Sheep Guarding Llama

The alarm went off at seven this morning.  I woke up, rolled over to check email and noticed that Francesca and not only managed to get out of the door at the earliest of her projected range but had actually made it out even earlier than expected and was already around Palmyra when we were rolling out of bed. So we were in a very big hurry trying to get out the door as quickly as possible.

We did a good job of getting the car loaded, Liesl ready and everyone on to the road right away.  We headed straight up to Batavia concerned that Francesca was far ahead of us as she was past the Seneca Service Station ten minutes before we were able to leave the house.

Our timing resulting in absolute perfection – we pulled in to the Bob Evans’ parking lot at the Batavia Thruway entrance right behind Francesca.  We could not have possibly timed it better, even if we had been following each other all along.

I was feeling really sick this morning.  I think that I have caught whatever it was that Dominica has had the last few days.  I could not stay in Batavia even to wait for everyone to be fully loaded into the car – it was a mad rush to get back home.

I was at work by normal time so the morning trip, as well as feeling sick, all fit into the “before work” hours perfectly.  I am very glad that that worked out so well.

Dad called from Geneseo to tell me that his breakfast was done and that he was still waiting for his car to be finished being worked on at the shop and that if I wanted, the shop could get the Mazda in right away to work on it.  I made sure that work was good, which took about twenty minutes, and then ran over to Geneseo quickly and dropped off the Mazda at M&R.  They are not sure if they can get to it today or not but they will see what they can do.

We stopped at Tim Horton’s for coffee and donuts.  Actually, dad had a vanilla cream and I grabbed two danishes (ssh, don’t tell Dominica – fortunately for me, she does not read SGL, ever) one cherry cheese and one the limited edition caramel apple.  We ate the danishes there and I took the coffee back home.  The Geneseo Air Show is on this weekend so Geneseo is just wall to wall people.  The sidewalk sale is on and downtown is a zoo.

We skipped lunch since I had not been feeling that well and since I needed to get back to work.  The afternoon was pretty uneventful.  Lots of work and following Dominica and Francesca’s progress across the country via email.

Once work was over, around eight, dad and I drove over to Geneseo and had dinner at Denny’s.  We had been planning to eat at the Lumber Yard but my job runs so late now that it is based on Central time that it wasn’t possible to go there before they were going to close.  Denny’s is cheaper and faster anyway.

After dinner we just came home.  I spent the rest of the evening working on the DVD archiving, SGL and other miscellaneous tasks.  I ended up staying up until around two in the morning, in fact!

No word on the car today.  With any luck we will be able to pick it up tomorrow.  If I cannot get it tomorrow it is going to be a major problem and I am not sure how I am going to deal with it.

No word on the house in Peekskill either, today.  That is pretty depressing.  We are getting rather desperate for time and we need to start making some kind of plans for getting the house emptied out.  I talked to Brian and he is going to go to the house with me on Saturday evening to see what we can do.  It would be awesome if we could get everything done and ready for the moving crew on Saturday afternoon but I do not see how that could be possible.  I’m not completely sure what is left in the house but I am assuming that we have to take a bit out by car when we leave.  I might spend the night there on Saturday night and head down to Philly on Sunday morning.  It will all depend how much there is to be done and how much of it I am able to do.  I sure hope that the movers don’t need us to do anything that we don’t get done this weekend.  That would be awful.

The Texas-bound trekkers made it to Jackson, Tennessee where they got reservations at the Quality Inn for just $63 which is excellent.  They got in around ten, I believe, after a long day of driving.  They made it farther than they had originally planned and tomorrow should be a good driving day for them.

Liesl was featured on an article in the Smithsonian Magazine titled: Mamas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Broccoli Haters.   This is perfect for her as she does, in fact, love broccoli more than any other vegetable.  I just stumbled upon this article with this picture that I had taken of her.  How exciting that she is in just a prestigious publication.  We are very proud of her.

Oreo, back in 2009, was apparently used in an article on dog safety in the car on the website Will My Dog Hate Me in an article titled:  Buckle Up for Dog Safety.  A picture that my mother took of Buffer, our cocker spaniel in the fields in the back forty, was used as an example of the breed on HubPages.  My old Mazda 6 (not actually a 6S but a 6 with all of the S options individually to save on insurance – so identical to the S but minus the badge) was used on eHow on the Mazda and Nissan Showdown.  Gomestic has an article on dangers for cats outdoors and one of our cats from long ago from the barn  got his picture used!

One of my recent pictures from Las Colinas was used in a blog post about all fifty states getting snow this winter.  Oreo was used in a blog on When Nine Hundred Years Old You Reach.  And yet another picture of mine was used on a  recent article from Truth Out on Social Security on Wall Street.

Today is the last day with Dominica and Liesl (and Oreo) in New York.  They will be heading out first thing tomorrow morning to return to Texas and I will be without my family for a week.  I was up early and working this morning.

The archiving process is a great success and all of the movies are now archived and ready for transport.  Now I am on to the television content which I had not originally to get but now I am anxiously hoping that I may be able to finish everything while I am here.  Serious progress.

We skipped lunch today – after yesterday I was not feeling like trying to get food again.  Dominica had some shopping that she needed to do so she drove over to Geneseo to Walmart and did some shopping.  She looked for an SD card for the new high definition camcorder but Walmart didn’t have anything useful at any kind of reasonable price.  So we have to wait until we can order something from Amazon once we get back to Texas.

For dinner this evening we just ordered in a cheese pizza from the Chicken Coop.  That was easy and would not require me to leave the house for more than a few minutes.

Liesl spent the day mostly hanging out with her grandpa.  She is really going to miss him once she leaves in the morning.  She has been having so much fun up here.  She loves the yard, camping, the toys and the constant attention.  She made grandpa read to her a lot today.

Liesl has really come a long way in learning about animals and animal sounds this week.  For weeks, or maybe more, she has been really into monkeys and she goes “ooh ee ohh” anytime that you say monkey or she sees one.

Off to bed somewhat early tonight.  We have to be up early tomorrow and on the road right away.  Francesca is hoping to leave Frankfort at five thirty in the morning and we are going to meet her in Batavia so that they can get right on to the road and get down to Tennessee where they will be stopping for the night.

I got up early this morning.  After the holiday yesterday I knew that there was going to be extra work to be done this morning and that things were going to be really hopping at the office so I made sure to be up and signed in and working extra early so that I could stay on top of things.  I also knew that my boss was out today so I needed to be around to cover for him.

I worked very hard all morning.  Definitely a busy morning as I had predicted.  I waited until a quarter till one local time, which I always try to do when going to lunch here because it seems to be the perfect balance for work to be optimally lunch-ish both for the people that we support and for our own office.  Working in central time and supporting eastern time causes all kinds of problems that someone somewhere never thinks that you should be at lunch at that particular moment.

Of course, no matter how much planning I do to not take lunch at the wrong time, I get a call from my boss while still on my way to lunch: “Where are you?  I guess you are out of office today?”  What do you mean I must be out of office?  I’ve been working for five hours already.  Do I not get any lunch?  I’ve only been away from my desk for minutes and I am available still by email and phone while I am away.  That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.  Not only am I working but he was supposed to be taking a holiday today.

Then he tells me that I was supposed to be in the office today even though we had discussed more than once that I would not be coming back until sometime next week.  And it just gets worse from there.  Well now I’m just having a crappy day.  I do not handle this type of stress well especially when I am not in a position to deal with it right away.  I hate problems that linger and the last thing that I want is to have major problems at work and have it be an entire week before I am in the office to find out what is going on.  And as the new practice seems to be to tell me major bad news only after it is too late I live in a constant state of waiting to find out what has already happened of which I have not been informed.

So now I’m just going to be stressed for a week.  The biggest piece of news for the day is that we are no longer able to move to Austin.  Originally we were going to go straight to Austin but then had offered to go to Dallas for six months to help out.  That would have meant that we would have been heading to Austin right about now.  But as the house in Peekskill didn’t sell or lease we were really trapped and we needed to renew our lease in Dallas until we were able to get out from under the house.  But now everything has changed and we are staying in Dallas now.

It’s not that Dallas is the worst option but we have had our hearts set on Austin for a year and until today we thought that we were moving there as soon as we were done with our lease.  Now that we pretty much have renters going into our house we were very excited that Austin was finally going to happen.  We are extremely fortunate that we found out today that we cannot go there since we might have sent the moving truck there this weekend!  Talk about cutting it close.

At this point I’m a little sick from the stress and worry.  Dominica is very upset that we will no longer be living close to family like we had intended all along.  So instead of being three hours from the Grices we are going to remain five hours away making our weekend travel pretty awful for the indefinite future.  Just when we finally had a long term plan after so many years of moving around.

I’m assuming, but won’t know for a while, that this also means that our plans of spending our summers up north is no longer an option.  That was a really critical piece of being in Texas.  Our lives are in total upheaval now. It’s not entirely unlike I lost my job or got relocated again today.  Effectively we did get relocated and we are starting our planning all over again.

I’m stressed enough that I have a stomach ache.  Dominica is pretty upset as well.  The worst bit is not really having all of the details for a while.  We can make Dallas work.  We will get over that.  That’s just surprising.  It is extra crappy as Andy and Miranda will be in Round Rock soon and would have been just up the street from us.  Now they too will be hours away.

We are assuming now that we need to rent indefinitely.  Dominica was right that we are just too volatile to buy a house.  Even when we try to have a long term, safe house buying plan we get burned.  Our previous house buying we knew was somewhat short lived. Not as short as it ended up, months rather than years, but it was never supposed to be our “home” location like Austin was.

So we cut lunch short so that I could come home and deal with this as much as was feasible this afternoon.  I shouldn’t even try to have lunch; it just seems like a bad idea.

When we arrived back at the house from “lunch” the new Kodak 1080p video camera had arrived.  Unfortunately it needs a very large SD card to be of any use and there is no spare one at the house.  Dominica is tasked with finding one tomorrow morning when she goes shopping at Walmart for doggy cooking supplies.

Back to work all afternoon.  After work was over we went down to the Richardsons’ for take away Chinese.  I was pretty distracted and not very sociable.  I hate that work does this – leaves bad things hanging so that it is impossible to leave work behind.  Liesl had a great time though.  She played in the yard and went all over exploring.  She got Aunt Sharon to walk her down to the garden and pick strawberries which she ate right there.

Liesl had a great time going over to the lawnmower shed and just standing on the slope and then running down.  She was quite the card and everyone found her to be really entertaining.  She knows how to work the crowd, that is for sure.

We did not stay too late.  Dominica is still feeling pretty sick and obviously I don’t feel too hot today.  So we were home at a reasonable time.

The DVD archiving project is going gangbusters.  With three laptops running all day long as fast as they can there is just tons and tons of stuff being archived.  At this rate I am hopeful that we will hit four terabytes of data before I have to head off to Texas.

We were supposed to have the paperwork finalized for the rental of the house in Peekskill today but we did not receive it.  We are told that everything is still going alright and that we just need to hang tight.  It was a bad day, though, and it makes it that much easier to think the worst.  We don’t really have any cause for alarm or concern yet.  It would be very nice to know the official status of the lease sooner than later, however, as we need to be able to schedule movers, get some plumbing fixed, figure out when I am going to go down there, etc.  There is so much to do to get the house ready and not knowing for sure if we can move out of it or not yet is making things that much more difficult.

Dominica and I did go down to the barn today to figure out if we really care about the stuff that is down there.  Tons and tons of the stuff that remains is either going to get tossed or donated.  Sorting through it and making sure that we find the sentimental stuff is our big task.  We want to get as much of that done now as possible as we no longer know when we will be returning to New York and what is there might remain there for a very long time without us having any opportunity to sort through it.

Again tonight, when we went to go to bed, Liesl wanted to go out to the tent to sleep rather than going to bed in the basement.  She really loves camping, apparently.  We were surprised that it occurred to her that we might go out to the tent again after we had only done it for those two nights.

It is great to be in Ithaca again.  It has been so long.  I can’t remember the last time that I woke up here.  Liesl has never been here at all.  I bet that Dominica has not been here for at least three years.

We slept in a little this morning as Dominica was not feeling well at all today.  She must have caught a stomach bug.  By “we” slept in, I mean that Dominica slept in.  Liesl got me up at seven in the morning.

The big event this morning was that Liesl, barely nineteen months old, spelled her name this morning without any prompting from us whatsoever!  She was sitting in bed playing with her Leapfrog toy Violet (a talking dog) which has her name programmed into it and when it went to say her name Liesl spelled L I E S L right along with it.  Dominica is like “oh my, she just spelled her name!”  I couldn’t believe it either.  She is growing up so fast.’

Liesl and I played for a while and then I found Nick Jr. and put on some kids shows for her.  The first show I did not know what it was but after that Dora the Explorer came on and so she watched that.  That is still her favourite show.  She has gone from The Wiggles, to Elmo in Grouchland to Dora the Explorer.  So each favourite show seems to last a few months.  I wonder what will be the next Liesl craze.

Dominica got up around nine thirty.  I had been speaking to Bob via email and txt this morning so we knew what was going on.  We got out at a quarter after ten and drove up to Ithaca College and out to Danby to find Bob and Lisa’s house to which we have never been before but I had a pretty good idea of where it was.

We had a really good time hanging out with Bob and Lisa and getting to meet Emily.  Originally we had to be out of town by one this afternoon but our plans for this evening changed so we were able to hang out until around four in the afternoon which worked out much better.

We drove up to Trumansburg after visiting because we needed to stop in at the Parkers’ to grab Liesl’s other water bottle that we had accidentally left at the Parkers’ lake house at the ring of fire on Silver Lake on the third.  We swung in there just for a minute and drove on to dad’s house.  Dominica just was not feeling well at all all day.

Tonight, when we went to go to bed in the basement, Liesl kept saying “outside, outside.”   She loved camping out in the tent and wanted us to take her out there again to sleep rather than sleeping in the basement.  It is too warm to sleep outside, though, and we brought in all of the sleeping accoutrements so it would be rather a pain to take them all out again and set up the tent.  Liesl was very sad when we told her that she could not sleep outside.  It is nice to see how much she loved the camping experience though.  Hopefully we can do this regularly at dad’s.

It was another hot morning in the tent with the sun beating down on us while we slept.  The original plan had been to have gotten up very early this morning so that we could be on the road to Waverly practically with first light. Last night, around two in the morning, Liesl started screaming and screaming.  This went on for hours.  She was so loud that Dominica had to leave the tent for a while and dad woke up inside the house which was sealed off as he was running on air conditioning.

Liesl was up screaming for hours.  It was horrible.  We were never able to figure out what was wrong at all.  Our best guesses were that her eye teeth were coming in and really bothering her or that she had had night terrors that had woken her up.  It just went on and on.

Once Liesl finally fell asleep – we moved her to the mattress with me and Dominica went and slept on the air mattress to get some distance from the screaming girl – she was still restless and would wake up crying on and off throughout the night.  It was a very rough night for everyone.

When Liesl and I woke up this morning Dominica had already gotten up and started getting ready to go.  She had given up on trying to sleep and had been up for a while.  It was pretty warm when we got up.  Oreo stayed in the tent with Liesl and I.  He really likes sleeping outdoors too.

So Liesl and I got up and came inside to start getting ready for the day.  Dominica was feeling pretty sick, probably from a lack of sleep.  So she went back to bed and took a nap for a little while.  So I logged in and worked for a little bit to make sure that things were okay at the office before I was going to be mostly out of touch for the day.

It was ten when we finally hit the road.  About two hours later than Dominica had wanted to have left but we made good time and were at the farm in Waverly before noon!  We had no idea that it was so close to dad’s house.  We had been expecting a drive of over three hours.  So it ended up that only arrived maybe twenty or thirty minutes later than we had wanted to have been there.  Not bad at all – especially considering that Dominica is not feeling well at all and that I was able to work before leaving and was able to stop and get gas on the drive.

We hung out at the farm all day.  Liesl had the best time playing with her cousins.  She is old enough now that she can totally just go off outside with them and the older girls watch over her and she just has so much fun playing with the kids.  I think that what she really likes is the independence of being able to go play without needing any adults to be around.

Liesl spent practically the entire day, it seems, outside.  She especially loved playing in the plastic castle and the jungle gym for the little kids.  I don’t know that she did very much playing with other kids her own age.  There really are only a couple that are close enough to even remotely consider to be “her age” and even then you have to stretch pretty hard.  Garrett is the closest and they play together all of the time.  When Clara is older she will be in the same play group but not for another year and a half, most likely.

It was a very hot Fourth of July with temperatures going into the mid nineties and bright, unbroken sunshine. It was pretty intensely hot.  It wasn’t so bad stepping outside for a minute here and there but being in a house without air conditioning in that heat does get to you after a while.  As long as I wasn’t moving too much it was okay but if I had to go chase Liesl or something like that I would get hot and not be able to cool back down.

We stayed until about eight thirty in the evening and would have stayed longer but Dominica was still not feeling well and wanted to get up to Ithaca so that we could get into our hotel room.  So we took off.  Liesl stayed awake for the drive which was surprising after getting a horrible night’s sleep last night and her only nap all day being the hour and a half that she got in the car on the drive down to Waverly before the day began.

The drive up to Ithaca was quite easy.  It really was not all that much driving today.  It just felt like it was going to be a lot.  So it was just after nine thirty when we drove in to town.  It has been a really long time since Dominica has been in Ithaca.  She was thinking that it felt awfully strange being there.  I have been there much more recently than she has.

We stopped at Taco Bell and grabbed a quick bite for dinner.  It was way easier to get food before getting into the hotel rather than after we had and Liesl had gone to bed.  Then we would have been sorry.

We were off to bed rather early tonight.  It was nice.  We have a king bed for a change and Liesl just slept with us – which always makes her happy.  She has been not sleeping with us pretty much since Dominica left to go to New York so we have pretty much broken that habit and should not have a problem sticking with it once we are back in Texas.  Fingers crossed.  We are planning on having her sleeping in her own room again right away.

We were probably in bed by eleven.  We are at the Comfort Inn on Elmira Street where I always stay when I am in town on business and where dad used to stay when he would go to Ithaca long ago.  The hotel is pretty nice but our air conditioning did not really work at all and the room was seventy eight degrees with no air movement all night.  Better than the ninety-something going on outside but at least outside there is some breeze.  We were a little uncomfortable at that temperature but we did manage to get to sleep.  The bed was comfortable.

Tomorrow morning we are hanging out with the Winans in Ithaca.  We have not seen their house nor met their daughter Emily yet!  We have not seen them since their wedding in September, 2006!  We will be back to Pavilion at dad’s house tomorrow evening.