Sheep Guarding Llama

Liesl was up and very active a little before six this morning.  It was enough that it woke me up so I checked the alarmclock which Dominica had given me to use so that I could wake up in the morning and not knowing that she had it set almost twenty minutes fast I thought that it was a quarter after six.  So I decided that since I needed to be up at a quarter till seven that I might as well just get up and get ready to face the day anyway.  So my day started very early.

Liesl and Dominica got up around ten and came down to see me.  I vacuumed the living room carpet that was shampooed last night so that we would be ready to move all of the furniture again and clean the other side of the room.

My work for the office went for quite a long time today.  Not totally unexpected but it was more than I would have guessed.  I didn’t get a chance to wrap up completely until almost three in the afternoon which is pretty late when you consider that I started at seven in the morning.  That is a full eight hour day and I did not even take a lunch break long enough to eat with Dominica.  I shoved my tofu dogs down, took three phone calls then went back and quickly at my cold vegetables and returned to the office again.

An N Scale boxcar from Micro Trains arrived in the mail today.  It is my first boxcar of the Genesee and Wyoming Railroad.

The postman keeps putting these Priority Mail boxes into our mailbox that are too big.  They are just the perfect size to be inside the mailbox but they are larger than what can come through the front of the mailbox due to a flange that meets the front mailbox door.  Because he puts the mail in from the back of the mailbox unit he is unaware, I assume, that the front flange reduces the size of the front opening compared to the back opening.  So twice now I have had to cut open a USPS Priority Mail shipping box, remove its contents and smash it inside of the mailbox in order to retrieve it.  It is very strange that the USPS made a shipping box of such a precise size as to fit in the back of the standard USPS community PO Box and to not fit out of the front.  This much be a problem all over the country.

After I wrapped up work with the office I had a chance to begin the process of moving web sites over from Scranton to Toronto.  I managed to get all of the sites that I control and that do not use a database moved over almost immediately without any incident.  That went really well.  I am very excited to see how much faster the page load times are from Toronto than they were from Scranton and Scranton had been a nice improvement over Geneseo which had been an improvement over Washington, D.C.  It has been a process or steadily upgrading over the years.

At four we finally had an opportunity to really get busy with cleaning the livingroom carpet again.  Dominica and I moved all of the furniture while Liesl slept.  Then Dominica red up packing materials while I did the first round of vacuuming with the Kirby.  Then we did the spot cleaning with some soap and a brush to tackle the worst of the stains.  Then the real shampooing.

The shampooing went much more smoothly today.  Yesterday was our day to learn how the shampoo attachment for the Kirby works.  After doing two rounds of shampoo last night we are pretty good at it now.  Doing the work today was a breeze.

The shampooing and basic cleanup was completed by five thirty.  Not too bad considering what a large space we had to do.  The tough part is, of course, once the shampooing is done the entire north half of the living area – that portion where the dining room table goes, is now wet and we can neither use it nor can we move our furniture back into that space.  So now we are stuck with a wet room on one side and a room crammed full of our furniture on the other with Oreo hiding on his pillow as far from us as he can get.

Dominica and Liesl went down to the basement and spent a few hours just hanging out down there on the sofa that we have there as it was really the only available space in the house where they could sit and be dry.  Oreo went down and sat on the sofa as well.  I received a few phone calls and was on the phone for a while and so went upstairs and paced around the large, open space that we temporarily have available in the dining room area.  The pacing in my socks helped to squeeze out the excess moisture and helped to dry the carpeting more quickly.  While I was on the phone I hooked up a fan to blow air across the floor which helped a little.

Once my phone calls were done and Liesl was falling asleep I took a trip into the attic and we loaded it up with all of the stuff that we have been waiting to store up there.  That took half an hour or more but cleared up a lot of space from all over the house.  Hard to believe how much stuff we had waiting to go up there.  Only a small amount of it came from dad’s last delivery of stuff for the house.

The carpet actually dried faster than we had thought that it would so by late in the evening we were able to begin actually putting the furniture back where it was going to go.  We had decided a few days ago that the rooms were really set up with a very different use in mind that what we actually ended up using the rooms for.  Originally we had put the furniture where it was when Liesl had not yet been born, when we had no video game systems but the Wii which we never used and we had only a small television near the fireplace that we were not even sure was going to stay in the living room area.

Now we have come to learn that Dominica and Liesl really spend their time in the living room and that it is the hub of all of the household activity.  We really needed to rethink the way that the furniture was situated based on the fact that the big television over the fireplace is always on and something is always going on on it, that there is always a laptop in use in the living room and that Liesl will always be hanging out in the living room and that she will need a permanent changing station there.  We also admitted that the dining room table was not really used for eating dinner and that it should not be set up in the way of other things in the hopes of eating dinner either.

The dining room table is now much farther into the corner so that we can still use it but it takes up much less space than it did before.  The lamp still needs to be adjusted.  The worktable where we have been doing the model railroading goes along the wall by the dining room table and can be moved to the back of the love seat like a console table so that I can sit in the dining room and work while facing the television and see over the love seat.

The recliner now faces the television almost directly head on rather than at an awkward angle so that when it is used for feeding Liesl that you can actually see the television rather than cranking your head far around to the side.  The two individual chairs have been moved along the western wall near to the deck door and are mostly just used for when we have company visiting us and for seating at the “changing station”.

We are very happy with how the room reorganized.  Now the living room and dining room are not separated by the wall of the large recliner and it feels much more like a large, open space.  It makes it far easier for us to hang out as a family and to use the four things that we actually use in that room – the television, the laptop, the modeling table and the changing station.  Originally it was laid out as a sitting room and formal dining space which are two uses for which the area is never used.