Sheep Guarding Llama

Liesl turns one half of a year old today.  Boy is that ever hard to believe.  She is growing up so quickly.

This morning I got up on the early side.  Liesl is always up before us so I grabbed her and took her down to the basement so that we could hang out.  She hung out with me while I swapped over to my new desktop as my main machine and got it joined up to the Active Directory domain and really working.  She had a good time with me for about an hour or maybe an hour and a half before work started getting busy and I had to go wake up Dominica so that she could watch Liesl and I could work.

No sunlight today.  Dark and overcast all day.  Good for productivity.  We got a little rain but very little.  Mostly just overcast.  Nice and cool outside.  The way that May is supposed to be.

We got our first word from the Ralstons in the Congo this morning at six.  It took twelve hours from the time that their flight was expected to land in Brazzaville before they had an opporuntity to get word out to anyone to let us know that they had arrived and that they were safe.  They had some scares in customs in the Congo but, in the end, managed to get in with all seventeen pieces of their luggage.  Very little news from them today, other than that, just a few sentences but we should hear more soon.

Recently Andy has started getting into photography and today he decided to go out and buy himself a rockin’ Nikon D60 SLR so that he could start doing “real” photography where he has control of his shutter speed, aperture, zoom, focus, sensitivity, etc.  He is going to really love that camera.  Nikon SLRs are just awesome.  You can check out Andy’s photo feed on Flickr.

Dominica was busy working on her class this evening so instead of cooking dinner we ordered in Italian.  Once she was done working on her classes we watched My Name is Bruce which was a pretty horrible B movie with Bruce Campbell playing himself as a washed up actor who gets stuck in a “real life” horror film just like the ones that he makes.  Overall the movie was pretty awful.  Bruce Campbell is always entertaining but this was truly a bad movie.  A B movie about B movies.  Eeek.

After the movie I was on the phone for about two hours and then had to stay up late doing a ton of work that I was not able to get done because I had taken the evening off.  I had a lot to do and I ended up working until three thirty in the morning!  What a long night.  Long but very productive.  I felt good about all of the work that I managed to complete and tomorrow will be much nicer knowing that a very large amount of stuff is not hanging over my head like it was today.

Today things are mostly back to “normal”.  Not only is today a normal working day but we are not even traveling this coming weekend.  Joe and Brit are coming to visit us this weekend so we will be at home doing mostly relaxed things – although that means that there is a lot more cleaning to do this week.

Today is the crazy traveling day for the Ralstons.  They took off from New York City at eight twenty last night and are due to be in the air for almost the entire day today.  They should have arrived in Casablanca, Morocco around three thirty this morning and left again around eight thirty to fly down to Brazzaville.  They are due to arrive there around six tonight.

Of course, everyone is anxious to know if they have arrived safely or not but once you consider all that they have to do after arriving including gathering up their luggage and getting through customs (eek!) and then getting on to the missionary compound in Brazzaville, getting their medical check-outs and all of that stuff we will all understand if it takes a very long time before they have the ability to get to some place with Internet access and get word out to us about how they are doing.

I worked all morning and was very excited when my new desktop arrived early this afternoon from UPS.  I have been putting off spending the money on a new desktop for so long that I really do deserve this.  Moving from my old dx5150 to this dc5850 is going to really be something.  I skipped the dc5750 line entirely and, along with it, the entire Windows Vista generation.  Windows XP was not even in service pack one or had just barely gone to it when I got the dx5150.  So that machine lastest through a pretty significant portion of the Windows XP years and all of the Vista years that I pretty much just ignored.  Vista still feels “new” to me.  But this new box is destined for Windows 7 RC for the time being.

I did a quick Vista install just to see how it would work on this box and it does look pretty nice.  The big problem is that the desktop shipped with Vista 32 and I really have to have a lot more memory than that supports so that is out of the question.  Once I saw Vista Business 32 working I went on to install Windows 7 Ultimate RC.  That really took hardly any time at all.  Microsoft has really improved the installation process over the years.  It is pretty smooth now.

I got Windows 7 installed and updated and my first impression is that it is awesome.  It is solid and smooth and reacts very well.  More pleasant to use than Vista but mostly that is because I have used Vista enough now that nothing is a shock anymore.  Windows 7 is truly just a tweaked and updated version of Vista.  Nothing really groundbreaking on its own.  Just like Windows XP was an update and tweak for Windows 2000.  When it comes to operating systems groundbreaking normally get a bad rap.  What people want is simple, accepted and stable.  Windows 95, 2000 and Vista did the groundbreaking with new interfaces and features.  Windows 98 (for what its worth), XP and 7 are the “followers on” who come along a few years later and provide minimal changes to the basic package but fix the bits that didn’t work and make everything more stable.  By the time that the second generation comes along people are happy with the new interface and are thrilled when things work a bit better.  It’s mostly just the impression that each subsequent release brings but that is all that it takes.  Windows 7 is destined to be the standard desktop operating system for almost the next decade.  Best to get used to it now.

We actually got some time to relax tonight and we watched a few episodes in the fourth season of The Gilmore Girls.  We really needed to just relax to some degree.  There has been way too much going on recently.

We are, more or less, back on our diets again now.  We have been pretty much been unable to keep to them recently because there has just been so much going on.  Now we just need to eat the remaining junk food around the house, which really is not very much, and we can get back to our healthy diets.

We even managed to get off to bed at a reasonable hour tonight as well.  Only a little after eleven.  Very respectible.  I wish that we could push our bedtime forward a little more yet to align more with Liesl’s sleeping schedule.  I tend to be ready to go to bed at ten thirty or so but it takes a bit to get Dominica to be willing to turn in before one in the morning or later.

Today is the big day.  We have nothing planned for today except to see that the Ralston family, missionaries to the Republic of the Congo, get onto their flight at JFK in New York City and off on their big move to the jungles of central Africa.

Art and Danielle really did not sleep at all last night.  Dominica did pretty well but was up pretty early.  I actually got to sleep in quite late which was awesome.  I really needed my sleep.  Today is my only day actually off from work (my second since approximately New Year’s – including weekends) so getting some rest is critical.  So it was around ten thirty when I got up and then I showered and got ready so it was around eleven when I came down to see how everyone was doing.

We had a light lunch but pretty much there was nothing to do except for final preparations for the trip.

The Ralstons’ flight is at eight twenty tonight but the airlines, Royal Air Morac told them to be at the airport at 2:52 pm this afternoon so since we do not have a good idea of how long it will take to get to JFK from Peekskill we decided that we needed to leave by 1:00 just to be completely safe.  We can not take any unnecessary risks today.

Art, Danielle and Michael said their final goodbyes to Dominica and Liesl (who was asleep when they left) and it was 1:05 when the four of us pulled out of the driveway in Peekskill to head to New York City.

Our first stop was to get gas on Crompond on our way to the Taconic Parkway.  We had planned for this so it was not a surprise and did not impact our time table.

The trip was rather interesting since Michael and I were sitting up front in the only seats and Art and Danielle had to ride in the back of the Ford cargo van sitting on their duffle bags holding on to the front seats to keep from getting tossed all around.

The drive through Westchester County and down to the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge and over to Queens and then down to Brooklyn.  Nothing too dramatic happened on the drive.  Definitely not a drive that I would want to do very often and especially not in a cargo van.

We made really good time and arrived at the airport at roughly two thirty.  Very good time.  I dropped the Ralstons at Terminal 1 and drove off to make an attempt at finding a parking spot.  Finding parking turned into a thiry plus minute adventure.  Parking an over-sized cargo van in a very tight parking lot with hordes of crazy New Yorkers who can’t differentiate between Brooklyn and the third world is rather an adventure.

It was after three when I finally went running into the terminal to see if there was anything that needed to be done.  When I got in I found that the Ralstons were standing with all of their luggage.  It turned out that the ticket / luggage booth for Royal Air Moroc would not even open until four twenty – four hours before the flight was scheduled to leave.  That means that we arrived a long time before there was anything at all to do at the airport.

Art and I were pretty pleased, though, that we were there so early.  Standing around waiting is a pretty minor inconvenience compared to so many potentially disasterous things that could happen today.  There is just so much that could go wrong here that being very, very early is not a bad thing at all.

The good thing about being so early is that we were first in line to get the luggage checked when the booth finally did open.  It turned out that there was more luggage here than was allowed per passenger and the flight was completely full so there was no way to buy an extra seat or maneuver any luggage or anything like that.

It turns out that since we were first in line there was some flexibility and the nice lady working at the counter decided to just accept the two extra bags.  She sure did not have to do that and we were definitely considering panic luggage scenarios.  The Lord was definitely watching over us – having the airlines tell us to get there way too early and then having that be the reason that the luggage managed to go to the Congo!

It took rather a while to get all of that luggage checked and ready to go.  Only the two heaviest duffle bags ended up getting flagged as being over the weight limit which was very surprising as everything was over to some degree.  They must have been really over the weight limit.  In the end the luggage ended up being an additional $1,300 USD fee over what they had originally estimated.  It could have been far worse.

That was pretty much it.  Art and I moved all of the luggage over to the TSA luggage handling people and they took all eight hundred pounds of it from there.  We had a little bit of an adventure moving all of the luggage from the airline check in point to the TSA folks but that was pretty minor.  We were definitely covered in sweat by the time that we were done moving all of it.  That was exhausting.

After the luggage was all set it was time to say our goodbyes.  It is really difficult to really conceive of how long it could be before we will see them again.  If all goes really well in Impfondo then it could be as much as four years before they return.  Michael will be about to turn sixteen and Liesl will be in school!  Oreo is very unlikely to still be with us as he would be thirteen then – Oreo and Art will definitely miss each other.  There is only a moderate chance that we will still live in Peekskill.  Four years is a long time to be completely cut off from the outside world.  This is about as remote as it gets.

So at roughly four thirty Danielle tweeted her last, shut off her cell phone and handed it over to me – no service in Impfondo so the phone is staying in the US.  Then we all hugged and they headed off to the security gate where I could not follow.  In four hours they will be in the air and on their way to Casablanca in Morocco then, after a five hour layover, on their way to Brazzaville in the Republic of the Congo.

I hit the little cafe by the security gate and had a sandwich while I waited to make sure that they did not have a last minute panic and need something.  Once I was done eating I left the airport and picked up the van and drove, in rush hour traffic, back up to Peekskill.

The drive back to Peekskill was fine.  I got home and immediately Dominica packed up Oreo and Liesl and we ran out to Enterprise to drop off the van.  No reason to let that go any longer than necessary.  That was a quick trip out and back.

It was six thirty when we finally got back to the house.  Five and a half hours from door to door to get the Ralstons to the airport and they still have two more hours to go before they are even in the air!  (It would end up being almost exactly 36 hours from this point before they were finally done with their initial set of travels!!)

Katie, who arrived at the airport half an hour after we did, managed to get into the airport, get through security, board her plane, fly to Washington DC and tweet her arrival half an hour before I got home and two and a half hours before the Ralstons even took off!

I was pretty exhausted when I got back home.  We did some cleaning and mostly relaxed this evening.  I checked my email tonight and it appears that my new desktop, an HP dc5850, is due to arrive via UPS tomorrow afternoon.  How exciting.  So tomorrow I get to build by new Windows 7 machine and, hopefully, have a nice, fast, stable environment from which to work.

We got off to bed at a reasonable time tonight.  It is nice to have some time to relax but awfully sad that the Ralston family has now left us for a very long time.

Today is it.  The very last day that the Ralston family will be living in North America.  It is really hard to believe that tomorrow they will be “gone”.  It is not very common these days to ever really need to say goodbye to someone.  Our world is one of constant communications and, in all likelihood, their disconnection from the rest of the world will be a temporary one.  Proliferation of Internet access is happening globally at an astouding pace and it is unlikely that they will be completely isolated for more than a few years before some form of digital communications will reach them such as reliable cell phone service or some form of regular Internet access.

I had to get up and work today which was not fun but covering on a Sunday followed by a holiday is a pretty easy task.  There was hardly anything going on today.

Art and Danielle spent the bulk of the day moving luggage around, weighing luggage and trying to make sure that they had whatever they could get and were leaving behind anything that they could live without.  By the end they had fourteen 50+ pound luggage items in addition to their carryon items.  It is a lot of stuff.  Over 800 total pounds of luggage that they need to get from New York to Impfondo.

Overall today was pretty relaxing.  Dominica and I were pretty much just sitting around the living room all day while the Ralstons attempting to get everything ready.  Boy is there a lot to do.  It is probably a very good thing that they had a lot of work to do today or else they would be getting quite nervous just sitting around thinking about tomorrow.

We did get a lot of time to visit throughout the day.  Evening came very quickly, though.  Must faster than we would have anticipated.  I worked from my laptop in the living room as much as possible which turned out to be quite a bit of the day.

Before going to bed, Art, Danielle, Dominica and I sat down and played Munchkin Cthulhu for a few hours.  It was our one chance to really relax before tomorrow.  It wasn’t the best game for them as I got an early lead and was ahead for the entire game.  Art knocked me out of several levels a few times (the goal is to reach level ten first) so that I had to generate about four or five more levels than anyone else (which is a lot for a game that only goes to ten) but, in a rather amazing set of circumstances, for a final move Art tried to block me with a massive three level loss play at the last second but failed to actually stop me and caused me to win suddenly going from a level of seven to ten all in one round while amassing EIGHT treasures all in the same move.  It was crazy.  A rather decisive win if I have ever seen one.

It was around one in the morning when we all finally headed off to bed.  I don’t think that Art and Danielle are going to get very much sleep tonight.

It is supposed to be a holiday weekend.  A nice, long three day chance to relax.  I, of course, do not get the weekend off at all.  I have a lot of work to do this morning basically in a panic and I have to work tomorrow as well.  At least on Monday I am actually off of work.

I was really exhausted when I went to bed last night having gotten no sleep at all the night before.  Last night I managed to sleep a bit.  Dominica got up to take care of Liesl so that I could sleep.  I ended up sleeping from roughly midnight until six thirty this morning when Liesl was so upset that there was just no way for me to sleep any longer.  I tried to sleep but at seven thirty I realized that there was far too much to do this morning and that there was no way for me to get any additional sleep tonight.

The air conditioning worked great.  No problems as far as I can tell.  I am sure that it really helped with getting sleep last night.

I got to my desk at eight and started working.  We have to pick up the cargo van from Enterprise in Peekskill, which is just around the corner, at ten.  From there we are supposed to go on to breakfast with everyone, including Deb and Lisa.  There was no way for me to be able to go to breakfast with everyone, though, that was really out of the question.  Way too much work assigned to me for me to be able to do anything like that.

I worked solid until almost exactly ten when Art and I had to run out the door to get out to Enterprise to pick up the cargo van.  That was quick and easy taking no more than fifteen minutes if that.  I had Art added as a driver so he was able to drive down to the Peekskill Inn and get Deb and Lisa there while I ran back to the house to continue working.

It worked out well having me run back to the house because with the extra time of luggage being relocated, extra driving, people visiting, et cetera I had until almost noon to keep working and ended up being able to complete enough of my work that I was able to join everyone for brunch.  We ended up going to Grandma’a Famous Pies for lunch so had I missed it I would have been very upset.  I love eating there.

Brunch was really nice.  I got the bagel and lox platter which sounds small but is actually a rather significant meal with a mound of cured salmon.  It was awesome.  The massive tomato slices were some of the best ever.  Everyone really enjoyed their food.  Then everyone got pie.  Yummy pie from the massive pie menu.  Very good.  Not like “home” though.

Dominica has decided that I need to start baking again as I am one of the few successors to my grandmother’s pie making and the only successor to my mother’s (as far as I know – no other pie making protege lurking around.)  My mother and grandmother come from a long line of Dutch and Pennsylvania Dutch pie makers.  It has been almost two decades since I have made my mother’s pies so I will need some practice, but Dominica wants me to be able to teach Liesl how to make them.  Especially apple, rhubard, rhubard custard and strawberry rhubard.

After lunch, Deb and Lisa said their goodbyes, which was rather emotional – Michael may not see his grandmother again until he is about sixteen – and then they headed out for the Bear Mountain Parkway to head back towards Rochester.  Then Dominica, Liesl, Oreo and I went back home and the Ralstons went to the Beach Shopping Center to go to GameStop to see if there was anything to pick up to keep them occupied during their really, really long flight from New York to Morocco to the Congo on Monday.

We all relaxed and visited for the afternoon.  One of the few moments of downtime that the Ralstons will get before the flight.  Then, this evening, we had dinner – the last tilapia meal for a very long time for them – that Danielle cooked.  For dessert we drove out to Cold Stone Creamery which they had never had before.  The first Cold Stone has only just opened in Rochester.  They were pretty impressed.  Boy are they going to miss ice cream in Impfondo!

Then we made a trip to Walmart for some last minute supplies.  From there Art and Dominica went back to the house while Danielle, Michael and I went to Panera Bread to pick up bagels for tomorrow morning.  Because we went so late they were 50% off which makes breakfast very cheap.

We hung out for a little while this evening but it was around then when we got back to the house and everyone was pretty much asleep by midnight or so.  I am hopeful that tonight may actually be a chance for me to get some sleep finally.  While we were hanging out this evening I managed to get a bit of work done on our Elastix installation.  That is coming along well.   I am really excited to get that working soon.  One more major task to knock out and get out of the way.  I am slowly making progress.  After this the Amanda backup server is the next major task.

Tomorrow we have no real plans.  Art and Danielle have a lot of luggage shuffling to do to make sure that everything is ready for the flight.  Then we will back up the cargo van so that nothing is lingering until Monday.