Today is, without a doubt, our decompression day. The stress of the last three to four months has been catching up with us. So many unknowns. Still many, but a general life framework is coming into focus. It is such an emotional relief to have a plan now and know, more or less, what we are going to be doing in the future that the weight of the last few months has really caught up and we are really just feeling worn out. Happy and excited, but exhausted and worn down. And to add to that feeling, now we have relatively little time to begin gathering details, processing paperwork and going through a rather extensive planning process for going out to California with the family, getting the house in New York completely empty and turned over to our renters and getting housing lined up for our first tour of duty in Europe! And there is this little Christmas holiday going on at roughly the same time too! What a month this is going to be.
Today was also my day to catch up on SGL. I mean really catch up. Roughly two full months of posts were posted today! The majority of the posts were written at the time that they occurred but because I was already so far behind I was unable to post them because of the gaps. So today I did my best, which took about four or five hours, to get the gaps filled in and to get as many posts as I could posted. Now, once again, the site is roughly up to date and people can follow along with everything that is happening.
It was much harder to have the site be up to date with all of the interviewing going on because you don’t want to make those kinds of things public while they are still happening but you don’t want to skip recording them. So having a bit of a delay on the blog made that easier too. I still have some older posts to deal with, mostly in September and October, which I will attempt to address as time allows. But the most important stuff has been updated.
Today we are all over at Francesca’s house. Dominica went over there very early in the morning to help out with baking and stuff. I brought the girls over a bit later once they were up and dressed and ready to face the day. That was well after ten. Dominica and Francesca were out shopping when I got there and were gone for at least another hour yet.
Emily and I did our traditional walk down to the Donuts, Kolaches and Tacos store to pick up a late breakfast for everyone. They have added croissants to their breakfast sandwich lineup now too. But their breakfast tacos are still the mainstay.
The cousins played outside together most of the day. It was so warm that they did not even need jackets. It was slightly chilly if you were to just stand outside but if you were active it was perfect. I definitely did not need a jacket when walking to the store with Emily.
Emily and I ended up making three trips down to the stores today, all on foot. Once for breakfast. Once for baking supplies for Dominica and Francesca. And once to look for moustache wax because my moustache is getting pretty long and I wanted to give it a try and see how it would look with a handlebar. We had to go to two stores before finding some wax at CVS.
The handlebar experiment was… interesting. Some people liked it, some did not. It is clear that the moustache is not long enough yet to really do it. It will need at least another month before it will work. Probably a bit longer than that.
I worked much of the day from Francesca’s new HP Chromebook that I had talked her into getting. It really is nice. Works great. They are loving it too. She almost never gets to see it because Madeline likes to steal it. The battery life on it is insane too. Like nine hours or more! I used it all day and never put a dent in the battery life and Madeline had been watching Netflix on it before I started using it.
Dinner was Mexican tonight. Joe and Francesca ran out and picked it up. Dominica and I both did fish tacos which were really good.
After dinner we were all kicked out of the house. So nearly everyone went over to Joe’s where they all watched Guardians of the Galaxy while I worked in the kitchen. I have plenty to do, no real time to just be relaxing. I have to catch up with SGL and some other postings, need to make future plans, need to catch up with emails like you would not believe, have to be posting on MangoLassi and Spiceworks and I need to be studying up on Ruby, Rails and Chef. Tons to do.
Luciana came back to the house from the theatre after about half an hour. She asked me to set her up with an iPad in bed. She was tired and not interested in the movie. Liesl was having fun, though, and watched the whole thing. So I put Luciana in my bed, where she wanted to be, for about half an hour. Then she came downstairs and asked to be moved into her own bed. She was asleep in no time after that. I am sure that she was just exhausted from playing with her cousins all day. She is so good about putting herself to bed when the time is right. Liesl, not so much.
Brittany’s family came over while everyone was in the theatre. I have not seen them in a while so we had a chance to catch up. Then they all watched Home Alone while I continued to work in the kitchen.
After all of the movies were over, Liesl came back over and just sat with me. All of the iPads were dead at that point and she did not want to use one plugged in in bed. So she just sat at the table with me. I talked with her about how she stays up so late and she told me “Well…. I never miss the best movies!”
Dominica did not get back to the house until about one in the morning. I stayed up a little longer because I was getting so much done on SGL. But my two everyone was in bed and asleep.