Sheep Guarding Llama

Back to the grind.  It is so nice to have a day that does not involve any type of travel or driving whatsoever.  I just want to sit all day and do nothing.

Today Liesl’s new protective barrier system arrived from Amazon.  It is a fold out plastic cage system that we can use to either keep Liesl away from all of the stereo equipment and the fireplace or to keep her away from the basement stairs in case we need to leave that door open.  Originally Dominica thought that we were going to need to spend almost two hundred dollars on a system like this but found a great on one Amazon for only about sixty which was very nice.

Liesl is really mobile now.  She gets around the house like nobody’s business.  She just crawls wherever she wants.  If Dominica goes into the kitchen then Liesl will just crawl after her.

There was plenty of work to keep me quite busy today.  Lots of catchup from the weekend.

This evening we continued watching bad sixties “B” movies with Muscle Beach Party and Ski Party. Really, really bad but still funny.

It was another early-ish night for us.  Liesl is in her crib again.  It worked well last night.  She seemed to be pretty happy.  It definitely makes it al ot easier for us that we do not have to worry about waking her up every time that we move or that Oreo decides to get out of bed to scratch.

I was up at six this morning. Ugh. Joe had come in to say goodbye to Dominica around five and I had only barely woken up when he did that. I am going to see him for several days very soon so he did not wake me up before leaving.

I had the car packed and pretty much ready to go before waking Dominica up close to seven.  She was really exhausted and Liesl had not woken up yet, but we were out of time and really had to be getting on to the road.

We were out the door around seven thirty and in Amsterdam, New York but ten after eight (according to my Twitter feed) where we got breakfast at the Mohawk rest stop McDonald’s on the New York Thruway.  We got gas there and ate in the car as we drove which we are trying to do as much as possible these days to minimize the length of our trips.  Having Liesl means that any time that we go into a rest stop, even just to grab a quick bite, that it will be almost an hour if not more.  It really cuts the trip down if we eat in the car.

We got home at a good time.  It is nice to be home knowing that we don’t have to travel for almost two weeks.  Much longer for Dominica.  We have been missing our home these last few weeks with all of the traveling that we have been doing.

I worked all day and did what I could to get caught up.  I managed to get a lot of photos posted to Flickr today.  I have a lot of pictures from this weekend to edit and post so expect to see them coming for the next few days.  I had a lot of email to get caught up on today as well.  I have been “off the grid” pretty significantly this weekend.

Once work was wrapped up for the day Dominica made some BLTs for dinner and we decided to just spend the evening relaxing and watching some Franky and Annette classics: Beach Blanket Bingo and How to Stuff a Wild Bikini. Both were incredibly weak but there is always something entertaining about classic, 1960s “B” movies.  They are fun even though they are horrible.

We went to bed on the early side tonight.  The whole family was really tired and we were all very much looking forward to the opportunity to sleep in our own bed.

Tonight we decided that it was time for Liesl to switch to sleeping in her own bedroom.  She has slept there a little before but never really spent any significant time in that room.  Tonight she is in her crib, all by herself.  It is a bit sad moving her out of our room.  It’s been seven months of always having her somewhere nearby so that we could hear her sigh, moan, cough, sneeze, etc.  She is only just down the hall and we leave the doors open so it’s not like she isn’t still audible from our room but it is not the same.

Finally a chance to really sleep.  Boy did I feel better this morning.  The Comfort Inn in Alliance is quite nice and we always sleep really well here.  I would sleep better if I had my Oreo though.  It is tough sleeping when I know that he is somewhere else.

I slept a lot but was up about every two hours all through the night.  Probably just over-exhaustion forcing me to get up and move around from time to time.

Dominica and I got breakfast down from the continental breakfast buffet in the hotel.  Then she, dad and Liesl drove out to my grandparents’ house with my grandmother leaving me in the hotel to work on my own for several hours.  It was around nine thirty when they left.

I worked in the hotel room with my laptop until noon.  It was a mad scramble to attempt to get everything done that needed to be done before I needed to check out of the hotel room.  It was just minutes before noon when I was able to turn off my laptop and pack up the hotel room so that I could check out.

Everyone took the BMW earlier so I had my grandmother’s Chevy Impala to drive out to East Canton.  It was not until I was checking out of the hotel that I realized that I did not have my GPS unit anymore and that I would be driving blind.  It is amazing how quickly you become completely dependent on a GPS unit.  All of a sudden you wonder if you even know where the highway is.

I made it, safe and sound and without any wrong turns, to my grandparents’ house in East Canton at twenty past noon.  Originally we had thought that we would only stay in Ohio until around noon but obviously that did not happen.

We visited for several hours.  My aunts were there as were my cousins Monica and Gwen and my “new” cousin Mike who joined the family this week.  We have known Mike for years, though.  He and Gwen even visited me when I lived in Ithaca in the summer of 2002 so we have known Mike for a long time.  That was a full seven years ago.  Boy am I ever getting old.  That was a really big deal because Gwen was eighteen and finally old enough to drive out to visit me.

We ate lunch at my grandparents’ house and visited until after three.  Then we went out to the garden and took some pictures before we had to climb into the car and get back on the road towards New York.  Today is going to be a really long driving day.  I have already driving twelve hours this weekend and there is about nine more hours to do today and three more tomorrow morning.  Not as bad as when Francesca and I drive to Texas, though, which is twenty six hours but with two people driving.  Only me driving on this trip.

We had been hoping that we would have had time while in Ohio to stop by and visit my great aunts who live nearby but there just was not any spare time at all this weekend.

It was three thirty ish when we got onto the road from East Canton, Ohio.  We drove out to OH 225 and were thirty so we stopped by Mike’s Pretty Good Grocery, or something to that effect.  Some side of the road grocery and beverage distribution place.  A bit of a shack, really.  Low and behold, inside there were stacks and stacks of Pepsi Throwback – the new, limited time only real sugar version of Pepsi!  So we bought a flat of them.  Twenty four twenty fluid ounce bottles for just five and a half dollars.  Now is that a deal or what?  We were very excited.  Dominica and I have been looking for this for a few weeks now.

Then we drove up to Erie, PA where we decided to make a pit stop for some lunch.  Dominica was so happy with Long John Silver’s yesterday that we looked in the GPS and found one on Peach Street in Erie and decided to just eat there.  Peach Street is pretty convenient for anyone traveling through the area.

Lunch was good and cheap.  Everyone enjoyed it.  Dad and I tried the buttery lobster bites.  Not the best thing ever.  The baja fish tacos are definitely the item to get. So cheap and quite tasty.  They do have some new, grilled items that are much healthier than their traditional fare.  Dominica tried the tilapia meal and liked it.  I want to try the grilled salmon sometime.

From there we drove back to Rochester by way of the Thruway to save time even though the drive is longer and costs more.  We got to dad’s house and dropped him off.  We only stayed just for a minute.  Then it was back onto the road and over to Geneseo so that we could get coffee from Tim Horton’s before driving for another three hours.  Dominica had really wanted to cut the driving short today and stay at dad’s house rather than driving on to her parents’ house so that we could get out of the car for a while but when she thought about the fact that that would mean going to bed early (possibly not falling asleep because it would conflict with our usual schedules), not having Oreo for another day, driving just as long tomorrow and getting up at three in the morning to make this all possible she decided that it was definitely the right thing to do to press on tonight and get as much of the journey completed as possible.  I was not really drowsy yet so we needed to take advantage of the situation.

It was nine in the evening when we left dad’s house.  What a long day already.  The drive out to Frankfort went fine.  Three more hours in the car.  It was minutes until midnight when we arrived there in a serious rain storm.  There was so much water coming down that the storm drains were dumping water into the streets and the streets were like little rivers.  At one point Dominica accidentally dropped Liesl’s portable highchair out of the car and it floated down the street!

We were pretty awake when we arrived at the Toccos’ and Francesca had some work for me to do.  Because Joe is moving to Texas in the morning (he and Brittany are driving down to Houston at five in the morning) he had unhooked his wireless router at the house and the family had bought a new one that evening.  It was not working so I had to log in and get that set up.  That was pretty quick.  Just issues because of the “easy configuration” software that, of course, breaks the whole thing rather than making it simple to configure.  What could possibly be simpler than the original web interface I have no idea.  Making you install confusing software with a unique interface that doesn’t handle normal scenarios is the worst possible option.

After that I fixed the output on the AppleTV.  It was having some signal issues during darker scenes.  Works fine now.  After that we visited for just a little bit as Liesl was not yet sleepy then got to bed between one and two in the morning.

When my alarm went off at eight this morning it felt like I had not been to bed at all.  Two and a half hours of sleep.  Way too little.  I was very, very tired and quite soar as well.  Dominica and Liesl were still asleep but dad was awake when I went up to the office to see how things were going.  He had not seen the post-it note that I had stuck on the office door telling him that things were fixed so he did not know the state of things and whether or not we would be able to leave as planned.

Luckily this gave me a couple of hours to sign into the office this morning and to make sure that things were running smoothly and that nothing was going to be needed in my absence.  I am only “off” of work for one day but everything falls apart regardless.  Or so it seems.

I was ready to go quite early.  Dominica and Liesl slept until almost nine, I believe.  They needed the sleep.  Dad could have used some more too.  We got the car loaded up and were on the road almost exactly at ten.  Not as early as we had hoped but far earlier than it might have been.  We built in a lot of buffer time so we still had lots of time in case things went wrong and we would still be able to get to the wedding reception without a problem.

We took the longer but more pleasant and scenic southern route taking NY 39 south out of Perry and slinging through southern Wyoming County to Arcade and then south into the Southern Tier counties heading eventually to US 86 and out to Erie, Pennsylvania.  I do not believe that Dominica has gone this way before or, if she has, that it has been a very long time.  We stopped in Arcade to get breakfast but it was ten thirty four – four minutes after McDonald’s stops serving breakfast – so it was lunch for us.  Four minutes.  Bummer.

On our way through Arcade Dominica saw the offices of the Attica – Arcade Railroad which she had never seen before.  It is a bright summer day and there were several AARR people standing around outside.  She was quite surprised that there was a railroad there and wanted to know when we could go on it for a ride.  I rode on the AARR long ago when I was quite young.  It is a short, scenic railroad that sometimes runs steam – which it did the time that I rode on it.  Hopefully my father will be able to figure out exactly when that was.

It was almost three thirty when we got to Alliance, Ohio where our hotel is.  We dropped dad at the hotel and then went to Long John Silver’s for their new Baja fish tacos that we saw advertised somewhere recently.  Dominica has never been to a Long John Silver’s and I have not been to one in a very long time.  Not a place that I frequent but every once in a while it sounds good.  I know that John Nicklin and I hit a LJS in the Pittsburgh area in December, 1999 on a business trip and I know that I have been to one at least once since then, but that is the extent of my definite memory.  We got our food to go.  Four fish tacos for $3.69!  We took them back to the hotel to eat there.

We got checked in to the hotel and unloaded the car.  We ate our tacos which were pretty good.  I liked them but didn’t think that they were all that exciting.  A great value for sure but not exciting.  Dominica really liked hers and thought that it was just as good as the ten dollar fish tacos from On the Border.  I did not feel that that statement could be made but did agree that they were the best priced fish tacos around and that I was happy to eat them and save nine dollars.

I finally got a chance to shower and relax a little.  Dad, in the room next door, managed to squeeze in a short nap.  Boy is it nice to be out of the car for a little bit.  It is also nice to be at the hotel in Alliance.  We stay here often enough that it is very comfortable.  We know our way around and where we are situated compared to the area.  We’ve been using this hotel for years because they are convenient, affordable and accept dogs.  Oreo loves staying here.  It is really too bad that he was not able to be here with us on this trip because of the heat.

Today is definitely a hot one.  We have been having such nice, cool weather all spring and summer thus far.  Today, though, it is in the high eighties here in Ohio.  Much warmer than we have gotten accustomed to it being.  Way too warm for me.

We drove right from the hotel to the wedding reception in Massillon, Ohio.  We arrived right on time.  Still no sleep for me but I was doing okay.

We had a great time at Gwen and Mike’s wedding reception.  This was the very first time that Liesl got to meet anyone from my mother’s side of the family!  Hard to believe that she is almost seven and a half months old and that this is her first time meeting so many people but travel just has not really been an option until now and knowing that we were going to be making this trip kind of held off everyone making a trip just to see her.

It was very nice getting time to visit and Liesl had so much fun.  This is her second wedding and she just loves getting to meet new people and getting passed around be help by one person after another.  She is our little social butterfly.  No doubt about that.  She definitely get’s that from me and me from my mother’s mother.

Mike and Gwen got married in Cancún, Mexico on July 4th which is also my grandparents’ anniversary. My grandparents celebrated their sixty-second anniversary on the day that Mike and Gwen were married. We had really wanted to go to Cancún but there was just no way. We had a prior commitment and with Liesl it just wasn’t possible. Dominica and I had really wanted to have gone to Mexico a few years ago but just never managed to make it happen. Someday I am sure that we will go. Either for a short trip and have Liesl stay with family or wait until she is older and can go with us (once the current national security crisis in that country has subsided.) Honestly, though, Mexico is near the bottom of my “must see” locations in Central America. I would prefer to see Panama, Guatemala, Belize, etc. But prices are good now. Maybe this winter we could sneak away to go down there if the political climate cools off.

We stayed at the party until around ten.  Boy were we all tired.  Dominica drove us back to the hotel in Alliance and it was straight to bed for everyone.  Tomorrow we are going to visit my family in the morning at my grandparent’s house in East Canton and then back to New York in the afternoon.  I do, of course, have to work in the morning so it will be a busy day.

Today begins our long weekend of driving.  Not as much driving and certainly not as much total traveling as the trip to Houston is soon going to be but this is still a very long weekend of driving.  Twenty four hours of drive time.

I did manage to take just a few test shots today with the Nikon D50 and the new 35mm lens that came yesterday.  I will be using it more at the wedding reception tomorrow, I expect.  But I wanted to grab a few additional test shots today and so I walked around taking some outside.  I discovered this little stream in my backyard, much to my surprise, so I took some pics.  I love the clarity on the new lens.  Really sharp.

The day was very normal.  Busy with work trying to get as much done as possible before we hit the road.  Anything not done today has to wait for almost a week until I get caught back up again and have time to get to things.  In addition to normal work I also did all that I could to get Handbrake set up on both machines in the hopes that it would be able to run for the entire time that we are gone.

Dominica spent the day packing and getting us as ready as possible so that we could leave the moment that I was done with work.  We are not taking much of anything with us on this trip.  No spare space to do any moving of stuff between our house and dad’s like we usually do.  Just one bag of DVDs to take so that they can go into storage.

I wrapped up work and we were on to the road around seven thirty.  It is going to be a really, really long night.

We skipped dinner to speed things up and grabbed food and coffee from McDonald’s on the Thruway just south of Albany.  Monica texted me while we were driving to find out when we were getting out to Ohio.  I only get to see my cousins about once a year so we always look forward to getting to see each other a lot.  It is tough being so far away from family.  We are far enough from Ohio that it is really difficult to get out there to see people.  We seem to only ever make it out when there is an event.  This is the first time that Liesl will be meeting anyone from Ohio, in fact!  Liesl is over seven months old now.

We made one additional pitstop during the drive and got Dominica some different coffee because her McDonald’s coffee was old and burnt and she had to throw it out.  Normally we love their coffee.  The decaf at night just was not fresh at all though and she could not bring herself to drink it.

We arrived in Frankfort at a quart until eleven at night.  Ugh.  We dropped off Oreo which was very sad.  We hate leaving him and being without him for the weekend.  I don’t sleep well when he is not around either.  I need my puppy snuggles to sleep comfortably at night now.  I am used to his snoring.

I had to do some quick work before we left because there is a datacenter relocation going on tonight and I have to shut down some servers for it.  We are doing updates to the servers since they are being cycled so that the updated get applied since getting time to restart the boxes is always a pain.  So we figured that we would be in Frankfort for about an hour.

Things went pretty badly with the shutdown process.  I did the updates and brought down most of the boxes and then discovered that something was wrong and that the boxes were not able to start again!  Very bad.  Very, very bad.  I worked for about an hour trying to determine what could be done but after midnight there was nothing to do as the servers needed to be turned off for the physical move.  So I worked until midnight and then we jumped in the car and drove towards dad’s house.  According to my Twitter feed, it was twenty four minutes into the new day when we hit the road.

As you can imagine it was a very stressful drive.  We spent the time strategizing about what would be the best course of action depending on what happened and when with the servers.  We called dad and ran through the scenario of determining that the servers were dead tonight and driving straight to Ohio rather than sleeping first but that did not seem like a reasonable option.

We arrived in Peoria, New York at five past three in the morning.  Exhausted but stressed and wired so no way was I going to fall straight to sleep.  Dad already had beds set up for us and had gone to bed himself.  Dominica took care of putting Liesl to bed and setting up my CPAP so that I could get to bed as quickly as the situation would allow.

I went straight to work to see what could be done to remedy the situation.  When we first arrived the servers had not yet been moved so there was nothing to do.  I caught up on email and kept checking everything that I could to make sure that there was nothing that I could do and then, around four, I tried going to bed myself.

No luck falling asleep.  I was too uptight to fall asleep at all.  Luckily I thought of using a web-based ping utility from bed.  Around four thirty I did a ping and noticed that the machines were responding.  I was up and out of bed like a shot and back up to the office upstairs.  After a really crappy night we ended up with a “best case” scenario – almost – and by a quarter after five all of the machines were back up and running without any problems.  What a relief.  It was a really long night but things worked out pretty well.

So at five thirty, roughly, I fell asleep finally.  Tomorrow is going to be a really rough day.  I need to be awake around eight which is slightly later than I had hoped originally but far better than we had thought that it might be.  Dominica is planning to get up with Liesl which will likely be closer to seven than to eight.  So, if all goes well, I will manage to get two and a half hours of sleep tonight after having worked all day and driven all night with loads of stress.  Ugh.  At least it is over now.  Just have to drive tomorrow.