Sheep Guarding Llama

Slept a full eight hours last night.  I woke up early but told myself to go back to sleep and get all of the rest that I could.  After a good night’s sleep I was feel much better this morning.

I remembered to check the mail, for the first time since moving back to Peekskill, this morning and there was a load of birthday cards for Liesl.  She has not been home since several days before her birthday so she has not had a chance to see her cards yet.  So those are waiting for her.  I am really checking the mail diligently, starting today, because we are waiting on the package from the bank that will allow us to start our home refinancing process.  I am concerned that it will have gone to the wrong place as twice today we got mail for different neighbours.  I have no idea how the delivery of mail continues to be so problematic wherever we go.

The drive into work was pretty good.  Very low traffic today.  Odd, it is only Wednesday.  Should be normal volume.

Work was much better today and my stress level is back down roughly to normal.  I decided to leave work at more of a normal time tonight, give myself time to get home and relax a little.  Tomorrow is going to be long as I have stuff that runs late and then a party to go to that goes very late.  So I am not expecting to be home until after midnight tomorrow.

Got home, made some veggie cold cut sandwiches and got caught up on SGL so that I am completely up today.  Tomorrow is my last day alone, I should see the family on Friday.

Dominica got the Acadia packed up today, nearly everything that got shipped up to New York in the last load is now in the car.  So when she gets here on Friday we are going to have a field day getting what we have set up in the house.  A lot of it is toys for the girls which will help immensely with them being so restless in the house.

Liesl finally got a chance to go out with grandpa today and make the snowman that she has been talking about for a month.  She has been so excited.  I saw the picture of it that Dominica posted on Facebook this evening and it is the most adorable thing ever.  Liesl is so happy that she is hugging her snowman in dad’s yard.

My latest article, The End of XP: Choices for Business, headlined today on Datamation.  This is not one that I wrote all on my own but was a topic specifically commissioned for me to write.  Glad to get an article published there again, it has been a while.  I have been too busy to keep the work flowing.

Today started off well but by the end of the day it turned out to have been a really stressful day.  I worked pretty late, probably not a good idea, and on the way home stopped off in Pound Ridge and picked up a bottle of wine.  It was really not a good day.

Got home and it was probably eight.  Talked to Art on the phone for probably an hour, maybe a bit more, and then watched two episodes of Family Guy on Hulu while drinking half of the bottle of Riesling.  Went to bed at eleven.  Decided that I needed sleep if I was feeling stressed out.  Seeing the family would help, but I can’t do that.  So sleep is the best option to make myself feel better.

Monday of my week alone.  I figured out today that I had forgotten that I have a party at the office on Thursday evening and that I will not be home until very late, probably after midnight, so that if Dominica and the girls come home on Thursday I will not see them until I come home from work on Friday anyway – they will all be asleep before I get home and will still be asleep when I leave for work.  So it makes little sense for Dominica to come home early to our still empty house where there is nothing to do with the girls when they could stay and visit with grandpa for an extra day instead and I will see them on Friday when I get home from work the same either way.

I worked late, no need to come home early as it is just me.  When I did come home I had a call with Art, Danielle, Alex and Dominica for, I would guess, an hour and a half.  That was at nine and I barely made it home before we had the call.  That’s how late I was at the office.  The drive home takes rarely more than eighty minutes.

After the call I played a little Assassin’s Creed, maybe two hours at most, and called it a night.  A very uneventful day.

Got up this morning and we got me packed up and mostly ready to leave.  Just before nine we all drove out to Dave’s Diner for breakfast.  The girls were super picky, as always, and really didn’t eat anything.  That is such a problem.  Luciana normally will eat a little and Liesl often nothing.  Today, though, it was chocolate chip pancakes and apparently Luciana is like me and can’t stand the taste or texture of chocolate in breads of that nature.  So she would not eat either.  That did not work out well.  For the rest of us breakfast was very good.

After breakfast it was back to the house and at ten thirty I was on the road back home.  The plan is that Dominica and the girls will come down on Thursday so that I can see them then.

The drive was pretty good.  I actually did not hit any traffic until the lower Hudson Valley.  Even there it was only so bad.  Probably lost no more than half an hour sitting in effectively stopped traffic.  I bailed at the Interstate 84 exit and drove out east to the Taconic Parkway and took that into Yorktown Heights to make things easy.  On the way into Westchester there was an electronic sign up stating that the Hudson River Line was closed due to the horrible Metro North train derailment that happened this morning.  That was my old commuting line and still my current route into Manhattan.  It derailed and was on the news while we were at breakfast this morning.  A few people died and many were injured.  It was really fortunate that it was an almost empty train on a Sunday morning.  Had it been tomorrow it would have been horrific.

I got to the house early afternoon and had the day to relax.  And that was my plan today.  No work, just take some time to take advantage of being at the house alone.  I got Assassin’s Creed, which I had waited for a year to get in the Steam Black Friday Weed Sale, installed on the computer in the basement and put in a few hours of playing that today.  In just this one day I managed to make it farther along in that game than I had managed to get when I had played it on the PS3 several years ago since it was one of, if not the first, game that I owned on the PS3.

And thus begins my week alone in New York.  I have five days until I see the family again to spend in this completely empty house.  After the three weeks alone in Connecticut this being alone motif is wearing itself pretty thin.

On the drive down I finished reading “A Concise History of the Middle East” which I started, I think, while in Connecticut during my stay alone.  And I started reading Francis Mayes’ “A Year in the World.”  After this I believe that I will have read all of her non-fiction writing except for her recent memoir which I am not sure is even out yet.  But it will be some time before I finish reading this one.

This morning Dominica and her dad got out the door pretty early so that they could go to the movie theater and see Catching Fire which they had been unable to see last night.  Dominica’s mother and I stayed home and watched the girls.  I played more of Liesl’s new Mario Kart 7 video game and managed to unlock all of the tracks so that she has the ability to drive any course that she wants.  She is a long way from winning races and we had to have a talk today about her setting the difficultly all of the way up on the game.  She is convinced that it is easier on the hardest setting and it is just making things harder for her.  Being five and playing that game is challenging enough.

After they were done with the movie, Elizabeth and I packed up the girls and drove them to Utica’s Brewery District where we met Dominica and her dad at the Celtic Harp, an Irish pub that they like to go to there.  The Brewery District is a pretty surprising little bit of Utica that is gentrifying a little bit in the middle of the city.  A nice area to go for food or a drink.  The food was quite good and very filling.  The beer selection was pretty lean for me, we just got Guinness except for Dominica who got something of Saranac’s that did not impress her.  It was supposed to be a spiced winter ale but was not very spiced for her tastes.  Liesl and Luciana were pretty restless.  We were upstairs on a high balcony and they mostly entertained themselves by looking out of the railing down on the people eating below.

After the late lunch, Dominica’s parents took Liesl and Luciana back to the house for a day with the grandparents and Dominica and I got the evening to go out shopping on our own.  First stop – the Village Toy Shop in New Hartford to look specifically for Christmas presents for Luciana.  We already have a pretty big cache of presents ready for Liesl.  Being five, Liesl is trivial to shop for.  She is into everything and can tell you the things that she wants.  Luciana, at two, is really hard to predict, especially a month away.  We found a number of things that we think that Luciana will like.  Her big thing is going to be some Calico Critters.  They are so cute and something that Liesl never had.  Luciana needs something that is uniquely hers.

We went to the mall too and hit several stores looking for toys and returning some clothes.  We found some stuff at Target including some very affordable games for Liesl’s new 2DS.  One is the new Kingdom Hearts game which is obviously for Dominica to play while Liesl is asleep as it is way too hard for Liesl and is part of a series that Dominica has already been playing.  The other is the Lego Pirates of the Caribbean game.  This one is for both Liesl and Dominica.  They have played Lego games together before and they both like them.  It will be harder for Liesl to play but we think that she can handle playing it.  She picks up video games pretty quickly.

We did a little more shopping, got ourselves a quick snack in the food court then started driving back to the house.  We were talking about Gerber’s, a new local speakeasy that has opened up downtown, when Dominica decided that it would be the perfect time to try it.  So we stopped in for Manhattans at a 1935 themed downtown Utica speakeasy.  The place was really nice and we hope to be able to make use of it when we are in town.  A very nice bar with great drinks, neat fresh menu and great ambiance.  And I love the fact that there are no televisions.  It’s a real pub meant for talking, not for ignoring people and watching TV like you were still at home.

Back home, played with the kids a little and it was time for bed.  I leave to return to Peekskill tomorrow after breakfast.  Then it is most of a week alone for me.  Dominica is going to stay in Frankfort tomorrow and head out to Peoria so that the girls can hang out with my dad on Tuesday.