Sheep Guarding Llama

Today is my last actual day completely in Texas.  Tomorrow I am off to New York.

I got nine hours of sleep last night which was great.  Been a long while since that happened.  That still meant that I was up and out of bed at seven this morning.

You know that you have been in Texas for a while when you go outside in one hundred plus temperatures and think “oh, this is pretty nice, at least there is a breeze.”  Even getting into my X3, which is black, after it has been sitting outside in those temperatures with the Texan sun beating down on it doesn’t phase me anymore.  Weird.

I took today off from La Cima.  I figured that I needed any spare time that I had to be getting ready for the trip.  So I spent my lunch time at home alone.  Then, after work, I just came straight home and spent the evening trying to get things ready for the trip.

Maggie came by around eight thirty or maybe nine to pick up some stuff that had been delivered to the apartment for her.  She was at the apartment for probably an hour or an hour and a half.  I managed to get her desktop readied for her so that she was able to take that with her this evening which was a major accomplishment.

My original plan was to do as much as I could and to be in bed by ten this evening so that I could “charge up” a big more hitting the road.  That did not work out, though, and I did not manage to get to bed until midnight.  So I will be much more tired tomorrow than expected.  That is unfortunate.  I have a lot of stuff to do tomorrow.

I am looking forward to the trip.  I have had very little time “up north” in seven months.  This is the longest that I have been away from the northeast, ever.

I slept in a bit too late this morning.  Being the only one home, though, I am able to get ready and out the door quite quickly so it is not a problem.  I’ve been driving to work all week.  I really shouldn’t do that but I can so I am.  Since I am so likely to have to drive somewhere either in the middle of the day or at the end it just seems to work out pretty well.

Work has been really busy this week.  It is a good time for Dominica, Liesl and Oreo to be away.

For lunch today I just ran home and spent an hour there by myself.  I made myself a PB&J and did a little work.  Then it was back to the office.  There really is not much point in my coming home when Dominica and Liesl are not here.  It is quite lonely.

My Blackberry that has not been working got fixed today.  Pheww.  That was going to be a major problem if I had to travel to New York and I did not have a Blackberry!

After work Nicki and I went to La Cima.  It is pasta night and I did not want to pass that up.  That would just be silly.  We made it in time for happy hour at six thirty.  It was actually extremely busy.  There was a big event going on in the main dining room so we just made seven thirty reservations and headed to the bar.

Dinner was excellent as always, and very cost effective.  Tonight was my first time actually having dinner in the Lakeside dining room.  Pasta night rules.

After dinner I got home but decided that it was late-ish and I was pretty tired so I just turned right in and went to bed.  Bed at ten at home alone.  That’s kind of sad.  But I need to get caught up on my sleep so that I am ready for this weekend.  It is going to be the deathmarch to get myself up to Maryland, then Virginia then New York!

I was not happy when the alarm went off this morning.  I am exhausted.  Nicki and I had decided that today would be a good day to try out the free daily breakfast at La Cima.  We rolled out of the apartment complex at seven forty and were over to the Williams Tower a few minutes later.

It is a small, continental breakfast at the club but it is good and healthy and, most importantly, free.  So we enjoyed that and some coffee and the views of the sun rising on the Dallas-Fort Worth Metro which was quite nice.

Very busy day at work today.  Worked till a quarter till noon then I escaped over to the club for lunch.  It was another “eating alone” day.  I’m quite glad to have the club to go to because it works out very well when I need to eat alone.  There are always people there to talk to as well.

Crazy busy afternoon then back to the apartment to meet up with Brian, get him a box of stuff that had come to my place via UPS and then we went over to Jersey Mike’s to get subs for dinner.  We ate there and then he dropped me off on his way back home.

This evening is my busy phone call evening.  I had three overlapping conference calls this evening which made for a very busy time.  So I was on the phone for at least two hours if not more.  Good thing that we had managed to squeeze in dinner as quickly as we had.

I spent the evening, what bits were not on the phone, working on trying to fix a networking issue that dad has been having and rebuilding my own laptop from Windows XP 32bit to Windows 7 64bit.  That went pretty smoothly and I had it updated in no time.  I got my VPN set up, got the laptop added to the domain and started doing package installs.  I’ll have it all set tomorrow night, I think, so that I am ready to head off to New York this weekend.

The other big thing that I managed to do tonight was to get scores of pictures from our 2009 trip to Disney World posted up on Flickr!  That was a major accomplishment.  Obviously it has been more than six months that people have been waiting to see those.  That was Liesl’s first birthday and we are already past her eighteen month mark.  There are a lot more pics to go but good progress was made tonight.

I talked to Jen tonight and we have figured out how we are coordinating the transfer of vehicles this weekend.  She is driving up from Houston on Friday evening.  We will hit La Cima for dinner.  Then she will take my car and I will take hers.

Saturday morning, hopefully very, very early, I will be hitting the road to head up to Arnold, Maryland.  We will see how early “early” is but before daybreak if I am motivated.  The drive is supposed to be approximately twenty-two hours.  Of course, I am doing this one without a GPS!  It has been a while since I have attempted that.

I’ll be in Maryland all day on Sunday – which will involve a lot of napping, I’m sure.  Then Monday morning I will get up very, very early again and drive out to Tyson’s Corners in Virginia.  There I will hit the Tower Club for breakfast.  I’m hoping that John will get up and head out there with me as well.

From the Tower Club I am able to just sit indefinitely while waiting for the Ralstons to arrive at Dulles and for them to clear customs.  It is just fifteen minutes, I am told, from the club to the airport so that is very convenient.

Then, once we pick up the Ralstons, they are planning to head to someone’s house in Sterling, get a shower and then it is time to drive them up to New York.  I’m expecting that that cannot be until afternoon that we leave Sterling.  So that means that between six and seven in the evening of June 21st we will be pulling into their place in New York.

Why it is best to pretend that you don’t know anything about computers.

I woke up at eight, a bit later than I had intended.  So I was not in the office until around nine.  I prefer to be in much before that but it could not be helped.

Work was busy but not crazy. At lunch time no one was available so I went to La Cima on my own.  Since there are limited grocery choices at the house and I am quite tired of frozen pizza I am attempting to eat at La Cima for the “cheap” meals as much as possible this week.  It was a little lonely sitting at the bar all by myself but the food was good.

After work, Nicki and I ran to Walmart to do some shopping.  She needed groceries and I needed some writable CDs and DVDs.  I’ve been trying to get some work done at home and I have not been able to for lack of media.  While we were there we hit McDonald’s for a quick dinner.

So the trip to Walmart, even though we left a little early from the office, meant that I did not get home until around nine in the evening!  Not much time in which I can get things done.  I struggled to be productive but it was mostly an uphill struggle.

I had a flashback to living in Geneseo tonight.  Suddenly I remembered how Dominica was going to let me have a stand-up video game machine in the living room.  It kind of hit me all of a sudden and was quite vivid.  It brought some of the “feeling” of being in Geneseo that I have not felt in years.

I found one of the best YouTube videos ever, the Mippey5 answer to Katy Perry and Snoop Dog’s California Gurls: Minnesota Gurls.  You can get the lyrics here.  Midwest represent!

Another day alone.  Actually, it turns out, that I was not too clear on my schedule and, in fact, this weekend is my only weekend at home alone.  Next weekend I will be traveling, alone still, but not sitting around at home all by myself.  I will most likely be leaving on Friday evening to get somewhere and then start the real run for Annapolis on Saturday morning.  If all goes well that will put me in Maryland early on Sunday morning giving me lots of spare time before having to get up very, very early on Monday morning to drive out to Sterling, Virginia to meet the Ralstons as they are coming in from the Congo.  From there it will be a brisk drive north to Pavilion.  The trip from Sterling to Pavilion takes long than it seems because Sterling is in the middle of the major highways leaving me with the only good option of taking the much slower, but quite scenic, US15 through Gettysburg, Pennsylvania on my way up to Harrisburg before I join the main highways.  It has been many years since I have taken the Gettysburg route.  In some ways it still feels fresh to me but likely it has been eight years!  Yes another sign that I am getting older.

Again today was mostly a work day for me.  I have a lot of hours to recoup this week so I spent much of the day working on that.  It ended up being a rather busy day at the office so I was doing quite a bit of work.

In addition to doing work for the office I also wrong a seven thousand word paper on virtualization and managed to make the paired PowerPoint presentation and record myself reading the entire paper, in conjunction with the PowerPoint presentation with Expression Encoder 3.  It only took sixteen takes to record the thirty five minutes class.  That was a major project but I think that it turned out pretty well.  That took many hours of work.

I managed to finish watched 100 Girls on YouTube.  That was a good movie.  It has been a while since I have stumbled on a movie that held my interest at all.  Of course starring Emmanuelle Chriqui, Katherine Heigl, Jaime Pressly and Larisa Oleynik doesn’t hurt.

I also took half an hour this evening and recorded the first podcast in almost two years.  I have not had time to get it posted yet but I hope to be able to do so soon.  I can’t believe that it has been almost exactly two years since I recorded the Walt Disney World recap for the May, 2008 trip that Dominica and I did while pregnant with Liesl!  It is amazing to think that I started podcasting five years ago!  I was very, very diligent about it before going to work at “the office” down in New Jersey but that was actually a very small window.  I started at the end of the summer in 2005 when I was well into my contract with Wegmans and I was in New Jersey by March of 2006.  I kept it up for a while, especially while living alone in North Brunswick, but it quickly became very difficult to maintain regularly.  I am working on getting the podcast posted but OurMedia, who used to host all of the media for SGL, deleted all of the content that all of us created over the years.  I’m not impressed.  So I am attempting to work with the Internet Archive directly.  So far their technology just keeps failing.  It appears to not have been updated in years.

Speaking of the Internet Archive, one of my favourite things is to check out the Way Back Machine and see how SGL looked over the years.  Check out SGL on the Wayback Machine.  Just click around to a few random dates over the years.  It is amazing to see how the site has changed from year to year.  It is hard to believe that I have been blogging for a decade now!  I was blogging when blogging wasn’t cool.  And then it was really cool.  And now it is not cool again. 🙂

It was pretty late by the time that I got off to bed.  I’ll be in the office tomorrow.  Good night blogosphere.  (Ha ha, whatever happened to that word?  And whatever happened to Technorati – that dysfunctional blog search engine that never parsed any blogs?)

I’ll be on the road to New York in under a week.  The Ralstons return to the new world in one week from tomorrow.