Sheep Guarding Llama

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.

For the next two weeks we are doing nothing but getting ready to move to Texas.  The vacation to Florida is finally over and our lives are getting back to “normal” and we are now able to focus on the things that need to be done.  The first big challenge is to find an apartment.  Yes, it is true, two weeks to go and we have not even called about apartments yet.  I really can’t explain how much of a life disruption this trip to Walt Disney World has been.  Everything in our lives has been completely on hold waiting for that to wrap up.  Now the move to Texas seems quite real and we really need to be on top of it quickly.

Dominica did a ton of work on the apartment stuff this morning.  She called a few places, got details, specs and even had some people go out and take pictures for us.  Once we were pretty sure that we had found a place that we were going to be happy with I emailed my boss and asked him to go over and to take a look to make sure that the place was going to be okay.  It is pretty crappy renting an apartment without ever having gotten to see it yourself first hand but we really do not have that kind of luxury these days.  So we are doing the best that we can.

By early afternoon we had decided on a place right in front of the office in Las Colinas.  It actually shares a driveway with work which is going to be massively convenient.  Parking at the office is horrible and being able to walk will be great.  It is a two bedroom exterior unit.  We have a pool and a coffee shop in the complex.  It looks really nice in pictures so we are hopeful.

The next big challenge is getting a storage unit here in Peekskill.  We have decided that logistically we absolutely have to have someplace where we can take the stuff as it gets packed so that it is out of our way.  We have no idea how long it is going to be before we are able to move from New York to Texas with all of our stuff because so much is dependent upon the sale of our house in New York.  So we are going to store things in New York for now and make the decision on shipping it all to Texas later.

I ran out right at five thirty and made it just at the last second so that I could check out the storage units and pick one up tonight.  We decided that we wanted the luxury of space so we got a 10’x15′ storage unit in town.  That will make life so much easier.  We are both completely relieved having gotten the unit.  Now our plan is to start boxing things up tonight and filling the car with boxes until it is full and then driving over to the storage unit and unloading there.  If all goes well we can do this twice a day.  That will keep all of the boxes out of our way and the house will actually become empty as we go rather than becoming a disaster of storage that is in our way while we try to pack. On my way back from getting the storage unit I swung into Pastel’s and picked up some dinner to go.

We have the additional complication that the house needs to remain basically furnished so that it can be shown by the real estate agent.  This is really tough because if we leave it furnished then we can’t ship that stuff to Texas until the house sells.  If we ship everything to Texas right away it might keep us from being able to sell the house.  We can’t leave the stuff that we pack in the house, though, because that impacts the showing too.  We ran through scenario after scenario and this one was the only one that made the remotest sense.  It isn’t going to be run living with everything that we own being in storage but we just have to do it.  It’s that simple.

After I got back I worked for another two hours or so.  Then I went up into the attic and we got down all of the packing boxes that we had fortunately saved up there so we can begin putting them together and packing everything up. Dominica did some work with Liesl after we were done in the attic with Liesl climbing up and down the stairs.  She was only going a few steps but it is some significant progress.  She walked around a bit this evening as well.  Toddling around the living room getting a feel for this new walking thing that she is doing now.

Then we settled into the living room and officially kicked off the holiday season by watching White Christmas which is the most classic holiday movie ever and never gets old no matter how many times that I have seen it.  Dominica and I have made a point to watch it each and every year before Christmas.

After today we are both feeling much better about everything.  Having an apartment and a storage unit means that we have a plan.  Not much of one, but a plan nonetheless.  Those were the most stressful items that could have caused there to be a real disaster.  They are out of the way and our real estate agent is coming tomorrow to discuss selling and/or renting the house.  Now it is just the packing that needs to be done followed by the cleaning.  We can handle this.  We are seeing the house as more and more manageable chunks.  As long as we keep at it, we should be okay.

So the plan is, more or less, on 19th December we are going to have a small party so that we can clear out all of the remaining alcohol in the house.  We can’t take it with us so we might as well have everyone drink it.

Then we will get onto the road on the 21st or 22nd.  It will take two days of driving, minimum, to get down to Houston.  It is going to be a really long trip since we have Liesl and Oreo in a completely backed car and Dominica is pretty much useless as a second driver because she is asleep the instant that we are in the car, even as a passenger.  So this will be dramatically more difficult than when I drove to Houston with Francesca because she was able to do half of the driving and was awake and actually talking to me when I was driving.  Dominica just nods off and makes it harder to stay away than if I was actually driving alone.

We will be in Houston at least until the 28th of December when our lease begins in Las Colinas.  We are not sure exactly what day we will move in but as we only have the clothes on our backs at that point it might not be for a few more days.  We are not going to be looking forward to a completely bare apartment very much.

Then we have the apartment for six months, until the first of July.  Our hope is that the house will have sold by that point and we can start looking for a permanent home in Texas.  Either way we will have had time to have found a more long term location at the very least and should have a better handle on our situation.