Sheep Guarding Llama

Thursday. It is surprisingly warm in Dallas today. In the high fifties! We opened the window before going to bed last night.

Today is a lot of construction work on the bathroom. The Grices will be here tomorrow, so it all needs to be done today. And tomorrow, of course, will be another frenzied day of cleaning as we do whenever there are going to be guests.

My morning was not too bad. Dominica is working on website stuff for MangoCon which is coming up quickly in May. That will be on us in no time. There is a lot to be done. But we are getting advertisers reaching out now, and more people signing up and booking their hotels and stuff. So that is looking good.

This afternoon a dog showed up at the house. Paul found it in the back yard. We figured that it was from next door because they had left their garage open and driven away.

I walked over to the neighbour’s behind us and yes, it was their dog. The person who was there said it was his Godson’s dog and that he and the dog didn’t get along really well. So we kept the dog until the Godson got back home, which was nearly three hours later. He came over to pick her up and let us know that her name was Judy. She was very sweet and the girls had a great time taking care of her all afternoon.

We found out that another one of their dogs, Tim, had gotten away as well. Apparently they were not watching over the dogs very closely. When I stopped in to tell them that we had Judy she had been missing for twenty minutes, minimum. And at that point they had no idea that she was missing and he acting like the other two were still there. So Tim was likely missing for three hours before anyone even noticed, even after they had been alerted that Judy had been found!

I worked with Valentina a bit today. She had decided to work the day from a Starbucks in the ritzy part of Mexico City. So I got to watch the comings and goings of the cafe from our NextCloud Talk system. Her Apple Pencil died today, though, which sucked. Those are like two hundred dollars! One hopes that at that kind of price that they hold up a little.

The girls seemed to have a good school day today. And they loved the break to watch over the dog.

Paul and Dominica were busily working on the guest bathroom all day. And needed to do another store trip or two for more stuff. That seems to be never ending. A lot of trim tile got up today.

At five thirty the girls fired up Slime Rancher to play together. That game amazes me as to how simple it is, yet the girls still love it after hundreds of hours of game play. It really holds up well. They still get really excited to get time to play it. They have owned it for years.

Dominica, Paul, and I watched Star Trek: Voyager during dinner. Dinner tonight was “make your own calzone”. We got through three episodes, a record for us. Then Dominica and I watched Golden Girls for a little while.

This evening, the girls and I played a couple of hours of Nancy Drew: The Phantom of Venice.

We then read chapters three and four of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

I will be busy tomorrow. I am running interviews for another company via Skype. So will be tied up a bit with that. And several meetings on top of that.

I got some additional SGL catch up completed. Making good progress in October. About halfway through it at this point.

Wednesday. I have a big scheduled meeting for lunch, but on the far side of Fort Worth today (heading out towards Abilene) so I did not have a lot of free time. I got up and headed into my office for about an hour of work. Thankfully the morning did not start out to busy, and everyone is in the office today so there was plenty of coverage. I caught up on email and everything else.

Then around nine I got in the shower and got dressed so that we would be ready to go. Paul didn’t start getting ready until after ten. Our plan had been to head out at a quarter after ten, but we didn’t really leave until almost ten thirty. It is nearly an hour drive.

Paul and I arrived at the Chinese restaurant with just a couple of minutes to spare. We got a table and were joined in no time. We had a good meeting for nearly an hour and a half. I had veggie fried rice extra spicy. It was very good. Paul had fried rice with beef. The meeting was with a large private K12 school out that way. It has been a while since I did private K12 work on any scale, it would certainly be extremely interesting to get involved in that again. And it sounds like they might have excellent contacts there.

It was after two when we finally got back to the house. I got straight to work to see how behind I might have gotten. Paul got to work on the guest bathroom which almost immediately required he and Dominica to go out shopping for more equipment. Real work on the bathroom is going to wait until tomorrow. That is going to make him very busy. Only two days until the Grices arrive!

I had to help out some with Liesl’s school today. She had a breakdown when Dominica wanted her to start using a dictionary to look up and record words. Liesl did a good job of pushing through it, but we have no idea why such a simple, straightforward task triggered this reaction. Sometimes we can predict these things, but quite often we cannot.

Next week is going to be super busy. The Grices are here with us through Monday. Then Tuesday we are just here working as usual. Wednesday is a Unitrends event in Houston that Paul and I are trying to attend. Then on Thursday is the Midmarket CIO Forum in Dallas, and we are both attending that as well. So three days next week are already booked up. I am going to be struggling hard to keep up with the normal work. Maggie is out next week as well. Because of her university obligations, she is forced to be a translate for the pope next week while he is in Panama for the World Day of Youth. (It is amazing that an even with that name can be put on by the Catholic Church with a straight face, how inappropriate can any group be?)

Things were more or less slow for me until around four. Then Rodrigo and I did a ton of work and had a really busy evening until around seven thirty. But we knocked out so big stuff that really needed to be done. I am feeling so much about the backlog of work now. Majorly successful night. Sometimes you just can’t get anything done unless you have two pairs of eyes on it.

I made frozen pizzas by request for the girls. I had muzzi muzzi as there is a lot left over from two evenings ago and Dominica cannot eat any. So that pretty much only leaves me to eat it. While eating dinner, Dominica and I watched three episodes of The Golden Girls, we are on the fifth season now. On her own, Dominica has started watching some show called The Good Doctor that does not look good at all. Paul and I both think that it looks super boring and the acting is horrible.

After our show, Dominica moved into the bedroom and the girls came out for a daddy – daughter gaming night. We tried to continue playing Ankh which we all love, but for some reason it was having weird graphics issues tonight. So we ended up giving up on that after fifteen minutes and instead switched to Nancy Drew and the Legend Crystal Skull which we are very close to finishing.

We played for an hour and a half and came to the conclusion of the game! This Nancy Drew title only took us eight hours to complete. Overall, we have to vote that this was one of our less favourite Nancy Drew titles. The story was not too bad, but it was short and light. This game, moreso, was all focused on really hard, stupid, and boring puzzles. It was really just a lot of “filler” meant to make it take a long time to complete with minimal writing.

Since we finished our game a little on the early side, and since the girls were having a good time, we went ahead and started the next game in the Nancy Drew series… Nancy Drew: The Phantom of Venice. We played until well after midnight.

I got to do some SGL updates tonight. I have now completed September. That means that I have now completed the first three quarters of the year. Only the final quarter left to go. Feeling very good about the progress.

Tonight’s literary reading with the girls is starting Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Monday. I tried to sleep in this morning, but it didn’t work. A customer had a system down and no one else could be found to deal with it. So I was up and working on it at eight. Not bad, but not what I wanted.

My day was very busy. Paul had a project for me analyzing a lot of customers and that took the whole day to go through loads and loads of potential customer information and make notes and create a document for us to work from. Productive, but a lot of work outside of my normal stuff.

My day actually flew by, and I really never got a chance to stop working. I was at my desk the entire day and pretty much missed everything going on in the house, for the most part. I even ended up not getting lunch until something like three or four in the afternoon. Lunch was just veggie chicken sandwiches that I often make for myself.

I had to intervene with home school unhappiness today, but I think that I help to solve a problem with Liesl and reading. She really does not enjoy reading when it is “assigned reading.” It is just not her thing. And really, it is not most kids’ thing. Lots of kids like to read, but lots do not. Nothing wrong with not being a reader. Her reading skills are not an issue and she reads “stuff” all day long, no problem. It is reading books that bothers her. But she likes books, just not reading them. Dominica’s concern is that she will lack a literary background that you get from reading, but in reality she is way, way ahead in that regard. So we discussed reading plans and how I can read to the kids and cover the literary range that they need and, in reality, they will probably get way, way better literature exposure with me reading to them than if they just read on their own. Heavier material, with the ability to ask questions as they go, years earlier than they could read for themselves.

For example, I’ve already read several of the Chronicles of Narnia, the Harry Potter saga, Tom Sawyer (nearly to the end), The Witch of Blackbird Pond, A Wrinkle in Time (party way through), and many others that she would not read on her own or, if she did, she would be unhappy and it would take a very, very long time. Instead, we move through them pretty quickly and she loves it (as does Luciana.) And instead of encouraging solitary time, we are encouraging family “together time.”

So this afternoon while the girls were showering I read chapter thirty three and some of thirty four of Tom Sawyer. We are right up to the end. Although Luciana is struggling with the sadness of the book. She hates when people die, even really bad people like Injun Joe, and the book is pretty upsetting for her. We were not able to finish it today even though we were right up to the end. It is slated to be completed tomorrow night. They will finish it before Dominica, who still has never read it.

Dominica is going to read them A Cricket in Times Square as part of their normal lessons. I have read them much of that book already, but it was years ago and I am sure that neither of them remember it at all.

Dominica dug out books that the girls might be interested in and filled the small bookshelf in the living room with them, instead of having them buried on the shelves in my office. Trying to make it easier for the girls to have a “home library” that they can visit when they want something to read.

Paul is back to working on the second bathroom. With the Grices coming to visit on Friday night, Dominica is anxious to have things completed in there. There isn’t anything really huge to do in there, but there is a lot of cosmetic stuff that is going to take quite a bit of work.

For dinner tonight, Dominica made muzi muzi. It sounded like a good idea, but after she made it and we started watching Star Trek: Voyager she discovered that she suddenly that she had really acute sharp pains in her stomach. So I went and looked at the sauce that she had used and, sure enough, ingredient number two was onions. She had only looked way down in the list for onions and never thought to look at the top of the list of the main ingredients. So she had eaten quite a bit of onions and was in a lot of pain. It hits her so fast now.

Nick ended up coming over this evening. He stayed maybe an hour. We talked about sales and some of his career plans; he is thinking about becoming a pilot. Apparently the pilot market is really good right now. He stayed for dinner, we have lots of muzi muzi now that Dominica cannot eat it.

Luciana spent the evening playing video games in the bed rooms on Steam. Dominica mostly watched The Golden Girls.

Liesl used the Oculus Go for a while this evening. She is starting to get used to using it. She got her own new games for it today and was checking them out.

Luciana wanted Liesl and I to help her do a “don’t laugh challenge”, one of the many simple games that Luciana has learned from watching YouTube shows. We did that for maybe fifteen minutes, but it really does not work as a game and doesn’t really make any sense. I always win, there is no real way for me not to.

After Nick left, I went back to work in my office. I had been thinking about calling it a night, but there was so much to do. I went back in my office and ended up having a phone conference for a while and working until after one in the morning! So many emails to send and meeting to set up. Many pokers in the proverbial fire and I have to manage them all and keep things moving forward. It is exhausting, but it seems like lots of good things are happening.

I didn’t get a lot of SGL backlog taken care of today, but I did get two or three old posts completed.

Sunday. Day 15,663 of life. Dominica and I slept in until after eleven today! We must have been really exhausted, we even went to bed on the early side. Like twelve hours of sleep, we never do that. Well, I never do that. She does, sometimes.

I worked on SGL updates this morning. I got SGL totally caught up all of the way through June by just after noon. So that is the first half the year completely taken care of. And the second half of the year was far better, so should move much more quickly.

We watched some Brooklyn Nine Nine and then decided to try a few episodes of the “new” remake of Lethal Weapon which was redone in 2016 and is still running. So far, we think that it is pretty good. It has a strong cast, and decent writing. The action bits are totally over the top and ridiculous. But the character development is really good. We enjoyed it, but it is not something that we are going to binge.

We switched to Golden Girls for a while. But not for very long.

This afternoon, Liesl came out and asked to watch Family Matters with me. We watched that together until after six. Then Garrett wants to play Raft with her online, so she left me. I switched to watching Star Trek: Enterprise. I am on the final season, getting close to being caught up having seen all episodes of all Star Trek series, except those currently being made and not yet available.

Dinner tonight was tuna steaks. The were amazing. Probably the best tuna steaks that we have had. Dominica made a lemon cream sauce that was just perfect. I don’t know what kind of rub that Paul used on the tuna but it really worked. Tomorrow is going to be salmon, it is already marinating tonight.

We all watched an episode of Star Trek: Voyager while eating dinner. We are working through that series very slowly.

It is supposed to get cold tonight, getting to just one degree above freezing. Quite cold, have to finally close the windows. Had the window open last night while sleeping still.

More SGL updates. It feels so good to get these wrapped up. I finished what was missing in July by around the time that we were having dinner. And August and most of September were completed long ago. So by completing July, I lept in completion to nearly the end of September.

Dominica has more dehydrator food underway. Today it is pineapple slices being dehydrated.

This evening I finally introduced Dominica to The Orville which we watched for a while.

Dominica needed something from CVS for her tooth, and so I ran out at a few minutes before midnight to get it. Our Walgreens here closes early, and our CVS closes at midnight. I made it in the door with just five minutes left to go. But I got what she needed and raced back home.

Dominica and the kids all had midnight snacks, literally after midnight. Had to make the girls a late dinner and everything. So we ended up watching Brooklyn Nine Nine way later than I would have wanted to. Liesl even came out and joined us.

Tonight I read chapter thirty two of “Tom Sawyer” to the girls, the scary chapter where Tom and Becky are totally lost in the cave and run out of food and candles.

Overall it was a quiet and relaxing day. The girls pretty much played video games with their cousins all day. Raft is proving to be pretty popular. That and Roblox were their games for the whole day. They really wish that they had two copies of it and two Steam video game systems so that they could play more together. And all of the adults were pretty much watching Hulu and Netflix all day.

Paul finally tried out the Oculus Go today and found that he can barely use it at all without feeling sick. He is the first one to have an issue using it. All of the people who thought that it would be a problem have found that it does not bother them.

The kids (and the cousins) are back to school tomorrow. As are our friends in Romania. But it is only one week of school, then more vacation next week. So the Grices are planning on coming up to Dallas to visit on Friday night and will be here until Tuesday, I think.

Saturday. I was awake around seven. Dominica and Kat didn’t get done watching movies till around three in the morning.

I learned from Rodrigo last night that Mexico is in the grips of a massive fuel crisis. He was out yesterday evening just trying to find some gas for their car. He left work “early” to go try to find it, and in an evening of searching had no luck. This morning he was out driving around and got in a fuel line before six hoping to get enough gas to be able to take his daughter to school this week. It’s really bad while the government is trying to tackle corruption and fuel thefts.

I started the day doing some dishes and cleaning up around the house. Then I set up my Chromebook at the bar and caught up on MangoLassi and did some SGL catch up. Around a quarter after nine I fired up the Steam laptop to see if there was anything interesting that I might feel like playing this morning before the kids woke up. I am assuming that once they are awake that they will want to get back to Nancy Drew and see if we can’t finish the game that they have been playing.

The blinds in our bedroom broke this morning. They don’t twist open any longer. Argh. Another broken thing in this house.

I don’t know if I mentioned it yet, but a few days ago Dominica got a food dehydrator. Her sister got one for Christmas, and Dominica has been wanting one, so she had to have one. Since then, about a week ago, it has been running non-stop. We now have a massive collection of dehydrated food products. Like seriously, so much dehydrated food. The problem is that there really isn’t very much dehydrated food that I would actually want to eat. I almost always prefer regular, juicy fruit to dry fruit, for example. The biggest deal is that Dominica is now able to make seitan jerky, I am hopeful that that will turn out well.

Luciana emerged at a quarter after nine, very sad because her nose was stuffy and her throat hurt. I gave her some water and she decided that she wanted to go lay back down and see if she could sleep some more.

Dominica actually got up pretty early, before ten. She came out and we watched Brooklyn Nine Nine. We are well into the fourth season now. It is just so good.

Kat joined us after a few episodes and we switched to watching Golden Girls, until mid-afternoon. Ciana came out a little after noon and set up her slime factory in the living room. It is so hilarious how good and creative she is at making slime, and how long she has gone on loving making slime.

I managed to do a lot of catch up work on SGL today. Another great day of progress. The end is kind of in sight.

Paul has been looking for the old video game Halo for a few months and finally found it on an abandonware site today. He downloaded that and was playing that for the early part of the afternoon.

Dominica taught Kat some knitting stuff this afternoon. I think Kat now understands that she does not want to knit.

Kat went “home” to head up to Winstar around three.

After Kat left, Dominica and I got dressed and went down to Preston Hollow in Dallas to the Velvet Taco there for a date. She has never been to a Velvet Taco before and I thought that they would have stuff that she could eat.

We ended up eating around five. Dominica got the paneer taco, and the fish and chips. I got the hot tofu, and the paneer. We also split some elote and some goat cheese tater tots. All of the food was amazing.

Dominica ended up loving all of the food at Velvet Taco. This has to be a new regular place for us. It is a little far away, but has so many things that we can eat. I especially liked the hot tofu taco!

After dinner we went for a drive to explore some Dallas city neughbourhoods. We drove down Inwood all of the way to the south side of the city and went east on Colorado and explored all the way to the Bishop Arts District. Lots of really cool stuff in Dallas that we almost never see.

We had a really nice drive. It was fun. We had no idea of the houses that existed on Inwood. It is crazy down there.

On the way home, Dominica wanted ice cream. We stopped at Braums and got banana splits.

We got home and watched some Brooklyn Nine Nine. We also tried an episode of Future Man on Hulu. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t very good. Poor writing and not very funny. We will give it more of a try, but we certainly are not going to binge it and Hulu’s huge marketing push for it makes no sense. They are pushing it so hard that they were even running ads for it during the show itself, as if they didn’t know that we were already watching it! Hulu’s algorithms for ads are absolutely the worst. I would never pay to advertise on Hulu, the way that they run ads makes no sense at all, has no logical targeting and is so over the top that it likely makes you angry with the advertisers and not want their products. Frontier’s ad is so grating that it makes me almost want to cancel my existing Frontier service! And they certainly have all of the technology to know that we watching the ad over Frontier’s network already! So why spend so much money and time to just make us angry?

The girls spent the afternoon and evening playing video games with their cousins. Raft is a pretty big hit, Luciana had chosen that one to get with her Christmas Steam money. It is a survival game that you can play cooperatively online. You have to do things to survive on a raft in the ocean. Doesn’t look interesting to me, but it is a big game and it is a good one for them to be playing. Luciana and Garrett like to play it cooperatively.

Paul spent the whole day playing Halo. Dominica and I went to bed early, just after eleven.