Sheep Guarding Llama

It seems hard to believe after having crashed at dad’s house for an entire week after returning from Florida but today we are finally returning home to Peekskill!  We got up this morning and Dominica worked on packing the car while I made sure that everything was all set with work for me to be on the road some of the day. We had hoped to have been up and on the road much earlier than we actually were but just getting out of Pavilion seems to be a miracle.

Dad drove separately from us and we all met down at Brian’s USA Diner in Mt. Morris which is on the way home.  We ate breakfast and then hit the road.  We made a quick stop at the Rite Aid in Mt. Morris to pick up a car charger for the BlackBerrys as, somehow, we cannot find ours at the moment.

The drive back down to Peekskill went okay.  Dominica was on my BlackBerry most of the way making sure that work did not need me.  At one point, of course as we went through the middle of nowhere, I did need to work so we had to drive to Liberty, New York and stop at the McDonald’s there.  It was convenient, in a way, since we were both a little hungry.  So I bought some WiFi access and worked from my laptop in McDonald’s for an hour or so.  We ate and it was a nice break.  Then back onto the road again.

It was late afternoon and dark when we finally pulled into the house in Peekskill.  Having been away from the house for more than four weeks in the last month and a half and knowing that we are moving to soon has really allowed us to distance ourselves from the house and to stop thinking of it as home.  It feels like nothing more than a short term apartment now.  That is very sad, in a way.  This is a house that we owned.  A house that we bought for Liesl.  Liesl’s very first home and the only one that she has ever known, at this point.  We are leaving so soon that there is very little chance that she will ever remember the house where she did so much of her early growing up.  Including learning to walk, which she did tonight.

We pretty much just relaxed this evening.  We did some work but mostly just light unpacking.  We are pretty tired.  There is so much to be done.  Tomorrow the real work begins.  There is no more avoiding it.

This evening, while hanging out with Dominica and I in the living room, Liesl suddenly just walked across the living room.  Fifteen steps on her first attempt!  She did really well.  She is going to be on a rampage now.  She had taken one step from her grandmother to me while in Disney World and then one or two nights later took two steps while playing with Madeline but they were all just isolated steps.  This was real walking.

Today is the fifth full day at dad’s house for Dominica, Liesl and I.  Oreo has been here for several weeks.  I think that we are beginning to overstay our welcome 😉

I was scheduled to work a few hours this morning but it ended up turning into a major, all day affair.  So the plans for going out to eat fell through and I ended up working more than an entire day!  I can’t complain, though.  We most definitely need any overtime that I am able to get these days.  This move to Texas is going to be insanely expensive and if we can’t get the house in New York sold we are going to be scraping for every penny that we can find.

After work was finally done I focused on my coursework for RIT.  My first week of work is due today so I was scrambling to get everything done tonight for the entire week because the class closes at midnight tonight.  The class is set up to not allow any work on Sundays.  We get new work on Monday morning and it is due by Saturday at midnight.  So Sundays are just off.  That is good for me but generally a bad practice for online courses as all of those people who have only the weekend to get work done have it really tough unnecessarily when the classes could be much more flexible.

I am really grateful to be back in classes again.  After this class I will be exactly halfway through my master’s degree.  I am really looking forward to having it done.  There is a lot left to do but it does not seem to be all that bad.  This class is sounding like it is going to be fun.

After everything was done, Dominica, Liesl, Dad and I settled into the den to watch Night at the Museum 2: Battle of the Smithsonian on DVD.  None of us had seen this movie yet so it worked out really well.  I don’t think that it was as good as the original but it was cute and entertaining and you can’t go wrong with Hank Azaria.

Off to bed somewhat earlier tonight.  Tomorrow morning the car absolutely has to be packed and we have to be on the road back to Peekskill.  There is no more buffer time and we just have to be there working on getting ready for Texas.

Well we are still here.  Once day at a time we are deciding that it just makes sense for us to be staying here.  Today is Friday and tonight I have my late night deployments so by deciding to stay until today we have committed to staying until the weekend because there is no time for us to get into the car and drive until tomorrow afternoon at the very earliest.

Today I realized that I had forgotten to sign up for classes at RIT for the winter semester!  Oops.  I contacted the graduate studies department and asked if they would be able to get me into anything.  They checked and had two classes available.  The first class was the last class in my software development sequence.  With everything that we have going on right at the moment, that seemed like a bad idea.  So I went with the other option which was Clinical Information Systems which is the first class in my Healthcare Information Systems sequence and far less intensive – we hope.

I got all signed up for class today and got my access to the online systems re-established.  My class itself failed to activate today.  I am hopeful that it will activate tomorrow since class has already been running for a week and this weekend will be the end of the week and I do not want to be that late for class.  I would email my professor today except that I do not know who my professor is until the system lets me in.

I worked all evening and then, after work was done and dad had gone to bed, Dominica and I stayed up and watched Star Trek XI which is just now out.  Dominica and not seen it yet and I had only seen it on the Aer Lingus flight returning from Dublin to New York.  I had thought that I was buying it on BluRay from the Amazon Black Friday sale but somehow they switched it on me (I only search for BluRays but sometimes they sneak other things into the list) and I ended up with a crappy DVD which they were trying to unload.  We decided that we only cared so much and decided to just keep this and Night at the Museum 2: Battle of the Smithsonian even though they are just DVD.  DVD is easier for us to store right at the moment and we only really care about having Star Trek on BluRay and night Museum 2 so it is really not very important.

Dominica really liked Star Trek.  I had thought that it was quite good too when I first saw it.  I can see several things that are not surprising that other people did not like it but I think that the concept is good and the new cast is far superior to the original.

It is Thursday.  Originally we had planned to be back to Peekskill by yesterday at the latest.  I guess not.  We are really dreading all of the packing and cleaning and decision making that has to happen as soon as we are back in Peekskill so we are avoiding it as much as possible.

First thing this morning I got up early and did some work so that we would be able to drive over to Geneseo and get breakfast at the Omega Grill right away.  That worked out pretty well.  Dad had his early morning breakfast club meeting over there and had gone over at seven thirty.  I was up then and able to go but Liesl was still asleep so we had to wait for her to wake up.  Dad’s group was over just as Liesl woke up so Dominica and I ran over and met dad there.  He had second breakfast while we ate our first.

After breakfast Dominica and I swung into Tim Horton’s in Geneseo to pick up some delicious Canadian blended coffee.  Then it was back to dad’s so that I could get back to work.  It was a busy work day for me so very little to update here.

This evening I did an update of a remote access server from OpenSuse 11.1 to OpenSuse 11.2.  What is really cool about this new version is that it is the first version that allows you to do a “live, hot update” of one in-place OS version to another.  That makes it really nice so you don’t need to go do a completely fresh install.  The update using the command line zypper utility worked flawlessly and the only thing that I had to do manually was install the FreeNX package that we use.  Once I did that we had everything back and working great in no time.

We decided that we were getting a lot of work done at dad’s house and that it would make sense for us to stay just a little bit longer. So we are not going back to Peekskill until tomorrow evening.  We are spending our time going through the stuff that we have packed away at dad’s and decided what should be kept and what should not.  This move to Texas is our serious opportunity to thin out our possessions as much as possible and only take those things that really matter.  Having to move things so far and to do so going to a temporary apartment before having a house again (if we ever really do get to have a house again) makes it so much of a pain to move things that we are far more willing to just give things up than we were previously.

I spent the day working.  Today at noon I had a webinar from Red Hat on Red Hat Clustering technologies that was pretty interesting.  I have never really worked with clustering too much.  I have some at work but it is never a focus of what we do.  I am thinking that I need to build a cluster or two to have running all of the time so that I can get a bit more soup to nuts experience on them.  That would probably be valuable, although in this day and age of failover virtualization systems clustering is rapidly losing its core market.

Aunt Sharon and Uncle Leo came over today to see Liesl in the early afternoon.  I was still on the call when they came over.  I did not, as usual, get much time to visit with anyone as I was stuck working.  We were originally talking about going somewhere for lunch today but because of my schedule we decided that it would make more sense to just order pizza from Davis’ Farm Market in Pavilion and eat at the house.  That saves time and makes it far more easy for the family to visit.

This evening, at around seven thirty when Liesl woke up from a long nap, Dominica, Liesl and I ran over to Livonia to visit with the Millens.  It has been forever since we have seen them.  It has been about two years since Dominica saw them and about three years since I have seen them.  They have had two children born since the last time that I saw them!

We stayed for about three hours and had coffee and ate Eric’s peanut butter blast cookies.  It was great to get to see them and Liesl had a great time playing with the kids.  Liesl and Elijah are almost exactly the same age, Liesl being younger but about six weeks.  Liesl was very excited as she never has children to play with and when she does they are almost never her age except for Landen.

We got back to dad’s around eleven. Time for some more work and then eventually off to bed.  We are still sleeping with Dominica and Liesl in the guest bedroom and Oreo and I sleeping in the television room, or den, on a futon mattress laying on the floor which is surprisingly comfortable.