Sheep Guarding Llama

I did a ton more research for our family tree today.  We are really getting a lot of branches tracked down and going really far back on my dad’s dad’s family.  It is amazing just how incredibly Swiss that part of the family is.  One remote branch is Norwegian (a surprise to everyone) and there is one person from the Czech Republic, long ago, and a few from the Alsace and one or two from German on the Rhine but by and large everyone is Swiss.  I knew that we were Swiss but the purity of the Swiss heritage is really surprising.  And we are not from a wide geographic sprawl within Switzerland either but from a rather tiny zone around Bern with a few people from the shores of Lake Constance.

We ordered in Domino’s to make things easy for lunch and we watched two episodes of How I Met Your Mother.

I got my travel plans for the next two weeks ironed out today.  I will be flying out of White Plains on Sunday (that’s just five days away!) and will be gone for two weeks.  On the evening of February 6th I will catch the red eye out of San Francisco and will be home by lunch time on Saturday.  It will suck losing the night of sleep but it makes it really easy for Dominica and the girls to deal with getting me to and from the airport.  So we are happy with how well that schedule turned out to be and that we have the details solidified now.  I don’t know where I will be staying in San Francisco yet but that is easy to deal with closer to when it is time to go.  As long as I know where I am going when I head to the airport on Sunday.

Tonight the girls and I played the last hour of Space Quest V.  I am glad to have that one over and done with.  We looked at the first five minutes of Space Quest VI, the last existing entry in the series, just to see what it looks like.  It appears to be a large leap in modernity over the former entries.  And it goes back to the audio narration of Space Quest IV which I much prefer.  I am hopeful that it will be better than the last ones.  The girls love them but these are not my favourite games by any stretch.

We put out a huge amount of stuff for pickup in the morning for donation.  We have about nine huge garbage bags full of stuff being donated, mostly toys, that are scheduled for an early morning pick up.  That cleared out a lot of the house.  You can feel that the house has been opened up with all of that stuff hauled out already.

Speaking of the morning, I am heading into Manhattan for the day so we have to be up rather early and I will be catching a morning train down to the city.  I will be in Midtown all day.  I’m only scheduled to get there at 10:30 so not a hectic morning.  I am hoping to be on the 9:13 train out of Peekskill which is off peak making things very easy.  I already have my iPod charged up and loaded with new Audible books so that I will have plenty of listening choices for the ride.  I am looking forward to a little quiet book time to myself.  I have not had any of that recently.

It was after midnight when I finally managed to get Liesl and Luciana into bed!  Boy they are good at managing to stay up late.

I did not get a lot of sleep last night despite having gone to bed exceptionally early.  Liesl and Luciana are little furnaces and they press right up against you when they sleep in your bed.  I had Liesl on one side and Luciana on the other and I was caught in the middle unable to move, which always makes it hard for me to sleep, and unable to stay cool enough to sleep.  So I woke up at three thirty sweating rather a bit.  I tried to go back to sleep but gave up by four and put in about four hours tracking down family histories online.  I managed to find hundreds of new family members that we previously knew nothing about.

I went back to bed to rest for about another hour but did not go back to sleep.

Dominica slept in the girls’ room last night as there was no room in our bed.  She got up shortly after I went back to bed because Luciana decided to get up, go into her own room and slapped Dominica in the face to wake her up and to ask for her morning chocolate milk.  Quite a way to be awoken.

This morning Dominica and I watched The Brian Boitano Project, which follows the Olympic skater as he “inherits” a home in the Lingurian region of Italy and renovates it to use as his second home.  It was interesting.

Then we finished watching Johnny English: Reborn on Netflix.  The girls enjoyed it.  They enjoyed it enough that Luciana asked us to watch the first Johnny English again.  She called it “the one like this one with the grown and staff, but not this one.”  Took Liesl to interpret that one for us.

Luciana watched Johnny English again. It is pretty funny that she has decided that she loves those movies.  She really likes National Treasure too and wanted to watch that again today, although we talked her into a family viewing of the Christmas Special of Doctor Who.

We liked the Christmas Special, we are very happy with where it appears that they are taking the next season of Doctor Who.  I won’t give away anything that might be a spoiler but something that we were really concerned about ended up not happening so we are very happy about that.

We played a little bit of Space Quest V tonight.  We are nearly to the end of that and looking forward to wrapping it up.

We spent most of this morning cleaning the house.  Dominica focused more on the cleaning.  I did some and got a lot of family genealogy research done.  I managed to track down some interesting family history like that we are descended from the very first Amish Bishop in America, that the family can trace its back to Bern in the early 1200s and that we are directly descended from the Hochstetler Massacre of 1757 during the French and Indian War.

Rob came up in the early afternoon.  The weather was awful today and his drive was pretty terrible.  It’s right at freezing and it has been raining all day.  So the ground is covered in ice.   A thick sheet of it.  Driving was really treacherous, there is a little fog rolling in and roads all over Westchester County have been closed.

We didn’t stay at the house for long, Rob wanted to get dinner and get back to the city on the early side before it got dark as the roads would be even more dangerous then.  So we went down to the Peekskill Brewery for a late brunch.

Brunch was okay.  The menu of the Peekskill Brewery left a lot to be desired for brunch and the one thing that Dominica and I thought looked really interesting they did not even have.  So our only choices were a catfish sandwich (not a very impressive fish offering) and French toast.  So we both went for the French toast.  I got mine with a kale salad, which was decent.  The French toast itself was okay but certainly nothing special.  Dominica didn’t even bother to eat half of hers and she shared some of the half that she did eat with Luciana.  So that was not a hit at all.  Liesl managed to get some pasta with butter which she liked.

The beer, at least, was good.  For the bill to be over $150 I expect a more impressive brunch than that.  We would have had ten times the food, higher quality, a more desirable setting at a fifth the price if we were back in Dallas.  This reminds us of how much we are looking forward to moving out of Peekskill.  The lack of good food options really wears on us.  And what little is here is so expensive.

Back at the house we had some amazing Scotch that Rob had brought for us.  It was very, very good.  He did not stay too long, though, wanting to get onto the road before it was too late.

This evening we watched Johnny English with the girls.  They both really liked it.  We have not seen it in a long time.  We bought it from Amazon.  When it was done we could not decide what we wanted to watch next so I suggested the sequel, Johnny English Reborn.  Dominica himmed and hawed about it but when she looked to see what we might want to see on Netflix she saw that it had been released, for free, just today!  So we watched the first half of that before everyone went off to bed.  What perfect timing.  We will finish it tomorrow.

I got up at seven thirty again this morning.  Got up, showered and dressed and did a little packing up.  Dominica and Luciana were up not long after I was out of the shower.  After everyone was up and fully awake we got the car packed and the kids dressed and we all drove down to Brian’s USA Diner in Mt. Morris for breakfast before we got onto the road.

It was around eleven thirty when we got onto the road.  The sun was shining even though it was bitterly cold, still.  The drive went well.  We stopped in the Catskills at a Subway and picked up our dinners about an hour from home so that we would not have to deal with food later.

I missed the turnoff at Route 6 and we accidentally got forced onto the Thruway which sucked.  That took us forty minutes out of way causing us to get home much later than we should have.  It would figure that on our very last time returning to the house this would happen!  What a pain that was.

So it was six when we finally got back to the house.

This evening we watched the first two Pure Nature episodes on Aerial Spain.  They were really excellent.  The first two are free on both Hulu and YouTube.  The third one I have only managed to find on Hulu.  But they are free on Hulu so not a big deal.  Really awesome tour of Spain.  Aerial Spain Part One. And Aerial Spain Part Two.

After the kids went to bed, Dominica and I watched Mom’s Night Out.  It was cute but overall we didn’t like it too much.  Much of the story did not make any sense and the editing was very poor.  There were several story lines that were obviously set up and then apparently edited out of the final film.  There were far too many characters without any character development, everyone was just flat and pointless.  Even the protagonist was nothing but a plot device.  There was a lot of potential and you could tell that the premise was cute and you were just waiting for funny things to happen but they never came to fruition and you are left hanging with a movie that feels like it never even happened.

I was up pretty early this morning, at seven thirty which was only about five hours of sleep.  I was surprised myself when I woke up so early.  But I made the most of it.  I got out of bed and took a shower.

Luciana was up before anyone else.  She came upstairs and banged on the bathroom door telling me that she had a tummy ache and needed to get into the bathroom.  So I rushed out.

Dad was up not too long after that and eventually Dominica was up.  Liesl was the last of the Miller clan to awaken and when she did her hair was so crazy that everyone was just dying.  It was hilarious and stayed crazy like that for much of the day.

Dad showed me the research that my Aunt Sharon has been doing on the family tree via Ancestry.com.  She was able to find a bit more today and so far has the family traced back to Bern, Switzerland in the 1560s.  But that was enough to provide some family roots and we have a little information about the family all of the way back to 1200, now, which takes us back to before the founding of Switzerland itself and to the first few years of the city of Bern which was founded in 1191!  So it appears that my family’s time in the Bernese Oberland predates the city of Bern itself, most likely, as the earliest recorded family member out on the farm on Yoder Hill is very unlikely to have been born there to parents who had just moved there.  Likely they had been there for some time.  It even appears that I have at least one family member who was involved in the crusades as a knight!  It will take some doing to tie all of that part together, though.

We got the Acadia unloaded of its boxes this morning and got the little green Spark moved into its winter home in the barn.  So that is that, we are down to just a single vehicle now for the indefinite future.  Our plan is that the Spark will be our summer car while we are in New York.  We also got to check out the new storage unit that dad and my Uncle Leo have been building in the barn.  It is not completed yet but should be before our moving truck comes up and will be of a fair size.  It is about twelve foot by eleven foot and five inches “square”.  It is a pretty major project that dad is undertaking.

I got to speak to our renter today and we have things worked out.  Things are far from ideal but far from the disaster that they easily could have been.  We will have a little extra time in the Peekskill house for the packing now.  Our renter will have lots of time to do their painting and whatnot before they have to be in the house full time.  We are losing several thousands of dollars but at least the amount that we are losing is capped and a known amount and will stop soon.  So while it is far from the outcome that we wanted, it is only so bad.  We are very thankful that we have a solution, at least.  Everyone is mostly happy.

For lunch today I drove around the corner to The Farmer’s Wife.  We finally figured out who owns it, it is two sisters who grew up just up the street from me.  We all rode the schoolbus together when we were little.  It is two of the neighbours that I actually know quite well.  So when I went down to pick up the food one of them was there and she knew who I was straight away even though we have not seen each other for almost exactly a quarter of a century!  We talked for a little bit and I got to meet her husband too.

The special of the day was baked fish sandwiches and seasoned fries.  So we got three of those and we picked up the local East Bethany Chevre goat cheese from First Light farms which we discovered at Thanksgiving when we were last up visiting dad.  It is the best goat cheese that we have ever had and are so delighted that we are able to get it here.

This evening we decided to go to the Wyoming Inn for their Friday Night Fish Fry which dad had said was his favourite.  We have not been there since they reopened.  My Aunt Sharon and Uncle Leo decided that they would join us around six.

It was very cold when we headed out to go to dinner.  About twelve degrees.  We all piled into the Acadia so that we could get by with just one vehicle.  When we got to Wyoming, Dominica pointed out that this was her first time being back there since our wedding!  That is crazy.  We are always so close, it had not occurred to me at all that she had never been back.  I had done quite a bit of work in town in the year or two after our wedding but Dominica was never involved in any of that and the restaurants, bars and inns in town all closed up and went out of business shortly after our wedding so there really was no reason to return for a long time.  So this was an odd trip for her.

There was almost no parking in town.  There was quite a wait to get into the Wyoming Inn and that caused Academy Street to be nothing but cars everywhere.  That town needs some municipal parking although heaven only knows where they would put it.

Dinner was awesome.  We got the fish fries and they really were great.  We were very glad that we went.  By the time that we left dinner the temperature outside had dropped to five degrees.  Dominica couldn’t stand waiting to get into the car and managed to strain her back from the stress of standing outside in the cold.  As we drove back through Pearl Creek the temperature was as low as one degree!

After we got back to the house dad put on The Water Horse for Liesl and Luciana.  Liesl picked it out after I had run several movie choices by her, none of which had met with her approval.

I skipped the movie so that I could get caught up on SGL, get a video posted to YouTube, get some posting done, etc.  Luciana ended up bailing on the movie halfway through and went to bed and made me snuggle with her for one episode of Blues Clues.  Then she got up again.

The girls were up too late.  Luciana was over exhausted by eleven twenty when we finally had to make her go to bed.

Finally the girls were in bed by eleven thirty.  Liesl came upstairs to tell us that Luciana’s iPad had died and so she would put Blues Clues on her iPad for Luciana to watch.  She said that she was sure that that was what Luciana would want to watch and “how could I do anything else, her iPad is dead and she is crying.”  Liesl really is just so sweet to her baby sister.

Dominica and I watched Rick Steves’ Travel Tips for Spain in bed to wind down for the evening.

We will be driving back to Peekskill in the morning.  We are not sure what time we are going to be leaving.  I suspect that we will be hitting Brian’s USA Diner on the way south for breakfast before we leave.