Sheep Guarding Llama

Day four at the new job.  I was up this morning at a good time but did an hour of my class work from home before going to the office.  It is much quieter at home.  I have requested noise cancelling headphones for the office.  Doing videos and audio lectures is a major part of the job there and the office has both a really loud mechanical hum (probably from the HVAC) that can cause headaches but also is just extremely noisy with people.  It is not uncommon to have to stop working and just wait for people to calm down as they get so loud that the entire room can do nothing but listen to one or two people.  A bit of a problem, especially in an environment where media rules the day.

I was pretty much solid on class work today without any interruptions.  It was just me at my desk getting loads of studying done.

Got back to the hotel after seven.  I need to pack up the hotel room in the morning as I will be checking out for the weekend and heading back home to dad’s house after work tomorrow.

Amazing news, around one hundred Dr. Who episodes have been discovered in Ethiopia.  This is some insanely bizarre news but one of the biggest breakthroughs for Dr. Who fans.  http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/10/07/twelfthcentury_tardis_turns_up_in_ethiopia/

I forgot to mention the other night that I have started reading Janet Evanovich’s Big Ten.  I am a good ways into it.  I’ve lost a lot of interest in her books as they are repetitive and the stories are predictable and weak and the characters are getting flatter as time goes on, but I am already so far in that I keep trying a little more.

My third day at the new job in Connecticut.  The weather is turning cooler already.   It is probably ten degrees colder today than it was when I arrived in Connecticut on Sunday.

The big news today is that our renters in Peekskill have declined our offer to allow them to stay in the house at the reduced rate that they have been paying and let me live in the basement long enough to establish residency and refinance the house – which would have been roughly a month.  This seems like an over-generous offer on our part as we’ve been allowing them to continue living there for a ridiculously long time at a fraction of the rent and without a rental agreement and to be able to continue affording that we had to refinance.  But they declined and said that it would be uncomfortable to live with their landlord so they are going to look for something else.  Strange that it wasn’t uncomfortable not to be able to pay the rent for a year.  And, surprise surprise, they suddenly have found work.  Uh huh.  So we are pretty suspicious that they have been working for a while and got addicted to paying the lower rent and wanted to see how long they could keep that up.

Even if that is what happened, it worked out in our favour.  Now we have our own house to move back into.  A house that is relatively close to work and is a house that we like.  The house where Liesl lived her first year.  We know the area, the restaurants and mostly how to get places from there.  We only lived there a year but at least now, for the first time ever, we will be returning to a home that we used to own and we can feel much better about the money that we have been pouring into it over the past five years.  It is still pretty far from having been an amazing investment, but it is no longer the financial disaster that it had been.  And if we manage to refinance it will be even better still as we will spend almost a full quarter of a million dollars less on the house over its lifetime than we are planning to spend today.

So we are starting to work out the timing for the renters to move out and for us to move in and for the refinancing process to get underway.  We are also planning on some extensive renovations of the house once we are back.  We want to remove all of the flooring on the main floor and move to high quality laminate or many some tile too.  We want to completely gut and redo the front of the house including the front closet, the powder room (even replacing the toilet and sink) and the kitchen including removing the one kitchen wall, replacing all of the cabinets, appliances, flooring, etc.  And lastly we want to turn the dining room area into an extension of the living room.  We will also get back to the project that we had previously of attempting to wire the entire house for Ethernet.  We had started that but never really got anywhere while we were there before.

There is a lot to do but not needing to house hunt completely changes everything.  That was a primary goal of my time here and this means that there is no reason for me to be spending any weekends or extra time in the area.  I can focus more on work and on hotel cost savings rather than on learning the area and trying to determine where it would make sense to live without enough time to get used to what work is going to be like and doing so without Dominica and the girls so the decisions would be completely mine and done in a very short period of time.  So this is very good for our long term housing planning as well.  Whether we live in Peekskill for a few months or several years we are not sure yet.  That we will find out later.  Does not really matter, this gives us the time to make better decisions and to really do good area scouting.  And having the chance to completely update the Peekskill house before renting it again, should we go down that path, is significant.  Unlike the last time where we had to leave the house empty for a long time and take the first renters that we were able to find this time, we think, that we will be able to live in the house indefinitely until such time that we find a renter who really is interested in the house and is willing to pay what we need to make the rental worth it for us.  And maybe that time will never come because we might easily be happy staying in the house, at least for quite a while.

In other news today, we’ve decided that the Windows Phone is just not cutting it for me for several reasons, the biggest one being that the maps simply are useless.  No matter how many times I attempt to use the mapping feature it is always wrong and the map software itself often fails and does ridiculous things.  The most basic mapping functions aren’t available and given that we are relocating there is just no way that we can be in a position of constantly needing to rely on the map and not having it be reliable.  There have also been some general radio reliability problems and rebooting issues but none have been horrible.  The lack of apps is an issue but not a critical one but some basic apps that I would like are certainly missing and the process of attempting to find apps that I need is horrendous but something that I can deal with when necessary.

So the plan is that I am going to head up to dad’s place upstate on Friday evening after work gets out.  This will give me a feel for what the traffic will be like doing this.  And I’ll spend two or three nights up there and save some money on being in the hotel down here in Norwalk and get to visit him and the Ralstons.  Then Saturday morning Danielle and I are running to Tmobile to switch my Windows phone out for the iPhone 5S that we managed to reserve for me.  Yes, I’m an early release iPhone user now!  Never thought that that would happen.  I might opt to get up super early and drive down to Connecticut overnight rather than staying in a hotel on Sunday night.  It saves a ton of money to go that route.

I also found out at work today that unofficially, because I live so far from the office, that I probably qualify for two nights a week in a hotel locally.  I am going to look into that one tomorrow but am very hopeful.  Even if I don’t end up using that once we live in Peekskill using it now would be a huge deal as I am homeless.

Work today was good.  This was my first day focused solely on my studies so I did nothing but that all day including eating lunch at my desk.  Lunch today was a tuna melt and a large ceasar salad.

After work, which got me to the hotel around seven, I did nothing but stay in the hotel all evening and mostly talk to Dominica over IM except for one quick stop over at the pharmacy next door.

More studying tomorrow.

 

My second day of work here in Connecticut was pretty non-eventful.  I am still in the Econolodge where I plan to stay out the week.  Went into the office this morning around eight.  I’ll give a shoutout to my new coworker(s) that are reading this appalled that people (other than them) sit around reading my sleep and food habits every day.

It was a quiet morning.  Got a lot done.  Around the middle of the day I had to go out to another campus which left me scrambling to drive around Connecticut to find another town and to find an office there hidden in the woods out on a farm.  It’s amazing where offices are hidden in Connecticut. I am not sure that I’ve ever come across anyplace that does office spaces like this.

I left the office at about a quarter after six and returned to the hotel.  I am still a little tired from the weekend of crazy driving and need time to relax.   I am also attempting to refinance the Peekskill house so there is a lot of coordination with that that needs to be done.  If we can pull it off, which at the moment it appears that we can, it could save us nearly $240K in total financing costs by shortening our mortgage by a full decade.  Hopefully will know more about that tomorrow.

Walked around just a little bit to hit CVS and to grab a tuna salad sandwich.  Other than that, a quiet night in the Econolodge.

I am nearly done reading Jared Diamond’s The Third Chimpanzee which, now that I read it, I can see how it lead directly in to his two subsequent books Guns, Germs and Steel and Collapse both of which I read long ago.

Today is the big day.  I slept a ton yesterday.  Slept all afternoon and nearly all night.  I was up for a little while but really, it was all about sleep after the ridiculously long drive from Texas.  Dominica thought that I was crazy for just letting myself sleep all evening as she would not be able to sleep at night and would then be tired during the day but my body does a pretty good job of allowing me to catch up on sleep which is exactly what I did last night.  I am still not one hundred percent but I am pretty nearly there.

I had no problem getting to the office this morning.  The hotel is very close but today was a different office than the one that I had scoped out yesterday so I had to make sure that I was able to find it.  But it turned out to be very easy.  I timed everything really well so that I was right on time and not waiting around for way too long.

Today, all day, is an introduction class at the office.  So nothing like normal work at all.  But that also made it incredibly non-stressful.  Just time to sit and get introduced to the new company.  Nothing even job related, or even site related, for that matter.  So very disconnected in some ways.

Put in a long day today.  It was a quarter till seven when I left the office and returned to the hotel.  I went for a walk tonight checking out what was around and got a tuna salad sandwich and returned to the hotel.  Just a quiet night in the hotel for me.  That is my plan all week.  If I get a chance I may drive around a little to look at areas but as it is dark when I get out of the office that is tough.

So far things are good after the first day.  Very tired.

We were still in northern Virginia, driving through the mountains, when we crossed the midnight mark making it Sunday morning.  I am so tired and there is still so much driving to be done.  West Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York are all still left before I can get to Connecticut.  So tired and so much left to do.

Made several stops in Virginia early this morning.  I was incredibly tired and having a hard time keeping awake so had to stop almost once an hour to get out and walk around.

Everyone fell asleep which meant that I could listen to Audible pretty easily.  I switched from the book that I had been reading and started reading a biography of James Monroe instead.  That was really good timing because I was driving right through the parts of Virginia that were being talked about in the biography.  It makes it so much cooler to read something like that while you are in the exact place where the story is unfolding.  The book was really interesting and made a huge difference in keeping me awake.  I was pretty good after that point and we made much better time.

No stops between an hour south of Winchester until stopped about fifteen miles into Pennsylvania to get a very early morning breakfast at a Sheetz.  I’ve missed Sheetz – they have the best breakfast sandwiches in Pennsylvania.  They do the same food as McDonald’s except that they do it so much better.  SO much better.

This was my passengers’ first time ever setting foot in the north.  They were pretty excited to be in Pennsylvania.  Very far from the world that they know.

Made good time through Pennsylvania and did not stop again until the sun was up and it was time for a quick bathroom break on I78 about midway through New Jersey.

I thought that it was really neat that today, of all days, having effectively driven directly here straight from having resigned my post at Citigroup that I drove right down the same road on which I worked for the first few years.  The old office, the one where I first interviewed and my first three locations at Citi, were all at the site in Warren that actually sat directly on Interstate 78.  So this drive today, on my way to my new job in Connecticut, is the same drive that I took for that interview and that I took again on my first day (and many times thereafter.)  We went right past Lebanon where Dominica and I had tried to buy a house somewhere around 2007 but had backed out at our attorney’s recommendation and ended up in Peekskill instead.  A very nostalgic and memory-filled drive.

It was a warm, foggy morning with a light drizzle.  We stopped at a Pilot and did the final bathroom break there in NJ on 78 before heading on.  Next stop would be the train station on the Hudson.

The drive from I78 up to Croton-on-Hudson went smoothly.  We got to the train station, I got my passengers tickets on the 11:00 am Lake Shore Limited from Croton to Rome and got them on their way before running up to Peekskill myself.

I went to the Peekskill house, my first time in Peekskill in nearly four years!  I didn’t go in, just wanted to test the route from Peekskill to Norwalk to see how the commute would be.

The drive was not bad at all.  It’s 42 miles but pretty easy.  Only a couple of turns from the Peekskill house to Norwalk.  I had no idea before tonight that you could get from the one to the other so easily.  It is all one, big woods from one to the other.

I drove around Norwalk a little, just to get a feel for the place.  I went to the office first then to a couple of apartments that Dominica and I had looked at online and were not sure if they were in a place where we would be interested in living or not.

I was very tired, though, and did not have a hotel reservation so wanted to get to the Econolodge and be sure that everything was all set before I did anything further.  If I found at that I had no hotel room that would be really had considering how tired I was.

So I drove out to the hotel and got a room.  I went in and ended up pretty much sleeping all afternoon.  I went down for a nap in the early afternoon, around two or three, and slept until well into night time.  Then I got up for maybe two hours but was back to sleep around three in the morning and slept all night.