Sheep Guarding Llama

Liesl woke up this morning and immediately expressed concern over the owl that she believed was hurt last night when we were at Joe and Britt’s house celebrating an early Thanksgiving dinner with the family.  I’m very surprised that she remembered that from last night and was so concerned about it first thing this morning.

Originally the plan had been that we would get up and get on the road pretty early this morning but there were some new things that Dominica and Francesca wanted to do before leaving town so the plan was changed to driving up in the early afternoon.  So for breakfast Emily and I walked over to Donuts, Tacos and Kolaches and got another massive order of food.  The owner of the shop remembered me from yesterday and was very excited to see us.  We must be one of his largest customers ordering ridiculously large quantities of pastries and breakfast tacos.

In the mid afternoon we packed up and headed up from Houston to Dallas.  Emily, Liesl, Oreo and I drove up in the BMW while everyone else rode north in Francesca’s Toyota.  We are a rather large caravan.  The Grice family is staying with us for the week since they are all off from school.  It is unfortunate that they are able to stay with us the week before we get the new house rather than the week after we move into it.  It would have been awesome to have them there to help with the move and the unpacking but they need to be back to Houston before we even close on the house.  Had we known how the finances were going to play out, we could have closed a full week earlier too – but there was really no way to know that ahead of time and it would have been too risky to try to do that.

My car needed to get fueled up so we stopped north of Houston and got gas and grabbed some McDonalds to eat since we were in a gas station that had a McDonalds in it and it is no more expensive to get McDonalds food than it is to eat the gas station fare.

While a few hours south of Dallas Liesl suddenly got really upset and we thought that she needed to get out of the car for a while.  So we got out and we stood at the gate to a ranch for a while so that she could stretch and walk around.  I walked Oreo too, while we were there, just to be safe.  It was a real pain letting anyone walk as the place was just fire ants everywhere.

Liesl really enjoyed standing at the gate of the ranch because there were cows, horses and a Sardinian donkey all in the pasture and the horse and donkey thought that they would make their way over to us to say hello.  Liesl pointed out that there was a gate.  Then she noticed that there was a lock on the gate and said “gate… keys” over and over again trying to convince us to find some keys and to unlock the gate so that she could go in and visit with the animals.  The should started to say “gate, keys, abre” which she learned from Dora.  You see, on Dora, gates speak Spanish and to get them to open, you unlock them with keys and say “abre.”  Boy is she growing up!

There was some confusion over what the other car was doing for dinner so, thinking that they were stopping to get a real dinner, we stopped at Dairy Queen to grab small blizzards to eat on our drive.  I thought that Liesl would want some but after a tiny taste of mine she decided that she was not interested.

We got home and it turns out that the other car did not go get food and the whole thing was miscommunications.  Some day I will get Dominica to understand to use email rather than calling me because I just cannot hear anything, ever, over the phone.  She wasn’t the driver so emailing me would have been easy and there is little room for misunderstanding.  This is why I tell people at work to always use email, not the phone, both because you need clarity but also because you need a trackable record of the information.

So for dinner for everyone else, Emily and I walked over to Five Guys Burgers and Fries and got take out for everyone.

It is going to be a tight squeeze in this little apartment this week.  Three adults, two tweens, two toddlers, one baby and Oreo in a two bed, two bath, twelve hundred square foot apartment is tough.  Very tough.  We are really wishing that we had the new house already.  At least this highlights just how important it is for us to have the extra space there.  The extra bedroom and the extra living space (the den) plus the atrium and the back yard should make a ton of difference.  Plus eventually, if all goes well, I’ll have my office in the garage and that will allow the bedroom to not be my office during the day which is going to be a problem here this week since that basically eliminated our bedroom from being used as a bedroom.

Nine days to go until we are in the new house.  Just nine days to go.

For breakfast, Emily and I went over to Donuts, Tacos and Kolaches and picked up breakfast for everyone.  They have a pretty good selection of breakfast pastries there and are so conveniently close.  We put in a massive breakfast order.  The guy just couldn’t believe it as we just kept ordering and ordering.

I ended up having to work quite a bit today.  I had just a few projects on my plate but there were some issues at the office that quickly turned into a big deal and I ended up working quite extensively.

Once I was done working we were able to go over to Joe and Britt’s house for our early Thanksgiving dinner midafternoon.

Oreo had a bit of an adventure.  He went out into the backyard to explore.  I went with him knowing that it was not safe.  He fought my direction and went directly into the swimming pool.  Not a big deal as I had a hold of him and he only put in two feet down onto the first step and went enough to get his nose wet.  A bit of a scare for him not nothing more.

I had to work really hard to keep him from going into the pool – no matter how I tried to direct him he would push straight towards the water.  Why this blind dog can’t learn to trust my directions I have no idea.

While trying to get him to go into the grass over at the far side of the pool (the backyard is dominated by the pool which takes up about fifty percent of the available space there) Garrett dashed out of the back door of the house.  I turned to watch him knowing that he would dart for the pool and in the split second that I turned around Oreo turned ninety degrees and ran full speed into the deep end of the pool exactly as I had anticipated.  I had to run for Garrett but a half second later Francesca was out the door chasing him and I turned and went for Oreo who was already two feet down and sinking quickly.  Fortunately he had his harness on and I was able to reach him by dropping to the concrete and just going half into the water – had I needed to dive in after him it would have taken a lot of time for me to get him back up to the side of the pool.  As it was I was able to drag him out in a matter of seconds.  He was still very cold and scare, though.

Oreo was feeling fine once he dried out and warmed up.  Hopefully he will remember and try to avoid pools when I attempted to steer him away in the future.

Liesl wanted to hang out outside quite a bit tonight, which was surprising.  She played with Garrett by the pool for a while but after Garrett went inside she insisted that I hold her and just walk around with her outside for a long time.  She is getting to the age where she is scared of many things.  Noises from the next street over or the next door neighbour’s squeaky back door would scare her.  If she was playing she would run to me and ask to be held for a while.

We probably spent an hour or two just walking around outside in the dark.  We would talk, this is the first that Liesl is really seeming to understand adult-like conversation even though she can only participate a little bit, and walk around the yard.  She wanted to look all over in the nooks and crannies of the yard but was afraid to walk around on her own.

At one point, Liesl believed that an owl had been hurt and needed our help.  She made me go all over the place looking for it.  On the ground, in a tree, over by the fence.  I’m not sure what she saw or imagined but it was very strange.  She really seemed convinced that there was an owl in need of assistance.

This has been one crazy busy month for us.  We went directly from Brian being down to dad visiting to learning for Houston today.  The Grice family is staying with us next week as well and just one day after they head back to Houston we will be closing on the new house and within a day or two of that Brian and Tara will be back for three months!

I did my usual work from home this morning for my Friday conference call.  Dominica and Liesl were exhausted and sletp through me working all morning.  Normally at least Liesl would wake up by now.  Liesl is loving having her room back to herself.  She really appreciates having her own space.

Work was mostly uneventful.  For lunch Pierce and I went over to Five Guys.  That place is going to be hopping for a while as they are the only burger place and the only fast food place within easy reach of a lot of businesses in this area.  I got the double sandwich meal that I had figured out last night and that was pretty good.  I got take out for Dominica and Liesl and dropped that off for them.

It was a long afternoon and quite busy.  It was around seven or eight when we managed to hit the road to head on down to Houston.  The trip was uneventful.  We hit some traffic in Dallas but overall the drive wasn’t bad.

As we left the apartment we stopped to get gas at the new RaceTrac that just opened, maybe today, across the street.  This is, apparently, the week of new stuff opening at the place that we are leaving.  That is rather annoying.  It would have been awfully nice to have had these things all this time while we were living here.  This is pretty much what happened to us in Newark as well – everything opened just before or after we left but not for the two years that we actually lived there.  Speaking of Newark, I really miss eating at Food for Life!  Someone needs to deliver me some of their food.

The new RaceTrac gas station is really nice and has a great selection of hot food items.  We got enough food there to get us through for dinner and got onto the road.

We arrived in Houston just a little after midnight.  Not too bad and in line with Liesl’s normal schedule.  She was awake for most of the drive and it took a little while for her to calm down enough to get off to bed.

Dad came over this morning and visited for a while before he had to go to the airport to return to New York.  I had to work so I had gotten up and was logged in and working, having just gotten out of the shower and gotten dressed, when he arrived at the apartment.

For breakfast dad and I walked over to La Madeleine’s and picked up food for everyone and brought it back to the apartment to eat it there.  We ate and I worked from the bedroom.  I can’t wait until we have the house and I can start to set up a real office.  Working from the bedroom doesn’t work at all.  I have no space and no way to really be productive and no way to set up everything, like me internal disk drives.  There just isn’t enough space.

I’ve been testing BackBlaze online backup software and so far it is going pretty decently well.  We have the world’s slowest Internet access (AT&T DSL) and it is going to take weeks to actually do the backup but we have so much important stuff that we store on the desktops like photos, home videos, Amazon MP3s, etc. that it would be a huge problem if we were to lose them.  So doing a major backup before we move house is an important project.  I really like that BackBlaze does an unlimited backup, though.  That is a big deal.  So I can just let it run forever and get everything.  It is pretty cheap too.

Dad needed to be at the airport around ten forty so we left the house at ten thirty and they all dropped me at the office on the way to the airport.  Time to get actual work done.

It was a pretty short morning before coming home for lunch.  I had stuff that needed to be done over lunch today so I couldn’t blow it off but I didn’t want to not go into the office this morning either after having been “out” for the last two days.  This week has enough disruption as it is, I didn’t want to create anything additional.

Back to work this afternoon.  Nothing too exciting to report there.

We noticed today that Five Guys Burgers and Fries located directly in front of our apartment had opened.  We need a change of pace so we decided to try it out.

Dominica has never been to a Five Guys before but I had and I was not impressed the last time that I was there.  They don’t have a veggie burger and so the only real vegetarian item on the menu is grilled cheese or a “burger without the burger”.  The grilled cheese was nothing special and I don’t like their fries.  At least they aren’t expensive.  Tonight we tried the “no burger” option which was actually quite delicious.  They have enough toppings that it turns into a pretty decent sandwich and they do have special pricing on that so they are not gouging the vegetarians when they don’t get half of the sandwich.  So I’ve figured out that skipping the fries and getting two of these sandwiches is cheaper and healthier and while not something that I would want to do everyday it is a pretty good option.

Liesl is definitely sad that her paw-paw is gone.  She loved having him here.  They have so much fun together.  She really likes having family around and constant interaction (I wonder where she gets that from?)