Sheep Guarding Llama

Sunday. My day to relax after lots of traveling, unpacking, and catching up on work after so much disruption.

Today I finally managed to watch the very end of Deep Space Nine which I have been watching for many months. People were right, once I made it to the very end I have to say that DS9 is way better than I had thought that it was and it easily might be second to TNG overall. Definitely better than Voyager and The Original Series. I have not seen Enterprise yet.

Saturday.  There is still a lot to be done to get the truck back.  It was supposed to be back this morning at ten, so we had to get up and get to work right away.  I was not at all ready to jump out of bed and get lifting things again.  I did get eleven hours of sleep, however, so did recover quite a bit since yesterday.  Mostly I am just tired and stiff this morning.

We basically only have the furniture left to get, but it is the heavy and awkward stuff.  It will be as much work to get that out of the truck as all of the unloading was yesterday.

There was so much to do, and so little time in which to do it, we decided to just get the couches down and to set them on the yard so that at least the truck could get back to U-Haul.  That alone was a lot of work and I could barely stand after doing it.

We got that done just in time for Paul to drive the truck back.  Then we had to get the girls ready to go to Isabella’s birthday party.  This is why we raced back from New York to make sure that we did not miss today’s party.  It is officially from ten until noon.

It is a pajama party, so the girls are all bundled up on a warm day, in pajamas.  Dominica took the girls down and picked up Paul on the way home. They stopped at the Guatemalan bakery and got donuts on the way home.

Before Dominica left, Ken made it over.  He did some work in the lawn, and then helped me to move the couches into the house and to move the old couch outside.  It was super hard maneuvering stuff into the house as the couches are so long and can’t make it around the front corner because of the pillars.  So it was three times the work of just carrying them in.

So we had everything in and arranged before Dominica got back with Paul.

Dominica spent a lot of time today cleaning the couches.  They were so dirty, and covered in mildew.  It was no small project.

At noon, I ran out to pick up the girls down in Addison.  The party was far from over, so I just stayed.  They ended up going till closer to one. The girls were having a great time and made new friends.  They did hand painted plates at the party as an activity so they brought those home.  Very cool party idea.

I got to meet Juan for the first time, too.

On the way back home we stopped at Papusa Dona Lola on Beltline and got papusas for Dominica, Liesl, and me.  Paul didn’t feel like them and Luciana will just never try them.  They were so delicious, though.  Probably the best ones yet.  I really like mine just covered in coleslaw.  And it make them that much healthier.

I watched some Fuller House with the girls while I ate.  They decided that they want to watch through the series yet again, since we finished it a couple of weeks ago.  Luciana especially is addicted to this show.

After a bit of the show I moved to my office.  I have been away from it for so long.  Just getting a chance to be semi-alone for a bit is nice.  I need a break from people for sure.

We did some unpacking today. Several boxes and bins were emptied.  We have some shelves and stuff to fill, so we got some immediate progress done.  Our goal is to do a few boxes every week.  It will take a very long time, but we will get through it all sooner than it seems.  The house is very full, and is going to feel much more full until we get it all figured out where all of this new stuff is going to go.

The “new” couches really take up a lot of space in the living room.  It is going to be packed in there.  Not only do we move from one couch to two, but we have our side table to add to the room as well.  And the dining room table is going to move into there to be used as part of the school room, while the dining room space gets turned into a real office for Dominica and Paul as they have been living without one for quite some time now, just working from the living room on furniture not meant for that.

The girls watched Fuller House all the rest of the day.  For dinner, Dominica made angel hair with vodka sauce.  The girls just had the pasta with butter, as they always do. The vodka sauce worked out really well, though.  It was delicious and the first time that I can ever remember her making that kind of sauce.

 

 

Friday.  We are home and today we have to unload the truck.  I slept poorly last night, I’m not even sure that I got any sleep at all.  I had some insomnia from staying up too late.  Then I had a bit of a stomach ache that made falling asleep harder.  I might have drifted off some, but was never really sure that I got any sleep.

So Dominica got me up just after ten and said that it was time to clean out the garage.  We have to completely empty the garage before we can do anything else.  So that was the first job of the day.  Opening the garage door (it is so full that we cannot enter from the house!) and starting to move everything out into the drive way.

We immediately discovered so much stuff that we had no idea was in there. Rachel even found some of her stuff, and some of her mom’s stuff.  Everyone has stuff that has been forgotten about in our garage!

With pulling everything out, we managed to go through all of the boxes and throw out loads and loads of stuff.  And we found stuff to donate.  There really was not all that much left when we were all done.  We put that stuff back in and got it all organized.  With the garage cleaned up and swept, it really doesn’t look too bad.

Then the real fun began.  Paul pulled the moving truck into the alley and got it backed up to the garage door.  I can’t believe that he was able to maneuver it in that tiny alley.  With the back of the truck at our garage door, the front was in the middle of the alley. So we fully blocked it.

Rachel took off around noon.  She is staying at her grandmother’s tonight, and might go to Austin this weekend.  She isn’t sure yet.

Early in the day, Paul had used his pickup to move the CanAm side by side on its trailer back onto the front yard where it now sits against the fence.  That will not be able to stay there for long.  But at least it is out of the street.

We opened up the truck and started unloading.  We took it in spurts and it went on all day.  A twenty four foot box truck is not small.  We put boxes and stuff all over the house, trying to get everything as close to where it would eventually go as possible.  The dining room (the school room) is filled with boxes.  There are boxes in every room.  My office filled up quite quickly, too.

The garage is so full that you can barely walk through it.  But it is all neat and orderly.  We have it set up so that we can pretty much find everything and we will be able to just take down one box at a time and go through it all.  Our plan is to go box by box and make sure that we are only keeping absolutely essential things and not a bunch of stuff just planning to be in storage indefinitely.  And what is left to put around the house or to heavily compress like the DVDs.  Those we plan to go through, convert all onto our NAS, throw out all of the cases and stuff, and to just store the DVDs themselves on big spindles and likely store those up in the attic purely for legal reasons, not because we will ever want them again.  That alone will eliminate nearly twenty boxes!  We need to do something kinda of similar with the CDs, although I am not too sure about the cases with those.  But we might deal with them in a similar way.  That’s nearly another twenty boxes.  There are thousands of DVDs and CDs.  At some point, we need to do it with BluRays, too.  But they take up a lot less space.

The girls kept themselves busy playing House Flipper, which Liesl got for her birthday all morning.  Then mid-afternoon they switched to playing Broken Age together. Luciana has never played Broken Age before even though it is Liesl’s favourite game and she can even do speed runs on it now.  For days they have been talking about it and Liesl has been explaining all of it to Luciana in the hopes that they will be able to play it together.  So now they are.

The truck was totally empty by probably around six.  We put on an episode of Star Trek: Voyager, the one where Tess is taken over by the alien and tries to overthrow a government.   Paul ran out and picked up Taco Bell for dinner.  The house has no food in it, and no one has any energy at all.  I can barely move, I am so stiff.  Nothing really hurts, my muscles are just really, really tight.

Tomorrow is Isabella’s birthday party that we raced back from New York so that the girls could attend.  There has not been a moment to take them to go shopping for gifts yet.  So once we were done eating, Dominica and Paul took the girls out to Justice to see what they could find.  They have to be up early in the morning to get to the party. That is going to be rough.

I took a long, hot shower, which I really needed after today.  That helped my muscles some.  When I got out I was so tired and it occurred to me that I am an adult and I can go to bed whenever I felt like it.  So at eight o’clock, after having been awake for only ten hours and having moved boxes and stuff all day long, I just went to bed.

So a very short, but extremely productive day.  There is more to do tomorrow.  We did not take the big furniture items off of the truck today, those are for the morning, hopefully when we might have a little help.  There is no way that we could handle doing them today.

I am worn out, but so happy with our progress.  It was so much easier to unload the truck than to load it.  Not so cold, either.  Ha.  It is nice knowing that this massive job of cleaning up the barn and storage in New York, getting the truck to Texas, getting things unloaded, cleaning up the garage, is all done.  This has been hanging over us for so long.  And there were so many unknowns.  We didn’t know if we were really going to be able to get all of this into the garage of not.  It easily might not have fit.

Now for sleep and recovery.  One more day and we will be done with it all. Then we can get down to the job of unpacking, deciding, and getting the house in order.

Thursday.  The second day of driving from New York back down to Dallas. Everyone said that they wanted to get onto the road early today, so with only four hours of sleep I got myself up at six in the morning.  No one else was awake, so I showered and took some time to relax.  I went and got coffee and scouted out the breakfast situation.  Eventually I had to wake people up as it was clear that we were not pulling out of Effingham, Illinois anytime soon if I didn’t take matters into my own hands.  Dominica always says that she is stuck waiting for me, but it really is just something that she says and most of the time, it is really no the case.  So this morning, I waited over two hours for everyone else to be ready to go.

We ended up getting Paul onto the road just a little in front of us, but he is going to Cuba and stopping for a bit to get lunch and to hook up the trailer so that he can pull his CanAm side by side back down to Dallas.

The drive went pretty smoothly today.  We didn’t run into any bad weather or any traffic problems.  We made excellent time and were only a few minutes behind Paul when we shot past Cuba.  He never caught up to us again.

We had some Taco Bell for lunch.  Liesl never grows tired of that.  And then we grabbed some quick Burger King before leaving Oklahoma.

We were amazing to see gas at only $1.88 when we got into Texas!  It is over $3.00 in NY!  And it is suddenly warm.  It was around freezing in Effingham this morning, and almost seventy when we got to southern Oklahoma.

It was probably around ten when we got to Texas.  Paul was a few hours behind us and decided to stop for a steak dinner break at Choctaw Casino in Durant and get a break from driving before doing the last bit.  He managed to get to the house right about midnight.  No unloading of the truck tonight, no way that we could handle any of that.

Everyone is really excited to be back in our house.  Rachel texted me from work when we got in and asked if I was up for going out tonight.  I’m tired, but I have done nothing but drive all day so going out sounded pretty good.

She got to the house well after midnight, so it would be a short night out.  She came in, did her make up, got changed, and drove us to the Fox & Hound on Midway.  We got some beers (or EastCiders for me) and shot a few games of darts.

After the bar we came home and kept watching The Haunting of Hill House.  We got in two episodes, which are not short.  We had some wine and she had some pizza that she had brought home earlier and I had some cheesy jalapeno grits that she had brought for me.

It was super late when we turned in.  Way too late.  But after so much driving, I really was not ready to go to bed too much earlier.  I am going to be so tired tomorrow, though, when we go to do the unloading of the truck.

It is so warm that we are running the air conditioning tonight!  Hard to believe that we have to do that after we have been in seriously freezing temperatures for the last two weeks!

Wednesday.  Today begins our long drive from New York to Texas.

We all had to be up pretty early this morning because we had to do the final loading of the U-Haul so that Paul could get on the road.  He needs to get out ahead of the family in the Nissan Quest because he has the big truck and needs to face the weather and have more time to make decisions and to drive more slowly.

We made good time and got him on the road by just after eight.  The truck is loaded.  Really loaded.  So much stuff in there, it is crazy.  How could we possibly own this much stuff?  And we are leaving so much behind!

After that, we had to pack the minivan.  That didn’t take too long.  We have a lot of stuff in there, too.  It’s not super packed, but it’s well packed for sure.  It is carrying all of the stereo equipment that has been in storage for years.  All of the Rotel and Marantz gear.  Stuff that has been in storage since before the kids were born!  Maybe we can have a stereo again soon.

We had everything ready so early that instead of waiting until noon to get on the road we started out just after ten.  And I was ready to go before everyone else.  I had everything packed up and loaded and was ready to get on the road.

There was a lot of snow, and snow still coming down, and an insane amount of wind as we got started.  The wind stayed with us all morning, too.  We are following the route of the truck so that we can be a sort of support vehicle in case anything goes wrong on the trip.  So that means going the central route through Ohio, on to St. Louis, and then down through Oklahoma.

We did okay in the wind and snow.  It was an exhausting drive, not nothing bad.  Just fatiguing fighting against all of that wind and the occasional bit of slippery road.  The temperature was hovering right around freezing all day as we drove.

We got closer to Paul throughout the day but only ever gained about twenty minutes on him.  Luciana really wanted to stop for dinner and had been asking to do so since early in the morning.  So we stopped in Ashland, Ohio and ended up at the same stop that we’ve done several times before with a KFC, Taco Bell, and a Popeye’s, along with a large convenience store.  How we keep stopping at this exact same spot, I have no idea.  So we all had a sit down dinner of Taco Bell, and got snacks for the rest of the drive.

We had to coordinate hotels a bit, just to be sure that everything was handled. Paul needed a room in Effingham, Illinois.  So Dominica handled all of the booking from our car.  She found a Baymount with a really good rate.  So that works.  We talked for about an hour about how well I was doing on the drive and decided that even though I was doing really well and could push on for a while, there is a benefit to the timing of arriving in Effingham, the low cost, and knowing that we were next to the truck.  So we just booked a second room at the same hotel and drove on to there.  Dominica stresses out if we don’t have a set destination for the night, anyway.  So this helped her to relax a lot.

The rest of the drive was uneventful.  We got into the hotel and into the room at a decent time, probably around midnight.  I spent about two hours getting the girls fed and into bed.  Luciana has had sniffles for several days and really wanted to take a long, hot shower now that we were in a hotel, so I set that up for her and she felt a lot better after that.

I finally got to bed just after two.  Pretty late.  The plan is to be on the road by seven.  So not going to be a lot of sleep for me.