Sheep Guarding Llama

The truck continues its move from Texas to New York. We were hopeful that the Ralstons would make it here tonight but the weather was not agreeable for them and they could not make the kind of progress that they had hoped. The made it through Tennessee and worked their way up Interstate 81 through the Appalachian Mountains and were able to get to Winchester, Virginia (where Dominica and I stayed once, long ago, and where Tim Stedman went to college.) They faced rough weather all day and the snow was starting to really hit hard further north so they were of the opinion that continuing on today did not make sense. Winchester left them, in good weather, about six hours short of Peekskill. But in the weather it will be much longer.

Like yesterday, we took some time to just relax today. We did some cleaning to get the house ready for the truck load to arrive but that is about it. We need all of the space ready as the box truck’s contents will completely fill our living room. We cannot stack stuff as high or as compactly in the house so that twenty linear feet of truck is going to expand into six hundred square feet of house.

Liesl is very excited for the truck to arrive. She keeps asking how long it will be until it gets here. She is going to have to wait until tomorrow night.

The Ralstons had the truck all packed up in Texas yesterday but they had stuff scheduled for today so waited until today to get on the road. They were originally planning on leaving very late tonight and driving during the night because there is less traffic and Art prefers, like I do, to drive at night. We have all been watching the weather, though, and they decided that they needed to be on the road earlier than later and ended up just hopping into the truck and taking off early in the afternoon in an attempt to avoid the worst of the weather along the route.

They made okay progress today. They got to Tennessee, but only to Jackson, and not nearly as far as they had hoped. Lots of rain and a twenty foot box truck is no fun to drive. Art said that the truck is absolutely packed to the hilt. Everything is squeezed in as tightly as they could manage. There is a lot of stuff on that truck and some stuff had to be left behind, but relatively little.

We did not do very much today. We know that this is our last weekend to relax before we have a ton of unpacking and organizing to do and shortly after that dad comes to visit and Dominica goes to the Bahamas so we will be extremely busy.

Making sure SGL gets caught up.

Got up at five thirty and was in the office at a quarter till eight.  Very cold one today.  It was eight degrees as I waited for the car to warm up and dropped to as little as two degrees on the drive into the office.  Very, very cold.  On the drive in I started reading “The Moon by Night”, the second in the Austin Family Chronicles by Madeleine L’Engle.  I like the Austin Family books more than the others, I think, because the author doesn’t know anything about science (or the world at large) and these books are much more down to earth and about realistic people and real, human problems instead of being bizarre fake science and immature fantasy writing (or worse, a combination of the two with flying, time traveling unicorns and mice that live inside mitochondria and turn into trees.)

I had to be up very early this morning so that I could take the Spark into the dealer to get an oil change (no way to do that at a normal shop yet), plus get a new air filter and tire rotation. I had to be at the dealer at eight this morning which meant leaving home at six thirty.

I got to the dealer in Connecticut just fine and they got the car right in. It took a little over an hour but I had a chance to read the entire book “Deploying OpenStack” on the Kindle which I brought with me and a good chunk of “CFEngine 3 Beginner’s Guide”, also on the Kindle. I was well prepared for my free time. It was a nice chance to just sit and read for a little bit while enjoying some coffee in the customer lounge at the dealer.

It is cold but bright today. We figured out at the dealer that my windshield wiper fluid is frozen in the tubes so will not work, as it has not for weeks, until the car has a chance to sit someplace that is above freezing for some time. What a pain that is. The fluid tank was full of ice, they said, when they had looked at it. It is bright and sunny today, very crisp. Only ten degrees on the way in but this week is supposed to warm up as it goes on.

Work was good today and I managed to leave at six after a ten hour day.  On the drive home I finished reading “Meet the Austins” which I first read as a young child.

I got home at seven thirty and then had a nearly two hour conference call. I dropped off so that I could spend time with the girls. I had promised Liesl that we would start playing Deponia (the first installation of the series) tonight and Luciana had been begging to start playing a new game too (actually she just wants to play Night of the Rabbit again but this will do.) I was getting the girls snacks before we started playing and Liesl asked if we were able to play the games again once we finished them. She was very excited to learn that we can – now she can look forward to replaying many of these games potentially on her own as she gets older. Playing them “again” is so much easier than trying to figure out the quirks the first time through. And I explained that when Luciana is Liesl’s age that we will have this collection of games that Luciana can then play too and Luciana got really excited about that.

The first night of playing Deponia was good. It is by the same company that made Night of the Rabbit. Liesl made it through the first few scenes and has the controls mostly down now. We played for nearly an hour and a half. Dominica stayed on the conference call all night and after I had the girls getting ready for bed.

I took the girls up to bed and read three chapters of “Voyage of the Dawn Treader” to them. They both stayed awake for all of the reading tonight and, I think, were getting into it a bit. Both girls seem to be following along pretty well. Liesl especially is really into it and had a lot of questions about the older stories and why things had happened the way that they did.

It was after midnight when the girls went to sleep and I managed to get into bed myself.