Sheep Guarding Llama

Liesl had a temperature above one hundred and two this morning.  Poor little girl.  I got up around seven to start work.  I had already taken this morning as a work from home morning because I was going to be going to the doctor with Dominica for her late ultrasound so that I could take care of Liesl during the appointment so the timing worked out well.  Dominica got up about an hour after me, got ready and headed off to her appointment while Liesl stayed asleep until after eleven!

By mid-morning, Liesl’s fever seemed to have broken and she was feeling some better.  She ate a tiny bit and drank some water and stayed in our bed watching “Wonder Pets” until Dominica got home.  She continued to stay in our bed until after I went to work and on until the middle of the afternoon.

The ultrasound went well this morning.  Little baby-to-be Miller is doing well and is on track.  We are most likely going to be meeting the newest member of the family on April 22nd or 25th.  The doctor was supposed to be there today to make the final schedule details with Dominica but was out today so that needs to be done yet.

I ate lunch, attended an Oracle M-series webinar and then went in to the office.  I didn’t actually get any time off for lunch at all – I just ate while attending the webinar for work.

Dominica had a really busy work week up until today but fortunately, with all that there was going on today, she didn’t really have to work too much.  So that really worked out well.

Dominica’s video game, Dragon Age 2, arrived this afternoon as did a book for me and a new USB headset for my computer as the one that I have been using for years and years got totally destroyed when the wire got wrapped around my foot and I tripped over it a few days ago.

This evening we just hung out with Liesl who swung back and forth between feeling pretty decent and feeling awful.  For about thirty minutes she would play and be mostly okay and then she would feel terrible and just need to be held and cry.  If this fever runs like Clara’s, we are looking at having a sick child until maybe even Saturday.

Liesl put herself to bed in our bed around ten but was unable to sleep and kept getting up.  I got into bed with her and Oreo and tried to get her to relax while Dominica started her first round through Dragon Age 2.  She didn’t get very long to play but maybe two hours.  The install and update process took forever so she probably lost half an hour or more just getting up and running before getting to play at all.  She has been looking forward to this game for so long, though, that I knew that she needed some time to get to play it today.

It was a rough night.  Liesl tossed and turned and just cried and cried.  Her fever was very up and down all night long.  We all got very little sleep.  This is one of the few times that we have had to go through Liesl really being sick.  She is generally a really, really healthy toddler – much healthier than I think of kids at this age tending to be.  So we are not as prepared for her being really sick as we might be.

For those wondering as to the never ending garage project – no, nothing has happened.  We have not seen nor heard from anyone for five days now.  Five days of silence.  It is getting more and more ridiculous.  The carpet is, in theory, supposed to take nearly four weeks since we paid for it on Sunday but at the rate that they are going the project that was supposed to only take two weeks or less from inception isn’t going to be able to be completed in twice that time from now.  Argh.

So the house next door, the one that we walked away from several weeks ago, is back in the picture today as ridiculous as that sounds.  The selling brokerage contacted our agent today and dropped the price yet another ten thousand dollars and asked us to come back and bid again.  I have no idea what they are thinking.  But we only need a tiny bit of concession over what they had been willing to do last time and they now know that we are not going to even be remotely intimidated or pushed into an emotional buying decision so perhaps they are ready to bargain since they now know just how hard it is going to be to sell that house and they know that we know all of the details about how much it will cost when all is said and done.

So we are bidding on the house yet again.  Not getting our hopes up.  We ran the numbers again and spoke to the bank today.  In theory everything is lined up and ready to go if the brokerage accepts our offer, which we still think is rather unlikely.  But you never know.  We are the first bidders, again, on this new round of bidding.  So we will see.  The selling brokerage still has our earnest money that we have been trying to get back for some time so we are thinking that that probably gives us some leverage as they are holding our money as if we are partway through the transaction at this point.  Our mortgage broker thinks that it does.  He feels that they will be pretty foolish to let us go again.  We hope that that is the case.

I made it home for lunch today.  Got some time with Dominica and Liesl.  The weather is continuing to be awesome here in Texas.  I’m loving winter in Texas.  I keep forgetting that it is so cold back home.  They have snow on the ground still and we are feeling like it is summer here.

After work Dominica sent me over to Blu Ginger to pick up Thai curry for dinner.  I had a conference call that I had to make it back for so it was a rush from work to restaurant to home, ate half of my dinner and then on to the phone.  A very busy evening.

Today was the release day for Dragon Age 2 for the Playstation 3.  Dominica has been waiting for this game to release for months now.  She has never played any video game like she played the first game in the series and its expansion packs.  She has had this one on pre-order from Amazon since it was first announced.  The game did not arrive as planned, however.

It turns out that Dominica had had the game shipped to the old apartment since, at the time that she ordered it, that was where we were living and probably had not yet made plans to move anywhere else.  Oops.  So that is a problem.  So we spent half an hour or more this evening trying to figure out how to get the game rerouted so that she could eventually get it.  In theory it will arrive tomorrow.

As we often do, we sat on the couch at the end of our bed and watched some Netflix before going to bed.  At around ten Liesl said to me “Dora blanket” and had me go into her room with her to get her her Dora fleece blanket that she likes to sleep with.  Then she grabbed her pacifiers, her bears and other assorted nighttime sundries and marched into our room and just climbed up in to our bed.  It was so cute!

Liesl is generally pretty good about knowing when she is tired and wanting to be put to bed.  Last week one time she slowly snuck her blankets, bears and other sleeping items into our bed while we watched “Hot in Cleveland” and then climbed up into our bed and went to sleep hoping that we would not notice.  It was so adorable.  We could not believe how funny it was that she had just decided to sleep with us and to do it so obviously sneakily.  Liesl almost never sleeps with us, at least not when we are at home.  She generally likes having her own bed and her own space.

Tonight, within just a little while of going to bed, it was noticeable that Liesl was very, very warm.  She is running a fever.  Dominica is guessing that it is the same fever that Clara had last week while Dominica and Liesl were down in Houston with the Grices.  So that explains why Liesl had decided to climb into our bed.  She was not feeling well and she knew it.

I tried to go home at lunch today but never ended up making it.  I just ended up grabbing Jamba Juice and having that in the office instead.

On my way home from work today I stopped off at B. B. Bop Rice Bowls which is on my commute.  I have been going past this place for a while and always think that it looks interesting but have not had a chance to stop in yet.  So on my way home I just decided to swing in since it was open.

They were very slow but had a neat menu.  My phone was dead so I didn’t have a way to let Dominica know that I was bringing food home so I figured that I would just surprise her.  I got us two large rice bowls of very healthy brown rice, vegetables and tofu and headed home.  It is really quick and easy for me to pick up dinner there.  Not out of the way at all.  And it is not often that we are able to grab Korean fusion cuisine so it is a nice change of pace.  We eat a lot of rice but this is a different style than we normally get.

Dinner was quite good.  I accidentally got way, way too much food.  More than double what we could eat.  It will be good left over, at least. It was not expensive and is quite healthy.  A good choice for dinner.  I’m sure that we will be getting take out from there much more often in the future.  It is so handy.

I got home at a really good time and having brought home dinner we were able to sit down and eat immediately which made for a much longer evening than we normally have.  I spent almost the entire evening out playing with Liesl.  We went out to the living room and she played there while I cleaned.  I managed to do a lot of clean up in the “den” and get almost all of the remaining boxes emptied so that we could get them out of the way.  We have the Grices comes later this week and we need all of the space that we can get.

Then Liesl and I went in to her room and read book after book.  It has been forever since she has wanted me to read to her.  This is great.  We had an awesome time hanging out together.  It was so nice to have an entire evening where we had nothing to do but spend time together.

Late in the evening we watched some Roseanne together as a family.  Then off to bed.

This week Dominica and I have been going back and watching the first seasons of Roseanne which I have not seen, I don’t believe, since they aired live in the late 80s.  If I did see them in reruns, it was while the show was still running in the original few seasons.  I watched the show when it was new.  I was in seventh grade when the show started and it’s most popular years were when I was in middle school and early high school.  By late high school I did not watch very much television, especially not American television as I watched British television when I could (shows like “Red Dwarf” and “Are You Being Served?”), and, from what I can remember, I have never seen the last half of the Roseanne series.  I have no idea how the show went after the early seasons.

It is very nostalgic to be going back and watching this show now.  It is a show that I have thought very little about since it was originally on.

I ended up having to work quite a bit today as well.  I had a production outage this evening that took several hours.

We did get a bit of family time in today, though.

Today was, in theory, supposed to be a slow and relaxing day at home.  But that did not end up happening at all.  The electricians came over this morning to attempt to wrap up but, as happens each time they come, they forget something that they need whether a second person or a ladder or daylight or something and so they are never quite able to finish the last few minor tasks.  Basically all that we have left for them to do at this point is to finish hanging the front dusk till dawn light, put up some lights in the garage and fix the wiring for the garage main lights.  That’s it.  Probably under one hour of total work left to go.  We have no idea when we might see them again.

I ended up getting paged out at six this morning. That was no fun.  So even though I went to bed early thinking that I would get some awesome sleep and maybe kick this infection I ended up getting very little sleep and working a ton.  No fun.

I ended up putting in a very, very long day today with several major issues going on.  I got very little time to do anything of my own.

This evening, Dominica really wanted to get cupcakes so after working all day I took an hour break and we ran to the mall to get cupcakes and to grab sandwiches at the food court.  Liesl wanted to play in the playground but the mall was closing so she had to settle for a few minutes of playing in the fountain.

Back home and back to work.  I had to work rather late tonight too.