Sheep Guarding Llama

Knowing that today was going to be a crazy one at work, I got up at four and was in the office at a quarter until seven in the morning. I was pretty tired all day. Liesl and Luciana had slept in our bed last night and Liesl practically pushed me onto the floor for most of the night making it very hard to sleep.

Originally we had feared that Dominica might have to leave a day early to make it down to Florida for her cruise and that would mean that instead of having today to “train” with her and then two days of the girls by himself, dad would instead of no training at all and three days of the girls to himself – a major difference in stress level. He was pretty worried about that but Dominica decided not to attempt to travel early and so was home today. Her day ended up being a very stressful one, though, because she had to spend the day watching the weather and the flight status and, midway through the day, her flight was cancelled and she had to spend the entire day trying to figure out what she was going to do.

Dominica had a very long day dealing with this. She was really stressed as she bounced from possibly finding a flight to being stuck with no way to get to Jacksonville (where the cruise is leaving from) over and over again. We checked into trains, cars and all kinds of options. She did little else all day.

Everything about this cruise and everything about the coordination necessary to go on it has solidified to me so strongly just how much I never, ever want anything to do with a cruise. Stress, expense, risk and tons of effort to get to the “vacation” all negate any positives that might be available in a cruise situation. Even with weeks of planning and days of closely watching options Dominica is now spending a full day, which is only possible because she stays home with the kids and because dad was there watching them today so that she had the time to do all of this, just trying to figure out how to get to the cruise and spending twice as much on the travel as we had expected. A horrible, horrible experience and, more or less, what you expect because cruises are only really beneficial when taken during local poor weather months (why would anyone want to cruise in the summer) and the tight schedule necessary for a cruise ship to keep makes everything surrounding it very stressful.

After a full day of trying to figure out what to do and being online trying to help others figure out what to do (people from all over the world are unable to make this cruise do to their travel arrangements) Dominica finally figured out that she could get the first flight (the very first flight ever) on JetBlue from JFK to Savannah tomorrow morning and that Katie could drive from Jacksonville up to Savannah and pick her up. So she booked that flight and we made our plans. She is very thankful that she was able to figure something out, but we are still very worried that the flight will be cancelled or that there will be no way to get her to the airport. The chances that any flight will make it through on the east coast is relatively low at this point.

I worked until late, not leaving the office until after seven. It was an extremely long work day for me. So it was well after eight when I got back to the house. Dominica and I decided that the weather was supposed to be okay early in the morning so we would not get her a hotel in Brooklyn for tonight as that would mean more traveling tonight and more logistics for her and more expense when this cruise already took on hundreds of more dollars of cost with the changes in flights. It is a tough gamble either way.

Dad slept in the basement tonight. The girls slept in their own room because Dominica and I really needed sleep and had to get up very early. Our alarm will be going off at three in the morning. Her flight out of JFK is at seven twenty five.

I am prepared and expecting to be working from home tomorrow. The weather is supposed to be just awful. The south was hit with the storm today and we get it in the morning. We are expected around a foot of snow to fall just in the morning. So everyone knows that tomorrow is almost certainly going to be a snow day at the office.

Today is Tuesday and today dad is spending the day on Amtrak working his way down to Peekskill to stay with the girls for the week. He leaves around eleven and, if all goes well, we should see him before seven. If he is on time Dominica and the girls will get him and if he is running late I will be picking him up.

This morning was a very cold one. Seven degrees when I went out to warm up the car. Quite nippy. I took out the garbage and the recycling to get the space in the kitchen cleaned up and did some cleaning in the living room while waiting for the car to get warm enough to drive. Even with all of this need to warm up the car for up to half an hour before leaving in the mornings my fuel efficiency has taken another bump up and the car’s lifetime average is now 34.7 MPG instead of 34.6 MPG. That’s the second increase I’ve seen since I got the last oil change that included the air filter change, that we knew was very much needed. That is the lifetime average at around 26,000 miles so gaining a tenth of a mile per gallon average increase is a huge deal. I continue to be extremely happy with the decision to buy the, rather silly, Chevy Spark. And Dominica still drives it anytime that she can. It has saved us a fortune already and we have not owned it all that long. It was one of our wiser investments. It has been acceptably good in the snow as well, which is pretty surprising, but the tiny wheels have something to do with that.

At least today is bright and clear. A good day for dad to be on the train. He has his new iPad but his train heading south does not have WiFi on it yet. He northbound train ride next week does, though. He has his T-Mobile 4G and should have a connection from time to time to get email.

I have the Amtrak app for my iPhone, as does Dominica, so we can track dad’s progress that way. Very handy. While at my desk I can track dad’s train in real time too via Amtrak’s site: http://www.amtrak.com/train-routes

Dad’s train was pretty delayed getting into Albany but made up some time heading down the Hudson River and I was able to leave the office in Connecticut at the perfect time to get out to Croton, New York at almost exactly the same time that dad’s train was pulling into the station at around a quarter past seven.

Liesl and Luciana was so excited to see grandpa. They were just exploding with excitement. They were screaming and bouncing off of the walls. They could not contain themselves at all. For a while they just ran back and forth through the house like crazed animals.

Dominica had managed to find someone in town who wanted our queen mattress and bed frame via Freecycle and they were coming at eight thirty tonight to pick them up. Dad and I had gotten to the house at a quarter to eight. The mattress was by the door and ready to go, no big deal there. But the bed frame that we were giving away was upstairs in the girls’ bedroom with dad’s bed made up on it. So we had to quickly go up and move it downstairs.

Moving the bed frame seemed like it would not be too hard of a task but when I tried to move it down the stairs I realized that the slats were going to fall off as I did it and would need Dominica’s help. When she came up to help we managed to get it heading down the stairs but then got stuck near the bottom as it would not fit through the available opening. Not good. We ended up having to disassemble it in situ in the stairwell. Less than ideal. That was a huge amount of effort and we were still getting the last pieces down the stairs when the two guys arrived to pick everything up. But we had it ready before they were done carrying the available parts out to their car so it worked out just fine.

We are so thankful for Freecycle. That worked out wonderfully. We would have hated to have thrown that bed frame or that mattress out. They were very high quality items when new and while the bed has taken some wear (mostly for our renters of four years) and the frame is less than fully intact they were both very usable and when assembled the bed frame was as functional and aesthetic as new. It is only when disassembled that the frame has any issues. Now they are off to a good home and we have a lot more space in our house.

Since that bed left, we had to go up to the attic and take down the folding queen bed frame that we had up there and put it together so that dad would have that to sleep on instead. So we made for ourselves a bit of work tonight but with that mattress gone the house, for the first time, is really feeling livable.

I did not get a chance to mention it or to pay attention because of the mattress work and screaming children but Dominica did a ton of cleaning in the house today. The Roomba was run all day long and the house is so much cleaner than it has been. It has been pretty rough living there and finally things are starting to look nice, like the house used to look when we lived here many years ago.

Monday and back to work. I was really exhausted getting up this morning after having worked so hard over the weekend and especially yesterday. I was really dragging this morning.

On my commute I am now reading Jules Verne’s “Journey to the Center of the Earth”, translated to English of course. So far I am really enjoying it. His writing, at least the English translation of it, is really approachable.

Work felt long and stressful today. It really was not a bad day, just a tough one. Kind of a “blue” day, possibly more related to feeling worn out than to anything that happened during the day. I am easily affected by outside influences and little things can make me have a “blue” day rather irrationally.

I did not leave until late and got home at eight. Dominica had plenty of work queued up for me. We had to prep the mattress for someone to be able to take it tomorrow, do some cleaning in the living room, head up to the attic with more cardboard, etc. Probably an hour of getting unpacking work done around the house.

Dominica took the time yesterday to put our older queen mattress and bed up on Freecycle. She got some hits today so we are hoping that someone will come and get that soon. It is really a pretty decent mattress still and a lot of people pay a lot of money for memory foam mattresses like these. It is still better than most peoples’ beds these days.

We were far enough along today that, for the very first time since we got into the house, we were able to run the Roomba (robot vacuum cleaner) on part of the house. Dominica turned it loose in the girls’ room (the guest bedroom this week) and the hallway. It feels great to be able to do that. It is like we have been fighting a battle and have claimed a small amount of space, some territory that is now ours again. I think that the entire upstairs might be Roomba-able tomorrow.

The girls really enjoyed Star Wars yesterday and today requested that we watch the next one. So we watched most of The Empire Strikes Back, although it was not as exciting for them as Star Wars and Luciana just played with her toys while snuggling on my lap and did not pay attention to the movie at all and Liesl was easily distracted during it. We ended up not being able to quite finish it as we were all very tired and the girls were not able to concentrate enough to make it through the movie. I remember being very young and having a tough time staying with Empire too until I was older. The Hoth scenes are gripping but after that the bulk of the movie is not action. But I think that Liesl will really love Return of the Jedi. That was, by far, my favourite movie when I was seven. It has so much more action and is so much easier to follow than the first two.

We put the girls to bed and I read to them the final chapter of “The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.” That means that tomorrow night we will be starting book four, “The Silver Chair” which is my favourite of the “main line” of the Narnia books. Dad will be able to join us for that. We should, if we stick to it, be able to read all of it while he is visiting.

It is awesome that our girls are now, finally, at the age where they are getting exposed to awesome literature, like the Chronicles of Narnia, and great cinematic literature, like Star Wars. And, to some degree, their video game literature as well.

Dad spends the day tomorrow on the train. He is taking the Lake Shore Limited, number 48, from Rochester to Croton-on-Hudson and should, if the train is on time as is never the case, arrive around six in the evening. The girls are very excited.

Today is our big unpacking day. Not that a lot has not been done already this week but the living room was still a forest of boxes this morning and the upstairs hallway was impassable between the old queen mattress and the load of cardboard still in the hallway. We slept in a little and when Dominica and I got up we set about to a full day of serious unpacking. We were energized and ready for the task before us.

I would venture to say that today was the most productive unpacking day that Dominica and I have ever had. There was so much to be done and we tore through the pile of boxes like nobody’s business. I moved nearly all of the boxes of books down to the basement. That alone was a lot of exercise. We opened nearly all of the boxes and learned where everything was. Much of what we were searching for we were able to locate. We are missing very little at this point. The one really big item that we know has gone missing, and we knew this while still in Texas, is my black camera bag that, sadly, has one of my lenses in it and the remote for the camera and, possibly, the GPS unit for it. It is a major loss as it was a really nice bag as well. We have no idea where it might have gone. It went missing not long before we started packing in Texas and our only guess is that somehow it got moved out to the garage and then, accidentally, packed into a box and taken up to the attic. We have come up with no other theory for its timing of disappearance and everyone has been on the lookout for it starting a bit before the packing began there.

We tracked down the Netgear ReadyNAS that we use in the house for our movie and music collection. We have been hoping to find that soon. That is one of the major pieces of technology that we use around the house. We have been using the Synology-based IOSafe for a while but that is going to move to the Ralstons’ soon now that we have the smaller ReadyNAS available for use at the house. We have hundreds of movies ready to go on our ReadyNAS and, from time to time, like to make use of them as there are many more awesome movies there than there are on services like Netflix. With the girls getting older we want them to have access to more really good media so having that is important. I think that really soon I am going to need to acquire larger drives for the ReadyNAS. I can’t remember how much storage it has, either two or three terabytes, which would be pretty amazing considering how old that unit is. Three terabytes is still very large for a drive purchased today. I hope to upgrade it to six terabyte drives soon because we use so much storage in the house.

We must have gone through half of all of the boxes. The house was totally transformed. Liesl and Luciana went down to the basement early in the morning and set up camp there. They have the room just full of toys, as they usually do, but are just crazy excited about the new boxes of toys that get delivered down from time to time. It is like Christmas for them. They keep finding things that they have not seen in months. They are having a grand time. Liesl was trapped in the basement for much of the morning because her skin got dry and her baby toe split open on her. I put on Neosporin and a bandage and she sat on the black couch in the basement for many hours playing with toys there. She had me bring her a newly discovered box of toys and set it at her feet so that she could explore it without getting up.

So the girls were great about being out of the way today. They did very well. Later on in the day the two of them came upstairs and played games hiding in amongst the boxes.

We got enough moved around that we were able to move the side board table over to where it is going to go in front of the white couch. That allowed us to start using both it and the television stand upon which it had been setting since first we unloaded the truck.

Dominica did tons of work in the kitchen. She reorganized everything and packed up things that we know that we will not use in this house and got them ready for attic storage.

After a full day of serious work we decided to take a break, hook up the ReadyNAS and finally let the girls watch Star Wars which Liesl has been looking forward to seeing for a while. Everyone was very excited about that. They settled in to start watching it and I took the opportunity of a quiet house to move the cedar chest up to our bedroom, another major unpacking win.

The girls both loved Star Wars. They thought that it was great fun. Liesl is just barely the age that I was when I first saw it too, I believe. She might be one year older, I am not sure. I know that by age six I had watched it twenty-four times! Liesl struggled to follow the story some but overall did pretty well.

After the movie Dominica and I decided to move the big, corner desk up to our bedroom and assemble that. We have been trying to figure out what to do both about the desks that we have and about what to do with the space in our bedroom for a while. But it has become apparent that having the basement as the only serious work space is not going to work at all. I need a means of escaping when I need to work and the basement is the movie area and the girls’ primary play space. So having that be where I can go to work conflicts with the general usage of the house. And not having another work area is a waste of the resources that we own too since I have a very nice desktop computer and a pair of excellent monitors that, if not used there, will simply go to waste. So we gave up on trying to keep a computer out of our bedroom and are putting my desktop there and leaving Dominica’s down in the basement. For the moment I will only have wireless access up in our bedroom but hopefully soon we can run some wiring and have CAT5e run up there too. The house needs updating with new wiring anyway just to modernize it.

We talked about it and we think that, once the bedroom computer is set up, we might add a television in our bedroom since all of the electronics to support it will already be installed there and in the perfect place for a television too. We might as well take advantage of the situation rather than ignore the possibility. It is just too easy to install it once everything else is done. My computer will have the speakers there already as well. So really ideal.

By the end of the night both bedrooms were in great shape. The girls’ dressers were in place and their closet cleaned up. Our room is nearly ready, although the electronics have not been brought up yet. The house is really coming together. It is starting to feel like we really live here and we can see the possibilities once again. It has been a rough four months, to be sure.

It is the weekend. Dominica and I did some light unpacking today, it is hard to get into the groove of getting that done. There is just so much to do and the house is so full of stuff that every time you turn around you are cornered by other boxes.

This morning Dominica had a salon appointment, her cruise is only a few days away, and then she went shopping as we were getting desperately low on groceries and supplies. So she was gone for several hours while I hung out with the girls.

We watched some Keeping Up Appearances this afternoon. Dominica had been wanting to watch that because we love the “cruise” episode where they take a Baltic cruise on the Queen Elizabeth 2. It is probably the most classic episode of that show. We watched three episodes while the little girls played quietly over on the side of the room together. They were so adorable. We are loving that Luciana is now old enough that she completely takes part in the imaginative play that Liesl has always done and the two of them play together in ways that I never played at all. They will spend hours in some game together with their toys in near silence. If you listen, however, you can hear the murmur of conversation as they act out scenes with the toys.

The girls got restless and requested that we play Deponia again tonight. Both girls enjoy it. Luciana might ask for it more often than Liesl does, in fact. So I agreed to play with them and we put in a few hours doing that. Luciana got tired, though, and had to be put to bed early on her own. Dominica was feeling tired too so she went to bed. Liesl should have gone to bed then but we determined that there was only about one hour left in the game and she really wanted to play it. So I stayed up with her and we managed to get to the end of the first title in the Deponia series.

Overall Deponia was nowhere near as good (or as long) as The Night of the Rabbit, but the girls still enjoyed it and want to play more. Liesl and I looked at some of the other games that we have ready and waiting for her and she is interested in many of them but she wants to stick with Deponia for now and we already own the second one in the series, Chaos on Deponia. So we will start that one soon, but maybe not until after dad has visited.