Sheep Guarding Llama

Friday. Had to be up this morning as I had an interview for a VP of Operations position in Plano. I figured that it was not going to amount to anything, but they had reached out to me yesterday and asked me to look at the position as it was potentially such a good fit. The interview lasted all of two minutes before they admitted that I was way over this position and it made no sense to pitch something this junior to me. So a bit of a waste of time. Even worse as I am not job hunting in any way and had little chance of having considered the position even if it had been a realistic fit.

Work was thankfully slow again much of the day today. I had to work a few hours this morning pretty steadily, but by early afternoon things got slow and I had a bit of a breather until around five when I had to work steadily until after seven. So still a decently busy day.

Paul went out to shoot some pool this evening. Kat came over while I was still on the phone working and she and Dominica went out to go to the Spa Castle nearby for a spa evening together. Paul likes going to spas as well, but it is men and women separate there only, so he didn’t want to go and be all by himself. So I was left to hang out with the kids for another night of video gaming.

I made dinner for the girls. First I made homemade pizzas. While I was cooking, Liesl and I watched Family Matters on Hulu and Luciana played a little bit of Slime Rancher. Then I made myself a grilled cheese sandwich and some pasta rings for Liesl.

Tonight is another night of Nancy Drew: Legend of the Crystal Skull. We took over the living room and played for several hours. Liesl controlled as usual, but needed me to handle a few tasks with a mouse and so we discovered how well we can set up having a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse hooked up in addition to the Steam controller. That works incredibly well and having us dual controlling the game really made things so much easier. I was able to set up at the bar with my Chromebook and wireless mouse to the video game system and work on SGL updates, keep up to date on ML and work, while being able to follow along with a Nancy Drew walk through and assist Liesl as needed.

We flew through the game tonight. I do not think that we are even halfway through the game, yet. There is so much to do. I love that these games are so long and involved. It really gives us a chance to get deep into the story and excited about what is happening and to engage with the characters. The length is really good for the girls. They get involved and interested, but don’t get bored or burned out.

Every time that we play these games the girls learn something new. For example, tonight’s gaming taught the girls about what a “card catalogue” is. Since they are so young, the idea of libraries having card catalogues is so foreign to them. It is weird to imagine that they live in a world where such a thing does not exist. As a child, learning about and using card catalogues was a huge part of our childhoods.

Card catalogues are a good example of just how pointless so much of our education was as children. Even if computers had not arisen and taken the place of the old fashioned card catalogue, it was not the kind of thing that we really needed to “study”. Nor was the Dewey Decimal System, another quirk of our era that has no point in my adult life. Kind of like writing in cursive. Even by the time that I was in high school, all of these things had devolved to being vestiges of another era. And what adult, even in the 1950s, found knowing the Dewey Decimal system or library catalogues useful? Those who needed them could learn them in minutes on the rare occasion of their being needed. Even dictionaries and encyclopedias or thesauruses: all things that haven’t been useful since I left school. It was nearly all filler.

One thing that we’ve not liked about this particular game is that it is “too full” of puzzles. Pointless, silly puzzles that really are not a part of the story and do not really make any sense. They get a bit frustrating when they are like this. Luckily we are able to just use a walkthrough and skip many of the puzzles that we don’t like. If we could not do that, we would never get through some of these games.

Paul got home about ten thirty, and went to bed around eleven.

I did a bit more SGL work tonight. More catch up in June. And am all up to date still for January, which is making me super happy. I went back to the post from the weekend and added some additional pictures of the girls from the Harry Potter Yule Ball Party. The City of Carrollton had had professional photographers at the event and took several pictures of the girls at the party. Dominica had checked out the city’s Facebook page today and found six of their pictures up on it. So I put them into the post from that day. Some are quite cute.

Dominica and Kat got back at a quarter past midnight. They had an awesome time at the spa. A fun Friday night outing.

The girls wrapped up their game at twenty till midnight. Then Dominica and Kat took over the living room to have a slumber party girls’ night of movies. I got the girls heading off to get ready for bed.

First movie for Dominica and Kat was Dirty Dancing of course.

Thursday. I wanted to sleep in some this morning, but I had an early morning meeting with a vendor to talk about a project with a customer. So I was up and working first thing.

Today managed to be decently slow. It was a nice day. Very sunny, too. Although by evening, rain had come and we had continuous rain all night.

Dominica is continuing her Golden Girls marathon and is up to the fourth season now. One thing that I really like about it is that I actually saw so little of this show when I was a kid that it is like having an entirely new 1980s sitcom to watch, but one that is very familiar and I know the characters. I probably have seen a lot more of the show than I remember, but always in bits and snatches, rather than going straight through. So I do not recall individual episodes in such a way, or a continuous story that I am able to remember.

Watching some original Star Trek and some Star Trek: The Next Generation this evening. Then it was a gaming night with the girls.

Both girls have been wanting to get back to the Ankh video game series again. It has been a long time since we played any of them and we all miss them. Those are great games and we have never actually managed to complete the first game of the series. We had somehow started on episode two or three, because Steam did not have the original when we first started playing, and when we got back to it, it just never got completed.

It has been a long time since we have played the original Ankh so we just decided that we would start over. That was good because when we went to play it we discovered that it had been reinstalled and our original saved game was no longer available anyway. We would have been very disappointed if we had not been planning to play it all again. Liesl remembers a lot of it, though, and so we were able to move through the parts that we know pretty quickly. Still a great game, very funny. It holds up well.

We put in a couple of hours on Ankh. I am looking forward, quite a lot, to completing the original story and finding out what happens. Then we can go on to the sequels and play them again. They have not been played since Liesl was tiny and Luciana cannot remember having played them at all. It is amazing to me now to realize that some of these games were games that Liesl and I were playing together when she was just four years old! No wonder she is such a hard core gamer.

We played a little Under Leaves, too. Luciana has completed that game in the past. There is no story, it is just a cute hidden object game. But a really hard one. Liesl and I have not really played it, more than a few minutes, so we did a few levels tonight.

While we were gaming, I ordered in dinner from Dominos. It came really quickly and was a delicious change of pace. We have all missed that.

Our last game of the evening was a little bit more time on Nancy Drew: Legend of the Crystal Skull, which is Nancy Drew Number 17. I was quite surprised to learn that “The Top Tens” has ranked this particular Nancy Drew game as dead last, because so far we are really liking it. It is not our favourite, but it is very good. Alibi in Ashes is our least favourite, so far, I think, but we have not finished it or even gotten very deep into it. We did not play for very long tonight, maybe an hour. Enough to make some solid progress, however.

Wednesday. Today we decided that it was time to do a deep cleaning of the house. The house was not in that bad of shape, but it needed a good “spring cleaning” day for sure. This was a heavy duty one. All of us, including the kids, dug in and really cleaned everything.

I handled the bathrooms. Deep scrubbing time. Bleaching and scrubbing. I put in most of an hour easily. That was really needed.

I broke out the vacuum cleaner and pulled it apart so that I could cut the hair out of it and went through a few complete fill and empty cycles with it. I did lots of organizing too. Many boxes organized and put away. Even some furniture was moved.

A lot of more donation stuff went out to Paul’s truck, too. It is basically full now. I took the hard drive out of his giant old HP desktop that has been sitting around the house. Everyone keeps thinking that it is going to be useful or that the parts are worth something. I keep trying to explain just how ancient is it. It’s an old Windows XP box with an ancient CPU, almost no RAM, and even the hard drive was only like 160GB SATA drive. Several boxes of things, the chassis of that computer, two glass decorative vase things, and more all went out to the truck. And so may books are out there.

Getting all of that stuff out of the house did a lot to clean things up. That was several boxes worth of stuff that was just sitting around the living room that getting out to the truck really cleaned up.

The one big thing that we have not managed to do anything about yet is the standing desk that is covered with stuff that is still living in the living room. That needs to find its way into my office, but my office is full of boxes and excess furniture. So very little progress there.

Dominica and Paul did some work on the kitchen. And Dominica did loads of laundry, cleaning up suitcases, and such. The bar is looking good, the living room a bit improved, the bathrooms and bedroom are way better, the kitchen much better, too. There has been a bit of planning to look into doing some real kitchen construction work sometime soon, too.

On the docket for this coming week is another round of construction work on the second bathroom. There is a lot of finishing work to do, and Dominica wants as much of it as possible completed before next week when the Grices come to visit. Also a key reason for the intensive house cleaning going on today.

After several hours, the house was looking very good. It feels great having the house looking so much better. It has been such a mess for so long, we were starting to get used to it and ignore it. That’s never good.

This afternoon, around four thirty, our friend Kristen came over to hang out. Paul and Dominica made a cheese, olive, and meat tray for dinner. And Paul broke out the Nadura Scotch, which is always excellent.

Watching some Are You Being Served? tonight.

Tuesday. It was super busy at work today. I ended up on one call after another. It was hard for anyone to get a hold of me all day, I was just jumping from one call to the next for hours on end. I didn’t even manage to get any real free time from a call from noon until nearly eight in the evening! It was a very busy day.

Exhausting.

Tonight was Paul’s billiards league night. So Dominica decided to go at the last minute, so just me and the girls tonight. I made the girls dinner tonight, then on to some gaming.

This evening was a video gaming night with the kids. They have been wanting to play Nancy Drew and the Legend of the Crystal Skull. They had started playing this one with the Grices’ last week, but Garrett found it to be too scary and they had not made it out of the first room in the game, but the girls were very excited about it. So we restarted it tonight.

We made it through a good chunk of the game. This one is set in New Orleans so the girls are learning all about the culture there. It is another good Nancy Drew game, we are having fun. In this one, you get to play both Nancy and Bess. The girls are getting really good at playing Nancy Drew games. Tonight our biggest puzzle was a crazy Rube Goldberg puzzle that took quite a while.

Monday. It didn’t feel all that busy at work today, but it was decently busy, to be sure. Rodrigo has been without water at home since yesterday, so we busy dealing with that for much of the day. So I was covering more than usual, and this is the first real full day back at work after the holidays so it was extra busy.

This evening was dinner at the Blue Goose Cantina in Frisco. I got the Impossible tacos, this was my first foray into Impossible meat substitutes which is supposed to taste more like meat than other substitutes. It is close enough to meat to seem like it fills a gap, but not so much like meat that it tastes disgusting. It doesn’t give me the bad “meat feeling”, which is good because I don’t actually enjoy the taste of meat. But for a change of pace, it is pretty decent. Although in the future, I think that I would just prefer a fish taco. Even great fake meat is just too close to meat and not what I was actually looking for in a taco. I just really like fish and beans in tacos and burritos. No need for a meat alternative. I just don’t like that as much.

After dinner, Dominica and I watched the end of the third season of Brooklyn Nine Nine and started into the fourth season. I can’t believe that we have missed as many seasons as this, but time really does fly and now it is pretty nice to have so much of one of our all time favourite shows to watch. Season after season that show is just hilarious.