Monday. Dominica was up very early this morning to try to get everything packed and loaded into the car so that we can drive today. I got up at the normal time and worked all morning. Of course, because we are trying to travel today, the day was just insanely busy. I was running from thing to thing like mad.
We discovered MeshCentral today and got it installed on Vultr and up and running before leaving the office. Finally a remote control system that actually works for Fedora with Cinnamon! I am so excited about this one. It is up and working already with Deepin, Windows, and Fedora.
Paul and I loaded Francesca’s “new” furniture into the bed of his Ford F150 for him to bring down to Friendswood with him on Wednesday or Thursday. He is planning on coming down on Wednesday, but I think that it is much more likely that he will not be making it down until Thursday. There are presents and stuff still being shipped to the house until Wednesday afternoon and it is a long, annoying trip to do in the evening, but only five hours so he might decide to do it anyway.
We loaded the Nissan Quest pretty thoroughly and got onto the road around one. Due to traffic in Dallas, we were routed down the Dallas North Tollway, so we stopped by at the Taco Bell on Marsh and got lunch for everyone. Liesl and I had waited to eat anything all morning knowing that we would get Taco Bell on the drive. We’ve settled into a pattern for Liesl, she does three cheesy bean and rice burritos, and a caramel apple empanada every time. Luciana generally is not that into Taco Bell and just got cinnamon twists. Dominica is able to eat the same thing as Liesl, but sans spicy cheese sauce, and she gets tostitos.
The drive went just fine. There was some traffic but nothing major. A few hours south of Dallas we stopped for McDonald’s coffee and got an Egg McMuffin (without the meat) for Luciana who says that an “Egg McMuffin is the closest thing to an hamburger that I can eat.” She is so funny.
Overall the drive was fine and we got to Friendswood at seven. Dominica’s dad, sister, Madeline, Garrett, and Clara had all gone to the movies about fifteen minutes before we arrived. So we had a quiet couple of hours at the house with Dominica’s mom and Bennie before anyone else arrived. The girls disappeared. Liesl went to the upstairs couch to be alone. And Luciana went into our (Garrett’s) room and hung out in the bed for a while. They were looking to just get some quiet time alone.
Once everyone was back from the movies the kids all hung out together until it was time for bed. Once the adults turned in, Dominica and I hooked up our gaming laptop to the TV in our room and watched several episodes of the second season of Fear the Walking Dead before going to bed a little before one in the morning.
The show has improved quite a bit. In the first season I was pretty ready to give up on it as it was just so boring. But the story is improving. Still a bit too repeated from the original series, but decent. Although I feel that they continue to fail to make a solid protagonist that you can hope survives. I’m still mostly rooting for the undead as they seem more together. I do enjoy seeing a show shot in Baja California in the wine country. It looks so nice there.
The bed in Garrett’s room is just awful, to the point that I cannot sleep on it. And the room is very warm and the bed is incredibly warm beyond that. So I grabbed a few blankets and moved to the floor which was much more comfortable than the bed, by a long shot. We slept with the window open to make it bearable.
After twenty minutes, Liesl came in and said that she had insomnia and asked if she could sleep in our room so that she could fall asleep. So Liesl slept on the floor with me, which made her very happy. And minutes later Luciana came in and decided to sleep in our room, too. She slept in the bed because her leg was hurting and she thought that that might make it feel better. This was probably not good for Dominica, though, since having two people in that bed makes the broken frame so much worse.
Rachel is still in Austin and not getting back until tomorrow at the earliest. So who knows if she is going to get to the house before even Paul has left. We talked for an hour or so tonight on text. We won’t be able to get back to watching our show, The Haunting of Hill House until after New Year’s.
Dominica was very glad that I skipped work all afternoon and drove the family down so that she did not have to worry. We don’t know how long we will be staying. Paul has to be back in Dallas to make a flight to Wisconsin on December 27th. We may or may not go back at that time. We might stay until after New Year’s. Or we might leave the kids for a week and go back up to Dallas for a bit and then come back to get them. We will see.
We remembered to bring my new portable work rig with my two laptops, my big twenty four inch monitor, wireless keyboard, and mouse. That will make this a lot easier to work for a couple of weeks.
And the holidays have officially begun. This is why we don’t have a Christmas tree or anything at our house ever, and no decorations. Technically we do have some this year, there is a tiny tree with lights, and some wall clings in the hallway, but that is it. But the last day that we were at our house was the sixteenth, so doing any decorating of our own just doesn’t make any sense. So this is what we do.
