Sheep Guarding Llama

Thus it begins.  Today is the beginning of the crazy long drive from Frankfort, New York to Houston, Texas.   No one got as much sleep last night as we should have but it was not too bad.  I slept in as late as possible this morning.  Dominica got me up at a quarter till seven.  Our goal was to be on the road by seven but we had to wait for the Friendly Bakery in Frankfort to have our cookie order ready that we are delivering to Houston with us.  Francesca was up much earlier than me.  I think that she got up around five or so.

There was a bit of packing to be done this morning before we could get on to the road.  Dominica packed up my stuff while I was getting ready and Francesca and the family packed the last of the trailer and the trunk of the car.  Boy are we ever taking a lot of stuff with us.  This is quite the load.

The cookies did not end up being ready until nine so we were delayed pretty significantly over what we had hoped to have been able to do today.  It was minutes after nine when we finally got out the door and into the car and pulled out of Frankfort.  Francesca took the first driving shift to get us out of the area.  The weather was perfect for driving today.  Clear and calm.

We took the New York Thruway west.  Nothing that we have not done hundreds of times before.  Francesca took the “boring” area for me driving through New York, Pennsylvania and most of Ohio.  All areas that I have driven through many times before and know backwards and forwards.  As far as Columbus, Ohio we covered area that I knew really well and driving the same roads over and over does nothing to keep me awake, but once we switched on to Interstate 70 in Columbus shifting our direction towards Dayton it became new territory.

The awesome thing about this trip is that we are Twittering from the car as well as testing out the new BlackBerry Tour with Google Latitude which is constantly updating everyone, every few minutes, as to our position.  So everyone was logging in to SGL to watch the map change and see exactly where we were.  Very neat.

Francesca drove all the way to Dayton.  We switched drivers there at a quarter until seven in the evening.  Francesca had driven for almost ten hours when we switched!  I was completely fresh at that point and barely felt like we had been in the car at all.  I took over on the “new” territory and drove us from western Ohio through Indiana and Illinois while we still had some daylight.  Early into Illinois we lost our sunlight which was a bit sad because both Francesca and I really wanted to see Missouri as neither of us had ever been there before.  We entered Illinois just before ten and did our final fuel stop there at eleven (that is still eastern time even though we switched to central time officially in Indiana.)

It was just after eleven when we finally reached the Mississippi River.  This is my first time ever seeing the Mississippi north of New Orleans, LA.  Very cool.

Coming into St. Louis was really awesome.  We could see the arch from quite some way away.  All lit up and signaling our arrival at the Mississippi River.  I have always wanted to see St. Louis.  It was a neat city to see even if we had to see it in the dark and only briefly as we zipped in on 70 and picked up Interstate 44 heading southwest through Missouri.

It was just before midnight when we entered Missouri.  We have a long way to go.  We have been driving for fifteen hours so we are approximately haflway to Houston.  The original plan was to drive until roughly midnight and then to grab a hotel.  But Francesca was very much awake and I was completely fresh still and did not need a break at all so we just pushed on through the night.  No reason to take a break and prolong the drive especially as sleeping on the road is extra hard when you have to get right to bed and only sleep a few hours and jump up, repack and get on the road again.  Not very effective and rather expensive.  So skipping the sleep it is for us.

We got to bed pretty late last night but I did manage to sleep in a little this morning.  Only one more night to catch up on rest before the crazy long drive to Houston.

Here is the planned route from Utica (Frankfort) in Upstate New York to Houston (League City) in Texas.  One day and five hours.  Quite the trip.  Francesca is excited as well about taking the western route.  She has never done this route either in all her years of driving back and forth between New York and Texas.  She does the middle route, technically the fastest, most of the time and has done the eastern route a few times.

My great aunt Esther dies this morning.  I found out from my father late this afternoon.  He might be going out to Ohio now, we are not sure what his plans are going to be and probably won’t know until tomorrow.

One of my big projects for today was figuring out how to get my cool new BlackBerry Tour to report my GPS location in a useful way so that people can watch us do our drive from Frankfort to Houston.  I tried several applications before I finally stumbled upon Google’s Lattitude which is awesome.  Now I have Google Maps on the phone and have a badge on SGL that shows my location at all times.  That is so handy.

I have added in tons of people to my Google iGoogle Latitude service so that I can see my friends on the map.  If you are using Latitude and want to include me just drop me a line and I will add you in so that we can see where each other.  What a handy service.  A geographic microblogger, in a way.

We got the quote on our house repairs today.  We have been dreading this but it has become a bit of an emergency and the repairs have to be done in the next few weeks (or else we get fined by the home owners association.)  We are not too happy about that as clearly these repairs needed to be done before we bought the house and neither the previous owners nor the homeowners disclosed the pending repairs to us and as soon as we moved in (weeks after, in fact) we sent our first notice of needing to do some trim repairs.  We are hoping that our house inspector’s insurance will cover the repairs as obviously they missed them during the inspection process.

The good news, though, is that the repairs are going to cost much less than we had anticipated.  We decided to “save” even more money and have our deck power washed, sanded, stained and sealed all at the same time as well.  Might as well get it all done while we have the crew there.  It will be good to get that all done and out of the way.

Originally we were not going to be able to load up the truck and the trailer for the trip to Houston until tomorrow but a last minute change of plans allowed for the trailer to be fully packed tonight.  This is a great change as it means that we are going to be able to leave New York hours earlier tomorrow.  Instead of sleeping in a little, then going out to load the trailer and then leaving around lunch time after everything is ready we can now get up early and get onto the road the instant that everyone is ready.  If things go well we might be on the road by seven in the morning which would be awesome.  That gives us about eighteen hours of driving on our first day – a good bit of the trip out of the way right away.

There was a ton of work to do today from the office.  I had originally thought that I might be able to wrap up early tonight but between supporting a SAN migration and doing several, large and rather involved system updates I actually got stuck working so late that I wished that I could get to bed so that I could get sleep for tomorrow!  The good news is that I was able to complete all of my work tonight and do not have to save any of it for tomorrow so that I do not need to get up and do anything before we leave in the morning.  Originally we had thought that I would have to work for several hours, maybe until as late as noon, but this is really great.

I finished work a little after ten.  I got the BlackBerry Tour set up as a tethered Internet modem to my laptop so that I can work from the laptop on the road.  I tested my download speed and I am getting roughly 1.65Mb/s on the BlackBerry which is just a smidgeon faster than a T1 line.  That is out here in the country.  I will test it periodically to see what kind of speeds I am getting in other locations.  It seems to work really well but I will really run it through its paces this week.

We also got Dominica switched over from her BlackBerry Pearl to my “old” BlackBerry 8830 WorldPhone.  Now she has the ability to use her phone overseas on the Vodafone network as well plus she now has a full keyboard so that she can actually email from her phone.  She had the Pearl for a year or more and that two keys per button thing never become comfortable to use.  It was always just impossible and ridiculous.  She is very glad to not be using it anymore.  Now, I hope, she will remain much more in contact when I am not at home even though that is most of the time.

I watched an episode of The Wizards of Waverly Place which is the one Disney Channel show that I really enjoy.  Then I checked my mail and decided to post to SGL, take a shower and get off to bed.  Our goal is to be on the road for eight tomorrow morning.  We would leave earlier but we have to take a load of half moon (aka black and white) cookies from the Friendly Bakery in Frankfort down to Texas and they were ordered for eight thirty. We hope that they are ready early and that we can get on the road first thing.  We have a lot of miles to get over tomorrow and we can’t dilly dally at all.

I hope that everyone enjoys being able to follow along as we travel with the new Google Latitude map that I have added to the SGL main page.  Very cool stuff.  It is this kind of stuff that makes me really excited about GPS on my cell phone.

I discovered this evening, as I did a quick check of my Google Analytics, that SGL has become quite popular in the People’s Republic of China!  I had no idea.  And no, before everyone says it, my traffic from China did not shoot up simply because Ramona moved there a few weeks ago.  There is relatively little traffic coming from the city where she is.  Bejing is, by far, my largest readership base over the “other” pond.  Very cool.  So here is a quick shoutout to my readers in China!

This is it.  The travling begins tonight.  It is going to be a very, very long week for me.  I did manage to sleep in a little today which will be really important over the next several days.  Can’t risk being tired from here on in.

There was a lot of work to do today.  Everything has to be ready for the week.  The big task of the day was setting up my new BlackBerry Tour mobile phone to replace my BlackBerry 8830 WorldPhone which I have been using since a week or so before Dominica and I went to the UK in late 2007.

The new phone is, thus far, quite awesome.  The most exciting new feature is that Verizon has finally decided to unlock the GPS features of the phone so that we Verizon users can now do all of that cool location-aware stuff that the iPhone users have been doing for a while now.  My goal is to have the phone set up so that it can track our progress as we travel from Frankfort, New York to League City, Texas over the weekend.  We will see if I can get that figured out in time for the trip.  I have very limited time to play with this new phone.  Luckily I at least have Twitter updates working.

Dominica spent the day packing.  There is a lot of prep to do and little chance to go back and get things later.  It is a very strategic trip as I need a lot of equipment to be away from home for so long but I also have to be able to travel very light because of the flights back to New York.  I will have just one carry-on, which is my CPAP bag, and my one suitcase with my laptop in it.  I hate having to fly like that but it is what I have to do.

Work ended up going a lot later tonight than we had hoped.  It was well after eight this evening when we were finally able to do the final car packing and shut down everything in the house.  It ended up being after nine when we were actually on the road from Peekskill to Frankfort.  And thus the drive begins.

We stopped at McDonald’s on the New York Thruway south of Albany to pick up our dinner.  Fillet-o-fish sandwiches as usual.  Liesl did really well sleeping the entire trip.  We was only awake for a few minutes the entire way.

It was almost one in the morning when we finally arrived in Frankfort.  I walked Oreo and Dominica got Liesl to bed and our “bedroom” set up so that we could get to sleep.  It was probably one thirty or possible two before we actually were able to get to bed.  The first three hours or driving are now complete.  Tomorrow we will be in Frankfort all day. The real driving begins early Saturday morning.

It is another crazy day in the world o’ Scott.  Today is my last full day at home for an entire week.  That is worrisome.  I always get stressed out when I am going to be traveling for any length of time because there is always so much to do and so many things to forget before leaving and then you are stuck away from home without the things that you need.

I got almost no sleep again last night.  Went to bed around midnight or a little later and was up by four in the morning because I couldn’t sleep.  So, again, I just went down to the office to get to work since I was already up so early.  If you can’t sleep you might as well be productive.

My BlackBerry Tour arrived from dad’s house today via UPS overnight.  I managed to get the box opened but did not really have any time to do anything else with the phone other than to look at it quickly.  It looks quite nice and I am hopeful that it will work well for me on this trip.  Just one more component that really can’t “fail” on me without causing a serious problem.

I worked all day.  It was quite busy.  I did get a little time in the afternoon to hang out with Dominica.  This is the last that we will really see each other for a week.  Liesl slept most of the day so we did not get to hang out very much.

I was really exhausted by evening and went to bed around midnight.  I really need to catch up on sleep before the crazy drive begins.  I am hoping that Francesca will agree to take the western route through Indiana, Illinois, Missouri and Oklahoma rather than the middle route through Kentucky, Tennenness and Arkansas.  The middle route is one that I know all except for a portion after Nashville.  It wouldn’t be bad as I would love to see Memphis and Little Rock and to drive through that region but so much of the drive would be “repeat” for me.  But the western route is almost completely new to me the moment that we are out of Columbus, Ohio.  I have been to Cincinati but this route will take us, instead, through Dayton and then into parts of Indiana and Illinois to which I have never been even though I have been to both states multiple times previously.

The real excitement is driving all the way east to west through Missouri, which I have never see at all, including crossing the Mississippi in famous St. Louis on i70.   Then driving north to south across Oklahoma which I also have never seen.  I will enjoy the trip a lot more being so much farther from landscape with which I am so familiar.  I tend to fall asleep when driving over the same roads again and again but I also tend to be very, very awake when travling to new places.  When I first drove from Ohio to Alabama it was all new and I could have just driven forever taking in all the new sites as I went.  Hopefully this trip will be like that.

I got some serious sleep last night and feel pretty good today.  I got up and got right to work.  Even though I did a lot of catchup yesterday things have been really busy for some reason and I am not exactly ahead – just not horribly behind like I would have been had I not worked so much yesterday.

Liesl is advancing quickly with her new found standing prowess.  Today she stood herself up when Dominica was not in the room and took the PS3 remote and turned on her DVD.  Dominica was in the kitchen and suddenly heard the DVD start playing and ran out to find Liesl guiltily standing at the couch with the remote.  She is definitely quite dangerous now.

Two new photography books arrived today.  My two book box set of “Scott Kelby’s Digital Photography” Volumes 1 and 2.  They are really good from what I have read so far and I have Volume 3 on my wish list and I plan to get it when it releases which, I think, will be pretty soon.

My day was crazy busy.  I had no idea that it was going to explode and that I was going to be just running from task to task as quickly as I could for most of the day.  It ended up being pretty exhausting just trying to keep up with everything.  It was all that I could do to get enough done so that I was able to run out the door at a quarter after six in the evening to get down to White Plains so that I could meet with someone from IBM.

This was my first trip ever to White Plains, New York.  It is a really well known small city and it is roughly the center, both physically and culturally, of Westchester.  It is a really cool place and I got to see the new Ritz-Carlton Towers in downtown that are only half filled right now.  Condos there are as much as eight million dollars in US funds!  Crazy.  They have amazing NYC views while being in small town Westchester.

My dinner with IBM went really well.  We had a great discussion and I think that we both came away with a lot of value.  Very much worth our time to get together.  We have some action items and I am looking forward to seeing where the relationship will go.

It was about ten thirty when I got back to Peekskill.  I was pretty tired since I had so little sleep yesterday so went to bed pretty much right away.  Probably before eleven thirty.

My new BlackBerry Tour arrived today… except that it arrived at dad’s house instead of mine.  Oops.  So dad is overnighting it to Peekskill so that I can have it to test out before the weekend as I desperately need it for my trip to Houston and I need time to make sure that it works and get all of the necessary accessories for it before leaving.