January 14, 2007: Deployment Day

The alarm went off at six this morning and boy was I tired. It took me a minute before I could figure out why I had an alarm clock going off so early in the morning in Geneseo. I was up quickly and almost immediately out the door and into the car. It was very cold out and the car was covered in ice so I had to sit for a little while to let it warm up.

I drove up to the city and was ahead of Eric so I swung over to Andy’s apartment and picked him up no the way to the hospital. That saved some time. We all got there at about the same time. The roads were pretty bad this morning with black ice. The bridges on US 390 were all frozen and made the driving pretty treacherous. There were a lot of accidents early in the morning out on the highway.

Eric worked with Andy and I until a quarter after nine when he had to leave to get to church. Andy and I stayed at the hospital for another hour or so working on getting the new system up and running. For the most part things went well but everything is not complete at this point and there isn’t much chance of getting things actually running until mid-week at the earliest.

After we gave up at the hospital Andy and I went over to Jay’s Diner and got some breakfast.  Well, Andy got some breakfast and I got some coffee as I was still full from the big dinner last night.

I got home just in time to shower and get ready to go out to lunch with my family.  Dad, Aunt Sharon and Uncle Leo, Dominica and I all went out to the Omega for lunch at half past twelve.  Dominica wanted to get out of town before the weather got too bad so she left early from lunch and headed straight out.

After lunch I went home and continued packing.  There is so much packing to be done!  This afternoon I finished going through the books.  The final count from just the books that are still in the house is approximately 190 books are being thrown out.  One hundred and ninety technical books.  It is a very rare person to ever own so many books dedicated to technical education.  Andy has one of the largest libraries of anyone that I have ever known and he owns only about eighty books.

After the books were finally sorted and catalogued it was time to start working on the rest of the basement.  Most of the basement work involved sorting and deciding what to keep and what to throw away or donate or whatever.  The actual packing and moving is only so hard.  I am attempting to make THIS time moving the time when I really start thinning everything out significantly.  But then again, I say that every time, don’t I?

Dad was planning on coming over for dinner but the weather turned kind of nasty after lunch and we decided that it would be smartest to just wait until breakfast rather than attempting bad weather travel just for food.  Dominica made it out before the weather got to bad and managed to stay ahead of it.  She actually made quite good time and was down in Newark before seven o’clock.

I worked until one in the morning or so on the basement.  I went through years worth of paperwork and disposed of almost everything.  Giant garbage bags of papers filled to capacity were dragged from the basement tonight. If I can keep on the roll that I am currently on moving next time won’t be nearly so bad and dad won’t have so much stuff to store.  But that is probably a long shot.  I also went through some boxes of “memories” that I keep and reduced the stuff in there.  Posterity doesn’t need to be able to piece together every single event of my life.  It is really tough parting with stuff though.  As I go through all of this old stuff it definitely makes me realize how old I am.

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