Sheep Guarding Llama

Today officially begins our process of looking for a house in the Metroplex.  We are very tired of living in an apartment, especially one where Oreo needs to go down a lot of stairs every time that he goes in or out.  We want a yard for Liesl too so that she can spend time outside. She loves being outside.

We had to be up pretty early this morning so that we could meet our real estate agent down at Waffle House at nine this morning.  We had breakfast and looked through the houses that we were interested in seeing today.

We had six houses on the docket for today’s looking.  One house, a foreclosure, we were not able to go see today and it was one that we were really interested in.  We never did find out why it was not available.

Overall the house hunting went pretty well.  We found a couple of acceptable houses and two that really stood out.  Unfortunately, from a decision making perspective, there are completely different making decision making that much harder.  One is a large house in one price range and the other is a much, much smaller house in a completely different price range.

Overall we were pretty encouraged by what we saw today.  We are looking in a very low price range so we were concerned that we would not be able to find anything that we would want to buy but there were definitely options after our first day.

This afternoon we got some time at the house.  Dominica and Liesl took a nap when we got home and I gave Oreo his bath.

I got a chance to play Oblivion a little this evening.  Not a lot of time but I am slowly making progress.  I manage to complete one or two quests each time that I play.  As of today I have almost exactly one hundred and fifty hours logged in the game.  I’m guessing that I have around fifty left to go but boy is it hard to gauge.  I am still finding new locations in the game on a regular basis!  I found at least five new places just today that I had never been.  Even having played for as long as I have there are massive swaths of wilderness that I have never yet explored or even visited.  There are places in the big cities that I have not seen yet too!  Truly a huge game.

I was up at six thirty this morning.  No days to sleep in this week for me.  Even tomorrow, Sunday, I have to be up at seven in order to get ready to meet with our rest estate agent to go look at houses around Irving.

All morning was spent working.  We went out for breakfast, got ready and as soon as we were clear this afternoon we drove out west to go to Dominica’s cousins to visit with the family for the afternoon.  I think that it was around three or so when we left Irving which is very early for us.  We almost never manage to go do anything that early in the day.

We had a really nice time visiting with everyone.  Liesl was especially excited to have access to stairs!  She spent the entire evening going up and down the stairs.  We taught her to hold on to the railing and to come down the stairs carefully.  She got a lot of stair training done tonight and wore us out because we had to stand at the bottom of the stairs for safety every time that she made a descent.  But she did very well and never really fell and only gave us one scare and Dominica was right with her at the time.

I got to play with an Apple iPad for the first time tonight.  I have to admit that contrary to my first opinions from seeing the details online, I really like it.  The screen is great and it is pretty easy to just pick up and use.  It was nice for checking the web and looking at houses on Zillow’s app.  I’ve heard from friends who have them that it is amazing for the first few days but gets old very quickly and you tend not to use it after a few days.  I feel like I would use it a lot, though.  I have so many times every day that I feel that I need something like that to make getting online less cumbersome for simple stuff.

We stayed down in Mansfield for dinner and hung out until it was way too late.  Liesl was tired and grumpy by the time that we went to leave.  But she did really well all evening while we were there.

We got home and put Liesl to bed. I fed and walked Oreo.  Then I stayed up watching Channel 9 MVC2 videos from Microsoft.  Tomorrow is our big house hunting day.

It’s Friday.  Got to work early today and needed to be there.  It was a crazy morning.  I didn’t have a spare moment all morning and I did not managed to even get out to take my lunch until one in the afternoon.

I just came home for lunch today.  I made myself a Tony’s frozen pizza and played a tiny bit of Oblivion while I ate it.  Liesl hung out with me and stole some of my pizza.  She went to bed shortly thereafter and then I ran back over to the office.  It was actually a short lunch today.

Even just taking a fast lunch I was all backed up with work by the time that I returned to the office.  It was totally nuts all evening too.

After work, Dominica just felt like something simple, so I drove over to Rockfish and got take out.  I had a drink while I waited and some volcano shrimp.  The volcano shrimp are the same as the fire island shrimp, just a new marketing name.  No idea why they changed it.  Everyone seems to agree that the name “Fire Island Shrimp” had more zing to it.

I ran over to Kroger too.  I had to pick up some snacks for Liesl and I grabbed a box of wine while I was there as well.  I’ve been experimenting with boxed wines with great success as of late.  Tonight we are trying a Old Vine Zinfandel that looks really promising.

It was almost eight when I finally got home.  We ate dinner and hung out for a little while.  I was quite tired and went to bed as soon as Liesl did – around eleven.  Tomorrow morning I have to be up by seven in the morning.  I have a bit of work going on tomorrow so it will be a busy morning.

Tomorrow afternoon we are all going out to Dominica’s cousins’ house in the DFW as her other cousins are in visiting from Arizona.  So it will be a family evening for us.

This morning I worked from home.  Very important as Liesl and I have gotten so little time together this week.  Today was also the day that I got a little bit of extra time to sleep in.  The phone has been going off pretty early in the morning all week and keeping me from ever getting any real sleep.

I worked from home all morning which was great.  For lunch we went to Einstein Brothers Bagels even though we were there yesterday.  We have discovered that we really like their food which is awesome so now we have another place that it is easy to get to and not too expensive to add to our rotation.

Liesl has started recently taking her pull-along puppy with her everywhere.  She has had that puppy for a very long time but hasn’t shown it any real interest in quite some time.  Suddenly she just loves it.  She really “gets it” now which makes it more entertaining.

The amazing discovery this morning at breakfast was that Liesl likes smoked salmon!  We had gotten her her own food but she stole my smoked salmon bagel and really loved it.  Who would have guessed that a twenty-one month old would like smoked salmon?

After lunch I went home and tried to stay until Liesl took her nap but Liesl ended up never taking a nap which was not good.  So once it was obvious that that was never going to happen, I ran into the office to work for the rest of the afternoon.

After work I came home and we went out to meet up with our new real estate agent.  We ended up just meeting at La Madeleine which is really easy and we talked about some specific houses and options in the area.  It looks like we have some really good options in the area.  We are excited to get out and see them in person rather than just online.  We’ve been seeing so many on Trulia that we are pretty confident that we will find something that we like.

We are scheduled to get out first thing on Sunday morning to go look at houses.  We already have nine houses of interest before even really getting started.  Fingers are crossed.

Another really busy day at work.  I’m going to be ready to collapse by the time that this week is over.  It’s not bad at all, just really busy.  Actually I would say that the stress is lower just from the change of pace.  Very hard to keep up with my blogging though!

For lunch today Dominica and Liesl picked me up at work and we went to Einstein Brothers.  None of us had ever been to an Einstein Brothers before although I have their bagels at work fairly regularly.  We were really happy with our lunch.  It was very good.  It worked out really well that I got some time to just sit and spend real time with Liesl and Dominica since I was gone all day yesterday and will be gone tonight as well.

After work I raced home again, changed and was out the door.  Liesl and I are barely seeing each other this week.  That is not fun.

I was much later than planned getting up to La Cima for the Young Execs group.  They were already in full swing when I got there.  I only got about half an hour to hang out before the group broke with several people going home and the eight of us remaining going into the dinning room for pasta night.

We stayed pretty late tonight.  I would guess that it was almost eleven by the time that I got home.  Although I heard stories that the group went much, much later just two months ago.

It was a good evening.  But tiring.  Tomorrow is my “day off” from as much as possible.