Sheep Guarding Llama

I got up early this morning to make sure that I was all ready for the big day today.  There is a lot to do.  My sport coat and shirt were horribly wrinkled after the long drive to New York, several weeks of being in New York and now the drive down to Maryland so last night I hung them up in the shower in my suite and took a hot shower which seemed to get the bulk of the wrinkles out.  I then left them in the shower overnight and left them in the shower while I took another shower this morning.  Luckily the shower is large enough that they can hang in it and not get all wet from the shower while getting quite a bit of steam.

We were running a little late when Brian and I managed to hit the road and leave John and Michelle’s home on the Magothy River.  We had built in a lot of extra time, though, to make sure that we were not going to be late when we got to Washington, D.C.

The drive in to Washington, basically identical to my old commute from a decade ago, went pretty smoothly.  Brian drove to make things easier so that I would be able to just jump out of the car if necessary.

We ended up getting to the conference pretty early, which was good.  I wanted plenty of time so that I was not rushed.

We drove around the corner and stopped by Subway to grab a quick lunch before I headed into the conference.  It was a good use of the time.  Then Brian dropped me at the conference and Jay met me outside and got me checked in with my badge and everything.  We headed out to the expo floor to check out the speaking space.

The stage at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference was the “Live Stage” on the Expo Floor.  It was a really neat speaking setup consisting of a very large circle with broken sides for people to ingress and egress.  Seating was all on extra-firm beanbag style benches.  There were multiple commercial video cameras and sound equipment for high quality recording.  Pretty slick.

After checking in with the presentation staff and getting situated we went looking for some food for Jay.  There were really no options inside the conference so he was stuck grabbing a bite at Starbucks really quickly and we were on our way back to the stage area to prepare.

The talk started at one and just ran for twenty five minutes.  It was a very short talk but that made it a lot lower key and more casual for people to just sit down and watch.

At the beginning of the talk there were very few people in the theatre but as Jay spoke it filled up pretty rapidly.  By the time that it was my turn to speak we had quite a good turnout.  The session was recorded too so we will be appearing on “Microsoft Television” sometime tomorrow or possibly sometime tonight.

Overall I think that it went quite well.  People seemed to be really engaged by the talk and one person pulled me aside at the end to talk to me about what we had been speaking on – which was Social Media in IT Communities.  One of my favourite subjects.  This was heavily related to my talk at SpiceWorld 2009.

As soon as the talk was over I was out the door.  Brian was “circling” the building to be ready to pick me up and we were in the car and on the road in minutes.  We pulled over a few blocks away so that I could jump into the driver’s seat to get us out of DC since we were in an area where I used to work and knew pretty well.  I got us right out onto I66 without any problem and we were on the highway to Front Royal in no time.

While I was at the convention, Brian had managed to get to a Verizon Wireless store to pick up the cable that I needed in order to be able to work from the car while we were driving.  We had thought that we were going to have to get one of these on the road so this worked out great.

The drive went pretty well.  We were both pretty well rested and the weather was agreeable.  Brian took over driving pretty quickly so that I could get onto my laptop and work tethered to my BlackBerry Tour for much of the journey.

Coming from Washington, D.C. makes the trip much shorter than from just about any other location in the north than I ever drive to or from.  We were more than an hour “into the drive” than we would have been even leaving directly from John’s house let alone coming from Brian’s place in Chalfont or mine in Peekskill.  This is a shorter drive than we are used to doing.

My Verizon 3G connection did great and actually stayed connected all of the way through Virginia from Washington to Bristol!  You really cannot ask for much more than that.  It ended up being a very productive day.

It was between nine and ten o’clock when we got into Knoxville.  We were a little tired and were beginning to suspect that we may not be able to push on all of the way to Dallas tonight.  That is going to be crappy as I had really hoped to have been able to have gotten to the office around ten in the morning and to have been able to work a “normal” day once arriving.  We decided that stopping for a short break and getting dinner would be better than driving continuously.

Since we were in Knoxville we stopped at the SpiceRack and got fish tacos.  We did not stay long, though, as we wanted to get as many miles done as we possibly could.  We did pretty well for several more hours.  Around two or three in the morning I was just too tired to keep driving, though, so I decided that that was going to be it for the night.

We ended up getting a room at the Comfort Suites in Forrest City, Arkansas.  Not nearly as far as we had hoped to have been able to go but it is what it is.

Brian slept well.  I had insomnia a bit and only got three hours of sleep at best if not far less.  I did get a chance to take a nice, long, hot shower, though, which for me is almost as good as getting sleep.

Ship Found in World Trade Center Dig Site

Today Brian and I are hanging out in Arnold, Maryland with John until we head to Washington tomorrow morning where I will speak at the Microsoft convention.  Today is the one day of “downtime” this week – our one chance to catch up a little bit before the crazy driving starts.

Brian and John ran out this morning and picked up breakfast and coffee from the deli.  They make some awesome sandwiches down there.

It was a hot day today but not nearly as hot as it was a few weeks ago when I was down here.  Fortunately work was pretty slow today so I was able to visit with John and Michelle while still working all day.  I just set up at the desktop in the kitchen and worked from there.  Very convenient.

For lunch Brian, John and I drove over to Deep Creek.  The food there is just awesome.  I miss having them nearby.

I worked all afternoon and we pretty much just hung out at the house all day.  Nothing too much to report.  Just a day of relaxing before all of the craziness tomorrow.

So my original plan had me leaving at seven thirty last night.  That did not work out at all.  There turned out to be a major issue at work and I ended up spending several hours camped out working on it from dad’s house.  That dragged on and on and it was after ten when I was finally able to run out, jump into the car and get on to the road towards Peekskill.  Much later than I had anticipated and so late that it is likely to impact my day tomorrow.

The drive itself went fine.  Driving so late at night generally means near-zero traffic and construction.  Even where there is construction there is no traffic so you go right through it and don’t worry about it.  It was late enough that I just decided to skip dinner as it was too hard to find anyplace that was open that would not take a long time to eat.  I was in a hurry to get down to the house so I drove pretty solid the whole way down to get there as quickly as possible.

It was three in the morning when I pulled into Peekskill.  This is only my second time back to our former home since we left here in December.  It is unbelievable that we have been away now for seven months.  It has been nearly three months since my last time stopping in.  I used to go through this when returning to the house in Geneseo to some degree but we never went very long without going back to the house.  In Peekskill we have been going some very significant time without coming back.  Dominica has not been back at all since we left in December which I find unfathomable.  Owning a home that you never, ever visit is a very strange feeling.

I got in okay and found the house was only eighty-one degrees.  Not nearly as warm as I had guessed that it was likely to be.  I got the air conditioning fired up right away and headed around on a quick inspection of the house.  For the most part things were in pretty good shape.  I got to check out the damage to the back door which was pretty extensive.  The outside pane of glass is all but gone, but the inside glass completely held so the issue remains relatively minor.  Nothing else was amiss downstairs so I headed upstairs.

The upstairs, while very hot, was in good shape.  I got the ceiling fans on, brushed my teeth, set up the CPAP and was off to sleep.  There is not going to be very much sleep for me tonight, I am afraid.  Tomorrow is going to be one busy day.

I only managed to sleep for about three hours.  I was up at six this morning and could tell that I was not going to fall back asleep so I just got up and started working on the house.  There is so much to be done that I am really not very sure where I should begin.  It is very overwhelming.

Dominica’s parents are on their way down to the house, expecting to around between eleven and noon, to deliver some furniture for Francesca that needs to come down on our truck when we have it come down and to help with some of the packing while they are there.

I tried to take a shower first thing and discovered that there was no hot water in the house.  That isn’t good.  So I went down and tried to adjust the hot water heater.  It had been set to vacation mode and I turned it up to a normal temperature in the hopes of getting it to fire up.  It kicked on and off a few times.  Not sure what that means.

I went outside and discovered that the grass is recovering nicely now that Oreo is not outside peeing on it every day.  He really did a number on the grass right in front of the door on both sides of the side walk.  The one side is nearly all recovered and the other side, while still having a huge dead area, has grown back in over almost have of the previously dead areas.  That is something that I had been pretty worried about so I am very glad to see that by next year this should be all but fixed.

Being in the house, especially now when I am all alone and have time to myself to just think about it, is very strange.  My first reaction is that this is a very nice house and that I really miss it.  I am tired of living in the apartment in Texas.  I don’t want to come back to New York, I just miss owning a house.  I have lived in apartments for so long and it is always as if your life is on hold when you are in an apartment.  Having your own house really feels different.  The house really does look nice with all of the paint that was applied just before we moved out.  It is hard for me to remember the house like that.  I knew if for nearly all of the time that we were there with different colours and brightness.

Being alone in the house is probably not good for me.  We bought the house in Peekskill for the sole purpose of Liesl being born there.  We wanted her to be a New Yorker, like her parents, and so we had bought this house for her.  We only lived in the house for a few weeks before Liesl was born and so the house has no memories that are not directly involved with preparing for Liesl’s arrival and taking care of her after she had arrived.  This is, effectively, Liesl’s house.

As I went around the house taking down Liesl’s pictures from the walls I couldn’t help but hear the echoes of her laughter in the house.  There is the spot by the fireplace where her swing was located nearly the entire time that we lived in Peekskill.  She just loved that swing.

And in the basement, there was my desk.  She loved to come down to the basement and crawl around from the mirrors on one side of the room down the “hallway” formed between the desks and either go under my desk or pop around the corner to see me.  She spent a lot of time playing down there while I worked.  That is where she first used my computer as well.

Up in her room there is her crib.  The crib that she almost never used.  Most of the time that we were living in Peekskill Liesl was sleeping with us.  There was a time period when she would nap in the crib and there were several months of her sleeping there, at least early on in the night but mostly she did not sleep in her own room.  It is so strange to think of her having her own room in that house.  She never really played in there.  Many a night Dominica or I would cradle little Liesl in our arms and rock in the glider to put her to sleep then put her down in the crib.

Even our room, when Liesl used to fall asleep in the chair in the corner with Dominica holding her or where she would stand on the head of our bed every morning to look out the windows and yell to the people getting into their cars and going to work in the mornings.  I had forgotten all about her standing there and yelling until I was here, in the house alone, today.

I found Liesl’s foam letters that were her very first bath toys.  I had found those at the grocery store and thought that she should have them.  She loved taking baths there.

It is amazing how many memories come flooding back when you go back to a house, especially when you are on your own, and have time to walk around remembering.  This house is full of Liesl memories.

I was pretty hungry having skipped dinner last night so I drove down to the Maple Ave. Deli which is just down the street and picked up some sandwiches and a pastry to eat.  That was very quick and convenient.  It also gave me a chance to tell them that I had moved to Texas – which would be why they have not seen me in many months.

I ate back at the house and then got busy on the packing for the day.  So much packing to do for a single day.  I got a few hours of prep work in on my own early in the morning.  The house was nice and cool and I had brought some plastic bins with me from dad’s house who’s purpose was to collect the little miscellaneous stuff from around the house that will travel back to Texas with me directly in the Mazda rather than waiting for the movers.  I have a number of delicate items that will go back in that way which is going to make the car very packed for the drive down to Texas.

Before Dominica’s parents arrived I ran out to Home Depot to pick up boxes and bubble wrap that we would need to get things packed up.  The house is pretty much empty already so much of this type of stuff has already shipped to Texas.

Dominica’s parents arrived at around eleven thirty.  We got their car unloaded and set right to work getting more packing done.  It was just about half an hour before the potential new tenant arrived at noon to meet me.  We had both wanted to have a chance to meet one another and this worked out perfectly.  We spent almost an hour going around the house and discussing what was going and what was staying, looking at stuff like the attic, working out schedules, etc.  It turns out that they want to move in faster than we had thought so getting the house emptied is going to be a bit of a challenge, I think.  We can’t get movers scheduled until the paperwork is all signed and the movers can’t move the furniture until the glass is all cleaned up which is scheduled for the fifteenth.

Dominica’s mom tested the range and noticed that there was no gas there either.  This isn’t good.  Why would the gas be turned off?  The electric is not turned off so the power company must not have shut us down – the payments are automatic anyway.  I can only guess that our agent turned it off for safety reasons.

Once she left it was back to packing.  Dominica’s parents stayed for several more hours and the house was almost done by the time that they had left.  I would never have gotten all of this done today without their help.  As it is we had decided to leave the television on the wall and have the movers take it down and pack it for us rather than attempting to do it ourselves but I still had just more work that I could have gotten done on my own before midnight and bringing the stuff down from the attic is really a two person job.

It was around four when I had the car all packed, the house completed and photographed to show to the movers and was on my way to head down to Philadelphia to meet up with Brian and to get ready for our trip.  It takes about three hours to get from the Peekskill house down to Chalfont, Pennsylvania where we were meeting.  I stopped in at the first New Jersey reststop for fuel and food.  Grabbed a quick bite of pizza and fro-yo.  The drive went pretty quickly.  The car is quite loaded.  This is going to be a challenge getting Brian into the car as well along with his luggage.

Once I got to Chalfont we unloaded the desktops and servers and spent about an hour doing packing logistics.  From the house we ran over to WaWa to get dinner.  Just as we got there we discovered an issue at the office and my boss called to have me conference in.  That ended up taking several hours of both my boss and I working on the issue with several other people.  Busy evening.  I was on both BlackBerrys constantly to be able to keep up.  Fortunately it worked out that I was able to do the work from the car so we sat at WaWa until we were sure that we could drive and then I just worked while we were on the road.

The drive down to Annapolis went pretty smoothly.  As we came through the inner harbor in Baltimore we saw a huge neon sign of what appeared to be a mustachioed Italian pirate.  We laughed for quite some time trying to figure out what that might have been for.  Why would someone pay good money for a four story tall sign that makes no sense at all to be erected.  That can’t be cheap.

It was just after eleven when we arrived at the Nicklin’s in Arnold, Maryland.  We did not stay up for very long.  We were probably off to bed around midnight.

Very few plans for tomorrow.  We will just be hanging around the house.  I am working all day tomorrow as usual so we really don’t have the ability to do anything too much.

I woke up early at seven eastern this morning with a sinus infection.  Argh.  Not the day for this at all.  It isn’t a bad sinus infection, just one of those “one day” ones that I sometimes get from using my CPAP.  The CPAP dried out, I believe, which causes sinus irritation so that I most likely the cause of it.  At least it caused me to get up bright and early and get a start on my crazily busy day.  There is so much to do that I do not even know where to begin.

I checked in on some DVD archiving work going on upstairs.  The one laptop is moving about 450GB of archived data over to an external drive.  I had kicked that off last night before going to bed because the local drive had run out of space and it needs working room in order to continue.  When I checked in this morning there was six hours remaining on the transfer!  The original 2TB external drive that we bought for this filled up to capacity this morning.  So I am down to just the one external and the small, local drives from here on out.  I timed that pretty closely, if I do say so myself.  I should have very, very close to exactly 4TB heading down to Texas when all is said and done.

I took a shower hoping that that would help with my sinus infection.  It did a tiny bit but not very much.  That is going to make for a very long day all by itself.

I checked in with work but I did not have any eight o’clock work scheduled today and my nine o’clock work was pushed off until ten.  Not a good day for getting a late start but there is so much to do that I am not sure how I would have actually have gotten out of here any earlier anyway.

I got the two servers unmounted and loaded into the Mazda.  That was the first packing task.  Those are going on past Peekskill and will be heading down to Philly where Brian will be setting them up in the lab that is located there.  Dad is very happy to finally have them out of his house.  They have been running here for years now.

For lunch, dad and I decided to get pizza from Papa Roni’s, the new place in Pavilion that replaced Davis’ Farm Market that was our mainstay of pizza for decades.  I am interested to see how Papa Roni’s compares to Davis’ long standing tradition of pizza.

The pizza turned out to be really good.  Not quite up to the memory of Davis’ Farm Market but still the best pizza in the area that I have had.  Their menu has expanded a bit since dad last ate there too and he picked up a menu so we will be using them more often in the future.  They also deliver.  We are not sure if they would deliver way out to dad or not. It would be amazing if they did.  No one, and I mean no one, has ever delivered there.

Growing up in a world without cable television (it did not exist in our county) and without food delivery of any kind whatsoever really made my childhood experience a lot different than what a lot of people think of of the ’80s.  I was really basically unaware of cable television until after I was in college and I had no idea that normal people could get food delivered to their house for a very long time. What a crazy, foreign concept!

I’ve done so many DVD archiving procedures that the DVD drive on the oldest of the laptops gave out on me!  I’ve put years of wear and tear on these machines in the last two weeks.  I had to borrow dad’s external USB DVD drive to attach to that laptop so that it could continue working.  Once I switched to that I probably got a 25% increase in speed or possibly more on that old laptop.  I wish that I had been using that all along.

Since I am stuck waiting for stuff at the office all day I am taking advantage of the time to attempt to go through more stuff at dad’s and try to get as much stuff ready for recycling or donation as possible.  I eliminated one entire plastic bin right away which was very handy since I need a few bins down in Peekskill to use to cart away any loose items that I come across tonight.

I spoke to our soon to be, we hope, renters down in Peekskill and we arranged to meet tomorrow at noon at the apartment.  I am very glad that we will be meeting them in person.  That just seems like a wise move.

Dominica went to GameStop and bought Lego Harry Potter for the PS3.  This is the first of two Lego Harry Potter titles expected.  This game covers the first four years.  She really enjoyed the other Lego games on the XBOX 360 and has been looking forward to this one.

Speaking of video games, while exploring in the barn trying to clean up our mess I found the box of my original, first generation Sony Playstation and my Super Nintendo Entertainment System – the first video game system (other than my handheld GameBoy) that I ever purchased with my own money.

The Playstation has no sentimental attachment for me.  It was a system that I lent Mark the money to buy and he never paid me for it so it defaulted to being my system.  I was never very happy about that.  There were no games that I was really wanting to play on it at the time so it was a big waste of money for me back around 1997 when I got saddled with it.  Josh, Eric, Andy and I did use it a bit at the house in Greece at Greenleaf Meadows and I did end up getting some classic titles for it like Final Fantasy VII, Parasite Eve and Suikoden but mostly it languished on top of the nightstand going months without even being remembered.

The Super Nintendo, on the other hand, has a lot of sentimental value.  I bought it at the old Walmart in Geneseo when the Super Mario All Stars pack came out.  I had earned the money for it myself at my job and I bought it and just showed up with it one day.  It would have been December of 1993 as that is when that pack with Super Mario All Stars and Super Mario World together with the SNES console was released.  That is the console that just six months later I took to Michigan with me when I started college.

But I know that these are not items that I should keep any longer.  I should have given them away years ago when they had more value.  So they are off to the Leicester Rummage Sale now.

Altogether today I managed to eliminate seven bins from our storage!  That is practically an entire car load worth of stuff that now does not need to be transported or stored any longer.

What a dent has been made in the barn storage!  I can see real progress now.  We are hopeful that the next time that we drive to dad’s that we will have a large vehicle, perhaps a GMC Acadia which we really want to get, and will be able to pick up a number of bins to cart back to Texas.  A couple good trips like that and the bulk of the stuff might be shifted.

My goal was to leave at seven thirty but there was just one final DVD to finish and I wanted to take a shower because my sinuses were so bad today so I pushed off my leaving time just a little bit.  The car was loaded and ready to hit the road right away.

As I need to finish packing the car and get the finishing touches on everything so that I can leave I am going to sign off and post while still at dad’s house in Pavilion.  If all goes according to schedule I will arrive in Peekskill at roughly one in the morning.  The Toccos are expected to arrive at the house between eleven and twelve tomorrow to deliver a piece of Francesca’s furniture that needs to get on to our moving truck with our stuff so that it can make it down to Texas finally.

It will be unlikely that I will be online tomorrow at all.  Once the work in Peekskill is done I have to drive to Philadelphia and pick up Brian and then we will drive together down to Arnold, Maryland.  We are crashing at John’s house on Sunday and Monday nights.  If all goes well, I will be home in Las Colinas on Wednesday morning.

Today is my last day at my dad’s house.  Tomorrow morning I leave for Peekskill.  The last seven months have probably been the longest that I have been away from home.  I was  at dad’s house only for one night in roughly seven months.  That is pretty extreme.  We have no idea when we will be able to return at this point either. Dad is hoping to be able to come down to Irving to visit us right at the end of October.  We are not likely to see him until then.

I slept in a bit this morning after being up so late last night.  I woke to the phone ringing – the car is done and we can pick it up at any time.  There was very little wrong with it and it was just $250.  Not too bad.  It sure could have been a lot worse.

The girls made great progress on the road and were in Little Rock before I even had a chance to check in on them.

Since we had to pick up the car today, dad and I drove over to Geneseo and had lunch at Denny’s.  We wanted to go to Aunt Cookies for toasted subs but Main Street was crazy and we did not want to fight the crowds. We had forgotten about the airshow again.

Work was busy today, it is a Friday after all, so I was stuck on my Blackberry all through the meal.  I’m sure that the people at Denny’s think that I am crazy.  I am never able to place an order or do anything there because I am always on my phone.  Since people in New York for the past few weeks I have really begun to be aware of how difficult it is for me to be able to have meals with people – there is just never a break where I am truly free to eat.

We picked up the car and came right back home.  Still no paperwork from the renters today but supposedly things are progressing and one of the people who is going to be renting from us would like to meet me in Peekskill this weekend while I am down there.  That sounds like a good sign to me and honestly I would feel better having a chance to meet the people who are going to be renting our house as well

I continued working on the DVD archiving.  I’m not going to be able to finish everything but boy did I ever make an amazing dent.

For dinner, dad ran down to York Landing and picked up fish sandwiches for us.  Since it is Friday night it is best for me to eat at my desk rather than attempting to go somewhere.  There just isn’t time all evening to do that.

After dinner, without leaving the upstairs office, dad and I watched the new BBC Miss Marple Mystery The Blue Germanium that aired two weeks ago.  We watched it from PBS.com.  It was really well done.

We made an attempt at getting the air hockey table into the car.  That was quite a pain.  The bottom line is it doesn’t fit and the Mazda is not designed to be driven with the hatch open – it is not a truck – and so fumes would potentially come into the car.  It just isn’t safe beyond the obvious issues of not being able to transport the stuff that we need down to Peekskill other than the air hockey table and the risks of stuff being stolen from the open car should I have to stop somewhere (maybe from carbon monoxide poisoning?)

Dad is thinking that he may be able to get the table into his much larger car and drive it out to get it to Dominica’s parents who have to make a trip to Peekskill with the truck anyway.  That will work much better. Unfortunately we have no idea when we can get movers, who we can get and how we will orchestrate the whole ordeal.  Since we don’t have a lease signed yet, we really do not have any means of moving forward on that critical task and it is becoming a logistical nightmare and we haven’t even begun to address it yet.  I really have no idea what we are going to do.

Dad went to bed really early.  He has to be up quite early in the morning to go to his Saturday morning breakfast group.  I get to sleep in until eight.  So I stayed up working on DVD archiving and some painful OpenVPN issues.

It took many hours but I eventually figured out why the OpenVPN connections have not been working.  It is because the router is seeing the multiple OpenVPN clients as a UDP flood and has been closing the ports!  No wonder it has been a confusing mess.

So I eventually got that fixed.  What a relief.  And since I was up working on that I kept the DVD processes going until the wee hours of the morning.  I almost managed to get all of the DVDs done.  So close but there is not enough time to even hope to be able to complete them tomorrow morning before I need to be on the road down to Peekskill.

Tomorrow is going to be an insane day.  I have no idea how I am going to get everything done.