Sheep Guarding Llama

Today is Dominica doctor’s appointment.  I went in to the office in the morning and then went down to the doctor’s to take care of Liesl while Dominica had her appointment.    It actually turned out to be a really fast appointment so we were out of there in no time.

For lunch we went over to Einstein Brother Bagel Cafe which we like down on MacArthur.  They do a good lox bagel, mostly like what I used to get back in Westchester.  Not too much good salmon down here in Texas.

Brian met us there and he and I went to check out a bulk desktop supplier that I recently discovered in the DFW.  That ended up being a great trip.  We got a chance to meet with the owner of the supply house and dealt with him directly.  We picked up ten dc5850 desktops all of which are as good as my own current desktop.  A very impressive haul indeed.  And a great price.  We are very happy.

Dominica continued with the painting today.  She got most of another coat of primer on.  The room is looking pretty good even though it is just primer and no real paint yet.  You can really see the house getting brighter.  Now I am excited about the idea of getting the rest of the house painted.  It will feel a lot bigger, brighter and more modern.

Nothing much doing tonight except for being at home and trying to get as much work done while hanging out with the family.

I worked from home this morning so that I could sleep in a little and help to deal with getting Brian’s prescriptions filled.  That ended up being an all morning project.  We did a few errands while out getting the meds.  We decided to hit the seafood cafe that is very close to the new house.   I have been looking at that place for a while and wanting to try it out but Dominica does not like to eat seafood when she is pregnant so I have not been able to go there to try it out yet.  So this worked out well today.

After getting lunch we went to Jack in the Box to get food for Dominica and took it back to the house for her.  While we were out she and Liesl went to the park to play for a while.  This is their new thing.  They have the park to themselves during the day and Liesl loves getting to go outside and play on the playground.  It is nice because we do not have very much of a yard and what we do have is pretty much full of stuff or needs to be manicured making it really hard for Liesl to get to use it right now.  So having the park so close works out really well.  They could walk there but do not.

Then it was off to the office for me.  Brian was still really sick this evening.  It’s going to take a while for this medicine to really help him out.

After work I went over to the Microsoft offices in Irving for the monthly SharePoint users group meeting with Souder, Watson and Maggie.  This month it was Pizza Hut pizza and Shiner beer.  Now this is how to do a users’ group!

I came home as soon as I could after the group.  I haven’t had a chance to make it out for the SharePint gathering that they do monthly after the users’ group meeting.  I definitely won’t make it next month.  One of these days.

Dominica started painting the “den” area today.  The original room was very dark with a deep burgundy paint that looked attractive but made the room feel like a cave.  At night it was really depressing and even during the day it was pretty dark even with four large windows to give it natural light.

The new colour is a light beige that will eventually match the rest of the house when we get that painted too.  At some point we are going to repaint the entire house top to bottom as all of the colours are too dark and dated and there are many patch jobs on the walls following all of the electrical work that has been done.

Once the room is painted the next step is painting the old, dark wood veneer cupboards to white.  That should modernize it considerably and really brighten it up.  At this stage we can’t really tell how the room will look when it is done but it was so dark that something had to be done.  Once the office is completed, this room is going to be emptied out for the first time since we moved in to this house and we will actually get to start using it.  We are pretty excited about that.  It will be like we magically gain two new rooms at once.  Like a fifteen percent growth in the size of our house all in one fell swoop.  It is hundreds of square feet of house that has been unusable for months.

Brian is still pretty sick tonight.

I was still quite tired when I got up this morning and went in to the office.  Nothing to interesting during the day.  For lunch Brian picked up me at work, we had been planning on having lunch today, and we ran up to Carrollton to meet Dominica and our contractor at Home Depot to do some final purchasing for the office that is being worked on today.  We ended up running to the house first and then over to Home Depot.

Brian was starting to feel pretty sick while we were at Home Depot.  He had not been feeling that had yesterday but not all that bad.  His morning had been really rough but he was mostly okay later in the morning but now, at Home Depot, he was really looking sick and he had decided that he did not want to get lunch with us.  So he went back to the house to take a nap and Dominica, Liesl and I went to IHOP after the shopping was done so that we could get some lunch.

Dominica took me back to work and then returned to the house to oversee the continued work on the office.  Today most of the new shelves and the secondary desk was put together.  The contractor ran out of paint and that kept things from getting finished which, unfortunately, means that it will take another week or two before we see him again.  We were this close to having the shelves done so that we could start putting all of the books away.  It often feels like we will never get there.  Even when it seems like there could not possibly be another stumbling block on this project, one appears.

I got home after work and discovered Brian really, really sick.  I had brought home sandwiches for Dominica and I and chicken noodle soup for Brian.  He couldn’t even eat it.  He did not want to go see the doctor but, after about an hour of Dominica and I seeing how sick that he was we decided that he just needed to go to the clinic and see a doctor.

So I drove Brian to the clinic that we use.  It was late and they were busy so we got there around nine.  While I waited for him I watched almost all of the movie Sky High which I have not seen in quite a while.  I forgot how much I enjoyed that movie, silly as it was.

The clinic sent us to the emergency room at Plano Presby because there was little that they could do.  So we drove over to Plano and spent the next three hours in the ER there.  An exciting Monday night to be sure.

Brian ended up not being nearly as bad as it had seemed but it was definitely a good thing that we went to the ER because it could have quickly become very bad indeed.  He is on a lot of medicine now and should be better in a few days.

It was late, very late, when we got back to the house.  Dominica was still awake but just barely.  Liesl had already gone to bed in our bed because she missed me.  It was probably three in the morning by the time that I managed to get off to sleep.  Eight hours since we started trying to deal with getting Brian in to see a doctor.  He is on a lot of steroids and will not likely be getting any actual sleep tonight.

And the driving continues.  Today is my third continuous day of travel.  I took over driving right around midnight and Brian spent the next several hours fitfully trying to sleep whenever he could here and there.  I had my iPod so I listed to some music and I started reading a recent translation of the story of Gilgamesh – the oldest story known to man.  It is very clear when reading this story just how bad literature was in this period.  By today’s standards it sounds like it was written by a very young, very immature child.  The quality of the writing is only at a lower elementary level at best.  It is amazingly interesting, though, to read a story written nearly five thousand years ago.  Many of the crazy, outlandish things that are written about in the story, things that seem fantastic and surreal to modern readers, were commonplace to the writer and hardly worth mentioning.  I can only begin to imagine how many points were considered to not warrant any mention at all as they were assumed.

The drive went fine and by the time that we were around Nashville we had recalculated and determined that even though the drive through Virginia seemed to take forever and traffic was so bad that we had actually managed to stay on schedule.  It does, in fact, look like the alternative routes work well through there.  We are looking now to arrive in Carrollton around one in the afternoon.

I drove until morning light and then Brian drove for a little while early on in Arkansas.  Then, somewhere in Arkansas, I took back over again and drove on through Texas.

It was twelve forty five when we pulled in to the house in Carrollton.  Boy were we glad to be out of the car.

I got to see the new office for the first time.  It really does look good with the bright orange wall and the dark grey carpeting and it does feel really nice to walk in there with the raised, wooden floor and the good padding under the carpet.  This is the first that this really feels like a new room and it is awfully strange to suddenly have this new space off of the side of the house that was not there before.

Now that the carpet is in the work on the main shelves and the secondary desk will start soon (hopefully) and we can start moving my desks in there right away which is important because they have been sitting all over the house for months now.  Talk about being in the way.  Having them in the office will be great.  Not only will they not be in the way but we will be able to put things on them too!

It wasn’t long before Brian and I needed to take naps.  We were exhausted.  Dominica tried to talk us in to staying up rather than napping because she thought that it would interrupt our schedules but I think that she underestimates just how tired you get missing an entire night of sleep.  Without a nap I won’t be able to recover the lost sleep enough to function this week.

Liesl came in and napped with me.  I didn’t end up sleeping for all that long.  It was probably no more than two hours total but it helped a lot.

We ordered in sandwiches for dinner.  We needed to make our dinner quick and easy tonight.  No one has any extra energy.

Off to bed early this evening.  Even with the nap I am quite tired.

I got up around nine this morning.  Nine on the east coast so it felt like eight to me since I just came from Texas a few hours before.  This is going to be one long, long day.

I showered and packed myself up – which didn’t take much.  I didn’t bring a laptop with me this time.  I am working purely from my BlackBerry and my iPod Touch.  I was very excited to find that American Airlines had free WiFi on the flight last night.  So even though I did not have a laptop with me I had the iPod which I hooked up and I was able to use email for the entire flight.  That was great.  I’m definitely using American Airlines much, much more often – especially now that AirTran was bought by SouthWest.

I went down and hung out with Michelle for an hour or so before John woke up.  Once he was up we went to the Double TT diner in Annapolis for breakfast while we were waiting for Brian to make it down from Philadelphia.

Brian arrived around noon.  We hung out with John until just after two thirty then we got on the road.  John and I had looked at the map and decided that skipping the long, arduous drive to Front Royal through downtown Washington, D.C. and the never ending stretch down Interstate 81 through the western Virginia mountains was best.  Instead Brian and I are driving south on 301 to Richmond, which I have done several times before but not for the last several years, and from there take Virginia state routes 60, 24 and 460 to get over to Roanoke which is an entire section of Virginia which I have never seen at all would be better.  The state highway route is many fewer miles but moves much, much slower overall.

Traffic ended up being horrendous on 301 for the first really long stretch.  We lost a ton of time there.  But that was expected to be slow – just not quite that slow.  The 301 route crosses the Potomac from Maryland into Virginia just ten miles up river from the George Washington birthplace which is on the north bank of the Virginia side of the lower Potomac.

Once we were into Virginia things sped up a bit.  We got out to Interstate 95 and down into Richmond and then turned west to head across the length of the state.  There is another route across Virginia even farther south and I think that we will have to try that one the next time that I am coming to or from Annapolis.  This trip definitely taught us a lot about what this colonial American heartland was light, though.  It was very beautiful and interesting.  We were very much off of the beaten path to be sure.

It felt like the trip was taking forever.  Around seven thirty we drove right past the Appomattox Courthouse – the place where the American Civil War officially came to a close.  There is a national park there now.  It was dark and officially closed to Brian and I parked the truck out in front of the gate and walked in in the darkness.  We walked around the park a little and up to the courthouse itself.  We were both pretty excited to get to see this amazing piece of history up close.  You learn about this place in school and often forget that it is a real place that really exists.

It was pretty late at night but the “super moon”, the biggest, brightest moon in eighteen years, was out and illuminating everything just fine.  I called Dominica and she really couldn’t care less that we were seeing something so awesome.  So I called my father who appreciates these things.  He said that he had visited Appomattox, Virginia in 1957 when he was eleven.  He could remember it very clearly.  It hasn’t change all that much but there are real parking lots now and the old dirt road is now Virginia 24 running nearby.

That was our only “fun” stop of the trip.  From there we were back into the car on on to the endless road again.  Virginia is the longest, most painful portion of the trip.

It was around midnight that we crossed into Tennessee in Bristol.  We were doing what we could to Tweet and FourSquare post from the drive but for nearly one hundred miles in Virginia Brian’s AT&T service was completely non-existent and my BlackBerry just can’t run FourSquare reliably so between us a lot of posting was missed.  I can’t wait until I am able to get a new phone on my Verizon plan.  The Blackberry is really just ridiculous today.  It was great when I first got it but over the past two years the market has really changed and it is a nearly useless device today.  I have about six months to go on my current contract but I am hoping to hold out until Apple releases the next iPhone version for Verizon before updating.

Brian drove this entire section of the trip.  I will be taking over early in the morning to do the “overnight” portion of the drive.  I do better during the overnight sections that few other people can do.  If only I could nap in the car this would all be so much easier.

Dominica was emailing all day letting us know what was going on with the house today.  The big item was that our HVAC guy came today and looked into why we were not getting any air conditioning.  Turns out that our furnace is not matched to our heat pump and the whole thing is screwed up and has to be replaced.  Ugh.  Fortunately, it looks like just replacing the air filter will get us through the immediate issues but likely by next year at the latest we will need to be paying for an entirely new unit – one that is modern and fits our heat pump.  Right now the air conditioning is freezing the coils because the blower is unable to move enough air to keep them warm.

The second big item is that the carpet guys arrived and did a great job putting in our new carpet.  Dominica says that it looks great and that the padding is really nice so it feels great in there.  All of the rest of the house is on a slab but the garage office area is on a raised floor and then with really good padding and the carpet on top of that so it feels great to stand in there.  Liesl loves it and has been playing in there all day, I am told.

Our contractor even came over this evening and got to work on the shelving that can go in to place now that the carpet is in.  We should, in theory, have most of everything done this week.  Fingers crossed.