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.

We are into the single digits.  Nine days left to go.  We are definitely into the home stretch now.

We are continuing to try to deal with the mail situation at the new house.  We are still not receiving mail and have no working mailbox from which to get our mail.  The post office pretty much refuses to help us out and we are completely stuck without any mail service.  It is very obvious that there is no competition.  If FedEx and UPS were competing for mail delivery services you know that they would fix a problem like this in minutes.  Not let it sit for weeks.

Dominica tried calling the post office again today to get them to do something.  Now they are trying to tell us that we have to pay money to get our mail.  Apparently the postage that is paid on the mail itself isn’t enough and now that they are holding our mail they are going to charge us again to deliver it to us (this is exactly the same as not having net-neutrality, charge one person to send and then hold it until the person receiving pays enough for you to deliver it even though both parties already paid for the initial service!)  This is extortion.  We move into a new house and there is a USPS delivery fee that we are not told about until after they have confiscated two weeks of our mail!?!

Already we have had the fix it person from the USPS refuse to take our calls.  Handlers redirect any calls going to him, Mike, with stories of him being “busy”, “out to lunch” or “gone home for the day.”   Today I find out that he was “on vacation” last week and so it seems pretty fishy that he was also “at lunch” or that someone “saw him leaving for the day” when he was not even in the office.

After many calls the story is now, and for the first time, that we are actually the owners of the lock and that we are responsible for replacing it.  Why we weren’t the owners of the lock and responsible for it last week I have no idea.  This is the third story that I have heard from the post office.  The first story was that the post office often just changes the locks without telling people.  The second was that that never happens.  The third is that we own the lock and we change it.

Why is it so hard to get a straight answer on something as simple as a mail box?  There should be laws protecting people from any sort of mail issue or, as I would prefer, it should be opened up for competition and let FedEx deliver my mail to me.  I bet if FedEx was my mail carrier they wouldn’t deliver junk mail to me just because some spammer gives them money for fear of losing my account.  Carrier would compete on features and price rather than having a monopoly.

So the upside is that the mailbox is being handled tomorrow morning at eight in the morning when I am home and Dominica does not have to deal with it.  That is, of course, assuming that we don’t have a baby in the mean time.  It is a bit unnerving to have a baby on the way and not to have had mail service for the past two weeks.

We were running pretty late for getting me to the 7:08 train this morning.  Dominica dropped me off at the station and we could see the train coming down the line crossing Annsville Creek which is a little too close for comfort.  Any closer and the crossing gate would have been down and there would have been no way for me to get to the platform in time.  I ran from the car and up to the platform and was able to get a ticket as there was no one else in line.  I have the machine down to a science, after just one week of use, and can have a ticket in my hand in roughly ten to fifteen seconds from the time that I first reach the machine including paying for it via credit card.  The MTA machines are really efficient.

I had a really busy morning.  Constant requests all morning.  I barely had a moment to do anything including going into my normally slow lunch period.

Someone that I support in London accidentally called Dominica instead of me today not realizing that they were calling my home rather than the office.  Dominica was pretty surprised to be getting a call from the UK.

Dan and I managed to sneak away at one to head down to the health club to get in our daily swim.  I am feeling much stronger every time too.  It is really working.  Although one would hope as I have been swimming for a month now.  I was hoping that the results would be a bit more pronounced than they are. I have been swimming a ton and haven’t lost a single pound yet.

Q: What do trendy clothing store managers do in London?

A: Mind the Gap

I had a good swim today, about an hour in the water.  I really appreciate it when I am able to swim for that long.  I can really feel it afterwards.

I got a tunafish salad wrap on the walk back to the office.  The late afternoon was not nearly as busy as the morning.  I would like to have been able to have left the office on the early side today so that I could get home and spend some time with Dominica and Oreo but a couple of things were scheduled for me after six this evening so I am stuck taking care of them before I am able to head out the door.  That means that I have no hope of making it for the early six o’clock train so my goal is to try for the 6:43 train but, more realistically, will make the 7:18 train.  That will get my home at 8:13 which isn’t too awful.  I am working from home tomorrow so that isn’t really bad at all.

I knew that I was going to completely miss the earlier train so on my way home I stopped in to Borders.  I was homing that they would have a Packt book on Subversion and Trac but they did not.  They had tons of other Packt books but not on the subject that I need.  I should have known better than to go into Borders.  They always have their heat set for their employees and not for their customers.  It is, I believe, over eighty degrees in there even though it is forty outside.  Even just wearing a thin dress shirt, no t-shirt, no jacket, no nothing I was sweating uncontrollably because of the sudden change from brisk walking outside when cold to blasting heat inside.  Amazon doesn’t do that to their customers.  Luckily later I went on Amazon and found that the book was quite poorly rated.  I guess that I will just skip it.

I found out from Dominica that our postal carrier stopped by today and brought in the mail that had been backing up out in the mailbox.  It was far more than would fit in the mail box so our carrier is probably lugging it all around in her car. Dominica had put a note on the mailbox telling her that Dominica was home so that they could work out what to do with the mailbox.  The carrier made Dominica turn over our mailbox keys.  Dominica told her that we were told to keep them to give to Mike in the morning but she insisted that she had to have them so Dominica handed them over.  We are sure that this is going to cause a problem in the morning, but we can’t fight with our mail carrier.  This is all a nightmare.

Dominica picked me up at eight twenty, the train was late again today, and we drove straight out to Nanuet to go furniture shopping at Bob’s Discount Furniture.  We had found some items on there online today that we really liked and their prices are great so we decided to go check them out.

The furniture shopping went very well and we ended up buying the Multiplex, a four seat theatre syle chair setup that will be perfect for watching movies and playing video games in the basement.  It was really comfortable.

Dominica also found a dresser for our bedroom that she liked so we decided to get that as well before we begin a never-ending cycle of putting our clothes onto the floor.  So we picked up the four drawer chest unit from the Vodara sleepset line.  Down the road we may decide to get one of the matching nightstands once we figure out how much space we have after our super king bed is delivered and setup again.

It was ten twenty by the time that we got done at the furniture store.  They were extremely glad to have customers, though.  There was just about no one shopping there and I don’t think that anyone was buying during the time that we were there.  This market is really tough on places like furniture stores, car dealers, etc.

After getting our furniture, which is scheduled to be delivered on November 19th, we went next door to the Nanuet Diner to get something to eat.  Then we drove home arriving at about midnight and were straight off to bed.