3 Work Days Left for Dominica.

Today was one of the busiest, craziest days in a long time.  So much to tell, I am going to put the headlines for the day here for those without time to keep up.  Today: Dominica’s grandfather passed away, Dominica and I moved from Newark to Peekskill, Dominica got a Playstation 3 and Wii Fit for her belated birthday and my dad and my aunt Sharon came to Peekskill to visit.

Last night, Dominica and I stayed up packing until well after two thirty in the morning.  It was probably around three when we finally got to bed.  Way too late.  Neither of us really slept at all either as we knew that we were not going to really get any sleep and there was just so much to do today.

We were awoken by the building’s fire alarm.  We should have guessed that this would happen.  The universe was not about to let us make it out of Newark without another fire alarm.  So instead of sleeping in until the last minute we were very much awake at six fifty five in the morning with almost no sleep.  This is going to make for a very long day indeed.

Since the fire alarm got woken us up we decided that it just made sense to get up and to get moving since there was just so much to do today.  A crazy amount of stuff.

The movers arrived just before ten which worked out perfectly for us as it gave us almost three hours to work on the apartment and to get all of the last minute stuff packed and ready.  Had they arrived right at eight it might have been pretty rough.

Before the movers arrived I walked over to Airlie Cafe and picked up breakfast.  The owner of Airlie bought breakfast for us as today is the last day that they know for sure that we are going to be in town.  Airlie is one of the few things in Newark that we are going to miss.

I also took the chance while the Mazda was out (Dominica forgot to cancel it for this morning) to load it up with as much stuff as we were sure was going to travel in it.  My office desktops and the bin of our last minute office equipment like my office router and final monitor went into the car so that they would be out of the way of the movers and ready for us to drive them up to Peekskill.

The movers arrived at ten in the morning and got straight to work.  They moved our boxes and furniture all out to their truck in just two hours.  Very impressive considering that they needed to go down sixteen stories by way of the elevator to get between the apartment and the truck.

The biggest problem of the morning arose when the smoke detectors (separate from the fire alarms) started going off on our floor.  They weren’t going off as if there was smoke but the way that they always do in Eleven80 – just beeping every 20 – 30 seconds for no reason.  Two alarms in our apartment and at least three out in the hall were going off.  Each individual beep sent Oreo into a panic.  The poor thing.  We were forced to spend over an hour with him locked in the bathroom with the shower running to cover the sound.  He was completely terrified and shaking horribly.  It was very sad.

At noon we hopped into the Mazda and headed north for Peekskill.  It is a cold and rainy day today.  Not ideal for moving but better than if it was too warm.

We got to the new house and unloaded the Mazda.  We had about an hour to relax before the movers arrived to unload the truck.  The unloading started off pretty smoothly with the basement office getting moved in early.

It was around three thirty, while the unloading had just begun, that dad and aunt Sharon arrived at the house.  They had left Leicester, New York at nine thirty this morning.  So the trip took them almost exactly six hours, but they had spent much of the time driving at no more than thirty miles per hour as they came through southern western New York in heavy snows, especially near Binghamton.  So dad estimates that in good weather the trip will take between five and five and a half hours.  Google Maps puts the trip at just under five and a half.

Just minutes after dad and aunt Sharon arrived at the house, Dominica’s phone rang with her mother calling to tell her that her maternal grandfather, Papa, had passed away last night.  He was at home, apparently watching the World Series, when he just went peacefully.  Dominica was, of course, a mess and unable to continue helping with the unloading of the truck so most of everything was just brought into the living room as I wasn’t sure where a lot of it should go.

Originally Dominica had an appointment with her midwife and clinic at four fifteen this afternoon – less than an hour from when she found out about her grandfather.  So she had to call and cancel the appointment.  That is a bit of a problem because we already had to push off the appointment from last week and she is so far along that not seeing her midwife for any amount of time can be problematic.  It is especially necessary for her to get an appointment as this is the appointment where they make decisions about her job and when she is or is not able to keep working.  Planning and scheduling needs to be done and Dominica is getting stressed not knowing what is going to happen and when.  She was unable to schedule another appointment as the schedule this week is really unknown and she is really upset today and really just can’t make that decision yet.  So that is up in the air right now.

The move wrapped up by five.  We were really happy with the movers from Suddath in Wayne, New Jersey and United Van Lines.  The whole move went very easily and smoothly.  That was so painless!

For dinner we all went over to the New City Diner on Crompond Road.  It was the quickest, easiest place to go – one of the very few restaurants that Dominica and I know how to get to.  After dinner we went down to the Beach Shopping Center so that Dominica could run into the dollar store there to pick up some shower supplies.  While we were at the plaza I ran into GameStop to check out what they had since I am on the hunt for Dominica’s very late birthday present.

We were in luck that GameStop had what we needed so I bought Dominica a Sony PlayStation 3, the PS3 BluRay Remote Control (so that the unit works more like a BluRay Player than a video game console) as well as Wii Fit for the Nintendo Wii which she really wants and almost no one has in stock.  I’ve been concerned about being able to get the Wii Fit for Christmas and now we already have it!

Dominica was very surprised to suddenly have a PS3.  She seems to have been secretly wanting one for reasons beyond its ability to play BluRay movies.  In fact, she seems to not even be that concerned about being able to watch BluRays and is more focused on being able to get some games for it even though neither of us really knows any games that we really would want for it.  I was going to get Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion – Game of the Year Edition but they did not have any a the store so I will need to get that online tomorrow.

She was very excited to be able to get a Wii Fit as she has been wanting one but they have been sold out everywhere and seem to be pretty much impossible to find.  Even Amazon doesn’t have any.  I had thought about getting it for her for Christmas but I am assuming that she will want to use it some after the baby comes in a few weeks and it will be pretty much impossible to hide from her between now and Christmas.  So I just gave it to her tonight.

We went back to the house and dad and aunt Sharon set about working on the nursery.  There is a lot of painting and wall work that needs to be done this week – especially in the nursery.  There was a wallpaper border in the nursery that was the first thing to come down.  Aunt Sharon actually managed to get the border all down this evening!

Dominica worked on unpacking.  There is a ton of unpacking to do and it will take us a few weeks before we even begin to get through any amount of it, but at least today we have a nice start.  A lot of stuff just needs to be nicely boxed, protected and moved into the attic.

Dominica had called into the office this morning to talk to them about her back.  Her back was really hurting last night while we were packing and she was sure that after a whole day of packing today that she would need tomorrow to recover or else she might be in far worse shape.  So she called her manager first thing this morning and asked what the office situation was like tomorrow.  He said that they were fine so it would be no problem if she took a sick day.  So she is off and we are able to stay in Peekskill tonight!  Now we get to be the first (or among the first at least) people to stay in our new home (since we bought it.)

I spoke to Maids on Call today and scheduled them to come out on Thursday afternoon to Newark to clean the apartment.  That is a real relief.  They will be doing the final cleaning so that we can get out of the apartment on Friday morning.  That is one less thing that we need to worry about before we are done with this very long week.

Tomorrow morning I will be experimenting with taking Metro North from Peekskill to Grand Central Terminal in Manhattan and then the 4 & 5 Subway line from Grand Central to Wall Street.  This will be my first time ever riding the Metro North train or using Grand Central Terminal.  So who knows how that will go.  I’m nervous that this is going to be really complex and time consuming which will be awful as the quality of life in our new home is really dependent upon the quality of the commute into the city.

Andy called tonight to let me know that email and instant messaging is down.  I had no idea since I am in the new house without any Internet access (we get hooked up with Optimum Online tomorrow morning if all goes well.)  Talk about awful timing.  Apparently it has been down all afternoon and I was just now finding out.  Craptastic.  (Or, as Katie would say, craptacular.)

I spent an hour or two, while everyone else was working on the house, working with Andy by phone or attemting to use SSH from my BlackBerry to fix the server.  We had no luck doing any repairs tonight but were able to determine that it was not our fault but that the data center had, either intentionally or through gross incompetence, power cycled my entire rack of servers!  Almost all of the servers had been about to flip a full year of uptime this weekend too.  So it was pretty obvious that they had all just restarted a few hours earlier.  Email and IM simply didn’t turn back on.

Andy called the data center several times but couldn’t get anyone on the phone or to get anyone to respond to voicemail.  This indicates that they probably allowed the entire data center to lose power and everyone under the sun is calling them to yell at them and to get things fixed.  What a long day.

The really exciting thing today is that we got to sleep in our new home.  The movers set up our bedroom so we have our bed and everything so we can sleep pretty comfortably.  We tried to get to bed early but didn’t succeed so well.  We went to bed around ten thirty or so.

4 Work Days Left for Dominica.

Today is our final day to get all of the packing done in the apartment before the movers come first thing tomorrow morning.  Dominica has to go to work today so I am stuck doing a lot of packing of whatever is left around the house.

I finally found a real Westchester County map today and confirmed that Cortlandt is the town in which Peekskill is a city.  So we live in the city of Peekskill, in the town of Cortlandt in Westchester County in Downstate New York.  I also found out that Westchester has less than a million residents in it making it smaller than Monroe and Erie counties (but still twice the population size of Alaska.)

Tonight is our final night sleeping in Newark with furniture.  Boy is this going to be a long week.

I’ve been doing some shopping for a BluRay player recently in the hopes of getting one for Dominica for her birthday (yes, a bit late because originally she was going to get a pink Acer Aspire One but they never ended up releasing it.)  So today I was about to order her a Samsung BluRay player with which to surprise her for her birthday when I discovered this cool software called “Play On” that is currently in beta for the PS3 and 360 (and soon to be available for the Wii.)  Play On uses a little bit of software running on a Windows XP or Vista machine elsewhere in your home to make Netflix OnDemand, Hulu, CBS, CNN, YouTube and other services available on your PS3 or 360.  (Notably it does not handle Amazon UnBox, at least not yet.)

Having NetFlix, CBS and Hulu functionality on the PS3 along with BluRay capacity is a really big deal and completely changes our decision making process.  So now instead of looking into just getting a BluRay player we are planning to get a Sony PS3 instead.  Sony should really be thrilled with these guys making this Play On product, it really makes the PS3 a lot more valuable to those of us who haven’t seen any games on it yet that we would even want to buy.  Now I will have to see if there are any decent games out there for it that aren’t significantly better on the 360.  Finding a single game that I really want for the PS3 is a little difficult.  The game lineup for it is very, very weak in the RPG and adventure gaming genres and the few games that it does have almost all exist both on it and the 360 with better performance and graphics on the 360 (Assassin’s Creed, for example.)

After reading a lot of reviews, it looks like the game for me is Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion – Game of the Year Edition.  If I am only going to own a single game for a while it might as well be something awesome.  That and maybe a Gran Tourismo game, those are awesome.  Mostly I like to play heavily story-driven RPG games and the XBOX 360 seems to be the platform for those.  So the PS3 will mostly be a BluRay player and Netflix device for us, I guess.  At least until someone decides to really start expanding its game library.

I was looking at Newark pics today and found a nice shot of Eleven80 and the National Newark Building from the Prudential Center.

I got a ton of packing done this afternoon and early evening.  Dominica didn’t get home from work until a bit after seven because she had to take Oreo to a vet appointment after work.  She was really tired when she got home.

I ran over to Subway to pick up a quick dinner for us and we got right into the packing.  There was a ton of work left to do.  No matter how close to being finished that it seems that you are there is always so much more left to do.  The kitchen is just impossible to get through; there is so much stuff hidden in there.  You just keep finding more and more.  Mostly old food that we haven’t seen in two years because when you have a kitchen this small everything gets completely buried and you never seen things that you buy because something is on top of them almost immediately.

Because we are not completely moving out of Newark tomorrow morning but have to still be functional here with a bed, computer, Internet access and shower necessities we actually have, I think, a harder job to do because we have to keep setting things aside so that they do not get packed.  In addition to that, I am logged in on the desktop doing SGL, keeping up with requests from the office and doing my RIT classword discussions so that I can’t quite break down the last of the computer stuff.  Just one more thing lingering “in the way”.

Dominica had to cook for Oreo tonight too and we had to do dishes.  Plus there was more laundry.  Wow.

I am wrapping up today’s post as we close in on one in the morning.  There is a bit left to do so we aren’t going to bed quite yet even though the movers are due to arrive as early as eight in the morning.  I cleaned up my email at the office and turned on my out of office assistant.  I Twittered to let everyone know how the packing is going.

My goal now is to break down the last of the office equipment and re-network everything so that we have just enough to remain functional.  We have packed two of the three phones and all we will have remaining is just enough to keep the one phone still online and Dominica’s laptop.  We will be offline all day tomorrow so don’t be surprised when we go silent.  I will not likely be answering email, I won’t be posting to SGL and the Twitter feed is unlikely to get much in the way of updates although I will update it if I get a chance.  I am up to date on my class so that shouldn’t be a problem.

I am going to be limping for the rest of the week.  If things go really well we will be back to fifty-percent computer functionality around Friday night and starting to recover on the weekend, but it is unlikely that we will have the house wired at all by that point and that is going to be the real stumbling block for us for a while.

Happy Diwali everyone.  See you all on Wednesday, I hope.

Tomorrow schedule: movers arrive in Newark at 8am.  Load truck from 8am until noon.  Load Mazda with breakables and Oreo.  Everyone drives to Peekskill.  Unload truck and Mazda.  Hopefully done before 4pm.  At 4:15, Dominica has a doctor’s appointment at the clinic in Peekskill.  Dad and aunt Sharon scheduled to arrived around five to six in the evening.  Dinner.  Unpack a little.  Return to Newark.  Collapse in empty apartment on air mattress.

I hope that we remember to put air into that mattress before we collapse onto it.  We won’t be able to see it as the bedroom has no light after tonight.  !!

5 Work Days Left for Dominica.

Dominica and I got up around eight thirty this morning.  I did some cleaning while she starting off with some packing.  Today is our big packing day to get things ready for the new house.  It is our last full day in the house together before the movers come.  I am working from home tomorrow which gives us a little bit of buffer to get things panic-packed before the last minute, but it would be much better to get things packed today.  Dominica also baked brownies first thing this morning.  We have to use up as much food in the house as possible before the move.

Ramona came over from Flushing, in Queens, a little after nine thirty.  She brought bagels with lox and cream cheese from Manhattan.  One of the things that is weird, I think, to people not really familiar with the New York Metro area is that Manhattan really is in the middle of everything and going between any two locations around the metro area almost always involves stopping through Manhattan.

Most large cities do not use their downtown area for the outskirts people to travel from one place to another but because of the multi-island nature of New York it is relatively necessary.  Adjacent areas don’t always do this (Brooklyn and Queens, Brooklyn and Staten Island, Staten Island and New Jersey, New Jersey and Rockland, Rockland and Westchester, Westchester and Connecticut, etc.), but sometimes they still do and any two areas not directly adjacent will almost certainly travel through Manhattan to get from one to the other.

Ramona helped Dominica in the kitchen to do quite a lot of packing.  The kitchen is the biggest obstacle at this point which is depressing considering how little cooking we managed to do in the two years that we have lived in Newark and the six months in North Brunswick before this.  There is just so much stuff to pack in the kitchen.  Box after box of stuff.  Much of it completely unused since we moved to New Jersey.  We even discovered a blender hiding in the back of a cupboard that we had no idea was in New Jersey with us.  We thought that it was packed away at dad’s house somewhere.

Ramona headed out around two and Dominica and I continued to pack until four when we loaded the Mazda and set out for Peekskill.  We made a really good load this time with the television and two of my big monitors from my home office.  Those were all items that we were concerned about leaving until the movers were here and now they are just done and out of the way so we don’t need to worry about them any further.

We ran into heavy traffic near to the Tap so we rerouted to the west and took the Thruway north and then wandered through Rockland County near Ramapo and Pomoma which was interesting as we got to see some nearby communities of which we have heard but never seen.  It ended up taking at least an extra half of an hour it not more to get to the new house.

Katie was meeting us at the new house but got stuck in traffic at Woodbury Commons too and was running much later than expected.  It was dark by the time that any of us got to the house.  Once Katie arrived we gave her the tour of the unfurnished house as it is.  She brought us house warming presents from Williams-Sonoma.  She got Dominica a pink cook’s apron because Dominica loves pink.  She also got us a very cool set of cupcake pans that, when you separate the cupcakes and put them together forms a big butterfly cake but can then be pulled apart as seperate cupcakes.  Very cool for kids (or adults.)  It is a little like a precut cake that just turns into cupcakes like magic.

For dinner the three of us went exploring.  Dominica and I had thought that we had seen a nice looking diner out on Crompond Road towards Yorktown Heights so we just drove out that way and did some exploring.  We came upon the New City Diner on Crompond and gave it a try.

The New City Diner has an amazingly massive menu.  It took us a really long time just to make it through the menu let alone decide on anything to eat.  It was crazy.  Dominica and I are going to have a lot of fun going there and getting tons of unusual food.  It is awesome that we are going to have so much variety so near to the house.  The diner is very close, just a few minutes away, so it will be very handy.  This will be one of our regular destinations, I am sure.

We did not hang out long after dinner.  It is a Sunday night and we all have to work tomorrow and our drive home (“home” meaning back to Newark) is not exactly short.  It takes at least an hour without any traffic.  Oreo has to go to the vet tomorrow as well for a checkup making Dominica’s day a bit longer than usual.

I am working from home tomorrow.  Monday is the only chance that I have to work from home all week.  Tuesday I am off.  I will be on Wall Street the rest of the week.

We got home at ten thirty.  I had to do some work for the office but not too much.  I thought that there was going to be quite a bit but a resource that I need from the office is not available this weekend so there was nothing more that I could do.

I gave Oreo his steroidal bath (a regular bath with steroidal topical shampoo anti-itch treatment.)  That takes about twenty minutes.

I also had to do some in-class discussions for my class at RIT.  This week everyone left everything until the very last minute so the only way to participate in any discussions was to do it late tonight.  That is very annoying since I took the time to do all of my class work on Thursday and even did next week’s assignment on Friday so I’ve been waiting for days for everyone else to get involved and no one starts this weeks work until the eleveth hour while I am busy trying to move.    The online classes only work when the class is motivated and most people don’t wait until the last day to start getting involved for the week.  Only one more discussion week left and the final.  No more regular homework for me at least.  Almost done, although the final is a lot of work yet.

Since I was up and working on everything else I took the time to update SGL.  Posts to SGL will be pretty lean this week, I think, as I will be stuck without much of a computer for a lot of the week.  I will do my best.  I am heading to bed tonight at a quarter until one in the morning.

We got to bed around ten and didn’t get up this morning again until ten. Almost twelve hours of sleep. That was awesome. I did have to get up at midnight and take Oreo for a walk around the block which is a pretty big sleep interruption but still, it was a lot of sleep.

Both of us felt much better this morning when we got up. Dominica still has a really bad cold but at least she is rested. With all of that sleep it appears that I managed to keep the cold at bay. I am not showing any signs of the cold this morning.

This morning I finished reading “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Foreign Currency Trading.” Since I work in the Forex market primarily I thought that it would be good for me to know more about the business side of things.

I had to do some work for the office this morning after getting up and also we had to pack to get ready to head up to Frankfort. For us, packing is really out of control. In this trip, for example, we are only staying for a single night and yet we still need to pack: a full bag for Oreo (because of his dietary and medical requirements), a laptop, three BlackBerries, iPod, Camera, chargers for each of the aforementioned, a suitcare for our clothes, toilettries, CPAP and books (just in case I have time to read) and my SafeWord (so that I can log in to the office to work remotely.) It is rather a bit of an ordeal just for the simplest, one day trip to Dominica’s parents’ house that isn’t very far away and has most ammenities that we would need!

All of that is for a single night and assuming that there is no time in which we would need to entertain ourselves. If that is the case then we need to start thinking about book(s) for Dominica, a means for me to work on projects, Nintendo DS, PlatStation PSP, etc. We even have the Nintendo Wii system portable-ized so that we can travel with it.

Dominica had a dream the other night that the baby was born and that we had an eight pound, one ounce baby girl – which supports Ramona and my belief that the baby is going to be a girl. Everyone else, and I mean everyone else, thinks that the baby is going to be a boy. Although I had a dream last night that we had quintuplets but the doctors have assurred us that that is not the case. (I also dreamt that to save money we bought a house in northern Panama so that the children could grow up with access to both coasts simultaneously.)

I did the dishes today which sorely needed to be done. The dishes have been sitting since late last week. We have been so busy this week that we just have not been able to get to them.

I worked for the office until almost two in the afternoon when we just couldn’t stay in Newark any longer and had to get on the road so that we could meet Dominica’s family at the Kitlas in Utica for our six o’clock reservations.

The drive up to Utica went pretty well. We didn’t hit any traffic or congestion and made quite good time. It is pretty rare that we are able to drive during the day which is a nice change.

We were running a bit late which could not be helped as I had to work before we could leave Newark, so instead of going to the Toccos’ house we went straight to the Kitlas to meet the family there. We called but could not reach anyone so we assumed that their mobile phones had died. We were just about to the restaurant when Dominica managed to reach Joe and discovered that he was still at home waiting for the family to return from their day at the lake. So we turned around and drove back to Frankfort to wait for them. Apparently they were missing the six o’clock schedule for dinner.

We hung out at the Tocco’s house until seven thirty when people returned from swimming.  It appears that Dominica had some bad information about the dinner plans and we raced all day to get here but no one else knew that the dinner plans were at six – although Joe was under the same impression and was also wondering where everyone was.  So we aren’t sure what happened.

So at seven thirty we all left to go to the Kitlas for dinner.  Dinner was awesome as always.  Then it was back for an evening of baptism party preparations and me racing Madeline and Emily on Mario Kart Wii.  Madeline kicked my butt in every single race!  I am getting seriously old.

Apparently I need to start playing video games more often as I have completely lost my edge and I need to be able to play against my own child in a few years.  I will be much older by the time that they are ready to play games against me so I need to be honed now or I will never be able to keep up.