August 21, 2009: Dominica’s Birthday and Big Cleaning Day

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?

August 20, 2009: Moving to Texas

I spent the whole of this morning and early afternoon eagerly awaiting some amount of solid news about what is happening at work.  I’m pretty good at dealing with disasters but I am exceptionally poor at handling “pending decisions.”  It is less of the unknown but more of the “known, but no one will fill me in.”  If there is truly an unknown then there is good risk mitigation planning to be done.  But when we are just waiting for someone with the information to give it to us then we are caught in a state of just treading water waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Today we simply play the waiting game.  Not the best situation for getting a lot of sleep.  Although getting in at two in the morning doesn’t allow for a lot of sleep anyway.  It actually worked out well being my late night out in addition to being a night of getting poor sleep.  I was not likely to have gone to bed and gotten any good sleep anyway.  At least I made productive use of my awake time.

At two thirty this afternoon we finally got some additional information to help clarify the situation both in terms of what was definitely happening as well as what options there were and what was likely happening.  There is a ton of stuff up in the air but at this point we have a pretty likely scenario that is going to play out and we know what our role is going to be in that scenario if it all comes to fruition.

So, this is the likely scenario going forward.  Sometime no sooner than December and most likely in the first half of next year (2010) we will be relocating to Texas instead of New York.  The job options and future potential look to be far better in Texas than they do in New York and the work environment looks to be better there as well before we even take into account any tax and pay advantages or housing cost benefits.

Most likely we are going to be living in Austin, not Irving.  Our plan is to buy a house in Austin after we have rented just long enough to learn our way around and to figure out where in town in makes the most sense for us to be living.  We are not looking to buy in Austin as a short term plan like we did in Geneseo or in Peekskill but this is a long term, strategic plan where we intend to keep this house for a very long time.  This will be the location that we call “home” for the foreseeable future.  We have never bought with that intention previously so we are hopeful that this will pan out.  This in no way implies our intention to live and work solidly in Texas for forever but simply that we are finally in a position to have a “base of operations” from which to reach out and live the rest of our lives.  We need at least a certain amount of space and stuff in our lives to be unmoving instead of having everything that we own traveling with us from house to apartment to house, etc.

We do not know too much else at this point and none of this is official.  The office has not officially posted any job positions which means that there is nothing officially to which I can apply and there is nothing into which I can be accepted.  All of the other key people who need to be doing similar things have not yet committed to anything yet either.  So there is still a lot that can go wrong but mostly it appears that we have a pretty solid path and plan and chances are pretty good that it will pan out exactly as described.

We definitely feel much better now that we have some semblance of a plan and that we know, basically, what is going to happen.  The biggest problem is going to be selling our house here in Peekskill.  We are allowed to rent it as of mid-October and that is one option if we can find some people interested in renting a furnished house.  That would make our lives a whole lot easier.  Ideally we will want to sell it as early as possible but we know that the market is not good now and we probably want to stall on that as long as we can.  Ideally we probably do not want to go to Texas until as late as possible which, could be, late next year or possibly even 2011 at a stretch.  Although now that we know that we are moving we kind of feel like we would like to just move on and get the moving started.  There is something about knowing that you are in a long term location rather than a temporary place.  Now that we know this house is really short term we don’t want to keep putting physical and mental energy into it.  It’s just an apartment to us now.

Overall this should all work out well.  Selling the house is the one challenge.  Other than that everything really works out well.  We had decided a few weeks ago, without having even the remotest clue that the office might decide to relocate me, that we wanted to move to Austin to call that our home base.  Dominica’s parents had already decided that they, some time down the road, were going to move to Austin.  My father had already decided that he would likely be okay with coming down and spending some time in Texas during the worst cold and snow months.  Dominica’s sister is already nearby and we just moved her brother a few weeks ago.   Ramona is already considering Austin for nursing grad school which will likely take about four years and she is not planning to start for another year – so we could overlap in Austin by four years just during her school time and possibly more if she decides to stay in the area.  The Ralstons had already decided that they were going to “move in with us” in Texas to make that their official American home rather than Art’s mother’s house in New York.  Calling Texas home is a major advantage for them in several ways.  And then, it turns out, that Andy and Miranda have been talking about Austin for some time and are very seriously considering it as a place to which to move as the market there is so much better than almost anywhere else for Andy to work!  Talk about serendipity!  Everyone we know is in or moving to Austin – a city to which almost no one that I know has ever been including Dominica or, I think, her parents.  Of course it looks like most everyone from my team at work will move down to Texas as well so we will all have each other too.

So the bottom line is… it sure looks like we are moving to Texas and doing so quite soon.  I will have a more definite answer on that in about two weeks and the final answer is likely to come in about eight.  But until then we are operating under the assumption that we are moving to Texas.  And very likely, we think, doing so as part of the vanguard to go prepare the site for others as we know Texas more and are more mobile than most everyone else.  So we are guessing that as early as December or January we are very likely to be down there in some capacity.

August 19, 2009: Big News and SpiceCorps Philly

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.

August 18, 2009: Finally Done with Cabling

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.

August 17, 2009: Indian Food in Peekskill

I got up and hung out with Liesl and Dominica a little bit this morning since we are all on an earlier schedule that we would normally have on a normal work week.  So no need to start work right when I got up.  I then worked for a little while making sure that I was all caught up and that there was nothing needing my attention.  Then, around ten, we made a run to Home Depot to get the CAT5e cabling that we need in order to test my theory about our spool of CAT6 being bad.  Luckily CAT5e is practically free in comparison to the CAT6 we already purchased so at least we are not spending an arm and a leg for our next round of testing.

No one needed me at work so we stopped by at Pastel’s for a late breakfast or early lunch.  When we stopped we noticed that the new Indian restaurant that we have been impatiently awaiting the opening of in the Beach Shopping Center had silently opened this past Friday the 14th!  How exciting.  It was only eleven when we were there and they do not open for lunch until eleven thirty so we vowed to return for dinner this evening.  We are very, very excited.  We have not had access to an Indian restaurant since moving to Peekskill.  This is a really big deal.

There is a rumor floating around the Internet today that the final release of Apple’s Mac OSX Snow Leopard operating system may be pushed forward to less than two weeks from now.  I have been waiting for forever for Apple to release Snow Leopard before buying my new Mac Mini.  This means that I might have it in no time. The reality is, though, that I will have no time at all to use it before my trip to Germany so even if it does release early I really should probably wait until after I return before ordering it.  I am really hopeful that a new version of the Mac Mini with a quad-core processor and at least 4GB of RAM will be available at the same time although I find that to be awfully unlikely.  Apple just never gives their Mac Mini product enough horsepower.  Now it is practically anemic in comparison to normal machines on the market for a bit less money.

Work slowed down considerably this afternoon and I actually had some time to relax.  I had time to make our first CAT5e cable and test it out.  Of course, on the first try, the cheaper cable worked perfectly!  This is great news while, at the same time, very annoying.  At least now we know that the cable itself is bad and it was not anything that we were doing.  So now we need more cabling from Home Depot.  Now we have to rip out all of the existing in-wall cabling and start our entire house wiring process over again.

At four thirty Dominica and Liesl ran out to do some shopping.  They hit the post office and then Home Depot to get another five hundred feet of cable in addition to the one hundred feet that we picked up early this morning.  It may not be enough for everything that we plan to do but at least it is a start on it without spending too much money.  We only have so much time to be making cable this week anyway.  She also hit Pier One Imports and a few others stores and got some important home decorating items like a new running for our side board table in the dining room and a serving tray that is going to go on it where we are going to keep the alcohol – very European style like you see in As Time Goes By. She also got several picture frames that we are going to be mounting this week around the house.  Now that we are printing photos at home we are getting ready to start using them for decoration.

After they got back I had to work for about half an hour more and then we were able to head out to dinner.  We drove down to the Beach Shopping Center and first hit the liquor store there as we now need an assortment of mixers to display on our side board so we picked up some vodka, Pimms and Irish whiskey.  Then we went to the brand new Ruchi (I hope that I got the name right) for dinner.

We were the only people eating at Ruchi’s until just before we left one additional couple came in to eat.  It is going to be a slow start getting an Indian restaurant going in Peekskill and most people associate Indian food with buffets so the lunch crowd there is probably a lot more popular – or will be once we get word out about the place.  The people there were super nice and the food was really good.  We were so excited to discover that they have south Indian cuisine like dosas.  We were totally not expecting them to have dosa.  There was so little chance of that and yet they have it.  This is going to massively improve our quality of life here in Peekskill.

The food was really good.  We split an appetizer and each got a dosa.  We also got some curry to split as well.  We skipped lunch having only had a late breakfast so we were both really ready for a large meal.  Everyone working there just loved Liesl and kept coming over to talk to and play with her.  She loved all of the attention even though she was getting tired and really just wanted to go home so that she could go to bed.

Liesl got to taste her very first curry tonight.  It was a buttery mild vegetable curry.  Not in the least bit spicy.  She just had a little bit but she liked it.  She also had a bit piece of garlic naan which she really enjoyed.  We had to keep taking it away from her because she was trying to eat the whole chunk at once.

There is a very real possibility that we will be going back to Ruchi tomorrow for the lunch buffet to check that out as well.  Dominica has only had Indian once in the last year or more.  We were eating it constantly when we lived in North Brunswick and got it occasionally in Newark but there it was a real struggle.  I was able to get it in the city from time to time.  Now that we have ready access to it again we are going to be on an Indian cuisine rampage for a while.

Once we got back to the house Liesl pretty much went straight to bed.  Then Dominica and I worked on hanging a picture in the dining room and getting other pictures ready to hang tomorrow.  Then the big job for the evening – assembling the baker’s rack in the utility room.  Unfortunately because of the tiny doorway we are stuck building the rack inside of the utility room instead of our in the den area.

After the rack was built Dominica felt really exhausted and fell right asleep on the recliner in the basement while I worked on cleaning up anything that could be gathered up and placed on the rack which included a lot of bins, paint cans, servers, etc.  Suddenly there is room for things in the basement again!  This place already looks much, much better and there is a lot left to be done.  Tomorrow is going to be cable making day.  We have a minimum of eight cables to make and to get run to really get things cleaned up.

I worked for another three hours after Dominica fell asleep.  I booked my hours for last week and realized that I worked approximately ninety-two hours for the office last week!  That is a bit ridiculous.

At the end of today the move conversion count is at three hundred and twenty seven movies!  That does not include television shows, music videos, miscellaneous stuff or whatever.  Just the filesystem count of files in the movies directory.  So some days it doesn’t move at all and some days it climbs quickly.  Overall, though, it gives a fair status of the overall progress.  When the count nears twelve hundred it means that the entire process is roughly “done”.  Although done will just mean “caught up”.  The process will never really be completed as new material will always be added.  It just won’t be coming from a massive backlog of material.

I found out tonight from dad that hurricane Bill is scheduled to be slamming into the Hudson Valley this weekend.  It is still five days away from making landfall in the northeast but the Hudson Valley is roughly in the center of the prediction zone so there is a really good chance that we will be hit.  We live on the top of a really tall hill and are a good twenty five miles from Long Island Sound and at least forty miles from the Atlantic Ocean proper so we are only likely to see amazingly heavy wind and rain at most but it should make for an interesting weekend with my grandparents and Aunt Gayle visiting us from Ohio.