Sheep Guarding Llama

This is our first day out at dad’s place with the whole family.  It is a Friday so I am at the kitchen table set up with the laptop trying to keep up with posting and writing and all of that kind of stuff while dad is getting worn out from Liesl and Luciana wanting to play with him all day.

I only got three and a half hours of sleep last night, unfortunately.

This morning Dominica and I had to take Liesl back to the dentist for her first round of getting her cavities filled and her molars sealed.  Dominica needed to see the dentist, too, so they went at the same time and I stayed with Liesl while they did her fillings.

Liesl did great at the dentist and never squirmed or anything even when they did fillings without any pain killers at all!  She is such the trooper!

After the dentist trip in Herkimer, we went back to the house, packed up the car, got Luciana and drove out to dad’s place.  This is the first time for the girls to see him since Christmas in Galveston.

It was fairly late when we got out there.  The girls were very excited, though.

I set up dad’s new Ubiquiti EdgeRouter X when we arrived.  His internet access is a little better now.

After the long, busy weekend and the busy trip to New York City yesterday, today is a day to recover and relax.  We have been so busy all weekend.  Today we just hung around in Frankfort and recovered.  Lots of sleep.

I ended up working on building, or setting up at least, a VyOS router today.  That ended up being a full day project and I was working on it until five in the morning!  Today ended up being pretty busy.  But it was just me sitting in the kitchen at the table all day dealing with VyOS.

Major work accomplished, though, and I am very happy that I have the things working that I needed to get working.  So it was all worth it and I was very happy when I finally managed to head off to bed.

Today is our big family trip to Manhattan!  We have just enough people that we could not fit in a single car.  Francesca drove the Ford Explorer down and I drove the Malibu that we are borrowing from Art.  We got up and moving early this morning so that we could get down to the Croton Harmon train station while it was still morning.  What an exhausting morning!

The trip down was tiring, but uneventful.  We got onto the first non-peak hours train into the city that we could.  That all went very well.

We got into the city and pretty quickly got ourselves to Times Square and onto the Big Bus tour of the city.  We road the one route all morning doing midtown and uptown.  This is actually the first time that the Miller family has done a bus tour in New York City at all.  Having lived there for so long, we never really got around to doing it.

For lunch we went to the famous Ellen’s Stardust Diner which was decent but kind of boring and the food was outrageously expensive and if you don’t eat incredibly quickly you see the very short show repeating.  It’s mildly interesting but not worth the stop at all.

After lunch we road the second bus loop covering downtown.  On this loop the kids got to see my old office at 111 Wall St. as well as my old office at 388 and 390 Greenwich Avenue.  No one was very excited to see them, though.

The bus tours were fun.  But we were tired quickly from the intense heat.  I rode most of the day down below out of the sun with our kids so that they would not overheat.  Most everyone else cooked in the bright sun.

When we were done it was some very quick shopping in Times Square.  Then back to Grand Central Terminal, some food and on the Metro North back to Croton Harmon station.

The ride home got pretty exciting.  Not that far along I84 Francesca’s new Ford Explorer died on the side of the road.  Some combination of throttle body and computer issues.  We ended up having to loop back for her and thought that we were going to be stranded there for the night.   We lost easily an hour dealing with that but it eventually got started and we limped back home with us following her carefully to make sure that they were going to make it.  That made for a very long day!

We had breakfast at the Best Western again this morning.  They do a decent breakfast but they are not prepared for the number of waffles that our clan wants to get all at once.  We back the waffle line up something terrible in the morning.

We got on the road back home pretty early.

This afternoon Madeline and I hung out while she played Mass Effect on the Steam laptop at her grandparents’ house.  She got through quite a lot of the initial game today!  That was fun.  I had been playing Mass Effect some while I was at dad’s house last week, too.  I’m enjoying playing through it again.  Such a good story.

Tomorrow we are heading down to Manhattan for the day.  Just doing a single day trip of sight seeing by bys around the city.