Sheep Guarding Llama

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.

The long drive from Texas to Connecticut was almost all taking place today.  I really only did about an hour of driving last night leaving nearly everything for today with little to no chance of not having a bit of it tomorrow morning too.

My night took an interesting turn when I stopped in Interstate 30 near Paris, Texas to grab a drink or something simple.  I can’t remember exactly what I was getting as I know that I had fueled up very recently.  I must have had a need to get something basic that I had forgotten at my last stop which was, at most, just one hour before when I stopped and had that extended discussion with the local folks getting pizza.

As I was leaving the gas station there near Paris a couple (a bit older than me) who had been sitting outside on the curb right in front asked if I was going towards Little Rock.  I told them that I was and going on through and they explained that they were desperately trying to get to Buffalo, New York.  That shocked me, not something you hear from a middle aged couple in rural Texas with obvious Texan accents.  I said that I was from Buffalo and asked where exactly they needed to go.  They explained that they were actually trying to get to Rome, NY but that no one had heard of that so their family up there had instructed them to say Buffalo instead so that people in Texas would know where they meant (that makes no sense as no one in Texas knows where New York is at all and anyone who gets them to Buffalo would be getting them so far away that it would be useless.)  Yes…. they were trying to get from Paris to Rome.  Ha ha.

I actually had space in the little Spark so that they would fit with all of their belongings (two small bags) which is a miracle in and of itself.  That they need to go from such a bizarre spot in the middle of nowhere to Rome, New York – a place that likely I am almost the only person in all of north Texas that knows where it is and has actually been there and would know how to get them there – is crazy.  They had been sitting out there for twelve hours trying to find anyone to take them in that direction at all.  Most of they day they were asking about Buffalo, based on the bad information that I mentioned above, and had just decided to try Little Rock instead based on the hope that at least they would start moving in the right direction.

What happened is that they had given up their jobs in San Antonio and moved up to Paris to take care of her sister who had cancer.  They have been there for a year and a half.  While they were there they sent their teenage daughter up to Rome to live with her other sister who had a home up there so that she would be taken care of while they took care of the family in Texas.  The sister in Texas was not doing well and sort of turned them out on the street with just the clothes on their backs, essentially.  So they walked down to the gas station on the highway after buying backpacks to hold what little they had with them and hoped to find a ride up to Rome where they had been offered a place to stay and where they could see their daughter for the first time in a year and a half!  That’s where I found them, just six dollars left between them and twelve hours of sitting in the hot Texas sun (long since down at this point) hoping that someone could at least move them in the right direction.  Neither of them had ever seen the north at all and they had absolutely no idea what New York might be like nor where it was (they suspected that it was about eight hours away making it still within Arkansas not too far from the western bank of the Mississippi River!)

It was clear that the Lord had arranged all of this.  The sheer chances that I would have stopped here, been delayed so, known exactly where they needed to go, actually had the room to fit them in that tiny Spark and was alone so that I could consider it was astronomic.  And the distance that they were attempting to cover was completely unreasonable – they could easily have spent weeks on the road trying to work their way to a state that they knew not where it was and to a city in the state that they knew far less about.  They continuously would confuse Rome (in the middle of the state) with New York City (in the south) or Buffalo (in the west.)  Even showing them maps did nothing to help them understand the immense distance between the locations nor did explaining that Rome was a little town in rural farm country make them understand that it was not in the middle of Manhattan.  It is amazing that people from a city of four million people think that a town of fifty thousand must be bigger than where they are from.

As someone who does risk analysis for businesses all of the time I knew that, in reality, having random passengers of their profile with their background on a trip of this nature was more likely to improve my safety (by keeping me alert) than to lower it.  To a casual reader who wasn’t there first hand it may sound crazy to pick people up in Texas to deliver them to New York but it is not nearly as dangerous as it sounds, not in the least, especially when you consider that I am much bigger than either of them and was driving a very small, inexpensive car filled with nothing of particular value.  The biggest risk was something minor being potentially stolen but there was almost nothing to steal in the car anyway unless someone wanted to make off with my socks.  The car had nothing but clothes in it and if they were going to try to steal the car that was a risk I was comfortable with.  Everyone freaks out thinking that all hitchhikers are serial killers but that isn’t reasonable at all.  The hitchhikers themselves are the ones at the big risk, they are in the least control.  I am the driver and control the trip over an insane distance.  I doubt that any serial killer has ever used hitchhiking as a means of finding people and if they did, it is just as random as any other human encounter.  Being in a car with a stranger, while intimate, is not particularly more dangerous than going into a nearly empty store or restaurant.  Especially as we would be on major highways the whole time and the gas station people had seen all of us.  It just sounds much worse than it is.  Hitchhiking is a normal thing that is quite safe.  Maybe not the safest thing, but it is not the scary activity that people make it sound like it is and, until recently, it was considered normal and safe.

So we checked out to see if they would fit into the little car with me and, somehow, they did.  Luckily they had almost nothing with them and they had offered to leave their stuff behind as they were so desperate, for obvious reasons, to make it anywhere close to New York.

We loaded up and made a decent run of it through the night.  It was already so late and it did not take long before I was exhausted.  There was no way, given that I had only a short night last night and did not get on the road until eleven tonight, that I was going to be able to drive all of the way through, not even with people to talk to – and they were pretty tired themselves so they were not particularly talkative after the first few hours.

An hour or two past Little Rock I decided that I had to give up for the night.  All along I had only been trying to make it to Forrest City, Arkansas but that was nearly an hour away still, but given that I started late and had some delays, this wasn’t too bad.  I tracked down an Econolodge and put them up in one room and got my own.  It was probably six in the morning when I got into the room, showered and was in bed around seven.

I pulled off a four hour nap.  I would sleep in the car if it was not for the CPAP.  Because of that I have to have a hotel if I am going to attempt sleeping.  The real bed, CPAP and shower did wonders though.  I can’t complain.  Four hours of sleep plus at least an hour of relaxing did the trick and I felt pretty decent.  So at just after eleven we were back on the road.  They had really not slept at all, maybe forty five minutes.  I think that they were nervous that I was going to take off and leave them there and now that they had a feel for how far it was (we were already as far as they thought that New York was and were still a couple of hours from Tennessee) they were beginning to realize what a massive undertaking they had in front of them.

The drive was uneventful for the next several hours, as Tennessee always is.  The long, never ending trek along Interstate 40.  It is exhausting.  Then comes the hills of Virginia which we did not enter until it was dark.  Tennessee got all of the daylight driving.  By Virginia I was already feeling pretty tired.

In Virginia, pretty early on, we stopped and grabbed a quick bite at Taco Bell but were back on the road.

From time to time my passengers would drop off so I would listen to Audible.  I am still working my way through The Third Chimpanzee.

Virginia, like Tennessee and Arkansas, just goes on forever.   Those three states are just so long.  It is daunting trying to drive through them.

In northern Virginia I switched books and started listing to The Last Founding Father, a biography of James Monroe.  Monroe is probably the founding father that I have studied the least and I was hoping that some early American history would serve well to keep me awake and I was correct.  That was the last really exhausted that I felt for the remainder of the drive.  It was very, very late and nearly midnight when I switched books.

It was really cool listening to the book talk about the very area that we were driving through.  That alone helped quite a lot.

Tons more driving to do tomorrow.  Over half of the states that we need to drive through are still in front of us.

Big day here.  Huge day. Three big things….

It is Dominica and my tenth wedding anniversary.  It is my last day with CitiGroup (technically I’m available to them tomorrow but only by phone.)  And tonight I leave Texas to move back to the north east.

Ten years.  It doesn’t seem possible that Dominica and I have been married for an entire decade!

This morning is my very last one with CitiGroup.  Let’s throw out some stats to drive home what a big day today is for us:

• I have been with Citi for nearly eight years.  The longest, by far, run at any “normal” job that I have ever had.  Wegmans was barely over a year.  IBM was nearly a year.  OilNavigator was four months.  My longest non-Wegmans run with Dell was five weeks.  Kettering University was two years but broken up.  Citi has defined much of my career.
• When I joined Citi I had just turned thirty a few days before making Citi practically define my 30s as a decade in my life.
• Dominica and I were married just two years when I joined Citi (plus a few months.)  So for 80% of our marriage I have been working with Citi.
• To add to the above, for 67% of the time that I have known Dominica at all, I’ve been working for Citi.
• Liesl and Luciana were both born while I was at Citi – they have never known me to work anywhere else.
• Almost exactly half of my Citi time was with me based in the NJ/NJ Metro area and half of it in Dallas.  Of the NY portion, half was in NJ then half was in NY.   Likewise in Texas, half was in Las Colinas and half was at Regent in Coppell.
• I have been based at five different sites with Citi and have relocated offices at least nine times in eight years.
• I have worked in the US, Canada and UK (both England and Northern Ireland) with Citi.

Liesl got me up this morning having put herself to bed on the early side she was up at a quarter after eight and needed me to get her her customary chocolate milk (pediasure) and put on a show for her (The Magic Schoolbus.)

It took until nearly eleven before I got into the office but there is no work for me to do today.  No one is having me do things, there isn’t enough time for me to follow up on them at this point.  So I am effectively done as of last night.

My only big task today is to assemble my farewell email and get that send out.  I put two hours into getting that ready but did not have time to get it sent before Jeff, Harsh and I went to Mi Cocina for lunch.  I haven’t been to Mi Concina is three or four years – not since almost immediately after starting down in Texas.  So it would have been early 2010.  Amazing how time flies.  So it was a little nostalgic eating here again on my final day at Citi and in Texas.

After lunch it was back in the office and in about thirty minutes I had the email sent out.  For the next two hours I dealt with a barrage of response emails to the one that I sent out.  I had fifty-four emails to my personal email from people at Citi before I made it home and more would come in later. Tons of LinkedIn and Facebook requests too.

I made my rounds saying goodbye to everyone and turned in my Blackberry, badge and Safeword to Harsh and was out the door just before four.  That’s it, I am all done.  That was my final day at Citi.  Eight years and we are all wrapped up.

I had to run to Dominica’s office to drop off a desktop for Ross that I had been carrying in my car all day and a monitor as well.  Then I ran to LA Burger to pick up Dominica and my last meal together in Texas.  We did our planned anniversary meal last night (from Eat Street) but wanted to eat together this evening as well.  So Dominica had requested LA Burger before I left the office.  Then on the way back to the house I swung into Walmart and picked up an anniversary card as well and got back home.

We watched The New Girl and ate dinner.  The evening was spent just hanging out with Dominica and the girls and doing some packing.  Actually got some real packing work done.

I had to run down to Brookhaven to close out my gym locker.  We had forgotten about that until now and this is, quite literally, the last chance to deal with it.  This is not something that Dominica can work on while I am gone.  So I had to do it.  On the drive there I ran into Chris driving to our house.  It is amazing how many times we’ve seen each other on the street since living in Texas.  At least five or six times we’ve spotted each other driving past each other.  I don’t think that I’ve ever had that happen so much.  He was heading to the house to say goodbye.

I closed out my locker, that was pretty fast, and ran back home.  We hung out with Chris for a couple of hours.  He played with the girls a lot while I did more packing.

Chris took off and we put the girls to bed.  That was rough – my last time seeing them for more than three weeks.  It will be only days shy of four weeks before I get to see them 🙁  Three weeks and five days without my girls.  This is going to be awful.

It was about eleven when I finally got on the road.  That was way later than I had hoped.  I had really wanted to be driving by nine with nine thirty being the latest.  But just after eleven it is.  This is going to be a rough night.

These overnight drives are difficult to blog both because of the time distortion without regular day time and night time schedules and because the exhaustion makes the whole thing a giant blur.

I made it about an hour before stopped to fuel up and grab some drinks at a small stop probably around Royse City.  I had take the George Bush to Interstate 30 and was heading east that way.  While at the gas station I ended up talking to some folks that were there in the parking lot for about half an hour while they ate some pizza.  They were waiting for their grandkids to get done with the local high school football game.  Then I was back on the road just after midnight.

I would not be going to bed for a long time yet but I will save the rest of tonight’s tale for tomorrow’s post since we rolled past midnight and that is the only good way to organize things.  I have a very, very long drive ahead of me yet.