Sheep Guarding Llama

28 Days to Baby Day! (36 Weeks Pregnant)

5 Work Days Left for Dominica.

Today is the first of the last days in Newark (today is the last Friday, tomorrow is the last Saturday, etc.)  One week from this morning, Dominica and I will be heading out of our apartment in Eleven80 in Newark for the last time, throw are few remaining items into the trunk of the Mazda and on Friday night, after work, we will be heading for Peekskill to stay.

We are close enough to the end of our time in Newark that I can now see what the weather will be like for the rest of the time that we are here.  Only three days are scheduled to hit over sixty degrees.  Good for those of us who commute primarily on foot and prefer to walk quite briskly but are often restrained by the temperature.

It is a bright and crisp day in the NY Metro today.  There is a lot of smog, though, and I can barely see Manhattan from Newark.  It will be awesome to be up in Peekskill where the air is clean every day.

Last night, whilst walking Oreo, I finished reading Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People.”  The book is interesting but I don’t agree with Joel Spolsky’s assessment of it that it is not a book on manipulation.  I feel that it is.  Many of the techniques that Dale mentions in the book are in a grey area of lying and flattery.

The book is based around the assumption that the reader is always in the right and that the people that the reader wants to “influence” are simpletons.  Many of the techniques, I felt, came across like marketing which often have an adverse affect on people with Asperger’s Syndrome and similar world views.  I could sense the techniques in the book being used on my while reading it and it really turned me off.  I felt Dale attempting to manipulate me through the book.  In many ways the book just felt like an advertisement for the Dale Carnegie classes.

There is much to be gleaned from the book, especially for marketeers, but make no mistake that the book really is about manipulating people and that the average person will really feel like it taught them a lot simply because the book is written using its own manipulative principles that really do work on most people.  The book completely forgets to mention that the techniques will backfire on a significant percentage of the population and if you use them at the wrong time that you will really come across poorly.  Once people sense you trying to manipulate them you are in far worse shape than just being honest up front.

All of that being said, the average person is a sucker for marketing which is why they do it.  SPAM is only used so much because it has such a high success rate.  Telemarketers risk fines to market to people because the percentage of people who will buy anything is so high that it makes it financially worth the risk.  The book is very useful.  Just be aware that Dale is using its techniques on you too.

Our next several days are extremely busy.  Today Dominica and I both have to work plus I have homework due tonight which doesn’t make my day any easier.  Early tomorrow morning we are getting up and packing the car and heading to Peekskill where we are meeting Dominica’s parents for lunch and giving them a tour of the house and Peekskill.  Then we will return to Newark in the early afternoon and spend the rest of the day packing which we can do since my homework will be out of the way – although I then have a major paper due in two weeks so I need to be hard at work on that as well.

Sunday morning, Ramona is coming over to Eleven80 and is hanging out and helping us to pack.  She can only stay until early afternoon as she has some friends moving whom she is helping to move.  Then we are making another run to Peekskill.  Hopefully by that point we are taking nothing but delicates (monitors, computer supplies, plants) and no longer moving hard to deal with items out of the way.  Katie might stop by on Sunday afternoon to check out the new house.  We can’t hang out there long, though, as we will need to return to Newark to continue packing.  We have to have everything packed and ready to go by Monday night.

I am planning on working from home on Monday.  It is the only day that I can work from home all next week.  Tuesday I will be off as we are moving.  Wednesday through Friday I will be working from Wall Street as much as possible as all I will have in Newark is my laptop sitting in the middle of the empty living room floor.  That will not be very condusive to getting any work done.  It will kill my back having to work without having a chair.  We still need to schedule the maids to clean the apartment and the move out inspection.  So much to do!

I had to work from home all morning today and had to travel in to the office over my lunch window.  There were people already waiting impatiently for me to do some work by the time that I got to the office so I did not have any chance to go out for lunch or to swim or anything.

All of my free time today was put into doing homework for RIT.  To get ready for my homework that is due tonight I found it prudent to also do my homework that is due next Sunday (in nine days from now) which was pretty crappy to need to do it today, but it is pretty great that I have it completely out of the way for next week.  It was a pretty long assignment compared to most weeks as well.  I also went ahead and did the reading and prep work for the final week of classes which is the week after next.  That leaves nothing but in class discussions and the final project – which is a very large paper due in two weeks and two days.

Today, I just happen to examine my American Express records which I seldom do, and realized that we were charged for the rental car that we had while the BMW was last in the shop.  We had been phones a few times about the rental because the shop had lost information connecting us to the BMW dealer and apparently they just decided to charge us rather than the dealer even though we went through the effort of getting it all corrected for them.  One more thing that I need to deal with now in the midst of moving and homework and everything else.  I looked through my SGL records, boy am I glad that I have them, and the rental place charged my card more than a month after we had rented the car!  Talk about a scam.  They managed to have a mid-August car rental show up just a few days before November on my credit card bill.  Likely they were hoping that I would not notice the charge.  They also listed us as having rented the car for more than a month – claiming that we did not return the car until September 23rd after having borrowed it on August 21st!  This is crazy.

I was looking at some flight prices that were sent to me today – we get great deals sent to us now that we have flown around the UK a little bit.  This winter, flights to Ireland start at just $169 from New York going to either Shannon or Dublin.  Considering how incredibly strong the dollar is compared against the pound and euro right now, this would be an ideal time for a European vacation.  Talk about cheap.  The hotel that we had in London for $300 last November would be just $200 this November.  Our B&B in Stratford-upon-Avon would be really inexpensive.

I ended up working in the office, both on office work and on homework, until after nine thirty this evening.  What a long day.  Fourteen hours from start to finish at work, but the day passed relatively quickly and there is much to be done tomorrow.  We get to go to the new house first thing in the morning.

I was at work so late that Dominica and I decided to just eat separately.  It was a long night for me and I did not get to go to the gym today which is crappy, but I got a lot of important work done and out of the way.  Now I just need to keep working on my final project for the next two weeks as it is a very large project and I need to do it incrementally or else there simply will not be enough time to get it done.

I am signing off early.  I should get home around eleven tonight.  Might do a tiny bit of light packing but that seems unlikely.  Tomorrow we are off to Peekskill.

30 Days to Baby Day! (35 Weeks and Five Days Pregnant)

7 Work Days Left for Dominica.

Today the entire day is dedicated to the process of procurring our new house in Peekskill.  I have the day off from work so that I have the time necessarily to complete all of the work that needs to be done for the house.  Dominica is taking a half day.

I had to get up early with Dominica so that Oreo and I could drive her to work.  We only have the Mazda and if I don’t drive Dominica to work then she will have the car all day and we will be stuck.  So we got to play chauffer this morning.

Traffic was pretty bad taking MIn to work this morning.  Rush hour in Northern Jersey is not fun.

Once we were home, Oreo and I had a pretty short window in which to get ready ourselves and prepare for today’s walkthrough and closing.  It is a very busy day.

I managed to pack the car pretty well for today’s trip to Peekskill.  We moved the Marantz receiver and the Totem speakers both of which were on our “delicate items” list that we wanted to move manually by car instead of having them bounce around in the moving truck.  Because they are delicate items they were also making it that much harder to pack the apartment with them in the way.

I managed to load all of our packed clothing into the car along with some doggy supplies for Oreo.  We want to make sure that he feels like this is his home and that he can relax in it.  So we took his spare pillow, water and food dishes, his dinner, treats, some budda bones, his blanket and several binkies with which he can play.  He will enjoy that.

While I was packing the car, Dominica’s clinic called and rescheduled her appointment from this afternoon until Tuesday.  That is good as it will give us a bit more flexibility in our schedules today.

I managed to leave Eleven80 with Oreo and the loaded car (the trunk could barely close, the back seat was in use and Dominica is going to have to carry the speakers wrapped in a blanket) to go get Dominica from work at ten thirty.  Traffic was better now and I arrived right on time at eleven.

The sun was shining and it was a gorgeous day for a drive up the Pallisades Parkway with the leaves changing and barely any mid-day traffic.  We got up to Peekskill at noon.  Dominica had to run a quick errand to the clinic.  Then we went to Subway at the Beach Shopping Center for lunch as we had arrived with a full hour to kill in Peekskill.  (This particular Subway has the VeggiMax subs that we really like as well as a seafood delight sub that we did not try.)

At one o’clock we had the final walkthrough up at the house.  That went pretty well. I tried to get more pictures of the house and immediately realized that my camera, while having plenty of battery, did not have a memory card in it and was unable to take pictures 🙁  So much for that.

The walkthrough went well and pretty quickly.  We left Peekskill at one thirty to drive over to Katonah to actually do the closing.  (Had Dominica had to go to the clinic for her original appointment we would have dropped her off now and she would have had to have waited for forty-five minutes before getting in to her appointment!)

We got to the law offices at two and started the closing early since there was plenty of stuff for me to sign long before the sellers would need to do anything.  The closing process ended up taking over two hours and we didn’t wrap up until four thirty.  So we left Katonah, which is a gorgeous little town about ten miles off of the Connecticut border, and got back to Peekskill around five.

I am not sure if Dominica ever though about this process but had she had her appointment today at the clinic she would have been stuck there from one thirty until five – three and a half hours.  She would not have been happy!

So at five we used our own key to enter our own house in Westchester County!  It’s official, we are 100% New Yorkers again.  Only now we are downstaters rather than upstaters.  Weird.  (And yes, for those of you who live in NYC and have no concept of the rest of the state, Westchester County is the southern most tip of downstate, not “way up there”.  Upstate is still a ways away.)

We unloaded the car, which only took a few minutes, and introduced Oreo to his new home.  He was so excited.  He ran all over the house rubbing his belly on every bit of carpeting that he could find.  I set him up with his pillow and blanket and tossed his binkies all over the living room which he thought was great fun.  He went out on the back deck and had a great time sticking his head over the side and watching everything.  He is going to love it here.

We spent about an hour in the house.  There is nothing to do as the house is completely empty.  We walked Oreo around the yard which he thought was awesome as there are so many other dogs in the area.  We checked out our local dumpsters (yes, we have dumpsters!  Yay!) and picked up the community newsletter to see what was going on.  There are 439 homes in our Chapel Hill complex and there are a lot of activities up at the Life Center or whatever it is called including a knitting club on Thursday evenings.

We decided to get dinner in Peekskill.  Originally we had wanted to have run back to Newark, loaded the car again and returned to Peekskill but it ended up being far later than we had anticipated so we decided to just get a nice dinner and have a relaxing evening.  We couldn’t get parking downtown (the parking garage is being demolished or something) and we didn’t know much of where to go so we decided to play it safe and ate at “At the Reef” located on the roundabout north of town.  It is a very well known landmark in the area.

Dinner was really good.  Dominica had the blackened tilapia and I had the pistacchio crusted rainbow trout.  It was good but took a while.

It was nine when we got back to Eleven80.  We really did not want to have to go back as we now own a home and really want to be able to stay there.  We don’t get to completely move for more than a week.  It is going to be a long week.

It was time to feed the dog then straight off to bed once we were home.  I am working the early shift tomorrow so I need some sleep.  Dominica has to go in a little early tomorrow too as she is dropping off the Mazda at the shop for some minor work.  We have a belt squeaking and a headlamp out.  Just stuff that we want to be dealt with now rather than while we are going back and forth to Peekskill constantly.

Gas in NJ is down to $2.59 by this evening.  That is one of the gas stations on the main drag in downtown Newark.

31 Days to Baby Day! (35 Weeks and Four Days Pregnant)

8 Work Days Left for Dominica; House closing is tomorrow!

Today was crazy “do paperwork for the house” day.  As of today, all of the wire transfer authorizations are complete, everything is signed, everything is scheduled.  We are ready to go.  I even have the Internet access disconnect scheduled for the old apartment and the hook up ready for the new house!  Talk about being on the ball today.

The new house will be turned on by Cablevision at Wednesday morning, the 29th, while dad and aunt Sharon are there.  That will make the transition very simple.  Movers on Tuesday, Internet access on Wednesday morning, rest on Thursday (I won’t work from home since I will be reduced to a laptop on the living room floor,) Halloween party on Thursday night and then moving ourselves on Friday.

The weather was nice down here in the New York Metro today but dad said that it started snowing back home this afternoon.  They are even expecting to get an inch of snow tonight!  Hard to believe that it is time for snow back home when it is so nice here.  I am still wearing a short sleeved shirt, no t-shirt and no jacket and I walk for almost five miles each day outside.

I got home rather late this evening.  I was not hungry at all for some reason and decided to skip dinner.  Dominica was hungry so I went down to the deli downstairs and picked up dinner for her.  We watched three or four episodes of How I Met Your Mother. Then Dominica went to bed around eleven.  I was not tired at all and stayed up until almost one in the morning.

Tomorrow is going to be a very busy day.  I am “off” from work and remembered to turn on my out of office assistant so that I would not have to worry about answering emails or anything while I am busy with the house stuff.  In the morning I have to drive Dominica to work so that I will have use of the car during the day.  Then, around eleven, I have to pick her back up from work with Oreo in tow and the car loaded down with our very first load of stuff bound for the new house.  This is one of our few opportunities to move fragile and difficult to pack items to get them out of our way so that it is easier for us to continue to pack the apartment.

At one in the afternoon we have the final house inspection in Peekskill.  At a quarter after two Dominica has her appointment with her midwife, also in Peekskill.  At two thirty we have the house closing in Katonah (obviously I am going alone while Dominica is at her appointment.)  Then, after the closing, I drive back to Peekskill, pick up Dominica and we take the first load of stuff to the new house.  It is going to be a very busy day indeed.

32 Days to Baby Day! (35 Weeks and Three Days Pregnant)

9 Work Days Left for Dominica; House closing scheduled in 1 day.

The plan today was to go swimming.  Last week I had a trial membership at New York Health and Raquet Club down on Whitehall where I swam all week.  On Friday when leaving I asked at the desk to make sure that I could just stop in today and sign up for a membership so that I could continue swimming.  I thought ahead to verify that there would not be a lapse in my accessibility to swimming because once you break the habit of going every day it is quite difficult to get it started again.

So I was very disappointed when today Dan and I walked down to NYHRC, a half mile walk each direction, to sign up and start our membership and were told, after waiting for five minutes for them to find us a sales person, that we could not sign up at that location and would have to sign up back at the office and our membership cards would be mailed to us.  That means that we wasted this walk and wasted three days of stalling on our membership since we could have started that process on Friday but instead waited until today with the assurance that that would be no problem.

I tried signing up through the office but apparently they are not willing to put me onto the corporate plan because I am a consultant.  Normally this type of benefit applies to me as well but not this time.  So I called and worked out a three month membership.  I had to pay up front but it was only so much.  Instead of paying $75 per month which I thought that I was going to get I am not paying $123 per month which is significantly more, but it is about the only reasonable way that I am going to get to swim on my lunch breaks and that is extremely valuable.  Dan joined today as well so I have someone to push me to make sure that I go every day.

Today I installed Clojure at work and wrote my first Hello, World program to test it out.  Clojure is a very cool implementation of Lisp on the Java Virtual Machine.  So you get to write Lisp but with access to Java libraries and the speed of the JVM.  It is a great mix.

Work was rather slow this evening so I left just before six and walked down to my new health club and put in an hour or more swimming.  I really did not want to skip a swimming day.  Once I start skipping then I will never get into the habit.  It was a good workout.  Going after work definitely means that there is a larger crowd than when I go around lunch time.  Not many people actually want to work out during their lunch break, I don’t think.

It was really late by the time that I got back to Newark.  Dominica came outside to walk Oreo just as I reached the building.  He was very excited to see me.  He was in such a good mood tonight.  He was not acting like a dog who had played all day at daycare – way too much energy.

We ordered in Chinese for dinner from Golden City.  We watched one episode of How I Met Your Mother.

Nadine and Clarence were excited to get the Ledig’s bed table that they gave to us several months ago.  It is designed for a queen sized bed, like we have in Newark, but once we move to Peekskill we will have our “Super King” bed back and the table won’t even begin to fit over it.

Somehow it was almost midnight by the time that we got to sleep.  What a long day.  But now I know that I will get to swim tomorrow at lunch so that is good.

So far, everything is all set with the house.  We are moving forward nicely.  We are getting pretty excited.