Sheep Guarding Llama

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.

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.