April 14, 2009: Back to Waverly and Home

It is Tuesday morning and today is my first, real, honest to goodness day off of work since mid January.  Before going to bed last night I set my Out of Office in Outlook and am not checking my BlackBerry today.  I absolutely have to have the day off.  Too much to do and too long without a break.

I slept in a little but was up around nine.  At a little after ten we drove over to Geneseo to eat at the Omega Grill for breakfast.  Out third time here in two days.

My aunt Sharon and uncle Leo met us at the Omega so that they could see Liesl some more before we head back home this afternoon.

After breakfast we ran over to M&R and picked up the Mazda Protege 5 which is all set now.  Inspected, new rear brakes and the summer performance tires.  Not cheap but we haven’t had a car payment to make on it in years so can’t really complain and it costs practically nothing on our insurance.

Once we got back to dad’s we spent quite a while loading up the two cars.  Dominica and I went through the garage and picked out the bins that were of the highest priority to us so that we would have stuff back at the house that would be most useful to us.  We also grabbed books, CDs and all of the DVDs that we could cram into the nooks and crannies of the cars easily.  More than enough stuff to keep me very, very busy converting media for a month or more without a doubt.  It takes a long time to work through all of this stuff.

I think that it was around two when we finally got on the road out of Pavilion.  We are both driving on this trip.  Dominica driving Liesl and Oreo in the Mazda and me driving the BMW.  We had to split it up that way as it was the only way that we really all fit.

We stopped at the Pilot gas station in Kanona where they have a Subway.  We stopped in and got subs because we were going to be really hungry later on and would end up snacking while on the road if we didn’t.  We also topped off the tanks so that we would avoid needing to stop again for gas.

We drove on to Waverly and decided to stop and visit with Dominica’s family again for an hour or so before continuing on.  Dominica’s cousin Diane and her kids were down at James and Nikki’s house and we were unable to see them on the way up a few days ago so we decided to stop in and see them now.

It was around seven when we got back on the road towards Peekskill.  The drive went well.  I spent most of the time listening to my iPod.  I am still catching up on my podcasts from IT Conversations that I have been missing over the last few months.  I especially enjoy listing to Stack Overflow.

It was just before eleven when we pulled into Peekskill.  We were quite tired by the time that we got home.  We unloaded only what we needed and left the rest of the stuff in the cars until tomorrow.

The note that we left on the front door for UPS is gone so we are hoping that we will have our wine delivered in a day or two.

April 13, 2009: Omega Grill Day

I got up this morning and worked for an hour or two before we all loaded into the car and drove over to Geneseo to get breakfast at the Omega Grill and to drop off the Mazda PR5 at M&R Automotive to get the winter tired removed and the summer tires put on.

We dropped off the car and then went over to the Omega Grill for a long breakfast.  I was on the BlackBerry all morning working from that.  I was able to do almost all of my work through email so it worked out really well.

As we were leaving breakfast we ran into Karin

After breakfast we went across the street to Tim Horton’s where we bought $40 of coffee beans to take back to Peekskill with us.  We do not have any convenient access to Tim Horton’s at all so this is our only way to really get the coffee.  The nearest Tim Horton’s to us is in Elmira, New York which is just over four hours away.

Then it was over to Walmart for some quick shopping for baby supplies.  Were only there for fifteen minutes at most.  I made a quick pass through the store to see if Mary was working but she was nowhere to be found.  As always seems to happen whenever we are in Walmart in Geneseo, we ran into the Ralstons on the way through the checkout.  They are planning on coming over to visit this evening.

We swung through the auto shop to see if the car was done having its tires changed yet but it had not.  By this time, between eating a light breakfast, staying way too long drinking coffee, running errands and needing to wait for the car we decided to just swing back into the Omega and get lunch there as well.

After lunch the car was still not ready so we went back to dad’s house and I worked for the afternoon from there.  They called about the car.  It turns out that we had let our NYS inspection expire on the car without realizing it.  So they were going to take care of that when the found that the real brakes were in bad shape.

So the car has to stay in the shop until tomorrow morning and we have to have $800 of work done on it rather than just getting the tires changed.  Older cars are never cheap.  We only have about 115K miles on the PR5 at this point.  It is a 2002 so it is getting old but isn’t that old.  It still drives quite well.

After work was over, more or less, we ordered pizza from Davis Farm Market in Pavilion.  It just wouldn’t be a trip home without pizza from there.  I took the convertible down to pick up the pizza.  This is the first trip in it this season.

As I was pulling out of Davis’, the Ralsons pulled up behind me at the light on Route 63.  What timing.  I run into them more than anyone else that I know.

The Ralstons hung out until almost eleven.  They are getting ready to move to the Republic of the Congo in the very near future.  Maybe in as little as six weeks!

After the Ralsonts headed back home Dad, Dominica and Liesl all went to bed.  I hit the road to drive over to Geneseo to meet Tony at Tim Horton’s for coffee at eleven.

Tony and I ended up talking about software development until three thirty in the morning when he headed for home to do his homework and I went back to dad’s house.  Once I got back I worked online for almost another hour before turning in for the night.

April 12, 2009: Waverly to Leicester on Easter

“The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher
regard those who think alike than those who think differently.”- Nietzsche

It is a very busy weekend for us.  Almost every day we are driving somewhere.

This morning we got up in Waverly.  We hung out with James and Nikki’s family for an hour or two before packing up and driving down to Sayre, Pennsylvania to meet the family for breakfast at the Banana Curve Diner.  Yes, that is its real name.  The food was delicious.

After breakfast we drove over to Elmira with everyone and went to papa’s house where the work of cleaning out all of the “stuff” continues.  It is an immense job that just keeps going and going.  It is really unbelievable how much stuff is in that house.  I found a bakelite UHF television tuner in the basement that had frequencies instead of stations.  We found some old cameras too including an ancient Agfa bellows medium-format camera that was made in Binghamton, New York.  I wish that we could take all this cool, classic stuff, but we would never use it and it would go into boxes and be a problem for Liesl or her kids someday and that isn’t good for anybody.  It is so sad that all this great stuff is so unwanted.

A little while after noon Dominica, Liesl, Oreo and I got in the car and drove up to Leicester to see my family for Easter as well.  Using the Garmin GPS it took us some back ways out of Elmira and we were in Corning within minutes and got up to Leicester in just over eighty minutes.  We had no idea that you could make that journey so quickly.

My family was still eating Easter dinner when we arrived in Leicester so we sat down and had some food as well.  We had not been planning on eating there and had thought that we would have been arriving quite a bit later than we actually did.

We stayed for several hours at Sharon and Leo’s place visiting with my family.  Sara, Jeremy, Rachael, Shirley and Jim had not had a chance to meet Liesl yet so this was a big day of meeting people for her after a big night of it last night.  She is a social butterfly and handles it well.  Oreo spent the afternoon trying to sneak onto the chair with the best sunlight whenever anyone would get up and leave a spot for him.

We did a lot of patching work at the office yesterday morning and some of it apparently did not go smoothly so I ended up having to leave the Richardson’s to go up to dad’s house so that I could log in and work for a couple of hours.  So my working streak continues without a break.  I am really hoping to be able to completely avoid work on Tuesday but we will see if that can happen or not.

Dominica and Liesl came home not too long after dad, Oreo and I had gone home.  They stayed to visit for no more than an hour after we had left.

I spent most of the evening working as there was a lot to do after having spent so much time in the car and visiting with family.  Things pile up quickly.

April 11, 2009: Driving to Waverly

I got up at seven thirty this morning and got right to work.  Today’s work for Bahrain is very minor and only supposed to take fifteen minutes or so.  It won’t really be that fast.  It shouldn’t be long but fifteen minutes is never realistically an amount of time for anything.  It takes at least that long just to log into the computer.

I wrapped up my first bit of work in under and hour and set to doing my server patching.  That is the real work for the day.  That ended up taking several hours which was mostly expected.  I wasn’t surprised that it took so long.  It is just too bad that there was so much patching to be done on a holiday weekend because it kept us from traveling as early as we would have liked.

While I was working Dominica packed up everything that we needed and got the car mostly loaded up.  She made lunch so that we could eat at home before getting on to the road.  Cheaper, healthier and faster.  It is going to be an “off the wagon” weekend as far as the diet goes, I’m afraid.

It was just after one thirty when we got the troops loaded into the car and hit the highway.  We made a quick trip to the Beach Shopping Center to send out some mail and so that Dominica could make a run to CVS for some supplies.  We were less than ten minutes and were on our way out of Peekskill.

The drive went very well.  The weather was good and clear and there was a bit of traffic but not so much as to be problematic.  We made good time and only had to stop once and very quickly.

We drove to Dominica’s aunt’s house in Waverly, New York arriving in the late afternoon around five thirty.  So almost exactly four hours from our house to Waverly.

This was Liesl’s first trip to Waverly and her first time meeting a lot of people.  She was pretty happy overall.  Oreo had a rough time with all of the kids as he is really, really blind now and it was pretty dark so he couldn’t see people coming or where furniture was or whatever so it was tough for him.  It is sad seeing him get so old.

We had a good evening hanging out with the family.  We weren’t out too late.  We are spending the night at James and Nikki’s house which is just a mile or two away from Dominica’s aunt’s house in Waverly.  We have never been to their house before.

We had a good time hanging out with James and Nikki.  We stayed up way too late for Dominica and James.  Nikki and I are too much alike and stayed up until one thirty talking while the cousins were passing out from lack of sleep.

April 10, 2009: Covering on Good Friday

Today is Good Friday and today I am covering for my team so that they can have today off.  Instead I am taking a day off next week.

I slept in just a little this morning.  I was up way too late last night working on that DNS issue to be able to get up early today.  No way that that was going to be happening.  So I slept in as late as I could and then ran down to the office to get to work.

Work was very, very slow today which was awesome.  There was definitely several hours of work to do but it was all pretty low-key.  Mostly there was just a lot of packages to be deployed as a few teams decided to work today and to push out tons and tons of packages.  But it was all simple stuff so rather relaxing.

I did have to work fairly late tonight.  Until around seven.  Then the evening was spent getting ready for tomorrow.  We want to leave as early as possible but realistically it will not be all that early.  I have to start work before eight in the morning.

This has been a week of really short SGL updates.  Sorry, just too busy to keep up.