Sheep Guarding Llama

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.

We got up this morning and it was such a beautiful day and we had all of this new gear for our European adventure trip so we decided that it would be a great morning to take the girls out for a walk.  We have the new stroller to test out, the new Ergo Baby carrier and the new Nikon AW100 camera all to test out for the first time.  We packed up and headed out on foot.

On the way “away” from the house Liesl rode in the new stroller and Luciana rode front mounted on Dominica in the Ergo Baby.  Luciana really liked it and was very sleepy the whole time.  It is a very snugly way to travel.

We walked to Cafe Brazil and, while we were there, decided to get brunch.  We sat outside and had a really nice time.  The weather was perfect.  The girls had fun too.

We walked back to the house and this time Dominica pushed Luciana in the stroller and I carried Liesl in the Ergo Baby carrier on my back.  That gave me a handy extra thirty pounds to increase my exercise for the walk.  The total walk was more than three miles!  Pretty good for a Saturday morning for the Miller family.

We got home and Dominica set right about painting Luciana’s room.  We’ve been talking and with the hopes that we will be moving to Europe in the next few years it is just crazy to invest in converting the attic into a second floor playroom for the girls.  It would be six months from now before it was done and Luciana might never be old enough to use the stairs before we move away.  That would be quite the waste of money.  So since no construction will be done in there we no longer have an excuse not to get it painted.  It is being painted a pale yellow.  Very much like the colour of the kitchen before it turned green.

This evening we decided that the walk to Cafe Brazil had gone so well and that there was so much food there that we wanted to try that we would walk back again and eat a second meal there and skip our Medifast meals for the day.  This is my first time skipping my Medifast meals in about ten months but I figured that if it got Dominica out and walking that it was worth it.  It is always a struggle to get her to walk a long distance with me and Cafe Brazil seems to provide much needed motivation.

We walked back as it was getting dark.  We ate inside tonight, rather than out on the “patio” like we did earlier.  Really the patio is just the sidewalk next to the parking lot.  This is a cafe in Texas.  It lacks a certain something, to be sure.  I can’t wait to be eating at real cafes in Europe again.

I got the barbecue salmon for dinner, it was quite good.  The broccoli there is amazing.  Really good produce.  We were pretty happy that we returned to Cafe Brazil.  That was a good decision today.  It made for a nice change of pace – all this walking and hanging out as a family and going to someplace new.  Good exercise too as not only is it a good walk but we are carrying the kids or pushing a stroller the whole way for extra exercise.  Dominica did half of the carrying this morning but tonight I am doing it all.  That will wear her out quickly.

On the way back we decided that we were doing pretty well so walked away, rather than towards the house, from Cafe Brazil and took a really long way around and approached our house from the far side.  Altogether this evening walk was just over five miles for a total today of nearly eight and a half with about seven of that with me carrying either Liesl or Luciana on my back.  That’s some serious walking.  It was nice getting to show Dominica around our neighborhood too as she really doesn’t know the different areas that well.  This will get her used to it quickly.

It is Friday.  I got into the office on the late side.  It was a nice day in general.  I decided that in order to keep productive that I would skip coming home today and instead worked through my lunch break trying to catch up on things.  There is always just so much to do and commuting home during lunch means two more context switches, another hour in the car, money for all that fuel and half an hour of sitting at home not being able to do very much as it is such a short period of time.  So I stayed and got work done.

Today was not all that busy.  Not slow, just not super busy.  I mostly worked on getting my mailbox and ticket queues trimmed down, which overall, went well.

I am very excited because my new camera, the Nikon AW100, arrived today while I was at the office.  This is the camera that I bought specifically for our trip to Europe.  Dominica thought that I was crazy to need a new camera for the trip but once I explained why I needed it, she agreed that we really did need to get it.  This is a small, pocket sized point and shoot camera but rated as being excellent for image quality – according to some reviews it is supposed to rival my Nikon D90 for image quality!  It is a 16MP camera, which is more than we need but a nice feature and results in good low light performance which is very nice as I hate using a camera like this with a flash, it never looks good.  You need a good off-camera flash like I have for my D90 in order to get good flash photos.

I got home this evening and I played with the new camera for a little bit.  Not very long because as soon as the girls were awake and ready we went out to Brookhaven to get some dinner.  It’s not all that often that we manage to get out on a Friday night so that worked well.