July 9, 2010: Last Day with Dad

Today is my last day at my dad’s house.  Tomorrow morning I leave for Peekskill.  The last seven months have probably been the longest that I have been away from home.  I was  at dad’s house only for one night in roughly seven months.  That is pretty extreme.  We have no idea when we will be able to return at this point either. Dad is hoping to be able to come down to Irving to visit us right at the end of October.  We are not likely to see him until then.

I slept in a bit this morning after being up so late last night.  I woke to the phone ringing – the car is done and we can pick it up at any time.  There was very little wrong with it and it was just $250.  Not too bad.  It sure could have been a lot worse.

The girls made great progress on the road and were in Little Rock before I even had a chance to check in on them.

Since we had to pick up the car today, dad and I drove over to Geneseo and had lunch at Denny’s.  We wanted to go to Aunt Cookies for toasted subs but Main Street was crazy and we did not want to fight the crowds. We had forgotten about the airshow again.

Work was busy today, it is a Friday after all, so I was stuck on my Blackberry all through the meal.  I’m sure that the people at Denny’s think that I am crazy.  I am never able to place an order or do anything there because I am always on my phone.  Since people in New York for the past few weeks I have really begun to be aware of how difficult it is for me to be able to have meals with people – there is just never a break where I am truly free to eat.

We picked up the car and came right back home.  Still no paperwork from the renters today but supposedly things are progressing and one of the people who is going to be renting from us would like to meet me in Peekskill this weekend while I am down there.  That sounds like a good sign to me and honestly I would feel better having a chance to meet the people who are going to be renting our house as well

I continued working on the DVD archiving.  I’m not going to be able to finish everything but boy did I ever make an amazing dent.

For dinner, dad ran down to York Landing and picked up fish sandwiches for us.  Since it is Friday night it is best for me to eat at my desk rather than attempting to go somewhere.  There just isn’t time all evening to do that.

After dinner, without leaving the upstairs office, dad and I watched the new BBC Miss Marple Mystery The Blue Germanium that aired two weeks ago.  We watched it from PBS.com.  It was really well done.

We made an attempt at getting the air hockey table into the car.  That was quite a pain.  The bottom line is it doesn’t fit and the Mazda is not designed to be driven with the hatch open – it is not a truck – and so fumes would potentially come into the car.  It just isn’t safe beyond the obvious issues of not being able to transport the stuff that we need down to Peekskill other than the air hockey table and the risks of stuff being stolen from the open car should I have to stop somewhere (maybe from carbon monoxide poisoning?)

Dad is thinking that he may be able to get the table into his much larger car and drive it out to get it to Dominica’s parents who have to make a trip to Peekskill with the truck anyway.  That will work much better. Unfortunately we have no idea when we can get movers, who we can get and how we will orchestrate the whole ordeal.  Since we don’t have a lease signed yet, we really do not have any means of moving forward on that critical task and it is becoming a logistical nightmare and we haven’t even begun to address it yet.  I really have no idea what we are going to do.

Dad went to bed really early.  He has to be up quite early in the morning to go to his Saturday morning breakfast group.  I get to sleep in until eight.  So I stayed up working on DVD archiving and some painful OpenVPN issues.

It took many hours but I eventually figured out why the OpenVPN connections have not been working.  It is because the router is seeing the multiple OpenVPN clients as a UDP flood and has been closing the ports!  No wonder it has been a confusing mess.

So I eventually got that fixed.  What a relief.  And since I was up working on that I kept the DVD processes going until the wee hours of the morning.  I almost managed to get all of the DVDs done.  So close but there is not enough time to even hope to be able to complete them tomorrow morning before I need to be on the road down to Peekskill.

Tomorrow is going to be an insane day.  I have no idea how I am going to get everything done.

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