Sheep Guarding Llama

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.

Tuesday.  Liesl is ten!  Luciana was ready and waiting for midnight and managed to wish Liesl a happy birthday at exactly midnight.  Paula was only seconds behind.  So Liesl had three of us wishing her a happy birthday before 12:01.

I can’t believe that she is ten now.  A full decade of Liesl!  She is growing up so quickly.  Her childhood is more than half over!

This morning was spent getting the house decorated and ready for Liesl’s birthday party.  Her grandparents came out from Frankfort, too, for the party.

The party was early in the afternoon.  All done before four.  Liesl’s big present for this birthday is a big punching bag and a pair of boxing gloves!

Dominica’s parents brought some more furniture with them for us to load into the truck.  That truck is super full.  There is definitely going to be stuff that we are forced to leave behind.  Can’t be helped.

This evening I worked on Dominica’s dad’s laptop that has been having issues.  I managed to get a lot of things fixed with it and it seems to be working pretty well now.

This is our last day in New York.  Tomorrow morning we are getting up and getting on the road to start driving back down to Texas.  We have some last minute packing that needs to be done in the morning.  Paul is getting up early and getting the big truck on the road right away.  The the rest of us can sleep in for a while before loading up the minivan and getting onto the road ourselves.  We expect that we will be moving so much faster than him that we will likely catch him by the end of the day.

Monday. More packing. Now we are getting into the smaller stuff. One of the things that I worked on this morning was going through my childhood bedroom closet to see what was in there and what I should clean out. I got most of the books, for example. One thing that I got out of the closet that was pretty weird was a 1994 Woodstock Anniversary unopened Pepsi can that for some reason my 18 year old self thought would be some kind of collector’s item. The things that teenagers think will be cool, am I right? Anyway, I felt the can, which had not moved in decades, and realized that it was far too light to still be full. I don’t know how it happened, but somehow most of the contents had leaked out or evaporated over the last few decades. I opened the can and poured out the disgusting remains and threw it out. Saved it all of those years for no reason at all. I will always wonder how that much fluid left through the sealed aluminum, though!

We are leaving to return to Texas in two days. A lot to be done between now and then. Tomorrow is Liesl’s birthday and her birthday party.

I found out today that my Aunt Sharon has moved from Apple only to using a Google Chromebook (yes, on Linux) because I had switched and then her son Jeremy had switched and somehow he talked her into trying it!

Paul went out to Niagara Falls today to the casino in Canada, so he was gone most of the day.

Tonight dad took the family out to John and Sarah’s in Perry which both girls had made him promise that we would go to because they loved the mac and cheese there so much the last time that we were in New York. So we all drove down to Perry and had dinner. Unfortunately they made a completely different mac and cheese tonight that was nothing at all like what the girls were wanting or expecting. So that didn’t have the desired effect.

I did some NodeBB consulting for a client tonight. Nothing like needing to do consulting work while up in New York trying to get the truck all packed.