Sheep Guarding Llama

Today is Oreo and my second day at home alone without the girls.  It is pretty lonely in this house with no one here except for the dog and me.  I’ve gotten so used to not only have Dominica and Liesl home all of the time but also having so many other people around so often that I am not used to having the house all to myself for any extended period of time.  Weird.

Oreo is continuing to enjoy the peace and quiet.  He slept really well last night too without anyone tossing and turning to make him want to get up and leave in the middle of the night.

I did a lot more cleaning again today.  I am so excited to have time and space to just get things done around the house.  It feels so nice to have at least a little bit of the place looking better.  This garage conversion will never end.

For lunch Watson was back in town so we ran over to RockFish.  After lunch he came over and we did some storage training for an hour or two before he headed out to spend some time at home himself.

I got more work done today than I did yesterday but it was still hard to be productive with the amount of cleaning and organizing that I felt that I needed to do.

Our contractor did finally show up today again if only for a minute.  He had shown up last night, just long enough to run to Home Depot and pick up some wood that he needed to make the shelves and to pick up cabinets that we are going to use beneath the shelves in the office.

Today he showed up, as did the electricians, and a little work was done from the electricians but nothing on the office itself.  Boy this is going slowly.  It can be weeks between seeing any changes.  At least the electrical situation is nearly resolved.  Only a few things left to be done there.

Dominica and Liesl might be coming home tomorrow.  I’m feeling pretty productive, though, so it might work out better if they stay in Houston for another day.  I did get good work done today plus every day that I get to clean makes me that much more productive the next day.

It is really hard to believe that yesterday was my birthday.  Except for the early morning barrage of well wishes on FaceBook it pretty much passed without any thought.  I am thirty five now but I kind of feel like I have been thirty five for a while so I don’t really feel that age hit me at all.  Thirty five seems like a major milestone but it doesn’t feel that way while it is happening.

This morning I got up and got to work shampooing the rugs in the living room with the Rug Doctor that we are renting.  We were low on shampoo for it and we didn’t want to deal with moving lots of furniture so I just did the exposed high traffic areas.  We could have done more but there are just boxes and boxes of stuff sitting all over the place and getting around them is pretty much impossible at this point.

The Rug Doctor appears to have done an excellent job on our floors which were very stained previously.  It will take a day or two before we have a really good feel for how it did (wet floors always look good) but we are considering buying one of these units if it really does the job that we think that it did.

The girls were off to Houston in the middle of the morning.  And that meant that it was my chance to get some serious cleaning done in this house.  I can’t take the mess anymore and with no one in my way I can really make some progress.

My first stop was the grocery store to return the Rug Doctor and to pick up some carrots and celery to munch on.   Then back to the house to do some big time cleaning.

I cleaned for several hours.  I cleaned the kitchen and dishes to kick things off and got all of Liesl’s stuff up and off of the floor right away.  The house practically transformed in a matter of an hour or two.  There were practical limits to how much I could really do but the difference was pretty apparent right away.  It feels so much better being in a house that is a little bit clean.  Dominica is going to be quite impressed when she gets home.  I even did things like finally hung up our clocks and put batteries in them so that we can start to see what time it is.  We haven’t even had a single working clock in the house since we moved in!

I did not get nearly as much actual work done today as I had imagined that I would but it was a very productive day with all of the cleaning.  I am very bad about being able to be productive when the house is a mess and having a ton of cleaning done and out of the way really allows me to focus once it is done.

Oreo and I got a lot of good quality time together too.  He is already visibly enjoying having some quiet time with no toddler chasing him around and the floors clear of debris.  He needs breaks like this in which to just relax.

Originally Dominica and I were going to go down to Houston this evening but we have just too much going on for that to be possible.  So we have altered the plan to where I am staying home this weekend and Dominica and Liesl will head on down to Houston casually tomorrow morning and come back early next week on Monday or Tuesday – whatever ends up working out the best.  I will be home working like crazy all weekend.

I went in to work this morning and then, over lunch, Dominica went to Kroger in Carrollton and rented a wide track Rug Doctor for us to use to clean the carpets at the apartment.  They were in horrible shape and really needed a good cleaning.  I mean really, really needed it.

It took me almost two full hours and five or six loads of dirty water to shampoo all of the carpet in that little apartment.  Dominica played with Liesl, mostly out on the balcony, while I did the majority of the floor cleaning.  Liesl liked being back in the apartment.  Like I mentioned in the post from the other day, this apartment is the place where she has spent the majority of her life.  It will be quite some time before she has lived in the new house in Carrollton as long as she lived in this apartment in Irving.  So to her, in many ways, this apartment must seem like home still.  She was quite upset when I had to clean the floor of her old bedroom and she was not allowed to be in there anymore.  I’m sure that she was rather confused – she was always allowed to be in her own room.

The Rug Doctor machine did a great job.  I am quite impressed by how easy it was to use and how quickly it handled the floors.  I’m pretty tempted to buy one of these for home as our carpet issues just never end.  We do more carpet cleaning than anyone that I know (we own two spot cleaners as it is plus two vacuums) and there is always someone who needs to borrow something like this.  It would never go to waste.

So Dominica took the Rug Doctor home and I went down and turned in the apartment keys.  We have almost no deposit in for the apartment so we are not expecting to get anything back.  At most it will be like a hundred bucks.  Our total deposit was only two hundred and fifty and the final water bill comes out of that so there is almost nothing left to be returned to us.

Back to the office for the afternoon and then home to spend time with the family tonight.  We have the Rug Doctor until tomorrow so I am going to get up in the morning (tomorrow is Saturday) and shampoo the floors first thing so that they have time to dry while it is mostly just me in the house.  It is really good timing for that.

Today is yet another day without seeing our contractor.  We generally only see someone about once a week.  It is getting pretty ridiculous.

We tried to hang out as a family tonight since I won’t get to see the girls again for several days.

Early this morning Brian and Tara did their final packing and were out of the apartment.  That is the end of the apartment that we’ve had in Irving since the end of December, 2009.  It never felt like a place that we really lived it, it was always so temporary.  It is strange, though, to think that that is the “home” that Liesl knows best.  She is over two years old and lived in that apartment quite a bit more than she lived in the Peekskill home that we had bought for her.  She did more growing up in an apartment that we will never see again than in her own house.  Very strange.  Fortunately I don’t really feel an attachment to the apartment in the same way that I do to the house – where I just cried and cried as I packed it up to turn it over to the renters.  It is awful sad, though, that Liesl’s childhood at this age consists so heavily of a place that none of us will really remember.  It was not a good place for a little kid to grow up.  The new house is so much better.

I went into the office this morning and then headed home at noon.  Today is my webinar with Nasuni on how to deal with a lack of resources in today’s IT market.  Mostly we are focusing on virtualization and hosted services and how these apply to real world businesses.  Should be good fun.  I have a lot of people who have said that they will be attending so that is pretty cool.

The webinar was pretty long, about ninety minutes.  I think that it went pretty well.  It is impossible to tell with these things as people are always polite and try to give you good feedback.  It felt like it went well and the participants were asking good questions which is an excellent sign.

I ran back to the office after the webinar.  Brian and Tara made it to around Knoxville on today’s drive.  They will be back home to Philadelphia tomorrow afternoon.

This evening at seven Watson met me over at the apartment and we loaded up his truck and my car with as much as we could fit which was nearly everything at the apartment.  There is just about nothing left for tomorrow.  We got the bed out which was the main item.  The plan for tomorrow is for Dominica and I to work on cleaning the carpets.  After that we can turn over the keys and be done with the place.  It is a very big relief to have that over and done with.  This place has been very expensive and a headache for quite a long time.

Today is a crazy day.  We were trying to figure out what to do about the furniture in the apartment now that everyone is moving out.  Jen moved out yesterday and Brian and Tara are moving out tomorrow morning.  So today is the day to get the rest of the furniture out completely.  We had looked into options yesterday about renting a truck and, like before, it just made sense to hire Dr. Move to come and move everything for us since they cost barely more than renting a truck and they get everything done for us in one fell swoop with all of the cost just included.  We are good customers, this is our third time moving with them in four months.

So at eight this morning I ran down to the apartment to meet up with Dr. Move and to oversee the loading of the truck.  There was very little to get and we just hired them for one hour figuring that even with the load, unload and drive time that the whole thing could be done in under an hour.  There really is that little to get.  Mostly it was the couch, the arm chair, the one computer desk and a few small miscellaneous items.  Very little but large items that required a truck.  All that will be left for tomorrow for us to move ourselves will be some cleaning items and the collapsible bed frame and the foam mattress.

The loading took no time at all then a quick run up to the house and a quick unloading of the truck.  Boy there is no room at all for this stuff.  We are really struggling to figure out where to put things with the garage not being done.  This is awful.  The couch is the one thing that we really had a spot for – it was put at the end of our bed.  This is great.  Finally we have a way to sit and watch our television for the first time since we have been in the new house.  At this point it is practically a novelty.  Our long term plan is to have a small loveseat here that takes up far less space than the couch and have the couch in the “den” for Liesl and little Baby Miller to sit and play out there.  For now, though, this is a great use of the furniture and already is demonstrating why we need seating here.  We love having it there.

The rest of the furniture is just sitting in the way around the house.  We are getting really frustrated with this garage situation.

As soon as the moving was done, which we did manage to squeeze in in just under one hour, it was into the office for me.  A busy day indeed.

At lunch I ran down to the doctor’s office near my work to meet up with Dominica and to watch Liesl while Dominica had her checkup.  Liesl and I played for about an hour with the blocks that she loves so much there.  She didn’t care at all that Dominica was in seeing the doctor.  There were no other kids there so she had the run of the play area and had a really good time.  She loves the brightly coloured foam blocks.  Really, she just loves any toys that are not her own.

For lunch we went to Einstein Brother’s Bagels.  That was a nice change of pace.  Liesl is getting so big.  She almost never uses a booster seat anymore and she is so well behaved at a restaurant.  She just sits and eats for the most part and is quiet and polite.  She is growing up so quickly.

I, of course, had tons to squeeze in during my tight lunch hour and had a quick conference call that I had to do from my mobile while standing outside waiting for the food to be prepared.  It didn’t take very long, though.