Today is Friday so it is my super busy day. My boss was out today so I was extra busy as well. Fortunately today is the start of the long weekend so the market closes early today giving us a chance to get out at a reasonable time today so that we can enjoy the weekend, more or less. Of course, I am scheduled to work quite a bit tomorrow morning so that does not really count for me. I won’t really get much time off tomorrow. I do actually get Monday off, however, so that is great.
Dominica and I have been looking forward to getting to camp while at dad’s house. All of our camping gear is here and we are not planning on shipping any of it to Texas as we have no intention of camping where it is so hot and where there are so many dangerous things about in the wild (scorpions, big spiders, coyotes, etc.) Camping in New York is crazy safe and convenient. Camping in Texas is stressful at best. We figure that any time that we are going to want to camp that we are already going to be in the New York area so getting the tent from dad’s is as convenient as anywhere.
So this afternoon, Dominica and I carried the tent out to the back yard and while I worked on the afternoon deployments she worked on setting up the tent which she is very good at doing. We cannot camp very far from the house, unless we go to a campground, because of my need for a CPAP. We are limited to the distance that we can stretch an extension cord from the house.
While Dominica was working on the tent the Ralstons stopped by to pick up a computer that I had promised them. They need a computer to use as their home media server. Originally I had thought that we must have a D325 or D530 sitting around that was not in use but that turned out not to be the case. Dad and I looked high and low to see what we could find before I remember this custom-built, Athlon64 unit that has been in his office for a few years now. It is a 3U black Antec rackmount chassis with heaven only knows what in it. It was a computer that we had built and had used in Geneseo just before we moved out of there. There were two like this, this one and a 4U unit with loads of 250GB SATA hot swap drives. Antoni took that other unit almost a year ago but this one has been looking for a home for a very long time. In theory it will be perfect for them. More power than they actually need and lots of room to hold several 3.5″ hard drives. Dad is, I’m sure, ecstatic to have it finally out of his office. This is one of those very large items that we had not figured out what to do with. Problem solved.
While they were over, Art assisted in putting up the tent. So now we are all ready to camp out in the yard tonight. We also found out that the Ralstons bought a car today. That means that they are not going to be needing the Mazda for very long like we had originally thought. So instead of me flying to Washington, DC in a week I can potentially just take the car and drive down instead and then drive it on home to Texas. That is a pretty major change of plans but one that will work out really well for us.
We had been attempting to go out for lunch today but I ended up being so busy that we just skipped lunch altogether. We made plans with Aunt Sharon and Uncle Leo to do a Friday Night Fish Fry from the Capa Lounge and to watch a movie tonight. So around six thirty they brought up take out from the Capa and we all ate out in the back yard as it was really nice out this evening.
After dinner we watched Dear John which dad had downloaded to the AppleTV a few days ago but it had taken so long to download that we had been unable to watch it on the day that we had intended. So we watched it for the Friday night movie night instead.
Dear John was pretty sad. I found it surprisingly depressing. There story wasn’t bad and the actors were good, for the most part, but I’d have to say that overall I did not enjoy it. The story was pretty weak and mostly was just a commentary on how crappy life can be. Something that I would rather do without. In theory the ending was somewhat uplifting but it was also incredibly vague and melancholy. Not that there is not a place for a good melancholy film from time to time but this one was just too sad and not deep enough to pull it off, in my opinion. I would not necessarily avoid the film but I would not seek it out either. Nothing special and easily forgotten.
After the movie, the Richardsons went home and dad headed off to bed. Dominica and I took Liesl and Oreo out to the tent. Liesl thought this was great fun. She had been out in the tent much of the afternoon playing – especially while we were eating our fish fry out there. She thought that having a fresh air room in the middle of the yard was pretty cool. Liesl has been loving being outside in general so we were hoping that she would really like camping.
Liesl fell asleep pretty quickly as did Oreo. Liesl has an air mattress in the back of the tent. Dominica and I have the queen sized futon mattress in the middle of the tent and Oreo slept on his pillow right next to my head. Dominica brought out an ottoman as well on which we placed her laptop. I had been archiving movies all day on it and it was all set up with about a dozen films that we could choose from. Remember that we have power in the tent for my CPAP so having power for the laptop is pretty easy. Even cooler is that dad’s wireless reaches out into the yard without any problem so we could be online and check email or whatever as well. Now this is camping.
We looked through the available movies and decided to watch Johnny English with Rowan Akinson. Neither of us had seen that in a while and we both enjoyed it when we had. Dominica maybe made it a third of the way through the movie before falling asleep. I made it a little longer but was tired and decided to just turn it off and call it a night.
It is a great night for camping. The air is cool but not cold and it was relatively dry. It was cool enough that we could cover up with blankets which makes sleeping much more comfortable. No need for any of our fans either.