Sheep Guarding Llama

It seems like I can never get out of the door in the morning no matter how hard I try.  One way or another something will happen and there will be no way to escape the apartment to get to the office.  I ended up on the phone and didn’t get to the office until around ten thirty.  I did log in and work from home, of course, but it is such a problem that I can never make it out the door.  It just seems impossible.

Work wasn’t too busy today.  But before lunch Dominica called me to tell me that somehow, whilst sitting on the floor, she horribly sprained her ankle and could not stand on it.  So Liesl, who had just gotten out of the bath, was running around the house naked and in complete control on her own.  Not a good situation.

It was almost time for lunch so we figured that Dominica could wait for me to get home before we panicked about what to do with Liesl.  So Liesl was in charge for about half an hour.  Dominica was able to cajole her into letting her put a diaper onto her so it wasn’t that big of an emergency at that point.

When I got home, Dominica was still in the same shape.  I worked on her foot as it seemed like an actual sprain was unlikely.  I could feel that her Achilles tendon did not feel the way that it should.  We tried pulling on her ankle and foot to see if the joint might be having a problem.  But then I tried working on her tendon and… ta da, her tendon went back into track and instantly her foot was all better.  She went from unable to bend it at all to perfectly fine in seconds.

We watched House Hunters International and had taco salads for lunch.  It has been quite a while since Dominica made those.  She did a ton of work cleaning out our closet today too moving a lot of stuff into the dresser that was recently brought down from New York.  What a difference that is going to make.  Our closet is usable again and we can find stuff.  It had gotten crazy.  We just haven’t had enough space.

Afternoon at work was fine.  A little busy but nothing much.

Once I managed to escape the office I ran home and changed and then drove over to La Cima to meet Watson for the Tech Execs night in the lounge.  It turned out to be a really valuable evening making a lot of good contacts.

We ended up eating dinner at the club and getting home around ten thirty.

It is another very hot day in Texas.  I am sad that we missed all of the rains that came while we were in New York.  Texas summers are great when the rain is falling.  But when the sun is out it becomes rather annoying to have to do anything that involves going outside.

Off to work this morning.  Just the usual routine.  Just before I left Liesl woke up.  Last night was her very first night in her new bed!  She was very happy.  I asked her about it this morning and she said that she really liked her new bed.

Work was decently busy today but not bad.  At lunch I came home to be with Dominica and Liesl.  Liesl was so tired, though, that she had gone to bed for her nap before I had made it home.  So no Liesl visit time and no way for me to play Oblivion since it is in her bedroom.  Maybe that wasn’t the best planning.  On the way home I stopped at La Madeline and picked up lunch for us.  There is nothing to eat at home and Liesl’s nap timing meant that there was no way to hit the club today.

Back to work this afternoon and home at a pretty decent time today.  Work got really slow by the end of the day.

I came home and watched Liesl while Dominica went grocery shopping.  The house is pretty much bare and if she didn’t get food we would have been scrounging pretty hard to find a meal in the house.

While Dominica was out shopping she bought Liesl a potty!  Liesl has been wanting a potty of her own ever since she saw her cousin Garrett’s potty while they were on vacation on Lake LBJ.  She wants to be a big girl and we have had to spell the word in order to talk about it because she would get so excited if she so much as heard us say it around the house.  So we are pretty sure that she is ready to start potty training now.

I came out to the dining room where Dominica and Liesl were and I asked Liesl “Did you see what mommy bought you?”  Liesl said, “No.”  Then I pointed to the potty on the floor and Liesl looked down at it and suddenly got the most excited look on her face.  It was so adorable.  Her jaw literally dropped and she just stared for a minute before dancing all over the room.  Very, very cute.  She is quite proud to have her own potty now.

We tried doing some potty training tonight but it did not go well.  You cannot expect Liesl to be able to do it on the first day though.  Too much pressure if nothing else.

I did get a chance to play a little Oblivion tonight.  That was nice.  We got some cleaning done around the house too.  It is still a complete disaster but it was a move in the right direction.  Dominica got a chance to play her Harry Potter Lego game on her PS3 as well.  It is handy, but lonely, having dualing PS3 consoles in two different rooms.  It is great because we can each do what we want but we don’t see each other now.  It is nice for Liesl because she can run from room to room playing with someone in each room.

We managed to sleep in until eight thirty this morning.  Boy did I need that!

Once I was up and showered this morning I drove out to Panera and picked up breakfast for everyone.  After breakfast Francesca and I loaded her wash stand, which has been at our house the last couple weeks since we brought it down from New York, into her Sequoia so that she could take it back down to Houston with her.

Shortly after Francesca and the kids left the apartment, around a quarter to noon, Liesl went to bed and I hit the road to drive out to Fort Worth to pick up Oreo from his weekend vacation at Maggie’s house with the two pugs.  Unfortunately, on the way both to and from Maggie’s, I hit some serious construction and was stuck on the road for a very long time.  It more than doubled the amount of time necessary to drive between Irving and Fort Worth.

I hung out a Maggie’s for a little while, maybe as much as an hour.  We talked shop and I got to visit with the pugs.  We figured out that Maggie has the same furniture that we have.  She has the regular couch and love seat units that match our theatre seating exactly.  Very strange.

Dominica put Liesl’s bedroom together today.  Liesl’s crib, which had arrived from New York a few weeks ago but could not be assembled because Brian had been using the room and then Francesca, was converted into a toddler bed so that she can use it again.  She has not slept in it since her first birthday, or maybe earlier, back when we were living in New York in 2009.

I showed Liesl her old crib and asked her if she remembered it at all, but she said that she did not.  She thought that it was very cool having her own bed in her own room and got right onto it and checked it out and said that she was very excited but no memory of it from when we lived in New York.  That was eight months of her twenty month life ago so I guess that that is to be expected.

My plans for the afternoon, after a very long time of missing it, were to settle down on Liesl’s couch and play Oblivion.  We have the “old” Playstation 3, the one that we had in New York, hooked up as of last night in Liesl’s room.  The new one, the one that we bought in Texas, is still in the living room.  My Oblivion game was stored on the old PS3 which was in New York and then went to the Lake House for the family vacation and only just made it to our house to really use yesterday.  I am very excited.  It has just been forever since I had my game to play.  Having it is Liesl’s room means that I will not get to play it very often but maybe that is best anyway.

I loaded my saved game file and noticed that my last time playing the game was November 17, 2009.  Wow has it been a long time.  Nine months since I last got to play my game!  A few people recently had asked me how, with my busy schedule, I am able to play so many video games.  Um, what?  For nine months I haven’t even had the game which I was in the middle of playing!  I’ve been playing Oblivion as my main game since before Liesl was born!  I took a break to play Fable II and then went nine months without the console and I played Dragon Age: Origins in the mean time but three games in two years doesn’t seem like all that much to me!  Especially when Fable II is really short, DAO is moderately short and I am nowhere near halfway through Oblivion!

It was not solid play time but I did manage to squeeze in several hours on Oblivion.  I needed that.  I’ve been missing my game and the downtime that it provides for me.  I was so tired, though, that I had to drink several cups of coffee in the middle of the afternoon just to be able to keep playing without passing out on the couch.

It was great to get back into the game.  It took me a while to figure out where I was in it and to get back in to the swing of things.  I bought my second house in the game, in Skingrad, and completed several quests and kicked off my journey through the Arena.  I really appreciated having an afternoon to just veg for a little while.

Liesl spent much of the day just playing in her room while I played Oblivion.  Oreo snuggled on the couch next to me.  That left Dominica mostly alone in the living room to watch PlayOn on her own.

Once Liesl went to bed, Dominica and I watched some House Hunters International on HGTV via PlayOn for a little while before going to bed ourselves a little after eleven.

Liesl was excited about getting to sleep in her new bed.  She likes having her own room and she likes having a bed that is more her size and that is much lower to the floor.  We are hoping that this helps a lot with our sleep schedules as she has pretty much been stuck sleeping with us for the past nine months.  That makes it very hard for us to sleep when we want and means that I have a hard to managing to work in our bedroom after Liesl falls asleep as she is in there and I might wake her up.  Now I can spend the evening hanging out with her and when she falls asleep in her room I can move to the office in our own bedroom and get lots of stuff done at that point which is often when I want to be working anyway.  So this should be very good for us all around, I think.

I had to get up at seven this morning so that I could work for several hours before the family hit the road to drive from Lake LBJ up to the metroplex.  I managed to do a bit of work for the office and also to catch up a bit on SGL while we were there.

Originally I had thought that Dominica needed me to get up and be ready to be on the road as quickly as possible.  I had the impression that with me having to work in the morning that everyone would be waiting on me.  That ended up not being the case and while I was ready to leave by just after nine we actually left at more like ten thirty.

It wasn’t all that hot when loading the cars this morning but it heated up quickly and was another hot Texan summer day.  The drive went well.  We all (except Bennie who drove back to Houston earlier in the day) stopped at McDonald’s in Killeen for lunch.  Then, on the highway north, we stopped in West for gas and kolaches at the Czech Stop.  Yum.

We drove up to Arlington where there was a surprise, early 60th birthday party for Dominica’s dad.  There was quite a turnout too.  The house was packed.  Liesl had a great time playing with the kids in the back yard.  She loves being able to go outside.

The party went pretty late.  It was probably nine thirty or so before we managed to get back to the house in Las Colinas.  Madeline and Emily went with Megan for the evening for a girls’ party night.  Francesca, Garrett and Clara came to our place for the night.

Dominica, Francesca and I were up till after midnight talking.  Boy was I ready for bed when I finally fell asleep!  I was exhausted.

Tomorrow Oreo will be coming home as well.  I am planning on sleeping in a bit tomorrow.  I am way behind on sleep.  Dominica had to drive a bit of the way today as I just could not keep myself awake on as little sleep as I have been getting.

Today is a day of logistics.  Brian was up and cleaning the house around three I think.  I slept in until nearly four when I rolled out of bed, got dressed and was ready to be out the door in about five minutes.  Oreo got up and moved into the living room on the “new” couch that we just brought down from New York.  He missed that couch, I think, as he used to always lay on it when it was in the basement of the Peekskill house so that he could be near to me while I worked in the basement office.

We were on the road pretty quickly over to the airport.  Without a doubt, DFW is the worst airport ever. Having used it twice in the past couple weeks it still remains an incredible challenge just to get to your terminal even with GPS, Toll Tag and all the other tools necessary to make it is as easy as possible.  The roads are horribly labeled and confusing, tons of information that you need is not available, there is a toll (without any warning) just to drive through the airport (they call it a parking toll but we never parked – this is twice now) and there appears to be no way to get to the actual places that we need to go and “near enough” is as good as you can do.  It is absolutely terrible.  I travel a lot and never have I had to deal with an airport like this in the US, Canada, England, Northern Ireland, Ireland, Holland, etc.  I will actively avoid trying to use this airport even though I live right next to it.  The whole thing needs to be razed and a professional needs to design a working airport in its place.

I got home from the airport at around five.  It takes way too long to go to an airport that is almost walking distance from our home.  I had originally thought that I would try to go back to sleep, but I was wide awake and decided to just start working as there is so much that needs to be done.  Oreo had gotten out of bed so there were not puppy snuggles waiting for me.

It turned out to be a productive morning.  I signed right in to the office and got to work.  It was a good morning to be on extra early as today was the announcement of the unemployment numbers by the federal government so it was convenient to already be awake rather than waking up just to handle that call.  The US has lost another 131,000 jobs this month.  But mostly those were from the public sector and the private sector actually added jobs.  So the economy appears to be recovering with the government being unable to find a firm footing.

Dominica emailed to tell me that Liesl used the potty for the first time yesterday!  I can’t believe how quickly she is growing up.  Potty training already.  She is only just over twenty months old.  Ahead of schedule for that as far as I can tell.  Even before this happened, about a week ago, Dominica had said that we would be beginning potty training as soon as Liesl returned from Lake LBJ.  Liesl has been giving many of the signs that she is ready to potty train.

I ended up working from home this morning.  I was already signed in and getting stuff done and there was just too much to do, both at the office and around the house, to be able to go in this morning.  I was very productive.  I had several phone calls that I had to do today so that worked out really well.  I had been planning on spending much of the morning cleaning the house but ended up being so busy that I never really managed to do that at all.

When I left the house I looked around for Oreo and discovered him in his kennel.  This is the very first time that I have ever seen him voluntarily use the kennel as a place to sleep.  I found it surprising that he used it since he loves the couch and it is only he and I in the house so he has no reason to be escaping anything.

I finally got a chance to take the Wii that Dominica boxed up for the Ralstons to the UPS Store during working hours and to get it shipped off to New York for them.  Surprisingly, even with insurance of $300 on that massive box, it still cost less than $40 to ship the box to New York.  Not bad at all.  So next week they will have a Nintendo Wii and tons of boring games to play.

I also ran to Target to get emergency cleaning supplies that we needed to get before Francesca and the kids come to visit us tomorrow afternoon.  Since I was over there and had not managed to eat all day and as it was one hundred and eight I decided that I needed to get some ice cream from Marble Slab Creamery.  From there I ran into the office so that I could work from there this afternoon.

Work went a little late but pretty good for a Friday evening.  As soon as it was clear that the work was done for the evening I ran back to the house.  Oreo was still in his kennel.  I didn’t close the door on him, he just felt that he should be in there I guess.  He is such a good, sweet little dog.  I had to pull open the flap for him and tell him that he could get out before he would.

Jeff had some work for me to do so I spent an hour and a half getting work done for him.  Then I was able to pack the car and get Oreo’s stuff together so that he could go on his vacation weekend to visit Maggie.

It was roughly eight forty when I was finally able to pull out of Las Colinas.  My first stop is Fort Worth to drop Oreo off with Maggie.  I stopped in just long enough to drop off my little boy.  We will see him again on Sunday afternoon.

The drive south went okay.  There was some rain for the first two hours of the drive which slowed my progress considerably as I had to drop my speed by almost fifteen miles per hour to avoid hydroplaning.

I stopped in at Taco Bell for a quick dinner.  I discovered that they now have delicious “crispy potato soft tacos” on the $.89 menu which is awesome.  Finally another vegetarian option.  Taco Bell is always veggie friendly but this is a great addition to their veggie lineup.  That will definitely make me more likely to stop in at TB as it is very delicious.

I stopped near Temple to get fuel and found myself swarmed by flying cockroaches and crickets. It was amazingly disgusting.  I’ve never had any insects get all over me like this before let alone cockroaches and their noisy kin.  I was kicking them away but still they were getting all over my legs, shirt and head – and I was in shorts so it was that much worse.  At one point one flew into my hand and got stuck in between my fingers!  All I can say is… EEEWWWWWW!

I pulled into the lake house on Lake LBJ at one twenty in the morning.  Better than expected.  I shaved forty minutes off of the GPS’ original estimate of my arrival.  I have to be up before seven in the morning.  I am going to be quite tired tomorrow after a very tired day today.

Once my office work is completed in the morning we will be on our way back up to the metroplex.