Sheep Guarding Llama

Back to work this morning.

For lunch today everyone wanted to do something different so we drove down to Perry to have lunch at the Charcoal Corral with Aunt Sharon and Uncle Leo and Jeremy came along as well.  Jeremy is on summer break from SUNY Fredonia and has been at home.  Sara is the only one who did not join us but she is coming down tomorrow afternoon to hang out at dad’s house so that she can see Liesl.

Lunch was good at the Corral.  It was quite busy there.  The “restaurant” section was completely full and we had to sit in the pizza parlour to have a seat at which to eat our lunches even though we were not having pizza.  The pizza business appears to be pretty slow at lunch and picks up for the movie crowd in the evenings.  We also got ice cream while we were there.  They have Perry’s ice cream and they have the banana cream pie that I love so much!  They also have the new midnight orange flavour that Dominica has been wanting to try.  Apparently Perry’s is doing some amazing things with their ice cream line up.

Liesl got a kiddie soft vanilla cone and was in heaven.  She is an ice cream lover like her parents.  She ate pretty much the whole thing – at least the parts that she did not get all over her.

On the drive back home the Ralstons managed to call us.  They both have new mobile phones now so the are reachable again.  So we made plans to get together this evening since Dominica is going to the Silver Lake Drive In tomorrow night to see Eclipse at midnight when it opens.  She tried to get me to go but there is no way I am going to watch that stuff.  Jeremy is going to go with her which is pretty funny because Sara and I won’t watch it.

We worked all afternoon.  I am making amazing progress on the DVD archiving.  I have one laptop running around the clock in dad’s office and one set up on the kitchen counter as well.  So I am constantly running back and forth and going downstairs for another stack of DVDs.  As they get archived they are going straight into boxes for storage.

At six the Ralstons came up.  They have been down the road at their house most of the time getting it ready so that they can move back in.  They are hoping to be moved in in another week or so.  For the moment, until the house is ready, they are living at Art’s mom’s house in Mt. Morris.

Liesl had a great time playing with Art and Danielle.  She really missed them, I can tell.  She was SO little the last time that she got to see them – when they were down at our house staging to leave for the Congo, down in Peekskill.  Liesl would only have been just six months old at the time.

Liesl has really started playing a lot with my 1980 Hot Wheels Sto n Go City set.  I loved that set when I was a kid.   It has pop-up buildings, a scale, a police chase hideout, an automotive lift, hidden garages and more.  It was a ton of fun when I was little and liked to play with cars.  There were two other sets, the Service Center from 1979 that can attach to this set so that a car can travel from the top of the Service Center all the way down through the city.  I’m not sure how well that would actually work in practice but in theory it is pretty cool.  I never had that set even though I wanted it as a kid.  I checked on eBay and they are pretty cheap, maybe ~$25 after shipping.  So maybe I will splurge and get it for Liesl.  I also found the third of the set, the construction area, that attached at the bottom of the city (the Service Center attaches above) and we are talking about maybe buying that on eBay so that Liesl can have it to play with when we are at home in Texas.  Apparently she is really into Hot Wheel and Matchbox cars.

At almost nine we piled into dad’s car and drove over to Geneseo to get dinner at Tim Horton’s.  We got sandwiches, coffee, smoothies and donuts.  A good trip.  Liesl did pretty well considering how late it was.  Her bed time is as early as eight thirty, normally.  We were out well past ten.  By the end she had had enough and was definitely needing to go to bed.

We managed to get a hold of Mary but she was just getting off of work at Walmart as we were climbing into the car to take the Ralstons home and Liesl was not going to put up with being awake much longer so we were not able to get together.  So we made plans to get together for lunch at the Omega tomorrow instead.

We got home and got Liesl to bed.  I worked for a little bit longer and then we went to bed ourselves around midnight.

We found out today that Art and Danielle just bought a car so they are not going to be needing the Mazda for very long.  We had been intending to have bought my plane tickets for me to fly to Washington, DC and then on to Texas tonight so this completely changes our plans.  So the current plan is that I can grab the Mazda just before heading south and I can drive it all the way to Texas.  That means no car rental in DC either.  This will save a lot of effort.  It also means that I can drop it back off for Jen at some point as well so that she can drive it again.

We are quite excited that I am going to be able to take a rather full load of stuff down to Texas now.  Originally we had no spare space whatsoever.  Now we have lots of room.  Now the challenge will be figuring out what we want to take with us and how tightly to pack the car.

This morning we went to the Omega in Geneseo for a late breakfast.  After breakfast we went over to Walmart for a very quick stop just to pick up a few vital supplies and for me to hit the computer and electronic sections to see about finding an external hard drive that I can hook up to the laptop so that I can get some DVD archiving done.

I was very fortunate to find a two terabyte USB hard drive enclosure for around $139 which is very good.  It is just a cheap Western Digital but more than enough for my uses.  That is a very good price and it is a “rollback” currently so it is usually more expensive.  This will let me get started right away.  I am very hopeful that we can get the basement in dad’s house cleaned up, at least, on this long trip even if we can’t get a truck to haul all of our remaining stuff down to Texas.

I had to work for several hours this afternoon and into this evening for the office.  Once I had some free time I got the external hard drive hooked up and started the first DVD archiving to get up and running.  It may not be hard work but it is stuff that really needs to be done for everyone’s sanity and it makes me feel much better to know that real progress is being made on something very tangible.

I am hoping, if all goes well, that about four hundred DVDs can be archived during this trip.  That will represent a massive percentage of dad’s remaining store in the basement.  We have done hundred previously although much work was lost at one point requiring me to start over from the beginning but now we seem to be making some significant progress and my plan is to script a massive compression process that I can allow to just run on its own without any intervention given the volume of work that I will have for it to do all at once and to let the server do it without needing me to set up desktops to do the work.  That should be far, far better than it was before when I had to do everything by hand.

This evening we watched When in Rome on the AppleTV which was quite good.  It had a lot of people that I like in it and was a cute story.  Nothing too ground breaking and, of course, Dominica figured out the entire plot from the very beginning as she always does but it was still cute.

We spent an hour or more just looking through movies available on the AppleTV to see what was out there.  I was very interested to learn that it appears, at least according to some strong rumours, that the next generation AppleTV is about to debut.  Rather than being a direct descendent of the current AppleTV it looks like it is going to be based upon the iPhone and iPad platform and be effectively nothing more than an iPad without any screen with just HDMI output.  This will allow it to be extremely green using almost no power whatsoever and should lower the development cost from Apple’s perspective.  The rumour is that the new AppleTV will be absolutely tiny, use almost no power and output full 1080p instead of the ridiculously limited 720p of the current model.

The new AppleTV is said to have no hard drive, which was a huge mistake, in my opinion, of the current models.  The need to download content to the current unit is a huge pain and the connection to iTunes makes it almost worthless.  Competing systems rely on streaming nearly all content and the current AppleTV has moved in that direction slowly with Internet Radio features and podcast viewing being added since the original version that Dominica and I bought some years ago.

So we will see what all features exist in the new AppleTV when it finally releases, if it ever does, but the old AppleTV was so close to being an amazing idea that I think that Apple will really do itself and its customers a major disservice if they do not continue and upgrade the platform and, hopefully, take it in a new direction not involving local storage.  My primary concern is that they may not support that DLNA standard that all of the competing platforms are using.  If they fail to support DLNA then they will not be able to compete against the PS3 and XBOX 360 and many other devices, in my opinion, that already do this and do it so well.  People have large collections of music and video that they want to be able to listen to and view via their AppleTV that simply cannot do so in any reasonable way with the current system.  The new AppleTV will also need to support a slightly wider array of formats as well.

I had to be up early this morning, but as early as when we are in Texas, so that I could do the early morning deployments.  This seems to be happening more and more often these days.  It feels like it must be two out of every three Saturdays.  I was up around seven thirty this morning.  Dad had been up long before me and was gone to breakfast long before I got up.  Dominica and Liesl slept for several hours more.

In addition to my eight o’clock work I had other work scheduled for later in the morning so I had a busy morning until lunch time.  Then, for a change of pace, dad and I decided that we would go to the Chicken Coop in Pavilion to get lunch there and bring it home.  I haven’t eaten there more than once or twice and that was many, many years ago so that will make a nice change of pace.

Dad needed to run an errand in Batavia to go to the dry cleaners so we drove up to Batavia first.  That really took no time at all.  Then back to Pavilion to the Chicken Coop.  In reality we should have ordered our food as we went past the first time and picked it up as we went back past but that did not occur to us.

We ended up getting way too much food at the Chicken Coop.  I had skipped dinner last night and breakfast this morning so I was feeling way more hungry than I actually was.  I always order too much food in those circumstances.

While we were waiting for our food, we both got some ice cream.  I discovered a new flavour of Perry’s ice cream that is simply amazing – banana cream pie!  I’m going to be searching for as much of this as I can get while we are up in New York.

We brought lunch back for Dominica and Liesl and ate at the house.  The food was pretty good and we think that we will try the pizza from there again.  We got their white pizza today and want to try their regular pizza too.

This evening, Dad, Dominica and I watched Jackie Chan’s latest movie The Spy Next Door.  It was pretty good.  I would not call it a Jackie Chan classic but it is amazing that he can keep making these movies as he gets older and older.  He is fifty six now.  Not that old but very old for doing his own stunts in these types of movies.  After a lifetime of beating the crap out of himself he must be getting very tired.  He does so much work it is incredible that he is even still alive.

Dad was up and out early this morning to go to his breakfast club.  So no Omega for Dominica and I today.  I got up and started work while Liesl and Dominica slept in for a while.

We decided today that we need to get a two terabyte hard drive from Walmart that I can use to archive our movie collection.  That would be a very good use of the time while we are here at dad’s house.  Of course we were just at Walmart yesterday so now we need to wait until we are over there again.  So we are going to lose one day at least that could have been used for transfers.  Moving movies takes a very, very long time.  This part of the never ending process of getting our stuff cleaned up and out of the way at my father’s house.

Aunt Sharon and Uncle Leo came over late morning today to see Liesl whom they have not seen in a long time.  We got lunch from York Landing (or whatever it is called now since they have been bought and sold so many times that I have no idea and just call them York Landing now for ease as no one knows their real name anymore.)

The original plan for this evening was that the Parker clan, Nate, Tammy and the kids, were going to come up and visit since they were getting into Perry today but they ended up having a very busy schedule and decided that it would be better if they could come tomorrow morning instead.  Our morning was free so we decided to just do that instead.

Our new plan for tonight was to have the Richardsons return later this evening and we were all going to watch Dear John on dad’s AppleTV.  That ended up not working out, though, as the AppleTV was unable to download the content from the iTunes Store.  I’m guessing that the Apple infrastructure is buckling under the load of the new iPhone OS 4 being released and just about everyone with an iPhone or iPhone-like device downloading it as quickly as they could.

So we had to give up on watching anything on the AppleTV tonight.  Instead, once work was finally done for me, we watching some of The Tigger Movie and then some of Hammy the Hamster until Liesl fell asleep.

We were all pretty tired and pretty much just called it a night at that point.  We are all working hard to catch up on some sleep.

Today is my first day actually getting a chance to spend time with my family in two weeks.  I can’t believe how this week has flown by – there has just been so much going on.  I haven’t had any time to just sit still for a few minutes.

This morning was Liesl and dad’s chance to get to know each other again.  Liesl has not seen her grandpa for seven months – which is a very, very long time to a nineteen month old.  She does remember him and being at his house seems to make it easier.  She warmed up from her shyness in no time and they spent the morning playing and playing.

For lunch we all went over to Geneseo to the Omega Grill.  Liesl had the grilled cheese.  She loves cheese now and grilled cheese is one of her favourite meals.  It is our current “go to” diner food for her.  She can pretty much eat an entire sandwich on her own already!

After lunch we ran across the street  to Walmart.  Dad, Liesl and I stayed in the car and Dominica went in and did some shopping.  That ended up taking much longer than we had anticipated.  No more letting Dominica shop on her own.  We saw Mary going into Walmart just as we were leaving but we did not have enough time to get her attention.

Dad brought out one of my very favourite childhood toys – my Fisher Price Magic Show set.  I can’t believe that that thing still exists and works perfectly – a testament to Fisher Price’s quality (and, as Dominica points out, to how well I treated everything that I owned as a child.)  I spoke to Jeremy a few days later and he can remember playing with this set as a child too and that means that likely Sara did as well.  So Liesl could easily be the fourth generation to be playing with this.  I looked it up on eBay and, much to my surprise, there are none for sale currently.  I guess this is one seriously unique item.

Liesl had tons of fun playing with the magic set.  By far her favourite thing to do was to take the magic wand and make the flower that is in it magically appear.  She learned how to do this in minutes and thought that it was great fun.  Every time that she would make the flower appear we would all go “Ta da!” and she would get all excited.  She could not make the flower disappear on her own so after every time that she make it appear she would say “Need help.” and give it to one of the adults to set it up for her again.

Dad also brought out other childhood favourite toys like my Fisher Price drill and workbench set and my little table top kitchen range set – nothing like the fancy kitchen toy set that Liesl has down in Texas.

I thought that it was pretty cool to see my old toys again.  I can’t believe that dad still has them, knew where they were and that they were in such good shape.  It is really neat seeing Liesl playing with them and enjoying them just like I did more than thirty years ago.  That was a lot of fun.  I’m going to try to get lots of pictures of Liesl and these toys.  Just seeing these really take me back.  I have not thought about these toys in decades.  It is amazing how seeing them suddenly takes you back and I can remember being two or three years old and playing with these (older with the magic set.)