Sheep Guarding Llama

This is our first day all home together.  We stayed home and spent the day together.   Pretty much we just camped out in the play room and hung out.  We had a lot of catching up to do anyway.

I did have to do some work for the office today. A few hours.  Nothing crazy.

Woke up at a quarter after four this morning and had missed two phone calls from work.  So I jumped up, ran into the office (in the house) and signed in.  The server that I was dealing with last night had failed and so I was stuck working for a few hours from home before driving into the office to deal with the non-farm payroll announcement this morning too.  From super slow to rather busy in one day, it seems.  Of course, once that call was over, it was slow again.

Dad was doing some research on Ancestry.com today and discovered that in 1959 he had a first cousin (so my first cousin, once removed) who was born on the first of August and died five days later on the sixth of August named Scott Alan Miller.  Not a common name, not super uncommon, but not common and for it to be my cousin is really surprising.  Dad didn’t remember my cousin’s name so I am not actually named after him although it seems reasonable that my father must have heard the name at some point.  He would have been thirteen when Scott was born.

Since I started work so early today I decided to go home around lunch time and work from home in the afternoon.   No need to be in the office.  This is the last week of the freeze.  Things start getting busy again next week.  So this is my chance to take advantage of being able to be home and I’ve really missed seeing the girls.

We were just home together this evening.  Boy it is good to have my family back home.

I worked from home today so that I could stay home and take care of the girls while Dominica was at work. There is no one in the office so there really is no point to me being there.  I say that nearly every day and it just keeps being true.  We had a good time all hanging out together and I have barely seen them so this is our first big day of just us.

The house is a massive disaster from the combination of the mess made by me trying to get things cleaned up and with all of the stuff dump out of the Acadia when the family returned from Houston.

I had a conference call at lunch today that took quite a bit of time but went really well.

Dominica worked a really long day.  They’ve missed her there.  Her job is going really well and she is getting more hours than we had originally planned.  And so far our hit rate of me being able to be home with the girls has been really high which helps a lot with being able to keep the cost of her going to work down.  And she commutes with the super-cheap Spark too.  We have been doing a good job of using that whenever possible and it has been lowering our automotive costs.

Just an evening together as a family.

Finally a get a day with my girls.  A whole day to myself with them, actually, as Dominica ended up working a long day at the office, effectively skipping lunch and working late.  I am very glad that I stayed home with them as we got a long day together, just us.  Dominica is working long hours at this new job.  She is still only doing two days a week there but she is doing longer hours than we had expected and working from home a few hours too when not in the office.  So she is getting a significant number more hours than the scheduled days would suggest.

Liesl had a lot of fun today showing me all of her new stuff from Christmas.

So today was pretty much all just the girls and I.  We spent a ton of time together just hanging out.  Dominica worked quite a bit this evening from home too.  It was a really long day for her.  But she gets to relax tomorrow.

Happy New Year everyone.  This is my last day at home alone.  Dominica and the girls are hanging out in Houston this morning but only for a few hours and then coming back home this afternoon.  The Peaks arrived in Houston this morning so they are all visiting before they head back north.

I did some more cleaning today but not a lot.  I decided that I needed a little downtime and this morning I discovered Steam by Valve which is an online download service for video games.  It is pretty cool.  I love using Kindle and Audible for books and audiobooks and this is very much the same kind of service.

I bought a couple of games on Steam to try it out.  Yesterday I actually bought Fable through Steam and installed it on Dominica’s computer with her new graphics card to try it out.  It was just $2.50 for the game so a pretty safe investment even though I already own it and have played through it on the XBOX 360.  The graphics are a lot crisper on the PC version. On the 360 it is downright blurry.  Of course the difference in resolution is 640×480 vs. 1280×1024.  And one is heavily anti-aliased while the other is not.  So about four times the resolution on the PC version that we have.

I picked up a matching graphics card to Dominica’s yesterday and installed it on my desktop too.  So I have three monitors now as well and can really play some games as well.  I bought the Broken Sword series for a few dollars and decided for five dollars to check out Knights of the Old Republic from Bioware originally for the original XBOX.

KOTOR ended up being a lot of fun, much like an earlier version of Mass Effect, and I got into it a bit.  I managed to play for several hours today.  It doesn’t have the graphics and deep story of Mass Effect but it is older and from an older platform so you can’t complain too much there.  This is not a new game by any stretch.  I really like the writing and pacing of Bioware titles, though, so want to check this one out as I am up to date on all of the Bioware titles that are currently in production (Mass Effect and Dragon Age series.)  I can’t wait until they get Dragon Age 3 out the door!

Dominica left Houston early in the afternoon and arrived in Dallas when it was just getting dark.  Boy is it good to have my girls home again.  I have really missed them.  Liesl and Luciana were extremely excited to be home too.  Both because they missed me (and the house) but also because they have a lot of toys that they have been waiting to get to play with that they were not allowed to play with until they got home.

Evening with the family, but a short evening as everyone is tired.  I am staying home with the kids tomorrow while Dominica goes to the office.