I was not happy when the alarm went off this morning. I am exhausted. Nicki and I had decided that today would be a good day to try out the free daily breakfast at La Cima. We rolled out of the apartment complex at seven forty and were over to the Williams Tower a few minutes later.
It is a small, continental breakfast at the club but it is good and healthy and, most importantly, free. So we enjoyed that and some coffee and the views of the sun rising on the Dallas-Fort Worth Metro which was quite nice.
Very busy day at work today. Worked till a quarter till noon then I escaped over to the club for lunch. It was another “eating alone” day. I’m quite glad to have the club to go to because it works out very well when I need to eat alone. There are always people there to talk to as well.
Crazy busy afternoon then back to the apartment to meet up with Brian, get him a box of stuff that had come to my place via UPS and then we went over to Jersey Mike’s to get subs for dinner. We ate there and then he dropped me off on his way back home.
This evening is my busy phone call evening. I had three overlapping conference calls this evening which made for a very busy time. So I was on the phone for at least two hours if not more. Good thing that we had managed to squeeze in dinner as quickly as we had.
I spent the evening, what bits were not on the phone, working on trying to fix a networking issue that dad has been having and rebuilding my own laptop from Windows XP 32bit to Windows 7 64bit. That went pretty smoothly and I had it updated in no time. I got my VPN set up, got the laptop added to the domain and started doing package installs. I’ll have it all set tomorrow night, I think, so that I am ready to head off to New York this weekend.
The other big thing that I managed to do tonight was to get scores of pictures from our 2009 trip to Disney World posted up on Flickr! That was a major accomplishment. Obviously it has been more than six months that people have been waiting to see those. That was Liesl’s first birthday and we are already past her eighteen month mark. There are a lot more pics to go but good progress was made tonight.
I talked to Jen tonight and we have figured out how we are coordinating the transfer of vehicles this weekend. She is driving up from Houston on Friday evening. We will hit La Cima for dinner. Then she will take my car and I will take hers.
Saturday morning, hopefully very, very early, I will be hitting the road to head up to Arnold, Maryland. We will see how early “early” is but before daybreak if I am motivated. The drive is supposed to be approximately twenty-two hours. Of course, I am doing this one without a GPS! It has been a while since I have attempted that.
I’ll be in Maryland all day on Sunday – which will involve a lot of napping, I’m sure. Then Monday morning I will get up very, very early again and drive out to Tyson’s Corners in Virginia. There I will hit the Tower Club for breakfast. I’m hoping that John will get up and head out there with me as well.
From the Tower Club I am able to just sit indefinitely while waiting for the Ralstons to arrive at Dulles and for them to clear customs. It is just fifteen minutes, I am told, from the club to the airport so that is very convenient.
Then, once we pick up the Ralstons, they are planning to head to someone’s house in Sterling, get a shower and then it is time to drive them up to New York. I’m expecting that that cannot be until afternoon that we leave Sterling. So that means that between six and seven in the evening of June 21st we will be pulling into their place in New York.