Sheep Guarding Llama

Today was an overall pretty uneventful day. I was in the office and have several phone meeting today.  Nothing really worth noting.

Tonight was a quiet night in.  We did a little cleaning as Francesca and the Grice kids are coming up from Houston early tomorrow morning and will be staying with us for the weekend.  Today is my “Friday”, more or less, because tomorrow is marginally a holiday.  We were originally going to have tomorrow off completely but it turned out to not officially to be a holiday so I do have to work but it is going to be a very light day and I will be working from home all day.  Unfortunately the federal government is still doing the non-farm payroll announcement tomorrow morning so I have to be up early to deal with that.

Today was just a boring day compared to yesterday’s exciting day of tornadoes.  It will be hard to top that one.

This evening we went for a walk again as a family.  We are getting better about going out regularly.  Dominica is able to walk pretty far now without it being much of a problem.  We are much better prepared for Europe already.

We walked to Cafe Brazil, no big surprise there, and got dinner.  We are still loving the food there although it really encourages us to cheat heavily on the diet.  There is so much stuff there that is very not on plan and looks so good.

I stayed home from work today and we were very glad that I did because the weather today ended up being very exciting.  The morning wasn’t exciting.  In fact neither Dominica nor I had any inkling that we were in store for any interesting weather at all.

I worked as usual this morning.  At lunch time we talked about going out for a walk to Cafe Brazil.  We were just about to walk out the door when I had an emergency come up and I had to work for a bit. Then we checked and it was starting to rain, so we decided that it was best that we hadn’t set out for a walk at that particular moment anyway.

Within a very short time I got a text message from Watson asking how we were doing and if I was taking shelter at the office in Irving.  I asked what was going on as we had no idea.  He told us that tornadoes were seen and he was watching out of his downtown windows looking out towards Irving and they could see the storm hammering the area.  That’s when we heard the Farmer’s Branch tornado alarms go off and realized that quite a storm had moved in on us unexpectedly.

In no time we were in tornado warning conditions with crazy amounts of wind and rain.  Boy were we glad that we didn’t go out for that walk, we would have been caught quite some distance from home, on foot, with the kids.

We started watching Twitter and NOAA to see what was going on.  It turned out that today was a mad crazy tornado day.  The DFW got completely pummeled by tornadoes all afternoon.  It wasn’t long before we heard the Carrollton sirens and the police announced that there was a tornado at Trinity Mills and the Tollway.  Too close for comfort.

We took the kids and Oreo and we huddled in the master bedroom closet which is the closest thing that we have to a shelter.  It has no windows and is not open to the garage like my office is.  I’m not completely convinced that the office isn’t safer, though, as it is newly constructed and has more structural elements to protect it than the other side of the house does like more brick, a corner, newer walls, more walls, a reinforced ceiling, etc.  While huddles in the closet we watched Twitter carefully to follow the progress of the tornadoes.  Arlington was getting hit really hard.  There were tornadoes all over the DFW and one right down the street from us.  We could hear the tornado but never saw it.

We made it through the tornado without a problem.  There appears to be no damage in our neighbourhood at all.  Having a tornado makes for an interesting day, though!  I spent a while this afternoon sitting out on the patio reading.  The weather, once the storm was past, was perfect for sitting outside.

Once the storms had died down we went out to Brookhaven for kids’ night.  It was a very slow evening at Brookhaven.  No one was out golfing so that severely limited the number of people coming in for dinner as well.

Today is a short week at the office.  Or at least we thought that it was.  Friday will be Good Friday and we traditional have that day off.  We found out today that we don’t actually have Friday off, that was from our old schedule, and now we are officially working but we are going to run the day as much as possible like a day off.  However, Non-Farm Payroll is still being announced Friday morning so I have to be up at six thirty for that.  No fun.

I really don’t feel last night’s walk in my legs.  I am feeling good today.  Walking ten miles (sixteen kilometers) is apparently just an easy walk for me now.  Losing the weight really makes this a lot easier.

I had my Medifast meeting this morning then I ran over to Panera to get some coffee for the office.

After work I got home and Dominica was ready to return to Cafe Brazil.  So we went out for another walk, about four miles, and got dinner there again.  We are really becoming regulars.  We need to watch how much we do that, though, as it is quite a bit more expensive than just going to the country club.

The weather was absolutely gorgeous today so I spent a few hours sitting outside on the patio with the Kindle enjoying the warm sun and catching up on my reading for class.  I got a lot of reading done.  Dominica would have come out and sat with me but her own Kindle has been on loan and she has nothing that she can read outside.  This might be an argument for physical books again.  She has gotten into the habit of loaning out her Kindle like it was a book and goes long periods of time without it so we can’t read together like we used to.

I tried to get Dominica to go out walking with me today but her feet hurt from yesterday and she decided not to do any walking today.  So I decided that I would go out myself this evening as I really want to keep the activity level up.  Without doing the extra exercise I am never going to manage to lose the weight and get into shape for Europe.  So it is really critical.

I left for my walk just before Luciana was going to go to bed.  I had checked out the path earlier for walking from home to historic downtown Carrollton.  It did not look too bad and I need a “destination” when I am walking to give myself motivation.  So I set around eight or eight thirty.  It was dark but the nice was quiet and the weather was good – just a little bit cool so that I could really enjoy my walk. I had “Hard Eight” on the iPhone Touch to listen to while I walked.

I am finding that there are many more late night or all night gas stations around me than I would have realized.  I don’t think that I have ever lived somewhere were getting gas late at night was so easy.  You can go in any direction from our house and you will hit a gas station open all night.  I stopped at Seven Eleven on the way to pick up a fountain soda, some nuts and a package of veggies.  It is Sunday so, for the most part, I skipped eating today as I often do but on the long walk it is kind of important to have something.

My path to downtown Carrollton took me through some areas that I have barely seen previously so it was nice to walk the neighbourhoods and get to know the area better.  I approached downtown from Denton Road and got to see the old houses.  That area looks a lot like I imagine it did in 1950 when those houses were not very old.

I got to downtown just before ten.  I walked all around downtown as I have never been inside the main plaza before and I wanted to see what there was.  Downtown is full of really neat little shops, the train station, a twenty four hour RaceTrac gas station and more.  Downtown is really pretty and very accessible.  It is mostly food, candy, clothing and antiques but it is extremely well done.  It was nice to walk around and at some point I look forward to getting Dominica to walk down here to try out the food.  Sadly, though, there is almost no fish and very little vegetarian outside of a salad here or there in all of downtown’s restaurants and what there is is extremely bread heavy as every restaurant is a sandwich place except for one that is an Italian restaurant whose menu was not available in the window.  There is the rather famous Agave Azul Mexican restaurant there that can be see far and wide because it is so tall that it towers over the highway.  We’ll need to do some exploring here during the day when things are open.  This is not a late night area.

I stopped at the RaceTrak and loaded up on supplies – nuts, V8 and some Green Machine.  Very healthy stuff.  I used the restroom, thank goodness for all night gas stations, and headed back north.  The walk back north went quicker, I feel, than the walk south.  I was feeling pretty good and I decided to stop in at the Carrollton Public Library and check out the external parts of the facility so I walked through the building (there is an open area to go between the two main parts of the building) and down to the waterfront on Josie Ranch Lake where there are nighttime lights and a fountain.  There was even someone out there fishing at nearly midnight.

It was not quite midnight when I got back to the house.  Probably a quarter till midnight.  Nearly ten miles on my walk today.  Not bad at all.  I was tired when I returned.  Right off to sleep for me.