Sheep Guarding Llama

The Ides of October already.  This month is moving by quickly, even with me being out in Connecticut all alone.  Only a week and a half until I return to Texas for almost a week.  Today is Tuesday and I fly out next Friday.  That’s just ten days away and I will see dad over this weekend as well.

We have been working with our renters in Peekskill to figure out what they are going to do.  They know that we are desperate to be in the house by November 10^th.  We are very, very hopeful that they will have some place to live by then so that we don’t have to find an interim place to live until they are able to move out of the house.

Got moving a little slowly this morning and traffic was a bit of a pain on the way into the office.  Got in and had another very long day of doing training.  Good stuff, but it is very long and hard to keep on track with many, many hours of training.

Lunch today was an amazing cheese quesadilla.  Not the healthiest, but very tasty.  I did discover today that I can get grilled salmon, as far as I can tell, every day which is what I really need to start doing on a regular basis.

Worked until around seven this evening in the office.  It was dark quite a while before I left to go back to the hotel.  Not that there is any hurry to return to the lonely hotel room.  Looking forward to being into the house and having the family here.  At least keeping up on SGL is no problem.

Lonely night in the hotel.  Didn’t leave to go anywhere tonight.

Got up at one thirty this morning.  Going to bed at eight and getting up at one thirty feels a bit odd but somehow I managed to get enough sleep and felt pretty decent when I got up.

It took me until three to be showered and have the car all packed up and be pulling out of the driveway.  It was a light rain this morning which slowed be down a bit.  The Spark is not good in rain (and I am sure not snow which I will be finding out soon enough.)

I drove over to Geneseo and fueled up so that I didn’t have to deal with it later.  Gas was around $3.78.   A far cry from the $2.98 that I saw last week on my drive from Texas to Connecticut.

After getting gas I stopped by Tim Horton’s to get a sesame bagel with cream cheese and a coffee.  From there it was on to Interstate 390 heading south.  The rain lasted for me until Bath, New York which was pretty crappy.  That made for a slow trip for the first long stretch.  But once I was past Bath I was able to speed up and really did not see rain the rest of the trip.

On the drive I continued listening to “A Concise History of the Middle East” which I have been listening to on Audible since Friday which I believe that I forgotten to mention last week.

Overall the drive was not bad.  Five hours and fifty minutes using the Geneseo path on the western edge and the Danbury path on the eastern edge.  And stopping for times, twice for fuel, once for coffee and once at a rest stop.  So leaving at three in the morning to get to the office is not bad at all but leaving at two thirty would be more ideal.

More training this morning.  Lots more videos.

There was a birthday on the team today so the whole team went out for BBQ at lunch today in Westport, Connecticut.  I got a veggie burger with onions and a spicy chipotle mayo that was very good.  It was a very good lunch.

This afternoon we had baked goods at work.  I am not sure what the occasion was but there was pie, cookies, brownies, cupcakes, etc.

After work it was back to the Econolodge in Norwalk.  This time I got a better rate but am stuck in a stinky smoking room in order to get the king bed that I prefer.

Went to bed around midnight.

Got up at seven thirty, showered and then at nine dad’s cousins, Patty and Vicky, came up to the house and we all drove up to Bob Evans in Batavia to have breakfast before they were getting onto the Thruway to head out to Ohio.  We had a really nice breakfast but could not hang out for too long as they needed to get on to the road.

Dad and I came back home and were there only about twenty minutes before we drove down to the Milligan’s farm so that dad could give me a tour of their milking facility which is pretty new there.  We got to see the cows eating and then went up to the observation room and watched them get milked as well.  It was not a long tour but pretty interesting.  It is a really impressive operation that they have down there.

After that we were at the house for a few hours.  I got some Spiceworks posting done – I was actually completely caught up on that all weekend which is really impressive considering the volume of stuff that I missed during the week this past week – and we just talked in the living room.

At four, Sharon and Leo came up and we got pizza from Davis’ (we still call it that even though it has not been called that for years) and they hung out for about two hours.

This evening dad and I watched I Don’t Know How She Does It with Sarah Jessica Parker, Pierce Brosnan and Greg Kinnear.  It wasn’t great but it was cute and entertaining.  After that we watched the pilot of Robin William’s new show The Crazy Ones which I think that Dominica will like because it has Sarah Michelle Geller in it.

That pretty much took us up to the end of the day.  Dad went upstairs to watch his Sunday night shows at eight and I went to bed.  The plan is to sleep from eight until one thirty and then hit the road around about two thirty and drive straight to the office in Connecticut.  That saves me from getting an extra hotel night (which is over ninety dollars) and gives me a little extra time at the house to relax.

I did manage to do my laundry today too in between things.  This whole week I only produced a single load of laundry so that was no big deal at all.

As it currently stands I am planning on doing the same thing next weekend – leaving work on Friday night, hopefully closer to five this week, and driving up to the farm and staying there until early Monday morning before returning to work.  Reducing my week to four hotel room nights instead of five might sounds trivial but that is a twenty percent reduction in the hotel costs and it really adds up over a course of weeks.

Today is my first day back home on the farm since we were here in mid-June of 2012 having just returned from our six week adventure in Europe.  So it has been sixteen months since I have been home which is, I am pretty sure, my longest stint away from home ever.

I was up pretty early this morning, a little before eight, and got down to the Ralstons’ at eight forty five.  Danielle made omelets and we had breakfast and all hung out for a bit.  We’ve not seen the Ralstons’ for about seven or eight months, I think, although I lose track of time a lot these days.

After breakfast Danielle and I ran up to Marketplace Mall and went to the TMobile store where I got my new iPhone 5S activated to be my main phone instead of the Nokia Lumia Windows Phone which has been okay but not up to par with the iPhone at all.  I am really excited to be back on the iPhone again.  Especially with the 5S which has a bigger screen than my old 4, way faster processor with more memory, runs IOS 7, is international and has the finger print scanner.  I didn’t think that the finger print scanner was going to matter but after using it for just a few minutes I realized that it is really awesome – maybe my favourite feature of the new phone.

After TMobile it was over to Best Buy to get a protective screen for the phone then to Tim Horton’s for coffee.  Then back down to their house.

We worked for several hours at the house until probably three in the afternoon.  We covered a lot of ground.  Massively productive day.

Then I went up to the house and hung out with dad until Sharon and Leo and dad’s cousins Patty and Vicki came up and we all went down to Perry to the Lumberyard for dinner.  Have not been there in quite a while.  Dinner was very good.  Tanqueray martini and a stuffed salmon fillet.

This evening I used Facetime on the new iPhone to talk to Liesl and Luciana although I only barely got to see Luciana flash by and say “hi” to her and from then on Liesl monopolized the phone.  I got about ten minutes with Liesl before she wanted to talk to grandpa and probably spent forty five minutes talking to dad.  She took him on tour after tour of the house and even took the iPhone up to her bunk bed where she and Ciana were hanging out.  She really misses her grandpa.

After dinner it was back to the house.  This evening dad and I watched the movie Now You See Me which was not too bad.  Cute adventure movie although it was pretty cheesy overall.

Got to bed at a decent time.  Was pretty tired after my short night last night.

My last day in the office for the week – for my first week.  I checked out of the hotel this morning so that I can head out to dad’s house this evening after work and stay there this weekend.  It looks like I do not have to be house hunting in Connecticut while I am here so I am spending this weekend and next weekend at dad’s house and that gives me time to visit rather than being alone in a hotel wasting time and money.  This cuts me to four hotel rooms per week if I spend Sunday night at dad’s house too.

Today went well.  Pretty uneventful, just studying all day.  That is my big task through all of this week and next.  Mostly watching videos.

Danielle received my new iPhone 5S from TMobile today that we are planning to switch over for me in the morning.  My Windows Phone just didn’t live up to my hopes and expectations and I need to move back to the iOS platform as it is simply a better one.

My new headphones arrived today to use at work.  Bose noise cancelling headphones.  I’ve never used noise cancelling headphones before and I am generally not a fan of Bose but this will be an interesting experiment to see what I think of them.  These are really nice, high end headphones that I get to use but, honestly, the mechanical hum in the office is very high so these are very much needed, even when not listening to anything on them just to cut out the heavy white noise that fatigues you in the office.

I had to charge the new headphones for about an hour before I could use them so I only got about one hour of using them today but boy do they make a difference.  They are heavy but very comfortable and fit my head way better than the ones that I have been using.  And they really do cut out a huge amount of the background noise.

At the end of the day today I got to attend my first ever office happy hour.  That was fun.  It is really awesome to work in an office that attempts to wrap up the week a little on the early side on a Friday rather than where I have been for the last eight years where Friday nights universally meant the busiest evening of the week with work routinely going to six o’clock at a minimum and eight or nine o’clock regularly.

I left the office at five thirty, got in the car and hit the road to go to dad’s immediately.  I am trying a new route to see if I can avoid the New York City traffic as much as possible.  I took CT Route 7 straight north from the office.  I discovered that the offices for Melissa & Doug is just up the street from me.  How interesting.

North on 7 does not take too long before reaching Interstate 84 going west.  Taking 84 to NY 17 up to Interstate 390 back home is pretty straightforward.  A very easy drive – except for the fact that the Chevy Spark has a terrible time trying to make it up the mountains in the Catskills.  I am lucky that the car manages to keep moving and that is with only me in the car.

The drive took about six hours.  It wasn’t a bad drive at all.  I stopped a few times, mostly around Hancock, New York to get gas and coffee at the Tim Horton’s Café.

Got to dad’s house a little before midnight.  Dad was waiting up for me to arrive.  We talked until two in the morning when he was too tired to stay up and went to bed.