost entirely accessible.  There are still many bins to go through but we have overall control of the situation now and can maneuver in the garage and really do things.  Tomorrow starts the cleaning up of the toys now that there is space made in the garage.

We heard a noise, both Dominica and I, at 3:45 this morning that woke up both up.  So I got up, got dressed and investigated.  I couldn’t find anything and my hypothesis is that it had something to do with the roof shifting.  I tried going back to bed and laid in bed for probably half an hour or more but couldn’t get back to sleep so I got up and moved to the office for several hours and got a lot of work done, including getting SGL caught up and doing a ton of posting on Spiceworks.  Also closed several tickets, took out the garbage, worked through a lot of my email backlogs, etc.  Good use of my time.  Two cups of coffee later I was off to shower and get into the real office.

I worked through lunch and ended up having a busy afternoon which kept me in the office until after seven in the evening.  Having woken up so early I was really exhausted by the time that I got home with it pushing eight in the evening.

Luciana was already tired and nearly ready for bed when I got home.  We saw each other for a few minutes then she asked that I turn on “The Fresh Beat Band” on the television in our room.  This is one of her new things, she likes to go into our bedroom and use the television there and sit in the nice chair and be alone.  So she watched an episode and was off to bed, happily, as she was very tired.  She is very good about not fighting going to bed when she is tired and will demand, sometimes, that you put her to bed.  She is very funny.

Liesl watched some weird Japanese show about “spider riders” in the middle of the earth.  Very weird.  She loves it though.  She says that Garrett introduced it to her.

Watson came over around ten so that we could all go out tonight to celebrate his new job.  He starts in two weeks having put in his notice at his current job this morning.  Tonight is also Snow Angels night so Redneck is going to be packed.

Kayla arrived just after ten.  Liesl was so excited to see her.  Liesl just ran around the house over and over again as she could not contain herself.

So it was after ten thirty when the three of us got to Redneck.  I was the designated driver tonight so a quiet evening for me.  It took about forty five minutes to get a table.  Very busy evening.  I saved my meal for the day so that I could have a grilled shrimp salad tonight without feeling guilty.  We are trying very hard to be staying on our diets again now.

Got back home around one thirty.  Luciana had stayed up until eleven and Liesl till nearly midnight!  We will likely be able to sleep in tomorrow.

Tomorrow starts our three day holiday weekend. I have just a small amount of work requiring my attention tomorrow.  Should be a nice, relaxing weekend.

Dominica got up at 5:45 this morning so that she could get ready for work.  I never managed to fall back asleep after she got up so I laid in bed for a while but got up pretty early myself.

Luciana was up early, as she often is, and just wanted to sit in the moon chair in our bedroom and watch a few episodes of “The Fresh Beat Band” while she snuggled with Lambie and her blankie.  So she pretty much entertained herself while I got a few things done around the house and Liesl slept.

Liesl, of course, got up late so it was a rush to get the girls ready so that I could get them out the door to drop them off up in Corinth for their day of daycare.  As we left the house I swung by the neighbour’s place to take a picture and see how bad it was today.  The house is completely ruined, nothing salvageable from that.  Even the slab might be damaged.  The drive up there takes a bit was it was around a quarter till ten when I finally dropped them off.  Liesl was very excited to go to “Miss Melissa’s” but Luciana was not too happy that daddy was leaving.

Dominica actually ended up working a moderately short day today and was able to leave at noon – working just five hours on her four hour scheduled day.  She then went grocery shopping and took care of some errands while the girls were still at daycare before she went to pick them up.

I went to Sweet Tomatoes with the guys from the office for lunch today.  I got a massive salad that actually filled me up for the day.  That was a pretty good change. I needed that.

I left work at the normal time.  Got home before six.  Hulu had the latest episodes of several of our favourite shows like “Family Guy”, “Hot in Cleveland” and “Happily Divorced” so we watched all of those.  The we watched more of “Are You Being Served.”  You know, for a show that was so important to my younger years it is amazing to me how few of them there are.  They only made about six per season so altogether there are not very many of them – even if you include the awful movie that they made, which we also watched tonight.

Luciana went to bed around eight.  Liesl went to bed around nine thirty.  We went to bed around ten.  We are sleepy people.

I actually spent the whole day in the office today.  It is cold but no snow today.  There was frost on my windshield this morning but just a little.

Busy day at work but I got a lot of stuff done and am very happy with the day.  I needed to play catchup and for the most part, I did.

Dominica stayed pretty busy working from home today too.

I got home this evening and we immediately packed up the girls and went out to Denny’s for dinner.  It was probably 6:20 when I got home to get them.  Dominica had them all ready to go so I just had to run in the house and help get the girls into the car.

Little did we know that we were driving away from a fire in our neighbourhood.  It must have been burning as we drove by but we didn’t know.  We drove on obliviously.

We got to Denny’s and ordered our food.  While we were waiting we heard the fire sirens going. Liesl asked what that was and we said that it was a fire truck.  She said, “A fire truck?  Maybe it is a house fire.”  Little did we know how much she knew.  The Denny’s is a few miles from home so we didn’t think anything of hearing the sirens up there.

After dinner we went to Aldi’s.  That was eight o’clock.  We shopped until eight thirty eight and drove home.  We got back to the neighbourhood to find it blocked off from the police but we could see the fire and fire trucks on the other side.  We couldn’t tell where the fire was exactly but it was definitely close to us.  We had to drive a couple of miles out of the way to get back to our house as the two most obvious ways back were blocked.

After we got home and got the girls inside and unloaded the car I went back out to walk over to the fire to see what was going on.  Turns out that it was very close and the house was burnt to the shell.   I read on the Carrollton Police Twitter feed that the Fire Department had reported that they found a body burnt in the house.

Luciana made me read several books to her and then went to bed.  Liesl and I spent about an hour talking about sea urchins and researching them online because suddenly she was very passionate about sea urchins.  She had been looking in an old “learning your letters” flash card thing that she had grown up with and that Luciana uses now and it is “U is for Urchin” which, of course, they show a picture of a sea urchin rather than a real urchin (or hedgehog) but so Liesl got interested in them so we went on Wikipedia and then searched for pictures of sea urchins.

Luciana woke up early this morning and came into our room and snuggled in bed with a new bottle of soy milk for about an hour before we actually got up.  When I went out into the kitchen, around seven, to make her a warm bottle I noticed that the yard was nearly all white!  We actually got snow, quite a bit of it.  I had not realized that we were supposed to be in for a snow “storm” last night so this caught me off guard a bit.  I suppose that I did not go outside at all yesterday so maybe that is why I did not realize how cold it had gotten the last day or so.  The snow was still falling when I looked out into the atrium, not coming down fast but it was really coming down.  This was real snow.

This is the first time that Luciana has ever seen snow.  She has not made it to New York for a winter yet and the only times that we have had snow in Texas she was in Houston.  Liesl was very excited once she got up.  She didn’t notice the snow at all until I mentioned it and then she was jumping around and running to look at the windows.  She gets snow so rarely that it is really excited.  Having grown up in New York where there is always more snow than you wish that there was, it is strange to me to see my own children excited to see it.  Hard to believe that snow isn’t something with which they are used to having unlimited access.

I took a little while to fix some power and Internet problems at the house this morning, probably caused by the cold.  Our server closet was extremely cold this morning.

I left for work just a little before ten because I wanted to be sure to avoid anything close to rush hour.  As it was instead of the usual empty roads the highways were moving like molasses in, well, January which is what it is.  The drive in for me was fine since I stuck to the surface roads where the traffic was light and moving just fine.  There wasn’t any real snow on the road surface except for on one low bridge so it wasn’t treacherous or anything.

The office was pretty thin today, I am assuming that a lot of people were avoiding the drive.  There were only three people there.

I had to come home during lunch to do some work and put in a very busy afternoon.  I didn’t go back to the office because it didn’t make any sense.  I would have just been driving all day had I done that.

After work this evening we took the kids out to Brookhaven for dinner.  It is kids’ night and we have not been there for dinner in quite some time.  It turned out there was story time tonight, but The Grille was full so we had to wait for a while.  Story Time started while we were waiting so I took the girls and we sat down to listen to the stories while Dominica waited for our table.  Liesl was so cute sitting on her own listening to the stories.  Luciana just sat on my lap and hung out with me playing with my freece’s zipper and making faces at people eating dinner.  Then Liesl told Luciana to come sit with her and the two of them sat next to each other on the floor for a while listening to the stories, it was adorable.

We got home pretty late and Luciana was pretty much ready for bed when we got back.  I got her off to bed and she wanted a story.  She is just starting to be into reading books.  She has been asking for stories during they day for about a week but now she is doing it like Liesl connected with bed time.  She has been on a kick to read this Swedish book about two children who help to rescue a garden when the old lady who owns the garden goes away to take care of her elderly sister.  Liesl has a stuffed broccoli that is one of the characters from the book and Luciana was very excited to take the broccoli to bed with her.  We asked Liesl if it would be okay for Luciana to sleep with the broccoli and Liesl said, “Sure, maybe it will become a pattern.”  So cute.

We watched some more “Are You Being Served?” tonight.