Sheep Guarding Llama

I got about a full hour and a half of sleep last night.  No rest for the weary.  Karla was out of the office today, she had to do something up near Honduras so we didn’t have our usual early morning support.  I talked to Paul and had him watch things to cover for her so that I could get as much sleep as I did, but it sure wasn’t very much.

I had to be up before eight to deal with just oh so many things at work.  This week has just been insane.  No chance to relax at all.

Rachel took off around one because she had to get to work.  This is her first full week of bar-tending up in Frisco.

I worked until six thirty, then jumped in the shower.  Kat was supposed to arrive around seven for our somewhat weekly cheese tray evening party.

Tonight was a smoked salmon night.  Four kinds of smoked salmon, all with some sort of honey mustard and dill sauces.  So good.  Both girls loved the salmon, too, and ate a lot of it.  Kat also brought over a big selection of hummus and pita chips, and both girls fell in love with that, too.  It is one of Ciana’s new favourite foods.  She especially liked the roasted red pepper hummus and the garlic hummus.

Dominica also made apple dumplings tonight.  So I made an exception from my diet, my first real cheat in over a month, and had one.

They were so good, especially as my first “treat” in well over a month.  And so filling.

Went to bed early tonight, was pretty tired between the lack of sleep and all of the great food.  The girls had a really great time trying lots of new foods and hanging out with the adults doing a fancy dinner party.  The girls devoured much of the food, but neither touched a dessert!  Was in bed by eleven, likely was asleep about one minute after that.

Tuesday, and a second power outage this morning.  We actually knew about it last night, so we were much better prepared for the start of day, today.  But it was still a very long day trying to deal with all of that.  It has been a crazy week, and we are only two days into it!

After work this evening, Paul dropped me at the Trinity Mills Train Station and I took the last train of the day, the 8:10PM A-Train north to Denton downtown.  This is my first time every taking the A-Train or going north by train at all.  The ticket price is outrageous, $12 for a one way ride, but the train is clean, comfy and ridiculously easy.  And it is pretty fast.  If it was a smart price, I would want to do this all of the time.  It goes from and to the perfect locations, it would be hard to be handier.  But it does not run late at all, not even quite late enough for comfortably going out, let alone returning from going out.  So the schedule definitely needs some work.  You can’t even use it for going out to dinner.  I’m not sure who this train is for, but not for people going to Denton, that’s for sure, and that seems like a pretty foolish financial decision for Denton to make.  Denton is like Dallas’ little piece of Austin and should be a huge draw, but there is no good way to get there.

I arrived at a quarter till nine and walked west on Hickory through a charming restaurant and bar district.  I had loads of time to kill so stopped at Rusted Taco and tried their fried rockfish and grilled mahi mahi tacos.  It is Taco Tuesday, after all.  The tacos were pretty good, I ate them while I walked to the square.

Since I was so early for industrial night at the Abby Underground, this is the last one ever, I took a long walk around the Denton Square to check out what was there.  There are a lot of venues and restaurants and stuff that look really nice.  I want to spend more time in Denton exploring what there is here.

I sat on the square for a bit cooling down, it was a really hot night, and finally went to the Abby at a quarter after nine, which was still ridiculously early.  Rachel isn’t even supposed to get out of work until ten thirty at the earliest.  The bar lights were all on and I was the first person there.  Just Jaiden setting up, his co-DJ and the bartender.  So I just had a beer and chilled for a while.

The party got going around ten thirty or so.  L was there tonight, so we hung out some.  Rachel arrived around twelve fifteen.  We danced till the bar closed. This was Jaiden’s last night DJing at Abby Underground.  My understanding is that the party picks up at Andy’s across the square sometime soon.

We decided not to stay for the after party.  It’s always so late and we were not sure where it was going to be.  I was pretty happy when Rachel decided that she wasn’t in the mood to stay out that late.  She was hoping for an 80s movie back home.  So I drove her back to the house, and we watched The Lost Boys which is one of her, Dominica, and Paul’s favourite movies, but  I have never seen it.  While a classic 80s film, it’s actually pretty horrible and if you didn’t know that the stars of the movie ended up being famous actors, you would definitely think that it was some unknown B movie.

Today really was a Monday, literally and figuratively.  I got woken up by the Nicaraguan monitoring office to tell me that a client was down and having major issues.  So I started the day leaping out of bed to go see what was wrong.  Ended up being a major power failure inside the building that led to loads of time being spent determining what was wrong and getting things “working” which took most of the day.

The whole day ended up just being completely crazy and intense.  We all worked so much, it was exhausting.  Thank goodness it wasn’t problems that we had caused.  Major outage days always stress me out until we know it wasn’t us.

So my day was spent completely head down working for clients.  No time to relax in any way.

Dinner for me was homemade fried clams and a giant salad.  The girls had homemade deep fried shrimp and really loved it.  My clams were possibly the best that I have ever had.

This evening, Paul made homemade apple fritters in his deep fryer.

This evening there was at least a little time and we were able to play just a little bit more of King’s Quest before Liesl had to go to bed. She got in about another two hours.  We still have quite a bit more story to play through in the first episode.  It’s quite a good game.

Sunday.  I got up this morning and got straight into Mass Effect: Andromeda.  I’ve been waiting over a year since this game released and much longer since finishing the last title before it in the series so I am very excited to be finally playing this fourth installment.

By the time that I actually got it all set up and working, Liesl had come out to join me and ended up spending pretty much the entire day sitting on the couch with me playing Mass Effect.

Liesl has gotten so good at video games that she helps me out of most of my jams in the game and I often give her the controller to let her take over on tough jumps and pathfinding.  She is so good at the puzzles now.

It was a very full day of gaming fun and we made it really far into the game.  We are well into the meat of it now, so it is really fun as the story and adventure unfold.

Dominica went shopping at Once Upon a Child and got a huge haul of new clothes for the girls.  Liesl especially got a lot of new stuff as she is growing like a weed and doesn’t fit into any of her old stuff any longer.  She needed an entirely new wardrobe.  Some of her old stuff will go to Ciana, and Ciana got a few new things, too.

Dinner was deep fried tofu nuggets in Buffalo sauce, so good.  It was delicious.  Both girls really liked the tofu, too.  It was a hit.  We ate dinner and watched an episode of Star Trek: Voyager.  We are well into the second season, now.

After dinner, Liesl and I played a few hours of King’s Quest (2015) that we started a few nights ago.  We still have not quite completed the first episode, which is good as we don’t own the subsequent episodes, yet.  She is really enjoying it, though.  The graphics, the story.  When we started a few weeks ago, I had tried controlling the game, but find the mechanics of it very frustrating and difficult, especially with the controller and my arthritic right thumb (the one that I broke seven years ago.)  But Liesl is able to fly right through the portions of the game that I find so challenging!  She has already surpassed me in a lot of things in video games, I can’t believe it.  She is so good at playing these.

So we played King’s Quest until it was bedtime.

Tonight Dominica and I talked about her stomach issues for a really long time and we think that we may have finally gotten to the bottom of it.  We has been refusing to track her eating habits and, of course, that would have exposed this a long time ago.  But we finally think that we figured out that in addition to having an onion sensitivity, it seems like she has a carrot family sensitivity too including carrots, parsnips, and cilantro.

So going to start testing that very soon, but it could be the magic answer that she has been looking for.

Rachel hung out for a while this morning.  We were all pretty tired from last night.  So a slow morning getting started.

Paul had more energy than the rest of us, so he got up and made pancakes for everyone for breakfast.  All kinds of pancakes.  Plain, chocolate chip, blueberry, raspberry, blackberry.  Of course, none for me.  More than a month without bread, not losing my diet over pancakes.

Origin has had Mass Effect: Andromeda on sale finally after a year of me wanting it, and as it appears that no additional online content is going to be added to the game, it seems like this is finally the time to buy it.  Only ten dollars for something I’ve been waiting a year since its release and years since finishing the previous installment in the series, Mass Effect 3.

I bought Andromeda and it ended up taking basically the entire day to get downloaded and installed.  At least six hours.

I did some work this afternoon, but by later evening Andromeda was installed and so I managed to play that for a few hours.  I got through the intro and managed to get into the real game.  Looking forward to really getting into the story.  I’m amazed that the old gaming laptop is able to play it so well, but it does have the graphics turned way down and is only rendering a 720p game, which I am watching on the big 4K display.  It really shows how nice it would be to have a new machine that can really push well rendered 4K games.  Someday…