October 25, 2008: The Toccos See the New House

27 Days to Baby Day! (36 Weeks and One Day Pregnant)

5 Work Days Left for Dominica.

Today is our first day in which we get to return to our new home since having purchased it.  We are pretty excited.  Dominica and I both slept in this morning as much as we could because we knew that the weekend was going to be pretty exhausting and that we would need as much energy as possible.

Every minute that we had this morning was spent getting all of our storage containers out from under the bed, making sure that they were as packed full as they could be and then loading them into the car.  The trunk was so full that we could not see out of the back of the car at all.  Good use of space.

We managed to take several delicate items today as well, filling the back seat of the car with all of our miscellaneous paperwork from around the house (most of which is garbage but needs to be carefully sorted) as well as video game consoles, a box of photographs, etc.  We filled all of the back seat which was not already in use by Oreo.  Dominica also got to carry a plant on her lap while we drove.

It was almost one in the afternoon by the time that we made it to the house in Peekskill.  Dominica’s parents had just arrived five to ten minutes ahead of us.  They would have been there earlier but got pretty lost trying to find their way through Peekskill without a GPS.  Peekskill is a really tough town to get around and right now there is a ton of constructions and the main exit off of NY 9 that most people would use to get to us has been removed and a detour to South Street is necessary.  (Dad, did you catch that?)

So today was our first chance to actually show off the house to anyone.  Katie will get to see it on Sunday, we think, and then dad and aunt Sharon will see it on Tuesday evening.  I took a bunch of pictures of the house today, but the camera got left at the new house so I have no way to upload them today.  Dad needed pictures of the house to figure out how big the walls are for painting.  🙁

Oreo was very, very excited when he realized that we were back at his favourite house.  He was quite anxious to get out of the car and didn’t care that Dominica’s parents were there to see him.  All he wanted to do was to get into the house as quickly as possible.  He is just completely thrilled with the house.  It makes him very happy.

We gave the Toccos the grand tour.  Then Dominica opened baby presents from the family that her parents delivered to us today.  We got some really cool stuff.  We are in pretty good shape for when the baby arrives.  I think that we have almost all of the necessities at this point and are starting to get into the fun stuff.  We definitely don’t have a ton of stuff by any stretch but we have enough to be able to get the baby home from the hospital without there being a panic that we don’t have something critical.

Dominica’s mom knit a bunch of really awesome baby outfits too.  The coolest one is a hooded bear outfit in brown wool.  It is so adorable.  The eared hoodie on it makes it look a little like a Japanese pair of pajamas.

Around two thirty we went out for a late lunch.  Neither Dominica nor I had eaten anything all day.  Everyone recommended to us that we go down to Croton-on-Hudson to get lunch at a restaurant called Justin Thyme; so that is where we went.

Justin Thyme Cafe is in the weirdest location, but many things in Westchester are, and we would never have thought to have tried it on our own but the food was amazing.  What a great restaurant.  The have a large and extensive menu that Dominica and I are really eager to sample.  Today she tried their apple and walnut salad while I went for their veggie burger (which they make themselves, of course) both of which were awesome.  We all shared some appetizers too including potato skins with brie and cajun spiced waffle fries with cheese.  All very good.  No one had any room for dessert.

After lunch we went back to Peekskill where Dominica and her mom checked out the Cozy Corner Yarn Shop on Washington Street.  I guess that it was not very impressive, though.  They had a guard dog that growled and blocked them from entering the store and no one working at the store cared at all that they were stuck outside.  Once they finally got in, nothing was marked with prices and they only accept cash or cheque!  Who does that outside of the third world?  It’s like yarn shopping in China!

After the attempt at yarn shopping, we returned to the house for just a little bit before the Toccos got on to the road back to Frankfort before it got too dark out.  We stayed at the house for about half an hour before heading back to Newark so that we could continue packing.  There is still a lot to be done.

It had been raining lightly all day but on the drive home it turned pretty heavy making the drive very fatiguing.  We had been thinking about making another run tonight, there are things that need a special trip like the television yet, but we were both pretty tired and Ramona is coming over early tomorrow morning and helping us to pack so we decided that it would be better to just stay in and pack at home.

I managed to kick off some Handbrake jobs that I expect to run all weekend and into Monday that complete the conversion of all of the material that we currently have down here in Newark.  So I was able to get some more stuff packed because of that.

By eight we were both really tired and decided to take the rest of the night off and just watch some How I Met Your Mother on the AppleTV.  We are down to only the AppleTV as all of our other entertainment devices are packed like the Wii and the DVD player.  Tomorrow we intend to break down the television and the AppleTV as well.  This week is going to be so busy that there is very little opportunity for us to use either of them anyway.

At nine, the fire alarm went off in Eleven80.  We are in our final five evenings in Eleven80 and the fire alarm went off for us.  (Regular readers will remember the fire alarm problems that we went through when we first moved in here.)  It turned out to be a false alarm.  I would guess that it was caused by the excessive wind and rain that we have tonight.

It was around midnight when we finally got off to bed.  Ramona is expecting to arive around nine thirty tomorrow morning.  Then we will be off to the new house sometime in the middle of the afternoon.  Katie is considering meeting us out there to check it out.

October 24, 2008: Last Friday in Newark

28 Days to Baby Day! (36 Weeks Pregnant)

5 Work Days Left for Dominica.

Today is the first of the last days in Newark (today is the last Friday, tomorrow is the last Saturday, etc.)  One week from this morning, Dominica and I will be heading out of our apartment in Eleven80 in Newark for the last time, throw are few remaining items into the trunk of the Mazda and on Friday night, after work, we will be heading for Peekskill to stay.

We are close enough to the end of our time in Newark that I can now see what the weather will be like for the rest of the time that we are here.  Only three days are scheduled to hit over sixty degrees.  Good for those of us who commute primarily on foot and prefer to walk quite briskly but are often restrained by the temperature.

It is a bright and crisp day in the NY Metro today.  There is a lot of smog, though, and I can barely see Manhattan from Newark.  It will be awesome to be up in Peekskill where the air is clean every day.

Last night, whilst walking Oreo, I finished reading Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People.”  The book is interesting but I don’t agree with Joel Spolsky’s assessment of it that it is not a book on manipulation.  I feel that it is.  Many of the techniques that Dale mentions in the book are in a grey area of lying and flattery.

The book is based around the assumption that the reader is always in the right and that the people that the reader wants to “influence” are simpletons.  Many of the techniques, I felt, came across like marketing which often have an adverse affect on people with Asperger’s Syndrome and similar world views.  I could sense the techniques in the book being used on my while reading it and it really turned me off.  I felt Dale attempting to manipulate me through the book.  In many ways the book just felt like an advertisement for the Dale Carnegie classes.

There is much to be gleaned from the book, especially for marketeers, but make no mistake that the book really is about manipulating people and that the average person will really feel like it taught them a lot simply because the book is written using its own manipulative principles that really do work on most people.  The book completely forgets to mention that the techniques will backfire on a significant percentage of the population and if you use them at the wrong time that you will really come across poorly.  Once people sense you trying to manipulate them you are in far worse shape than just being honest up front.

All of that being said, the average person is a sucker for marketing which is why they do it.  SPAM is only used so much because it has such a high success rate.  Telemarketers risk fines to market to people because the percentage of people who will buy anything is so high that it makes it financially worth the risk.  The book is very useful.  Just be aware that Dale is using its techniques on you too.

Our next several days are extremely busy.  Today Dominica and I both have to work plus I have homework due tonight which doesn’t make my day any easier.  Early tomorrow morning we are getting up and packing the car and heading to Peekskill where we are meeting Dominica’s parents for lunch and giving them a tour of the house and Peekskill.  Then we will return to Newark in the early afternoon and spend the rest of the day packing which we can do since my homework will be out of the way – although I then have a major paper due in two weeks so I need to be hard at work on that as well.

Sunday morning, Ramona is coming over to Eleven80 and is hanging out and helping us to pack.  She can only stay until early afternoon as she has some friends moving whom she is helping to move.  Then we are making another run to Peekskill.  Hopefully by that point we are taking nothing but delicates (monitors, computer supplies, plants) and no longer moving hard to deal with items out of the way.  Katie might stop by on Sunday afternoon to check out the new house.  We can’t hang out there long, though, as we will need to return to Newark to continue packing.  We have to have everything packed and ready to go by Monday night.

I am planning on working from home on Monday.  It is the only day that I can work from home all next week.  Tuesday I will be off as we are moving.  Wednesday through Friday I will be working from Wall Street as much as possible as all I will have in Newark is my laptop sitting in the middle of the empty living room floor.  That will not be very condusive to getting any work done.  It will kill my back having to work without having a chair.  We still need to schedule the maids to clean the apartment and the move out inspection.  So much to do!

I had to work from home all morning today and had to travel in to the office over my lunch window.  There were people already waiting impatiently for me to do some work by the time that I got to the office so I did not have any chance to go out for lunch or to swim or anything.

All of my free time today was put into doing homework for RIT.  To get ready for my homework that is due tonight I found it prudent to also do my homework that is due next Sunday (in nine days from now) which was pretty crappy to need to do it today, but it is pretty great that I have it completely out of the way for next week.  It was a pretty long assignment compared to most weeks as well.  I also went ahead and did the reading and prep work for the final week of classes which is the week after next.  That leaves nothing but in class discussions and the final project – which is a very large paper due in two weeks and two days.

Today, I just happen to examine my American Express records which I seldom do, and realized that we were charged for the rental car that we had while the BMW was last in the shop.  We had been phones a few times about the rental because the shop had lost information connecting us to the BMW dealer and apparently they just decided to charge us rather than the dealer even though we went through the effort of getting it all corrected for them.  One more thing that I need to deal with now in the midst of moving and homework and everything else.  I looked through my SGL records, boy am I glad that I have them, and the rental place charged my card more than a month after we had rented the car!  Talk about a scam.  They managed to have a mid-August car rental show up just a few days before November on my credit card bill.  Likely they were hoping that I would not notice the charge.  They also listed us as having rented the car for more than a month – claiming that we did not return the car until September 23rd after having borrowed it on August 21st!  This is crazy.

I was looking at some flight prices that were sent to me today – we get great deals sent to us now that we have flown around the UK a little bit.  This winter, flights to Ireland start at just $169 from New York going to either Shannon or Dublin.  Considering how incredibly strong the dollar is compared against the pound and euro right now, this would be an ideal time for a European vacation.  Talk about cheap.  The hotel that we had in London for $300 last November would be just $200 this November.  Our B&B in Stratford-upon-Avon would be really inexpensive.

I ended up working in the office, both on office work and on homework, until after nine thirty this evening.  What a long day.  Fourteen hours from start to finish at work, but the day passed relatively quickly and there is much to be done tomorrow.  We get to go to the new house first thing in the morning.

I was at work so late that Dominica and I decided to just eat separately.  It was a long night for me and I did not get to go to the gym today which is crappy, but I got a lot of important work done and out of the way.  Now I just need to keep working on my final project for the next two weeks as it is a very large project and I need to do it incrementally or else there simply will not be enough time to get it done.

I am signing off early.  I should get home around eleven tonight.  Might do a tiny bit of light packing but that seems unlikely.  Tomorrow we are off to Peekskill.

October 23, 2008: Stuck in Newark for a Few Days

29 Days to Baby Day! (35 Weeks and Six Days Pregnant)

6 Work Days Left for Dominica.

It is another early day for us.  I was up and logged in to the office at six thirty.  At least I get to get a jump on the day because I have a ton of homework that really needs to be done today as some of it is due tomorrow and tomorrow is my busy day.

Dominica took the PR5 to Wayne Mazda this morning for some light work.  She was blocked in and couldn’t leave Newark for twenty minutes because of an ongoing dispute between the Eleven80 valet service and the local businesses.  (Just one more week… just one more week…)  They didn’t have a shuttle driver for her this morning at the shop so she got a courtesy CX7 to drive around for the day.

More car surprises this morning.  Turns out that the belt noise was coming from the alternator which was never fully installed the last time that the car was in a shop.  The bolts were never tightened down and the thing was moving around.  The shop said that we were really lucky that the thing didn’t just snap off sometime while we were driving!  So we had that fixed which cost a fortune since they had to disassemble everything to get to it.  We also had the sway bar and brushing taken care of which needed to be dealt with for quite some time.  So today turned into some extra surprise expenses (although nothing is really all that surprising anymore after how the last two months have been.)

Oreo is very itchy again today after having been exposed to grass yesterday.  This is not a good sign.  He is still on the steroids.  This new house is going to be really rough for him.

We have decided, at least initially, that the living room is going to get a television/monitor.  Our plan is to hang it above the fireplace so that it takes up no space and is positioned diagonally into the living room and easily visible from the dining room.  The mantel is a perfect place for the AppleTV which will be used to power the monitor.

We have decided that the Nintendo Wii will be going into the living room as well as its primary purpose is as a gaming system for friends and family when they are visiting and there is no better place for people to hang out and use such a “physical” gaming system.  I think that that means that we will be putting the PlayStation 2 there as well although that has not yet been determined and might be determined simply from the availability, or lack thereof, of component video inputs into whatever monitor eventually goes there.  Our current 32″ 720p unit will be there immediately so that people have something to use until we buy something larger and newer that will go there.

In the long term, we are planning to have three televisions around the house – one in our bedroom, one in the living room and then, of course, the den downstairs which will be the main entertainment area and where, we hope, we will have the XBOX 360 and, at some point, a BluRay Player.

I did some packing today.  Not a lot but it is progress.  Every little bit helps.  There is so much to do before Tuesday.  It is very stressful.  I can’t wait until the move is over and we can move into the new house.  I need a break from this type of stuff.  Dominica really needs to get into the house as well as her nesting instinct is kicking in and she has nowhere to nest.

Dominica came home and we walked over to Subway to grab a simple dinner.  Then we finished watching the first season of How I Met Your Mother which is by far one of the best sitcoms that I have seen in a long time.  Neil Patrick Harris is awesome.  What great casting.

Dominica went to bed around ten but I had to stay up and do homework for RIT.  I took care of my normal, weekly homework tonight that is due on Sunday.  I have extra work that is due tomorrow that I am going to focus on tomorrow.  I realize that that sounds out of order but getting the easier and more straight-forward normal homework out of the way today will let my brain be free and clear to really focus on the one task that I need to do tomorrow.

I keep forgetting to mention that Dominica is hooked on watching Wine Library Television.  She discovered it through the AppleTV’s podcast guide.  I’ve known about it for some time because of the billboards up on Route 78 that I used to see when commuting to Warren.  That alone should tell you how long they have been around.  The show gets around 80,000 viewers per day.  She has been watching it for a few weeks now and is really loving it.  She had no idea that the show is local to us here in Newark and that the Wine Library itself is located in Springfield, New Jersey which is a suburb of Newark.  It really is a great show for people looking to learn about wine.  A good example of the power of podcasting.  As far as I know it is now the most popular English language show on wine.

October 22, 2008: We Have A New House

30 Days to Baby Day! (35 Weeks and Five Days Pregnant)

7 Work Days Left for Dominica.

Today the entire day is dedicated to the process of procurring our new house in Peekskill.  I have the day off from work so that I have the time necessarily to complete all of the work that needs to be done for the house.  Dominica is taking a half day.

I had to get up early with Dominica so that Oreo and I could drive her to work.  We only have the Mazda and if I don’t drive Dominica to work then she will have the car all day and we will be stuck.  So we got to play chauffer this morning.

Traffic was pretty bad taking MIn to work this morning.  Rush hour in Northern Jersey is not fun.

Once we were home, Oreo and I had a pretty short window in which to get ready ourselves and prepare for today’s walkthrough and closing.  It is a very busy day.

I managed to pack the car pretty well for today’s trip to Peekskill.  We moved the Marantz receiver and the Totem speakers both of which were on our “delicate items” list that we wanted to move manually by car instead of having them bounce around in the moving truck.  Because they are delicate items they were also making it that much harder to pack the apartment with them in the way.

I managed to load all of our packed clothing into the car along with some doggy supplies for Oreo.  We want to make sure that he feels like this is his home and that he can relax in it.  So we took his spare pillow, water and food dishes, his dinner, treats, some budda bones, his blanket and several binkies with which he can play.  He will enjoy that.

While I was packing the car, Dominica’s clinic called and rescheduled her appointment from this afternoon until Tuesday.  That is good as it will give us a bit more flexibility in our schedules today.

I managed to leave Eleven80 with Oreo and the loaded car (the trunk could barely close, the back seat was in use and Dominica is going to have to carry the speakers wrapped in a blanket) to go get Dominica from work at ten thirty.  Traffic was better now and I arrived right on time at eleven.

The sun was shining and it was a gorgeous day for a drive up the Pallisades Parkway with the leaves changing and barely any mid-day traffic.  We got up to Peekskill at noon.  Dominica had to run a quick errand to the clinic.  Then we went to Subway at the Beach Shopping Center for lunch as we had arrived with a full hour to kill in Peekskill.  (This particular Subway has the VeggiMax subs that we really like as well as a seafood delight sub that we did not try.)

At one o’clock we had the final walkthrough up at the house.  That went pretty well. I tried to get more pictures of the house and immediately realized that my camera, while having plenty of battery, did not have a memory card in it and was unable to take pictures 🙁  So much for that.

The walkthrough went well and pretty quickly.  We left Peekskill at one thirty to drive over to Katonah to actually do the closing.  (Had Dominica had to go to the clinic for her original appointment we would have dropped her off now and she would have had to have waited for forty-five minutes before getting in to her appointment!)

We got to the law offices at two and started the closing early since there was plenty of stuff for me to sign long before the sellers would need to do anything.  The closing process ended up taking over two hours and we didn’t wrap up until four thirty.  So we left Katonah, which is a gorgeous little town about ten miles off of the Connecticut border, and got back to Peekskill around five.

I am not sure if Dominica ever though about this process but had she had her appointment today at the clinic she would have been stuck there from one thirty until five – three and a half hours.  She would not have been happy!

So at five we used our own key to enter our own house in Westchester County!  It’s official, we are 100% New Yorkers again.  Only now we are downstaters rather than upstaters.  Weird.  (And yes, for those of you who live in NYC and have no concept of the rest of the state, Westchester County is the southern most tip of downstate, not “way up there”.  Upstate is still a ways away.)

We unloaded the car, which only took a few minutes, and introduced Oreo to his new home.  He was so excited.  He ran all over the house rubbing his belly on every bit of carpeting that he could find.  I set him up with his pillow and blanket and tossed his binkies all over the living room which he thought was great fun.  He went out on the back deck and had a great time sticking his head over the side and watching everything.  He is going to love it here.

We spent about an hour in the house.  There is nothing to do as the house is completely empty.  We walked Oreo around the yard which he thought was awesome as there are so many other dogs in the area.  We checked out our local dumpsters (yes, we have dumpsters!  Yay!) and picked up the community newsletter to see what was going on.  There are 439 homes in our Chapel Hill complex and there are a lot of activities up at the Life Center or whatever it is called including a knitting club on Thursday evenings.

We decided to get dinner in Peekskill.  Originally we had wanted to have run back to Newark, loaded the car again and returned to Peekskill but it ended up being far later than we had anticipated so we decided to just get a nice dinner and have a relaxing evening.  We couldn’t get parking downtown (the parking garage is being demolished or something) and we didn’t know much of where to go so we decided to play it safe and ate at “At the Reef” located on the roundabout north of town.  It is a very well known landmark in the area.

Dinner was really good.  Dominica had the blackened tilapia and I had the pistacchio crusted rainbow trout.  It was good but took a while.

It was nine when we got back to Eleven80.  We really did not want to have to go back as we now own a home and really want to be able to stay there.  We don’t get to completely move for more than a week.  It is going to be a long week.

It was time to feed the dog then straight off to bed once we were home.  I am working the early shift tomorrow so I need some sleep.  Dominica has to go in a little early tomorrow too as she is dropping off the Mazda at the shop for some minor work.  We have a belt squeaking and a headlamp out.  Just stuff that we want to be dealt with now rather than while we are going back and forth to Peekskill constantly.

Gas in NJ is down to $2.59 by this evening.  That is one of the gas stations on the main drag in downtown Newark.

October 21, 2008: House Preparations

31 Days to Baby Day! (35 Weeks and Four Days Pregnant)

8 Work Days Left for Dominica; House closing is tomorrow!

Today was crazy “do paperwork for the house” day.  As of today, all of the wire transfer authorizations are complete, everything is signed, everything is scheduled.  We are ready to go.  I even have the Internet access disconnect scheduled for the old apartment and the hook up ready for the new house!  Talk about being on the ball today.

The new house will be turned on by Cablevision at Wednesday morning, the 29th, while dad and aunt Sharon are there.  That will make the transition very simple.  Movers on Tuesday, Internet access on Wednesday morning, rest on Thursday (I won’t work from home since I will be reduced to a laptop on the living room floor,) Halloween party on Thursday night and then moving ourselves on Friday.

The weather was nice down here in the New York Metro today but dad said that it started snowing back home this afternoon.  They are even expecting to get an inch of snow tonight!  Hard to believe that it is time for snow back home when it is so nice here.  I am still wearing a short sleeved shirt, no t-shirt and no jacket and I walk for almost five miles each day outside.

I got home rather late this evening.  I was not hungry at all for some reason and decided to skip dinner.  Dominica was hungry so I went down to the deli downstairs and picked up dinner for her.  We watched three or four episodes of How I Met Your Mother. Then Dominica went to bed around eleven.  I was not tired at all and stayed up until almost one in the morning.

Tomorrow is going to be a very busy day.  I am “off” from work and remembered to turn on my out of office assistant so that I would not have to worry about answering emails or anything while I am busy with the house stuff.  In the morning I have to drive Dominica to work so that I will have use of the car during the day.  Then, around eleven, I have to pick her back up from work with Oreo in tow and the car loaded down with our very first load of stuff bound for the new house.  This is one of our few opportunities to move fragile and difficult to pack items to get them out of our way so that it is easier for us to continue to pack the apartment.

At one in the afternoon we have the final house inspection in Peekskill.  At a quarter after two Dominica has her appointment with her midwife, also in Peekskill.  At two thirty we have the house closing in Katonah (obviously I am going alone while Dominica is at her appointment.)  Then, after the closing, I drive back to Peekskill, pick up Dominica and we take the first load of stuff to the new house.  It is going to be a very busy day indeed.