February 7, 2009: Dad Drives to Peeksill

I was extremely exhausted when I pulled myself out of bed at seven thirty this morning.  Oreo made me take him for another walk after I signed off and had started heading to bed last night which always makes it hard to fall asleep.

I am very glad, though, that Oreo made me walk him so late at night.  Because it was so late we took a shorter than usual path that lead us down below and in front of the Mazda parked in our parking lot.  As we strolled by I was low enough that I was able to see that the interior light of the car was on and had been on, I would assume, for about twenty-eight hours!  Oops.  I have no idea how or why it was turned on but it had to have been me when I drove home from Warren on Thursday night.

So, to be safe, I took Oreo inside then came back out with the keys and fired up the car and let it run for a little while.  Fortunately the battery was not dead at all and the car started right up.  I took the opportunity to take out the trash since I was stuck waiting for the car to run for a while anyway.

I started work this morning at eight as I normally do on Saturdays.  The upside to always having work scheduled so early is that I never, ever sleep away my weekends.  I get a nice, long weekend and often my work is done around the time that the rest of the family gets out of bed so I don’t miss any time with them.

Dad was able to leave Peoria just before nine to get on the road.  His first stop is McDonald’s for breakfast and then on to Peekskill.  He is hoping to arrive around three this afternoon.

Work for the office went pretty well this morning.  My scheduled work wrapped up around ten.  Then there was my unscheduled maintenance work to do.

House preparations went well this morning.  Some redding up was done and the kitchen was cleaned by ten.

I managed to get my database server set up finally.  That took some work and, of course, each time that I do it I forget that there is a problem with SELinux and MySQL when you move the default database location so I had to fix that too.  Seems to be working well now.

I kicked off a ton of Handbrake compression jobs this morning.  I am attempting to move as much stuff to h.264 as possible before dad leaves so that he can take the source media and put it into storage and also to clean off Dominica’s hard drive which has been holding a lot of stuff in preparation for compression for quite a while.  He laptop doesn’t really have spare drive space for things like that.

We are planning to get a large server for network storage sometime soon but, in the meantime, I think that we need to have a temporary solution as there is so much stuff that we need to store and move around right now.  No one believes the amount of capacity that we need on a regular basis.  We can eat through terabyte disks like they are nothing.

Dad made some good progress on the road today.  He called from just 110 miles away before it was even one in the afternoon.  Around one o’clock Liesl fell asleep and Dominica took the opportunity to run out to Stop and Shop to stock up on groceries.  Our cupboards are pretty bare.

While Dominica was out shopping I watched over the kids and continued to do some cleaning and redding.  I got a lot of good, manual carpet scrubbing done that I have been wanting to do.  The carpet in the dining room area right as you enter the house gets so much traffic and in the winter that traffic is always dirty and salty both from shoes and from Oreo’s feet plus it gets all of the dirt that sticks to your socks when you are on the kitchen linoleum.  There is no avoiding the linoleum because there is a patch that separates the dining room carpeting from the stairs going upstairs.  So you are stuck dragging the dirt onto the carpeting no matter what you do.  I also got a second round of dishes cleaned.  Lots of dish cleaning done today.

Dominica got back just a little bit before dad arrived.  Dad managed to get to Peekskill before three in the afternoon.  His drive went pretty well.  Good weather with a little cloud cover so that it was not too bright.

We spent most of the afternoon visiting and catching up.  It has been over a month since Dad has seen little Liesl and they had some catching up of their own to do.  I had lingering work that I was not able to complete until the early evening.

We had most of the evening free and we able to just hang out in the living room.  We saved the unloading of dad’s car for tomorrow.  We were all very tired tonight.

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