Sheep Guarding Llama

Liesl had a rough night.  Up at two thirty.  Then up again at three needing a bottle.  She came in and slept with us after that. I ended up oversleeping and not getting up until a few minutes after my morning deployments were supposed to have begun.  Oops.

I worked for two hours for the office and then it was time to switch to packing.  Good progress on the CDs early this morning.  That is a very labour intensive process and takes a tremendous amount of time, especially as my CD drive is located on the other side of my desk requiring me to get up and walk around the desk attached to my desk all the way to the other side to swap discs.  It is the equivalent to walking the entire length of the basement just to swap CDs!  It doesn’t sound like a lot of walking until you have done it three or four hundred times!

Another trip to the attic was needed to get supplies to kick off the next big round of packing.  We are even putting my Acer Aspire One into storage.  Sad but we just don’t have spare room for these kinds of things.

After work was done this morning we packed up a load and drove to the storage unit and then to Pastel’s to get a very late breakfast (after noon, so not even early for lunch.)  Then a quick trip to the grocery store.  We have to buy tons of plain soymilk now as in the last few days Liesl has switched from drinking soy formula to drinking soymilk.  This saves us a ton of time and money.  Formula is very expensive, especially when you need the lactose free kind like we do.  And it takes forever to make a bottle when you do it over and over all day long.  So having her on regular, premaid soymilk means that we just refill her bottle and away we go.

SpiceWorks 4.5 came out last night so I performed the migration from 4.1 to 4.5 today.  Lots of great features in there.  The really big one being the move to Apache as the embedded web server which allows them to now have native SSL without needing to have the application pumped through a proxy or some other means of getting SSL.

I was supposed to be working on my class at RIT today but ended up forgetting about it in the flurry of morning work, packing and watching Liesl while Dominica packed resulted in my completely forgetting about it.  Oops.  My work is supposed to be due on Saturday evening. Argh.

So much to do!

Packing, packing, packing.  Not much more to say.  Dominica finally bit the bullet and went through the large plastic bins that we had in the living room for the last few months that are mostly her yarn and made the decision that we can spend money storing, shipping and storing the yarn yet again.  Most of it, if not all of it, came from the house in Geneseo which means that we have already paid to move it once or twice and shipping it all to Texas is not at all worth it.  It is tough giving away so much stuff but it can’t be helped.  We need to thin down as much as possible.  Paying movers to move stuff from Newark to Peekskill was one thing.  But paying for a NY storage unit, a Texas storage unit and moving to haul the stuff all the way across the country, then paying movers to take it between storage units and not even having access to it for many months anyway just is not worth it.

It is really cold in New York today.  Not fun for packing and taking loads to the storage unit.  The upside is is that we just keep saying “It will be warm in a week and a half when we get to Texas.”  Of course, Dallas his twenty nine degrees a few days ago but it doesn’t last like it does here.

Today is the last Friday before the winter financial freeze happens on Wall Street so it was packed with deployments.  We were able to sneak out for a late lunch and a run to the storage unit, though, in the middle of the afternoon.  We just ate at Pastel’s where we have been eating almost every day.  No time to go elsewhere.

I worked until seven thirty then we ran to the storage unit one last time and picked up dinner from Burger King.  The food was stale and bad, though, so we won’t try that again there.  We’ve had very bad luck with fast food here in Peekskill.  Apparently since no one uses it they don’t expend much effort making the food any good.  Dunkin Donuts here has ancient, hard, stale donuts too and doesn’t refresh their coffee.  DD is very big on being inconsistent between franchises and BK is similar with little corporate control.  Not the best way to run chains.  You can’t trust them to be doing a good job even though some do a great job.

Tomorrow morning I work again at eight.  That is the last of my deployments for the year.  The freeze begins on Monday.  Yay!  Tomorrow is a hard core packing and RIT classes day.

Our days are long and boring.  Packing is no fun and we make very little progress between Dominica having to watch Liesl most of the day and I having to work and rip CDs all day we get very little time to get boxes packed and then loaded into the car and driven over to the storage unit.  This is going to take forever even though we can see progress happening at a good clip.  I suppose once we have the books in the basement out of the way we will see things change very rapidly.  Those are the single largest item to be packed and are by far the heaviest items so they take forever.  Load after load to the storage unit is just my books and my back and right knee are none too happy about me carrying all of them.  Once the boxes are larger and lighter maybe the whole process will accelerate and we will be doing okay.  In two days, I estimate, I will also be done with the CD transfers and then I will have that extra time to put into traditional packing too.

Ah, the first day of being able to write SGL with everything being completely up to date.  No pressure to think back trying to figure out what happened on what day.  No worrying that people won’t know what is going on.  This is good.  Progress, real progress.

I ended up being up super late last night working on SGL and the CD transfers.  There was just too much to do and I was getting too much work done to quit while I was ahead.  It was after four when I finally managed to head off to bed.

I ended up sleeping in a bit late this morning as I was pretty tired, as you can imagine.  I awoke to about an inch or an inch and a half of light snow everywhere.  We had some snow yesterday but just a dusting.  We got a nice blanket during the night and it really looks like “Christmas” now.  Liesl was really happy looking at the upstairs window this morning.

Back to packing again this morning.  Packing and ripping CDs.  What a lot of work there is to do.  The boxes are piling up in the living room to be carried out to the car.  Dominica worked on buying us a car top carrier to mount on top of the X3 so that we would have room to take clothes and stuff that we need down to Texas.  With Liesl and Oreo taking up the entire back seat of the X3 and their paraphernalia taking up most of the spare space in the car we do not have any space anywhere to use for actually taking anything with us.  That is rather a significant problem.  We are going to be going down to little more than just our two laptops and nothing else for quite a long time!  That is not going to be fun at all.  These next several months are going to be focused on work, house hunting and college.

No real news to report.  We packed.  We went to the storage unit.  I’m glad that we got as much space as we did.  Just putting the boxes in there is taking up a lot of space and all we are really doing at this point is the books and similar items from the basement.  We certainly will not fill the entire space but we are taking up a lot of room and because of the weight of many of the items we cannot fill the space very deeply so it sprawls quickly.

Today begins the real packing portion now that the basic logistics of our move have been organized.  We had the boxes ready for our first load to the storage unit pretty early today.  Dominica did a ton of cleaning today and quite a bit yesterday too getting ready for the inspection by the real estate agents today.  They are scheduled for a little before lunch.

I also began doing CD transfers today.  There is limited time and I have a ton of stuff that I want to get done before I drive the Mazda up to dad’s house next week to drop it off.  I am going to load it to the hilt, if possible, to get stuff away from Peekskill. The plan is, loosely, that Brian and I are driving to Pavilion on Tuesday night.  Then going to Toronto on Wednesday morning and working in Toronto all day.  Then Wednesday night we are kicking off SpiceCorps Toronto.  Then crashing with Antoni.  Then driving back to Pavilion super early on Thursday morning.  On Thursday afternoon it is Amtrak from Rochester to Croton-Harmon.  I haven’t taken the Lake Shore Limited in quite some time and I am looking forward to the trip.  The tickets were just $51 which is pretty good for a trip so long.  It is going to be exhausting but all stuff that just has to be done.  The Mazda has to be delivered to dad’s place and the rest just makes sense once we are making the trip.

It was a busy work morning and I was just loading up the X3 when Cindy and the other agents arrived to take a look at the house.  Overall they seemed to be pretty happy with the state of things and did not seem to be too concerned with our ability to sell it.  There are concerns, of course, but they did not make it seem like it might be as bad as we have feared that it might be.  But we will see.  It could very easily be very bad.  There really is no way to know.

I worked for a while more and then we all ran out to go to lunch down at Pastel’s.  There is no food in the house really and we are not going to be doing any real grocery shopping as one of our goals is to get the house as empty as possible.  There are only a few meals left to be eaten here.

We hit the grocery store for bottled water and soy milk.  Then back to the house.  I wrapped up working and then we took a drive to the storage unit so that Dominica could see it and I dropped off the first full load of stuff.  Just that one load and already the house is looking much better.  This is very encouraging that we are going to be able to make real progress really quickly.

This evening Liesl climbed the basement stairs the entire way, all by herself!  I was there to catch her, of course, but she just climbed right up.  She is getting so big so quickly!

We tried to watch a movie this evening but there were so many interruptions that I gave up on it.  Dominica had made a chicken pot pie for dinner that I was able to eat.  She watched some movie with Jeff Daniels and Lauren Graham but I don’t know the name of it.  It wasn’t too bad but not gripping enough for me to worry about the fact that I was missing pretty much all of it.

I got a ton of work done tonight on CD ripping.  There are two massive bins of CDs here that need to be ripped and it is a very manual process that is going to take up a lot of time.  I only have a few days in which to get it done so I am doing all that I can to make good progress on it.  At the rate that I am going I will easily complete the first bin tomorrow and should even manage a start on the second.  Once those bins are out of here the living room will clean up a lot.

I am very excited that, for the first time in about a month, SGL is now completely up to date!

Tomorrow we are just home doing more packing.  I am planning to make at least two runs to the storage unit.