Sheep Guarding Llama

The sun rises on the second decade of Sheep Guarding Llama this morning.  We have now entered the “twenty teens”.  Ten more years until we have a decently named decade that we can easily refer to.  For the past ten years everyone has generally just avoided referring to the decade as anything at all because they just don’t know what to call it.  “The turn of the century” still refers to moving from the eighteenth to the nineteenth centuries and not the latest change, which is strange indeed.  It has been so long since we had the aughts and the teens that no one is sure that the correct usage is in that context.  Some people called it the “2000’s” which makes no sense as that refers to the millennium, not a century or decade.  The century is the twenty first.  The millennium is the second.  The decade is the aughts or, more precisely, the twenty aughts.

Today is Saturday and presumably a holiday but I had just a little work that needed to be done today.  Other than that it was just a family day.  Time to hang out and visit mostly with dad so that he can get more Liesl time.

This evening, Dominica, Liesl and I drove over to Livonia to hang out with the Millen’s.  We only get to see them once or twice a year at best.  Being in Texas is hard when there are so many people back home that you want to get to see.  We picked up pizza and beer and hung out for several hours.  This is our first time seeing their home since they have mostly finished the basement.  They had not even begun work on it the last time that we had been in Livonia.

Liesl had a great time playing with the Millen kids.  Liesl is the youngest but only barely.  They taught her to say “No Way!” like a little 90s girl.  So now she is saying that constantly.

The first decade of the new millennium draws to a close tonight.  Hard to believe that another decade has come and gone.  This one flew by like crazy.  So much to remember.  This has truly been an eventful ten years.  Today, being New Year’s Eve, really snuck up on me.  Even during the day today I kept forgetting what day it was.  New Year’s has become so unimportant that I don’t really even think about it at all anymore.

I wonder if my devil may care attitude about holidays and special days is a product of my age or just a part of who I am?  Will my lack of acknowledgment for holidays make Liesl not really realize that they even exist or will she, like a normal child, be thoughtful of them and excited about them?  Since we will be homeschooling her, I assume that my nonchalance will be passed on one way or another.

We did nothing special for the holiday.  Nothing at all.  Probably as it should be.

Happy New Years, everyone, and this closes out the first decade of SGL.  I have now been blogging for ten years, since I started in two thousand.  It seems unbelievable that I have been writing this blog for nearly a third of my life and an entire decade.  It didn’t even occur to me until I was writing this paragraph that this was the case.  It seems almost impossible.  In so many ways it feels like I have just started.  It is still something “new” that I am doing.  I guess not.

Well, see you next year and next decade.  Happy 2011.

Today is Thursday.  I am working from dad’s office today.  Very little work going on.  This is the slowest week of the year, the week between Christmas and New Year’s.  I’m not sure if there is any holiday day to take this week but things are so slow that I am just working through it anyway.  Likely tomorrow is meant to be the holiday and I just don’t know for sure.

Very little to report.  SGL is far behind and I am filling details back in weeks later, as expected during the holiday seasons.  Most of the day is spent with me working in the office and Dad, Dominica and Liesl hanging out in the living room.  Dad is getting lots of Liesl time in.

Liesl has been playing with her new Fisher Price playhouse set that she got from her Aunt Sharon and Uncle Leo quite a bit.  She is really loving it.  She is also liking her new car racetrack toy from her Paw-paw.  It is a quite tall, plastic car track that you put one of two plastic, Little People cars onto and they race down one of two racetracks to the bottom.  She has been liking playing with cars pretty recently now.

While at Walmart in Geneseo this evening we managed to run into Mary.  Somehow we always manage to see her when we are in town which is amazing as we never really know where she will be.

First thing this morning, but not nearly as early as we had hoped, Dominica, Liesl, Oreo and I set out to drive out to dad’s place to spend the rest of our time in New York.  We managed to divide our time equally in Frankfort and Peoria on this trip.  The roads were good and the trip was pretty quick.  We listened to more of The Disappearing Spoon on our drive.  We have about two hours left to go before we are completely done with the book.

It was nearly noon when we arrived at dad’s.  There is more snow here than I had been expecting but there is snow everywhere up here so it is not really surprising.

We spent the day hanging out with dad.  He and Liesl were very excited to see each other again.  They are buddies.

For dinner we were out to the Omega, our old stomping ground.  It’s been a while now and it is getting hard to remember that we used to live here, in Geneseo.  I haven’t seen our house now in years.  I do miss it, though, it was a great house.  And it was our first.  You always miss your first house.

I can’t believe that I now, being only thirty four, own my third house.  Who goes through that many houses?  It is amazing how much our life has changed since we bought the house on Lima Road back in 2003.  Who would have guessed that we would have moved to New Jersey, then the Hudson Valley and then on down to Texas?

This morning, Dominica, Francesca, Madeline and I went out shopping to look for Legos.  Since Emily and I had already depleted the supplies at the SuperWalmart in Herkimer we decided to head out to New Hartford instead to see what they had there.

Overall, the shopping experience was  a bust.  We hit Walmart, then Target, Toys R Us and other stores.  Then up to North Utica to try the Super Walmart there.  Nothing.  Apparently the Legos of my childhood are not very popular now.  What is popular is either Star Wars collector item Legos or weird themed stuff in tiny quantities that make no sense to me.    The Legos that seem to really make sense, those modeling houses, businesses, normal vehicles, normal life, etc. are all but gone.  Instead of being the building blocks of modeling, Legos have widely become used as a means of building knick knacks – abandoning the traditional market and attempting to just make toys for the collectibles market (which I swear is going to suddenly dry up and disappear once people realize how silly collecting cheap toys is.)

We were out shopping for easier four or five hours.  With all of those people and all of that driving and being so willing to spend good money on a Lego set it is amazing how hard it is to do.  Not only is this a failure of Lego to get the necessary kits out onto the market to lure in a very large segment of their market but it is also a failure of the brick and mortars whose only advantage over the online markets (a la Amazon) is to provide the ability to buy what you want, right now, at a premium price.  Now, we will simply resort to shopping online and getting the product at a competitive price as no one could be bothered to sell the product in the entire Utica market.

We did some online Lego shopping and discovered that Diagon Alley is releasing on January 1st.  Dominica is going to be really excited about that.  It is a very large set.  A bit bigger than the castle that she has now.

Madeline is depressed that we were not able to find anything for her today.  So we are going to find something that she wants online and order that for her since there just isn’t anything to be had in stores.