Sheep Guarding Llama

Dominica and I were up before eight at the Hilton Garden Inn in Norwalk. Dominica got up and looked outside and was dismayed to discover that it had snowed during the night and was still snowing. This isn’t good. My car, the Chevy Spark, is bad in snow and Dominica’s Acadia’s tires are in terrible shape and going to be really bad on snow – which they have never seen before. So we got up earlier than we had wanted to, got checked out and got on the road as quickly as was easy to do so that we would have maximum time to deal with the drive. It was probably about eight thirty when we set out for the forty plus mile trek from Norwalk to Peekskill.

We were unsure of what path to take back to Peekskill as the highway would probably be better for the Acadia and the backroads probably better for the Spark. I have had really good luck on the back roads over the past few weeks, including in the snow, and there is expected to be basically no traffic today so we decided to give that a try. Dominica followed me as I took her on the complicated route back to the house.

We had assumed that Connecticut and New York would have been out clearing the roads. Boy were we wrong. Not only had no plows been out but basically no traffic in the direction that we were heading. In some cases we could see that the other, oncoming, lane was well driven but ours was lucky to have seen a car, let alone a plow.

The drive was very stressful. We had to creep along to keep control of the roads. The worst part came when we took Parade Hill, in New Canaan, between routes 123 and 124. Going up Parade Hill we had someone drive less than ten miles per hour in front of us which nearly brought me to a halt causing me to lose all of my momentum and the Spark could barely hold enough traction to make it to the top of the hill. Dominica was even less fortunate and looking in my rearview I saw her come to a stop on the hill, unable to move.

I pulled into a driveway and ran back down the hill and took over driving for her. I had her get in the passenger seat. With my additional weight and making half a dozen runs at the hill I was finally able to get the Acadia to the top of it. That was ridiculous. There is no doubt, we have to get new tires on this car this weekend. There is no other option. It is not safe to use this vehicle any more, not in winter. So now we have that to deal with this weekend.

All in all, the slow drive back to Peekskill took about two hours! Dominica went straight home. I stopped in Yorktown Heights at Daily Bagel to get a dozen bagels for the family for the weekend. One of the joys of being downstate. Best bagels anywhere.

It was around ten thirty when we got home and the girls were awake.

Today’s projects including fixing network issues and, not surprisingly, figuring out what to do about new tires for the Acadia. We finally found tires that we liked at a reasonable price at Sears. Dominica ordered some all weather Continentals that came in around nine hundred dollars that Sears will install for us late tomorrow morning.

This evening Liesl and Luciana wanted to introduce their grandfather to Doctor Who, their favourite show. So they brought him down to the basement and had him spend the entire evening watching the “first” season of it starting from the first episode and running through the fifth (which we had to make it through as it was a two parter.) He liked it a lot and is now hooked on it.

Today is the company Christmas Party, the adult one (the one of the kids is next week.)  So a slower day at the office.  Dominica parents should get to Peekskill around five and Dominica will head down to Norwalk as soon as they get to our house to watch the kids.  They are going to spend the night so we are able to stay overnight in Norwalk to make things easier.

Dominica left the house just after five to drive down to Norwalk. I walked her through the directions of how to use the backroads, or the semi-back roads of 35 and 123 to get down to Norwalk and how to find the hotel. She did it in the opposite direction, once, at night while following me about a month ago. She knew that the traffic would be much better here than on the expressways at this time at night so decided to give it a try.

I got a beer at happy hour and left the office as soon as that was done, so just a little after five. The hotel, the Hilton Garden Inn, that Dominica had booked last night is basically right across the street from my office complex being right on Main St. diagonally across the intersection for route seven. I got up there and got us checked in and even had time to set up our Internet access and take a shower before Dominica arrived. Her drive went fine and she found the route quite easy to do now that she has adapted to being in the area again but she had really heavy traffic so it took her closer to an hour and a half to make the trip down.

We got dressed and were ready by a quarter after seven. We went down to the hotel lobby and hung out for a little bit. We had just missed the first shuttle of the evening and accidentally missed the second one, as did everyone else in the lobby, no one quite realizing that it was there or that we were supposed to just go out to it. So it was the eight o’clock shuttle that we ended up taking to the evening’s festivities.

We had a good time at the party. We decided not to stay super late, we aren’t late night people anymore. We put in three hours, had some really good food, saw people that I knew, met new people and went back to the hotel at eleven. It was an impressive party in many ways, scale for one thing. I am very glad that Dominica was able to make it down for it.

We were among the earlier ones leaving the party but far from the first. Next year I should know a lot more people, and Dominica probably will too, so we will probably put in a lot more time. And will probably dress more casually too. I think that we made a good showing for me having only been here for two months.

Got back to the hotel and got to bed pretty quickly.

 

Today I started reading “The Lady in the Palazzo: At Home in Umbria” by Marlena Blasi.

Very cold day today. Good day for reading about a sunny day in central Italy.

Got home and spent the evening with the girls again while Dominica went out to go shopping. She had to return some stuff from yesterday and do some more shopping. She is getting us ready for the holiday party tomorrow evening in Connecticut.

The girls just wanted to hang out in the living room tonight. I made us a fire in the fireplace and we gathered around the hearth to stay warm. It is only about fifteen degrees outside so quite cold. It is days like this that we are so happy that we live in a middle unit and have warm neighboring walls on either side helping to keep our house warm. We use so little energy to keep the place warm in the winter.

I was really tired this evening. I actually fell asleep laying on the floor in from of the fireplace. Dominica was gone shopping for a long time, nearly three hours. As soon as she was home we got the girls off to bed and we went to bed ourselves.

Dominica booked a hotel room for us tomorrow in Connecticut so that we have a place to put the cars, change and sleep after the holiday party tomorrow night. It is a long way (over an hour) from there to the house and if we had to come home we would both have to drive which would leave us both unable to drink or anything for the entire evening and still have us both driving home while very tired, in the middle of the night. This way we can take a shuttle to the party and not have to worry about it, get a good night’s sleep and drive home in the morning, in daylight. Dominica does not know the way that I drive to and from so we would need to take a longer route anyway.

Dominica’s parents are coming down tomorrow after work to babysit for the night. They should arrive probably around five. Dominica will drive down to the hotel in Connecticut as soon as they get to the house so that she can get us checked in and start getting ready. Party starts in the early evening and goes all night. I am not even sure where it is, thankfully the hotel will just shuttle us there.

Quite cold today but no snow on the roads. No issues driving. Everything in Texas is still frozen. The reports from there are that they are still under some serious ice. We are quite glad that we got out before this all happened. Hard to believe that Texas is getting a much worse winter than we are up here in New York. But so far, we are coming up on Christmas and our winter has been incredibly mild and theirs has been horrific comparatively. We have light snow sticking to the ground, mostly in the woods. They have ice covering their buildings.

On my drive home in the dark this evening (the one thing that really drives me crazy about winters up north, even an early day has you going home in the pitch dark) I finished reading “A Year in the World” by Francis Mayes.

I got home and the family was camped out down in the basement. This is the first time that I have come home to them not being in the living room. Dominica must be getting used to having her computer now.

Liesl, Luciana and I set put the couch and spent the evening watching Doctor Who together. Dominica immediately headed out to go shopping for clothes and food and stuff. So she was gone for over three hours while the girls and I hung out. I had them off to bed before Dominica even got home.

When I was cleaning up the basement as I was taking the girls to bed I noticed that the storage arm of the couch, which both of the girls love to play with and know that they are not supposed to, was up and when I went to close it it did not close correctly. As we knew was going to happen (but not this early) they messed around with it and with it open had enough leverage to rip the top of the arm off. So it is broken. Argh. I can’t tell how bad it is, as long as it is closed it is fine for now. Going to look into seeing if we can fix it. We are not happy though. Less than three days with the couch and already they couldn’t resist messing around with it like this.

We ordered dad’s Christmas present from the girls today. Liesl decided what it would have engraved on it. Hopefully it will arrive at his house in time for Christmas.

I woke up around two after a bizarre dream about moving from California to, somewhere, and having forgotten to move my books and needing to hire a taxi to drive me there to get them and driving back with them in a taxi.  But once home falling asleep and forgetting to unload the taxi and so it left.  Weird.  I guess subconsciously I’m worried about all of our stuff waiting back in Texas needing to be moved up here.

I woke up again around three and realized that Dominica had never come to bed.  I had not noticed because Luciana was snuggled up with me so I didn’t notice that Dominica was not on the other side of her.  If Dominica does not come to bed at the same time that I do then I know that she is going to stay up late watching her shows so I don’t expect her to be there for several hours.  But I was awake enough that I checked my phone and got up to go look for her.  I found her on the chez lounge watching the “Vampire Diaries” as I had expected.  So I made her go to bed.

I tried falling back asleep but couldn’t so get up at three thirty and went down to the basement to get to work.  Might as well catch up on things rather than lying in bed thinking about being unproductive and not sleeping anyway.

Finally this morning, the Top Contributors page on Spiceworks has been fixed which is exciting because on Friday afternoon I finally passed Andy Phelps as the top “Best Answers” contributor to the site.  That only took about six years of hard work to do.  I needed 2,904 BAs to pass him.  I did that on Friday afternoon, around one, but the official list doesn’t get updated until around three in the morning.  So to see if officially I had to wait until Saturday.  But, of course, after all of those years, that page fails, for the first time, on that particular day.  The Top Contributors pages was down on Saturday, Sunday and even yesterday.  It was not until they reran the numbers this morning that it came back up and now, finally, it shows me on top for posts, answers and reviews.  The first time that one person has ever held all of them!  That was a lot of work.

When I went outside to check on the car at seven it was neither frozen, the outside temperature being thirty four degrees Fahrenheit, nor was there any snow. It was clear and damp with standing water in puddles in the parking lot. So I went back inside and did some work down in the basement until seven thirty.

I came back upstairs to go to the car and discovered that in the half hour that I was down in the basement that snow had been falling quite hard and that the world was mostly white and big fluffy flakes were coming down pretty hard. Now for the first time of really driving the Spark in the snow.

Before leaving the house I went upstairs and tried to wake up Liesl because she asked that I wake her up and give her a hug before I leave yesterday. So I tried today but even with her going to bed at nine thirty last night, she was still fast asleep. So I gave her a sleepy kiss and left. Dominica and Luciana were still fast asleep where I had left them.

The drive took quite a long time but because of traffic in Yorktown and not because the roads were bad. The roads being bad might actually have improved the drive because there was, quite literally, no one on the roads once I got to Katonah. I turned onto NY22 and was pretty much all alone for nearly the entire drive in. I saw cars but never had to wait for anyone and never had anyone behind me. I actually make decent time driving in. I was surprised.

The furniture from Bob’s arrived early afternoon.  Now the basement will be a little more functional.

Got out of work at a reasonable time. Wanted to get home to test out the furniture!

The family spent most of the evening watching the third season of Doctor Who together on the new couch.  The middle seat is perfect for Liesl, so short that she can’t use the reclining function, and then Dominica and I can have the recliners on the end with the lighted drink holders.  It is going to be a huge challenge for us to keep the girls from treating the really cool and interesting couch as a toy. It has so many lights, buttons and motorized parts that they just can’t help but climb all over it, press all of the buttons and don’t even get us started about the cubby holes that they can use to hide things.

It was a nice evening with all of us just hanging out.  So glad that I am able to use the desk a little bit and Dominica and the girls don’t have to stay upstairs but can actually join me.  I feel less isolated and lonely already.