Wednesday. This morning I was talking to Paula about coffee and she was very surprised to learn that some people would put alcohol into coffee. But then, it turns out, that she regularly drinks Irish coffee which is, of course, coffee with Irish whiskey in it. So she is actually one of the people who drinks alcohol in coffee regularly.
My morning was very busy, so busy that I did not get a chance to have lunch until four in the afternoon. And then it was just a can of black olives.
This evening I started on the second season of Star Trek: Enterprise. So far I am really liking it.
Tuesday. Really not much to tell today, again. These two weeks are just my time to work. Unpacking, and office work. This afternoon we have fresh bread with olive oil for a late lunch.
For dinner tonight I made angel hair pasta with vodka sauce.
Monday. This is the last full, “normal” work week in Dallas before the hard core holiday craziness besets us. Dominica might be leaving for Houston as early as Friday. But probably not quite that early. The girls are starting to work on making Christmas presents for the family. And a lot of house cleaning and unboxing is going on.
Very busy day, today. Not only did I work all day, but I ended up having to work until about midnight.
Sunday. It has been a very busy week and today is my day to catch up and, most importantly, relax.
This morning Francesca asked us to do some research on the video game Fortnite which, until today, I had heard of but had no idea anything about it. But I had spoken to a friend who was getting it set up for their kids because they really enjoyed it just this morning, so it seems to be the topic for the day.
Did a bit of research on it and ended up getting it set up for the girls today so that they could test it out. Seems like it might be fun for them to play online with their cousins.
Liesl has been playing Elder Scrolls Online this weekend as it is free for a few days to get people hooked. I tried playing it a little, but my verdict was that it was a massively large install (which I did yesterday) and not all that engaging. Not like Skyrim or Oblivion were. It didn’t draw me in and the idea of playing online with other people makes me so much more wary of it. That seems like a lot of work and no extra value.
Liesl tried playing it and put in quite a bit of time but her character was ruined by getting stuck a few different places and having to spend in game gold to get them unstuck. Making players play for game glitches isn’t a fun way to game. And it was bad enough that she had to kill her character and start over having no way to recover from a glitch.
But while I immediately wrote the game off after the trial as being decent, but not good enough to bother playing, Liesl say that she enjoyed it and might want to play it. Which really surprised me.
The girls started playing Fortnite tonight, just a little. I played one game of it myself and found it insanely boring. But Liesl tried it out later on and decided that it seemed like a lot of fun. So we will see.
This evening, once Dominica and I got the living room television back from the girls, we watched several episodes of Babylon 5. Oddly, this is a show that came out when both of us were teenagers, but neither of us every watched. Amazing, given that it is exactly the kind of show that you would think that we would have watched. For me, it came out right as I had started college and I was just busy with other things and it was over and forgotten before I ever had a chance to check out television again.
Yesterday was definitely one epic day. Today I have the morning to get caught up on work a little, relax some, and getting ready for going on this evening with the same crew to a “Egg Nog Soire” at Ryan and Michelle’s house.
I spent the morning in the office. Being gone for an entire Friday left me with a lot of stuff that I still needed to work on before I go anywhere today. So it was a pretty busy work morning, and seeing the kids while I could.
Paul and Dominica went out and did some grocery shopping this morning while I was around. They ran errands all morning, barely getting back in time for me to get ready to leave.
Liesl, the Flamingo Girl with her new bracelet from the Dallas Zoo
Luciana, the Penguin girl, notice her bracelet from the Dallas Zoo
I had to get ready around three, and get on the road a little after four. I am not taking the train today, that works for the zoo which sits directly on the train line, but does not work for going to a house party on the south side of the river, that is both too far away and in the part of the city least served by the train system. I don’t even know if one of the train lines goes into that region of the city.
Looking later, it looks like the Dallas Streetcar goes somewhere near there, and the very end of the Red Line might go to the general vicinity. But nothing goes very close or is very convenient.
So after four I hopped into the car, and drove down to Kessler. Dominica had picked up a bottle of wine for me to take to the party. I had been hoping that Dominica would go with me today, but this morning she decided that she was having a bit of a panic attack thinking about going to a party at the house of people that she did not know and having to spend the entire evening making conversation with loads of strangers without even a single person that she had ever met before being there (other than me.) I tried to see if Rachel would want to go, but she had to work this afternoon showing houses over in Fort Worth, and then had some parties of her own that she attended instead. She later regretted not having dropped things to have gone as her other stuff was a bust and this was exactly the kind of party that she would have enjoyed. And it would have been perfect for her real estate career. She needs to go to more places where she is going to interact with potential clients.
So I went to the party all by myself, which in reality worked out pretty well. I am comfortable meeting new people and making conversation and am pretty approachable. If I had had someone with me, that would have been a lot harder to meet new people and would have been a lot of us talking to each other. So in the end, while it would have been nice not to have have to have gone alone, it worked out pretty well that I did.
The party went until well after midnight. It was a really nice crowd and I had a really good time getting to know people. And the egg nog was really good. The house was gorgeously decorated, too. Definitely my kind of party.
It was a fun day, but a long one. A very busy weekend. I am ready for some sleep.
