It’s Monday. We are back in Peekskill and we do not have to be in the car again until Thursday night. That means three whole days to ourselves at home! Practically a vacation for the Miller family. Dominica has been trying to talk me into traveling on Wednesday to break up the driving a bit more but I just can’t bring myself to leave the house so soon again and she doesn’t really want to be away from the house either. We have been away too much recently and it makes us feel like we just can’t get anything done if we are never here.
Today is Liesl’s big crawling day! We were so excited. I was in the basement but heard Dominica gasp when Liesl did it for the first time. Just a few “steps” at first but she got better very quickly. I came to the top of the stairs when Dominica yelled and Liesl quickly attempted to crawl over to me. She is going to be an expert crawler in just a few days. Two months ahead of her doctor’s schedule for her.
We are working on getting arrangements made about the drive to Texas that is coming up. Francesca and I spoke for a while today by phone and finally figured out what we are going to do. Francesca, Madeline, Emily and Garrett are going to come down to our house in Peekskill sometime during the week of July 20th – probably closer to the end of the week but we are not sure about that yet. Then, on Saturday the 26th, whenever I am done with work for the day, we are going to jump into the Toyota (the five of us, Dominica, Liesl and Oreo are staying home) and hit the road towards Houston.
Our hope is to make good progress and to be able to stop in Chattanooga, Tennessee without being too exhausted. That is a good, solid drive but nothing that we can’t do. We will be tired but not overly tired. And I will get to see a few places that I have never been before although very little as almost the entire trip on Saturday will be parts of the country that I have driven previously. The new bits will be almost entirely in the dark, unfortunately.
Then on Sunday, the 26th, we will get up early and drive on from Tennessee to Houston, Texas. This entire drive will be parts of the country that I have never really seen before. At least parts that I have not driven extensively in daylight. So we should be in Houston late on Sunday evening with plenty of buffer time in case something goes wrong.
Monday I will be working from the Grice’s house in League City, Texas and recovering from the drive as much as possible. Tuesday I will also be working from there and then going to SpiceCorps Houston’s first meeting at seven that evening! Very exciting and a great use of the trip. After SpiceCorps I will go back and get some early sleep. I need to be at the Houston airport very, very early on Wednesday morning because I am taking the first flight from Houston to Austin. I am excited as I have never seen Austin before.
Wednesday I will be in Austin all day. I am already scheduled to spend a bit of time with the crew at SpiceWorks there. I don’t have solid plans for the day or how we will be getting me from point to point but that should be worked out very soon. Hopefully I will not be stuck in the airport all day. That would be a pain. But I am prepared just in case. Then on Wednesday evening I am flying from Austin to Orlando and then from Orlando to White Plains where Dominica will go to pick me up and bring be back home. It will be a very, very exhausting trip.
I called Verizon Wireless today to see what I needed to have Internet access for my laptop while I am doing all of this traveling. They went through several things with me and we discovered that we were not using our minutes anywhere near as much as we could be so they dropped us by several plan levels and modified a few things and, in the end, Dominica and I managed to reduce our mobile spending by approximately $60 per month! We also have an additional $15, roughly, to be saved once I get into a store in person and do a change based on a discount for which I am eligible. I also found out that I am able to get a brand new BlackBerry Tour, which comes out a week from today, for about $49. So I just need to call Verizon Wireless back on Sunday and they will ship me my cool new phone. Dominica is going to get my current BlackBerry 8830 WorldPhone because she does not like her Pearl.
So we are really excited about saving a total of $75 every month. That is awesome. I love working with Verizon Wireless. They have the best customer service ever. Every time that I call them they are just so pleasant and easy to work with. They always have good answers for me and work hard to fix stuff. And they have awesome hours too. I would really feel guilty going to another vendor just because of how well they treat me. Plus other vendors don’t have their coverage so it doesn’t matter anyway. I’ve been with Verizon or someone that Verizon bought for seventeen years now! That’s got to be almost a record for being with the same carrier continuously. Almost no one even had a cell phone in 1992 let alone with the same carrier even since then.
This evening we watched more of Big Bang Theory. Then I ended up staying up until around three in the morning getting caught back up on things, posting to SpiceWorks, writing for SGL, etc. I turned in my next article today and am very hopeful that it will be published soon. The publisher who is picking up the option on it was very positive so I am hoping that we might see it tomorrow.