Today is Dominica’s thirty first birthday!
Dominica and I (and our families too, I imagine) are still in a bit of shock surrounding the whole “moving to Texas” thing. We are now desperately attempting to plan, as much as possible, for what to do next. We are still in the process of moving to Peekskill! There is a ton of stuff left at dad’s house that needs to come down. He is bringing another massive load of stuff, including furniture, tomorrow. We are thinking that we need to get stuff down to Peekskill still as we will plan to move all at once from here to Texas. So emptying dad’s place is still the order of the day and will still take many more trips. Perhaps I need to drive up there with the X3 and get another major load in addition to the loads that he is able to bring by car down.
We are trying to figure out what housework makes sense to do and what makes sense to skip. We had almost begun investing in updating the kitchen. We had been out pricing new cabinets and granite counter tops and had been planning on carpeting the basement walls and painting more rooms! The cabling is mostly done but now the cables to the upstairs rooms will definitely be skipped. Now our biggest job is going to be repacking everything that was just unpacked and getting it ready to go. We won’t pack most things but anything that was about to be unpacked will definitely stay the way that it is. It is also time to start seriously thinning out our possessions. We want to have as little “extra” going to Texas as possible. This is the real time to get down to the bare essentials.
In addition to the obvious things there is now an increase in the pressure to get all of the DVDs and CDs converted and onto the big NAS device. Anything that is not converted will have to be shipped to Texas with us and then shipped back to New York for long term storage. Not a good plan at all. So the project to get them all converted is going to be kicked into an even higher gear, if that is even possible, so that we can wrap it up before we go. I doubt that we can actually complete it all before we have to go but there are a lot of variables so I am going to give it my best shot at the very least. Dad is bringing hundreds of DVDs and CDs tomorrow so I will have a lot with which to keep myself quite busy.
With everything that has been going on Dominica decided that she did not want anything big for her birthday as anything that she would have wanted would be things that we would have to ship and the last thing that we want to do is to ship anything more than is absolutely necessary down south so all of our unnecessary purchasing is on complete hold. So instead I took her out for lunch and took her shopping this afternoon. It is Friday so it is a really busy work day for me but with everything going on at the office this week there is a bit of consideration for everyone’s lives being thrown into upheaval and since I work so late it isn’t that big of a deal to take some time this afternoon. Not to mention that I didn’t book an entire day’s worth of hours last week to save until this week because I did so much work.
We went to Pastel’s for lunch. Then we drove out to Cold Stone to get Dominica some ice cream for dessert. She really wanted ice cream cupcakes for her “birthday cake” but everyone is coming to celebrate her birthday tomorrow so we are going to do that tomorrow instead. While we were there the sky turned quite dark. I am guessing that this is the storm from hurricane Bill which is just beginning to hit Long Island.
We did some quick shopping at Walmart but nothing special. Mostly just some stuff that we needed. Not fun birthday stuff. While we were in Walmart we could hear the pounding of the incredibly heavy rain on the roof but it stopped by the time that we went outside again.
We hit Best Buy but discovered that they don’t have anything in which we are interested. Buying movies or music there is far too expensive thanks to Amazon’s prices and there are no electronics that we need (we would buy them from Amazon too, most likely. So we were there for not very long.
Then we went shopping at Kohl’s. Dominica picked out a bunch of house decoration stuff that she wanted. Even though we are holding off on buying most stuff the house decoration stuff is important as we are preparing the house to be sold sometime within the next year and a half and having it look nice is really important. So we are continuing with items that we are confident will look nice and will transfer to Texas well.
After Kohl’s we did get caught out in the rain but it was not too bad. It was getting late and I had to get back to the office. It was a nice afternoon outing though and Dominica enjoyed it.
I worked until almost eight. Then we called Ruchi’s and ordered some Indian take away that I agreed to go pick up. They do not deliver and Dominica did not want to go out. So this was my dinner treat for her.
I ran to Stop and Shop and picked up a small birthday cake, yellow cake with lemon pudding, so that Dominica would have a real cake for her birthday. I also grabbed some basic supplies like tonic water. Then I went to Ruchi’s to pick up dinner. I learned that the owner is a computer science professor and department chair at Mercy College in Dobbs Ferry here in Westchester County. They have a new IT/CIS program there that is in need of professors. This would be a most perfect opportunity for me and now, of course, we are moving away. Horrible timing there. I have been wanting to be involved as a part time professor or lecturer for quite some time. That is one of my career goals. He did advise me against obtaining my Ph.D. as he really felt, and I agree, that it will have no career benefits for me. He has a Ph.D. but went back to school for a masters before teaching in CS.
Dominica and I had dinner and watched Princess Protection Program. We had seen almost all of it before with Madeline and Emily over the summer but neither of us had managed to see the entire thing or to really get a hold of the plot. It’s a cute movie but with some serious plot problems. The movie makes no sense whatsoever, especially the ending which I think that Disney would see as cute but both Dominica and I saw as the lead character abandoning her people for whom she fought for the entire movie almost immediately after all of the work that they showed in the film so that she could become a secret agent with her friend instead of being their queen. I guess we can assume that she sold the country to the evil general who was trying to take it over during the movie? It made no sense at all. I really have no idea what Disney was attempting to imply with the absurd ending that was tacked on like an afterthought. It would be roughly the equivalent to Princess Leia fighting for the rebellion for two Star Wars movies and then, completely disconnected from the storyline, having her at the end of the final movie suddenly shown as playing beach volleyball for the evil emperor’s Olympic team. What?