August 25, 2013: Cleaning and Writing

Quiet Sunday at home.  Everyone was up by eight, Liesl being the last one up.  Dominica and I were up at seven.  I did SGL catchup this morning and Dominica worked on apartment hunting.  It’s Sunday so I have to work for three hours in the middle of the day.  Only a few more weeks of that, though.  Hopefully I won’t have scheduled work of that nature once we are in Connecticut, at least not regularly scheduled work requiring every weekend to be scheduled around work.  Life in Connecticut is going to be a lot more busy than here in Texas.  I’ve been really fortunate to have a lot of free time and schedule flexibility for the last six years or so.  That will be mostly going away.  This will be a huge life shift for us.  At least a lot of our favourite places are within easy drives of there.  Like Prince Edward Island, Halifax, Montreal and Bar Harbor.

We are beginning the strategy of figuring out what can be donated from everything in the house.  Time to cull the stuff again.

I watched the kids and worked this afternoon while Dominica went to the salon and out shopping at Target.

I did a lot of cleaning up emails today.  No opportunity to be behind on emails after a few weeks.  I really need to be prepared.

Dominica spent the early evening on a cleaning frenzy around the house.  It is going to take all that we have to get the house ready for when we are ready to move out.  We have no idea when that will be but we are playing with the idea of Dominica and the girls continuing to live here until late October when we go to Spiceworld and then to Disney World.  It seems rather foolish to have them move before then as we would be moving up to Connecticut just in time to immediately leave the new place, completely exhausted, and head out for vacation.  That seems like a bad idea.  It will be too much to do in too short of a time.  It would force us to move sooner than we want to and to make decisions too quickly.  That is, unless we get a beach house that starts right away.  Then everything changes.

Liesl and I played nearly to the end of Ankh 3 tonight.  I think that we will be able to complete it tomorrow.  She is getting better and better at these games.  She can do a lot of parts of the game faster than I can now.  I am constantly amazed by how much of the storyline and events she remembers.

Ciana went to bed at nine after I read her some stories.  Liesl went to bed at ten after a few stories too.  Then pretty much straight to bed for Dominica and I as well.  I did a lot of writing today.  Spiceworks was incredibly slow this weekend, the slowest that I ever remember it being.  There was maybe only three or four posts all weekend.  Normally there is more than that an hour.  Something must be wrong somewhere.

We didn’t watch anything today, a nice change.  The house is looking so much better.  Dominica really put in a lot of work.  The entire house has been mopped.  We are really looking forward to the shipping labels arriving for some large boxes of Microsoft and Lenovo gear that was here on demo and needs to ship out.  It is taking up our entire foyer area and making it hard to get around the house.

Madeline is taking Liesl’s old bed and Liesl’s current black dresser that Dominica painted a few years ago.  At some point we are going to figure out how to get those down to Houston for her.  That will help so that we don’t have to deal with those in the move and Liesl won’t be heart broken that her bed is going away.  She is very sentimental.  And we will be happier too.  That was Liesl’s bed that we bought before she was born and it was always there in the Peekskill house, then Liesl used it in the Tuscan Villas apartment and for the first year at this house.  Then it became Luciana’s bed and she has used it ever since until a few weeks ago.  So it has a lot of sentimental value having been the bed of both of our children.  It’s been with us constantly for nearly five years.

Dominica has been getting bags of stuff ready for donation.  One good thing about each move – we cut down on the amount of stuff that we have more and more.  Tons of clothes getting ready to be donated and a ton of toys will be coming up next.  We aren’t planning on taking much of the furniture with us this time either.  That will help a lot.

I am really happy that SGL has been staying up to date a lot more recently and I have been getting content out for SMB IT Journal recently too.  Not a ton, but some.  I was really overwhelmed with everything going on, work and whatnot, for a while and just could not keep up.  Now I seem to be pretty much on top of it and that always makes me feel a lot better in general.  When I worry that SGL is not updated I start to feel like things are piling up and I have a harder and harder time getting other things accomplished.  Keeping SGL up to date and my mailbox as close to empty as possible are key factors in keeping myself productive and sane.

Tomorrow Dominica goes to work early.  I have to stop by her office at some point during the day to discuss the fact that we are relocating and preparing them for that.  Hopefully that goes well.  What they decide to do about that will have major ramifications on how we are handling the house and lots of other things.  I will be going into the office tomorrow, although I am not sure when and for how long.

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