This morning I had to get up and work. Even when Monday is a holiday it is still the day that I have to submit my hours for the past week both to the office where I work as well as to my consulting firm. If I fail to do it today then it is possible that my paycheck will be missing the hours for this week and I won’t be paid for another two weeks. I don’t get docked or anything but going an extra two weeks without pay is best avoided.
Once I was logged into the office there turned out to be several things that needed my attention. One of the disadvantages of supporting global areas, as in outside of the United States, is that not everyone is aware of our holidays and so most of the people that I support are generally surprised to learn that today is a holiday (Martin Luther King, Jr. Day) so it is important to be online part of the day to let people know that they either need to make alternate accomodations fo rthe day or to just wait until tomorrow and some stuff, being important, gets handled today on the holiday anyway.
After a couple hours of work I was able to join Dominica in some serious house cleaning. The house really needs several bouts of serious house cleaning and it only seems to happen when someone is coming to visit. We are very last minute cleaners. We did manage to do a lot of cleaning before I had to drive down to the train station to pick up Ramona. We made a large dent in the “putting away” of stuff and general cleaning. The kitchen is in the best shape since we first moved in in October.
Overall the cleaning went well and we managed to get most of everything in the main living areas packed up and put away. Quite an accomplishment if you had seen how much stuff we had scattered around the house.
Ramona arrived at Peekskill at 1:48 via the Metro North from Grand Central Terminal. I picked her up and we all hung out for an hour or two. This was her first time meeting Liesl or seeing our new house.
For dinner we went down to the Beach Shopping Center and ate at Pastel’s. After dinner Dominica and Ramona went to CVS to pick up some baby supplies while Liesl and I stopped by GameStop to trade in a used video game that has been kicking around the house: True Crime L.A. We had bought the game a year or two ago for the PS2 simply because it was the only HD game that we could find for the system and wanted to test out the capabilities. Dominica had picked it up for me for just $4.99 used. It wasn’t the type of game that I enjoy and it was purely to test the technical capabilities of the PS2. We tried it. Saw what it could do and neither of us had any interest in playing the game at all. So I was happy to get $1.83 for my trade in. Better than having it go into storage someday for no reason.
We went back to the house and just hung out for the evening talking. We haven’t seen Ramona in months. Ramona had originally needed to get into the city very early tomorrow morning but her early appointment was cancelled so she decided to crash at our place.
We all stayed up way too late. It was around one thirty when we finally turned in for the night and Ramona and I need to be up at six tomorrow morning so that I can drive her to the train station so that she can get to work in the city by eight. I am working starting at six thirty tomorrow morning. So it is going to be a short night.