Sheep Guarding Llama

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.

Today, effectively, is my last day with CitiGroup.  Tomorrow is officially my last day but all I am doing is getting lunch, turning in my remote access stuff and BlackBerry and heading for home.  So today is the last day actually working.

To celebrate my final day, I was paged out at two thirty this morning to deal with an issue that offshore support in India could not handle so I was up for about an hour.  It’s been a week since I was last paged out so this was kind of a “for old times’ sake” kind of thing, in my mind.

To deal with the outage that occurred during the night I was paged out at eight this morning too.  I was fast asleep and so it took me a good five minutes to figure out what was going on and remember that I had been paged out during the night.  Typical me.

I went into the office, we were going to have lunch today but it had to be postponed because of the outages from last night.  So doing lunch tomorrow.

This afternoon I had to run into Dominica’s office to take care of some last minute stuff there.  Very busy day.

Went home and loaded up a big load of gear in the Acadia and took it down to the storage unit.  Dominica really needed me to do that before I left.  It got another shelving unit and lots of big, heavy stuff out of the house.

On the way back from the storage unit I swung through Eat Street Kabob Factory and picked up our anniversary dinner that Dominica had called in to order for me.  We love their food and won’t be getting anything like that potentially for a while.

I had to run in to Redneck for a quick pickup of my Mass Effect game but it was forgotten so the it was a quick up and back.  No spare time tonight.

This evening we watched Monsters, Inc. with the girls.  Liesl really liked it.  She remembered watching Monsters University over the summer at the drive in.  Dominica is on a mission to introduce Liesl to as many Disney movies and characters as possible so that she will recognize them once we get to Disney World next month.

We put in some time getting a workstation built for me to deliver tomorrow.

Luciana was not feeling well today and slept nearly all day.  She has been sick for days and has not been sleeping well.  Apparently she was making up for it today.  She got up for a while this evening but was back asleep after not too long, but was still up until after midnight.

At one point Luciana was upset and Liesl went and sat on the entry step with her.  It was so adorable.  Liesl was so mature sitting there talking her down and making her feel better.  They are great sisters.

Liesl was, apparently, too tired today and got really angry with me because of something that she got in trouble about.  She stormed off to her room and when I went to check in on her she had fallen asleep in her bed.  So I covered her up and she slept the night away like that.

Dominica and I watched How I Met Your Mother after Liesl went off to bed.

Had to be up at six this morning so that I could be into the office by seven.  Non-farm payroll, which I thought that I would was going to be covering on Friday morning, was cancelled because of the government shutdown that happened two days ago.  So this morning’s ADP numbers are the last early morning numbers that I need to cover for the office.  It is definitely an end of a very long tradition.  I’ve been the guy covering the Foreign Exchange and Rates calls for most of a decade.

Quiet morning, the call went smoothly.  No issues.

This morning’s project for me is to go to Public Storage and get access to our new storage unit that Dominica called to reserve yesterday.  We are just getting a small 5’ x 5’ storage unit to offload a small amount of the stuff that is not supposed to move up to New York and/or Connecticut with us.  We want to start moving stuff there today to get it out of the way while I am here so that Dominica does not have to deal with it in any way.  Especially since much of the stuff that I am going to move is heavy and would pose a problem.  So I ran there at lunch and got that all set up.  I will take our first load of stuff over there this afternoon.

Came home and spent the afternoon packing.  Got a huge load ready for the storage unit – the Acadia was really packed.  Had to get one of the big shelving units cleared off in the garage so that I could take it over there plus all kinds of gear.  That was the first big dent in the packing process.  Very noticeable.

This evening Watson and I had said that we would go to Redneck as it is my last chance to go there at night.  We had been going to go over the weekend but decided to do it mid week.    He picked me up at nine and we went over.

Redneck was pretty busy tonight.  We sat with Stefany, which was really handy as we had a chance to discuss her renting the house which she is very interested in doing, and ended up getting sat in a reserved seating area for the preview showing of the new television show Big Tips Texas which is shot at Redneck Heaven with several people that I know.

We were only there for a few minutes before there was a pounding on the window behind me.  It was Amber, the main star of the new show and one of my regular lunch waitresses before she moved down to the Arlington location to film the show. I’ve not seen her in months because of that but have known here for nearly two years.  So she was excited to see me and came inside shortly to visit.

The show came on around ten and about half of the cast was there sitting beside us to watch it.  Most of them, like Amber, had not seen anything but the commercials yet so this was their very first time seeing themselves on television.  I managed to get a picture of Amber watching as she was on television for the very first time (you can see both her in the picture and her on television at the same time – it was the very first scene in which she was showed.)

We watched the show with everyone.  It was very loud in there with all of the girls screaming.  All three people that I know that are stars in the show were there with us.

After the show was over we moved outside instead.  The place cleared out a bit after the show was over.  The weather is great, perfect for sitting outside.

We had a really good time and it was the perfect way to wrap up my final chance to go out to Redneck.  After a few years of being “part of the gang” here Watson and I managed to go out with a big, nostalgic wrap up.

Got home and off to bed.  Busy weekend coming up.

Only three days left.  This is all flying by so quickly.

Went into the office a little on the late side this morning, just before ten.  Worked for a while.  Then Dan, Venkat and I went out for lunch at Redneck.  I drove separately as I had a call to do so I did that from the car while driving to save time.  That was quite efficient.  It wrapped up just as I pulled in.

So we took a long lunch and hung out with Chelsey and saw as many people as we could as this is one of, if not my very, last lunch at Redneck for a long time (or possibly ever. )  I suspect that we will be back later this week but I’m not sure when that will be so this very well might be my last lunch trip.  Watson and I are scheduled to be there tomorrow night, late, and that is very possibly my final evening trip too.  Getting down to the wire.  Seeing everyone for the last time.

After lunch I went home and helped out there.  Did a lot of house cleaning today.  It is looking much better.  We need to be able to show it soon.  Hopefully people will soon be interested in renting the house.  We’ve got to get it onto the market soon.

Dominica reserved a storage unit today that I have to go get tomorrow morning.  Then we will start moving some stuff that is definitely staying in Texas out to there.  That will help getting that stuff out of the way of the packing efforts.  There is a lot staying here, we are hoping that a five by five storage unit will be sufficient to hold it all.

Tonight we watched the new episodes that just released of Blacklist and Sleepy Hollow.  We are enjoying these new shows that have just released.  Glad that we have Hulu so that we can watch them.

I went to bed early tonight after kidding the kids off to bed.  Dominica stayed up late.

In the office today for my final week.  So hard to believe that this is it, the very last week of the job that I have been at for almost eight years.  It feels surreal.

Now we have so much to do to get ready that we are in a little bit of a panic.  There is really so much to do.  It is crazy.  We need to pack up the house.  We have to get ready for me to be away for weeks without the family.  I need to find a way back to Texas and a ride between cities.  We have to get a storage unit.  We have to fill that storage unit.  We have to arrange movers.  We need to rent our house in Texas.  We need to figure out what is going on with the house in Peekskill (are we moving into it?)

Morgan came over today to watch the girls and allow Dominica to get packing and house stuff done.

Dan and I went to Redneck for lunch today.  We are planning on hanging out all week since this is the end of my time here in Texas.

After lunch I went home so that I could assist Dominica with house repairs.  She had run out to Home Depot and got stuff that we needed for the house.  I got home just in time to find that she had done the plumbing herself – we have plumbers coming tomorrow to deal with the clog in the kitchen drain and we were hoping not to need them to work on the broken garbage disposal as well.

I may not have mentioned by while I was in California, the garbage disposal broke, but Dominica was not sure what it was.  I was on the plane heading towards Dallas when she discovered water pouring out from under the sink.  She did not have time to look into it so left it for me to look at.  On Sunday I took everything out from under the sink, ran the water and found that the garbage disposal was pouring water straight out of the bottom of it.  Time for a new one.

So Dominica picked one up today and, with Art on the phone, removed the old one and installed the new one!  When I got home she was just wrapping up the final bits of the installation.  So there is a new Insinkerator Badger now.

Dominica also fixed the toilet in our bathroom which has been broken for a week or two.  Nothing major but the flapper and chain have been breaking.  They are old, probably as old as the house, and just needed to be replaced.  So she did.  Now it works great.

I had to run an errand for AJ taking a package over to UPS for delivery down to Austin.  That only took a few minutes.

We did a little more packing tonight but relaxed a bit.  Lots of new television to watch that we wanted to see together.

The big show that we are really excited about is Blacklist which just started on NBC with James Spader.  We’ve been seeing ads for it for a while on Hulu and thought that it looked really good so wanted to check it out and we were not disappointed.  The only problem is that it is too violent to watch while the girls are awake so we started it but had to turn it off to save for later at night.

So we finished the second season of The New Girl and caught up on Family Guy and got the girls off to bed.   We watched the new episodes of The Mindy Project and tried out the new Seth Green show Dads.

Then we watched the rest of Blacklist which was excellent.  James Spader is an amazing actor and this role is really perfect for him.  We are pretty sure that we are really going to like this show.

After that we watched the first two episodes of the new show Sleepy Hollow which is a thriller, mystery, horror show based loosely on the events in the book but set in the modern world – but one that has apparently never heard of the book which doesn’t make much sense.  But other than ignoring the fact that the book is famous and not one person in the story realized that the events of the book are unfolding in Sleepy Hollow, NY it is pretty good.  And the police chief’s name is even Irving and no one points out the coincidence.

The thing that we probably like most about Sleepy Hollow is that a lot of it is actually shot in Westchester just a few miles from our house.  So watching it just before we move back to the area is really cool.

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