Sheep Guarding Llama

Today is my work from home day.  I thought about getting up early this morning but I don’t have the benefit of the gym being en route to the office and I was still quite sore from yesterday’s workout so I just went back to bed and slept in as much as I could.

Dominica got up and headed out to Arlington to help sit with Casen today so I’m home most of the day alone with Liesl and Luciana.  Luciana was actually up first today with Liesl not long after.  Luciana was walking around the house with Liesl’s chocolate milk so we had to find where she hid it before Liesl could drink it.

The girls were very good today and Luciana actually decided that she wanted to go down for her nap very early at ten thirty.  Normally it is more like one in the afternoon that she decides that she is ready for a nap.  Very odd.  She ended up sleeping for almost five hours!  That was handy because it was during my busy work hours and until Dominica got home.  Liesl spent most of the day quietly playing around the house.  She is mostly self entertaining.

Dominica got home around two or three.  Shortly thereafter Liesl ended up putting herself to bed and taking a nap for a few hours too.

Around four thirty the Google Nexus 7 Android tablet that I ordered over the weekend arrived.  This is my first Android device other than Dominica’s phones (which were horrible.)  I have high hopes for this device.  It was very cost effective and from what little bit I got to see it tonight, looks really nice.  It is a quad core processor (more cores that even my desktop) with a twelve core GPU.  This is Google’s first tablet and it is manufactured by Asus.  I got the less expensive 8GB model.  The screen is great and from what little bit I have seen I am liking the seven inch screen form factor, very easy to hold in one hand and carry around.  I need to find a good case for it yet.

As soon as the Nexus arrived we ran out the door to do flooring shopping at Lumber Liquidators down in old town Carrollton.  We had tried going there yesterday but they closed before I could get there from work.  That seems a bad decision, closing before people with jobs can get there but being open while people without jobs can easily stop by.  We found a few options that we liked and one that Dominica really likes.  It is not nearly as cheap as we had been hoping, but nothing really seems to be.

After looking at the floors we drove up to Frankford to get frozen yogurt for the family.  Then we went to Home Depot just to make sure that they did not have any flooring deals that we were overlooking.  They did not.  So we went back home.

We watched the movie Mean Girls 2 tonight, which was pretty weak and made no sense.  Luciana went to bed pretty much right as we started and Liesl went to bed towards the end of the movie.  Dominica and I turned in shortly after Liesl, as soon as the movie was over.

Liesl and I are just about all of the way through reading the first Winnie the Pooh book for the second time.  She loves those stories.  In case she is reading this many years later and trying to remember, the first Pooh story book is the orange book, the green one is “House on Pooh Corner.”  The other two are the poetry collections (pink and blue.)

I was pretty tired this morning so instead of going to the gym before going in to work I slept in instead and decided that I would go later.  Working out yesterday morning then dancing all evening and then going out to Plano used up my energy stores, apparently.

At lunch I went to the gym and did some strength training for my upper body.  Not a long workout as my time was more limited than usual.  But I am glad that at least I did something and am keeping up with the pattern of going to the gym.

This evening we went to Brookhaven for kids’ night.

After Luciana went to bed Dominica had me teach her the dances that we learned last night at ballroom class.  Liesl thought that that was great fun and tried to dance with us too.  That made it hard.  She was upset that she couldn’t learn to salsa and just wanted to do her own thing to the music, except in our way so that we kept tripping over her.

I woke up on my own at five this morning, which was exactly when I had wanted to have woken up, so I got right up, got dressed, backed my bag and drove down to Brookhaven to use the gym.  This is my first day of attempting to go to the gym on my way to the office.  If I can get myself into this groove it will be great for me.

I managed to do a full ninety minute workout today, five minutes on the Helix lateral trainer, a full hour on the Arc Trainer (heart rate up to 185 BPM) and twenty five minutes on the treadmill.  Then I hit the steam room and showers.  This worked our really well.  That was an excellent workout and I was able to get to work right on time.

Now to make this a routine.  That is going to be the hard part.

I went to the office today and worked all day.  Nothing exciting there. Had lunch at Redneck today, Dan and I went.  Doue was supposed to go with us but he got caught in a meeting so it was just Dan and I.

This evening I can home, saw the family and on the early side ran down to Las Colinas for my very first night of ballroom dancing lessons.  Chris has been trying to get me out for a while to go dancing but I can just never make it.  The lessons are at the Studios of Las Colinas.

It was some serious dancing tonight.  I was drenched with sweat before we were done.  I learned to salsa, to cha cha, to calypso and to rumba.  Plus, right at the end, I learned the Zydeco Bounce which is a new line dance.  I think that I did pretty well and Chris and the instructors said that they were really happy with my progress.

After three hours of dancing, Rachael emailed me while we were all still hanging out at the studios and wanted to hang out.  So Chris and I drove out to Plano to hang out with her at The Holy Grail where he, PSX, Kara and I went a few weeks ago.  I drove Chris up there so we dropped his truck at his house.  I’ve never actually been to his house before even though it is walking distance from ours and I have, in fact, walked past it before.  He is moving a few blocks away in two weeks so there is little chance that I will ever see it again either.

It was probably eleven when we met Rachael at The Holy Grail.  We hung out till nearly two and had a good time.  She just started her new job really close to us.

Dominica was tired this morning after dancing last night and so decided to sleep in and let me get up and go to the gym this morning instead.  It is Sunday so the gym doesn’t open until nine, which is a little later than I would like, but not too bad.  I got there around nine thirty and did a good workout for about forty-five minutes on the elliptical machine.  Not a huge workout but it was decent and consistency is what matters.  This is my third time in the gym in four days and the day that I missed was not my fault.  That’s pretty good.  I’m happy with my progress.

I got home and we hung out in the playroom for about an hour before we decided to go to Brookhaven for a late breakfast.  So we got the kids dressed and Dominica showered and we went back to the club and got brunch.  Normally on Sundays they do a breakfast bar on the all day buffet.  So it was omelets and waffles for us.

After brunch I walked Dominica over to the fitness center so that she could see what it was like and how to use it so that she would be comfortable coming here on her own.  She has been avoiding it because she didn’t know what to do and is always nervous going to new places.  This got her over that and hopefully she will be able to come in and start making use of the gym really soon.  We are hoping to figure out how to get involved in some group classes too.  I’m really interested in taking zumba and yoga classes.  Zumba is potentially doable but yoga is only offered at a really hard time for me to make it.

We went back home and Dominica and Luciana took naps while I stayed up hanging out with Liesl.

I ordered a Google Nexus 7 Android tablet today.  The girls use the iPad almost continuously and there isn’t enough battery life for them.  Dominica almost always has to give up her iPhone for Luciana.  We really need more devices and we would like to see the girls get some time with something other than iOS exclusively.  Liesl used to use Android now and then on Dominica’s old phone but we don’t have that anymore so this will be their only exposure to Android.  Luciana has never seen it.  It should arrive sometime this week.  It is smaller than the iPad that we have but with tons more power and for only $199.  Hard to really go wrong at that price.

I got a tiny bit of work done today but mostly spent time with the girls.  We had a good time just spending the day together.

This evening Dominica and I watched the 1998 film “Night at the Roxbury” which is, of course, awful but neither of us had ever seen it and it was free on Netflix so we figured, “why not?”  It was mildly entertaining.

Liesl is having me read the first Winnie the Pooh book to her again.  We are on chapter five tonight.  Every night she drinks her chocolate milk, sits in my lap in her room in her pajamas and we read one chapter in her book.  This is the best time that we get together all day.  She makes me hold the book so that she can look at it too even though there are rarely any pictures.

After being so tired yesterday everything thought for sure that I would be sleeping in super late this morning.  But not so much.  I got up around seven thirty and at nine went in to Brookhaven to go work out at the gym.  I didn’t do a huge workout but I got around forty minutes in.  I feel good about it, I am just getting back into the swing of working out so taking it a little easy.

I got home and pretty soon thereafter Chris came over and he, Dominica and I spent about two hours working on some brochure designs.  We made good progress and almost have something that we can use.

Because Luciana’s nap we decided to go to Oktoberfest in Addison which we tried to go to the last two days.   We made it with only minutes to spare before the price doubled at five o’clock.  This is Dominica’s first time really being in Addison, she had no idea what the town was actually like other than the restaurant row on Beltline.  It is really a neat community.

It was blazing hot today, though.  Nearly one hundred degrees which is pretty ridiculous for going to an outdoor event, and one with just thousands of people.  It was way, way too crowded for us, not really fun at all.  It took us at least half an hour, if not an hour, to find Brian Watson and meet up with him.  We tried going in the beer hall and it was packed beyond capacity.  We got one beer each and gave up on getting more as it was too hot.  We split a red velvet funnel cake.  That was it.  We decided that we would call it a day.  The crowd was too much, the food too limited and unhealthy (and not German at all) and it was just too hot.  And honestly, we were just in Munich a few months ago at the actual beer hall that they are mimicking here and at the actual beer garden that they wished that they could match.  So this was a pretty sad imitation.  And in Germany there is a farmer’s market and a fish restaurant serving the beer garden, not funnel cake and meat on a stick stands.

We were hungry and needed actual food so went to Antonio’s, or something like that, right on the main circle in Addison across the street from the Oktoberfest.  That was a really good meal, completely off diet, but good.

We got home and Luciana took a nap right away.

This evening Dominica went out dancing in Las Colinas and I stayed home watching the kids.  She had a really good time and got a serious workout.  She was sweating like crazy, as if she had been running.  They danced for about four hours.