Sheep Guarding Llama

Somehow, even with only four hours of sleep, I woke up completely on my own at six thirty this morning and Dominica was awake a few minutes later.  We both just got up and started packing up the hotel room.  Since we were awake we might as well get this show on the road.  We had to stop early last night so we have extra miles that we need to cover today.

Dominica and the girls went down to breakfast while I got in the shower since the girls take so long to eat breakfast (or any meal.)  This let us get things done in parallel.  We were fed and on the road nice and early.  Not super early, but we did well and took advantage of our free meal.   Luciana was even happy to eat her scrambled eggs.  That almost never happens.

We were packed up in our little Hyundai and on the road before nine.  It is a long way to go from Bowling Green to Houston.  We really had wanted to be in Nashville or even Alabama before stopping last night but it just did not make any sense.

We had a good drive today.  We made excellent time and the little car did a great job.  The gas mileage on that thing has been excellent, it costs hardly anything to drive across the country with it.  We are easily getting the forty miles to the gallon that they told us that it got.  I’m moving fast, but have the car on Eco mode all of the time.  You really feel the lack of power, but it keeps you from burning fuel accidentally.

We hit essentially zero construction and almost no real traffic the whole way.  We got a little spotty rain here and there but the weather cooperated well for nearly the entire drive as well.  It was a very good day for driving.

We stopped every so often to get coffee at McDonald’s here and there which let us take regular bathroom breaks as well.  I like to get out and stretch so stopped every few hours works out well and keeps the troops pretty happy.  If we do it well, getting coffee and taking bathroom breaks together, we only stop a tiny bit more than doing the drive in a death march fashion but it is so much more comfortable.

We were into Houston around eleven.  We beat the Google Maps estimated time, even with all of our stops.  What a great day!  We even stopped at some point in Mississippi and got Subway for dinner and ate it there, and did this well.

All of the little cousins were awake and came out to great us as we pulled in.  We were exhausted but it took an hour or two for us to spin down and manage to get off to bed.

Are arrival time is perfect, Brittany has been having contractions and might head into the hospital yet tonight, but more likely tomorrow.  So we arrived just in time to get to see the new baby as soon as he decides to grace us with his presence.

It is Saturday and today we are driving from dad’s place in New York as far as we can get towards Texas.   I have been so tired and so short on sleep for the last week that I had to just sleep in this morning as much as I could, which was until around nine thirty, and then I took a long, relaxing shower.  Today is going to be a long day and I am feeling rather tired and run down.

When I was showered, Dominica already had Sharon and Leo’s Malibu all loaded up so that we could set off right away.  I drove all of us, including dad, up to the Rochester airport so that we could get to Enterprise and pick up the rental car.  We accidentally went to the wrong location first and thought that the car was from the location across the street from the airport but it was actually from the airport itself.  So we had to quickly drive back to the airport and get dropped off and deal with it there.  But it was all quick and easy.

We rented a little Hyundai Accent in red.  It fit us pretty easily and drove well.  I am decently happy with this rental and as always Enterprise was great to deal with.

We stopped at McDonald’s before even getting onto the highway to grab breakfast.  Dominica is always impatient and hates not getting right onto the road but this always saves a lot of time and makes everyone happy.  So we did that and got a good start on our drive.

We had a good driving day.  It was after noon, but not quite yet one, when we got onto the road and the weather was perfect and we made great time all the way through Pennsylvania and down through Ohio.  Getting started so late made it a bit tough as we needed to wrap on the day on the early side.  But I felt good and we were making pretty good time all day long.

Luciana was really interested in our travels and asked to be alerted to every new state that we came to.  I found her a kid’s travel atlas of the US states at one of the gas station stops that we came to in Ohio and got it for her.  She liked that a lot and tried to follow along with what state we were in.

Nothing really to report.  Our only “mishap” was missing a detour exist where Interstate 71 goes over the Ohio River in downtown Cincinatti and we had to loop back and take the 471 bridge instead.  We lost about five minutes there, but that was about it.  Not bad at all.

I was feeling good and doing well around midnight, but we looked ahead and the hotels were full in Nashville and it would be far too late if we tried to push on to central Alabama.  So our only good choice was to stop for the night in Bowling Green, Kentucky.  Thankfully the Hampton Inn there had a few rooms left, or at least one, which we got.

It was about two thirty in the morning when I finally managed to drift off to sleep.  All of the driving and caffeine makes it hard to just get to the hotel and pass out.  I did set up my laptop and catch up a little when we got to the hotel.  I’m so happy that this new laptop is really working now.  Today was my first test of it.

Another super busy day for me.  I got up with just a couple hours of sleep and went right down to the office down the street to be able to work.  I needed to be on the phone all morning so this was really the only practical way of handling it.

The whole day ended up being pretty crazy.  I was on the phone for just hours and hours.  And in the early afternoon we had a vendor drive down from Toronto.  We thought that it was going to be a productive day but the vendor ended up just being crazy and the day was essentially wasted, from what we can tell.  We had food brought in from Wegmans, which was nice, though.

I ended up being stuck on the phone for a lot of the day which was a huge pain.  I missed out on a lot of time with people.  But I still got several hours.

Abraham, who had driven down from Toronto, had to leave early, like around six.  And then I drove Tony, who had come up from Jersey City, to the bus station in Rochester at seven so that he could catch the eight o’clock bus back down.  It was a very, very long day for him.

I stopped back at the Ralstons’ on the way home, picked up my laptop and other stuff, got some leftover food to take with us on the drive tomorrow and headed back to the house.  It was around nine when I got home and we immediately got busy watching Back to the Future: Part 3.

To my great surprise, my father has never seen the third episode in the Back to the Future Trilogy!  How this happened, I have no idea.  He saw the first two when they were new but never saw the series completed.  So this was pretty cool that he got to see if for the first time with his granddaughters.  They girls had a great time watching it, too.  They have seen the trilogy before but it was a year or two ago at least and they are young so barely remember it. But they have played through the video game at least twice in the past year so know the characters very well.

This evening I finally got my Linux laptop built!  I had to resort to using Ubuntu 16.04.1 instead of Mint, OpenSuse or Korora but it is working and it is blazing fast.  So much faster than anything that I have ever used.  This blows my $3500 Macbook Pro out of the water, so much faster.  And so much better than even this same machine with Windows 10.  I’ve used Danielle’s Windows 10 monster gaming rig this past week and it wasn’t even faster enough for me to type comfortably on it.  This thing has no delays at all.  I love it already.

Once the movie was over it was right to bed for everyone.  Dad is very worn out from the kids being around (and us, too.)  And I am so far behind on sleep, I was ready to pass out all evening.  I was very happy to get to bed. Tomorrow is going to be a very long day.  Dominica got us a car reserved at Enterprise Rent-a-Car at the Rochester Airport that we need to pick up at noon tomorrow.  Dad is going to ride up with us to get it and drive Sharon and Leo’s car back down afterwards so that we can get right onto the road.

It is Thursday.  Today ended up turning into an “all day on the phone” kind of day.  I tried doing a couple of hours of phone calls from the house this morning, but after a bit it was obvious that the calls were not sounding very good and it was very hard to do anything on them.  So I decided to quickly shower and run down to the office down the street in between two of the calls so that I could make calls from Danielle’s desk, instead.

This worked out much better. I took my new Asus ROG laptop with me and worked on getting Linux installed to it while taking calls all afternoon.  I had no luck getting anything to work on it, though.  I’m getting a bit frustrated.  The laptop works great with Windows but for some reason every Linux distro that I try has all kinds of problems.  I had wanted to get Linux Mint working on it but that does not work at all.  By the end of the day I got OpenSuse half working on it, but only half and that’s not enough.

This evening back at the house we ordered in pizza and mozz sticks and the family watching Back to the Future Part II together while I set up the new laptop and spent hours trying to get things working to no avail.  It was a fun evening, though.  The girls are very into the Back to the Future movies now.  They are really enjoying them.  And Liesl is pretty close to the age that I was when the very first one came out.  I would have been nine.

I slept in very, very late today.   I had to use much of the day to catch up on the sleep that I have been missing the last few days.  Yesterday was just exhausting and I had to sleep till at least noon today to even have a chance at getting back on track.

So today was mostly a lost day.  I got just a little writing and stuff done, but very little.  But I am feeling better with the sleep.

My new Asus Rog laptop has arrived but I need to get Linux installed on it before it is ready for serious use.

This evening we all settled into the basement and watched Back to the Future together.  The girls have both seen it but not for a while.