Sheep Guarding Llama

I am in the office this morning.  Dominica is at home awaiting the power delivery provider to come out and deal with our missing neutral situation.  The team last night indicated that they would be bringing in a trencher this morning to dig up our yard and likely replace the line coming in from the street.

The team from the electric company arrived quite early this morning and ended up finding that the issue was not in our yard at all and so they did not have to dig up our yard in any way.  They were able to fix the issue of the missing neutral in short order and had Dominica test everything in the house to see how it was working.  So far so good.  She turned on all of the lights and kicked off some laundry.  Rock solid power.  This is awesome.  We can now safely turn on our computers and appliances without continuous fear that something disastrous is going to happen.

I came home for lunch today and got a chance to check out the newly working electric.  I am very excited now.  Having the electric be unreliable made being in the house not so much fun and was a constant worry.  Now we can, with much more confidence, move forward with other projects.  And with the repairs being free, we have more funds with which to pursue other work as well.

Most likely our first project is going to be the conversion of the garage.  Getting more working space in the house would be great.  But more importantly having that space as an additional guest bedroom is really a big deal.  That will, in theory, give us the “nursery”, the garage office and the “den” as potential places for guests to use when staying at the house.  Quite different from places that we have owned previously.  We’ve never really owned a place that could house so many people.  With the garage being able to act as a guest bedroom, in theory, that makes the house function much like a four bedroom house.

Possibly the biggest advantage of getting the garage conversion completed, however, is the addition of the one wall being shelving which we will use to house all of the sprawl of books that currently fill the house.  That is the top source of “stuff” around the house.  There are easily twenty boxes of books, plus loose books, books that haven’t made it to the house yet and more than need someplace to go and until we have those shelves will not have anyplace to call home.  Many of those boxes remain in the living spaces of the house making the place a bit of a mess while the rest remain in huge piles in the garage.  In fact, now that I contemplate it more, there might be closer to thirty boxes.  It is truly that bad.

Additionally, if all goes to plan, those shelves will also be used to hold my collection of rare and antique computers interspersed among the books.  I plan to have my Commodore 64, 128 and 16, Vic=20, TRS-80s, XO-1 and others on display there.  I have several interesting items that I would like to display.  I want to put them on stands behind plexiglass or something similar and have little LED lights shine on them and have little museum-style labels that say what each item is.  I think that it would be a really neat use of the space and really fit with the office.

It is Wednesday and after spending yesterday at home I am back to work as usual today.  Jeff and Sarah are on their way to their new lives in California.

Once into the office I settled in a little and got down to business.  I was sitting at my desk and thought that I heard a voice that I had not heard in a very long time but sounded incredibly familiar.  Then I realized that it is my “boss” back from India!  I haven’t seen him in a couple of years.  If I remember correctly, the last time that I saw him was at a bar in New Jersey sometime in 2008.  It is unbelievable that I have not seen him in this amount of time.  That is crazy.  This is his first time ever in Texas.  It took three days of flying for him to reach here.  The weather has been affecting flights all over the world.

This evening, before leaving the office, I finally managed to call TXU (Texas Utilities, I believe that that stands for) and talked to them about the power issues that we have been having at the house.  John, our electrician, had guessed that the issues were internal to the house and not external but had felt that there was enough concern to warrant testing by the power company so had asked us to call, just to be safe.

TXU said that given that this was an ongoing surge and brown out situation that we should escalate directly to OnCore and let them handle it as they are the actual service delivery providers.  So I called OnCore and, after getting them to understand the issue, they realized that it was very serious and rushed someone out to the house.  I asked to get an estimate on arrival time and they said that they couldn’t give me one.  So I didn’t know if it would be an hour or two days.

OnCore was at the house in under an hour!  I guess that they are considering the power issues to be more serious than we had imagined.  Dominica IM’d me to tell me that they were there so I instantly shutdown at the office and hoped in the car and zipped home.  Unfortunately it was rush hour traffic so it took a good hour to get home which made the whole exercise a bit pointless.

OnCore had left long before I got home but Dominica had good news: OnCore had discovered that there was no neutral going from the street to our house!  Well that explains it.  It does not explain why the former owners of the house lives, presumably for several years, without working electric.  So OnCore said that they would be back first thing in the morning to get this fixed as it was dark and very late this evening.

This is very encouraging.  We were in a panic that the electric was going to cost us thousands of dollars to get resolved and would require us to rip the house all up.  Not the case.  Now we are confident that our electric is going to be fixed and we won’t have to pay a dime.  The Lord watched over us big time on that one.  We are quite relieved.

It is awesome to be back home with our own space and our own stuff.  You really miss your home when you have just bought a new one and then immediately leave it for an extended period of time.  We were away from our new house for more than half the time that we had gotten to live in it.

Liesl went to bed around eight last night and Dominica and I were asleep around nine.  I slept for eleven hours getting up at seven this morning.  I pretty much am back to normal after the driving marathon that we did yesterday.

I had taken today off from being in the office, more as a precaution than anything else.  I knew that I would be completely exhausted and even if I got in last night, like I did, that I would not want to get up this morning and go hunting for my razor, work clothes, etc.  I need some time to acclimate to being back in Texas and need to get things done around the house too.  So I am just at home today.

Souder came up to the house late this morning.  Not long after he got there Jeff and Sarah Pierce came up as this is their final day in Texas.  They leave for their move to Sunny Vale, California first thing tomorrow morning so this is our last chance to see them before they go.  We are lucky that we managed to cross paths at all.

We all went out to Denny’s in Carrollton up on Frankford for lunch.  Then it was back to the office for us and the Pierces were off for their final prep for them move.  At least they managed to stop by and see our new house before they left.

I will be back into the office tomorrow.  It was nice getting a day to just “be” in my house.  When you buy a house you don’t really want to be away from it for a while.  You want to spend time in it and putter around getting things put away or whatever.  We still have a lot to do from our initial move in and it would be awfully nice if we could get some of that actually done.

We still have the horrible electrical issues.  We will be dealing with that more thoroughly this week.  Maybe we can get that resolved.  That has been hanging over our heads.

When midnight rolled around we were on the road in central Ohio.  We were already making very good time.  I was feeling very good and we were putting a lot of asphalt behind us very quickly.  Starting these drives in the evening works far better than you would ever expect it to.  It is amazing that that works but it does, to some degree.

We were still entertaining ourselves at this point listening to our Sirius XM satellite radio.  That really is a good resource for these long trips.

Liesl managed to fall asleep just as we left dad’s place yesterday and slept almost all of the way through the night.  She woke up once in the middle of the night when we stopped at a truck stop but she was only awake for about an hour and managed to get back to sleep and stay that way until the middle of the morning.  Her sleeping soundly through the night is really the biggest benefit of driving when we do.  Her staying on schedule while doing all of this traveling is awesome.  Otherwise it can be so disruptive for her.

Dominica fell asleep somewhere in western Ohio.  It really is no easier for me to drive with her awake than it is for me to drive with her asleep so I just let her sleep.  While she was sleeping, I took the time to listen to the remainder of my book on Samuel Champlain.

Dominica ended up sleeping through all of Indiana and most of Illinois.  She just barely woke up in time to get to see the great Arch in St. Louis as we approached it from the east.  She has never seen any of this whole region of the country although none of it is really unexpected.

Once Dominica was awake I got her to listen to Madeleine L’Engle’s Meet the Austins which is a classic that I first read when I was quite young.  Probably younger than twelve although I have a very poor memory of when it might actually have been.  Sadly many of the books that I loved as a child I am unable to place in time and have no idea when I may have read them which makes it very difficult to have a good idea of when it might be appropriate for Liesl to read which level of books.  As she will be homeschooled it is very important that we keep her on a good track for literature.

Dominica has never read any of the books by Madeleine L’Engle which I find very surprising as she is very much the type of author that Dominica, I believe, would enjoy.  It took a while of listening to the book before I started to remember having read this particular one.  It has probably been twenty two years or more since I last read it.  It is a good book but very sad.  I had forgotten.

Going through Missouri for the first time ever in daylight for me let me get a much better look at the terrain.  I noticed Cuba go by.  Brian and I had done a bit of speaking to someone from there and we had discussed the world’s largest rocking chair that is located there and I could see the billboards for it but did not have time to get off of the highway to investigate.  I had hung out a bit with my friend from Cuba down in Austin in October.  If only there was more time to stop off and visit people on drives like this.

Eventually we were in to Oklahoma.  This is when you start to get really tired.  There is so much Oklahoma to drive through and so little to see.  It was still pretty cold as we entered Oklahoma as well.  It was nineteen degrees when we left New York and rarely topped twenty degrees for most of the drive up until now.  We expect to see the temperature increase significantly as we turn south and head towards the Texas border.

We were surprised to find that up in northeastern Oklahoma we were finding a lot of really beautiful housing developments in the area east of Tulsa.  Great area.  If only there was work here.  I’d not mind living up here.  Gorgeous area.

We made decent time working our way down Oklahoma Route 69 on the eastern border of the state.  I can’t help but wonder if the highways would not be more practical even though they add many more miles.  I think that shooting through both Tulsa and Oklahoma City on Interstates 44 and 35 will be what I try next time.

We made it into Carrollton around five in the evening.  The drive took us twenty three hours inclusive and we gained an hour from the change in timezones that burned us going in the other direction.  The Acadia did great and we are very pleased with it.  Liesl also did very well on the trip and fussed very, very little.  We are very proud of how well she handled the drive.

The Oklahoma Route between Dallas and New York appears to be the clear winner.  It is the easiest drive, most interesting, fastest roads and appears to have the best overall time between places.  Hopefully switching to the highway route will make it even faster yet.  Dominica was pretty happy with it even though it was like pulling teeth to get her to go this way which is surprising because it is not like she needed to drive any amount in either direction on this trip.  I made all three legs (DFW to Utica, Utica to Rochester and Rochester to DFW) all without her getting behind the wheel a single time.

We are very excited to be home.  It is certainly strange coming home to our new house that we barely had a chance to move into before we had left for New York.  We are definitely not used to this being “our house” yet and it is a lot like we are moving in again rather than returning to our existing home.

First order of business was watering the plants.  They have spent a lot of time in a very cold house.  Most of them like to be watered every two days or so.  Going almost two weeks is quite a stretch for them.

Overall everything seems to be fine with the house.  We had our concerns, of course.  Now to get back to normal life.

Today was a work day for me but there is really nothing going on at the office so checking in via BlackBerry tends to do the trick for the most part.  Tomorrow I will be back into the office in person again for the first time in two weeks.

We slept in some this morning and then went to the Omega Grill for lunch.  We tried to get up there before the church crowd let out and filled the place up but we were running late and we were well into the church crowds by the time that we got there.

After lunch we came home and visited for a while.  Around four in the evening, after doing some work on a computer for dad for several hours, I went down and attempted to take a nap in the basement.  While I worked on the computer and napped, Dominica did what she could to get the car loaded up.  We aren’t sure exactly when we are hitting the road but we want to be as ready to go as possible.  At the latest we are going to leave first thing in the morning.  For just one night at dad’s we need very little stuff.  The Acadia is already packed pretty full.  We are continuing to be very thankful for that huge vehicle.

I got up from my nap around seven having not actually slept at all but having gotten a chance to calm down and relax a bit which was almost as good as a nap.  It was at least two hours that I spent in the basement wearing my CPAP and listening to a book on my iPod.

When I came upstairs I decided that I was rested enough, even if I hadn’t fallen asleep, that we should just hit the road tonight.  I will be a restless sleeper if we try to go to bed and getting some road beneath our tires now would be highly beneficial over not sleeping well and then trying to do the trip tomorrow.  This was we have a lot more buffer time in case we end up too exhausted to keep going.

The other consideration was the snow.  Today is supposed to be a lot better than tomorrow and the snow has already started so waiting until morning might be a very bad decision.  We want to beat the bad weather and get to central Ohio before the Great Lakes start to get buried.

It took about an hour to get the final stuff into the car, everyone ready to go and Liesl and Oreo all strapped in.  We said goodbye to dad and got ourselves onto the road.

The snow was coming down as we put the final items into the Acadia and the snow continued to come down as we drove up to Batavia and onto Interstate 90 heading west to Buffalo.  We were really hoping that we would only see the lightest of snow but this is actually a decent amount – enough to make driving very fatiguing.  Not fun.  At least the roads were not yet slippery, at least not noticeably.

We made good time, even with the snow.  The snow continued throughout every inch of the New York portion of the drive, which is several hours long from Peoria to the border at Erie going through downtown Buffalo.  The snow stayed with us through the short Pennsylvania portion of the drive as well.  Once into Ohio it mostly stopped but we still saw flakes on and off again until we turned south in Cleveland to head down to Columbus.

We made our first stop for fuel and restrooms just west of Akron around Medina.  I commented to Dominica how bizarre it is that I can remember so vividly my childhood when a drive from Peoria, New York to East Canton, Ohio was a burdensome trip requiring much planning, a full day to be scheduled and set aside for its purpose, toys and diversions to be purchased for me and an hour-long stop at Millcreek Mall in Erie, Pennsylvania taken during which time we would eat and shop to give us a break from the car and today that same trip is something that I do, without any forethought, without a single bit of prep or break and stop only after it would be over in order to jump out of the car, refuel, grab a bottled water and hit the road again all within a matter of minutes to do another leg of equal or greater length immediately thereafter.

What used to be a long, arduous trip is now nothing more than a minor warmup, a prelude to a real trip.  It is hard to believe that I was that child who was so bad at riding in the car so many years ago.  I often wonder what precipitated such a change in my personality.

We made good time through the first leg of the trip.  Lots of progress.  We listened to our satellite radio for the first eight hours or so.  Our first long listed was to the “80s on 8” station which was doing a Top 40 countdown for this same week in 1980.  While the music was almost entirely awful (so bad that even the Rolling Stones managed to appear on the charts for this week!) it was, at least, incredibly interesting to hear what the pop stations were playing exactly thirty years ago.  Much of it was quite surprising and between Dominica and I, both children of and fans of 1980s pop music, we were lucky to know much more than fifty percent of it.

Midnight rolled around while we were driving through northeastern Ohio.  There is a lot of road left in front of us but getting the jump on the trip already seems very much like the right decision.  Liesl was kept up so that she would not nap today and she immediately fell asleep in the car and did very well.  She hardly notices the drive at all.

At midnight I was feeling very good and did not feel like I was going to get sleepy for a very long time.  That “fake nap” seems to have done the trick well.  We are hoping to arrive in Carrollton in the very late afternoon.

New York and Pennsylvania down.  Ohio less than halfway through.  Most of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Oklahoma and North Texas left to go.  Dominica has never been in Indiana, Illinois, Missouri or Oklahoma so this is her chance to get to see some of them for the first time.