December 12, 2014: New Stove

I was pretty tired this morning, only three hours of sleep last night, but I had to be up at eight so that Art and I could unload the oven from the back of the van and get the van returned to the UHaul place in Mohegan Lake before nine.  Even if we did not have to get the van returned that early Dominica and Danielle want to go up to Wappinger’s Falls to do some shopping and need to be there at ten thirty so we needed to get moving just to get back in time to watch the kids so that they could go.

Unloading the stove was quick and easy.  We just carried it into the house and then took the van back.  I really like the new UHaul place that we are using now.  They were really friendly and the whole thing, which was nearly 700 miles of driving, was only $275.  That was an amazing price with all of that mileage.  I am very glad that we did that trip, it was well worth it.  Although I wonder how much the cost of that trip was something that Dominica calculated into the cost of the acquiring the stove in the first place.

On the way back to the house, Art and I stopped at Dunkin Donuts and picked up breakfast for Art, Dominica and me.  Danielle cannot eat anything from there so there was nothing to be done about her.  She will eat later.

We got to the house just in time for Dominica to eat and for her and Danielle to get on the road.  Wappinger’s Falls is a good forty five minute drive away so they had to get moving.

Art spent an hour or so taking out the old stove and installing the new one.  That went really smoothly.  The kitchen looks to be greatly upgraded now.  The new stove looks much better.  It is new, modern and stainless steel rather than the old all white one that was probably original with the house.  And the new one works too.  It is also a double oven.  One small oven and one large one.  Very handy.  That is a really nice feature.  We are very thankful to have that all installed and Dominica  is going to get the old one listed on Freecycle later today in the hopes that someone will want it soon.

Art also worked on the basement stairs that broke on us the other day.  That did not take too long.  It turned out that it just needed some screws put in and everything put back together.  Fifteen minutes and it was better than new. Much more solid.  We were afraid that we were going to have to replace the whole thing which would have been awful given the tight time frame that we have to deal with things like that right now.

After Dominica and Danielle returned to the house we pretty much got them straight out the door and down to the Peekskill train station.  I dropped them off so that they could get into Manhattan on the early side, get to their hotel and have time to eat and relax before needing to go into the office there and work all evening.  Their plan is to work a lot this evening and a bit tomorrow and only a tiny bit on Sunday morning which should be mostly a simple checkout and then have time to relax on Sunday.  We will see them back at the house on Monday.

I finally got work this afternoon about my interview that I just had in Seattle.  It is bad news, they have decided that they don’t have a position open for my skill set right at the moment.  But the good news was that I passed all of the interview rounds and that they really liked me and are definitely interested in hiring me, just not right at the moment.  They will call me if one of the slots on the team opens up and they are going to look around the company to see if there is another position somewhere for me.  So it is unfortunate that there is not a job for me there right now, but it is very encouraging that I passed through a very rigorous interview process and have them as an open option in the future and now, having gone through that process, it should be much easier for me to look at positions there down the road.

I got my interview in California scheduled.  We were trying to schedule something for Tuesday but, late in the evening, we ended up getting it scheduled for Monday morning.  So this evening was spent rapidly putting together travel plans so that I can head out to San Francisco on Sunday!  Very short notice.  There is a lot going on.  This is great, though, because I will be back for Tuesday and we have nothing blocking us from getting down to Texas for the holidays.  We have been worried about when we were going to be able to schedule getting down there and did not want to cut it too closely.  This will allow us to get there at a relaxed pace, we need to hit Rochester and Canton on the way, and still get there with a lot of time to spend with the family.  Dominica’s parents are heading down there tomorrow by plane.  We will be driving, though.

We did a little relaxing this evening, which is hard to do with so much going on.  It was rather late by the time that we had everything worked out so not much time to spend preparing for the interview process itself.  I will be spending tomorrow doing that instead of today.  I have nothing else on the schedule for tomorrow so, in theory, I will be able to focus on that for the entire day which is good because after tomorrow I am doing nothing but traveling for pretty much an entire week which is pretty crazy.

I am exhausted just thinking about all of the things that we have going on in the very near future.  The really good news about the interview schedule is that if it was on Tuesday we should have gotten feedback on it by Thursday.  But as it is Monday there is a good chance that we will know things and be able to do a little more planning by Tuesday night!