Sheep Guarding Llama

22 Days to Baby Day! (36 Weeks and Six Days Pregnant)

1 Work Day Left for Dominica.

“Information wants to be ambient.” – Erin McKean, Lexicographer

Scott’s new words for today: layoffable and layoffability.  In reference to “how layoffable” a certain employee is.  The more layoffable you are the easier it is for the company to lay you off.  If you are completely critical to the firm then you are not very layoffable or your layoffability is very low.  Go ahead, start using them.  It’s fun.

I got to Peekskill Station without any problems at 9:23 last night.  I was running to make the train home.  I really did not want to miss it or it was going to be one crazy late night for me.  I got to check out the Peekskill waterfront at night while I waited for the family to come pick me up.  There is a bar in the train station itself as well as the Peekskill Brewery being right across the street.  These will be handy for evenings when I get it but have to wait before Dominica is able to pick me up from the train.  I also found that there were taxis waiting at the station when the train arrived which will definitely come in handy from time to time when Dominica just can’t get down to the station to get me or, for example, when Dominica goes into labor and I have to rush to the hospital from Manhattan.

Everyone came down to the station and picked me up around nine thirty.  It was pretty chilly standing outside without a jacket this evening.  They were coming to get me straight from having dinner at the New City Diner which Dominica raved about again being extremely happy with her meal there.  That is our third time eating there this week.

For dinner, Dominica picked up fish and chips for me.  They have awesome fish and chips at the New City Diner.  We went home and I ate dinner then everyone had the pear tartlets that I brought home from Financier Patisserie.  Those were really amazing.  Dad and aunt Sharon were not prepared for how awesome real patisserie desserts are.

We did our best to make it an early night but there was not much hope.  It was around eleven when we all finally managed to get to bed.  It is going to be a short night.

Today was the only day that Dominica and I both need to commute from Peekskill.  We were up at five thirty and out the door around six fifty.  Dominica dropped me at the Peekskill Station where I easily caught the 7:08 Metro North train to Grand Central Terminal in Manhattan.  She drove on from Peekskill north over the Bear Mountain Bridge and down to Totowa, New Jersey.  She was in the office by 7:53 which was not bad at all.  She made great time for rush hour.

The views from Peekskill Station are awesome.  While I was waiting for the morning commuter train I got to watch the freight trains in Orange County across the Hudson River lazily winding their way along the river’s edge.  It is so cool to watch trains across the river.  The lower Hudson Valley is one of the greatest train watching spots ever.  You can also watch traffic as it winds down from Bear Mountain Bridge on either side of the river.  And the ferry boats making their way towards the city.  I wish that there was a ferry that I could take so that I could alternate routes to shake things up a bit but no such luck coming from Peekskill.  Nyack has a very cool ferry, I hear from Katie.

The ride was nice.  The train was definitely full this morning.  Not standing room only but every seat was taken.  Peekskill is one of the later stops with only Cortlandt and Croton-Harman being “pickup” stops made before the Harlem and Grand Central drop off stops.

At Grand Central Terminal I managed to pick up the Peekskill/Cordlandt Schedule to carry with me.  That will make things easier when I am rushing for the trains at night.  I got to ride the “sardine train”, the Lexington Avenue Express (5) from GCT to Wall Street today.  Katie has been warning me about it.  Everyone tries to avoid teh 4 & 5 trains in the morning as they are awful but there is very little that I can do to get around it.  I managed to get onto the first train this morning but it was definitely back completely full and very uncomfortable.  More like riding on the London Underground (the Tube) or DLR than riding a New York City subway.

I timed my trip carefully this morning and with the Lex Express getting stuck around Utica Station for almost ten minutes and me grabbing a bagel and coffee (sesame seed with cream cheese, large with milk and no sugar, of course) on the way the time from door to desk was one hour and fifty minutes.  That’s total travel time.  Less than two hours from the time I step at the door until I am typing on my computer.  It is a very long commute but a comfortable one that I am not going to mind so much.  I really do get a lot of chance to read, listen to podcasts, microblog (tweet) and just relax and have some time to myself.  Once we master the time that we need to leave the house, get a monthly pass rather than buying the tickets on the platform and if I don’t get stuck anywhere the trip could theoretically be shaved to as little as one hour and thirty five minutes from door to desk, and that is during rush hour.  There are times that it could, with the right set of trains, be as little as one hour and twenty five minutes.

No sooner do I learn this new commute that I get to the office and learn that the rumour mill says that I am being relocated, again.  This time up to Tribeca to the fixed income trading floors.  The move is not all bad, of course, as there is always some amount of silver lining.  Chances are that I would maintain my Wall Street office in addition to my spot on the floor (the floor would be paid for from a different budget, I believe.)  The commute will be longer by a bit and more of a pain.  There is the problem of the gym, as well, since there is no gym with a pool anywhere near the Tribeca building.  So I would need to commute from Tribeca to Downtown in order to swim.  The upside is that it is a higher profile position sitting directly on the floor.  Not that being high profile is all good, but it isn’t all bad either.  (I was told that it was very unlikely that this would actually happen.  We will wait and see.)

To add to all of our stress, Dominica found out that tomorrow is our last day of open enrollment for our health care coverage from Siemens so we have to decide on health plans, tonight.  Deciding in a few weeks would be so much better.  We are stuck going to a less expensive plan too because we start paying out of pocket for the coverage starting pretty soon.  That is going to be very, very painful.  We decided to move to a lower cost HMO plan that is still going to cost us more than $1,050 per month out of pocket.  Eek!

I also had to deal with homeowner’s insurance this morning.  Apparently it is required that we be covered by our homeowner’s association even though they refused to disclose any and all homeowner’s association information prior to the sale of the house.  I called the insurance company early this morning to attempt to get things rolling.  I need to make changes for the cars anyway since we have a new address and now that Dominica is not going to be commuting at all.

Serious email delays at the office this morning.  Thirty to forty minutes for internal email delivery.  That makes for quite a mess.

Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, has an interesting post recently about how it is possible that Linux will be shipping on more computers (desktops, laptops, etc., not servers) next year than Windows.  It is a short and interesting article.  Very interesting that Linux may make it on to the majority of user’s computers without them even realizing that Linux is providing a significant base to their user experience rather than Windows.  The Linux distro causing the splash (sorry) is SplashTop.  Interesting product indeed.

A related product is the new Asus EeePC B202.  I don’t know too much about it, but it definitely looks quite interesting.  It is a lot like having a desktop version of the EeePC Netbook.  Not a very powerful machine but very inexpensive and has been doing quite well for certain uses.  I expect that this type of device will become increasingly popular as more and more people need environmentally friendly, almost-always on email and browsing solutions for their home.  In a world where people have become accustomed to always being able to check their email and lookup movies on IMDB, get an anwer from Wikipedia, read a blog, grab a recipe, etc. having a nearly instant-on computer that uses almost no resources, generates almost no noise or heat and costs very little could be a pretty big player.  Look for more devices like this to be appearing from the big vendors once people begin to realize the need for something in this niche.  Add in the ability to handle lots of media (just add a dash of VideoLAN’s VLC player) and you have one awesome piece of equipment.

Today is another super busy day with house and apartment stuff so I know that I am not going to have very much time to write and post SGL so my plan is actually to post very, very early in the day.  I am leaving the office during my lunch window and taking the train back to Newark.  I will be working from Newark for the afternoon.  I have to be there to coordinate with the maid service who is cleaning the apartment today for the check out.  Then, as soon as Dominica can get to Newark from Totowa after work, we are loading up the car with everything that we can fit into it and taking a load up to Peekskill.  That should include all of the plants at the very least.  Then we will return to Newark with the air mattress and Oreo where we will spend the night.

Tomorrow Oreo is going to daycare to his halloween party.  Dominica is going to her last day of work.  I am staying in Newark to do the final apartment move out inspection with Ramone then I am taking my final commute on the PATH.   And at the end of the day we are commuting from Wall Street and Totowa up to Peekskill and will be completely done with our life in New Jersey.

It is one in the afternoon and I am signing off now to head back to Newark.

23 Days to Baby Day! (36 Weeks and Five Days Pregnant)

2 Work Days Left for Dominica.

One of the greatest feelings ever is waking up for the first time in your new home.  For us it was this morning even though we have actually owned the house for an entire week already.   Having four people staying in the house on our first night really highlighted just how much larger this house is than our apartment.  Everyone had more space last night than Dominica and I have alone in the Eleven80 apartment.  Having four people in the house was no problem at all – even with there only being a single shower ready for use.

Getting up this morning at the new house was great.  There was space to move around and, possibly my favourite feature, carpeting everywhere.  I am so used to the floor hurting my feet constantly.  Now I remember how nice it was in Geneseo with all of that carpeting.

Now that we have moved into the master bedroom we really have a feel for how much larger this room is than our bedroom at Eleven80.  The closet is huge in comarison (although not nearly as large as the closet that we had in Geneseo.)   We are talking about putting in a dresser yet, an armchair for reading and, once we have the funds available, a large LCD.  We loved having a large monitor in our bedroom at Eleven80 and don’t want to do without that again.  That is just so handy.  We are thinking that we will have a big 1080p monitor attached to a Mac Mini running Snow Leopard (OSX 10.6) that comes out this winter and an XBOX 360.  That will give us movies, Internet and gaming from bed.  It will be our escape option.

Dominica called the clinic today and asked if there was any way that they could see her today even though yesterday they had said that they were full up.  They managed to squeeze her in around lunch which was really important as she already had today off and was in town.  Any other day and it would be a pretty major problem either because she would have to leave work and drive a significant amount or because it would be so long without seeing her midwife.  That was a major stress reliever for her.  We were really concerned after she had to cancel her appointment yesterday.

This morning was my time to experiment with Metro North between Peekskill and Manhattan.  I have read about the trains but have not had a chance to go to the station yet and don’t really know how ticket purchasing or anything else works so I am looking forward to finding out and being confident about riding the train.  Dominica drove me down to the train station and waited for me to get my ticket and to be sure that I knew what I was doing before she left me.  She said that it was a lot like dropping off a kid on their first day of kindergarten.

Using the Peekskill Metro North station was actually very, very easy and tomorrow it will be even easier as I learned a few little tricks today.  The ticket machines there are very simple and there is a ton of information posted all around.  You just need to go to the correct platform (north bound or south bound) and you just purchase a ticket by credit card.  Very easy.  The train comes roughly every half hour.

I caught the express which stops at Croton-on-Hudson and then zips all of the way to Manhattan going along the beautiful Hudson River waterfront the entire way.  The train ride is great.  Very comfortable and easy.  The time did not seem to be much longer than the ride from Newark to Summit when I am not on the Express.  The time is about 53 – 56 minutes on this stretch of the train from Peekskill to Grand Central Terminal.  I am going to be able to do a lot of reading.

The transfer from the Metro North Hudson line to the NY Subway 4 & 5 line was very easy.  I was worried that that would be confusing and difficult or, at the very least, require going outside but it did not at all.  The 4 & 5 connect inside of GCT so I just had to follow the signs from one to the other.  Very easy.  I was lucky enough to catch the Express 4 which took me down to the Wall Street Station pretty quickly.  Faster than I had anticipated.

The Wall Street Station for the 4 & 5 is actually at the head of Wall on Broadway near Trinity Church and the Borders at 100 Broadway.  So from there I still have to walk the length of Wall Street to get to the office but that really is not all that far.  It is very handy that the Express goes to the three stations about which I care: Grand Central/42nd, Wall Street and Bowling Green (in case I am coming or going from the gym and/or meeting Katie.)  That probably shaves five to ten minutes off of the commute time.

Dominica messaged me this morning around eleven thirty to tell me that the Internet access from Optimum Online (Cablevision) had been hooked up at the new house!  That was a major fear that something would go wrong with the hookup and that we would be isolated out there.  Without Internet access we have no phones or anything and I can’t work in the evenings, work from home or work on the weekends.  It would be awful if we were stuck without access for any length of time as last night proved.

Today for lunch I met up with some friends from work who are taking a class in Manhattan from Red Hat.  They came down and met two of us from the Wall Street office down on Stone and we all got pizza at Adrienne’s.  It is much cheaper to eat there than a lot of places in downtown.

Andy and I did a bit of work all morning to get things working again in the data center. We have been without email or IM for almost an entire day which is just awful.  I managed to get everything prepped for the services to come back on but it was almost one thirty before Andy actually got a hold of someone a the data center and made them power the server back up physically.  What a pain!  We have to be thankful, though, as this was not a total disaster and just a matter for turning things back on.  No data was lost or anything like that.

I found out today that another friend from the office is joining the gym where I go now.  Once Katie manages to join we will have four of us going to the gym more or less together.  That will really make it that much easier to always have someone with whom to go.  Much better motivation than going alone all of the time.  Dan is planning to go at lunch.  Katie, I think, is leaning towards lunch.  Suraj is going to do after hours.  I will have to do a mix of the two.

I ordered some games for the Playstation 3 today from Amazon which should arrive on Friday.  Dad is hoping to be able to mount the Westinghouse 32″ LCD in the living room above the fireplace either Friday night or Saturday morning.  Once that is mounted we will have the PS3 hooked to it as our BluRay player, streaming Internet player and video game console.  Temporarily it will be our main entertainment console unit along with the AppleTV.  So I ordered Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivions – Game of the Year Edition and Assassin’s Creed.  I was going to wait to get Assassin’s Creed on the XBOX 360 as that is supposed to be the better version but there are so few games that I want for the PS3 compared to the 360 that there seems to be some value in spreading them out and the PS3 version is just $19.99 new from Amazon so it seemed worth it.  That and it is something that we can use right away instead of waiting months on the 360.  There are so many things that I want for the 360 (five games at the very least) that it seems wise to just get this for the PS3.  I am thinking about Ridge Racer 7 and Gran Tourismo 5: Prologue for the PS3 yet.  We will see if I can find them inexpensively.  When the price comes down I will probably try Eternal Sonata as well.  That looks awesome.

I also ordered Heroes Season Two on BluRay.  It will be the first show of any sort that we own on BD.  We have been looking to see what movies we want to own but so far there is almost nothing on BD about which we really care.  Coming out really soon is the new Batman movie and the new Narnia movie Prince Caspian which, of course, we will be getting, but other than that we don’t really want very much.  I am hopeful that The Sound of Music will be out in BD pretty soon.

Dominica went to GameStop today and found Folklore used for the PS3 and bought that for herself.  We don’t know the game but there is nothing that Dominica knows that she wants for the PS3 and she wanted some game to call her own so she looked around and decided to give Folklore a try.

My day was fairly busy all day today.  Mostly caused by me trying to play catchup since I was out of the office yesterday.  Hundreds of emails backed up that I had to sort through to make sure that I was not needed.  I wasn’t exactly swamped, just busy.  I tried to leave the office a little on the early side so that I could ride the subway with Katie (it is literally just like one block farther to meet her at Bowling Green rather than taking the Wall Street subway stop) but she could not stay late and fifteen minutes before we were ready to leave I got stuck on a surprise conference call that ended up lasting quite a long time.  So my entire evening was spent on a conference call that wasn’t on my schedule.

Because Dominica was able to get into her appointment today and because the Internet access was hooked up successfully we decided that we could stay in Peekskill again tonight (that and we just really want to stay there rather than to go to our completely empty apartment in Newark.)  So tonight I will be trying the train ride on Metro North in reverse for the first time as well.

The conference call ended up going on for so long that I had to let my family go to dinner without me.  So much with visiting with the family.  At least Dominica got to spend some time with them.  I took the opportunity to catch up on my RIT classwork since I was stuck in the office so late.

Tomorrow we have no choice but to be at Eleven80.  I have to leave the office early to go let the maid service in to clean the apartment and will be stuck working from Dominica’s laptop on the floor until the end of the day.  Then we have to get every last thing in the apartment packed up into the car so that we can take it all to Peekskill.  This might be tough since so much of what needs to travel is plants.  We may easily be forced to get a load in the evening and then another load on Friday morning.  Not sure yet how we are going to move all of those plants logistically.  That might be a pretty serious problem.  Might need some special trips which is not what we need at this point but at least we are down to the very end of this type of stuff.

I have our move-out inspection scheduled for first thing Friday morning.  Dominica will head off to work on Friday then I will do the inspection with the resident manager of Eleven80 and then head to work myself.  Should be quick and easy.

We’ve decided that we have to skip, as you can see here, the Eleven80 halloween party on Thursday night.  It just isn’t possible for us to do that.  We didn’t really realize just how swamped we were going to be with the move this late in the game.  We were a bit overly optimistic.  It is very sad since Oreo has a custom pirate costume that his grandmother made him to show off at the party.  He is still going to wear the costume and go to the halloween party at Doggie Paradise on Friday but we had hoped that he would get to wear the costume twice.

To add to our confusion with so much stuff to schedule over the next several days we are now trying to figure out how Dominica and I can get out to Elmira, New York for her Papa’s funeral which we expect to be a week from Saturday.  We really want to be able to go but are not sure if she can safely go being that pregnant.  She will be 38 weeks and 1 day pregnant at that point which is 8 days past the full term mark and into the highly volatile “baby any day” period.  We are going to just have to play that by ear.  The weather will also be a significant factor.

My conference call ended up lasting for more than three hours!  What a long day.  Eight o’clock when I finally had a chance to walk out of the office on Wall Street.  It will be a race to make it uptown to Grand Central in time to catch the 8:29 train to Peekskill which is due to arrive at 9:23.  Hopefully I make the train or it will be long after ten when I get back into town.

I am posting early as I leave the office as I know that I will not have time to write after I get back to the house.  Dominica has to be up very early tomorrow, probably around five thirty in the morning.  She has to drive all of the way down to Wallington with Oreo to get him to daycare then back to Totowa to get to work then back to pick him up and home to Newark to the bare and empty apartment.  She is going to be exhausted.  Then we might have to make an additional run.  I am going to see if Oreo can just stay with dad and aunt Sharon during the day.  That will save time and money.

One good thing to come out of everything is that Dominica, being an actual employee and not a true consultant, gets three bereavement days from work.  That is important as we attempt to maneuver her driving, working, holidays, disability, etc.