Sheep Guarding Llama

This is it, I am in my hotel in Connecticut this morning and will check out tomorrow morning and am on my way to Texas tomorrow afternoon.  I can’t wait to get down there and see my family and take a much needed two week vacation.

I walked to the office this morning.  One of my rare chances to do so.

Pretty quiet day at work.  Nothing to report.  Since I am new and leaving tomorrow for vacation, I am not expecting anything much.

After work it was just back to the hotel.  My last night alone in Connecticut!  I am so glad that this stint is finally going to be over.  I have really been missing my family.

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.