Sheep Guarding Llama

Today is Sunday, midday on my three day weekendish kind of thing.  Today and tomorrow we are mixing our time between just relaxing and spending time together as a family and getting things ready for my trip on Tuesday.  For the most part everything is ready.  Dominica really has the packing all planned and there is very little left in flux.  At this point I can pretty much just run off to the airport and away I go.

Today Liesl said “Hi” and waved hello for the very first time!  She is rapidly moving into a “talking” mode.  It is really neat to see her start acting like she is having conversations and she is definitely interacting with us more and more conversationally.  She has “hi”, “bye bye”, “dada”, “mama” and “more” now under her belt.

I know that this week is incredibly light in my posts.  Not much to be done about that.  Stay tuned as I expect there to be a lot of posting once I am off to Germany.

It’s Saturday and that means that my long, real vacation has semi-formally begun.  I don’t have any more “real” work before my trip to Europe.  I do have to work on Tuesday which is, more or less, a regular work day – a work day in which I leave work slightly early to go straight to the airport to fly away from North America for a week! Yay!  Can you tell that I am excited.

This is my weekend to relax and prepare for the trip.  There is nothing stressful left to prepare before traveling.  Dominica has already done all of the necessary packing and I am going to be going with just two bags – both carry-ons.  I am traveling very light on this trip.  More than half of everything that I am taking is not even clothing or toiletry related.  I am carrying the new Nikon D90 which takes up a ton of space with the mammoth new lens, Dominica’s laptop as mine is unable to read the new high density SD cards that I need and the CPAP.  In fact, the entire second bag is devoted just to the CPAP and its associated paraphernalia.  It is amazing what a pain it is having to have a CPAP when traveling and how much of a concern it is that something might happen to it.

The last thing that I need for the trip is my German phrase book which is due to arrive on Tuesday just in time to head off to the airport.  There is every possibility that it won’t make it in time which will be a big pain and result in my buying one at the airport or someplace else while on the trip. 🙁  Hopefully that doesn’t happen.  Just one more annoying thing at that point.

Yesterday our “Insider’s Guide to Austin” arrived from Amazon.  This is our first book for us to prepare for our relocation to Texas.  We need to start learning about the area so that we can make some useful decisions.

I got to work right away this morning and wrapped up all of the scheduled work really quickly.  Then Dominica, Liesl and I went to the Westchester Diner for an early lunch.  We love their veggie burgers their and the cheese cake.

I spent some time this afternoon working on the new camera.  I have not gotten the GPS unit to work yet and wanted to be sure that it was going to work when I was in Europe.  It didn’t take too much to get the Nikon reading satellites and adding GPS data to the EXIF and it only took a minor change to get Flickr to accept the data.  Very cool.

I took a few pictures of Liesl today and a few walking around Chapel Hill just to see if the GPS was working.  Can’t wait to be posting from Europe in a few days!

It’s Friday.  It’s a Friday going in to a three day Labor Day weekend so today is pretty slow at work.  It’s great.  Not only is today a relatively slow day but I actually have the weekend basically off – I am still doing some work tomorrow and covering on Sunday and unable to travel on Monday because I am the on-call for the team but that’s okay because there is going to be hardly any work this weekend and then on Tuesday I get to hop on a plane and leave North America behind for a week!

After a full day of work Dominica and I ordered in some Italian for dinner and relaxed for a little bit while I worked on and off throughout the night as I often do on Fridays.  While we watched The Suite Life with Zak and Cody via Netflix I did some work on finding a hotel in Osnabruck, Germany which I desperately need for my upcoming trip.

It took several hours of looking but I finally came up with a hotel that appears to meet my needs as best as anything can when I am booking in a country in which I have never been before and only have a vague idea of what I am going to be doing on this trip.  I found a place that seemed modern and nice, has Internet access and is not going to break the bank.  In fact the price really turned out to be quite great.

So I am all set for the days that I am staying in Germany now.  Now I am only in need of a single night hotel for my final night in Amsterdam.  That and I need to figure out exactly what I have to do with trains to get from the Amsterdam airport to the train station and then out to Osnabruck’s train station and then to the hotel.

I am really amazed by how inexpensively this trip is turning out to be.  The flights are $535 round trip after taxes and fees and the hotel is just $360 for the week.  That’s about $900 and all I need is one more hotel night.  So the “trip infrastructure” is going to be roughly $1,000 USD which is pretty amazing for six full days in some of the most expensive countries around (Germany and The Netherlands.)  Just need to pay for trains and food beyond that.

I was somewhat surprised that there appears to be nothing going on while I am there around the two thousandth anniversary of the Battle of Teutoburger Wald.  Given the importance globally of this battle it seems strange to me that there just seems to be nothing going on.  I’m not aware of a single event being planned.  I guess I will find out when I get there.

This whole week is pretty much just going to be some super short and sweet updates.  I have been way too busy to have anything interesting happen.  I’ve been working quite a bit and when not working trying to spend every spare moment with Liesl.  I am going to be missing time with her for an entire week coming up so I am trying to get as much time with her as possible.

I worked quite steadily all day.  Dominica did some cleaning when she had some spare time.  We have dinner plans with Katie tonight.  We have been trying to get together for an Indian dinner for a week or so and are finally managing to get together tonight.

Katie caught the six fifteen train out of Grand Central.  That put her in Peekskill about ten after seven.  Having her come straight up to Peekskill after work works out really well timing wise for all of us.  I picked her up at the station then swung back through to grab Dominica and Liesl before going down to the Beach Shopping Center to go to Ruchi’s.

Dinner at Ruchi’s was good as always.  We got the appetizer sampler and a dosa to split.  Then we all got curry for dinner.

After dinner we were all very much in the mood for ice cream so we went to Cold Stone in Yorktown Heights.  Yummy.  I’m loving their banana pudding special flavour for the peanut butter cup thing that they do.  Katie got one of their ice cream cupcakes as she is a cupcake fanatic and was interested in trying these out.

We hung out at the house for maybe forty-five minutes after dessert before Katie and I left to drive her back home down to Nyack.  It’s not a bad drive at night and I have never seen her apartment before so I got a quick tour and got to see Dudley for a minute.

It was bedtime by the time that I got back home to Peekskill.  Dominica had already gone to bed by the time that I got back.

Wednesday, wow, where is this week going?  I am not even noticing the days fly by.  There has just been so much work that the week has blended into one really long day.  Today was so busy that I didn’t even Tweet today.  So today’s post is quick and simple.  Too busy – will catch up with everyone tomorrow.

I worked until two in the morning again tonight.  Going to be tired again tomorrow.