Sheep Guarding Llama

Today is my only other day in the office other than Monday.  Thanksgiving week is one of the best of the year since the holiday falls on Thursday and basically no one goes into the office on Friday making going in pointless.  So only two office days for me this week.

I didn’t manage to get out of the office until quite late for lunch today.  When I did, Francesca, Emily and I went over to Five Guys Burgers and Fries to grab lunch for the family.  With today’s ForuSquare check in, I am now one day away from becoming mayor of Five Guys!  How funny that a vegetarian is about to become mayor of a famous burger place?

Nothing much to report from today.  Tomorrow is Thanksgiving and we are planning on hitting the Fort Worth Zoo for a holiday change of pace.

For dinner, Emily and I walked over to the RaceTrac that is basically across the street and picked up food and brought it back to the apartment.  It is such an easy walk and they really have some pretty decent food over there.  It is surprising how good it is.  It is really a shame that they finally opened the RaceTrac there just two weeks before we are moving out of the apartment!

We move into the new house in six days.

Today I am working from home as part of a continuity of business test.  So I “have” to work from home which is pretty awesome.  Perfect timing as it is a holiday week so it is already broken up pretty significantly and with the whole family here it gives me time to actually see everyone rather than having to head out to the office all day.

I worked from home in the morning and hit La Cima for lunch with Watson at noon.  We did lunch and then had a meeting before I returned to the apartment and worked all afternoon from there.  It was nice to be home basically all day as I got to take advantage of the fact that the family was all here and actually got a chance to do some visiting with everyone in between work items.

After I got back, Dominica and Francesca went out to see Harry Potter 7 Part 1 themselves since Emily, Madeline and I were here to watch the toddlers and Clara.  That gave them a chance to escape and have some kid-free time to themselves during the afternoon.  I’m sure that they really appreciated that.

It is Monday and thus begins my short-ish work week.  Today is more or less normal.  Tomorrow is a work from home day as part of an organization disaster planning test.  Then back into the office on Wednesday for what is bound to be a short day – or at least not a long one.  Then Thursday off from work for Thanksgiving and working from home on Black Friday.

I’m going to keep today’s post very short.  The day was quite busy between work and coming home to hang out with the family.  We didn’t do anything special today, everyone just hung out at the apartment which is way, way too small for all of these people.  If only we had been able to have moved into the new house this week rather than next.  Boy do we need the extra rooms.

After work, Francesca, Emily and I went to Las Nenas to pick up Mexican for dinner.  While we were waiting for them to make our food we walked over to Tom Thumb and did some quick grocery shopping as there is very little food at the house at the moment.

On the way home we hit CVS for some medicine as nearly all of the Grices are feeling sick and we hit Sonic to get a drink for Dominice because she was not feeling like eating Mexican tonight.

We got home and ate dinner and discussed plans for the week.  Nearly everyone except for Emily wants to go see the latest Harry Potter movie that released last week and we were trying to figure out how to do that so that everyone could go.  I would be happy not going but would like to see it too so could go either way.  We finally figured out that if Madeline and I went to see it tonight that that would mean that Dominica and Francesca could go see it together later in the week while Madeline, Emily and I babysat the little ones.

So Madeline and I ran out the door to get to the movie theatre to attempt to make the nine thirty showing at the MacArthur 16 theatre just down the street.  We got there in just enough time to squeeze in but there was a ten o’clock showing as well that was empty so we opted to just wait the extra thirty minutes and be a bit more relaxed.  Got got popcorn and an Icee and made our way into the theatre.  There were just three people there before us and just two who arrived after us.  Seven total people watching the movie.  You can’t tell me that home theatres aren’t making a dent on the movie theatre market!  This is my first time in a theatre since 2005, I believe.

The movie was awesome.  By far the best of the Harry Potter movies thus far.  This is the first one that is one book split into two movies so the pacing was way, way better.  The books have so much character development that are, almost entirely, skipped in the movies leaving them very flat and emotionless whereas the books really draw you in to what the characters are feeling.  This movie brings a little of that to the cinema audience for the first time and the movie is so much better for it.  All of the previous movies would have benefited greatly from being allowed to have been twice as long.

It was almost one in the morning when we returned to the apartment.  A very late night for us!

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.