Sheep Guarding Llama

Slept in a little today.  Got up and shortly dad and I went out in search of some breakfast.  We went down to Mt. Morris to try our hand at Brian’s USA Diner but there was a bit of a line so we abandoned that idea and instead drove over to Perry and went to John and Sarah’s which was full but didn’t have a line at least.

Breakfast was very good and when we were done we walked over to the car dealer across the street because dad thought that he had seen a new Fiat over there, but we didn’t find any.  We did discover that Chevy now is selling a Turbo Diesel version of the Cruze which is pretty interesting.

We went back to the house and I checked in online and then we went for a walk before the rain hit over to the little pond area across the street from the house.  Dad has done a lot to clear that area out.  It is all mowed now and you can easily walk all over.  I can’t remember the last time that you could walk around half of that area and never were you able to get to this much of it.  I got to see where Mr. Humphries is buried, beneath a little stone with his name engraved on it at the edge of the woods in a small stand of aspen trees.

I got to see the plum tree that grandpa planted over there.  I was so little that I don’t remember the tree being planted.  I am guessing that it was planted when I was three or younger.  I remember being very little and knowing that there was this little baby tree over there with this wire mesh fence around it to protect it.  I can’t remember the last time that I saw it but it was very little still.  It was knocked over in the big ice storm in 1991 but it lived and grew along the ground.  It is alive and doing well but not at all what grandpa would have expected.  It still has the little wire around the base.  Dad and my cousins harvested plums from it and ate them in grandpa’s memory when they were up from Ohio a few weeks ago.  That tree is so much older than any of them.

This evening we went up to Tom Wahl’s in Avon for dinner.  We had been debating where to go when it just “came up.”  Sharon and Leo ended up calling as we were just headed there so they ran out and joined us too.

After dinner we came home and I was in bed by eight thirty.  Another short Sunday.  I will be up at two tomorrow morning, with just five hours of sleep, so that I can drive from dad’s down to Connecticut.

Danielle is leaving around the same time tomorrow to go up to Syracuse, well Liverpool, and pick up A.J. and then drive out to Albany where they are catching Amtrak to go down into Manhattan for the day.

This morning the task was to get the oil changed in the Chevy Spark.  This is easier said that done because the oil filter is an impossible to find part.  Yesterday dad spent a few hours trying to track one down for me.  It wasn’t easy, no parts places had one.  Had to get one from the Chevy dealer and even they seem to not have that many of them.

So this morning I got up at seven thirty, showered and did a little Spiceworks posting before dad got back from his Saturday morning men’s prayer group.  Then we headed right up to Ideal Chevy just past the old house in Geneseo.  It was weird driving up that way realizing that it has now been ten and a half years since we first moved into that house.  It’s been a really long time since I actually drove by it.  Very little has changed there.  What we thought was going to be a rapidly developing area really has stalled, for the most part.  The area behind the old house is just as rough and uncleared as it was when we lived there.  I don’t see any new houses in the area.  Ten years and all they did was finish the immediate tract of houses that we were a part of and that was done just as we sold the house anyway.

We got the oil filter and then drove back down to Geneseo and went to the Omega Grill for breakfast.  It was not even ten yet when we got there.

At eleven we took the Spark in to M&R right there in Geneseo who have been taking care of my car for about a decade now and they still know me by name.  It probably took about half an hour to get the oil filter changed.  They wanted to put in a new air filter too but, of course, they had no way to get one as no one has one in stock anywhere.  So that didn’t happen.  Will need to deal with that rather soon.

We stopped at Walmart for just a minute, I needed to get a card for Michael, my Godson’s, sixteenth birthday party which is this afternoon from four to six at Art and Danielle’s house.  Dad is going as well.

Got home and had a few hours to just relax.  Dad and I took a walk in the woods which I have not walked through in I don’t know how many years.  We walked all of the way back to the “big pond” as we have always called it which I really have not seen in a very long time.  We know that the pond was essentially inaccessible since the big ice storm of the winter of 1991.  So the last that I could possibly have been there was the fall of 1990 and very likely I was not there then.  It’s conceivable that I have not been to the pond since the 1980s.  Twenty three years or more!  The woods and the pond were an incredibly significant component of my young childhood and that massive ice storm in my early high school years brought down one out of every three trees in the woods and made all of the paths completely closed off.  That whole part of the property just “disappeared” to me right around the same time that I entered high school.  No one that I know from high school ages like Art, Josh, Phil, etc. have ever seen it or probably even know that it is there.  That is so bizarre to me.  Such an important part of the family farm and it just vanished.

Dad and I were talking about it and trying to put it into perspective.  We bought the farm in 1976.  The pond was a huge part of the property that we used all of the time, even in winter, for those first fourteen years.  In thirty seven years, though, only fourteen of them was the pond and the majority of the woods accessible.  But it was a very important fourteen years.  My parents planted spruce trees out there that they harvested for our Christmas trees for many years when I was young.  It was where we went for picnics, had school functions, where I would go to get away and play on my own, where we would once or twice take the rowboat out on the pond and where my grandfather taught me how to fish (something that I never did without him.)

At four we went down the hill to Michael’s birthday party.  We had about three hours there before Art had to take off to go down to Birdsall to set up for a gig that his band is playing down there tonight.

Dad went back up to the house at seven.  Danielle and I worked for a little while at their house till around nine when it was time to drive down to Birdsall.  That is not a short drive and it is way, way out in the country in Alleghany County.  Really remote.

We arrived and discovered that neither of us had Internet access on our phones – neither her Verizon nor my T-Mobile phones had anything, not even phone service.  So we could not stay long as Michael was home without any adults and no way to reach anyone.  I am not actually sure that I have ever been to Birdsall.  I probably have but it would have been long ago.  I’ve been nearby on 36 and 19 but not on 15B/16 for sure.

We had a couple of beers and watched Art’s band “Bad Habit” play for a little over an hour.  They did a good job but the venue was tiny making the sound loud and muddy.  The ceiling was only eight feet, I would guess, which is okay for a house but crazy for a live music venue.  There were probably thirty five people at the bar.  A good crowd considering we were miles from a house.

We went back north and swung into the Wadsworth Grill which, believe it or not, I have never been to.  The Grill opened more or less across the street from my high school in York around the time that I was in high school.  It is really a bar, not a restaurant although they do have a little food there, and I moved away when I was eighteen so it was never a place that I would have gone.  But it is the regular hangout for everyone who stayed behind, especially with the years right around mine in high school.  So going in there was an adventure.

Literally every person in the place that I saw was someone from high school.  I knew everyone and there were easily thirty people there.  It was as if I had stepped back in time, except that everyone was really old.  Not like I remembered them.  Everyone was familiar but nothing was quite right and obviously, no one remembered me at all.  Not even sitting there with Danielle did anyone have a guess who I was.  I did see Justin Grant and talked to him for a while.  But otherwise I kept a low profile.

Went back to the Ralston’s and worked for another hour before returning to dad’s and going to bed.

It was great waking up in the new hotel.  This is much nicer than what I have been used to for the last two weeks.  I’m thrilled with the new digs.

I got breakfast in the hotel this morning, which was nice.  Scrambled eggs and potatoes.  Nothing crazy but can’t get eggs at the Econolodge and really shouldn’t have breakfast without protein.

Had to pack up the hotel room, today is my last day down in Connecticut for the week, and into the office.

Very slow day at the office today.  Nothing scheduled and my only work was to study.  So very few interruptions.

Had to figure out how to get the oil changed in the Spark today.  No one has the oil filter.  This has become a pretty severe problem.  Dad spent a few hours trying to find the part somewhere but had very little luck.  The Chevy dealer was the only place in the area that he was able to find it.  I tried to take my car in for service locally in Norwalk but the instant oil change place didn’t have the filter and the Chevy dealer was backlogged until next week at a minimum.

After happy hour (at the office) I hit the road. It was only a few minutes after five thirty and I made very good time getting up to Danbury and headed west on Interstate 84.  The drive went well and I was not tired at all the entire way.  I listened to a good chunk of “The Last Founding Father” which did not get me yet up to the point where James Monroe has run for President yet but it did cover a lot of the War of 1812 (the Second War of Independence) which was really fascinating because there was so much about the war that I have never been taught.  American schools seem to really just gloss over this really critical war.

Got into dad’s house around eleven, having made excellent time and having good weather.  We talked for an hour or two and then were off to bed.  Have to be up to deal with the car in the morning.

I checked out of the Econolodge this morning.  I’m approved to be in the hotel by the office tonight which will be really nice.  It is an easy walk to the office from there rather than being several miles away.  The Econolodge has been good.  It is pretty cheap, about seventy to eight dollars, and not horribly far from the office.  But it is not around the corner either and not as cheap as one might hope.  It suits by purposes.

Got into the office today.  Nothing much going on.  I studied most of the day and finished up my class material ahead of schedule.  So that seems to be going well.

After work today I switched hotels and moved into the hotel right down the street from the office which is great.  That’s at a minimum ten minutes closer and a far nicer hotel.  The hotel room was really nice.  I resisted eating in the restaurant, though, as there was no need for extra food.  But it looked really good.

I spent an hour on Facetime with Liesl and Luciana who were fighting over Dominica’s iPhone because they both wanted to talk to me.  The fought a bit but at least they pretty much got equal time with me after all was said and done.  It is great being in this hotel because the Internet access is good enough here that I can use Facetime.  At the Econolodge I cannot.  I can only talk to the girls when I am at dad’s otherwise.

Once I was off of the phone it was around nine and I just decided to head to bed right away.  I have not been getting enough sleep and there was no reason to be up at all tonight.  I didn’t even take time to plug in my laptop before drifting off to sleep.

[Totally forgot to post this…. wrote it inline but am backposting to fill it in.]

Not very much to say about today.  The time away from the family is stretching out.  I am just under halfway through the time and it is not any fun.  I’m really missing everyone back in Texas.  I’ll be in Texas in just a little over a week but I won’t see the girls for a full six days after arriving there.  I won’t see them until Halloween evening when we drive to Houston from Austin.  Four weeks without them 🙁

I am in the Econolodge today, still, but today is my last one staying here.  I’ll be leaving the hotel tomorrow morning and switching to another hotel nearer to the office.

Nothing to report from the new job.  Still studying.  It was a good day though.  Feeling good.

I did very little after work tonight.  Just back to the hotel and spent the evening alone.