December 13, 2014: Travel Prep Day

Today turned into a “panic” prep day for my interview in California tomorrow.  Originally we had been thinking that there would be a few days before I was going to go out there but at the last minute last evening they were able to schedule me for Monday morning which means that I need to fly out tomorrow morning so today is my only day to get everything ready to go now.

I slept in a little and got to get well rested.  I spent the first part of the day, till about two or three o’clock, with the girls allowed in the room with me.  They were mostly good and just played quietly, more or less, on their own.  I managed to do a little bit of prep work this morning, mostly working on my Python skills.  More than anything else just doing Python stuff to make sure that all of it stays current because I have to do so much of it under pressure on Monday again but I do so little of it in general.  Just keeping it all fresh is the most important thing.

By mid afternoon I ended up getting dragged into a support call with Art and Joe who are doing stuff in Manhattan.  I ended up putting in a couple of hours helping them out with what they were working on.

After that disruption I had to “lock myself in” so that I could work in the bedroom alone for most of the evening.

We got some new video games today in all of the sales.  I got the Prince of Persia series that Liesl asked for.  I got the first eight (out of nine) Leisure Suit Larry games for Dominica, which she has been wanting.  And I got Neverwinter Nights 2 for myself.  We also got the PC version of Dragon Age II so that Dominica can start playing that on her laptop.  We are planning on packing up the PS3 relatively soon and it would be annoying for her to start playing Dragon Age II on there and then have it unavailable for an indefinite amount of time.  So we bought the PC version and she was downloading that for much of the day.  She has been wanting to play that for a long time.  Dragon Age Origins is her favourite video game of all time so it is pretty surprising that she has never played the sequel which we have owned since it originally released around 2011.

By evening Dominica had DA2 downloaded and was playing it on her 4K resolution laptop which really pushes the game.  It runs okay but she has to turn all of the settings all of the way down and it is still a little jerky.  I am looking forward to playing it again once I have a real gaming machine on which to play it.  I want to play through Dragon Age Origins and Dragon Age II completely on the new rig before looking into getting Dragon Age Inquisition sometime next year when the prices come down.  I figure that it will take me long enough to work through the two games (it is probably 150 hours of gaming in there) that there is plenty of time for the price to drop.  I am attempting to read the Dragon Age novels before then too so that I am completely up to date.  I learned what a good idea that that was from reading the Mass Effect novels in conjunction with playing those titles.

We managed to get everyone off to bed at a reasonable time.  We have an early start tomorrow and the girls are not known for wanting to get up early in the morning so we want them to get as much sleep as possible so that they are not too grumpy when we have to head off to the airport.

Dominica got me all packed for tomorrow.  We should be able to pretty much just get up and go.  I made a trip up to the attic and got down a ton of empty, collapsed boxes for her to assemble and start packing while I am gone.  We are thinking that we might begin our trek towards Texas as early as Tuesday evening after I return from California, nap and am ready to get into the car.  It is going to be one long, crazy week.  I might end up doing a continuous week of travel after having just done the crazy traveling the last two days!!