I woke up early at seven eastern this morning with a sinus infection. Argh. Not the day for this at all. It isn’t a bad sinus infection, just one of those “one day” ones that I sometimes get from using my CPAP. The CPAP dried out, I believe, which causes sinus irritation so that I most likely the cause of it. At least it caused me to get up bright and early and get a start on my crazily busy day. There is so much to do that I do not even know where to begin.
I checked in on some DVD archiving work going on upstairs. The one laptop is moving about 450GB of archived data over to an external drive. I had kicked that off last night before going to bed because the local drive had run out of space and it needs working room in order to continue. When I checked in this morning there was six hours remaining on the transfer! The original 2TB external drive that we bought for this filled up to capacity this morning. So I am down to just the one external and the small, local drives from here on out. I timed that pretty closely, if I do say so myself. I should have very, very close to exactly 4TB heading down to Texas when all is said and done.
I took a shower hoping that that would help with my sinus infection. It did a tiny bit but not very much. That is going to make for a very long day all by itself.
I checked in with work but I did not have any eight o’clock work scheduled today and my nine o’clock work was pushed off until ten. Not a good day for getting a late start but there is so much to do that I am not sure how I would have actually have gotten out of here any earlier anyway.
I got the two servers unmounted and loaded into the Mazda. That was the first packing task. Those are going on past Peekskill and will be heading down to Philly where Brian will be setting them up in the lab that is located there. Dad is very happy to finally have them out of his house. They have been running here for years now.
For lunch, dad and I decided to get pizza from Papa Roni’s, the new place in Pavilion that replaced Davis’ Farm Market that was our mainstay of pizza for decades. I am interested to see how Papa Roni’s compares to Davis’ long standing tradition of pizza.
The pizza turned out to be really good. Not quite up to the memory of Davis’ Farm Market but still the best pizza in the area that I have had. Their menu has expanded a bit since dad last ate there too and he picked up a menu so we will be using them more often in the future. They also deliver. We are not sure if they would deliver way out to dad or not. It would be amazing if they did. No one, and I mean no one, has ever delivered there.
Growing up in a world without cable television (it did not exist in our county) and without food delivery of any kind whatsoever really made my childhood experience a lot different than what a lot of people think of of the ’80s. I was really basically unaware of cable television until after I was in college and I had no idea that normal people could get food delivered to their house for a very long time. What a crazy, foreign concept!
I’ve done so many DVD archiving procedures that the DVD drive on the oldest of the laptops gave out on me! I’ve put years of wear and tear on these machines in the last two weeks. I had to borrow dad’s external USB DVD drive to attach to that laptop so that it could continue working. Once I switched to that I probably got a 25% increase in speed or possibly more on that old laptop. I wish that I had been using that all along.
Since I am stuck waiting for stuff at the office all day I am taking advantage of the time to attempt to go through more stuff at dad’s and try to get as much stuff ready for recycling or donation as possible. I eliminated one entire plastic bin right away which was very handy since I need a few bins down in Peekskill to use to cart away any loose items that I come across tonight.
I spoke to our soon to be, we hope, renters down in Peekskill and we arranged to meet tomorrow at noon at the apartment. I am very glad that we will be meeting them in person. That just seems like a wise move.
Dominica went to GameStop and bought Lego Harry Potter for the PS3. This is the first of two Lego Harry Potter titles expected. This game covers the first four years. She really enjoyed the other Lego games on the XBOX 360 and has been looking forward to this one.
Speaking of video games, while exploring in the barn trying to clean up our mess I found the box of my original, first generation Sony Playstation and my Super Nintendo Entertainment System – the first video game system (other than my handheld GameBoy) that I ever purchased with my own money.
The Playstation has no sentimental attachment for me. It was a system that I lent Mark the money to buy and he never paid me for it so it defaulted to being my system. I was never very happy about that. There were no games that I was really wanting to play on it at the time so it was a big waste of money for me back around 1997 when I got saddled with it. Josh, Eric, Andy and I did use it a bit at the house in Greece at Greenleaf Meadows and I did end up getting some classic titles for it like Final Fantasy VII, Parasite Eve and Suikoden but mostly it languished on top of the nightstand going months without even being remembered.
The Super Nintendo, on the other hand, has a lot of sentimental value. I bought it at the old Walmart in Geneseo when the Super Mario All Stars pack came out. I had earned the money for it myself at my job and I bought it and just showed up with it one day. It would have been December of 1993 as that is when that pack with Super Mario All Stars and Super Mario World together with the SNES console was released. That is the console that just six months later I took to Michigan with me when I started college.
But I know that these are not items that I should keep any longer. I should have given them away years ago when they had more value. So they are off to the Leicester Rummage Sale now.
Altogether today I managed to eliminate seven bins from our storage! That is practically an entire car load worth of stuff that now does not need to be transported or stored any longer.
What a dent has been made in the barn storage! I can see real progress now. We are hopeful that the next time that we drive to dad’s that we will have a large vehicle, perhaps a GMC Acadia which we really want to get, and will be able to pick up a number of bins to cart back to Texas. A couple good trips like that and the bulk of the stuff might be shifted.
My goal was to leave at seven thirty but there was just one final DVD to finish and I wanted to take a shower because my sinuses were so bad today so I pushed off my leaving time just a little bit. The car was loaded and ready to hit the road right away.
As I need to finish packing the car and get the finishing touches on everything so that I can leave I am going to sign off and post while still at dad’s house in Pavilion. If all goes according to schedule I will arrive in Peekskill at roughly one in the morning. The Toccos are expected to arrive at the house between eleven and twelve tomorrow to deliver a piece of Francesca’s furniture that needs to get on to our moving truck with our stuff so that it can make it down to Texas finally.
It will be unlikely that I will be online tomorrow at all. Once the work in Peekskill is done I have to drive to Philadelphia and pick up Brian and then we will drive together down to Arnold, Maryland. We are crashing at John’s house on Sunday and Monday nights. If all goes well, I will be home in Las Colinas on Wednesday morning.