Sheep Guarding Llama

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.

I’m doing my best to get caught up with SGL after the holidays.  It is so hard once you have fallen behind.

This morning was the morning to begin cleaning up after Christmas.  The tree got taken down and the dining room cleaned up.  We got a table set up in the dining room so that Emily could set up and work on her Legos.

Dominica and Francesca also got to work in the kitchen on their own Lego projects.  Everyone really enjoyed working on Legos.  We have a major hit on our hands.

Madeline decided that she wanted to get Legos as well.  We ended up, due to dinner taking over three hours even though we were only one of two tables in the restaurant when we got there and being one of only three all evening, not having time to run out to do some shopping for them tonight so the plan is to take her shopping in the morning instead.

There was so much to do yesterday that Liesl did not even manage to open all of her presents!  She has two large presents waiting for her to get around to opening them yet today.

Today, Dominica and Francesca began assembling the Lego Harry Potter game that Dominica received for Christmas.  This is the first time that we have seen a Lego game like this.  You assemble the board game like it is a Lego kit then you can play the game.  A neat idea.

As it turns out, this is the first time that either Dominica or Francesca had ever put together a Lego kit!  Unbelievable.  We talked about it and it turned out that when they were young they had a denim bag of loose Lego parts and a book of “ideas” – just pictures of some simple Lego structures and things – and they had no idea that Legos normally involved specific kits with directions.  Being someone who grew up with Legos this was unbelievable to me.  Especially as I am so used to seeing Lego kits in stores – it never occurred to me that someone would think that those kits had no directions.

They had so much fun putting together the Lego kit that before they were even done Dominica had sent Emily and I out to go shopping for some Legos.  Emily had decided that she wanted to do Legos as well as had Francesca.  So Emily and I drove over to the Walmart in Herkimer.

We picked up the Lego Hogwarts Castle, not a small set at all, for Dominica.  It is the one that she had really been wanting.  We also got Hagrid’s Hut for Francesca.  We looked around for quite a while for Emily and finally decided on a house kit from the “Creator” series that comes with the parts and directions to do three completely different houses with one kit which is perfect for Emily who will only own a single kit for a while.  Madeline decided that she would wait to see if the Legos looked like fun and if she decided that she wanted a kit that we would go out tomorrow to get one for her.

No one did any of the kits tonight for lack of space in the house.  Emily was quite bummed as she really wanted to get started.  The plan is to make space for her tomorrow morning once the Christmas tree is taken down and the dining room is cleared.

After everyone went to bed, Dominica pulled out her Legos and did a little work, maybe an hour or two, on the beginnings of her castle.  She really enjoyed it and is planning to finish the giant kit tomorrow.