Sheep Guarding Llama

Dominica was up a bit before me this morning.  I am still feeling the emotional drain of the last few months.  But today feels good.  I got up around nine and helped to get the girls ready.  Once they were up and ready Dominica took them over to Francesca’s house to spend the day with their cousins until early afternoon when they were going to head out to the Grice Family Christmas at one.

I spent the entire morning sitting at the kitchen table working almost exclusively on SGL.  I got all of November and December updated last night and today I worked on getting all of October updated and a few days in September.  It is going to take a while for me to work back through all of September and get that all filled in as many of the days are missing but many are there and more than a week is the Spiceworld window which I can fill in very easily.

I also put in a ton of effort cleaning up my email.  I have fallen so horribly behind for the last several months.  Partially this was because I would get swamped with emails from recruiters or companies looking to potentially hire me and I was reticent to turn them down until we had something solid lined up.  So going back through and responding to hundreds of potential jobs and letting them know that I am no longer available and cleaning up all of those emails has been a high priority.  I need to get my email cleaned up so that I don’t miss things and can function better.

I worked until around two then Joe drove me over to Francesca’s house where I spent the rest of the day.  It was just a few of us there for about an hour until the Grices returned from their own Christmas event.

Nothing planned today. Everyone just hung out at the house.  Some of the baking continued.

We didn’t stay too late tonight.  We were back to Joe’s before nine.  Luciana was ready for bed before we were even back.  A full day of playing with her cousins is more than she is used to.  Everyone needed some sleep. Dominica has been up way too late the last few nights.

Today is, without a doubt, our decompression day.  The stress of the last three to four months has been catching up with us.  So many unknowns.  Still many, but a general life framework is coming into focus.  It is such an emotional relief to have a plan now and know, more or less, what we are going to be doing in the future that the weight of the last few months has really caught up and we are really just feeling worn out.  Happy and excited, but exhausted and worn down.  And to add to that feeling, now we have relatively little time to begin gathering details, processing paperwork and going through a rather extensive planning process for going out to California with the family, getting the house in New York completely empty and turned over to our renters and getting housing lined up for our first tour of duty in Europe!  And there is this little Christmas holiday going on at roughly the same time too!  What a month this is going to be.

Today was also my day to catch up on SGL.  I mean really catch up.  Roughly two full months of posts were posted today!  The majority of the posts were written at the time that they occurred but because I was already so far behind I was unable to post them because of the gaps.  So today I did my best, which took about four or five hours, to get the gaps filled in and to get as many posts as I could posted.  Now, once again, the site is roughly up to date and people can follow along with everything that is happening.

It was much harder to have the site be up to date with all of the interviewing going on because you don’t want to make those kinds of things public while they are still happening but you don’t want to skip recording them.  So having a bit of a delay on the blog made that easier too.  I still have some older posts to deal with, mostly in September and October, which I will attempt to address as time allows.  But the most important stuff has been updated.

Today we are all over at Francesca’s house.  Dominica went over there very early in the morning to help out with baking and stuff.  I brought the girls over a bit later once they were up and dressed and ready to face the day.  That was well after ten.  Dominica and Francesca were out shopping when I got there and were gone for at least another hour yet.

Emily and I did our traditional walk down to the Donuts, Kolaches and Tacos store to pick up a late breakfast for everyone.  They have added croissants to their breakfast sandwich lineup now too.  But their breakfast tacos are still the mainstay.

The cousins played outside together most of the day.  It was so warm that they did not even need jackets.  It was slightly chilly if you were to just stand outside but if you were active it was perfect.  I definitely did not need a jacket when walking to the store with Emily.

Emily and I ended up making three trips down to the stores today, all on foot.  Once for breakfast.  Once for baking supplies for Dominica and Francesca.  And once to look for moustache wax because my moustache is getting pretty long and I wanted to give it a try and see how it would look with a handlebar.  We had to go to two stores before finding some wax at CVS.

The handlebar experiment was… interesting. Some people liked it, some did not.  It is clear that the moustache is not long enough yet to really do it.  It will need at least another month before it will work.  Probably a bit longer than that.

I worked much of the day from Francesca’s new HP Chromebook that I had talked her into getting.  It really is nice.  Works great.  They are loving it too.  She almost never gets to see it because Madeline likes to steal it.  The battery life on it is insane too.  Like nine hours or more!  I used it all day and never put a dent in the battery life and Madeline had been watching Netflix on it before I started using it.

Dinner was Mexican tonight.  Joe and Francesca ran out and picked it up.  Dominica and I both did fish tacos which were really good.

After dinner we were all kicked out of the house.  So nearly everyone went over to Joe’s where they all watched Guardians of the Galaxy while I worked in the kitchen.  I have plenty to do, no real time to just be relaxing.  I have to catch up with SGL and some other postings, need to make future plans, need to catch up with emails like you would not believe, have to be posting on MangoLassi and Spiceworks and I need to be studying up on Ruby, Rails and Chef.  Tons to do.

Luciana came back to the house from the theatre after about half an hour.  She asked me to set her up with an iPad in bed.  She was tired and not interested in the movie.  Liesl was having fun, though, and watched the whole thing.  So I put Luciana in my bed, where she wanted to be, for about half an hour.  Then she came downstairs and asked to be moved into her own bed.  She was asleep in no time after that.  I am sure that she was just exhausted from playing with her cousins all day.  She is so good about putting herself to bed when the time is right.  Liesl, not so much.

Brittany’s family came over while everyone was in the theatre.  I have not seen them in a while so we had a chance to catch up.  Then they all watched Home Alone while I continued to work in the kitchen.

After all of the movies were over, Liesl came back over and just sat with me.  All of the iPads were dead at that point and she did not want to use one plugged in in bed.  So she just sat at the table with me.  I talked with her about how she stays up so late and she told me “Well…. I never miss the best movies!”

Dominica did not get back to the house until about one in the morning.  I stayed up a little longer because I was getting so much done on SGL.  But my two everyone was in bed and asleep.

Thank goodness that I thought ahead and made Dominica set an alarm in addition to my own alarm because my phone, while plugged in, did not turn on and its alarm did not go off this morning!  But Dominica’s went off not that long after mine was supposed to have woken me up so not an issue.  I have a major interview this morning on the early side and then another one later in the afternoon.  So I had to be up pretty early to make sure that I was all set up and ready before the morning interview began.

Dominica got up with the girls and hung out with them upstairs to keep them quiet while I did the interview.  The one this morning felt like it went very well.  But, as always, you can never really tell with these things.

Right after my interview, Dominica and the girls came downstairs and were hanging out in the kitchen.  It was not long before something happened and Liesl fell from a tall bar stool and face planted onto the hard tile kitchen floor.  It was horrible.  I did not really get to see her fall but saw her seconds later when there was some serious screaming.  She had not managed to even get her hands out in front of her and she apparently impacted the tile floor with her teeth hitting it first.  She was in an incredible amount of pain.  Some of the worst pain that I have ever seen her in.  It was just awful.  She was screaming and screaming about how much her teeth hurt.

It took probably twenty minutes before we were really able to get to the bottom of Liesl’s situation as there was a bit of blood and she was in so much pain that she could not communicate.  Eventually she was able to tell us how scared she was because she could feel that a tooth or two were out of place!  Dominica was rapidly getting herself dressed and I worked to get Liesl ready so that they could run to a dentist to get her X-rayed as soon as possible to see what the teeth situation is.  The two teeth that she appears to have hit on the floor are her two adult teeth so this is a really big deal.

I had to stay behind because my second interview was coming up soon and there was not time to reschedule and there was nothing that I would be able to add to the situation.  Liesl was okay and just needed to see a dentist and Dominica was on top of that already.  So I stayed back with Luciana.

Before leaving Liesl actually said through her streaming tears “At least it wasn’t Luciana who fell and got hurt.”  Such a sweet girl our Liesl is!

The trip to the dentist went well. The X-rays appeared to show that Liesl’s adult teeth are okay although a follow up appointment was recommended in a few weeks to ensure that things were still okay.  There were definitely some teeth out of place and the dentist filed down at least one baby tooth to allow Liesl to be able to close her mouth properly again.  But everything will be fine.  No solid food for Liesl for a while now, though.  That is going to be really tough.  What a poor girl.  She was quite the trooper, though.

Dominica dropped Liesl off at Francesca’s house on the way back.  She came back and took her morning shower which she had had to skip because of the emergency.  While she was in the shower I had the start of my second interview.  While I was still in the Skype session Dominica got Luciana and they both went over to Francesca’s so that they could hang out with their cousins all day.

My second interview seemed to go really well.  I spoke to the recruiter and told him that I would really like to move things along and make a decision today.  He said that if my goal was to have a decision today that he would make sure that that happened.  So we spent the day awaiting news on an offer from them.  But we feel really good about the chances that there will be an offer and we are excited to be looking at the possibility of having some closure about things.

It has been more than four months at this point that our lives have been in complete and utter upheaval without knowing what is going on.  We have had absolutely no stability for so long now that even though everything has been financially okay.  Financially great, in fact, we have been struggling with the stress with having no way to make any plans at all.  And it is not just Dominica and I.  Everyone in the family has been eagerly awaiting some news.

Joe and Bennie came back over the house and we hung out for most of the afternoon.  We had originally thought that I was going to get an offer closer to two or three in the afternoon.  We spent the day waiting for information to come in about that.  That was stressful but I kept getting good reports about the situation, so we all remained hopeful.

It was late in the evening when I finally got the call and the initial offer.  We were pretty confident that one was going to come in today but it was getting so late, about a quarter till five Pacific time making it nearly seven o’clock here in Houston, that we were worried that things were going to run over the weekend and then hit all of the issues that you always have with the holiday week.  But finally the call came.

We spoke for a while but the money that they were offering was just not enough for us to really take it.  So they went back to talk about options.  While I was waiting for them to come back to me, the rest of the family came over to Joe’s house to have dinner.  They brought pizza.  So I was still waiting on pins and needles when they got there.

It was about an hour before they called back and offered the money that we needed to accept.  Much lower than we were hoping but pretty much what we were expecting.  This one is really about the job and the lifestyle changes and what it means for the family and much less about the money.  The benefits are outstanding and I think that our family is going to be much, much happier with this.

So the evening was mostly spent dealing with the realization that more than four months of stress are now over and that our decision is made.  There is a lot of stuff to do before I can start.  Paperwork with the non-compete, ugh.  But thankfully there is zero competition and the state of California does not recognize non-competes so it is null and void anyway.  But we want to go through the procedures.  No need to rock the boat at this stage.  And we need to arrange moving out to California and figure out exactly what the “being in California” situation will be like.

I have a lot of details but it is too late and we are too warn out to discuss them now.  I will do my best to fill everyone in as much as I can tomorrow.  This is a really awesome opportunity but it is extremely complicated to explain and there is a lot that we do not know ourselves yet.  Needless to say it is going to be some extreme upheaval.

Officially, we are now Texans again.  We are living here in Houston as our American base.  The only trip back to Peekskill is going to be Dominica and I making a trip just to pack everything up, get it cleaned out and to hand over the keys to the renters so that they can get into it as soon as we are done shipping everything out.  We have no idea when we will be doing that, though.

We were up at a decent time this morning, like eight-ish.  Today is our all out driving day. Because I have an early interview tomorrow morning (via Skype) we need to make it all of the way to Houston tonight.  There really isn’t any option to cut it short this time.

It was probably no later than nine thirty before we were all loaded up and on the road.  That was a great start.  Although we started the day with a known major traffic jam out on Interstate 65.  So we took some backroads and worked around it from the beginning and actually did really well.

Overall, it was a great driving day.  We made really good time and managed to get down to Birmingham, Hattiesburg and across Louisiana without any issues.  Overall a great travel day.

The only real issue that we ran into the entire drive was on the outskirts of Houston we hit a pretty bad rain storm that probably cost us nearly an hour just inside of the Houston metro area.  And down on Interstate 45 we actually ended up in some mess with cops blocking the highway.  We were stuck there for quite a while.

I drove this entire trip.  Not just the sixteen or seventeen hours today but every mile that we have done over the past three days of driving.  Dominica did not need to take the wheel a single time!

It was well after one when we got to the house and unloaded the car.  We were off to bed almost immediately.  I need to get a few hours before my interview in the morning.

We got the bad news on the drive that Facebook, for whom I had gone to San Francisco on Sunday and Monday, decided to decline me for the position that I was looking at.  They liked me overall and invited me to apply again later but at this time, they were not going to make an offer.  Depressing but it will help with decision making if the job that I am talking to tomorrow makes an offer because before now we were torn as to which we were more interested in.  Both positions had lots of merits but were drastically different.  It could have been a really tough decision.  Now we are just hoping that the other one makes an offer.

Liesl and Luciana are staying in one room and Dominica and I are down the hallway in our own room.  This makes things much easier.

We got a pretty good night’s sleep last night at the Quality Inn where we stopped along our drive out to Ohio.  We are so glad that we did that.  The drive this morning was only about an hour and a half to get to grandma’s house.  That was really easy.  We got to her house around eleven thirty, just in time for me to get ready for a phone interview that I needed to do as a follow up to the secondary interview that I did on Monday evening.  It seemed to go well, but it is always very hard to really tell.

Most of the family made it out to grandma’s house shortly after we did to visit.  Unfortunately Gwen and Mike left for a vacation in Wisconsin during the night so we did not get to see them.  But everyone else was around.  Monica even managed to get out of work early so that she could come down and spend more time with the girls.  Liesl really misses Monica.

We hung out till about three thirty then went up to Louisville to get a late lunch at Grinders, the restaurant than everyone knows that Dominica and I love.  The food is just awesome.

We went back to grandma’s house and stayed until a few minutes after eight.  That was much later than we had wanted to stay today.  Our original plan was to be on the road by six.  This was much later.  But even Monica’s fiancee Joe, whom we have not had a chance to meet yet, was able to make it and he spent a lot of time playing with the girls.  They all had a great time.

We were not feeling much like driving once we finally got out the door.  We managed to make it all of the way past Louisville, Kentucky.  Rather apropos to go directly from Louisville, Ohio to Louisville, Kentucky this evening, I guess.  On the drive we listened to several chapters of The Cricket in Times Square for Liesl until she fell asleep.  Then Dominica and I listened to an hour or two of Eragon which both of us have read before but neither have read for a long time.

We stopped at an EconoLodge along the highway.  We have a long day ahead of us tomorrow but we are going to make it to Houston by the end of the day.