Sheep Guarding Llama

It is Friday! It was a busy day in the office, meetings galore. I managed to leave the office at a really good time today, though. On the drive home I finally finished reading Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita” ready by Jeremy Irons via Audible. I am trying to fill in my background in classic literature of which this is one of the most famous. It is certainly well written and an impressive work although I am unable to establish a clear opinion of it. Creepy and weird but well written. There is much about it that is difficult to ascertain if it is a style of the author that is poor or the author’s excellent portrayal of the insane fictional author through whose lens the writing is skewed. Much of the result sounds, to modern ears, like a pretentious French version of Dora the Explorer with pointless lapses into French for no added value other than to point out the ability to say single words or phrases in another language. Let’s go. Vamanos.

I had a few minutes after finishing that book so started reading “Journey to the Center of the Earth” which, from a quick listen, sounds like it is going to be a good book. I have never read any Verne so am very interested to see how it is.

I stopped at the deli on the way home, which has become a custom, and got our falafel for dinner. I got home and we watched Doctor Who with the girls before reading “The Voyage of the Dawn Treader” and going to bed.

Our weekend will be filled with unpacking. We need to get a lot of it done as dad is coming on Tuesday to stay for the week. Dominica leaves on Thursday for her cruise to the Bahamas with Katie. A busy week for us.

It is Thursday. Due to the very heavy snow fall, yesterday was a “snow day” and I worked from home, my first time doing so since coming up here. It worked pretty well. Today the sun is bright and while it is still quite cold there has been no new snow and it should be fine to drive into the office.
I got outside early and worked to clear the car. This proved to be a monumental effort. I got the car started early to warm it up but the snow was six to eight inches thick encasing the car and that snow itself was encased in solid ice. I spent at least half an hour trying to get the car clear. I was in and out of the house repeatedly both warming up and getting two liters of hot water at a time to bring out and pour on the car. The snow was so thick and the ice so solid that even pouring that onto the windshield did effectively nothing to clear the car. I used just gallons and gallons of hot water and was still digging through inches of solid snow that was not budging on the car.

Having a Wednesday be our snow day was awesome. A nicely broken up week with only two days in the office on either side. A nice change of pace. The kids really enjoyed that, getting a surprise day with daddy midweek.

The drive in and back were fine today. No problems at all.

The weather was nice the rest of the day and it was clear and crisp this evening. I arrived home at eight to the two little girls waiting for me right in the doorway. They get so excited when I get home.

Tonight was a snuggling night. We all camped out on the couch and finished watching the first half of the seventh season of Doctor Who, up until the end of the episodes with the Ponds. Then it was off to bed with the girls at ten (yes, my evening lasts only two hours) and I read them a chapter in “The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.” We are nearly to the end of it. Only a day or two left.

We were anticipating the blizzard last night so I was all prepped to work from home today. I woke up around five and heard something that sounded like typing but it was the ice hitting the side of the house. I went back to sleep and slept in for several hours. It was wonderful. Knowing that it was going to be a snow day and a guaranteed late start at the office made for a quiet, snuggly morning. No need to run down to determine that everything was too awful to drive. A quick peek out of the window shows that the plows were not keeping up with our own driveway and that little Spark was not going anywhere. We had six inches of snow or more and a solid sheet of ice over the top of that.

I have my loaner laptop from the office so in the later morning I set that up down in the basement on the desk, the only desk that we have so far, and logged into work there. Today is officially a “snow day” with the office effectively closed but that just means working from home but it does mean that it will likely be a pretty quiet day. I am very thankful that I really did not need to make any judgment call on that and got to just work from home today without feeling guilty.

Dominica did school with Liesl much of the day down in the basement. Liesl did not get a snow day. It was fun getting to see her doing school today, though.

We did not go outside all day, in fact the front door was blocked by a bunch of cardboard all day. Dominica was pretty annoyed that I had taken over her desk, though.

We got a little more unpacking done today here and there although, overall, pretty little. I am still resting up after the moving the other night. I don’t feel bad but it is a good day to take it easy. We do have a bit of a panic to get a lot of stuff put away over the next few days because dad is coming to stay with us in less than a week and there isn’t any place for anything, the house is just a collection of boxes.

The really big, awesome news tonight is that we got our house in Texas rented! This is a huge deal. What is amazing is that we had two people “fighting” over the house for the last few months. It has been going on since months before we left Texas. At first one friend committed to taking it and has been stating that she would for months. So we felt bad with other friends said that they had wanted it and we had not saved it for them due to some severe miscommunications. But then, while the Ralstons were there, the first friends looked at the house again and ended up deciding that they couldn’t take it. Then the second friends, tonight, decided that it just didn’t make sense for them. So two seemingly “definite” renters both fell through this week. We haven’t been even thinking about renting the house out all of this time because one person had committed to taking it and another had been almost begging us to give it to them instead.

But tonight, everything came together, and a third friend, out of nowhere, asked if the house was available and committed to it tonight. We expect that he will probably be moving in by this weekend. We are so happy that that is over and done with. Now we have someone that we know going into the house and we know that it is happening soon rather than at some indefinite time in the future and we will have the rent coming in from that house which is pretty critical as we have been just outright paying for both places for a whole season already. That has been exceptionally financially painful. Paying for an empty house with lawn care, electric, FiOS Internet access, etc. is not cheap. That has made being in New York not very cost effective. That is probably our single, largest point of stress at the moment taken care of.

We stayed up a little late tonight watching Doctor Who with the girls, we are in the first half of the seventh season watching it straight through with them. Then I read them “The Voyage of the Dawn Treader” and we got them off to bed. The two of them are currently sharing the queen guest bed that we set up in their room for the Ralstons. They are so cute snuggling together in that big bed with tons of blankets, stuffed animals and such. We are up to the “dark island” late in our book. Liesl is just loving the story.

The weather let up today so no reason to think that I will have any issues going into the office tomorrow.

I woke up at five this morning but decided that sleep was important or I would be overly exhausted and probably way too sore all day. So I slept until seven. The weather is very nice this morning, clear and bright. Nothing like yesterday and certainly nothing like what is predicted to be hitting tonight. We are expecting a pretty horrible storm tonight – as much as a foot of snow falling during the late night. So all of the preparations are being made so that I have the option of working from home if necessary.

The Ralstons left before I did to take the truck back and get ready for their day. I had to get off to work and did a little to get Dominica set up for the day before I headed out. She is going to have a rough day with her foot hurting so badly.

I left for work while the Ralstons were out and the girls were still fast asleep. The weather was nice this morning, no issues at all.

Getting home it was like walking into a forest of cardboard boxes.  Dominica had managed to get several large boxes processed and put away during the day today but it really did not make a dent at all.  So much unpacking needs to be done.

When I woke up this morning Dominica said that she thought that she had heard a snowplow so it must be snowing. I peeked out of the bedroom window and indeed, there was a lot of snow on the cars and the parking lot had been plowed. This is not going to be a good day for the U-haul to arrive and to deal with getting everything moved.

We talked to the Ralstons this morning and there it was sleeting in Winchester, Virginia where they spent the night so they were going to wait it out this morning and see how the weather progressed before deciding on what to do today. The twenty foot box truck is not something that you want to be driving in bad weather.

It took me two hours to get into the office. The roads were not atrocious but they were not good. I slipped and slid a bit on the way in, but overall it was fine just slow to progress.

Once in the office, much of the talk was about how bad the weather was going to be today. The snow was coming down even harder in Connecticut than in Westchester and it came down steadily all day. Very solid snow with the skies and ground white and only the dark of trees really visible outside.

I have discovered that both my Blackberry and my Windows phone are not working anymore. I got a replacement battery for the Blackberry, it fired up, I charged it and immediately the device was toast again. Putting this all together, I am pretty sure that the charger on my desk is bad and killed all three batteries. This is a huge pain. Thankfully that charger cannot be used with my iPhone or iPad.

Art and Danielle were on the road shortly after noon and were making good progress. I did not want to wait in the office to head home until it was dark so left early to take advantage of the sunlight and to stay ahead of them to make sure that I could get home and be ready before they go there.

The drive home really was not bad. I was ahead of rush hour so there was very little traffic.

I got home and we set about getting everything cleared and ready for the truck to unload. I beat the truck by about an hour. The girls are very excited that the truck is coming. They cannot wait for their stuff to be here. Luciana has been going on and on about wanting her table to get unloaded because she wants to be able to paint and she needs her table to do that. She probably asked to paint more than a dozen times tonight.

It was dark when Art and Danielle arrived. Dark and cold but the snow was not coming down although there was a lot of it on the ground. We got right to unloading the truck.

Dominica came outside to help and on her very first trip down the sidewalk, before making it up into the truck to get the first box, she twisted her ankle and fell off of the sidewalk spraining her ankle badly. She had to go inside and sit down. She could not walk at all. So we were down one person before we even got started. (Dominica later realized that this was probably a blessing, hurting her ankle saved her from possibly hurting her back which would have been far worse.)

It took many hours to unload the truck. Twenty feet of floor to ceiling, tightly packed boxes and stuff. It is truly insane how much stuff we own and move around. I cannot believe that we still have that much stuff and some small stuff could not make it and had to stay behind still in Texas: like our dehumidifier.

It was exhausting work and the outside was probably twenty degrees and the inside we let drop to sixty. Still I was drenched with sweat so going outside was horrific but I could not wear anything more than a polo or I would get too warm when I went inside and that would just make it worse.

We filled the living room and the kitchen and a number of things went straight to the basement and top floor too. Pretty early on we found Liesl’s dollhouse and she asked that that go straight to the basement as she had been missing it and she spent a few hours quietly playing with that all on her own. She also found a plastic bin of toys that she unloaded completely on her own too putting them all away in the basement. I have no idea even what was in that bin as it was empty by the time that I found it.

At about the sixty percent unloaded mark we ordered pizza from Nonna’s and had that delivered. Dominica had attempted to get Domino’s but due to the weather they had no means of doing delivery.

It was probably four but possibly five hours to unload the truck. Completely exhausting. Once it was empty we set about getting the bedrooms set up. We moved the queen bed into the girls’ room for Art and Danielle to use. We switched out the old beat up mattress that Dominica and I have been using for the last several months for the really good queen mattress that had been on the truck. We will be throwing out the beat up one that we have been using. We assembled our king frame and put the king mattress on there for us. This is the one that we were sleeping on in Texas most of the time. Now our bedroom feels very small. We brought up the black dresser too so we went from one queen bed to a king plus a dresser. But boy is the king bed more comfortable! Both more space and a firmer mattress that is not all beat up.

Tonight the girls are sleeping with us. With the king they actually fit with room to spare – although Liesl still tries to push me off of the bed most of the time. Dominica and the girls all went to bed and I took a long shower before turning in for the night. It was exhausting but it is done. Done for us at least.

Tomorrow morning Art and Danielle have to return the U-haul and pick up a Ford Fusion rental car. Then they are loading up several servers, the SAN and tons of miscellaneous stuff and shipping it all up to their place. So they have a bit to do yet in the morning and a full day of driving.

Hopefully Dominica’s foot will not be too much of a problem tomorrow. We are going to be very anxious to begin the process of unpacking everything. This is going to be hard as there is no room at all to maneuver anything around. And we really want to get the living room cleared so that we can vacuum and then Rug Doctor the entire thing. We are so excited to be able to actually clean the floors now. Oh, and somewhere in all of those boxes is the Roomba too!