Sheep Guarding Llama

Today is going to be a rough one.  We had to be up slightly early this morning, pack up the kids and run to Mohegan Lake to pick up a UHaul Cargo Van that we scheduled yesterday.  Pick up time was at nine.  We didn’t make it exactly for nine but by ten we were home with the van.  Today is nothing but getting the van, packing it and traveling.  Nothing else.  There is no time for anything.  The Ralstons are coming to our house tonight too, but I will not have any time to see them.

It took many hours to load the van.  I had warned Dominica that she was completely misunderstanding the size of a cargo van and that we would be able to take so much more stuff than she was imagining that we would be able to take in this one trip.  We ended up actually spending over three hours packing the van!  It was seriously exhausting.  I mean really awful.  I had to load nearly every box into the van.  Dominica spent much of the time out in the van organizing the boxes.

The drive to dad’s was pretty long but the van was decent. I managed to listen to a book via Audible most of the way in the van.  I started reading, and made it through most of, “The Stolen Throne” which is the first of the Dragon Age prequel books that take place before the events of Dragon Age Origins.  The book was pretty good and gripping enough to keep me wide awake for  the entire drive.  It turns out that there are a trio of novels set before Origins.  Now I need to read the other two as well.

I had a little snow as I crossed southern New York but did not hit any real accumulation until I was on Interstate 390 at Avoca. It still was not bad but it slowed me down driving north.  I was driving in the dark from around Binghamton which was pretty depressing as I had to do the seven hundred mile round trip all today and needed to get to each place by a certain time.  I got such a late start.  This was going to be pretty rough and I was already soar.

As I neared dad’s house there was a bit of snow on the ground and driving got harder.  There were a few inches on the road by his house.

I had almost no time at dad’s.  I stopped and he and I quickly unloaded the van together.  It probably took no more than thirty minutes.  I had to get out to Frankfort well before eleven and there was no time to spare.  The moment that the van was empty I was out the door and rushing east.

I got to Frankfort with the empty van at ten thirty.  Dominica’s dad and I loaded the stove into the van and eventually figured out how to secure it.  Then I was right back onto the road to get back home with the stove.

The drive south went fine on the Thruway.  No issues there.  The roads were pretty clear.

I got home to Peekskill with the van at three in the morning and I was really exhausted.  Dominica, Art and Danielle were all still awake waiting for me.  Liesl and Luciana were sleeping in Dominica and my room on the floor with their little air mattress.  They enjoy doing that from time to time.  It is like an adventure for them.

Tomorrow is going to be pretty busy in the morning.  Art and I will need to unload the stove from the van and then return the van to the UHaul place before nine in the morning.  That will be easy other than the general lack of sleep.

Today is my final phone interview day with Facebook.  And there is more packing to do before we get the moving cargo van in the morning.

My interview today seemed to go well.  Will not likely know anything more until tomorrow or the day after.  But at least it did not go poorly.  Always so hard to tell.  This one was earlier in the afternoon so the entire day was not shot after this one.

I have nothing scheduled (interview-wise) at this point so this afternoon and evening were spent getting ready for me to take the cargo van to dad’s house tomorrow.

So instead of getting a reprieve after doing the interview yesterday, now I have another one tomorrow and I need to continue preparing for that.  I helped Dominica with the packing for a bit today but she worked on it quite a bit.

I was online for much of the day working on MangoLassi and SpiceWorks and getting ready for tomorrow.  Tomorrow will be the final phone  and online interview with Facebook.

We will know more in a few days about what all is going on.

Our house is filling up with boxes.  I cannot wait to get these out of here.

After the exhaustion of yesterday and the opportunity to take today off because of the weather postponing my drive to dad’s house with the moving fan today became a day off from packing duties.  Probably a bad idea as there is so much to do but I was extremely busy all day with studying my Python.

My coding interview with Facebook was this afternoon at four.  So I was attempting to prep for that all morning.  It has been so long since I was really a coder that while coding, conceptually, comes pretty easy to me the skills are relatively rusty and my technical knowledge of current languages is very sparse.  So I am working hard to overcome that as this is a very coding heavy company and Facebook is a company that I am really interested in.

The interview went well this afternoon, I think.  It was slightly late in the day so there is a good chance that I will not hear back from them until tomorrow or later.

Once the interview was done, we took some time and all relaxed as I wanted to decompress a little after the interview and all of the prep that I did for it over the weekend.  We actually got the call this evening that Facebook liked the interview and wants me to do another round with them on Wednesday.

This really messed up our week’s travel plans.  Originally we had thought that I might take the cargo van up to dad’s this afternoon.  We pushed that off because of the weather.  Now we don’t have a window to do the trip until Thursday to Friday which is the last possible window in which to do it because Art and Danielle are coming to our house on Thursday evening and Friday morning will be the only possible time to install the new oven that I will be bringing back with me.

This is going to be one really busy week.

Today is dedicated to packing up the house as well as me continuing on my work on Python.  I was up on the early side today because Luciana got up early and got me up with her.  So I got to work on my Python work rather early.  Dominica got off to the store around ten thirty to go get the packing tape that we need to put the boxes together to start boxing things up.  There is so much packing to be done!  Even just this first load is going to be huge.  An entire cargo van is a lot of space to fill up.  And we plan to that plus another Acadia and a Spark load to ship up to dad’s in the near future.  That is just a lot of stuff to do in short order.

Any shopping trip of this nature is always a massive affair.  Dominica was gone for several hours.

Dominica packed all day.  She put in something like four hours of solid packing which is enough to completely exhaust anyone.  Her back does not allow her to even do that much let alone do any more.  I spent probably half an hour helping out, but the process did not start until the afternoon after she had done the shopping (because we needed packing tape to get started) and I was pretty swamped trying to study Python with the remaining time.