Sheep Guarding Llama

Today is our family Christmas day.  My internal calendar is all off this week trying to figure out what day is what.  Today is Wednesday and officially I am back to work today.  Yesterday was the actual holiday that I had off.  That feels weird.  And originally I was driving down to Houston on Tuesday (Christmas) morning but ended up, at the last second, driving down on Monday night.  So even my intended schedule is all off in my head.  My plan is to drive back up to Dallas tomorrow afternoon so that I do not have to drive in the dark at night.  I was pretty tired driving south to Houston on Monday night and would prefer to not have to repeat that.  I wasn’t dangerously tired, just painfully so.  Driving the Spark with no cruise control when tired is extra annoying on a really long trip.

I slept in a bit today but we tried to get Christmas going around nine.  I didn’t get to really participate much this year because I had to work so I set up in the “media room” which can see the living room on our old theater seating that they have in there (I am so used to it being in there that until just now as I am writing this update I forgot that that was our seats that we bought for what we thought would someday be the theater room in the basement but never so much as got a television put down there before we moved out and then went into our living room in Carrollton for a while but didn’t make any sense there.)  So I got to watch the kids open presents to some degree and I popped in and out of the room regularly.  There was not that much going on at work.  Very, very little.  But I needed to stay logged in as there are only a few of us covering this week as so many people are on vacation.

The big gift for the girls is an Apple iPad 2 for them to share.  This is perfect as they currently have just the one original iPad that Liels commandeered from her father. I haven’t been able to use it myself in forever.  I forget that I ever actually had one.  Now they won’t have to fight over who gets to use the iPad and they can have one in use while the other is charging.  They get serious use around our house.  The Grice kids got two iPad 2 tablets to share between pairs as well.

Dominica and I got money to put towards a Roomba floor cleaner for our house.  We are trying to decide if we want the vacuuming model or the sweeping model.  Our lives are a constant challenge of trying to keep the floors clean.  I got a very cool penguin beer stein from the Utica Brewery too.

This was a great Christmas for Liesl.  Being four is like the perfect age for Christmas.  It is magical and exciting.  She had a such a good time with everything from the stories last night that grandpa read to the kids to waking up to all of the presents under the tree this morning to unwrapping presents and the whole experience.  Luciana is still pretty young for it all and isn’t sure quite what is going on, but she had fun.  Liesl was especially happy to get the My Little Ponies that she had been hoping to get.  Her collection is really something at this point.  I think that she got seven new ponies today!

This evening there were a lot of board games played.  Everyone really loves Emily’s new game “Ticket to Ride” which is a strategy board game where you have to build train lines across the country.  Kind of difficult to explain but pretty easy to play.  They played a few games of that and then later on in the evening I joined the group to play a round of Munchkin, which Emily also got for Christmas.  Munchkin is a classic and hilarious adventure card game.

Liesl was upset that she couldn’t play Munchkin but I told her that she could sit on my lap and play and that I would help her.   Then she was very happy and did her best to play the game.  It was very adorable.

I decided to sleep in a lot this morning.  I’ve been getting behind on sleep and I had nothing that needing my attention this morning so I stayed in bed until ten or later.  At nine-ish Liesl came in and got into bed with me and snuggled for a long time.  That was really sweet.

I got a lot of downtime today.  There was nothing going on this morning so I got to see the girls a lot.  The weather in Houston turned nasty today.  It stayed warm this morning, in the mid-seventies, but we got really high winds and some rain.  It was pretty nasty.  But at least I was down here and not driving in it.  It was snowing up in Dallas.  Most of the country was getting really awful weather today.  We are pretty lucky down in Texas.

Dominica’s parents flew from Albany directly to Hobby (Houston) on Southwest and were only delayed a very little bit because of the weather.  They took off half an hour late but they worked hard to make up the time in the air.  Unfortunately the flight was the least of their worries.  Dominica and Francesca drove out to pick them up and were gone for hours even though the airport is right around the corner.  It turns out that even though the flight was direct, Southwest “misplaced” their luggage.  And not just one bag, all three bags (is it just me or is that extra suspicious – an accident would have been just one bag, right?)  This kicked off a day of luggage disaster.

The Southwest screw up of the luggage was so lengthy and complicated that I’m not even sure that I can real describe all of the problems.  Needless to say every conversation had with Southwest turned out to be the airlines lying about one thing or another.  Southwest Airlines at Hobby refused to even answer the phones and relied on Dallas to handle the calls for them.  One agent would tell us one thing and the next would inform us that they had been lying and that something completely different had or would be happening.  Southwest even made the outrageous claim that they can’t tell where luggage is because they don’t track things that go on their planes because they “aren’t FedEx.”  One would hope, of course, that as they carry humans rather than packages that they would be more careful, not less careful, with what they ship!

After hours and hours of fighting with Southwest they finally called and said that the luggage had been found and that they had it.  We were holding up Christmas dinner pending getting the luggage sorted out.  So a few people ran to the airport to pick up the luggage.  I advised to leave someone behind because Southwest, after lying left and right all day long, was not to be trusted and there was no way that they were going to reliably keep the luggage for them.  So for an hour or two they were out trying to get the luggage and when they got back it turned out that I was right – Southwest didn’t give them their luggage claiming that it had already gone “out for delivery.”

So since we were already holding up Christmas I told them that I would stay behind at the house and wait on the luggage delivery and everyone else could go ahead on over to Joe and Britt’s house and get on with Christmas dinner.  Southwest said that they would be calling before arriving at the house but we couldn’t trust that they would simply not call and use that as an excuse to claim that we weren’t available for the drop off.  So I stayed at the house.

I got to watch How to Steal a Million with Audrey Hepburn and Peter O’Toole which wasn’t too bad.  And I got caught up on SGL.  And earlier in the day both Liesl and Luciana took turns snuggling with me on the couch.  I got a lot of time with them today.  We have all really missed each other.

I was right that Southwest never called.  Everyone got back from Christmas dinner and after many hours of waiting on their truck Dominica’s mom had given up and called them and Southwest said that the truck had never gone out (um, then why did they refuse to give them the luggage at the airport when they were there many hours ago?) and that they weren’t even considering delivering the luggage until tomorrow (no guarantees on tomorrow either, just a guarantee that it wasn’t happening today.)  To be extra ridiculous, Southwest shipped the luggage across the city so that they would have to drive extra far to go try to pick it up (remember they’ve already driven around for hours following Southwest instructions today.)

This time Southwest finally was willing to give them the luggage.  It took quite literally the entire second half of Christmas day continuously dealing with it from our side to get that luggage back.  Southwest never once took any initiative to be helpful or truthful.  They lied left and right and never intended to do anything to get that luggage back.  Losing luggage on accident happens.  Lying about it and being jerks was something they did for fun.  Southwest has some seriously crappy people working there.  Not just to do this to people but to do it on Christmas!

I’ll certainly be reconsidering any Southwest flight plans that I was thinking about using in the future.  I don’t care how close they are to our home, I don’t want people like that staying in business.  Their customer service department refused to even respond to us today.

At ten Dominica and I had to run out and drive all around trying to find more wrapping paper and Scotch tape so that we could keep wrapping presents.  So many presents.  We ended up getting about sixty dollars worth of wrapping paper and tape just for the extra “last minute” wrapping needs.  That is kind of crazy.

So that was my Christmas.  Sleeping in, waiting on luggage and running around.  Not ideal.  But at least it wasn’t the day that we were celebrating Christmas.

I woke up early this morning at six thirty.  That was ridiculously early for being home alone.  I ended up just getting up and getting a jump on the day since I was awake.  I worked from home for an hour or two and then headed into the office.

Since it is Christmas Eve there was nothing going on at work.  I had maybe one package installation all day.  The office was pretty empty too.

A little after noon Dan and I went out to do some last minute alcohol shopping, mostly because he needed rum for eggnog, and we discovered that, it would appear, that nearly all liquor stores in the region of the city that we normally go to are going out of business or something and it was impossible to buy anything.  There were hordes of people driving around from one “everything must go” sale to another trying to find anything that they could, which was incredibly little.  We hit three or four stores before Dan was able to find a single bottle of rum.  A weird problem to have in the fourth largest metro area in the while in the main liquor buying area of the city (Dallas is partially dry so only certain streets and areas can sell alcohol – a really backwards and antiquated zoning practice.)

We hit Burger King for a quick lunch and went back to the office.  The office was totally empty when we got there and no one needed us for anything.  It was so early that I decided to change my plans and instead of waiting until tomorrow morning to drive down to Houston I figured that it would make more sense to run home, pack up and get on the road right away and get down to see the family.  I really miss my girls.

So I ran home, packed up, got the house ready and ran out the door to get on the road.  It was a little after three when I headed out to take the Spark on what I believe is its first trip down to Houston.

I was very surprised to discover that there really was no traffic at all on the way down.  It made for a quick drive, maybe my fastest ever.  Only a little more than four hours for the entire drive.  Both Dallas and Houston were traffic free as I crossed the metro areas.  I made one pitstop to refuel along the way and that was it.  It was a quick in and out there, very efficient being on my own.  I was anxious to get down and see my girls.

So it was just after eight when I arrived.  I was exhausted but very glad that I am down in Houston and don’t have to get up early and do that drive tomorrow.  That worked out pretty well.  I got to see Liesl and Luciana tonight, both of whom were very glad to see me.  I hung with both of them until they went to bed.  Liesl loves getting to sleep on her cot in Madeline’s room.  I think that it makes her feel like one of the big kids.  Garrett was already asleep when I arrived.

We had to wait on a UPS delivery until around eight tonight and one of the packages was lost.  There were so many packages that we didn’t figure out that one was missing until really late, though, so there is no way to discuss it with them until the day after tomorrow.  The volume of Christmas logistics that needs to be handled here are quite staggering.

Netflix was down tonight because of an outage with Amazon’s network.  We were hoping to watch our annual White Christmas tonight but Netflix is down.  And, of course, it appears that Hulu is down now too – most likely due to the traffic of people heading over there because of Netflix not being available.  It was a few hours.  I was following the outage on Twitter.  The whole world was freaking out as no one could watch anything tonight.

After the kids all went to sleep Netflix came up and we watched White Christmas and drank a bottle of wine that I brought down from the big sales up in Dallas.  So we managed to maintain our holiday tradition but I was sad that Liesl went to bed before we watched it.  This would have been her first year watching it with us and I was looking forward to that.  I really hope that she is able to watch it with us next year.

It is weird not celebrating Christmas tonight or tomorrow.  All through my younger years we celebrated Christmas on Christmas Eve and then once Dominica and I were married we celebrated Christmas day itself with the Tocco clan.  Traveling on Christmas Even and not celebrating the holiday at all until the day after Christmas is really disorienting, and it means that I will have to work while we celebrate Christmas.  That’s not a big deal, I just have to remember what day it actually is rather than what day we are treating it as.

Today ended up being quite interesting.  I continued working on the house some more.  It is really coming along.  I even got the guitar out of Luciana’s closet and got it tuned.  I can’t believe that the strings that are on it were still working and able to be tuned.  I haven’t played the guitar at all in about five or six years.  It was while living in Newark, NJ that I last played it, if I remember correctly.  I know that it has been at least since then if not longer.  Dominica has been after me for a long time to get playing again so that the girls can grow up in a house with music that we play ourselves so as part of her Christmas present I got it ready and played it a little to make sure that I still could.  It always amazes me that I can go years without playing the guitar and pick it up and just start playing again.

I assume that since Dominica never, ever reads SGL that it is safe to post what I am doing for her for Christmas since she won’t figure it out.

I did some work today and then at three thirty went to Addison Airport to go flying with Chris.  He is flying some patterns today and originally he had someone who was going to go flying with him but they decided not to so I am flying with him instead today.  This is my first time flying in a small, personal aircraft.  I’ve flown in puddle jumpers before but never a two person aircraft.  This little Czech airplane only weighed around 736lbs.  That is a small plane!  Only one hundred horsepower.

We did about twenty minutes in the air.  I got some decent video.  Sadly we were stuck on the tarmac for quite a while because the plane was cold and the oil didn’t want to heat up as it was getting chilly out and the oil pressure was high because of that.  Flying in the tiny craft was really cool.  That was a lot of fun.

By the time that we were done flying it was very cold and quite dark.

I got home and before long Watson called and wanted to hit Redneck for dinner.  So not getting as much done today as I had intended but it was a fun day.

I slept in pretty dramatically today and did not get out of bed until after ten.  I guess that I really did need some sleep.

I got up and barely got moving on the day when Watson called and wanted to go hang out and get lunch.  So he picked me up just a little after noon and we went down to downtown Carrollton.  We stopped off at Mo’s place and hung out probably for about an hour before going to lunch at the Broadway Bistro in Historic Downtown Carrollton.  I love their breakfast vegetarian sandwich that is a lot like a toasted cheese sandwich with a hard boiled egg in it.

After lunch I went to Watson’s apartment in Addison, which I have not been to before, so that I could assist with an issue that he was having with his stereo. That took about an hour but we got it fixed (it was a series of issues between his sound card on his computer and the stereo receiver itself.)

It was late afternoon by the time that I actually got home.  I worked around the house some but not nearly as much as I had planned.  I have the place seriously torn apart in an attempt to get things organized and cleaned.

Watson called later and wanted to go out this evening so we ended up heading out to the bar for most of the evening.