It is Sunday and today I turned forty two years old. I am now old enough to buy alcohol, twice, in the US. Or, to look at it another way, as of today I have been able to legally buy alcohol for the majority of my life.
Paula, in Romania, wins the “first person to wish me a happy birthday” award today. I got up around nine this morning. I was supposed to have a call this morning, but it did not end up happening all day. So much for getting important work done.
It was a very quiet birthday. I went to come upstairs after waking up, but the girls had already woken up, probably around eight, and were putting together a birthday surprise for me in the living room so I had to stay downstairs for a while. So while I was up before Dominica, she ended up getting to go upstairs a bit before me.
My girls (with dad’s help) blew up loads of balloons and had them ready to go in the living room and they both made me birthday cards, too. Both of them drew foxes on my cards as well. They are so sweet. As soon as I came upstairs they cheered and kicked balloons all over.
We decided to stay in and not to go anywhere today. We are all feeling pretty tired and looking forward to just having time to relax at the house. The girls have been pent up for a while and are ready to really play.
I set up the Dell laptop in the kitchen and got a lot of work done today. Lots of posting on MangoLassi, tons of code review done on SodiumSuite, a little blogging, etc. I actually had quite a busy work day, just all background stuff. This is the most code that I have looked at in years, I would guess. I did tons and tons of SaltStack work on MacOS. I think that at this point I have a working installer which is pretty amazing as it appears to be the only working MacOS SaltStack installer working out there for the current version of MacOS, from what I can tell.
I still had a bad cough today. I’m feeling pretty congested, but I can’t tell if it is really that I was sick or if I just got this congestion started and now here it is.
Dad played with the girls for most of the day. For my birthday dinner dad made grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup. We actually skipped breakfast and lunch today. Probably for the best as we have been eating way too much all week.
We dug out my childhood guitar today. I have probably not seen that guitar for a good thirty years or more. I got the guitar when I was seven for my first guitar lessons with Ralph. I only used it for a few years before moving up to a full sized acoustic and a full sized electric. I’m sure that I used it once or twice after that, but that would have been it. It is hard to believe that it has been out of its case since I was about twelve and that would be exactly thirty years ago! Amazingly it was still in good shape and nearly in tune! I have no idea how it has held on to its tuning for this long.
Liesl was so excited about us finding the guitar today. She is going to be playing with that every day now. We need to find her YouTube videos to get her learning how to play. She has been wanting to play the guitar for so long and she has been playing with her Ukulele quite a bit that she got for Christmas.
We did a quick search and have no idea where my full size electric or acoustic guitars have gone. My Epiphone electric, that I got from Buzzo’s in Geneseo long ago, may have gone to Jeremy a few decades ago. My acoustic, I have no idea where it is. I did find my professional classical guitar in the basement and my good Fender bass is down there, too. So my two professional guitars and my childhood guitar are all located. Just the two more standard entry level full size ones are not to be found.
It was chilly, but not freezing, and heavy wind today. So we really avoided going outside.
We got the girls to take a shower just before midnight. Liesl managed to fall asleep a little after one, not too bad. Luciana was still up after three, which I knew because I was still awake working at that point.
We are not sure when we are heading back to Texas, yet. Maybe a week from tomorrow. On this Wednesday Danielle and I are driving down to Delhi, New York to work for the day. I have not been down there yet, but have been to Oneonta long ago. Other than that I anticipate that this is going to be a very busy week of working from dad’s house. There is so much to be done between banking, preparing for the trip to California, dealing with the new work in Atlanta, hopefully dealing with new contract stuff that didn’t get a chance to happen today, seeing family, etc. We are going down to ShortTrack to go to the Pancake House there with Aunt Sharon and Uncle Leo on Tuesday morning, too.
Tomorrow Dominica and I need to go down to the barn and start in on the process of going through the storage unit. We will be loading up the Nissan as always, trying to squeeze as much into it as possible to get our stuff down to Texas. We will be working on that all week, there is still just so much stuff in there to be going through. We are never going to get through all of it.
And that is the story of my forty second birthday.