Sheep Guarding Llama

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.

The alarm was set for three but I was already awake without it this morning.  The girls slept upstairs in their tent last night and Dominica slept in the guest room in the basement so that I would not wake her up when I got up this morning.  I probably got at least two hours of sleep last night, it is hard to say. But regardless, I am pretty tired today.

I was ready in no time and was outside waiting for Danielle and her mom to pick me up well before three thirty.

We were on the road very early.  It is a long drive to Manhattan from dad’s place.  We went south down Interstate 390 and across Interstate 86 in the Southern Tier.  We stopped for coffee several hours into the trip as we had forgotten that nothing was going to be open for a very long time.

It was still decently early when we got to the Croton Harmon train station.  It is always weird to me that we use this train station even when coming from so far away because this station is close enough to our house in Peekskill that I have walked home from it before.  It’s almost like being home, but not nearly close enough to really feel like we are at the house.   And we have lived in that house so little (less than two years total, split up between two separate times spread out over a six year window) that it never feels quite like home.  But in some ways, it does have a home feel to it.  That house has been ours for eight years now, so there is always this small attachment to the area in a strange way.  But never enough to not feel like strangers.

We had no problem catching the morning train into the city.  It’s an easy ride.  And one that we just did, or at least I did, a month ago with the family for our bus tour day.  Odd that I am doing two marathon day trips to Manhattan so close together.

We got to Grand Central Terminal and split ways.  Danielle and her mom had some family stuff to do this morning.  I went straight to the AetherStore offices and set up shop there doing some writing and then hanging out and catching up with everyone. It was a busy day as I’ve not seen most of everyone for about a year.

It was a pretty relaxing morning, I got a bit of time at my own desk before Rob and I went out for lunch and spent the rest of the afternoon working.  Danielle and Shannon had a lunch meeting in the same restaurant and I did not even know.

Rob and I hit a liquor store on the way back to the office and got back just in time for the very small and very casual MangoLassi impromptu Manhattan Meetup this evening.  Only four people showed up, but we made new friends and had a nice time hanging out.  Technically there were more like eight or nine people, as AetherStore provided quite a few. We had pizza as well, all at their offices.

We had to leave on the early side, around eight, to get back to the train station and get the train back to Croton Harmon so that we could drive the very, very long drive back to dad’s place.  Danielle’s mom was staying for the week in Brooklyn so did not ride back with us.  It was just Danielle driving and me riding for the tiring ride back home.

It was after three in the morning when Danielle dropped me off.  And it was right off to bed for me.