Sheep Guarding Llama

We got up this morning pretty late.  Liesl was the first one up and she just hung out on her own and watched Go Diego, Go for a while before Dominica, Oreo and I got up.  We did our best to sleep in for a little while.

Pretty much as soon as we got up this morning we walked Oreo and then packed into the car and ran to McDonald’s for breakfast and then headed out to drive around looking at houses (from the outside) and neighbourhoods to see what we could find that we would be interested in looking at more.  We have been running the numbers and buying a house looks like it will be quite a bit less expensive than renting saving us a hundred dollars a month or possibly even more.  The fact that we have to maintain a storage unit at around ninety dollars a month and do without so much of our stuff all of the time really makes us want to have a house again.

We spent several hours driving all over.  We saw lots of different areas, checked out local businesses, looked up houses we had found online, made note of houses that we found while driving and did a lot of good decision making.  We learned tons today and think that we are armed with enough knowledge to begin a pretty good house search process.

In some ways, we are loathe to buy another house.  The last two purchases were followed almost immediately by needing to relocate making the purchase seem pretty silly.  But on the other hand, both purchases, in the long run, worked out pretty well.  Our first house in Geneseo ended up being a great financial investment with us gaining a little equity during our four years of owning it and having taken a capital gain on it in total selling it for quite a bit more than we had originally paid.

The house in Peekskill, while we have only now owned it for just two years, is looking like it will be a good financial decision as we have made it through the hardest stretch and now have renters in it.  It is not yet a good financial decision but we can see that, in time, we will have that house actually be a profit center on its own justifying that buying decision as well.

So when we look at the big picture and how much our current renting is costing us and how much we are in need of a house (more space, eliminate storage unit, real office space, guest space, no more multi-story stairs for our blind dog, a yard in which Liesl can play) it makes us think that getting a house when we are done with this rental period makes a lot of sense.  The only real downside is that I will no longer be walking distance to work but will have to commute and that will make coming home for lunch much, much harder and I will see Liesl less.  But hopefully it means a better overall life.  It also means that Dominica will be able to take Oreo out on her own instead of needing to have me around to do that and Liesl will get to spend a lot of time outside which she needs.

While we were out we found Swiss Donuts on Story which was great.  They have the best donuts that we have found in Irving thus far.  I think that we will be stopping back out there again.  It turns out that Dominica had never had a sourdough donut before!

After we spent several hours looking for houses we decided to go to Best Buy to see if they had the fourth generation iPod Touch.  We started talking about it last night and were thinking that if we got an iPod Touch for Liesl instead of an in-car DVD system that it would be much more useful, less expensive and used in a much greater variety of circumstances.  So we went to buy one but found out that they are and always are sold out of them.  I guess just ordering one online from the Apple Store makes the most sense.  We figured that we would just wait until the next paycheck arrives for that then.

We came home and plunked down in the living room.  We watched Liesl’s shows for a little bit but she was getting tired and soon went down for a long afternoon nap.

While she was asleep we attempted to watch District 9 but that movie was so awful that we had to turn it off.  Dominica’s Parenting Magazine had recommended it as a movie that women would like for the moral message and that men would like for the action.  Obviously they took some cash to say that.  This movie was low budget and shot mimicking The Office which is silly and flippant as it is.  Then the subject matter is racism, murder, brutality and genocide and shut with quite a bit of unnecessary gore.  The movie was completely not child friendly, was not entertaining and was too intense for Dominica and too gross for me.  I’m sure had we finished it that there would be some message but we weren’t going to sit through two hours of that crap to find out what it was.  This is a definite “avoid” movie.

We spent the evening just hanging out and watching some television as a family.  That is commercial free, on-demand Netflix and not real television, of course.  We don’t actually have any form of traditional television.

This evening there was a major issue at work and I ended up having to work for several hours trying to get a server back online.  That was rather crappy.  Dominica and Liesl had to go into Liesl’s bedroom to play because Liesl really wanted to sit with me which was not working as I had to work right then.

Dominica was not feeling very well tonight and went to bed pretty early.  I was not tired at all so I stayed up and watched movies that Dominica was not interested in while I worked on writing documentation.  I stayed up way too late but I got a lot done too so not all bad.

Liesl got me up and moving early this morning.  She is my little alarm clock.  If we can get her to go to bed at a decent hour then she will wake me up early in the morning.  She wakes up and is up and alert in a wink and wants to get up and play, watch Diego or eat pretty much instantly.

I got into the office on the early side today and remembered to bring my coffee with me.  I didn’t even spill my coffee like I did yesterday.

At lunch today I decided that I would drive around and look at neighbourhoods where we are considering looking for a house rather than getting food.  I wasn’t really hungry, which was amazing considering how little I had to eat yesterday, and so just skipped lunch.

I managed to find a number of homes that we had been looking at on Trulia last night.  Some were definitely not interesting at all but the area in which we are looking definitely looks very potentially good for us.  Close to work, close to the club and generally pretty affordable.  We are planning on going out tomorrow as a family to really look at places more closely.

I had taken lunch late and it was a very busy day so I did not get much time to look around.  I ran into Jamba Juice and grabbed a large fruit smoothie for lunch and headed back to the office.  I wasn’t very hungry but knew if I did not get something that I would be sorry.

Late this afternoon Dominica and Liesl went to Kroger to do some grocery shopping.  Dominica was not feeling well after that and just wanted to relax this evening.

Dad arrived in Ohio this evening safely.  He is out there visiting for the weekend.

Work was very busy all afternoon.  I really felt like going out by the end of the day so Nicki and I went to La Cima and met up with Brian there.  There was a private wedding (as opposed to a public one, I suppose) and basically the entire club was booked for the evening.  There were just two tables of club members at the club this evening so we just had a private room for ourselves.  The bar was open and the bar snack table was set up for us.

We were all a bit hungry so we ordered dinner – the lounge menu was available.  I tried the shrimp po’ boy which I had not had a chance to try yet.  It was excellent as was the Chianti that I had – the same that I had had on Wednesday.

All we did was arrive, order dinner and head back home and it still took several hours.  There is no getting in and out of the club quickly.  It was after seven when we got there, thanks to me having two flat tires on the Mazda when I got out of work.  It was almost nine thirty when I got back to the apartment.

I was expecting to have several hours with Liesl before she went to bed but it turned out that Liesl was already asleep in bed when I got home.  Her schedule is apparently improving.

I fed and walked Oreo.  Then Dominica and I settled in and watched the 1952 Doris Day film April in Paris which is certainly not one of her better films.  It did have Ray Bolger, whom you might know as the Scarecrow from the Wizard of Oz, in a role that did not suite him at all.  It is amazing that even now, Doris Day remains the highest box office grossing actress of all time!

After yesterday’s cooling tropical depression we have a hot and humid day today.  Not so hot but so humid.  It was very uncomfortable just driving the Mazda over to the office.

On the way into the office I discovered the tallest fire ant mound that I have ever seen right at the entrance to the office.  These fire ants are quite tenacious and will show up in the weirdest places.  They must have a massive nest underneath our grass in front of the building.

After working for a little bit I drove John to the garage to drop off his car to have some work done today.  Then back to the office.  It was a bit of a drive.  Much farther than I had anticipated.  Nice excuse to escape from the office.

For lunch today it was over to Rockfish where, today, I became the mayor on FourSquare.  I am not the mayor of Rockfish and La Cima.  Taco Bell will be mine soon as well.  Panera cannot be too far behind.

Then it was back over to the garage with John to pick up his car.  Right next door to the shop was a Mexican snow cone restaurant (yes, a Mexican restaurant that makes breakfast tacos and snow cones – go figure) so we decided that it would be just wrong to not try it out.  So we went over and got snow cones.  They were pretty good.  I got a guava flavoured one.  They had easily sixty or more snow cone flavours including dill pickle, three types of apple, two types of bubblegum, etc.  Pretty crazy.  They even had one special snow cone that came covered in pickles and some other odd things.

After lunch and the drop off I went to the apartment to deliver Dominica her lunch from Rockfish.  I then hung out at the house for little while as I had a call and few things to attend to before returning to the office.

It was a short afternoon at work that really seemed to just fly past me.  I worked really late too and did not even really notice.  It was almost seven thirty by the time that I made it home.

Liesl is addicted to watching the Dora the Explorer spinoff show Diego.  She was watching that with Dominica when I got home.

Tonight we started playing catch with Liesl.  Really it is more of playing “throw” because she doesn’t even make an attempt at catching anything but she does love to throw stuff.  She was doing really, really well too!

Once she got into throwing things she started looking for other items to throw.  We figured out that if we said, “You cant through that, it is hard and you will hurt mommy.”, that Liesl would start to cry.  I’m pretty sure that she was thinking that she had hurt mommy and she was upset because she did not know what she had done.  So we had to refrain from saying that.

So we started focusing on the idea that it was okay to throw soft things and not okay to throw hard things.  Liesl started grabbing all of her toys and rubbing them against her face to see if they were hard or soft!  It was amazing her learn this new concept right there on the spot.  She totally understood and was exploring the concept of the items’ surfaces.

We pretty much skipped dinner tonight.  I just ate a leftover burrito from Taco Bell the other day and I did not have that until very late at night.

Liesl went to bed at a much more reasonable time tonight – just a little after ten thirty.  That is a good bedtime for her and I hope that we can keep her to going to bed sometime around there.  We need to be able to get some sleep too.

Tonight Dominica and I did some looking into homes in the area to see what was available and what the price ranges were.  We were amazed to find that there are a large number of homes on the market that would cost us less to own than we are currently paying in rent – even after taking into account the taxes.  We knew that homes in Texas were inexpensive but this is much less expensive than we had been thinking.  Dominica is pretty sure that our lease is up on February 1st so we need to figure out what we are doing pretty quickly to have a hope of being able to get into a house by then.

We had been feeling like we had lots and lots of time to worry about where we were going to be living when our lease was up but, in reality, we have almost no time at all.  One advantage to a house would be that we would no longer need to maintain a storage unit in addition to the apartment cost.  That’s almost a hundred dollars a month that we lose that could be going into a mortgage.  We are also feeling the crunch in terms of space.  I need a real office (I’m working out of the bedroom right now) and we always have guests who need their own space as well plus we have a house-worth of furniture in storage that would be nice to have out and usable.

So we are seriously considering the idea of buying a small, inexpensive house in Las Colinas.  Of course, we have to convince the bank to give us a second mortgage when we already have one mortgage up in Peekskill.  But my guess is that that will not be all that hard.  I also need to talk to the bank about refinancing options as we could potentially save a lot of money simply by refinancing the house in Peekskill.  There is even a chance that I could take it from a thirty year to a twenty year mortgage which would be fantastic.

Tomorrow morning dad is heading off to Ohio for the weekend.

I got up this morning unaware that a tropical depression slash hurricane was expected to be pounding the metroplex.  I had gone to bed with the weather being completely normal.  I had spoken to a friend in Austin yesterday before leaving work and he had been saying that they had gotten four inches of rain yesterday but I really did not think very much of it.

When I looked out the windows this morning, it was pouring.  And I mean pouring.  It was torrential.  Quite literally, this is what a torrent is.

I drove to work and was completely drenched by the time that I reached the front of the parking lot.  The lot is quite large and you always have to walk quite a long way to your car.  I was seriously wet.  Then, just in front of the office, there was a massive stream flowing through the parking lot with no way to get across it.  So I jumped the best that I could but still managed to completely soak both feet.  It is going to be a long day, I can tell.

All morning it was freezing cold in the office because I could never dry out.  My feet were wet all day.  A lot of people did not make it to work and those that did were very late as they fought traffic that was moving so slowly all over the metroplex.  Accidents everywhere.

My lunchtime there was already significant flooding in the Dallas area with police using helicopters to rescue people stranded by the floods.  The rain had let up some so I ran to Taco Bell and picked up lunch for the family and brought it back to the apartment to eat.

It continued to rain all afternoon.  I worked late today not leaving the office until six thirty which is when our dinner reservations at La Cima were for.  Oops.  We did what we could to get over there but we ended up eating at more like seven thirty.  It worked out that I was working late, though, as Liesl was still asleep until just as I was leaving the office.

When we got to La Cima we learned that tornadoes had touched down very near by at the corner of Irving and Mockingbird and had destroyed a warehouse there.  There was a ton of flooding all over and the Trinity River was close to breaking its banks which would be disastrous.

The drive to La Cima down Riverside Drive was pretty amazing.  This was the second heaviest flooding I have ever seen – the worst being when the riving in Binghamton broke its banks and the whole region was wiped out several years ago.  This was very similar though but without the obvious devastation.  There were whole trees underwater.  The park along Riverside was just gone.  The buildings in the park were just rooftops.

From the dining room at La Cima, the Skyline Room, there was  a really good view of the flooding and I could see all over Irving and Las Colinas that there was a lot of ponds and rivers where there had not been any previously.  It was amazing to be able to look out and see a flood happening in real time.

We had our regular, Wednesday evening pasta night tonight.  Brian Watson joined us, or we joined him – he was at the bar hours ahead of us since we were running extremely late.  Tonight was shrimp cream, but a different shrimp cream than we usually get.  It was almost a vodka sauce tonight.  It was quite good and I was glad for a change of pace, even if just a minor one.  Every little big helps.

The wine flight tonight was really something special.  It was Tuscan wines with a pinot grigio that I like but was not crazy about but then a Santa Cristina Sangiovese and a Principe Corsini Don Tommaso Chianti that were simple unbelievable.  It was the best flight that I have had yet at La Cima.

On our drive home from La Cima, we swung over to the post office to send out some mail and then, on our way back past the club, Dominica and I saw our first, real, live, in the wild armadillo!  That was very exciting.  We have seen them in the zoo, of course, as everyone has.  But it was really neat seeing one actually just running around on the side of the road.  At first I thought that it was a possum but realized that it was shaped differently and armored when we got closer.  It was much, much larger than we had thought that an armadillo would have been.

After we came home, Liesl went into her room and watched Diego while Dominica and I watched a combination of Rick Steve’s Europe and House Hunters International.  I ended up working from my laptop and there was a lot to do so Dominica was up until around two in the morning and it was pushing three in the morning when I was finally able to take Oreo out for his last walk and get to bed myself.

We had a really restless night, though, as Liesl was up by three thirty and a few times after that and finally around four thirty we decided that she needed to come into bed with us as she was just unable to sleep.  She did not do much better sleeping in our bed, though, and so no one got much of any sleep tonight at all, including poor, old Oreo.

Back to work.  The weekend had to end sometime.  I sure did not want to pull myself out of bed this morning when I got up.  I was a bit late as well.

At lunch today I rushed home and managed to sneak in about one more hour on Awakening.  I am very close to the end and my goal is to complete the game this evening.  I want it done and out of the way 😉  It has been really nice having a few days to forget most everything else and get stuck into the DAO world.  I am pretty sure that once I complete it that Dominica is going to get back into playing through her second game again.  She is already pretty far through DAO for her second time.  She is much more of a “play it again” person than me.  I really like to play a game through, very thoroughly, and get really in to it one time but I nearly never consider going through a game twice.  King’s Quest being a notable exception there – I’ve probably played through the original three times at least.

After work I came home and Liesl was still asleep, which has gotten to be pretty common these days.  She used to go to sleep for her afternoon nap around eleven thirty.  Now she doesn’t fall asleep until after two – or even after three.  So she is very tired and still napping when I get home from work.  This is good for me because I get to spend lots of time with her at lunch but it is bad because she stays up much later than we want to and her sleep is all weird which does not seem to be good for her.

It did give me a chance to get right into Dragon Age: Origins Awakening when I got in the door and I played it straight for about two hours and managed to complete it!  Eighteen and a half hours in three days and the game is done.  It was very good and I was quite happy with how the ending played out.  They did a good job and I like how things ended for my character.  I really feel that they did an excellent job of making my character really be true to himself even if the ending was somewhat melancholy.

As soon as the game was done it was time for the biweekly conference call that I do on Tuesday nights.  It was just a short one this week, though, and only lasted about forty-five minutes.

We managed to get off to bed at a semi-reasonable time tonight.