Sheep Guarding Llama

This morning we got up at a decent time, got the kids dressed and the car packed and we headed out to Geneseo to get there for ten thirty.  We went to the Geneseo Family Restaurant on Main Street for a change of pace.  Dad drove down to Leicester and picked up Aunt Sharon and brought her up to Geneseo.

Breakfast was good.  Liesl ate cake before leaving the house because no one told her that we were going to breakfast.  Luciana had her usual pancakes.  We discovered that the Geneseo Family Restaurant has a great vegetarian selection that we want to come back and try.

It was right at noon that we got on the road to drive out to Frankfort.  Traffic was not bad at all.  We stopped at Dunkin Donuts and got coffee for Dominica and I and we had to make one stop at a texting stop to get some stuff out of the back of the car.  Other than that it was a quick drive and we were in Frankfort just barely after two thirty.  That was a fast drive.

We got to see Truman, the new Boston Terrier puppy.  He is about three and a half months old.  He is a little sweetie.  We spent a lot of time snuggling with him.

Liesl opened her birthday presents shortly after we arrived.  She is really excited about her new Playmobile boat.  She put that together immediately.

We got Big Willie’s Pizza for dinner tonight.  At eight Dominica and I went out to Gerber’s in Utica to meet up with Brandi and Kerry.  Brandi is Dominica’s sorority sister from Geneseo.  We figured out that Dominica and I last came to Gerber’s one year ago tonight!  How weird that we did it exactly a year later.  Neither Kerry nor Brandi have ever been to Gerber’s either.  Completely by coincidence half a dozen or more of Kerry’s coworders ended up coming in right after we did and none of them had ever been to Gerber’s before either!  Lots of weird coincidences tonight.  Her friend Nicki ended up joining us for much of the evening at our table.

We had a really nice time.  It was a lot of fun.  We were out until probably one in the morning.

When we got back the girls were fast asleep, thankfully.  We poked our heads in to check on them.  They were so cute, the two of them sharing a small bed.  They hate to be apart.

We all slept in rather late this morning.  Liesl and Luciana were actually the first ones up and out of bed but Dominica was right behind them and dad was right behind her.  I was only ten or fifteen minutes later.

We did not do too much this morning.  We got dad set up with a Steam account and he bought his first two modern video games: Age of Empires HD and Tropico 3.  Both of these were in the Steam Black Friday sale so were only a few dollars.  He is going to try out some video games to see if he enjoys them so we wanted to have him start with two very different types of games to see what he may or may not like.

Art and Danielle stopped up this morning.  I bought Danielle’s iPad Mini 2 (with Verizon WWAN option) as I have been without a tablet for quite some time – several years since I gave my original iPad to the girls.  I have been wanting to get one for me to use.  I got to use a company one for several months last year and it was awesome having it.  The Mini is better for me, I just don’t need anything too large.  I am really excited.  I am going to be traveling a bit in December and possibly in January and who knows what we are doing in February so having good means of being online and having a really mobile device to use while traveling will make things much better.  It is good timing for us to get a new tablet.

We went down to Aunt Sharon’s at noon so that the girls could play with the kittens that they have: Pico and Toby.  They are very cute.  The kittens were very playful and the girls had a lot of fun getting to play with cats for the very first time.

After the cats we went to Brian’s USA Diner for some “lunch.”  I got a garbage plate there, I was craving another one after having the one last night.  They are so good.  I miss them living outside of the Rochester area.  We had a really nice lunch and then it was back to the house.

The girls opened their Christmas presents from grandpa this afternoon since they are unlikely to have a chance to see him before Christmas actually rolls around.

The girls took a long bath together this afternoon – Luciana got a new Barbie bath play set for Christmas and both girls were very anxious to have a chance to play with it.  Both of them are still so focused on imaginary play and just love being able to play that kind of stuff together.

We spent a lot of time just hanging out in the living room relaxing.  Liesl was pretty focused for several hours on building her new Lego beach house set.  It’s a really nice one.  Dad got it for her yesterday for her birthday.  She is loving it.  Luciana played with several different toys.  We mostly got time to visit.

Around seven, dad settled in to the office and started playing Tropico 3 which he bought earlier today.  This is the first “modern” video game that he has played.  So this is going to be a pretty big experiment to see if he enjoys where games have been going over the past thirty years!  Things have changed a lot since he was last playing video games regularly on the ColecoVision that we got when I was in second grade!!  I am writing this paragraph sitting in the same room that he is playing the game so I have no hindsight to give me a view as to how he likes it.

We did dinner of Thanksgiving leftovers, mostly baked ziti, and then it was time for a few science experiment with Liesl’s new science lab kit.  She had a lot of fun with that and Luciana helped out as much as she could.  That probably lasted an hour or more and I managed to get several videos taken and uploaded to YouTube tonight.

After the science experiments, Liesl and Luciana played for a little while then dad set up the theatre in the basement and he, Dominica, Liesl and I watched Journey to the Center of the Earth which Dominica and I have seen but dad and Liesl have not.  Liesl really enjoyed it.  Luciana came downstairs but grabbed the white iPad and took it into the girls room and said that she wanted to watch her own shows.  She wanted to be near us but did not want to watch the movie with us.  By the time that we checked in our her about halfway through the movie she was already fast asleep.  This week was really exhausting for her.

We finished the movie at eleven thirty and everyone was off to bed.

Today our oldest turns six years old!  We really cannot believe it.  Five is such a huge year, the first year that I really remember concretely from my own childhood.  Sure, I have memories from three and four, but mostly they are spotty and fuzzy.   Five is so iconic.  The year that school starts (for most people), for example.  That Liesl is no longer five and all of those memories and events for her from that age are now over is unbelievable.  How did our little girl get so old?  Liesl was still awake at midnight last night so I ran downstairs and wished her a happy birthday before we sent her off to bed.

Liesl and Luciana both love snow and Peoria, NY is completely covered in snow this morning.  Not snow that will cause driving problems, but enough that everything is covered in it.  This is what people wish that Christmas would look like.

Liesl got me up at six this morning, she needed me to escort her upstairs to get tissues.  She doesn’t like walking around grandpa’s house alone at night in the dark.  She went right back to bed and back to sleep after that.  I did not.  I ended up laying awake for an hour and a half before deciding to get up and get started.  Dominica was up at a quarter after eight to start cooking.

The morning was spent getting ready for the festivities.  Dominica was making baked ziti for everyone and that took much of the morning.  The gang was due to arrive around eleven thirty.

We had a total of seventeen people come for Thanksgiving dinner today.  It was a very long day, the crowd was here from about eleven thirty until seven in the evening.  And nearly everyone was here the whole time too.  We had a really good time, it was a lot of fun.  The girls had a blast.  They had a bunch of twenty-somethings to play with them all day too which they thought was just awesome.  So they were really worn out by the end of the day.

At nine, Art and Danielle stopped up and picked Dominica and I up and we drove up to Rochester to go to the old Nick Tahou’s (now Steve T’s) on Lyell Avenue.  This is the nineteenth year (1996 was the first year of the tradition) of our gang getting together there right at 10PM as they open up after being closed for Thanksgiving.  We are always nearly everyone there.  Very few people think of going there at that time.

We had an amazing thirteen people come this year.  Jeff Simpson and two of his cousins arrived first and Joe Howlett was waiting in his truck when the four of us got there.  Nate and Tammy came up bringing his cousin and a friend and Tess came for the first time too.  It was a huge turnout.  Bob was thinking of coming out from Syracuse but with the bad weather it just was not worth the long drive.

It was great being back.  We had a great time and everyone stayed until after midnight.  The food was awesome too.  It has been many years since I have had a garbage plate.  I love this tradition.  It is so much fun.  Dominica always hates the idea but loves it when we actually go.  She was very happy that we went too.  Maybe now we can get back into the swing of this.  This is our first time making it back since Liesl was born!  It was great seeing everyone again too.

It was just after one when we got back to the house.  Dad was still awake.  The girls had been pretty rambunctious and did not actually go to bed until a quarter after eleven!  We are not happy with them.  But their internal clocks probably made getting to sleep as early as we had put them to bed pretty hard.  They never go to bed before eleven and rarely before midnight.

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!