Up at six thirty this morning. Way too early. It was just after midnight when I got off to bed last night and Liesl was pretty restless again making us wake up several times before eventually bringing her in to bed with us around two thirty. She then tossed and turned violently until three thirty so we were awake all of that time. She has been having problems sleeping for the last several nights and we are getting pretty tired.
Dad got up at six thirty when I went down to the office to work, as would be expected since he sleeps in the basement. Dominica slept in until seven thirty.
This morning dad’s car was finally unloaded. There were several small items, many of which will just go into storage here rather than at his house – maybe we should reconsider owning all of this stuff? The big items that arrived in this trip include the four foot desk that Dominica is using. This doubles her deskspace in the basement. Now she has a lot of room to work. And it includes a five foot desk peninsula unit that is added to my two desks adding just over fifty percent more desk to my area. And the last big item is the baker’s rack which is going to go into the utility closet in the basement and will finally allow us to move all of the equipment sprawled out all over the floor in the basement into the utility room and get this basement cleaned up. It will also allow us to actually hook up some of this stuff and really use it too.
Dad put the desks together and we moved them into position including moving Dominica’s desk to its final position nearer to the closet under the stairs. Now the big job that Dominica and I really need to finish is getting all of the cabling run around the basement. We have been avoiding that all of this time because the desks were not here yet nor was the rack so we did not have a need for them yet. Now we can use the cables and put them into cable channels and get this basement looking nice. We have some work to do.
I worked until noon then we all went to Pastel’s for lunch before dad needed to get on the road back home. We all opted for a late breakfast. Liesl had a great time watching everyone in the restaurant. She loves getting to go out to eat, especially at Pastel’s where she is most familiar with her surroundings and is starting to recognize people.
After lunch dad hit the road to drive back to Pavilion and I went back down to the basement to get back to work.
I worked until about five thirty. Then Dominica, Liesl and I drove out to the Beach Shopping Center to look at some tiles from the tile store there. We arrived and, of course, like all local businesses in Westchester, they were not open at a time that anyone with a normal, daytime job could get to them. It’s like they snub the normal, working folk who are their neighbours. We stopped into GameStop and picked up a used remote control for our XBOX 360 now that we are using it to view NetFlix and Hulu content from PlayOn.
We drove out to Mohegan Lake to see the tile store there since our local one in Peekskill was closed. We got all of the way out there and found that the store there was closed as well. Seriously? If I wasn’t off of work early because of working the early shift today I would still be working for another hour. These stores not only don’t have any hours to provide service to working people but they do not even bother to work a full day! No one can say that we didn’t make an attempt at supporting our local businesses. We are very big on using local businesses over big national chains whenever possible but there is a reason why those big national chains get so much business – customer service. People like to think that the little local businesses are the ones with the good customer service but generally that is not the case and in this case it is pretty dramatic. We drove over to Home Depot where, of course, they were open and someone immediately helped us look at tiles. Those rich, local business owners couldn’t be bothered to show us their wares so the friendly staff at Home Depot came to the rescue. I’m sure that Home Depot is much cheaper anyway.
We picked up a tile sample and got a few odds and ends that we needed. We are looking at tile with which to replace the ugly blue tiling around the fireplace. It was bad before and now with the new colour on the walls it would be really nice to get something matching for the fireplace. Then we drove back to the Beach Shopping Center – we could have saved a lot of driving and wasted fuel had we just shopped at Home Depot in the beginning – and picked up dinner from Subway and ran into Stop and Shop to get their awesome, single serving cakes for dessert. We went home to eat while we watched some of The Wizards of Waverly Place.
Dad got home around seven thirty. His drive went pretty smoothly.
Liesl fell asleep in my arms while we were watching Waverly. She is really exhausted having gotten almost no sleep for the last several days. We are thinking that she might be teething and not able to relax because of that. So we gave her some Tylenol before falling asleep tonight and will see if that helps any. She needs to get some sleep.
We turned in early as we were both tired. I have to work early again tomorrow. It was probably around ten or ten thirty when we shut everything down for the night.
Hopefully tomorrow I will be able to get some pictures of the living room to post.