Sheep Guarding Llama

Wednesday. I had to be up very early this morning, about five thirty.  Showered and was ready for Danielle to pick me up at six.  We are driving down to Delhi, New York to meet with a customer down there for an engineering team meeting that is done once or twice a year.  This is my first time meeting this client and should be actually rather fun.

It is a three to four hour drive to get down there, but we had good weather and an easy drive.  Especially easy for me as I did not have to drive, which is great.  Danielle is one of the few people that I get to ride with instead of having to be the driver.

We had McDonald’s from Dansville on the road.  We took some backroads to get to Delhi and made it just in time for the morning engineering meeting.  Our meeting went really well, it was great for everyone involved.  One of those meetings where meeting in person definitely makes things better for everyone.  Especially for me as this gave me a chance to get to know people I’ve been working with for years much better.  That always makes future work a lot more smooth.

We were given an office to work in after the meeting, but we ended up having far less to do than we had anticipated.

So my big, shocking news for the day is that I’m no longer on Spiceworks, which is interesting as I’ve barely been on for a week or more anyway.  So I will be starting March fresh, with no SW to do.  This is going to change my daily schedule rather significantly.  I’m not happy about the drama, but I am thrilled to not be a part of it anymore.  As many friends and Dominica have said, I’ve gotten addicted to trying to help people and have put up with the terrible platform and all kinds of childish drama for years because it allowed me to be helpful.  Now I can not help people and it is not my fault that they do not get help and I don’t have to feel badly in the least about it.  So in many ways, an awesome situation.

For lunch today, Danielle and I met up with Chad in downtown Delhi.  I’ve known Chad for years from MangoLassi, but have never met in person.  He is the person who posts the most that I’ve never met in real life.  Danielle has known in in real life for years, though.

Lunch was great.  Delhi is a really cute little town.  But the Internet is terrible here so having a business here is pretty bad.

We had planned on being in Delhi all day and leaving tonight.  We didn’t have to, though, and were able to get on the road back to dad’s at one and were home by late afternoon.  Very nice.

Tuesday. We started the day with packing up the family into the Qwest, driving down to Leicester to meet up with Aunt Sharon and Uncle Leo, and driving down to Short Track in Allegheny County to go to the Cartwright’s Maple Tree Inn, the famous destination for real maple and buckwheat pancakes.

We arrived around eleven and the line was insane.  They can seat a crazy number of people in the Inn so they moved decently quickly but we were not expected this number of people this morning.  Of course, later today I would find out that today is National Pancake Day, so maybe that influenced the lines in some way.  Although I rather doubt that anyone else knew that it was National Pancake Day, either.

The food was great.  The kids were not that into it, though.  They like more modern pancakes not the buckwheat kind.  I prefer these classics, personally, and had quite a few.

It was a long drive home and we had to rush because I had a meeting with Max to discuss the presentation that I will be making in California next week.  It seems like a long way away, ten days at least, but we have so much to do between now and then that there really isn’t any free time for me to be working on a presentation before then.  As it is, we are going to be rushing to get back to Texas in order for me to make my flight out to California!

Tonight, Dominica made a tuna casserole and to make Liesl happy we all moved into the basement while we had dinner and watched The Emoji Movie which was awful, just like everyone has been saying that it was.  It was bearable, but not good.  It made her very happy for us to all watch it with her, though.  She’s seen it a few times already, since it is on Netflix, but she really likes sharing movies with us as a family.

Monday. I started my day by installing PC Linux OS, which I have never used before.  Testing for SodiumSuite has me working with so many OS variations that I have never touched before.  I’m getting quite the survey of the market, for sure.

I started using MongoDB Compass today and absolutely love it.  What a great tool for those of us that have to work with MongoDB all of the time.  This is going to make my life so much easier.

This afternoon the girls wanted to eat at Denny’s in Geneseo and there were some errands to run.  So dad and Dominica dropped me off at Tim Horton’s in front of Walmart and I got on the wifi and worked from there with some coffee while they did some shopping.  When they were all done, maybe after an hour or so, they picked me up and we all went over to Denny’s.

This evening, back at dad’s, we watched Table 19, which was pretty decent.

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!