Sheep Guarding Llama

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.

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.