Sheep Guarding Llama

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  They put forth such an effort but didn’t both to be a good, historical reference.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.

It is the weekend, although none of us can really tell what day it is anymore.  Our schedules have been so weird for so long that we are really just kind of lost as far as what day it is or even what time of day it is.

We relaxed most of today too.  It is a weekend, you know!  We slept in like crazy today, none of us were up until after eleven!  We have been pretty tired so that was probably pretty good for everyone.  It makes for a short day, though.

Dominica and I tried to watch the British file The Trip today but found it to be boring and actually kind of annoying.  Two bad actors doing fictitious and annoying versions of themselves while doing bad impressions of people we mostly could not identify while driving around the countryside (the only interesting part)  and stopping to eat.  Not entertaining at all.  We gave it about twenty minutes and gave up.

We then watched Dirty, Rotten Scoundrels which is a classic and neither of us has seen in a very long time.  What a great movie.  It has been so long since I have seen it that I really forgot just how good it really was.  We really enjoyed seeing that again.

This evening we watched National Treasure as a family.  Liesl came downstairs and said that she had decided to watch a movie with us because I had seemed sad when she said that she didn’t want to do something together this evening so that she could play her Furby game.  She is so sweet.  She ended up really enjoying the movie too.

Right at the beginning of the movie Luciana said that she was going to bed and promptly put herself to bed and was asleep in no time.  She fell asleep with an iPad on her head, which was pretty funny.

After Liesl went to bed at eleven, Dominica and I stayed up and watched the latest episode of Sleepy Hollow.  Although I am afraid that that series has now jumped the shark.

I really had forgotten just how awesome our beds are here at the house in Peekskill.  Both Dominic and my bed and the girls’ beds are just awesome.  So easy to get a great night’s sleep here.  I am pretty sad thinking about the fact that after the next two weeks we are looking at probably years before we get to sleep in beds so nice again!

I worked most of the day from my desktop.  Boy have I missed that too.  A great chair, a great work surface, two huge screens, a good keyboard, a mouse that does not skip all over when trying to use it… it is the little things that you miss the most when you have been away.

This afternoon, since there is no food in the house, we ordered in Domino’s pizza to make things easy.

This evening Dominica went out running errands and doing some shopping for three and a half hours. There is no food, no chocolate milk (Pediasure) for the girls, no nothing in this house.  It is empty.

I managed to get some GoPro footage from the past week edited, compressed and uploaded to YouTube today too.  Just a couple of videos.  One of Liesl using her new needle felting “sewing” kit while in Houston is there along with two videos of the cousins that I took while we were in Ohio this week.  The GoPro takes great video but it takes a lot of effort to get videos uploaded from it too.

After Dominica got home from shopping we watched a movie together as a family.  We started watching the new Tom Clancy movie Jack Ryan: Shadow Agent but after ten minutes or so we realized that we had watched it already this year.  Probably at some point it was rented while we were at Dominica’s parents’ house.  So we stopped watching that and decided to watch Bruce Almighty instead.  We have not seen that movie in a really long time.

We were going to watch another movie after that but then we realized that it was after midnight!  Our internal clocks are all messed up from having been in central time and having done lots of very late night driving.  We can’t tell what time it is at all.