Sheep Guarding Llama

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.

Tuesday.  Breakfast in the hotel, then into the office.

Dad found this old picture of me and my Mazda RX-7 taken in East Canton, Ohio at grandma’s house in 2002.  This would have been when grandma and grandpa were both alive, as was mom.  And Dominica and I were dating at the time.  This would have been about one year into dating, and a year until we got married.  This is the car that I bought and took Dominica out for our very first date in.  I believe that this was likely the only time that I ever drove the car out to Ohio, but I’m sure that that is all well recorded in SGL.

I did a Dragonfly BSD install today.  Trying to get that working with SodiumSuite.  That’s going to be a bit of a challenge.

Good and quiet day in the office.

This evening, the girls both drew pictures of penguins to commemorate having gone to the aquarium this past weekend.

The girls requested Domino’s Pizza this evening.  We gave in and ordered that from right across the street and ate dinner while watching MacGyver.  We just found that on Amazon Prime.  I remember it like it was yesterday, each episode is completely familiar and I know exactly what is going to happen.  Dominica remembers the show but does not remember the episodes.  I’m sure I’ve not seen it at all since the original re-runs were on the mid-1980s.  Amazing how it feels so familiar being so old now.  It definitely looks dated, though.

Monday. So starts the second week here in Norcross, Georgia.

Had a good day in the office.  Nothing much to say about work.  We have busy days, that’s why I am here.  Things are going well.  Every day is about the same, get breakfast in the hotel, grab a coffee to go, drive ten minutes into the office just two blocks away (traffic here is insanely bad), and the time in the office is fun.  Good people, good work to be done, good progress on everything.  It’s going very well.

Today for lunch it was shrimp po’ boys ordered in.  It was very good.

Back at the hotel it was time for happy hour with our snacks and wine.  Then this evening Dominica and I watched Death in Paradise, we are on season four now and don’t like the new cast nearly as much as the old, but the show is still quite good.  And the girls requested that we get Chinese food.  We found some delivery and had that sent round.