Sheep Guarding Llama

Our last weekend before the trip.  Holy cow time has flown by.  We are suffering from vacationitis – we don’t want to do anything and mentally have already switched into vacation mode.  It is really hard to focus on anything but the trip.  So much to do before we go!

I am the on call for the office this weekend.  I got up this morning and tried to get as much work done as possible.  I worked really hard all day.  It was a very busy day.

I spent much of the day working on several servers, including a SunFire V100 that I am supposed to be delivering to Danielle when we drive up to New York.  We are delivering three laptops and the V100 on this trip.  That will reduce the “stuff” in our house but only by the tiniest bit.  I really wish that there was more for us to send.  I am so tired of the house being full of stuff.

I ran out to Redneck Heaven this afternoon and picked up shrimp salads for us for dinner.  That was my only real free time today.  We just have to push through until the trip.  There will be plenty of time to relax once we are gone.

 

I had to be up early this morning so that I could get into the office for the non-farm payroll announcement from the fed.  So that meant getting up at six.  But it meant that it would be easier to work from home this afternoon too.  I worked in the office until noon then came home, did some phone work for a while then worked from home for the rest of the day.

We are starting to get a little nervous.  Five days to go.  Five days!  Are we ready for this?  I am definitely not ready.  So much to do.  I have no idea how I will get everything done that needs to be done.  This is nuts.

I had to do some fancy maneuvering of weekend support schedules in the office to make it that I can be free while we are in Europe.  Somehow I got scheduled to work the weekend support during my holiday so we had to juggle several people to find a solution that would allow me to cover some other time so that someone could cover for me then.  We finally got it figured out and I am actually the on call this weekend – which is really awesome both because it gets it out of the way and also because there is a freeze in effect this weekend so the likelihood that much will happen is not very high.  Likely it will be a quiet weekend.

The new global phone arrived today.  That is good.  We have it in hand and Dominica spent the day getting it ready.  So far she likes it a bit more than her old phone too, which is good.  It is faster and smaller – perfect for traveling.  And since we don’t really care about this phone as it is being replaced as soon as we return from Europe we don’t have to worry about it getting beat up either.  The new phone is an HTC Droid Incredible 2 replacing her older Droid X.

Dominica took Oreo the vet this afternoon.  She is very pleased with his progress which is good as she was really concerned about him a week ago.  The extra food and baths seems to be helping a lot.  He appears to be happier too although he now seems to be really restless at night.  I wonder if he is more restless because I am not wearing my CPAP?  I got the CPAP a few months before we got Oreo so this is the very first week that he is trying to sleep with me that I am without my CPAP and I wonder if that change is bothering him.

Tonight we more or less relaxed.  Not totally but some.  This weekend is going to be really hectic and there is really no break until we leave on Wednesday evening so tonight is our chance to rest up before everything goes crazy.

Six days until we leave.  Now we are in the crunch.  Everything has to be ready.  This is a trip of epic proportions and considering how little traveling Dominica and I have ever done, this is really going to be a leap for us.  Since we started dating a decade ago, we have only taken our honeymoon and two long trips to Walt Disney World together that constitute anything resembling real vacations and those are nothing like this.  We’ve done trips to Europe, but they were nothing at all like this.  This is a new level of packing, preparation and “no turning back.”  Once we hit Wednesday morning next week, we are on autopilot.  Everything is planned to the minute at that point and everything has to go exactly to plan.

I am in the office today, one of my few full office days this week (or for the next two months, for that matter.)  I don’t think that I will have a full four days in the office until the first week in July!  How crazy is that?  I really cannot believe it.

I had to run out to UPS today to overnight checks up to dad so that he could cash them and get the money into the bank and available for us before we leave for Europe.  This is going to be one tight financial adventure.  While I was out I ran across the street and got some frozen yogurt.  It was quite warm out today in my car that has no air conditioning.

The temperature in New York and Europe is going to be a shock for our systems.

I have been putting in a bit of work attempting to build a storage server for Danielle.  I am trying to convert a SunFire V100, which is supposed to cap out at 137GB of drive capacity, into a half terabyte storage machine.  Because Solaris 11 does not support this old platform I have to try some alternative ideas.  I have been working to get FreeBSD 9.0 working but am running into some incredible hurtles.  I’ve considered Ubuntu, OpenBSD and NetBSD as well.  We will see what ends up being the best option in the end.

I am loving my new laptop.  I have barely had any time to get it set up yet so I am hoping that I will have time to get it all tweaked and tested out before it is too late.  I really like how portable it is and how it makes me easily able to use it while we are all sitting around in the play room.  My old laptop was too large and fragile for that.

After work I came home.  I was a little later than usual.  Dominica hadn’t decided what she wanted for dinner so I didn’t bring dinner home.  She decided that she was in the mood for Mexican (this never, ever happens) so we tried out Los Lupes which we have been seeing for a year and have not yet tried.

Dinner was quite good, we both did the tilapia fish tacos.  The restaurant was completely packed and they had a live piano player slash singer who was quite good.  It was a nice place but very small and very busy – hard for the girls as they could not get up and move around at all.  We really splurged on our diets tonight and tried the tres leches which we have never had before but have really been wanting to try.  It was awesome.  Liesl really liked it too.

The new mobile phone is supposed to arrive tomorrow morning.

Today was my work from home all day day.  So much to do.  We are trying to deal with all the last minute errands that can’t be handled any other way today.  We don’t know if I will be getting another day at home during the week until we leave for New York and on to Europe.  This is when you know that it is the home stretch, now we hit the “last” of everything before we go.  We leave Texas one week from today.  One week.  I can’t believe it.

I worked on getting the bills paid today.  Our tax return money has come in.  That was one of the big items that we were really concerned about.  Having that resolved before the trip is a huge weight off of our minds (and our banks’ minds.)  So today we paid one of our big credit cards to zero.  Whoo hoo!  And we paid pretty much all of the other outstanding bills too.  Boy does that feel good.  Our finances have been really worrying us for this trip and they are still going to be really rough but this is the difference between rough and “what are we going to do?”

Dominica ran out to do trip shopping this morning.  She went to IKEA to get some new luggage after having tested our old luggage the last few days and determining that it was not going to do.  One of the pieces of good luggage that she had hoped to have used was partially eaten by the rat so that made using what we already had a little harder than expected.  We can fix that luggage by replacing the wheels but we can’t do that anytime soon.

Verizon decided to take a stab at solving the European mobile phone problem again today (after I posted on Twitter about how we had to find another provider after twenty years with Verizon over something so trivial) and, after an entire day of trying, they did finally come through with a solution and Dominica has a replacement HTC Droid Incredible 2 World Phone shipping out already.  We are supposed to have the replacement Android phone on Friday morning and she will still be eligible to move to an iPhone in late June as originally planned.  That was the last big hurtle solved.

For lunch today I was at Brookhaven with John.  I haven’t seen him since he left the office so we hung out for a while.  The weather was perfect for hanging out outside at Brookhaven.  We sat right on the golf course and it was warm but overcast.

After work the family went to YogurtLand and got dessert.  Then Dominica decided that since we were out and since the phone issue was resolved (it got finally resolved while we were at the yogurt place and I was stuck standing outside getting the details figured out) that we should run back up to IKEA so that she could get a second piece of luggage like the one that she got this morning because it is so perfect for our trip.  It is a convertible rolling bag and backpack so that we will have some flexibility in how we use it.  So we ran up to Frisco and she made a quick dash into the store and back with the luggage.  She was incredibly fast, maybe little more than ten minutes with Liesl, Luciana and I waiting in the Acadia for her.

One week until we leave and the big items are figured out.  Not too much to worry about at this point.  Just have to get all of the work items wrapped up and my school work all done so that we are clear to go.

Here we are in May.  The month that we have been looking forward to since last August when we decided to take our long vacation.  The time has really flown.  This seemed so far away and now we are scrambling to be ready.  We leave Texas a week from tomorrow!

I ordered a new laptop today.  I have been working off of the same laptop for a few years now and while it is perfectly fine it is a bit large for backpacking through Europe and the battery doesn’t have nearly the life that I would hope that it would anymore.  It was from a different era.  Not old enough to justify replacing normally but old enough that something new would sure be nice.  Well the right set of circumstances came up and I have a new HP Folio 13 on order.  The Folio 13 is widely regarded as one of the, if not the, best ultrabook (very small notebook but more full featured than a netbook) on the market.  Aluminum casing, solid state drive, low power, long battery life, backlit keyboard – all of the things that a hard core traveler needs.

I came home at lunch and ended up working from home all afternoon because I needed to deal with getting the new Folio.  I got the order finalized around three and picked it up at the warehouse at four.  I got it home and Dominica was very relieved to see how much smaller this new laptop is than the old one and how much lighter and more rigid.  She has been working like crazy on all of the packing to get us ready for the trip and every ounce matters and every inch as well.  Things are tight and we have nothing to spare.  It is going to be really hard carrying all of this stuff as we don’t have a car in Europe.

My first impression of the new Folio is that it is awesome.  A full size keyboard but no wasted space.  Light and easy to carry.  This is going to be so much better.  We have to live off of this thing for two months as our only computing device.  Having it be as usable as possible is critical.

My next task this afternoon was to figure out what we are going to do about a phone while in Europe.  We have been planning all along to just get a loaner phone from Verizon, which we had been told that we could do when we first got our current iPhone 4 and Droid X which are not international phones.  We had hoped that Dominica’s phone might be up for renewal soon enough so that we could just get a new iPhone 4S instead of getting a loaner phone.

Well, nothing goes to plan.  I called Verizon and Dominica is not eligible for renewal until June 19th – the very end of our trip abroad.  So that does not work at all.  Argh.  So we had to resort to getting a loaner phone.  Ah, but there is a catch.  We called for the loaner phone and it turns out that that is not available unless your trip is only roughly three weeks, or less, in length.  That’s not going to work.  Uh oh.  What to do now.

Now we are in a panic.  The only options from Verizon are ones we can’t accept – better to drop our plans than to do what they suggest (agree to two more years on an Android that isn’t reliable.)  We talked to Sprint and it sounds like they might be an option.  Buying a phone in Europe when we step off of the plane might be an option as well.  Hard to say.  We are brainstorming.  This isn’t good. We thought that we were doing well for the trip but suddenly we have reintroduced panic back in.

For dinner we went to Brookhaven and sat outside for kids night.  We stayed until the girls were exhausted and they both were pretty much asleep by the time that we got back home.