Sheep Guarding Llama

This morning was a crazy cleaning morning.  Tons to be done.  My dad is coming to visit early this afternoon and then later on today my grandparents and my aunt Gayle are coming in from Ohio to stay for the weekend.  This will be their only chance to ever seen where we live before we move to Texas so we want to get the house in order as much as possible before they arrive.  So stuff was going up to the attic, new wall decorations were being put up, lots of general cleaning, etc.

It is Saturday so I had office work to do as usual.  I helped Dominica clean when I could but was stuck in the basement for much of the day.  That did give us a chance to do some serious basement cleaning, though, and the basement is looking so much better than it ever has.

I also kept up, as much as possible, with DVD conversions.  I am trying as hard as possible to get a complete bin of DVDs prepared for dad to take back with him for storage.  I only have a small number ready at this point.  It is probably going to be a small load this time.

Dad left from Pavilion at eight thirty this morning and arrived in Peekskill at around a quarter until three.  His drive went pretty well.  His car is really, really loaded.  He has discovered how to remove his rear seat so he is able to really pack the stuff in now.

The Ohioans arrived in Peekskill around six.  They had some problems finding their hotel and called to say that they were lost and it turned out that there were in Buchanan – right at the exit where we were intended to get dinner with them at the Westchester Diner!  How perfect.  They could see the Westchester Diner when they called.  So we had them just pull over and wait for us there.  Then we drove down and met them for dinner.  That really worked out well.  It was actually easier than having them go to the hotel first.

I got a great picture of grandma Myers holding Liesl in the parking lot of the Westchester Diner in Buchanan. This was taken with my BlackBerry right as we all got out of the cars.

Almost everyone got the beer battered fish for dinner.  Grandma and grandpa thought that the fish looked like too much food and decided that they would just get “small” fried fish sandwiches, ha.  Those sandwiches ended up being two enormous slabs of fish each making the sandwiches actually larger than the fish dinner.  Everyone had a great time hanging out with Liesl who was in a really good mood today.

We had a chance to break our big news at dinner that we are moving to Texas (we think… not official yet.)  My grandparents and my aunt had not heard yet since they had been traveling since we found out ourselves.  So they were pretty surprised to learn that we would be leaving Westchester possibly very soon.  This also made them very, very glad that they had decided to come visit us now and to see Liesl while they had the chance since once we move to Texas it will be nearly impossible for them to come visit us and our schedule will make it difficult to get out to Ohio although we will have an opportunity to stop there anytime that we are driving back and forth between dad’s place and Texas or between our “summer home” and Texas wherever our summer home ends up being.

Speaking of being thankful – today while cleaning we decided to throw out the little railroad vignette “layout” that we did to learn some new modeling techniques.  It is not a working railroad and we are never likely to put it on to any sort of display and there is no way for us to use it as a part of some other layout.  It was a chance to learn some modeling and it was perfect for that.  It was many hours of work and rather expensive and turned out pretty well so it has been really tempting to keep it and for the last several months we have.  It would also have been nice to have kept it just because it was a memento of some of the time that we spent during Liesl’s early months.  But it is incredibly impractical so I just marched it out to the dumpster this morning and said goodbye.  It seemed pretty strange to be throwing out the best model train layout that I had ever actually seen in person, but it had to be done.  When we thew it out, though, it occurred to us how blessed we were that one thing after another had kept us from getting to work on the real train layout that we had already invested a lot of money, hundreds of dollars, into parts for.  This one that we threw out was far less than one hundred dollars of investment and was not a running railroad.  But what we have purchased so far is three or four hundred dollars of parts that, when assembled, should be a full working railroad layout of decent size (for a starter railroad) with more than a dozen buildings and lots of details.  Had we started even the most minute portion of that project – from base work to building assembly – we would pretty much be unable to ship any of it to Texas.  As it is everything is still in boxes, bags and bottles and can be shipped easily on the truck when it goes.  So all model railroading is now on indefinite hold until we get to Texas and not just to Texas but to our “final” house there.

After dinner I drove the Ohioans up to the Peekskill Inn and got them situated there.  While they were settling into their room Dominica, dad, Liesl and I drove out to Cold Stone Creamery to pick up the ice cream cupcakes for everyone that Dominica had wanted for her birthday.  Then back to the motel to pick everyone up so that they could come back to our place and see the house.

We hung out at our house until pretty late.  Around eleven.  Then Dominica and I drove everyone back to the motel and came home and pretty much called it a night at that point.  Dominica has a really early morning ahead of her.  Tomorrow is our ninety day mark before our Disney trip and that means that all of our food plans have to be made and booked early tomorrow morning if we want first pick of the restaurants.  So both Dominica and Francesca have to be up really early in the morning to do the food bookings as the reservations open at around six in the morning our time here on the east coast and that means that they are at five in the morning for Francesca.  They are going to be really tired tomorrow.

Tomorrow should, in theory, be a light day for me and we will get to spend the day visiting.  Everyone is heading home on Monday morning or possibly Monday early afternoon in dad’s case.  Dad is staying with us rather than at the Peekskill Inn with the Ohioans.

The Peekskill Inn is really working out well for them as it is so close to us.  Once they saw how difficult it is to get around in this area with the winding streets and heavy tree cover blocking all distance sight they were really happy to be so close that we could easily drive them to and from our house.  Without us being able to do that this would have been a much more stressful trip for them, I think.

Everyone has been having a great time hanging out with little Liesl.  And she is having a great time being the center of attention yet again.  She is still avoiding the “fear of strangers” phase and continues to just love everyone including family as well as strangers that she meets when we take her out to restaurants or shopping.

Today is Dominica’s thirty first birthday!

Dominica and I (and our families too, I imagine) are still in a bit of shock surrounding the whole “moving to Texas” thing.  We are now desperately attempting to plan, as much as possible, for what to do next.  We are still in the process of moving to Peekskill!  There is a ton of stuff left at dad’s house that needs to come down.  He is bringing another massive load of stuff, including furniture, tomorrow.  We are thinking that we need to get stuff down to Peekskill still as we will plan to move all at once from here to Texas.  So emptying dad’s place is still the order of the day and will still take many more trips.  Perhaps I need to drive up there with the X3 and get another major load in addition to the loads that he is able to bring by car down.

We are trying to figure out what housework makes sense to do and what makes sense to skip.  We had almost begun investing in updating the kitchen.  We had been out pricing new cabinets and granite counter tops and had been planning on carpeting the basement walls and painting more rooms!  The cabling is mostly done but now the cables to the upstairs rooms will definitely be skipped.  Now our biggest job is going to be repacking everything that was just unpacked and getting it ready to go.  We won’t pack most things but anything that was about to be unpacked will definitely stay the way that it is.  It is also time to start seriously thinning out our possessions.   We want to have as little “extra” going to Texas as possible.  This is the real time to get down to the bare essentials.

In addition to the obvious things there is now an increase in the pressure to get all of the DVDs and CDs converted and onto the big NAS device.  Anything that is not converted will have to be shipped to Texas with us and then shipped back to New York for long term storage.  Not a good plan at all.  So the project to get them all converted is going to be kicked into an even higher gear, if that is even possible, so that we can wrap it up before we go.  I doubt that we can actually complete it all before we have to go but there are a lot of variables so I am going to give it my best shot at the very least.  Dad is bringing hundreds of DVDs and CDs tomorrow so I will have a lot with which to keep myself quite busy.

With everything that has been going on Dominica decided that she did not want anything big for her birthday as anything that she would have wanted would be things that we would have to ship and the last thing that we want to do is to ship anything more than is absolutely necessary down south so all of our unnecessary purchasing is on complete hold.  So instead I took her out for lunch and took her shopping this afternoon.  It is Friday so it is a really busy work day for me but with everything going on at the office this week there is a bit of consideration for everyone’s lives being thrown into upheaval and since I work so late it isn’t that big of a deal to take some time this afternoon.  Not to mention that I didn’t book an entire day’s worth of hours last week to save until this week because I did so much work.

We went to Pastel’s for lunch.  Then we drove out to Cold Stone to get Dominica some ice cream for dessert.  She really wanted ice cream cupcakes for her “birthday cake” but everyone is coming to celebrate her birthday tomorrow so we are going to do that tomorrow instead.  While we were there the sky turned quite dark.  I am guessing that this is the storm from hurricane Bill which is just beginning to hit Long Island.

We did some quick shopping at Walmart but nothing special.  Mostly just some stuff that we needed.  Not fun birthday stuff.  While we were in Walmart we could hear the pounding of the incredibly heavy rain on the roof but it stopped by the time that we went outside again.

We hit Best Buy but discovered that they don’t have anything in which we are interested.  Buying movies or music there is far too expensive thanks to Amazon’s prices and there are no electronics that we need (we would buy them from Amazon too, most likely.  So we were there for not very long.

Then we went shopping at Kohl’s.  Dominica picked out a bunch of house decoration stuff that she wanted.  Even though we are holding off on buying most stuff the house decoration stuff is important as we are preparing the house to be sold sometime within the next year and a half and having it look nice is really important.  So we are continuing with items that we are confident will look nice and will transfer to Texas well.

After Kohl’s we did get caught out in the rain but it was not too bad.  It was getting late and I had to get back to the office.  It was a nice afternoon outing though and Dominica enjoyed it.

I worked until almost eight.  Then we called Ruchi’s and ordered some Indian take away that I agreed to go pick up.  They do not deliver and Dominica did not want to go out.  So this was my dinner treat for her.

I ran to Stop and Shop and picked up a small birthday cake, yellow cake with lemon pudding, so that Dominica would have a real cake for her birthday.  I also grabbed some basic supplies like tonic water.  Then I went to Ruchi’s to pick up dinner.  I learned that the owner is a computer science professor and department chair at Mercy College in Dobbs Ferry here in Westchester County.  They have a new IT/CIS program there that is in need of professors.  This would be a most perfect opportunity for me and now, of course, we are moving away.  Horrible timing there.  I have been wanting to be involved as a part time professor or lecturer for quite some time.  That is one of my career goals.  He did advise me against obtaining my Ph.D. as he really felt, and I agree, that it will have no career benefits for me.  He has a Ph.D. but went back to school for a masters before teaching in CS.

Dominica and I had dinner and watched Princess Protection Program.  We had seen almost all of it before with Madeline and Emily over the summer but neither of us had managed to see the entire thing or to really get a hold of the plot.  It’s a cute movie but with some serious plot problems.  The movie makes no sense whatsoever, especially the ending which I think that Disney would see as cute but both Dominica and I saw as the lead character abandoning her people for whom she fought for the entire movie almost immediately after all of the work that they showed in the film so that she could become a secret agent with her friend instead of being their queen.  I guess we can assume that she sold the country to the evil general who was trying to take it over during the movie?  It made no sense at all.  I really have no idea what Disney was attempting to imply with the absurd ending that was tacked on like an afterthought.  It would be roughly the equivalent to Princess Leia fighting for the rebellion for two Star Wars movies and then, completely disconnected from the storyline, having her at the end of the final movie suddenly shown as playing beach volleyball for the evil emperor’s Olympic team.  What?

This morning started uneventfully.  Got up, started working for a few hours.  Nothing special.  Seemed like it would be a completely normal day.

There was a big conference call at work today.  Normally I skip any of these big organizational calls as they are always just for the employees and have no meaning to a consultant but today’s seemed like it might apply to me as well so I attempted to get on to the call.  There was some problem with the phones and I could not get on.  I am assuming because too many people were dialed in and the system was saturated.

As soon as the call was done I got an instant message from Antoni – our entire organization within the company is being relocated to Dallas (Irving, actually.)   This isn’t a warning this is the announcement.  It’s happening.  Most of us had not even heard the slightest rumblings of anything like this.  Completely out of the blue this came.  I had absolutely no idea that this might even be considered.

So today went from drab to panic in an instant.  Luckily a second conference call was set up just for our smaller “family” within the organization that would have our higher ups giving us some more direct information.  I was sure to get on to that one right away before there were any problems with the phone lines.

The basics of the call were that we don’t have any really solid information yet except for these things: the team functions are being relocated to Irving and none of our job functions like we do now will remain in the New York or Toronto areas where we have always been based, all jobs are being redefined so there is no carry-through of our current roles to any new ones and we all have to get our resumes ready and reapply for our current jobs (they aren’t officially our current jobs so technically they call it applying for new jobs as our old ones have gone away.)  There are some jobs staying in New York City but they are new roles that are very much unlike what we do today and there are not very many of them.  It will be roughly six weeks before the new job roles are officially posted and until then we are all just going to sit in the dark wondering what is going to happen.  No guarantees that we will have jobs in the new set of roles so we are left rather “hanging” until they get that done.  Then it will take some weeks before they make decisions.  So the final decisions, if they manage to stay on their own schedule, will likely be around late October or early November.  That is a really long time to wait just to find out if we have jobs or in want region of the country.

The mood at the office is, understandably, a mix between panic and depression.  Most people on the team have never seen Texas and those that have mostly are not too happy about having to move there.  This is not a small move and no one is getting relocation assistance – we have to apply for the jobs in Texas as if we were Texans and then move ourselves down there.  That makes it that much more scary.  Most everyone has well established lives in the New York and New Jersey areas so this is a major change.

Luckily for Dominica, Liesl and I we have been talking about Texas for several weeks really seriously and our families are already prepared for us to move down there and we have lots of family there already as well.  Not the move for us that it will be for everyone else.  But we have a new house that we have been in for under a year and now have to figure out how to sell quickly in a bad economy.  It is going to be tough.  The Lord will watch over us, of course, but we are going to be worrying about it anyway because we can’t help it.

We have been in the house for nine months and the move cannot possibly happen until December at the earliest which puts us at around fourteen months in the house which is not nearly as bad and, in reality, December is probably really, really early because big companies can’t turn around on things like that that quickly.  And at this point we have no idea if I am even eligible for a position down in Texas or if I would want one if it was offered.  There are some positions in New York but they do not sound very good, but we do not have any details on those either.  Basically we completely in the dark and the only thing that we know is that we need to “batten down the hatches” and prepare for the worst and we need to stop doing any work on our house because we have to assume that we have to sell it rather quickly.

It is really awful to think about all of the work that has gone into the house already (I’m sure that my dad is really thinking about all of that painting that has been done already!)  And the cabling that we just did the last few days!  We have been buying cable and other stuff for the house just this week.  We have furniture in our basement den meant for our “new” theatre room which we have never installed and now never will.  We have now purchased that furniture just for the joy of packing it up and shipping it somewhere if we end up going to Texas.  Dad has just finally gotten the bulk of our stuff down from his place too and another load is scheduled for this coming weekend.  We are scrambling to figure out what to do about all of our stuff in storage.  Where should it go now?

I’m sure that everyone on my team at work is getting their resumes sent out in droves.  Since the company is requiring everyone to have an up-to-date resume in order to apply to stay where they are even the laziest and most reserved people will have it all ready to go and, once you do that much work, you send it out.  Especially when not sending it out could very easily mean a lay off, taking a completely different job role and/or being relocated at your own expense halfway across the country.  There is a lot of fear in the air.

I only had so much time to worry about it today, though, as this evening is SpiceCorps Philadelphia’s inaugural event in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania.  For that I left Peekskill at four in the afternoon and drove down across New Jersey in horrible traffic.  It took me three hours to get down to Blue Bell – much longer than anticipated.

SpiceCorps Philadelphia had a nice turnout.  We had a great meeting space provided for us at Turnberry Solutions and nine people showed up for the event. That was about the same size as the Upstate New York event in Rochester.  It was a good group and the meeting went well.  Definitely less discussion than we’ve seen in other groups but with fewer people that can happen easily.

I gave a quick presentation on open storage and specifically on using the HP Proliant DL185 G5 and OpenFiler appliance for a large NAS / SAN solution.  That went well.  I am giving the same presentation, but with more time to prepare, next week at SpiceCorps NY in Manhattan on Thursday.  I would have had more time to work on it today but recent events rather caught my attention.

After the meeting, four of us went out to Houlihan’s near the place where we had the meeting and got some late dinner.  Stuffed mushrooms and fish tacos for me.

It was just after ten when I headed out for home.  I tried taking the northeast extension rather than the route through New Jersey on i95.  I missed my turn for i78 and ended up taking i80 which, altogether, didn’t get me home until two in the morning!  What a long day.  Hopefully some more information tomorrow.

During my drive today I managed to finish reading, via Audible on my iPod Nano 3G, “The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge” by David McCullough.  I am really glad that I got a chance to read this book while living and working in and around New York City.  That my office is right at the base of this famous NYC landmark makes it that much more special even though I have never driven across it.  I will probably make a point of doing that now before I leave the area.  I would really like to walk across its world famous promenade – still the only one of its type ever made.

I finished the book just before driving across Bear Mountain Bridge into Peekskill.  I did so just after reading the bit where they mentioned that the cables of the Bear Mountain bridge were made by the Roebling Family who also built the great bridge itself.  So much of the history of this particular book intersects with places and bridges that I have grown up around and now live so near.  Roebling the elder (John) did a number of bridges around New York like in Niagara and in Pittsburgh.  All places where I have lived.

My big news for the day is that my latest article, The Small and Medium Business (SMB) Information Technology Vendor Relationship Dilema, was published as the headlining article on Datamation this morning!  This is my first article to be the main headline.

By early afternoon my article was linked from the IBM Tivoli for the Midmarket Community website!  Now there is a compliment.

I am very sad that my first major interview done with Baseline and eWeek magazines in late 2006 was lost.  I never made a copy of it and they reorganized their online publication losing many older articles.  I did find, however, an article from IEEE summarizing the Baseline article which I will be sure to copy this time!  At least there is some record of the article and even a summary.  Who would have thought that a major publication like Baseline would not keep their old articles around!

Three days until Dominica’s birthday and I still have no idea what I am going to get for her.  She refuses to give me any ideas which is not fair at all.

Liesl fell asleep right at noon which caused some problems with our lunch plans.  We waited until she woke up which was around two.  I had gone upstairs to check on her and discovered her just hanging out in her crib already awake hanging out with her Cheer Bear.  This is an important step in development.  She is now happy to hang out on her own.

For lunch we went back to Ruchi in the Beach Shopping Center to check out their lunch buffet.  We are so excited having Indian food in the area again.  We definitely wanted to try the buffet to see how it was.  We were pretty late for lunch so we were, again, the only people eating in the restaurant while we were there.  That is not a good sign, but they have not been open for even a week yet and it will take a while before people in Peekskill really realize that it is there and get used to it as a dining option.

This afternoon and evening we were back into “making cables” mode.  This time we are taking it personally.  Dominica got into “cable building mode” as I worked on other projects while going in between getting cables measured for her and then, once we had enough cables to really start running them, we started running them from the cabling closet out into the rest of the house.

We ran four cables to Dominica’s desk, four to mine, pulled out the CAT6 running upstairs and replaced it with a new, working CAT5e and ran two incredibly long runs into the utility room with the new rack.  We powered down the two remaining servers that were running in the open area of the basement and moved them into the utility room.  Finally the very loud white noise that they produce is not pounding in my ears while sitting down in the office.  This is going to be great.

We tested out the cables and we have working GigE everywhere now.  This will be quite the improvement.  The cables are no longer strewn all across the floor either.  We have everything in the closet going out through the hole that Art had prepared for them.  Now we can finally close the closet door again.  It is like having a whole new basement.  The only things that we have left to do are to put the wall enclose together through which the cables will run next to Dominica’s desk and then to cover up the bundle of cables crossing the floor between our desks.

We also decided, as it was well after midnight when we were finally done, that we were not going to drill the final holes in the utility room tonight for running the cables and will just leave them for tomorrow.  That is the last bit of work remaining and not a big deal to do.

Then it was off to bed happily knowing that the cabling work which has been hanging over our heads for months is finally complete.  What a good feeling.  We are so much happier with our house here in Peekskill with the new paint, window dressings and the basement changes.  It doesn’t feel anything like the townhouse that we bought just nine months ago.