Sheep Guarding Llama

I got up at seven thirty this morning.  That’s quite early for me for the past two months.  The alarm caught Dominica quite by surprise.  I showered and got ready and then worked for about thirty minutes while Dominica was getting ready.  Then we packed the car and got the girls up.  We had to be out of the house by ten till ten so that we could get down to the Peekskill Coffeehouse to meet up with our renter so that we could talk about what the plans are and strategize about getting her back into the Peekskill house as soon as possible.

We were only a minute or two late getting to the coffee house.  Of course, no, after nearly three years of living in the Peekskill house and more than six years of owning the house right up the road from the coffeehouse we are finally using it for the very first time ever.

The coffee was great.  We were at the coffee shop for over an hour and a half.  We got a lot of good planning done and we think that we know what we are going to be doing.  Fingers crossed.  Hopefully we will find out tonight.

We got ourselves more coffee, each got a panini and we got back onto the road.  Liesl and Luciana riding in the little green Chevy Spark with me and Dominica driving the Acadia full of boxes.

Overall our drive went very well.  It was a quarter after five when we arrived at dad’s house so the trip took almost exactly five hours.  We did not hit snow, as often is the case, until we were just down the street from dad’s place.  The girls are getting used to the drive and Liesl knows when we are in Mt. Morris and when we are in “grandpa’s neighbourhood.”  Luciana said “Grandpa’s neighbourhood is my favourite!”

We gave the girls about an hour and a half to decompress from the drive.  Then we drove over to Geneseo to go to the Geneseo Family Restaurant.  Dominica has been wanting to go back there since we were here last time and we discovered that they have an extensive vegetarian menu with a number of tofu and fish options.

Dinner was good.  After dinner dad went back home and we made a quick stop at Walmart as we were out of chocolate milk for the girls and needed a few other supplies like bread for the weekend.

We spent the evening in the living room just talking.  Finally got the girls off to bed and stayed up until almost two in the morning as we really only get a chance to talk once they are in bed.  Otherwise they are just talking and talking all of the time and it is impossible to carry on a conversation of any sort.

Did a bit of work this morning.  Our plan is to travel down to dad’s house in the morning tomorrow with a load of stuff for our storage.  Not a huge load, as we need to bring four people up there, but we are going to bring as much as we can get into the Acadia.  It will help a little, at least.

I ran out and picked up Indian take away for us for lunch.  We have not had Indian for a while and Dominica was craving it.  A nice change of pace.

This afternoon we watched one more episode of John Adams, he was elected vice president right as we finished up this episode, and then we set about getting the Acadia all packed up.  We only managed to get four large boxes in there, but three of them are the really big wardrobe boxes.  Those were really in our way in the bedroom, we have barely been able to walk around, so we are very thankful to have them out of the way now.

Still no idea what is going on with our renters.  We are meeting with them tomorrow morning at ten at the Peekskill Coffehouse to see if we can figure out a strategy.  We are getting a little worried that we are going to move out of our house and be homeless while still needing to pay the crazy Peekskill mortgage with no renters in the house.  That will be awful and crippling.

I worked most of the evening.  Once I was done we watched some of our regular shows that release new episodes and got the kids off to bed around eleven thirty.  Before we did, though, we watched several of the videos of the family from our last trip to Europe.  The girls really enjoyed that.  We also watched a few episodes of the latest season of Rick Steves.  His eighth season is available, with no commercials, via YouTube.  It plays better and looks better than if you get it from Hulu+ or other services.  If everyone used YouTube for their shows, those other services would not exist.  They do such a bad job of it.  Except for Netflix, they consistently work well too.

Heading to dad’s house in the morning right after we get coffee downtown.  Should be up to his place in the late afternoon.  Maybe around four or five.  Dominica is going to drive the Acadia and I am going to drive the girls in the Spark.

 

I managed to get a little more work done today and we got more planning done about our move.  The moving truck is scheduled for the twentieth, that is one week from today.  So we have seven days to have everything ready.  That is not much time.  We are also planning on making a trip to dad’s house the day after tomorrow.  That trip will involve one full load of the Acadia, which is a fair amount of the stuff that is left, and delivering the Spark to be stored there.  We plan to stay there and visit until early Saturday morning.  Then we will drive back to Peekskill with just the Acadia.  So, in reality, we only have about four days left to pack up the entire house.  And, of course, we still have no idea what is going on as per the rental situation.  So we are very much in the dark about that.

I got to talk to my office today.  Travel plans for San Francisco are not finalized yet.  I suspect that I am flying out on the 25th but we do not know that yet.  My new desk is all set up, though, which is cool.  They sent me a picture of it today.  It is pretty rare for a job to have my desk set up before I start working rather than long afterwards once I have been sitting around idle for a long time.  I am getting a maxed out Macbook Pro too, which is pretty awesome.  That is the computer that I will be using for work while we are living in Europe.

We started watching the 2008 mini-series John Adams from HBO today.  I have been wanting to watch that for a long time.  I read the book long that the series was based on.  Dominica has not read the book.  We watched the first episode, which is over an hour, this afternoon and will save another one for this evening.  Dominica is really getting into it.  She has studied the American Colonial era and the American Revolution far less than I have so it is kind of like an adventure movie for her finding out all of the things that happened.  The mini-series is not all that historically accurate, sadly, which is really too bad.  They put forth such an effort but didn’t both to be a good, historical reference.

We did a little more packing today.  That is getting to be very slow going as so much of what is left is the hard stuff to pack and everything is in our way now.

This afternoon we ordered in from Nonna’s, down the hill, for something different.  Pasta and eggplant parm.

I have been playing Trivia Crack on my iPhone a lot recently.  I started playing with Madeline while we were in Texas.  I have been the top scorer for the past two weeks!  A couple of days ago I decided that I needed to increase the challenge level to make it more interesting so I have started playing in Spanish and Catalan.  I figured that I might as well make it an educational experience and I am definitely getting much better at reading Spanish very quickly by doing so.  I started using DuoLingo, again, this time working on Spanish.  Four years of Spanish in high school did not teach me much but things are starting to come back a little bit.

We watched more of John Adams this evening.

This evening we bought the Lonely Planet guide book to Andalucia to prepare for our move.  Time to start learning a lot about the region.

We got up at a more reasonable time today and today we actually managed to do some of the packing that so desperately needs our attention this week.  Our window for getting everything done here in Peekskill is rapidly closing. Although now we have discovered that our renters (we thought) are having issues with their current rental situation and do not know if they are going to be able to figure out how to move into the house.  That is going to cause all kinds of issues.  They are working on figuring out a solution but we do not know yet what that is going to be so we are now stuck with a new unknown that we are trying to figure out so that we can make plans again.  There seems to be no end to the whole life situation being thrown into a state of chaos.

It was  a decently productive day.  We managed to eat a lot of the food that had is still here in the house.  We need to make as much of that as possibly go away in the next week.  Not much time left to eat everything.

I spent an hour and a half playing Space Quest V with the girls tonight.  They were both begging and begging to play it.  We played until we got stuck on another part again.  Saving that for maybe tomorrow night.  I want to wrap up some of these video games that we have been playing before we pack up all of our systems and move on down to Texas with them.  I would rather not be stuck in the middle of a game and have the system never get unpacked again.  I have had that happen too many times before.

This evening, we got the girls off to bed at a more reasonable time and Dominica and I watched Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison which is a southern Pacific Word War II film from 1957.  It was rather boring overall, but somewhat interesting and definitely one that I have never seen before.  A break from the ordinary.

Slept in a bit again today but nothing like yesterday.  Today is a bit of a cleaning day as Ryan is coming over this evening.  This is his last chance to see us before we move out of New York.

Ryan came over this evening, probably around four.  We hung out and visited for a few hours.  The girls were, as always, super excited to have someone different at the house and had to talk to him and jump on him to no end. Liesl wanted to go on and on about her Furbies.  Luciana decided that Ryan was very handsome and that she would marry him when she grows up.

Ryan had wanted to go to the Peekskill Brewery for dinner because he is into beer and wanted to check out their beers.  So around six we went down there and discovered that they had closed at four, even though their website, which we checked just before leaving the house, had said that their kitchen was going to be open until eight.  Not professional at all, Peekskill Brewery.  How hard is it to post an early closing on your website?  Answer: not hard at all.

So we decided instead to go to the Hudson Room which I had been telling Dominica about for a while and is conveniently located right downtown.  So that was a quick drive.  We were a little nervous about taking the girls there.  It is a rather fancy restaurant.  But we peeked in the windows as we walked around the corner and they were not busy at all, tons of open tables and space, and there were two tables there with small children too.   So we decided to take the chance on it.

We got a big, semi-circle booth with a very high, cushioned back which was perfect because the girls were able to sit in there where any noise that they made was absorbed by the booth.  It was really perfect. Although, in reality, we did not need it as both girls were perfect angels all evening.  They were so good, we could not believe it.

We did the Prix Fixe dinner.  Dominica and Ryan both got the tofu stir fry, which I had had last time and really enjoyed.  I got the salmon which was excellent.  We had calamari, salmon and tuna tartar and edamame for appetizers.  Luciana opted for just some French fries as her dinner, she has been on a French fry kick recently.  Liesl wanted penne.

All of our food was really good.  Liesl did not like the cheese on her penne and we had to get her another thing of penne that was nothing but butter, but she devoured that.  I ended up eating her original penne which was awesome.

After dinner we came back to the house for a while.  The girls played upstairs together and were very good.  We hung out for a little while.  Ryan was going to take the late Amtrak back to Manhattan but they were getting later and later.  So originally we were going to go to Croton to drop him off around ten thirty but it ended up being more like eleven thirty and, in the end, the Amtrak train did not come until about three in the morning.  He had to take a different series of trains and buses to get back to Newark around one or two in the morning.  What a pain.

Dominica and I caught up on The Mindy Project  and mostly on Brooklyn Nine Nine before heading to bed.