Sheep Guarding Llama

We got into dad’s last night (well, very early this morning) and so today we get to be here all day.  It was a great decision to come up as early as we did.  The snow really did hit hard back home.  School was closed in Peekskill today.  Roads are closed all over.  It would have been a terrible drive for us.

This morning Dominica and Danielle drove up to Rochester first thing to go to the T-Mobile store and deal with getting Dominica a new phone.  Dominica has been on Verizon for forever and she has been living with a broken iPhone 4s for a really long time.  Not only has it had a cracked screen for what seems like a year or more but it has not been charging properly for many months.  Easily more than six months.  It has been horrible for her.  But we kept waiting so that she could get an iPhone 6, and waiting to know about my job and waiting to know about which carrier she wants to use.

Finally, T-Mobile appears to have come out on top.  So she is finally joining me on the low cost plan with unlimited data.  The Verizon phones have been so expensive and it was because of Verizon politics that she has been stuck with a broken phone for so long.  And we are discussing our next trip to Europe and it was absolutely horrible dealing with Verizon last time that we went there and if she stays with Verizon she will be phoneless in Europe again.  Going with T-Mobile means that both of us will have working phones while we are there.  That is a really big deal for safety and convenience.  Being at home without two phones is bad enough.  Being in another country seems crazy.  And now that T-Mobile offers calling over WiFi and Verizon does not means that the use of the T-Mobile phones is better for us nearly everywhere.  That was really the trump card.

Dominica was not sure what she was going to get, the iPhone 6 or the 6+ but after seeing how much larger the iPhone 6 was than the iPhone 4s she went with the smaller option.

On the way back from the city they stopped in Avon at the cake shop where Dominica had ordered Liesl’s birthday cake and picked that up so that we would not need to run out and deal with that later.

Once Dominica was back home we drove down to Perry to go to Commodore Liquors where we picked up wine for Thanksgiving tomorrow.  They have an awesome selection of Finger Lakes wines there and they are the closest liquor store to dad’s house too.  Very handy.

From there we went to the Farmer’s Wife, the fruit and vegetable stand right around the corner from dad’s house, that now sells food.  I have not been in there since they first started selling veggies from the farm about a decade ago.  It’s a full restaurant now!  They have a big menu, lots of food items and a few tables.  It is funny because it still looks like a fruit stand and while waiting on your sandwiches you can see cows right at the back door.  It’s very Covington.

Aunt Sharon and Uncle Leo stopped by briefly to drop off some stuff for tomorrow while on their way up to the city to see Jim who had a stroke a couple of days ago and has been in the hospital ever since.  They are hoping that he can come home tomorrow but there is no telling at this point.

I had to be on the phone much of the afternoon.   Had a good day, though.  And, among other things, I am now scheduled to be flying out to Seattle on Tuesday morning.  I will be there all day on Wednesday.  That is very exciting both for the reason that I am going there as well as I have never seen the Pacific Northwest let alone Seattle itself.  I have always wanted to see it and now I will get a chance.  Our plan is to stay upstate until Monday to avoid the holiday traffic.  We will be at dad’s until Saturday morning and then drive out to Frankfort and stay with Dominica’s parents until Monday morning.  Then home just in time for me to get all ready to fly out to Seattle.  We are all very excited about that.

This evening, around nine thirty, Nate came by and picked me up and we went down to Retsof to the Krash Landing, what used to be the Capa Lounge, to see Art and Danielle play with the band.  There was rather a sizable crowd there, which was surprising.  I got to check out their menu which looked really good.  Maybe we will get a chance to eat there this Friday.  I really want to try their salmon reuben!

Nate and I only stayed out until eleven.  He hung out at the house to see Dominica for maybe half an hour.  They almost never get to see each other.  Hopefully we will all get some time to hang out tomorrow night if we can make it up to Nick Tahou’s for the traditional Thanksgiving evening gang reunion.  It’s been running for twenty continuous years, I believe.  Joe is the historian and will know for sure.  If this is not the twentieth year then it is very close to being it.  We’ve been doing that for a long time but we have not managed to do it since Liesl was born since we were in the hospital for her birth that year and moved to Texas after that.  This year is our first real chance in a very long time.

Luciana was already asleep when we got back from the Krash Landing.  Liesl was upstairs with Dominica.  Dad was already in bed.  I took Liesl downstairs and set her up with an iPad watching a movie on our futon where Dominica and I sleep so that she could entertain herself but not wake up her sister.  I can’t believe that she is all done being five!  Only minutes left to go.

The big Steam holiday sales started today (I watch these things religiously.)  I spend the whole year being ready to pick up lots of our video games for the year during these sales.  Today I was only able to get four titles, but four is pretty good.  We added Broken Sword 5, Assassin’s Creed Liberation HD, Broken Age and Banner Saga to our library today.  We have a great year of video gaming in front of us.

Dominica, Liesl and I were all off to bed at a quarter after midnight.  Tomorrow is going to be a busy day.  Sixteen people anticipated for Thanksgiving at dad’s house.  Dominica has to be up on the early side to start cooking.

We had decided last night that we would drive out to dad’s house near Rochester this evening rather than tomorrow because there is a large snow storm expected to hit Westchester County tomorrow morning or possibly late tonight and it would make travel nearly impossible.  It is supposed to be a pretty big one.

This morning I was mostly dealing with job hunting stuff.  Things are slowly down for the holidays which is very frustrating.  We will not likely have anything much in the way of news about anything until next week.

We spent a bit of the day packing.  Dominica did that most of the day.  We got the Acadia packed and got several boxes loaded up in it too as well as the “moon chair” – the mustard coloured leather chair and its ottoman that we got for our wedding.  That chair does not fit in our current house and it has been completely in our way ever since we moved in.  We are taking as much as we can fit into the Acadia up to dad’s house to put into storage there as we prepare for leaving the house in Peekskill.  We don’t have any definite plans so we are really in a bit of a pickle.    We know that we have renters moving in for February 1st but we have no idea where we will go once we don’t have the house anymore.

So our lives are really up in the air.  As if the job situation was not stressful enough, we know that we are homeless in about ten weeks.  And it is winter so moving our stuff around is a huge pain.  We are looking at options like New York City, Saint Louis, Seattle, Menlo Park and Dublin right now.  Any of them are real options and there are plenty of possibilities that don’t include any of them.  So we really have to be prepared for anything.  If we don’t have all of our stuff in some long term, strategic storage we are going to be in terrible shape.

Getting this first load out of the house makes just being in the house that much easier, though.  There are fewer boxes in our way and that chair made a huge difference.  The biggest issue now is that we have no idea when we will manage to take another load.  We want to use the time available to us wisely but there is not that much time left before we have to move.  Christmas in Texas makes our logistics that much harder.

We are thinking about maybe doing a cross country drive with the kids.  Take them to a bunch of states that we have never been to.  It would be fun and we have the time to do it.  We could do it “en route”, so to speak, to Texas for Christmas.  So that is something that we are kicking around.  It would use up most of the available time that we have between now and Christmas, though.  And it would not necessarily be cheap, which is something we are really trying to be these days.

It was around six when we left the house.  The drive was fine.  No snow at all.  We made good time and hit no traffic.  Very easy drive.  We grabbed some food at the Dunkin Donuts at the bottom of the Bear Mountain Bridge on the circle just as you leave Peekskill.  That is our usual stop for fueling up and grabbing food.

We only had to make one stop on the way up to dad’s.  For a huge change of pace, it was Liesl who needed a bathroom stop.  That never happens.  So we stopped at the Wegmans in Johnson City.  The girls thought that it was interesting that I had worked in that store and installed their servers.  That was almost a decade ago!  Hard to believe that that was 2005.

It was one in the morning when we got in to dad’s house.  The girls managed to get some sleep on the drive and were ready to run around the house and play for a while before going to bed.  They have so much energy.

So the latest job news from today is that things continue to move, just at a snail’s pace.  I finally was told today, after two weeks of silence, that some lawyers are getting involved at some point and will be talking to my old job to see if they can work something out.  That is encouraging that they are taking that step but very depressing because I was led to believe that that step had happened last Friday and yesterday and that everything was supposed to have been wrapped up yesterday.  That it took major cajoling today to find out that everything that I had been told was made up and that things were not moving forward as I have been told did not make me happy.  Because my old job is off for the holiday basically starting today that means that no one is even making an attempt at dealing with this until December.  That’s ridiculous.

So at this point I have no choice whatsoever but to move forward, full steam, with alternative options.  The time frame on this is just not realistic and at the rate at which I am getting news it will be months before anyone even gets around to telling me if things are going well or poorly let alone informing me if or when I am able to start working.  My last two weeks have been nothing but sitting around waiting for a call back that I had expected in an hour or two.  As things had been left with HR it sounded like there was very little chance of the job working out.  So I am not working with very much information.  The information exchange alone is happening horribly and not making me feel very confident in the process at all.

So that is where we are at this point.  Things have not stopped but our confidence level is at zero.  We aren’t burning bridges but we are forced to believe that the existing job process is, and has been, over and that we have to figure out something completely new.  Very depressing as this process has been going, in some form or another, for more than an entire season.  It’s been since mid-August that this was at least being kicked around as a possibility.  That is a really long time, especially when we are talking about weeks as a minimum before we even get an update as to where the process is!

It’s Thanksgiving week.  So we are not too hopeful that anything much is going to happen with the job situation.  Any aspect of it.  On Friday we were informed that today there was going to be a major conversation and that things were expected to be resolved.  We got pretty suspicious of that when I was then told that the recruiters did not “expect to hear the results today but would expect to hear something in the morning.”  That made no sense at all.  If there was anything close to a resolution today the new job would be seriously anxious to let me know.  Right now they have to be pretty nervous that I am looking at other options and would want to lock me in with a start date as soon as they possibly can.  Especially as they have stated repeatedly just how important me starting before this Friday is.  If they want me to start before Friday, and considering that Thursday is a holiday and that I will be traveling most of the week, the window to arrange that really closes, more or less, today.  So the story that I have does not add up in any way.

Today was mostly a planning day.  Dominica has been watching the weather and it looks like we have a big snow storm coming into our area on Wednesday so we are talking about leaving tomorrow instead to get ahead of the storm rather than getting stuck in it.  So our week at home is going to be very short.  I am sure that dad will be happy to find out that he will get the grandkids for several days, now, though.  Although we have to be ready to run back down in case something changes with the job situation.  But at this point we are assuming that getting started there this week, no matter how important that claimed that that was, isn’t in the cards.  They have not been communicating with me for about two weeks now, so the chances that they are actually thinking that I am going to be starting this week has to be pretty low.  That I am starting there ever is rapidly seeming to be less and less of a possibility.  I really wrote them off a while ago, but I keep getting what appear to be fake updates stringing me along on this.  I’m giving up even on that news after this.  It’s just getting to be worthless.

We played some video games today.  Dominica has her new collection of Rollercoaster Tycoon games to play and she is loving those.  I played Tropico 3 today and did the initial level (Hippie Island) again and managed to beat it this time.  That was fun.  I tried it before and failed at it so had to do it again.  This time I understood what was going on and had to problem crushing it.  I like that game, it is a lot of fun.  It is the perfect thing for a relaxing afternoon and keeping me occupied but is always very easy to pause when emails or calls come in so that I can shift gears quickly.  I like that it is such a fun, while still casual, game.  Dominica is enjoying playing Tropico 4 a little too.

This evening the girls were begging for me to play a game and Dominica has been wanting to watch me play Bioware’s Jade Empire.  So tonight we set up in the bedroom, Dominica camped out on the bed and the girls gathered around me and we played an hour or two of Jade Empire which already I am liking a lot.  The autumn in China graphics are just amazing to look at.  Yes the technology is old and there is no denying that the game shows its age, but the artistry is excellent and you want to just wander around looking at the luscious locale.

So far, in the first two hours, the story of Jade Empire is looking like it is going to be good.  Lots of back story, intrigue and character development happening already.  Bioware never disappoints in story.  This is the game that Bioware made after Knights of the Old Republic and before Mass Effect.  So if that doesn’t give it some serious street cred, I don’t know what does.  Sitting directly between two of the best story telling titles in video game history (or in all of literature for that matter) puts it in some good company.  It has a lot to live up to.  And being set in a Chinese-inspired medieval setting makes it unique and exciting too.  This is the first original intellectual property for BioWare ever, as far as I know.  Prior to this their RPGs were always D&D or Star Wars based.  This is the game that really put them on the road to being their own company.  So we are all very excited to get to play it.  It is action-oriented so Dominica tends to not want to play those herself but she doesn’t want to miss the game so is planning on watching me play the entire thing.  So this is a family event for us.

We played for a while then got the girls off to bed.  Then Dominica and I watched a few episodes of Brooklyn Nine Nine before we were heading off to bed ourselves.  This is, as far as we know, our last night at home for a week.  We will not likely be coming home until next Monday (a week from today.)  This is the longest that I will have been away from home in quite a while, probably all year.  Dominica has been traveling a lot so it is nothing new for her and the girls.

The word from everyone upstate is that the huge snow that accumulated over the weekend has already melted and there is almost no sign of it left at this point.  So our drive up should be just fine.  We will be managing to avoid all of the bad snow from November, if we are lucky.

Slept in till after nine this morning.  Dominica got up at ten and got straight to playing Tropico 4 even before she got out of bed.  Luciana was up around the same time. Luciana is a creature of habit.  She is the first child awake, she comes slowly into our room and asks for chocolate milk.  She makes me take her downstairs and set her up on the couch with a show on the big screen (normally My Big Big Friend or Creative Galaxy) and she spends about an hour alone watching her show all wrapped up in a blanket.

Liesl got up closer to eleven, she had been up late last night.  Once she was awake the girls brought their chairs back into our bedroom and spent the morning doing their sliding game.  It is very rare that all four of us hang out in the bedroom for an extended period of time like this.

This morning Liesl came to me and asked if we could read “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” again because she and Luciana missed reading that.  So we are scheduled to start reading that again tonight.  But they decided to do other things tonight when the time finally rolled around so we are planning on starting on that in the near future.

We mostly relaxed today.  Very little done.  It was a nice day to just spend together.

I was up at eight thirty.  Dominica got up pretty early and cleaned for a few hours.  The house looks much better.  I did some work this morning then cleaned and put in an hour or so playing Space Quest V with the girls.  They were very excited to get to do that.  I would estimate that we are now very close to halfway through that game.  The girls still love it.

Today is a huge day in the Miller house, today we decided that Liesl could try programming for the first time.  I spent some time researching Logo options for Linux and decided to just start with our old, trusty KTurtle option from the KDE project.  So in the mid-afternoon I sat Liesl down and explained what programming was to her, showed her how Logo worked and taught her a few basics so that she could get started making her own first program.  She loved it.  We probably spent two hours working on that today.  Five years old and already programming.  She has me beat by four years.

Dominica is completely addicted to Tropico 4 and played most of the day.  She camped out in the living room and is playing it on her new laptop which is way more powerful than my desktop upstairs so she is able to play a lot of games that we have that my current computer just cannot handle playing.

Overall it was a pretty quiet day.  I did a ton of work on the new XenServer instances that I have now and have FreeBSD, Dragonfly BSD, Linux Mint, CoreOS, SmartOS and more running.  I did a lot of work last night and this morning getting my remote Linux Mint desktop working which is great.  I’m testing on the new NX replacement called X2Go which is really cool and does a great job over low bandwidth.  Now I have regular access to a Linux desktop without needing to run a VM on my desktop at home.

We watched a little bit of How I Met Your Mother and caught up on the latest episodes of The Mindy Project and The New Girl but only just enough while we were eating dinner.  I spent pretty much the entire day working on the lab and Dominica spent most of it video gaming and cleaning.  The girls spent most of the day camped out in the bedroom with me.  They set up some chairs (soft ones) on the bed and floor and used them to make a makeshift slide so that they could slide from high in the room down to the floor.  They are pretty crazy.

We are trying to figure out our travel plans for this week.  We have no idea what we are going to be doing.  There is some possibility that I will be working early in the week, but not much.  There is a much higher possibility that I will be working on Friday.  At this point we really have no idea. We are going up to dad’s for Thanksgiving and Liesl’s birthday party which are both on Thursday.  We think that we are going up on Wednesday but my possible work schedule will determine if we are traveling together or if the girls are going up separately or what days we can travel and who, if anyone, is coming back on Friday.  The girls are planning on going to Frankfort for the weekend after Thanksgiving.  I might be working all weekend or I might be free.  We just don’t know.

Two months of living life in a “we just have no idea how to plan because we have no idea what is going on” is really wearing us down.  It has been so long since we were able to do any type of life planning at all.  It is just horrible.