Sheep Guarding Llama

I am back in the office today and the freeze is over so real work has begun again.  Not that we are swamped, but it isn’t the winter vacation any longer. Hard to believe that yet another freeze season has come and gone.  Hard to believe that I went through my first experience with the SEC winter change freeze in 2006!  I have been doing this for a very long time.

This morning Dominica had to take the girls to the doctors’ office for their regular checkups.  They came back with clean bills of health but both had to get shots today.  They were not happy about that.  Liesl had to show me her bandage when I got home.

After my very long day yesterday I am staying home with the kids today while Dominica goes into the office.  It was a busy day for me with all kinds of work spilling over from yesterday.  Dominica was up and gone long before I got out of bed.  She leaves for work a bit before seven in the morning.

The girls and I had a good day together today.  We always have fun being home together.  It is generally quite a challenge for me to be productive when I am home alone with them but today they were really good and entertained themselves quite well so I was still able to work really efficiently, for the most part.

Dominica worked another long day putting in eleven hours or so.  Boy is she getting a lot of work done.  This new job is really working out for her and we got her first paycheck today from her first month at the job.  We got a paycheck for her last month but she had only worked a week and a half, I think, on that month so it was really small and we didn’t really notice it in our monthly finances.  But this month’s check is from a full month of her working and even though she took a week off for Christmas she still put in extra long days nearly every day that she worked when she did so it was roughly the equivalent of a full month of work and the extra money is extremely noticeable in our finances.  What a relief that is to have that extra money coming in!  Our renters in New York are supposed to be back to work now and paying full rent this month too, which is going to be awesome.  That is a non-trivial amount of money that we will be getting each month, again.  We’ve really missed that.

Dad sent this one to me the other day: Michael Davis at Ford’s Theater on YouTube.  I’m not sure if he realized it when he sent this to me but he has this on VHS video tape somewhere at the house.  I remember this well from my childhood, we would watch it often.  I found the first part of the show as well.  Watching these again, for the first time in likely well more than twenty years, sure takes me back.  I can’t believe how familiar they are.  I must have seen these many, many times.

I was thinking that today would be a quiet day.  Boy was I wrong. I woke up on my own around eight and before eight thirty the phone had rang and I was stuck working for a full day and more.  I ended up putting in a full sixteen hour day working for the office today!  I pretty much never got to leave the office.  Most of the work wasn’t too strenuous but I was decently busy.  I did more work today than I do in a full week at the office on average.

Because I was so busy today and got so little time with the kids I am going to stay home with them on Thursday again too, in addition to my normal staying home on Monday (tomorrow) so that we get more time together.  Plus that saves quite a bit of money when we are able to do that.

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.