I didn’t get to bed until three thiry last night. But I got a lot of stuff done so it was not so bad. I think that I need to make this a Thursday night routine. Spending the time on Thursday to get way ahead on my emails and miscellaneous tasks makes me massively more productive on Friday and throughout the week. It gives me enough momentum to keep my email under control all through the weekend (which is pretty easy since the volume goes way down) and then I slowly lose ground during the week until Thursday night and I can catch up again. But I don’t end up getting completely bogged down in “email thrashing” as I call it if I do this to keep it under control.
I slept in some this morning but not too badly. I got enough sleep so I am not concerned about being tired all day. I can start later on Fridays. Nothing happens in the morning and I always have to work later than other days so it is a good match. Makes staying up late on Thursdays make more sense too.
It was a busy day of working for me and Dominica was busy spending the day cleaning (mostly kitchen stuff since we will be away for a week and a half) and packing. Lot’s of packing to do for four (Oreo takes as much stuff as a human would take) to get everything that we will need for such a long trip as well as making it all fit into the X3.
I put in a lot of time today ripping DVDs as quickly as possible so that we would have a full load of DVDs to ship back to put into storage. It has only been two weeks since the last shipment went but I did not want to waste the trip. So I just ripped them as quickly as I could using both the laptop and the desktop until both machines hard drives were completely full.
My plan is to have the dc5850 run all week while we are gone. I am hoping that I managed to load it up with enough content that it will be able to compress videos for the entire time that we are gone and will finish up just before we return home. Although, of course, Microsoft will likely release some patch that will cause it to reboot midweek. That would be really crappy. This was a lot of work to get this all ready. If it works it will mean not losing all of that time for compression. It takes so much time to do this that I really do not want to give up a week and a half of computational time while we are away. And when I am not using that computer it can do the work even faster so this is the best time to not lose.
Dominica went out around noon to get her hair cut which she has not done in a while. She was really unhappy with her last haircut. It was her first one in Peekskill and she had tried the local chain place instead of going to a real salon and decided not to go that route again. Today she found a salon that she really likes and so will be returning there. Really close and convenient too (and not a chain) so that will work well for her. Nice to support the local businesses.
My book from Amazon, “Ruby by Example” that I ordered the day before yesterday arrived today. I had ordered it on accident forgetting that we would be out of town and I was concerned about it arriving while we would be gone. Especially with all of the rain we have been getting having it sitting outside would not be good. But it came earlier than expected so all is good. It also gave me a chance to let UPS know that we would be gone for a little while. It is really handy having everything delivered via UPS so that they really know us. Our delivery guy knows us so well that he always has a treat ready for Oreo and he looks in the front door to see if Liesl is sleeping or not to know whether he should ring the doorbell or just knock quietly (because Oreo does not bark if he just knocks.)
I worked until seven and then we started really packing the car. Dominica had everything staged and ready to go out but the plastic bin with the DVDs for storage was not ready until the very last second and then I had to pack it additionally with SpiceCorp swag that I am taking to the Upstate New York SpiceCorp meeting next Saturday in Rochester.
We were on the road around eight. The trip was pretty uneventful. We stopped at a McDonald’s on the Thruway south of Albany for our dinner at around ten. It was just before midnight when we pulled into Frankfort.
Francesca and crew (Madeline, Emily, Garrett, Joe and Brit) had arrived in Frankfort just forty-five minutes or so ahead of us. They were pretty much asleep when we arrived. Francesca was just barely awake and held Liesl for a few minutes and then went right to sleep. We had to unpack the car and get everything set up upstairs before we could get to bed. Tomorrow is Stephanie and Josh’s wedding at three. I am working in the morning starting at eight and attempting to wrap up in time to make it to the wedding.