Today the baby is considered to be full term!  That means that if the baby comes today we are no longer considered to be premature but just simply “on the early side”.  It also means that the possibility of the baby arriving any day is much, much higher than it has been.  We are into the common, healthy labor zone in which we will remain either until little baby Miller arrives or we hit two weeks after the due date (in 35 days time.)  It is not likely that the doctor and midwife would allow us to go for a whole two weeks after due date.  Most likely labor would be induced at one week after the due date.

Dominica and I were really exhausted when the alarm rang at five thirty this morning.  We had, at best three and a half hours of restless sleep.  It was a rough night in a completely bare apartment.  It was a bit strange sleeping in the apartment when there was nothing but one lamp sitting on the window sill, the air mattress on the floor and some garbage bags with our clothes.

I got up and showered and then Dominica got up.  We were hurting pretty badly and Oreo was completely exhausted.  He slept in his car seat which was pulled up next to the air mattress so that he could be close to us since there was not enough room on the mattress itself for him to be with us.

Loading the car took two trips with the valet cart this morning and the car was parked way down the street so that took us extra long as I had to walk quite far with the cart twice.  Today is the last day for the Central Parking Valet Service at Eleven80 as well.  The valets were all given jobs at other locations, I have been told, so that is good.  I am sure that they do not really appreciate having to learn the ropes at a new location and get to know new coworkers, though.

Dominica got off to work a little on the late side.  I went back to the building and got Ramone, the resident manager, to come up around seven fifty to do the move-out inspection.  That only took a minute and went really well.  We were concerned that we would be charge for wall damage from where the television was mounted in our bedroom and where the plants were hung in the living room but we were not.  He said that that stuff was fine and that they expected to be fixing those things.  The only thing for which we may be charged is some carpet stains if they don’t come up with the steam cleaning.  We expect that they will so no big deal.

I headed out from Eleven80 just after eight twenty.  Nadine was working the desk which was very cool that we got to see her as we left this morning.  Leaving was very emotional.  We have been at Eleven80 for a very long time.  We have gotten to really know the place and feel like this is home.  Even though Newark was never really a place where we fit in we have been there for so long that it seems quite strange to be leaving.

For my blog readers from Eleven80 – if you want to find me via email or to get my phone number just go see Nadine.  She has that information for you.

Before heading to the PATH I walked over to Airlie Cafe and picked up breakfast.  It was my last morning to see them as well.  I got my “usual” breakfast sandwich, egg, cheese, black pepper and homefries on a hard roll as well as a cheese danish.  I said my goodbyes and walked to Newark Penn Station to get onto the commuter train to World Trade Center.  It feels very weird doing this for the last time.

Today was an absolutely gorgeous morning.  Crisp and clean air (the views of Manhattan from 1180 Raymond before I left were great – boy am I ever going to miss that) while being bright and sunny.  It is mornings like this that make autumn in the northeastern US so popular.  I had a nice walk to the train station and then from World Trade Center down to the bottom of Wall Street.

I had a large box of Lindt Swiss Chocolates brought to me desk today as a thank you.  Good stuff. Lindt is my favourite chocolate maker.

Today I finally brought my little fan into the office.   I originally bought this fan when I worked out in Warren before they began the crackdown on anyone trying to make themselves productive by being at a comfortable temperature. Then I took it home to keep it from being confiscated as it is a nice little fan that I bought from Walmart and of which many people were jealous.  Since fans are allowed and prevalent on Wall Street I have been meaning to bring my little fan in with me but there is never a time when it is convenient to carry a fan into the office with you.  Today it just needed to be done so that the fan would not be shipped to Peekskill where it would really not do me any good.  So I stuck it into my bag and carried it into the office today.  Now it is set up on my desk and helping to keep me cool while I work.

I decided that I really needed a command line Twitter client today so I whipped one up in Ruby.  I used it extensively today and I much prefer it to other Twitter clients that I have used.  It is also much easier to automate over methods.  Now I can start doing neat, automated Twitter messages without too much effort.  I am even considering making a little service that will read Twitter or Identi.ca and auto-publish to the opposite service.  In that way I could switch to an Identi.ca account but have everything that I do automatically appear in Twitter.  Then people who use either system would keep getting updates.  Even cooler would be if I set up my own Laconi.ca server (which is my long-term plan) and then have a service pull that feed and update Twitter, Identi.ca and maybe some others as well.  A microblogging-blaster.  Maybe this will be a project for next week.  I am talking myself into it as I write about it.  Seems like a neat idea.

I skipped lunch today and at around three in the afternoon Dan and I walked down to NYHRC on Whitehall and did our workout.  He played basketball for a bit while I swam.  I got a pretty good workout today and felt really good about it.  My swimming is definitely improving.  I was really glad to get in to the pool today as I have been missing quite a bit this past week and I don’t want to slack off nor do I want to waste the money that I put into the gym membership.  In theory, Katie is going to be able to start swimming with us soon too.

Dominica left work and went over to Doggie Paradise to pick up Oreo and then to visit some friends who just had a baby a week or two ago before she drives up to Peekskill.

We are so excited about tonight – our first night living full time in our new home.  That is going to be awesome.  I have a pretty light weekend from work too.  I originally had deployments scheduled for tomorrow morning but they were postponed until next weekend.  I will be doing a lot of homework this weekend and a lot of unpacking.

Dad and aunt Sharon are spending the night tonight and hanging out tomorrow morning since we have gotten very little time to actually visit even though they have been here for almost an entire week.  The commute time from Manhattan to Peekskill is pretty grueling and by the time that we would get to Peekskill it was always very late and everyone was so tired.  They are heading back home probably around lunch time at which point I will be getting to work on the homework situation from my new office in the basement.

Beyond the painting, which has been a tremendously huge project we are really hoping that dad will be able to get the Westinghouse 32″ LCD screen that we have mounted in the living room.  Until we have that mounted on the wall above the fireplace we really don’t have any way to watch anything or to try out the Wii Fit or the PlayStation 3.  Our first Amazon shipment, with a PS3 game and our first BluRay content, is supposed to have arrived today as well.  I checked the website and have not seen it listed as “out for delivery” or “delivered” yet so that is not a good sign.  The site still claims that it will arrive today.

Dominica took care of forwarding our mail to the new house today as well as setting up Netflix to go to the new house.  She also added BluRay as an option on our Netflix account.  Now we can really start getting use out of the PS3.

I managed to get in some class time for my RIT class.  There is almost no class discussion going on at this point.  I guess that people are winding down as they prepare for the final.  Unfortunately we have not yet gotten any feedback on the second draft of a final project so we really have almost no direction coming into our last week of the quarter.  This is really rough.  We have had almost no feedback at all for the entire course.  I have no idea whatsoever how I am doing or if I am even on the right track for this very large final project.  This is going to be a rough weekend attempting to do a project completely abstractly while being concerned that I am not even tackling the right problem.

Work at the office wrapped up at a decent time tonight.  I had some paperwork that needed my attention so I took care of that and then decided to just take the opportunity to deal with some work that is scheduled for this weekend.  The more that I am able to get out of the way tonight is less that I have to worry about tomorrow or on Sunday.

Dominica filled up the Mazda today while she was in Wallington, New Jersey.  She paid just $2.19 per gallon!  That is crazy.  We were at almost $4.00 just a few months ago.  This is so cheap.  I am pretty sure that gas is now cheaper than it was when we moved out of Geneseo well over two and a half years ago.  Gas is a big cost of living item and with it being half of what it was recently and lower than it was almost three years ago it does a lot to buffer against inflation.  We have not yet even begun to see what impacts the lower fuel costs may have on the transportation of food and manufactured good either.  There is a real possibility for big cost reductions although a lot of businesses raised prices based on the excuse of high fuel and are likely to be reluctant to bring the prices back down now that people have adjusted.

I called dad at a quarter after seven.  He and aunt Sharon were sitting in the dark hiding from trick or treaters because they didn’t have candy to hand out.  They reported that a package arrived today which is almost certainly from Amazon which should be Heroes Season 2 on BluRay for Dominica and Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion – Game of the Year Edition for me for the PS3.

My Friday night work went really well.  I burned through a ton of stuff very quickly.  I was quite productive.  I was very happy with the work that I was able to complete tonight.

I wrapped up at the office on Wall Street at eight in the evening.  Late but not all that late.  I am posting before I leave the office as I will not be back online until tomorrow.  I am hoping to be home before ten.

It was almost eight by the time that the maid wrapped up and we were in the process of loading the car.  When we went down to the lobby to get the car loaded we ran into a ton of people on their way to the halloween party and everyone kept asking us to go.  We finally caved in and decided to put in an appearance.

We love the Eleven80 Halloween Party, it is awesome.  It is Eleven80’s biggest event of the year.  A lot of people were really disappointed that they didn’t get to see Oreo compete in the dog costume contest this year.  He won last year and has a really cool pirate (salty dog?) costume this year that Dominica’s mom made for him.  He is the only dog that always has a custom made costume.  He looks so adorable in it.  He was far and away the favourite to win this year but with him being in Peekskill there was no way for us to get him down to Newark in time for the judging.

We stayed at the party for maybe half an hour.  It wasn’t very long.  We did not venture in very far and only made it to the ramp of the bowling alley.  We got to see several people just before leaving so that was good.  It is really starting to hit us tonight that we are leaving and really have been here for a really long time and know a lot of people now.  This is our third Eleven80 Halloween Party.  We were invited back for next year’s party and we will definitely make an effort to come visit.  Oreo would love to be back for an evening and show off his costume.

We hit the road around nine thirty with a very loaded car full of plants and food from the apartment.  It was almost eleven when we arrived in Peekskill!  We had not been planning on having been out this late.  What a long day.  We are not sorry that we delayed and stopped by the party, though, as it was really good to get to say some goodbyes.

Dad and aunt Sharon were still awake when we got to the house although they sure were not going to be awake for much longer.  Oreo had really been missing us all day and spent the day following dad around like, well, like a lost puppy.  We unloaded the car and visited for twenty minutes or so and got to get a first look at how the painting has been coming along.  The upstairs looks awesome.  The nursery is all but done and the master bathroom is done and bits of the master bedroom are done (there is just a master bedroom and the nursery as far as bedrooms go.)  They are hoping to complete the master bedroom tomorrow.

Dominica, Oreo and I arrived back at Eleven80 in Newark at one thirty in the morning.  Wow were we tired.  We pumped up the air mattress and did some quick, last minute packing to be sure that we were ready for tomorrow morning and got to bed sometime around a quarter till two!  The alarm was set for five thirty so this is a very short night.

No sooner than we dropped off to sleep on the not very comfortable air mattress than the phone rang, it was ten after two in the morning, from the valet saying that our car was double parked and blocking the street and that they needed our keys.  We had dropped off the keys so we were pretty confused.  I got out of bed and searched around the completely empty apartment for a few minutes before Kamil, the concierge, found where they had fallen behind a computer monitor on the desk and had disappeared.  So our short, less than four hour night was now a much less than four hour night with an interruption in the middle of it.  Tomorrow morning is going to be rough.

There is very little for us to do in the morning.  We are both going to shower, pack up the few clothes that we have here, deflate the bed, load the car, get Oreo ready for his daycare halloween party and get Dominica off to her final day at work.  (Her finaly official day.  We’ve decided that if she feels well enough come Monday that she is going to work Monday and Tuesday of next week.  Those are the two busiest days for her office when they will miss her the most.  Then she will take her three bereavement days and that will round out the week.  It will be a full five days later before she could work again and there is no way that she will be able to do so that close to the baby day.)  Then, as soon as Dominica leaves for work I am orchestrating the check-out of the apartment.  That is just a brief walkthrough to determine any damage, stains, missing parts, etc. in the apartment for which we will be charged.  Very quick and easy.  Then I will take the PATH from Newark to the WTC for the last time.

After work tomorrow we all just head to Peekskill and shift completely to our new home!