Sheep Guarding Llama

Thursday.  Today marks the four year mark since Dominica, Liesl, Luciana and I arrived at JFK Airport in New York City and awaited our very first flight as a family to head overseas.  That was the beginning of the adventure that we are now on.  A lot has changed since that day, but the main goal has remained constant – a journey to find home and to raise our children as global citizens.  Four years later and we are more excited about and more committed to that goal than ever.

It is amazing to see that our dreams really came true and we have spent a huge portion of the time since that original flight actually living around the world and doing what we set out to do.  For a couple years there in the middle we had some times when it seemed like things were not really going to work.  We’ve had a lot of changes and unplanned events, but here we are.  We did our epic tour of Europe in 2012.  We knew by 2014 that we were on our way to live abroad full time and all of 2015 and thus far in 2016 have been spent living the dream.  And no plans to stop.  This has been one crazy adventure.

And we already know where we are off to next: Moldova.  With the NTG Lab equipment going offline today, a lot of the normal work that I do is not able to be done for the next two weeks which means that it is a perfect time for us to get away, again.  This is a much, much shorter trip that we did last time to the Balkans.  This time will be a train trip and only to the country right next door.  No big driving for me, I get to relax, which will be awesome.  Really looking forward to this excursion.

We decided that we are not going to be going to Odessa in Ukraine like we had been planning. I have a friend who grew up in the Crimea and we spoke and she said that having talked to friends in Odessa that things are not very safe there right now and it is not a good time to be visiting.  Military in the streets and extreme, sudden poverty with the country actively at war and real fear of invasion as the occupied Crimea is just over the horizon on the Black Sea.  We were told that for the Ukraine, we should stick to the rural west or Kiev.

Wednesday and the rain continues.  So much rain here in Transylvania!  Today and tomorrow the big tasks are getting the NTG Lab ready to be broken down, boxed up and ready to ship off to California.  We have all of the gear that I normally use heading out west to the brand new Tier IV Colocation America facility that is being set up in Los Angeles.  A full rack is being dedicated for the server gear.

We had to trim things down for the move and only eleven of the servers are going to be going.  A lot of the older stuff is going to be left behind.  If we had more time to get things ready or if I was local to work on stuff maybe we could have gotten one or two more ready but as it was, getting eleven ready was pretty much a miracle.  There are SAN, NAS and other gear going out in addition to the servers themselves and, of course, all kinds of networking gear including three 10GigE switches!  It is an exciting move.  It is a ton of capacity that is bring brought online all at once and the setup in Los Angeles is going to be really sweet.

Today was pretty slow and my evening call got cancelled at the last minute. So between prepping the lab, having kids descend on the house again and working on writing there wasn’t a lot of free time.

It is Tuesday.  Today was a light rain day, we got a bit of a break after nearly a week of rain that has been coming down.  Everything is saturated with water and the grass is getting really high.

We had kids over again today, but not so crazy as yesterday.  That was really nuts.  We are working hard on getting Liesl’s school schedule shifted forward so that she can get most of her work done before kids show up and interrupt her but it is hard because she likes to sleep in and get started late and we never know when people might plan to arrive or how many will come or how long that they will stay!

Today we saw tons of cows coming down main street in Baita.  It took me by surprise. I thought that I heard something outside and went into the parlour and found a whole herd of cattle just coming down main street.  Some would stop in the front to eat some of our grass.  There is plenty of it for them.  The street is covered in manure now.

It is Monday, back to “work” today.  Today our house was overrun with kids from the neighbourhood.  They came early, much earlier than they normally do.  We have no idea what was going on with the school today but it seems like maybe there was no school or it was a half day or something.  But we ended up having the kids from around town coming to the house for more than seven hours today!

It is starting to be a bit of a problem.  We cannot exactly schedule kids to be here when it is convenient and we do not have a good idea of the factors involved so that we do not know when they are likely to come or when they are going to leave and which ones are probably going to show up. There is a core group of girls that normally comes no matter what and we have learned to expect them.  But if they show up for an hour or for the entire day, we have no way to know.

So today was nearly a full interruption for the entire day and Liesl had almost no way to do any school today.  Both girls were very exhausted and wishing that kids would just go home as they had their own things that they wanted to do for much of the day.  Having no control over when people come to visit you is a bit tough for them.  But they did have a lot of fun getting to play most of the day.  Dominica does not handle the visitors well and was really exhausted by the end of the day.

Because it continued to rain for basically the entire day all of the kids were indoors for pretty much the whole day, too, which did little to help matters.  We have not seen too many kids for days because of the rain but apparently they have gotten to the point that they are going to go out regardless of all of the rain coming down.

This has been a lot of rain.  Hard to believe that it has been most of a week with little to no real break in the rain.  It is causing problems with Dominica’s laundry schedule as there is no way to dry anything.

Today is Sunday and Mother’s Day.  Dominica was up first, her internal clock rarely lets her schedule shift at all.  The girls had stayed up to wish her a Happy Mother’s Day at midnight before going to bed and then had stayed up to work on Mother’s Day cards for her.  So they, and I, slept in this morning.

It is another raining day here in Transylvania.  Our time of sun appears to be over.  Suddenly we have gone from never seeing rain to seeing nothing but rain.  Three whole days of rain!

Just a lazy day around the house for us.  I did some work in the kitchen.  Dominica attempted to have the day off as much as possible.

This evening, at eight, I went over to buy milk as we do about every other day.  This time neither of the girls wanted to go over with me, which is unusual.  Because I was alone I got roped in to drinking with the farmer. He started pouring wine and put on the television then some locals showed up and it turned into several hours of drinking with the locals from around the village.  There is no cell service in the village because of the hills so that is always a bit of a challenge because there is no way to communicate back to home when I am out.  I had run the milk back to the house to let Dominica know where I was but was unable to talk with her while I was out.

I was pretty exhausted by the time that I got home, even though it was before eleven.