Sheep Guarding Llama

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.

Today is Labor Day and I have the day off.  Whoo hoo for a three day weekend.  The family slept in late and basically took the day off to do absolutely nothing all day.  No shopping, no traveling, no nothing.  Time to just zone out.

My big project, continuing from yesterday, was playing Dragon Age: Origins Awakening which is continuing to be really good.  The expansion is definitely very buggy in comparison to the main game but my game is playing better than Dominica’s did as there have been several bug fixes released since she played through the expansion pack.  Dominica is planning to play the expansion pack again, though, because she was not happy with the outcome of the first time that she played it and she wants to have better success playing it a second time.

It was great having an entire day with just nothing at all to do.  Of course, it wasn’t completely nothing but it was a good approximation.  There were some issue that came up that demanded my attention but they were few and far between.

We were very lazy today and neither of us felt like going anywhere so we decided that since it was a holiday that it would be good to just order in from Domino’s and go all out.  Liesl loves when pizza gets delivered and does her “happy pizza dance.”

I managed to make it through the bulk of Awakenings today.  I was probably about fifteen hours in by the end of the day.  I am far enough along that I was wondering around the game pretty extensively trying to figure out what I might have missed and trying to tie up any loose ends that might exist.  I don’t want to miss very much and am trying to be as thorough as is reasonable.  Dominica was not that thorough and was quite disappointed.  Awakenings is much less forgiving than the main DAO title was and if you don’t make good decisions, bad things can happen!

It was a very nice, very relaxing day.  We had a nice time just hanging out together as a family and doing as little as possible.

We got up at five this morning to see Aunt Gayle and Gwen on to the road.  They were up very early and managed to get out of the door by seven after five.  That will put them up in Kentucky, their driving goal for today, in very good time.  Liesl even got up and came out to see them off.  She loves having company.  She wishes that they could stay.

We all went right back to bed and slept in nice and late today.  Huzzah for holiday weekends.

Once we got up I drove to Panera and got breakfast lunch.  I was trying to get breakfast but, for some odd reason, they decided to not serve breakfast as late as they normally do on a holiday weekend.  But we managed to get leftover suffles.  Yum.

Today’s project is to finally complete my game of Dragon Age: Origins.  I got DaO for Christmas but did not get to play it for quite some time.  Long before I got a chance to start playing it, Dominica played it all the way through, then played the expansion, then started going through it a second time!  Then I got to play it but never managed to quite complete it.  I got stuck at the final, massive battle and went so long without getting a chance to pick it up again that I was so out of practice that I felt that I could not make it through the final battle.  So Dominica said that she would do that for me.

I ended up spending a bit of time working with Brian on an OSX server today.  That was pretty cool as I have not had a chance to work on OSX’ server edition previously nor have I had a chance to play with Snow Leopard, the latest release of OSX, so it was a good learning experience for me.

Dominica was able to complete the final battle pretty easily – I did have a very powerful party, I was just out of practice with the controls.  Once she completed the battle I went on and finished the remaining game elements.  Overall the game was awesome.  The amount of story delivered in the eighty-two hours that it took to play through the game was truly amazing.  The Dragon Age franchise is definitely pushing the envelope in terms of video game story telling.

The ending of the game was not a let down and it hinted at exciting new chapters in the game to come in the future.  We already know that DaO2 is slated for release in March and, of course, Dominica will not allow us to wait at all for that.  I am sure that we will have it pre-ordered and will pick it up on release day.

It only took about forty-five minutes to wrap up my DaO game.  Then I popped in Dragon Age: Origins Awakenings and kicked off playing through that.  I managed to get several hours into Awakenings this afternoon which was nice.  I have not started a new game in quite some time.  Awakenings is really a continuation of the first game and is not a stand-alone title but an extremely large expansion to DaO.

I managed to get deep into the storyline already today – which is easier to do as there is really just one storyline and it feeds off of your decisions, choices and accomplishments in the first “game”.  There aren’t six different characters to choose from, each with their own life story to get into.  This dives straight in doing a great job of taking over where the original game left off.  Anyone who plays the first game really needs to play this expansion as there is tons of great stuff in here.

It was a very relaxing day.  I am extremely glad that I got time to relax and game for a while.  So seldom that I manage to pull that off.  Liesl spent a lot of the day either sitting on Dominica or my laps or just playing with her toys in the living room.  Oreo spent the day on the sofa right beside me snuggled up.  It was very sweet.

After I couldn’t take playing Awakening any more we watched G.I. Joe, the new big-budget movie remake of the 1980s cartoon.  It was awful, as you would imagine that it would be.  Dominica actually liked it.  I was less than impressed.  Now, to its credit, I did not watch the cartoon as a child, ever, and had no idea about the characters and which parts were cool nods to the old television cartoon so I am sure that there was a lot of cool stuff that I did not catch.  Still it was an extremely weak movie with very little going for it.

I have tomorrow off from work.  We have no plans whatsoever tomorrow so most likely I will dive into Awakening and see how far I can get.  It is not a full-blown game and I want to get it wrapped up as quickly as possible.  Then I will be able to get back to Oblivion.  I try my best to just focus on one game at a time, or two at most.  I learned some years ago that if I start a lot of different games at the same time that I will just lose interest because I don’t get deep enough into any one of them.  So I try really hard to focus on just one and complete it before moving on to the next now.  Or maybe two, so that I have one in Liesl’s room (Oblivion) and one in the living room (likely going back to Fable I: Lost Chapters) so that I can play depending on which television is available for my use.