Sheep Guarding Llama

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.

This morning was a morning of house cleaning. Real cleaning with furniture being moved, things being found a new home, etc. We managed to generate something like four boxes of donation stuff while cleaning, too!

Kat and Rachel are both supposed to be coming over today, so we have a lot of getting the house ready to do.

Dominica’s new food dehydrator arrived today. Francesca got one at Christmas, and Dominica has been talking about getting one for months. So now we have the same one. Her plan is to make a lot of seitan jerky.

Dominica spent quite a lot of time getting things dehydrating today. Fruits, fruit leather, tomatoes, etc.

It was a full day of house cleaning. We went through many boxes and filled Paul’s truck up with stuff to donate. Three boxes of books at least. All kinds of stuff.

Paul hung several paintings today and Liesl’s new unicorn decoration stuff in their bedroom.

Jim stopped by just before six. We have not seen him in months. I’ve been wondering what he has been up to. He needed to borrow a ladder and while he was here borrowing that, he picked up his air compressor as well. That was taking up a bit of a foot print in the garage, so having him take that with him helped quite a lot.

Kat came by about twenty minutes after Jim had left with the ladder. We did cheese trays for dinner. Dill, cranberry, chocolate fudge, and other cheeses. Kat hung out till about ten. She wanted to try out our Oculus Go but did not have enough time, she has to work in the morning.

Rachel ended up bailing on us, but without any warning. Just didn’t show up. But I was not really feeling like going out or staying up late tonight, so that was overall pretty good. Dominica and I watched some more Brooklyn Nine Nine before going to bed at a reasonable hour.

Saturday. Got up at nine. It is a bright and sunny today, kind of warm out. Very pleasant.

I went into the office, but didn’t really work. Paul was just hanging out in his office (the dining room) and Dominica was on the couch watching Bones on Hulu. So I just hung out in my office while the kids were asleep. I talked to Paula and Anny in Transylvania a bit. Anny is at Paula’s house, today is Paula’s sixteenth birthday. So happy sweet sixteen to Paula.

At eleven I got an emergency call from a client who had a Windows 2003 Server cluster that had died on them and they needed my help. That was an interesting and unexpected one. I do not directly manage that cluster, nor did I even know that it exists, so I was finding out all of the details on the fly. But after an hour and a half we managed to get it working again. Yay for Saturday work!

The kids are still reveling in their ability to be alone and have quiet time. Luciana set up the Steam laptop in their bedroom and is playing Steam most of the day. Liesl continues to hide out in our bedroom mostly watching videos.

Dominica has been watching Bones on Hulu on her own. But I came out to the living room and joined her in the afternoon and we watched The Golden Girls for a while until I needed a break, and then we watching Brooklyn Nine Nine, which is just awesome and one of my favourite current shows.

I did a lot of work on SGL today and managed to complete May, 2018, finally. This spring is really lean on SGL updates, because there is really nothing to report. I spent several months just completely “head down” working. Long day, high stress, and nothing of note going on. It was horrible. June is the last really tough month that needs to be updated now.

After Dominica went to bed, I watched some Star Trek: Enterprise. Not very much, just one or two episodes. I am on the fourth and final season now. I think that the writing is getting worse, I still have most of the season to go, but the third season was a bit ridiculous and the fourth hasn’t started out all that great.