Sheep Guarding Llama

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.

Today is my big travel day.  Or, at least, the beginning of the big travel weekend.  Starting tonight I’m on the move pretty much constantly until Sunday afternoon.  This is going to be a long, long weekend.

Work was pretty busy today but not awful.  I went in to the office as usual. My traveling does not begin until pretty late this evening so my day is not really affected.

For lunch today I ran home and spent some time with Dominica and Liesl since I will not be seeing them tomorrow.  We decided that I would drive myself back to the office after lunch and that if I got done with work early enough that I would drive home and if not that Dominica would pick me up at the office and take me to the airport and we would just leave the Mazda at the office over the weekend.

The afternoon was completely crazy at work.  What a busy day.  My deployments this evening took two and a half solid hours without a spare second for me to stop and catch up.  It was maddening.  What a way to wear yourself out at the end of the day.

I managed to wrap up work just in time to run out, jump in the Mazda, drive to the house and have Dominica and Liesl drive me over to DFW to prepare for my flight.  Dominica had all of my stuff packed and ready to go.

I got to the airport two hours early – which has always been more than enough at DFW.  You move through security in around ten minutes there consistently.  It has never been an issue for me at all and now that we use that airport so often we are really getting good at getting in and out without too much problem.  I still like to leave plenty of extra time just in case.  Nothing worse than missing a flight as Dominica and I found out in England.

So I had lots of time which worked out well since I had not eaten since breakfast.  I hit the Tequilaria and grabbed a beer and a salmon quesadilla which was excellent.  It took so long to get the food that it killed about forty five minutes.  I had time to burn so that wasn’t an issue. I ate and then headed over to the gate which was just a few feet away.

The flight boarded on time and was scheduled to be down the runway at nine thirty but we ended up having ground crew problems and it took over an hour and a half for the ground crew to get around to getting us underway.  Not an impressive ground crew.

We finally got into the air sometime after eleven central time.  This is going to be one long, exhausting weekend.  That hour and a half delay came straight out of my very limited sleep schedule for the weekend.

Other than the delays on the ground in Dallas there were no issues with the flight.  I arrived only an hour and ten minutes late in Baltimore.  John picked me up in his new Toyota FJ Cruiser and we hit the gas station, got sandwiches and headed back to his place.

I was finally in bed around three thirty.  Nila was, of course, waiting for me and came up and got into bed with me.  She is the funniest cat ever.  She really misses me whenever I am away from Maryland.  She never leaves my side while I am there.

It took me until around four before I actually fell asleep.  Boy oh boy is this going to be one long day tomorrow.  Brian emailed me just before I fell asleep to tell me that he had just woken up but was going back to sleep rather than driving down to get me right away.  Probably best.  I need some amount of sleep or I will be useless tomorrow.

My phone woke me up at five this morning.  Of course when there is a major production issue I stayed up really late working on something.  So I got about two hours of sleep.  Ugh.

I worked for an hour or more.  I was kind of delirious.  I can’t believe that my cell phone battery lasted long enough for me to stay on the call.  Once the call was over I decided that I was too tired to just get up so I climbed back in to bed and slept until around nine.

Work was crazy slow today.  It comes in waves I guess.  Yesterday was so busy and today was so slow.  I guess the transition from busy to slow was in the middle of the night.

I went home and managed to take a long lunch today which was nice because Liesl was in a mood to hang out.  She seldom is really concerned about spending time with me when I come home for lunch.  She likes that I am there but she is normally busy doing her own thing and is not really looking to play.  Today she hung out with me and wanted me to read to her and spend time with her which was nice.  I am sure that she is really missing her cousins.  She loves having all of those people around and the constant activity.

We had to call the contractor, again, because he didn’t show up or communicate, like always.  Why is it so hard for people to realize that it would not matter very much as long as there was an email saying that he was running late or couldn’t make it for one reason or another.  We are sitting around waiting for him.  We could go do something or at least know that he did not completely forget about us if we did not have to follow up every day.  And every time he gives the “oh, I’m just on my way over there” excuse.  Every time.  It’s wearing thin.  If we call at noon or five in the evening, he is just on his way over.

I managed to leave work a little early today.  That was nice.  Dominica and I got some time to hang out and talk.  Good timing since I will be out of town most of the weekend.  Our contractor came by this evening too and got most of the server room sanded and painted.  That is a major victory.  We are mostly ready for the carpeting now which comes in on Saturday afternoon.  I can’t wait to start using that room.

We took out the track tonight and spent half an hour clearing out the new office of all of the furniture to get it ready for the carpeting as I won’t have any time to help with that tomorrow.  And tonight we had to pack for my trip.  I’m taking almost nothing since it is such a short stay.  Just zipping to Maryland, having breakfast with John and zipping back to Texas.  Now the house is really a mess again holding all of that stuff.

We watched the one new episode of Wizards of Waverly Place and the first two of the second season of Good Luck Charlie that Disney has released to Netflix then it was time for bed.  Liesl is starting to really enjoy snuggling on the couch and watching Disney shows with us.  Good Luck Charlie is her favourite adult show.  She sits next to me and leans on me with my arm around her and she really pays attention to the whole show.  It is so cute.  She often holds her blanket while watching.  She is glued to the show, you can see a lot of Dominica and Madeline in her.