Sheep Guarding Llama

It is Sunday and today I turned forty two years old.  I am now old enough to buy alcohol, twice, in the US.  Or, to look at it another way, as of today I have been able to legally buy alcohol for the majority of my life.

Paula, in Romania, wins the “first person to wish me a happy birthday” award today.  I got up around nine this morning.  I was supposed to have a call this morning, but it did not end up happening all day.  So much for getting important work done.

It was a very quiet birthday.  I went to come upstairs after waking up, but the girls had already woken up, probably around eight, and were putting together a birthday surprise for me in the living room so I had to stay downstairs for a while.  So while I was up before Dominica, she ended up getting to go upstairs a bit before me.

My girls (with dad’s help) blew up loads of balloons and had them ready to go in the living room and they both made me birthday cards, too.  Both of them drew foxes on my cards as well.  They are so sweet.  As soon as I came upstairs they cheered and kicked balloons all over.

We decided to stay in and not to go anywhere today.  We are all feeling pretty tired and looking forward to just having time to relax at the house.  The girls have been pent up for a while and are ready to really play.

I set up the Dell laptop in the kitchen and got a lot of work done today.  Lots of posting on MangoLassi, tons of code review done on SodiumSuite, a little blogging, etc.  I actually had quite a busy work day, just all background stuff.  This is the most code that I have looked at in years, I would guess.  I did tons and tons of SaltStack work on MacOS.  I think that at this point I have a working installer which is pretty amazing as it appears to be the only working MacOS SaltStack installer working out there for the current version of MacOS, from what I can tell.

I still had a bad cough today.  I’m feeling pretty congested, but I can’t tell if it is really that I was sick or if I just got this congestion started and now here it is.

Dad played with the girls for most of the day.  For my birthday dinner dad made grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup.  We actually skipped breakfast and lunch today.  Probably for the best as we have been eating way too much all week.

We dug out my childhood guitar today.  I have probably not seen that guitar for a good thirty years or more.  I got the guitar when I was seven for my first guitar lessons with Ralph.  I only used it for a few years before moving up to a full sized acoustic and a full sized electric.  I’m sure that I used it once or twice after that, but that would have been it.  It is hard to believe that it has been out of its case since I was about twelve and that would be exactly thirty years ago!  Amazingly it was still in good shape and nearly in tune!  I have no idea how it has held on to its tuning for this long.

Liesl was so excited about us finding the guitar today.  She is going to be playing with that every day now.  We need to find her YouTube videos to get her learning how to play.  She has been wanting to play the guitar for so long and she has been playing with her Ukulele quite a bit that she got for Christmas.

We did a quick search and have no idea where my full size electric or acoustic guitars have gone.  My Epiphone electric, that I got from Buzzo’s in Geneseo long ago, may have gone to Jeremy a few decades ago.  My acoustic, I have no idea where it is.  I did find my professional classical guitar in the basement and my good Fender bass is down there, too.  So my two professional guitars and my childhood guitar are all located.  Just the two more standard entry level full size ones are not to be found.

It was chilly, but not freezing, and heavy wind today.  So we really avoided going outside.

We got the girls to take a shower just before midnight.  Liesl managed to fall asleep a little after one, not too bad.  Luciana was still up after three, which I knew because I was still awake working at that point.

We are not sure when we are heading back to Texas, yet.  Maybe a week from tomorrow.  On this Wednesday Danielle and I are driving down to Delhi, New York to work for the day.  I have not been down there yet, but have been to Oneonta long ago.  Other than that I anticipate that this is going to be a very busy week of working from dad’s house.  There is so much to be done between banking, preparing for the trip to California, dealing with the new work in Atlanta, hopefully dealing with new contract stuff that didn’t get a chance to happen today, seeing family, etc.  We are going down to ShortTrack to go to the Pancake House there with Aunt Sharon and Uncle Leo on Tuesday morning, too.

Tomorrow Dominica and I need to go down to the barn and start in on the process of going through the storage unit.  We will be loading up the Nissan as always, trying to squeeze as much into it as possible to get our stuff down to Texas.  We will be working on that all week, there is still just so much stuff in there to be going through.  We are never going to get through all of it.

And that is the story of my forty second birthday.

Saturday. We were not in any big rush to get out the door this morning.  I woke up around eight and took my time showering and getting ready.  The family was very tired and enjoying our night at the comfortable Hilton Garden Inn in West Virginia.  So it was after nine when I got Dominica up and we got the room packed and the kids ready.

It was overcast and raining when we set off, but not raining hard.  We grabbed Taco Bell before we left the town that we stayed in overnight and we were on the road north.

We made good time today, it is only about six hours from northern West Virginia to my dad’s place.  It was roughly ten in the morning when we were really on the road and we expected to arrive at about four in the afternoon.  An easy day.

We made it home in the middle of the afternoon.  Glad for an easy drive.  The girls were so excited to get home to grandpa’s house.

We ordered in pizza from Papa Roni’s, of course.  Always the first meal that we are looking forward to when we get back home to New York!

Friday. This is our last day in Norcross, for now at least.  It’s been a very good two weeks here, we are very thankful that we came.  And we are super grateful to the awesome Hilton Hometown Suites that has been taking care of us for the last two weeks.

I felt awful this morning, really sick.  This isn’t good at all.  I was feeling terrible since late last night.  We have no idea what it is.

I got up and went into the office “early” this morning, Dominica worked on getting the girls up and the hotel room packed up.  Most of the packing was done last night and the Quest is already mostly filled.  Only the small stuff that needs to go in the final load still remains in our hotel room(s).

We had a good day in the office.  Wrapping up whatever we could.

At one I left the office and swung over to the hotel, picked up Dominica and the girls, checked out and took them over to the office where they had some room to hang out and we wanted to take a moment for Dominica to get to meet everyone.  So once there, I took Dominica and the girls upstairs and gave them the grand tour and introduced them to everyone in the office.

We were able to get everything done and in the car and on the road by three, which worked out perfectly.  We beat rush hour traffic out of town as we headed east towards Anderson, South Carolina to get to to I85 and head north.  Our plan is to go through South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia and then got west up through West Virginia and through Pittsburgh and up to Erie.

The drive went well and thankfully about an hour outside of Atlanta I suddenly cleared up and felt fine.  Likely it was just allergies.  So the drive was not bad.

We had a good night of driving and made good time.  It was farther than we had been anticipating, though, and decided when we entered West Virginia that we would just book a hotel for the night before it got too late and got hard to do.  We found a low cost Hilton Garden Inn up north about an hour south of the Pennsylvania border and booked that and just pushed through to get there around two in the morning.  That worked out really well.

So we have a nice hotel room tonight and are getting extra Hilton Honors Points (we got a lot the last two weeks) and will be all refreshed and will be able to easily get on the road in the morning to finish the drive up to dad’s.

Thursday.  This is our last full day working here in Norcross, Georgia.  Tomorrow we start driving to New York.

Early morning in the office again today.  Another good day.  We ended a little on the early side, today.

I got home and we went down to the Happy Hour in the lobby for a while.  I had a snack and a glass of wine.  Some friends are coming up to visit tonight, so Dominica and the kids are just having a night in while we go out in downtown Norcross.

Around six or seven, Brant and Mark arrived.  They had a few hour drive to get to me.  We got into Brant’s car and drove to “downtown” historic Norcross and went out for dinner at Zapatos, a little Mexico bistro there on the “square” near the train depot.  I just had one beer, a Pacifico, tonight and we all got dinner.  I went for the fish tacos and they were amazing, some of the best, if not the best, fish tacos that I can remember having.  Unbelievably good.

We had a good time hanging out, but could not stay out late as the guys had a couple of hours to drive home yet.  So about ten they dropped me off at the hotel and stopped in for a few minutes to meet Dominica and the girls.  Brant is one of the most active people on MangoLassi, second most in fact, that I’ve never met in real life before.  Many other people from the community have met him, but not me.  I’ve not met Mark before, either, but he is not nearly as active so it is not as surprising.  The ML community is starting to have that “everyone knows each other” effect that happens in communities like this.

After they guys left, I watched some Death in Paradise with Dominica.  After maybe thirty minutes of sitting on the couch, I had an incredibly suddenly and insanely acute scratching throat and inability to stop coughing.  It was horrible.  It just hit me like a truck.  We were just sitting there watching a show and a moment later I was having what I can only imagine was an allergy attack.  Super scratchy throat, air constricted, swelling glands, unstoppable cough.  I mean really, really bad.  And it went on all night.

We have no idea what happened but are pretty concerned about it.  It could be the flu, but what flu comes on like this.

This evening we packed up the hotel and got most everything loaded into the car and ready for tomorrow.  We check out in the morning and drive to New York tomorrow evening.

Wednesday. Our time in Norcross is going by pretty quickly.  Originally spending two weeks here felt like it was going to be a really long time, but in reality it is flying by like nothing.  The hotel has been so nice and comfortable that we haven’t noticed at all that we are “stuck” living in it.  It’s like just another place among our journeys, now.  The girls have really settled into the hotel and are enjoying it.  They really like their room and space, how it is separated from ours.

I had breakfast at the hotel, like usual, before going into the office. Breakfast: Swiss and chive scrambled eggs, rosemary potatoes and apple turnover.

Another good day in the office.  For lunch today, it was salmon in a cream sauce, very delicious.

Dinner was just whatever was available on happy hour in the hotel.  They put on a good spread considering that it is free.  Staying at the Homewood Suites means that we have seven breakfasts, four dinners (Monday through Thursday), all of our coffee, and all of our wine handled each week.  That adds up and shows a lot of value in staying here.  Figure breakfast is worth four dollars, dinner five, coffee another two, and wine another two and that comes out to thirteen dollars, per day, of food value alone from the hotel.  And that’s being pretty conservative.  Even if we were making Keurig coffee, the coffee we drink would cost more than two dollars a day.  And even drinking cheap Aldi box wine, the wine we drink would be more than two dollars a day.  And the thirteen dollars is really more appropriate as a per person cost.  When you consider that it is a family of four and that eleven meals a week turns into forty-four meals a week that are included with our hotel room costs!  So figure that a far more realistic food value of twenty to thirty five dollars is what it should be, and then consider that our hotel is only one hundred and eleven dollars, and it is really obvious that it is a really good deal!

We have been hearing terrible stories of the amount of rain that has been coming down in Dallas the past few days and are really worried about the state of our house there.  No one nearby has a key.  We have people with keys, and people near the house that are willing to go check on it for us, but no way to put the two groups of people together, which is a pretty major problem.  The rain has been intense, we are told, and we can only expect that the house has flooded.  We can check our Ecobee and see from that that the house is warm, the power, and the Internet are both on.  So at least we know that it has not flooded to the point of shorting out the electric, or that a fire has not burned down the house.  But that is about it, I’m afraid.  We are pretty much in the dark.

High on my priority list, I think, for the house now is to install a security camera system of some sort so that we have some means of monitoring the house when we are not around. Even something really simple would have been really important this week.

We watched some more of MacGyver in the hotel.  Such a good, classic show.