Sheep Guarding Llama

It was a very tired morning getting up today with only two hours of sleep.  But there was work to be done, as always, so no way for me to actually sleep.

Rachel and Slim slept in till pretty late, like eleven.  Apparently Slim was supposed to be at work around eight and missed a meeting at ten.  Whoops, adulting fail.  Rachel hung out for a while after he left, maybe another hour or two, before she went off to work.

Pretty relaxed day, other than the busy day in the office.

Today is Dominica’s big FOUR ZERO!

The girls made cards for Dominica, as they usually do.  They love making something special themselves.  Paul went out early this morning while everyone was asleep and got a birthday cake made at Walmart, and a selection of cheesecakes, too.

This afternoon, for dinner, we went to Taco Tuesday at Fuzzy Taco on Midway.  We had thought about going to a few other places, but tacos just won out.

I got my regular fish tempura burrito, and a Estrella Jalisco which was awesome.  Both girls loved the nachos and really like the food here.  Fuzzy Taco is our new taco place of choice.  Dominica gets the fish tacos, because they don’t have onions, unlike the burrito.

After dinner, we went back home and Kat, Rachel, and Rachel’s date Slim were to come over.  Kat ended up having to work and could not make it for the “party”.   But Rachel made it for singing and cake and hanging out for a while.  Our family and our “roommates.”

Rachel hung out for a while and later on her date Slim joined us before it was time to go out.  While she was there, Dominica opened her birthday card from Jenn and discovered that Jenn had sent pictures that she had taken, that neither Dominica nor I had ever seen before, of the two of us together on the day that we met, on June 10th, 2001 at Phil and Kate’s wedding.  Including a picture of the two of us sitting together at the Howard Johnson’s where we had our late night meal with a bunch of other people from the wedding and the waitress mistook us for a married couple when we had just met a couple hours before.

On the late side, since Dominica was tired and just wanted to go to bed after so much cake and stuff, I went out to Denton with Rachel and Slim to go to the Abby Underground on the square to see Jaiden spin some tunes for the evening. He goes by DJ Knights up there.

Rachel drove up and that was rather an adventure.  Her old Honda is in rough shape and the transmission can’t keep the car in fifth gear.  So while driving on the highway, it would just slip out of gear every few minutes which is rather surprising.  Very little still works in that car.

It was late, probably close to midnight, when we got to the underground.  But we had time to grab a drink and see Jaiden.  This is his next to last time performing here for industrial night as the club is being shuttered next week.  We will be back this coming Friday for the last “home town” concert that they are doing here.

We closed down the Abby, then drove some people home, then went out to an after party at Grrg’s place downtown.  It was about eight people, crammed into a very small room.  Mostly just listening to music and a lot of playing darts.  We were there till almost five, then I drove Rachel and Slim back.  So I had the adventure of driving Rachel’s Honda, however I figured out that you could hold the stick in fifth gear and it wouldn’t pop out on you, so I had no issue at all driving the car back to Carrollton; it did not pop out of gear even once for me.  It was very clear, though, that it was trying to pop out and it pushed against me the entire time and the moment I took my hand away it started to come out.  So that car is pretty much done for.

As with most of those “conservative” Japanese cars that people swear by, it’s dead and worthless at far less than 200,000 miles which is not an impressive number at all.  A 1980s American car would do more than that pretty easily.  This echoes everything I ever heard from Honda and Toyota owners – they always brag that their cars last “so long”, being able to top 100K miles without a problem.  The difference being owners of all other car brands think 100K is just warmed up, but they are amazing a car can last so long.  I’ve long believed that people who buy Honda and Toyotas simply believe all cars are crap and fall apart at 50K miles, and since they refuse to drive anything else, they imagine that the short lifespans of their cars is somehow impressive.  It’s bizarre.  But Honda honestly seems to be one of the least reliable cars out there and is just purchased by people with insanely low expectations of what cars can do today (or for the past half of a century.)

So we were pretty exhausted when we got home.  I was totally ready for bed.  Tomorrow is going to be rough.

Monday.  We started off this morning with our Nicaragua office losing power.  From the picture taken from the office, I discovered that there is a Pizza Hut just down the street from the office.

Today is the first day of the girls being back to school full time.  School has started back up in Houston, so it is back up here.  Going to be a rough week getting them back into the swing of school every day.

Today’s fun disaster is that suddenly our datacenter’s IP range was listed by the Internet mafia arm of Microsoft, Spamhaus, who blacklists Microsoft’s smaller competitors at random to try to either blackmail ISPs or just convince small email users to move to Office 365.  So I got to spend the day working on interesting ways to bypass Microsoft refusing to deliver email from us, without just switching to Zoho which has gone up 50% in cost and just doesn’t really make sense at the higher cost.  I like Zoho, but it is just too limiting and too expensive for us.  When it was cheaper, I was okay with the limiting, but at this price, I’m just not up for it.

So it was a hectic day of trying to figure out how to get alternatives to work and what would make sense.  And that was after setting up a Zoho account thinking that we were going to have to go that way in the end.  Now I need to cancel that as it just wasn’t going to cut it.  And it took a lot of work to get it work as they had so many technical problems on their end just trying to get us able to get an account.  That was not an impressive process by any stretch.

This evening Liesl tried playing Kelvin and the Infamous Machine, a new video game that we just got for her.  It looks really fun.  A classic point and click adventure.

But that ate up nearly all of my day.

This morning Dominica and I drove down to meet up with her parents halfway between Dallas and Houston so that we could pick up the girls. They’ve been down with their cousins all week getting their last taste of summer.

We met up a Buc-ees and had just enough time to use the restrooms before they arrived to meet us.

So much of the day was just driving to and from getting the kids.  They were happy with how quickly the ride went by.

So mid-afternoon we got back to the house.  And it was mostly a day of hanging out with the kids.  We are all exhausted after Dominica’s birthday party weekend and the girls having a week playing with their cousins.

Luciana is nearly able to swim at this point and Liesl has become quite the mermaid able to swim underwater all over the place.

For dinner tonight we got Fuzzy Tacos, which we have discovered has a location much closer to us than we had realized.  We no longer have to go way up Josey to get to one, there is one at Midway right on Trinity Mills!  We will be going there more often, now.  Liesl tried a bean and cheese burrito and thought that it was okay, but nothing she really cared for.  She is not big into either beans or cheese.  She tried a bite of my fish tempura burrito, though, and she loved it!  She says that she wants to get that the next time that we get Fuzzy Tacos.

We started Dominica’s birthday party day with apple fritters.  I did not have one, but boy did they ever look good.  That’s exactly what an apple fritter should look like.  They really know how to do donuts, including fritters, in Texas.

Everyone had one, but me.  I’m trying so hard to be good on this diet.  It is not easy with this kind of stuff going on all of the time.

We decided that since we are so close to the Grassy Knoll and where JFK was assassinated that we should take the moment to check it out.  We never do things in downtown Dallas so this is a neat chance to see some things.  It is hard to remember that the places that you see on television are often right here.

We started by walking down the historic district through Founder’s Square where the city of Dallas began.  There is some neat Dallas history stuff down there and some nice monuments downtown.

It is only three blocks or so to the place where Kennedy was assassinated.  There is a small crowd there all of the time and an X on the road where it happened, which you can just see in the picture.  There were some people selling tourist stuff there, something that is pretty unusual in Dallas given what a completely non-touristy city it is.  Which is one of the things that I like about Dallas, no one visits it.

We thought about going through the Six Floor Museum, but the cost was very high and it’s not a subject worthy of much study.  It is just neat to see where it happened.

For a late lunch, we ordered delivery in from a pizza place in downtown Dallas called Tutta’s which we had seen last night on the Food Network.  It was pretty wild that we never, ever see television like that and the one time that we do, it is for a pizza place just two blocks from where we are.  We figured that it was fate and we had to try it.  So we did and it was pretty good.  Of course, I did not try the pizza, I just had a salad, but the salad was good and everyone else really liked their pizza.

Dinner was tacos.  Kat and I went out and brought tacos back for everyone.  We ready about Salsa Limon which is supposed to be the best tacos in town and had to try them.  And, lo and behold, they might be.  They were amazing tacos.

It was a good food day, and a cool day of exploring some local Dallas history.

This is our last day without the kids.  We head down towards Houston sometime in the morning to meet up with Dominica’s parents to pick Liesl and Luciana up.  School starts for them again on Monday, this was their last farewell to summer, swimming, and cousins.  They are ready to come home, though.  They miss us and they like to get some quiet time that never happens when they are down in Houston with all of the family.  They are so used to getting lots and lots of quiet time to themselves that being around people continuously is just not something that they are conditioned for.