Sheep Guarding Llama

I checked out of the Econolodge this morning.  They realized that I was a rewards member today and said that they really appreciated having me there, they really need the rewards members going there, apparently.  I guess that we show up differently in the reporting systems.  I supposed it tells corporate that their loyal customers choose the site rather than being chosen at random by people who don’t go on to utilize the rest of the chain.

Very slow day in the office today.  My boss has been out sick and my initial training is done.  But since I am leaving to head back to Texas the day after tomorrow it is not really that big of a deal.  I just have a couple of really slow days leading up to my two weeks of vacation.  Not a bad thing at all.

At the end of the day I was out at another site and went directly from there to the Hotel Zero Degrees to get checked in.  I’m glad to be back there.  And glad that I don’t have to pay for it – otherwise I would be at the Econolodge indefinitely.

I was feeling pretty lonely this evening and Dominica suggested that I go to the hotel bar and see actual people.  So I gave that a try.  It was packed there but not anyone being sociable at the bar.  I got some food, which was excellent, and a cocktail but did not hang around overly long.

Back in the hotel room I mostly posted on Spiceworks and listened to the book that I am working on, “Ten Big Ones” which I am a little over halfway through.  The sound of the book at least helps to keep the hotel from being so empty.

I went to bed early, probably around ten thirty.  Dominica messaged me just as I was going to bed to say that she and the girls had watched Disney’s “The Incredibles” tonight and that the girls had loved it.  They are all on a Disney movie marathon to get Liesl ready for Disney World next week.  We will be heading there just one week from tomorrow!  I can’t believe it.  Only two more days before I am on my way to Texas myself.

Art and Danielle hit the road to drive from New York to Dallas tonight.  They are driving more or less straight through as they have work to do on Thursday afternoon down there.  A long drive.  They hit some snow so turned south early on I79 from Erie to get away from it.  So they are heading through West Virginia – a way that none of us have driven before but partially the way that I had wanted to try when I was headed northbound recently.

My plan is to attempt walking to the office tomorrow now that I am at the closer hotel.  Why drive and deal with parking every day when I could get exercise instead.  My parking is free and not that hard, but still.  If the car can not move for a few days, best to take advantage of it.  I miss being able to walk to work.

In the Econolodge today. Off to work this morning.

Today is the last day of my training, or formal training at least, for the new job.  Spent the entire day working to wrap that up.  I didn’t want anything to linger on until tomorrow so I stayed late, not real late just about an extra hour, to make sure that nothing was going to make it to tomorrow.  I want to have this just done and get to go home and relax knowing that it is all finished.

I finished reading “The Last Founding Father” this morning.  This book definitely taught me an incredible amount, far more than I ever knew previously, about the first two decades of American political history post revolution.  George Washington and John Adams I have studied quite a bit but lessso for Jefferson and nothing at all on Madison and Monroe or even John Quincy Adams, all of whom were covered quite extensively in this biography.  The War of 1812 (the Second War of Independence) was covered in far more detail than I have been exposed to previously as well.

I am now moving on to working my way through “A Concise History of the Middle East, 9^th Ed.” which I have been listening to on and off for two weeks.  I am about halfway through currently.

Another quiet evening in the hotel.  Just me and my laptop.  Dominica is feeling noticeably better today after having seen the ophthalmologist yesterday.  Much of it is probably just knowing what is wrong but she has the right medicine now too and I am sure that that is making a difference too.

I did a bit of posting on Spiceworks tonight.  And I listened to about an hour of “Ten Big Ones”, the current Janet Evanovich book that I am reading.  It’s not very good, at least not yet.  Boring, but I feel committed to the series at this point.

The alarm went off at two.  I showered and got the car packed and was on the road at two fifty.  No rain this week, thankfully.  I drove past the Ralston’s where Danielle had just left.  So she was on the road somewhere ahead of me, probably already out on 390 heading up to the Thruway by the time that I came by.

I drove over to Geneseo and stopped at Tim Horton’s to get coffee for my trip.  No snacks this time, I was good.  Then onto the highway and south.

The trip went well today.  Had to stop midway to get some gas but that was all.  The weather was nice although I saw the thermometer drop to as low as thirty six degrees while I was driving.  I’m not sure that I am ready for snow already.

I mostly listened to “The Last Founding Father” while I drove.

Traffic wasn’t a problem until I got on CT 7 heading south out of Danbury.  Then I got caught in sluggish, barely moving traffic for about an hour.  I lost a minimum of half an hour on that stretch.  That really sucked.

Work today was nothing to write home about.  Pretty quiet.  This week will be mostly quiet as I start vacation on Friday evening.

I did have to run up to a meeting at another site today around lunch time.  That was my only real break in the day.

After work I checked back into the Econolodge.  Not very exciting.  Only two days there this week, though.  That’s nice.

Quiet evening, I just stayed in the hotel all night.  Went to bed pretty early, just a little after nine.  Need to catch up on sleep after last night and the long morning drive.

Thus begins my last week leading up to my long awaited two weeks of vacation.  I leave Friday night and I will be gone for sixteen days!

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.