No one needed me at work so we stopped by at Pastel’s for a late breakfast or early lunch.  When we stopped we noticed that the new Indian restaurant that we have been impatiently awaiting the opening of in the Beach Shopping Center had silently opened this past Friday the 14th!  How exciting.  It was only eleven when we were there and they do not open for lunch until eleven thirty so we vowed to return for dinner this evening.  We are very, very excited.  We have not had access to an Indian restaurant since moving to Peekskill.  This is a really big deal.

There is a rumor floating around the Internet today that the final release of Apple’s Mac OSX Snow Leopard operating system may be pushed forward to less than two weeks from now.  I have been waiting for forever for Apple to release Snow Leopard before buying my new Mac Mini.  This means that I might have it in no time. The reality is, though, that I will have no time at all to use it before my trip to Germany so even if it does release early I really should probably wait until after I return before ordering it.  I am really hopeful that a new version of the Mac Mini with a quad-core processor and at least 4GB of RAM will be available at the same time although I find that to be awfully unlikely.  Apple just never gives their Mac Mini product enough horsepower.  Now it is practically anemic in comparison to normal machines on the market for a bit less money.

Work slowed down considerably this afternoon and I actually had some time to relax.  I had time to make our first CAT5e cable and test it out.  Of course, on the first try, the cheaper cable worked perfectly!  This is great news while, at the same time, very annoying.  At least now we know that the cable itself is bad and it was not anything that we were doing.  So now we need more cabling from Home Depot.  Now we have to rip out all of the existing in-wall cabling and start our entire house wiring process over again.

At four thirty Dominica and Liesl ran out to do some shopping.  They hit the post office and then Home Depot to get another five hundred feet of cable in addition to the one hundred feet that we picked up early this morning.  It may not be enough for everything that we plan to do but at least it is a start on it without spending too much money.  We only have so much time to be making cable this week anyway.  She also hit Pier One Imports and a few others stores and got some important home decorating items like a new running for our side board table in the dining room and a serving tray that is going to go on it where we are going to keep the alcohol – very European style like you see in As Time Goes By. She also got several picture frames that we are going to be mounting this week around the house.  Now that we are printing photos at home we are getting ready to start using them for decoration.

After they got back I had to work for about half an hour more and then we were able to head out to dinner.  We drove down to the Beach Shopping Center and first hit the liquor store there as we now need an assortment of mixers to display on our side board so we picked up some vodka, Pimms and Irish whiskey.  Then we went to the brand new Ruchi (I hope that I got the name right) for dinner.

We were the only people eating at Ruchi’s until just before we left one additional couple came in to eat.  It is going to be a slow start getting an Indian restaurant going in Peekskill and most people associate Indian food with buffets so the lunch crowd there is probably a lot more popular – or will be once we get word out about the place.  The people there were super nice and the food was really good.  We were so excited to discover that they have south Indian cuisine like dosas.  We were totally not expecting them to have dosa.  There was so little chance of that and yet they have it.  This is going to massively improve our quality of life here in Peekskill.

The food was really good.  We split an appetizer and each got a dosa.  We also got some curry to split as well.  We skipped lunch having only had a late breakfast so we were both really ready for a large meal.  Everyone working there just loved Liesl and kept coming over to talk to and play with her.  She loved all of the attention even though she was getting tired and really just wanted to go home so that she could go to bed.

Liesl got to taste her very first curry tonight.  It was a buttery mild vegetable curry.  Not in the least bit spicy.  She just had a little bit but she liked it.  She also had a bit piece of garlic naan which she really enjoyed.  We had to keep taking it away from her because she was trying to eat the whole chunk at once.

There is a very real possibility that we will be going back to Ruchi tomorrow for the lunch buffet to check that out as well.  Dominica has only had Indian once in the last year or more.  We were eating it constantly when we lived in North Brunswick and got it occasionally in Newark but there it was a real struggle.  I was able to get it in the city from time to time.  Now that we have ready access to it again we are going to be on an Indian cuisine rampage for a while.

Once we got back to the house Liesl pretty much went straight to bed.  Then Dominica and I worked on hanging a picture in the dining room and getting other pictures ready to hang tomorrow.  Then the big job for the evening – assembling the baker’s rack in the utility room.  Unfortunately because of the tiny doorway we are stuck building the rack inside of the utility room instead of our in the den area.

After the rack was built Dominica felt really exhausted and fell right asleep on the recliner in the basement while I worked on cleaning up anything that could be gathered up and placed on the rack which included a lot of bins, paint cans, servers, etc.  Suddenly there is room for things in the basement again!  This place already looks much, much better and there is a lot left to be done.  Tomorrow is going to be cable making day.  We have a minimum of eight cables to make and to get run to really get things cleaned up.

I worked for another three hours after Dominica fell asleep.  I booked my hours for last week and realized that I worked approximately ninety-two hours for the office last week!  That is a bit ridiculous.

At the end of today the move conversion count is at three hundred and twenty seven movies!  That does not include television shows, music videos, miscellaneous stuff or whatever.  Just the filesystem count of files in the movies directory.  So some days it doesn’t move at all and some days it climbs quickly.  Overall, though, it gives a fair status of the overall progress.  When the count nears twelve hundred it means that the entire process is roughly “done”.  Although done will just mean “caught up”.  The process will never really be completed as new material will always be added.  It just won’t be coming from a massive backlog of material.

I found out tonight from dad that hurricane Bill is scheduled to be slamming into the Hudson Valley this weekend.  It is still five days away from making landfall in the northeast but the Hudson Valley is roughly in the center of the prediction zone so there is a really good chance that we will be hit.  We live on the top of a really tall hill and are a good twenty five miles from Long Island Sound and at least forty miles from the Atlantic Ocean proper so we are only likely to see amazingly heavy wind and rain at most but it should make for an interesting weekend with my grandparents and Aunt Gayle visiting us from Ohio.

Dad was the first person to whom I spoke that saw the snow.  He had gone over to Geneseo in the morning and got caught driving home in the snow which came up much quicker than he had been expecting.  It was quite bad there very early this morning and heading towards us out here in Peekskill.

I was on the phone with people in Ithaca much of the day and about an hour after dad reported the snow in Peoria I was hearing similar reports from Ithaca.  It is going to be a big one for Liesl’s very first snow storm.  There have been a few flakes here and there and once there was enough snow to leave the ground a mixture of green and white for two to three hours but nothing more.  This is going to be real snow and might mean a white Christmas for Liesl’s first Christmas.  If there is snow here then there will be lots of snow up in Frankfort.

The Grices are traveling today from Houston to Frankfort.  They left after work and school and are planning to drive straight through because there is another snow storm expected on Sunday and if they don’t make it to Frankfort before the storm hits then they will be stuck somewhere or stuck driving in a snow storm.

The snow started here around eleven thirty.  At eleven there was no snow and everything was green.  By eleven thirty the ground was white and it was coming down rather quickly.

We were extremely glad to learn that Chapel Hill here in Peekskill does amazing well with snow management.  The instant that the snow was coming down there was a huge crew out keeping our internal roads and driveways clear.  They even had our sidewalk clear within an hour or two.  For the entire rest of the day after the snow started I never once looked out the window and didn’t see the guys out there keeping something cleared.  Extremely impressive.  The complex has several different snow removal trucks with large plows, bobcats, pickup trucks, etc. plus a crew of hand shovelers.  They even have their own salt trucks so that all of our roads are salted.

We didn’t attempt any driving.  I had to work all day and there was no pressing need to try to get out to a store.  We do need to do some Christmas shopping but that will simply have to wait.  It is really crappy that Dominica bought one of the big Christmas gifts from BJ’s Wholesale Club, paid for it and then a day later they emailed to say that they no longer carry that item and that the web site was wrong.  So tons of planning had gone into that item (it was one of the really hard ones) and now we are stuck trying to find something at the last minute, with a snow storm hitting today and another on Sunday, while everything that we look for online is out of stock and won’t be available until after Christmas.  Argh.

After work this evening we just relaxed around the house.  Oreo had an awful day.  The snow was so deep that it is up to his chin even when he holds his head up.  Walking outside is so cold for him and the snow is so deep that he doesn’t know what to do.  This is when it would be so nice if he knew how to use his doggy potty that we have sitting out on the back patio.  After he finally does his business I have to scoop him up and carry him back to the house as quickly as possible as the snow makes him so cold that he can no longer walk.

I got to sleep in again.  This is five days of continuous eight hours or more of sleep every day.  This is unprecedented!  I can’t remember the last time that I was so rested.

The federal governments backstop plan for Citi went through during the night and Citi shares were soaring in pre-market trading this morning.  Things are looking up in the short term for Citi and the east end of Wall Street.

Dominica’s day consistent of nothing but poorly handled medical visits.  She slept in a little and just before noon dad drove her down to the clinic downtown for her appointment with her midwife.  She was barely there fifteen minutes when she called to have me come pick her right up.  It turns out that the midwife’s office had scheduled her appointment before the appointment at the hospital which this appointment was meant to discuss.  So Dominica whole morning had been planned around a trip to the clinic where all they did was realize that they had a scheduling mistake and send her home.  So she has to go back in two days.

Rant Warning: I am beyond livid with Hudson Valley Hospital Center in Peekskill, NY and their unprofessional behaviour.  For the 99% of my readers who don’t need to know the details of the day here is what’s important – nothing is wrong with Dominica or the baby.  Everyone is healthy but the baby is not likely to come for several more days.  The rest of this post is a record so that we can recall exactly how HVHC behaved today.  Feel free to skip it.

Then, with only a small break at home, at two in the afternoon I took Dominica over to the Hudson Valley Hospital Center for the ultrasound and non-stress test (NST) that the midwife had wanted to have discussed this morning.  I was running around trying to get showered and fed before we left.  I only had time for a quick snack instead of lunch.  The change in her earlier plans had thrown off my schedule a bit.

So at two we went to the ultrasound at the hospital.  Dominica managed to get pre-registered so that we don’t have to do that when we go in for the labor and delivery.  The ultrasound went well but took longer than expected because the baby is extremely active and twists and turns so much that the ultrasound technician was unable to get good pictures.  Everything looks good and the baby is estimated at 7 pounds 6 ounces.  It is evident from the ultrasound that labor is not ready to begin because the baby hasn’t completely moved into position yet.  Labor is unlikely to begin until the baby is “lodged” head down without much room to move.

From the ultrasound we went up to the delivery ward for the non-stress test.  In reality, the NST should be called something more like an “activity test” since the real test is to make sure that the baby is mobile and active which, in theory, is facilitated by not being under stress.  Since the test actually tests mobility and activity and not stress it seems misleading in a marketing-statistics sort of way to refer to the test as a non-stress test.

The test itself went quite quickly.  Fifteen minutes or so and that was all wrapped up.  Then we got stuck for a while and I could not figure out what was going on.  It was already three thirty or later by this point and I was thinking that we would be doing well to be all done by four.  The results were up from the ultrasound and everything looked good.  Then, without any hint of there being “more to come”, we were given menus and asked if we would like the television put on (we were in a delivery room with all of the “fixins”.)  This was a bad omen.

Eventually a phlebotomist arrived and tried to take Dominica’s blood samples.  He was completely absent minded and talked to himself like he was crazy the entire time.  He was friendly but seemed to be quite off his rocker.  His English was not clear at all either so I could barely understand anything that he was saying.  He might have been high.  He certainly was not coherent.

The phlebotomist took Dominica blood sample through her hand instead of through her arm.  He was very bad at drawing blood and this proved to be incredibly painful.  I looked over and saw Dominica trying not to cry from the pain.  The needle in the back of her hand looked horribly painful and he was not paying any attention as he wrenched it this way and that.  I think that he may have kept forgetting that he was in the middle of drawing blood.  Dominica was visibly in unbelievable pain but was trying hard not to let on.

After the blood was drawn we sat.  And sat.  And sat.  After about an hour of no news a nurse came in to tell us that when no results had arrived from the lab that they had called to check and once they had confronted the lab about the lack of results the lab admitted that the phlebotomist had taken too little blood for some of the samples and had completely forgotten (or lost) some of the other samples so samples would need to be drawn again.  The lab was apparently quite embarassed and attempting to avoid the situation by not communicating this to us in the hopes that we would just leave eventually and not need the tests to be run.

Then we sat.  The lab never responded.  No phlebotomist ever arrived.  After forty five minutes the nurses came in to appologize, gave us a letter of apology and some gift certificates to the gift shop and called the lab to yell at them and to get someone up right away, but, as can be expected at this point, the lab refused to send a phlebotomist.  So we sat for another long while.  Nothing.

Our only guess is that there is some political struggle going on within the hospital and that hospital administration has lost control of some of the departments and that the blood lab is attempting to exert some control by refusing to do thier jobs.  It is incredibly unprofessional and a violation of medical ethics to let some petty internal concerns like this keep patients from getting medical treatment and lab results.

Finally the third shift nurse (we were there through three shifts!) told the blood lab that she was doing the blood collection herself since they refused.  It took an additional forty five minutes from the time that we were discussing leaving and having the hospital call us at home once they decided that we were worth treating until the blood lab was willing to tell the nurse what samples were needed in order to run the tests.  Incredible.

The nurse on duty took the blood sample and just after eight in the evening – SIX HOURS after we had arrived at the hospital, we finally had the results from the extremely simple bloodwork saying that everything was fine.  All of that and they could have just taken the blood sample at three thirty and called us at home.  We were there for so long that Dominica had a full meal delivered to her hospital room and was offered a second meal because it had been so long since the first one.  We went through three nursing shifts.  We arrived in the middle of the day and left after visiting hours had ended and the vallets had gone home.  The lights had turned off almost an hour before we were done.

It was really sad that long after the nurses had realized that something had gone wrong that it took several times the length of the total time necessary to draw the blood and get the tests results to even get the lab to respond at all.  Other patients were likely arriving, getting tests and leaving all while we sat waiting.

The whole ordeal was really awful.  We were in the dark pretty much the entire time.  I had no idea why we were there past four o’clock or what was going on.  There was really no communications to us.  We were just suddenly left alone in a delivery room for what seemed like no reason.  The worst part is, that even though the nursing staff for the delivery unit were great, that I have serious doubts about the hospital’s ability to handle any sort of actual medical care or to deal with an emergency.  What if something goes wrong during the delivery?  Will the hospital respond or will politics play a bigger role while disaster strikes.  If this is how the facility handles a normal situation what would happen when lives are at stake?  This was our first interaction with the hospital and now we have to have the baby there (we are too far away from another hospital to consider using them and we are too far along in the pregnancy to even consider it if one were closer) even without being able to trust them to handle the most trivial medical task.

It was a lot like watching Kitchen Nightmares when one customer waits for food and watches customers who come in after them get seated and served and leave before they get any food and at all.  Then complain that this is happening, get tons of apologies from the owner and then have MORE people come in, sit down and go through an entire dinner cycle and still not get anything themselves.  You wonder how that could possibly happen in a restaurant (it actually happened to me at Tom Wahl’s in Avon in 1993) but it is truly amazing to see it happen in a hospital!  And for all we know this is how everyone is treated all the time.  We have no evidence to tell us that this was a fluke.  No administrator was called.  No one was disciplined and after several “cycles” of being completely ignored nothing changed.  These are symptoms of a system where this type of behaviour is normal, accepted and no longer a cause for concern.

After our hospital ordeal we went to Pastel’s at the Beach Shopping Center for dinner.  We had been planning on going there since about five thirty.  Only, once we arrived, we realized that it was so late that the restaurant had closed.  So we called dad and had him wait at the house (he was going to meet us at the restaurant) and we drove back home.  Then we all drove together to New City Diner and had dinner there.

By the time that we got back home it was well after ten and I still had work for the office that I needed to do.  So Dominica went straight to bed and I went to work for another hour or so.  It is pretty pathetic that a simple, routine test in the early afternoon causes us to have to go to bed late.

I got to head off to bed around midnight.  I will be working from home again tomorrow.  It is a good thing as I have a ton of catching up to do from my lost day today.

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.

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.

5 Work Days Left for Dominica.

Today is our first day in which we get to return to our new home since having purchased it.  We are pretty excited.  Dominica and I both slept in this morning as much as we could because we knew that the weekend was going to be pretty exhausting and that we would need as much energy as possible.

Every minute that we had this morning was spent getting all of our storage containers out from under the bed, making sure that they were as packed full as they could be and then loading them into the car.  The trunk was so full that we could not see out of the back of the car at all.  Good use of space.

We managed to take several delicate items today as well, filling the back seat of the car with all of our miscellaneous paperwork from around the house (most of which is garbage but needs to be carefully sorted) as well as video game consoles, a box of photographs, etc.  We filled all of the back seat which was not already in use by Oreo.  Dominica also got to carry a plant on her lap while we drove.

It was almost one in the afternoon by the time that we made it to the house in Peekskill.  Dominica’s parents had just arrived five to ten minutes ahead of us.  They would have been there earlier but got pretty lost trying to find their way through Peekskill without a GPS.  Peekskill is a really tough town to get around and right now there is a ton of constructions and the main exit off of NY 9 that most people would use to get to us has been removed and a detour to South Street is necessary.  (Dad, did you catch that?)

So today was our first chance to actually show off the house to anyone.  Katie will get to see it on Sunday, we think, and then dad and aunt Sharon will see it on Tuesday evening.  I took a bunch of pictures of the house today, but the camera got left at the new house so I have no way to upload them today.  Dad needed pictures of the house to figure out how big the walls are for painting. 

Oreo was very, very excited when he realized that we were back at his favourite house.  He was quite anxious to get out of the car and didn’t care that Dominica’s parents were there to see him.  All he wanted to do was to get into the house as quickly as possible.  He is just completely thrilled with the house.  It makes him very happy.

We gave the Toccos the grand tour.  Then Dominica opened baby presents from the family that her parents delivered to us today.  We got some really cool stuff.  We are in pretty good shape for when the baby arrives.  I think that we have almost all of the necessities at this point and are starting to get into the fun stuff.  We definitely don’t have a ton of stuff by any stretch but we have enough to be able to get the baby home from the hospital without there being a panic that we don’t have something critical.

Dominica’s mom knit a bunch of really awesome baby outfits too.  The coolest one is a hooded bear outfit in brown wool.  It is so adorable.  The eared hoodie on it makes it look a little like a Japanese pair of pajamas.

Around two thirty we went out for a late lunch.  Neither Dominica nor I had eaten anything all day.  Everyone recommended to us that we go down to Croton-on-Hudson to get lunch at a restaurant called Justin Thyme; so that is where we went.

Justin Thyme Cafe is in the weirdest location, but many things in Westchester are, and we would never have thought to have tried it on our own but the food was amazing.  What a great restaurant.  The have a large and extensive menu that Dominica and I are really eager to sample.  Today she tried their apple and walnut salad while I went for their veggie burger (which they make themselves, of course) both of which were awesome.  We all shared some appetizers too including potato skins with brie and cajun spiced waffle fries with cheese.  All very good.  No one had any room for dessert.

After lunch we went back to Peekskill where Dominica and her mom checked out the Cozy Corner Yarn Shop on Washington Street.  I guess that it was not very impressive, though.  They had a guard dog that growled and blocked them from entering the store and no one working at the store cared at all that they were stuck outside.  Once they finally got in, nothing was marked with prices and they only accept cash or cheque!  Who does that outside of the third world?  It’s like yarn shopping in China!

After the attempt at yarn shopping, we returned to the house for just a little bit before the Toccos got on to the road back to Frankfort before it got too dark out.  We stayed at the house for about half an hour before heading back to Newark so that we could continue packing.  There is still a lot to be done.

It had been raining lightly all day but on the drive home it turned pretty heavy making the drive very fatiguing.  We had been thinking about making another run tonight, there are things that need a special trip like the television yet, but we were both pretty tired and Ramona is coming over early tomorrow morning and helping us to pack so we decided that it would be better to just stay in and pack at home.

I managed to kick off some Handbrake jobs that I expect to run all weekend and into Monday that complete the conversion of all of the material that we currently have down here in Newark.  So I was able to get some more stuff packed because of that.

By eight we were both really tired and decided to take the rest of the night off and just watch some How I Met Your Mother on the AppleTV.  We are down to only the AppleTV as all of our other entertainment devices are packed like the Wii and the DVD player.  Tomorrow we intend to break down the television and the AppleTV as well.  This week is going to be so busy that there is very little opportunity for us to use either of them anyway.

At nine, the fire alarm went off in Eleven80.  We are in our final five evenings in Eleven80 and the fire alarm went off for us.  (Regular readers will remember the fire alarm problems that we went through when we first moved in here.)  It turned out to be a false alarm.  I would guess that it was caused by the excessive wind and rain that we have tonight.

It was around midnight when we finally got off to bed.  Ramona is expecting to arive around nine thirty tomorrow morning.  Then we will be off to the new house sometime in the middle of the afternoon.  Katie is considering meeting us out there to check it out.

Anonymous Game Developers (AGDInteractive) have finally, after several years, released their remake of Sierra’s classic Quest for Glory II: Trial by Fire.  AGDI has, in the past, created remakes of King’s Quest I and King’s Quest II.  However, these two titles have mysteriously vanished from their website along with any information or mention of them along with the links that used to allow you to download the games.  I no longer know how to get copies of these classics which is extremely sad.

Quest for Glory II can be downloaded, for free, from AGDI’s web site.  I downloaded a copy, since you never know when they are going to abandon their work and forget about it, but do not anticipate having an opportunity to play it for quite some time.  I really hope to have a chance to play it though.  AGDI’s version of the games are generally far superior to Sierra’s ancient originals.

Both KQ1 and KQ2 I played through several times from Sierra back in the day along with other Sierra titles like KQ3 and The Black Cauldron.  But I have never actually played any of the Quest for Glory series so having an opportunity to play one remade by AGDI should prove to be a real treat.  I am confused, though, that they chose to begin with the second title in the series and not to begin with the first.

I did some digging around on the AGDI website and in the forums someone asks what has happened to the original KQ1 and KQ2 downloads and the answer was that they have temporarily been suspended from downloading until an update of some sort can be made available.  If you have never played them, keep an eye open on the web site as the games are truly classics in the strictest sense.  In the mean time, join me in trying out Quest for Glory II.  I know that my old college roomate, Jamie Quaderer, will be excited.  He was playing Quest for Glory IV on his Intel 80486 based PC when we first started college in Flint, Michigan in 1994.

I was completely exhausted this morning and forgot to set my alarm.  Dominica woke me up and asked if I was going to Warren today.  I jumped out of bed and got ready with blinding speed.  I actually did alright this morning, as far as getting ready for work goes, and it probably worked out for the best that I got an extra fourty minutes of sleep.  It was necessary.

Nothing special to report about work today.  Very much “the usual”.  For lunch three of us went out to Baja Fresh on NJ22 near the office.  As we were leaving we discovered a new Georgian restaurant that had just opened next door.  We stopped in and checked out the menu.  The place looks really nice and I am very curious to try out the cuisine.  The plan is for us to go there for lunch next Wednesday.

I left work at five and just barely made it to the shuttle that takes me from the office to the Summit Train Station.  I actually had to run a little bit to catch the shuttle.  Then, when the shuttle got us to the train station, there were huge lines for the ticket machines as well as the human-manned window.  So I gave up and ran for the train which was on the platform.  I just made it!

It is nearly impossible for me to catch the express train to Broad Street Station but on rare occassions it actually works out.  The timing has to be perfect and there is no way for me to buy a ticket.  The really annoying bit is that there is no way for me to buy a round trip ticket in the morning so that this wouldn’t be a problem!  Argh.

The express gets me to Newark very quickly as there are no stops whatsoever between Summit and Newark.  The timing of the train was perfect so that I stepped off of the platform and saw Dominica pulling up in front of the train station.  I had to run to catch her as well, it was just that kind of day, but I did catch her and got a lift home to Eleven80.  It was a very convenient day from that respect.  Almost no walking at all.

On the ride home I completed reading John Man’s 2006 title “Attila“.  Before starting another book I will be catching myself up on podcasts from IT Conversations.

We ordered in some dinner quite early from Golden City and watched a little bit of the sixth season of Frasier.  Dominica has been watching Frasier without me so I have actually missed about half of the episodes thus far.

My PacSafe Metro 200 bag arrived today from Amazon even though Dominica had only ordered it yesterday.  I will not have any call to use it tomorrow but on Friday I will be stuffing everything into it that I need for a day in the city and trying it out.  I look forward to being able to bring everything with me that I might want or need while out in the city without having to pick and choose based on weight, plans and weather.  Because I will be able to carry my digicam into the city on a regular basis hopefully I will be producing many more pictures of life in the New York Metro area.

I am hoping that when I get a NetBook that that will fit into this bag as well although there is every chance that it will not.  This is not a particularly large bag and the books that I often carry only barely fit into it.  A NetBook is very small but it would have to be quite small to have any hope of fitting in.  It sure would be great if it did.  That would do wonders for my soon-to-be very long commute from Peekskill to Manhattan.

The Acer Aspire One, which I am interested in, is 9.8″ x 6.7″ which just might fit.  The book that I tried putting into the bag this evening, “Presentation Zen”, is 9.1″ tall and does fit well, but there is not very much room to spare.

While we are on the topic of Peekskill I should also mention that yesterday we received confirmation that the sellers had signed the paperwork for the house and that it was on its way back over to our lawyer so that the house buying process could continue.  By late this afternoon the paperwork had been received by our attorney’s office and was on its way to our bank in Rochester who should have received it before the end of the day.  So hopefully we will have more status information very soon.  The next major step is the bank’s assesment of the house.

After Dominica went to bed, I had some work that needed to be done this evening so I stayed up late working on that.  No rest for the weary, I guess.

Driving Dominica to work really cuts into my day.  Her commute is pretty rough as it is and when I take her in it requires me to do her entire commute twice plus deal with getting the car from the valet in the middle of the afternoon which never goes smoothly.

Dominica’s morning was so busy that she didn’t even have time to hop onto her instant messenger to talk to me.  Normally we are on IM all day long.  It is really nice; it makes it seem like we see each other all day.  Really makes both of us working full time not seem so bad.

My day was absolutely crazy as well.  I worked like mad all morning trying to stay on top of things so that I would be able to leave for the house inspection this afternoon.  I was so busy that I did not have enough time to get myself a meal all day.

Yesterday I finished reading Mark Twain’s “A Murder, A Mystery and A Wedding” and today I began reading “The Hacker Ethic.”  Much of the book is material that I have read before in other forms but I have never actually read this book.

The house and mailbox keys that I had left accidentally at the Tocco’s home last weekend arrived today by the post.  Now we can get to our mail again and I no longer must prevail upon the concierge to lend me his keys so that I may lock and unlock the apartment.  Having keys of my own is most convenient.

In order to make it to Peekskill in time for the house inspection I had to leave Newark at one thirty.  Oreo was most lazy today and spent most of his day sprawling lazily upon the couch, practically pouring himself from one cushion to another.  While he is very sad to be home alone, today is most certainly a perfect day for him to have time to himself to sleep.  He is seldom this sleeping – especially after just a single day of daycare.

I picked Dominica up from her office just a little after two and from there we made wonderful time up to Peekskill arriving almost a full half of an hour earlier than our appointed time.  Everyone that we were meeting arrived quite early as well which worked out perfectly so that we were able to begin the inspection by a quarter after three.

Dominica and I were laughing about the fact that we have now made a purchase committment on this house and as we drove to Peekskill we had almost no idea how to get to the complex, and when we had arrived there I still had very little idea what the inside of the house looked like or how it was laid out.  Getting to see the house in the light of having already purchased it made going to see it especially exciting as so much of it involved “discovery” and not just a simple revisiting.

The real estate agent representing the sellers of the first property on which we had made an offer, that is the house at 11 Villa in the Woods III complex also in Peekskill, called our agent today to attempt to justify their incredibly high asking price for the house.  We suspect that this was in the hopes that we were still pining for the property and might somehow be pursuaded to spring for it even at the atrocious asking price.  Our agent was quite happy to have the opportunity to inform the sellers that not only had we had an offer accepted on another property but that we were currently en route to have it inspected!

The inspection went very well.  No major items were found.  Much to our surprise we found that the house has a brand new, quite large and very expensive (and extremely fuel efficient) hot water tank.  Total bonus!

Things that we learned that we are very happy about that we did not remember for sure from our first visit include: there is a good amount of “under the stairs” storage in the basement, the utility room is larger than we remembered and has enough space for a baker’s rack to be placed in there along with quite a bit extra, there is a wood burning fireplace and there is a quite large, pull down attic with about two-thirds of the space already set up for storage.  We will be able to store most of our “where is this supposed to go” stuff up in the attic.  That attic is going to make all of the different to us between having and not having any space.  Our camping stuff and holiday stuff alone will make a major dent in what we have to store around the house.  We are already planning to convert into into total storage up there.  We have just a tremendous amount of stuff that needs a home.

We were both starving when we left the inspection.  Dominica had barely eaten today and I had not had a single meal.  So we ate at our customary Burger King on the Garden State Parkway on our way home.

Dominica spent the evening playing Paper Mario on the Nintendo Wii.  I had to do work for the office to make up for my time away this afternoon.  It was an exhausting evening.  Tomorrow I have to be awake especially early as it is Wednesday and I am traveling out to Warren for the day as I try to do most Wednesdays.  I should be home at a reasonable hour.

The rain is gone and the hot, humid weather is back in force in the New York Metro area. Not only is it hot today but tomorrow and Sunday are set to be even warmer. All week is going to be pretty rough. Autumn can’t come too quickly for me.

We are still pretty excited this morning about the prospects of our new home (pending) in Peekskill, New York.  We are trying to get the engineering inspection done as quickly as possible and then it is time to get the lawyer involved to check over the contracts.  October 15th will come much more quickly that it seems that it would.

One of the big challenges that we are going to have is the issue of moving one large load of stuff from the apartment in Newark as well as moving the huge load of stuff from dad’s house in Pavilion.  The new house is going to be completely filled with stuff for us to sort and find homes for as soon as we move in.  The entire basement will be just stacked from floor to ceiling with stuff until we figure out what to do with it all.

The new house is actually smaller than the house in Geneseo when all of the space is considered together.  The new house in Peekskill is listed at 2,000 square feet – which is large and luxurious when compared to our itsy, bitsy apartment in Newark.  Peekskill has that 2,000 sq. ft. split between three levels (that means two sets of stairs taking up space) and has two bedrooms and two and a half baths.  But the Geneseo townhouse was 1182 sq. ft. for both the main living level and the basement for a total of 2,364 sq. ft. of usable space with only two bathrooms.  So Geneseo had more space with which we could work by one stairway, one powder room and 364 sq. ft.  None of this takes into consideration the two car garage that we had in Geneseo as well in which we stored quite a bit of stuff.  So we are still being forced to squeeze down quite a bit.

Geneseo was also set up with one third of the basement being used for nothing but storage and my office area was lined with heavy-duty shelves that were used for storage as well.  So the percentage of the house used for pure storage was very high.  We are going to have to do some serious “compression” to make everything fit.  It is going to be pretty tough.  Dominica reminds me that there is a pull-down attic but I wonder how much storage that is going to provide.

I was doing some research on my commute from Peekskill to Wall Street today as well.  I have three stations to choose from when leaving Westchester – Peekskill, Cortlandt and Croton-Harmon.  There is a different monthly ticket cost from each station which are, in order, $261, $261 and $221.  The extra drive time to Croton-Harmon may be worthwhile for the cheaper monthly train pass and for the lesser time spent on the train each day.  We will see.  Cortlandt does not have the cost advantage that one would hope that it did.  Travel times are 56 minutes, 51 minutes and 42 minutes – Croton-Harmon also has a non-express line that would take 62 minutes or a semi-express that would be 53 minutes and a few random schedules that fall within that range.

Once reaching Grand Central Station in Manhattan I will need to take the 4/5 Metro line from there down to the head of Wall Street and then walk the length of Wall Street to get to the office.  All in all, the trip is going to take a really long time in each direction.  It is going to make my days really long.

Travel to the Peekskill station is just 1.8 miles from the house.  Croton-Harmon is 9.3 miles.  The Peekskill station could be walkable on nice days – but not very often.  If I am really lucky they will have some parking available for scooters and I will just get myself a Vespa that gets 73mpg and only costs $1,800 and I will use that to zip to and from the train station.  That would work out just fine for most days, I think.

I got a chance to have a nice lunch today.  Ronak and I managed to escape the office around one and went out to Mad Dog and Beans on Stone in downtown Manhattan for some serious American-Mexican fare and mojitos.  The food there was excellent.  The guacamole was by far the best that I have ever had and the grilled corn was amazing too.  The main meal was huge and way too filling and quite good and the mojitos were the best that we had ever had as well.  I am sure that we will be going back to Mad Dog and Beans again.

After eating at Mad Dog we stopped in to the Financier Patisserie to pick up iced coffee to get us through the afternoon.  We both wanted regular coffee but it is just too warm for that today.

In addition to the normal Friday evening work, today there was house-buying work to be done as well.  We found an inspector to look at the house for us.  We are, of course, getting radon and termite inspections done as well.  I called about an attorney as well but the attorney that we are trying to reach was out today so hopefully we will have something more solid come Monday.  I spoke to the bank as well.  It’s been a busy day.

Dominica and I managed to get scheduled for a house inspection for Tuesday evening at three thirty.  It will be tough for us to make, but both of us have already taken the evening off so that we can go so it will only be so bad.

I have been really busy the last several days listening to the latest batch of material from IT Conversations but today I got completely caught up and have decided to move onto a book so I am now “reading” Bill Bryson’s “Shakespeare: The World As Stage“.  Of course, you can get this book via Audible which is now a division of Amazon.

In tech news today, Microsoft did a bold experiment – setting up users in San Francisco who did not like Vista to try out Microsoft’s secret new “Mojave” operating system to see if they liked it better than Vista.  The response was overwhelmingly positive.  Mojave is, not perfect, but very close to what users would prefer as the successor to Vista.  Just one hitch – Mojave IS Vista.  Just like Pepsi is preferred over Coke as long as the consumer isn’t seeing the label, users don’t like Vista unless they can’t see the label.  The marketing and hype has created public sentiment that is based on the marketing and not on the product.  Once the public thinks that Vista is bad there isn’t much Microsoft can do.  Rational product choices are not the hallmark of the American public.  (Not that Vista is faultless, but overall it is a pretty good product and not the garbage that it has been made out to be, by and large.)

The main part of the day was pretty slow today.  I was busy but not backed up.  Five o’clock came and I got pretty busy.  I was in the office until well after seven.  And today is even SysAdmin Appreciation Day!  At least a couple of people in the office remembered and sent me nice emails.

Friday nights wouldn’t be so bad if Saturday mornings weren’t part of the normal work week.  We are not traveling at all this weekend which is great and my work tomorrow is not “scheduled” work meaning that I can do it at my leisure.

It was just a few minutes before eight when I was finally able to leave the office on Wall Street.  Quite a long day for me.  Since it is so late I am going to go ahead and post today’s daily!  Have a good weekend everyone.

If everything goes according to plan, we close on or around October 15th.  Our lease in Newark ends on November 1.

We are very excited.

We dealt with the official pre-qualification for buying a house today because we have a couple of prospects that we are interested in.  We went this afternoon to officially put in an offer on a townhouse in Peekskill but got a stern warning from our real estate agent that we needed to be prepared that our money was very likely to not be good enough for these people [downstaters.]

Apparently the pre-qualification that the banks in upstate New York use causes issues downstate because they want the same letter to be called pre-approval – even though the weight that the letter carries is the same.  They just sometimes refuse to sell houses to people because they don’t like the terms that we use, I am told.  And they may also refuse to sell us the house because they don’t approve of the type of mortgage that we are attempting to use.  This, I am told, is because there is no faith in our bank.

We are told over and over in the news and it is obvious when looking at homes that nothing is selling.  Nothing that we have been interested in has sold since we started looking and all of the prices have just been getting lower and lower.  It seems like people would be a bit desperate to sell.  At least desperate enough to not treat people like their money isn’t good enough down here is rich, snobby downstate New York.

Just getting warned that these are likely to become problems when buying a house (a house that will have been on the market for an entire year by the time we would close, mind you) really puts me off from the buying experience.  Dominica and I are nervous enough about spending this kind of money in such an unstable market but to the then be treated like we are dirt for offering to buy someone’s house that they seem pretty desperate to sell (their agent literally calls daily looking for a status update) is rude and insulting.  It took no more than that conversation for me to already wish we were renting this year rather than trying to buy.

With buyers being treated so poorly and sellers seemingly having no interest in unloading their homes it is no wonder that the entire housing market is completely falling apart.  How can anyone buy a house under these conditions?  Our bank was very impressed that we were doing everything right and felt that we were the perfect home buyers (great credit, cash reserves, low debt, previous mortage with the bank, etc.) and I don’t think that doing things considered “less conservative” for the sake of the seller’s crazy financial sense is a good idea.  There is a reason why they are stuck in a bad financial situation and are trying to dump their home at the trough of the market.

We got called within an hour or two of putting in the office.  The sellers aren’t even willing to discuss the offer with us – no counter offer.  Strange but true.  They are desperate and have been calling every day to find out where we are in the process of making an offer and once we made, what we and our agent thought was a very reasonable starting offer, they won’t have anything to do with us.  Rather cocky in my opinion.  So we just walked away.

We went ahead and put in an offer on another, more expensive, townhouse that we had been interested in.  We will find out tomorrow, I expect, whether or not they are even willing to talk to us about our price.  We had these two in mind and we had a bit of a problem deciding which one we were the most interested in.  The one that we didn’t get (and aren’t even going to attempt to talk to again) did have an extra full bath in the basement which was very cool but the one that we are looking at now is much nicer, newer and in a better location.  It has fewer rooms which makes it a little harder for us to use but it has more space so we will be able to figure things out.

It is hard buying a house without getting emotional about it.  You start to feel attached to the homes that you attempt to buy before you manage to actually buy them.  This can cause really bad buying decisions if you are not being careful.  We need to keep in mind that this is an investment and not something that we are doing for forever.

We spent the evening watching the first season of Frasier which is really interesting as neither of us have seen very many of the episodes from this season.  The sixth episode is the very first one that I can even be sure that I have ever seen.

Dominica picked up food from On the Border on her way home since she didn’t have to go get Oreo from daycare.  They have pretty good food and it is easy for Dominica to reach on the way home.

Much of our night was spent in a back and forth bit of bidding on the second townhouse that we were looking at.  Around final bid was accepted at 9:20 this evening.  So it is “official”, we are now in the process of getting a townhouse in the Chapel Hill neighbourhood of Peekskill, New York.  Now we have to get the engineer and lawyer involved and get everything finalized with the bank and get all of the final ducks into a row.  We spent more than we had hoped but well within our predetermined “safety zone”.  The townhouse is nicer than we had planned but we got a good deal on it, we think, so we are happy.

My morning started nice and early.  I was online and working starting at a quarter until eight and had to keep working for the office until one thirty in the afternoon.  Almost six hours of work first thing in the morning.  Not the way that I pictured that I would be spending my Saturday mornings when I was a child – I probably thought that I would be busy watching cartoons and eating cereal – but it does help to pay the bills and with the house payments coming up soon it all helps.

At one thirty I quickly jumped into the shower and got ready to go.  Dominica and I were out the door at ten till two.  We met out real estate agent in Peekskill, New York at three.  We had several townhouses which Dominica had picked out to look at today.

The first townhouse wasn’t in the best part of town and had no basement.  For us the basement is very important because we need the storage space, the utility space and a place for me to have computer equipment that isn’t sitting in the “middle of the house.”  While we could make due in a house without a basement it is extremely unlikely that we will find a house that is cost effective for us without one.  Basements are cheap compared to a lot of other types of space, like extra bedrooms, and serve our purposes just as well or better, in many cases.  This first place was nothing special and the current owner hadn’t vacated like he was supposed to have done so we had a really awkward situation of being shown around by both the real estate agent and the owner and not being able to discuss anything.  There were even someone sleeping in one of the rooms that we were there to see.  Luckily we weren’t impressed with the place at all so it wasn’t like that swayed us in any way.  It just wasn’t the right place for us.  Not a bad place, just not a good fit for us.

Our next stop was to a townhouse down in Croton-on-Hudson.  That was its address but in reality it was more like Cortlandt – which might be even better.  This place, a three bedroom with a great deck and a tiny basement, was very nice and we were quite impressed.  The area was gorgeous and the neighbourhood seemed really nice too.  We were impressed with everything.  The price is a little higher than we were hoping for but technically within our range.  It even had a garage.  This one is the first definite consideration that we have seen thus far in all of our house hunting.  Our selection process has definitely improved.

Next we saw two, nearly identical, townhouses in Peekskill on the east side of town.  The first was amazing but expensive and really set up for adults without children.  Lots of living space but very little bedroom / bathroom space.  It would be great if we weren’t planning on having kids but it isn’t what we need now.

The next place was much better.  More modern than the townhouse in Croton-on-Hudson and with more space (1850 sq. ft. vs 1800 sq. ft.) in a more sensible design.  It is only a two bedroom but with three and a half baths, which is awesome.  It had a giant basement.  The yard, street and neighbourhood weren’t as nice as in Croton but the structure is much nicer.  It is also slightly cheaper although the Croton townhouse is a better market value making it a safer investment, but we are thrilled to have two places that we are really interested in on just our second day.

We looked at one final place in a different complex. It wasn’t a great place but the price was really good and we wouldn’t be unhappy if it was all that we could get.  Not a top contender but a decent fall back option.  Now that we know what we are looking for almost everything that we are seeing is a consideration and we know even more for next time.  This last place was smaller and not as nice.  The lack of space would be tough but workable.  If possible we will shoot for at least 1800 square feet.

It was almost seven when we got back home to Newark.  Oreo did pretty well with us being gone.  We would have taken him with us today but it was horribly hot – well over ninety degrees with a heat index several degrees warmer.  He would have been cooking in the car the whole time.  It was really uncomfortable being in the houses that we were looking at because almost none of them were air conditioned in any way, which didn’t seem like a good sales tactic to me.   I realize that keeping them cool would be expensive when no one was living there but it seems to me that making potential buyers feel more comfortable in the house would trigger a happier memory of it as well as make them less likely to want to leave as quickly as possible.  It definitely shortened the amount of time that we spent in almost all of the houses.

I ended up doing a bit more work this evening.  Another two hours throughout the night.  In between bits of work Dominica and I watched some more Third Rock from the Sun. Then she went to bed a bit after eleven and I worked for a while until almost one in the morning.

Today is my first day really working with OpenSUSE 11.0 which I finally got installed on my HP dx5150 desktop (AMD Athlon64 3200+ 64Bit processor with 2.5GB of memory) late last night.  I have it installed at home now and at the office in Microsoft VirtualPC 2007 SP1.  The install went pretty well and so far I am liking what I see.  It is not a major upgrade over OpenSUSE 10.3 which I have been using for the past six months but all of the packages are slightly updated and now FireFox 3.0 is included which is a very big deal.  The big, new “toy” in the system is KDE 4.0.4 which I am excited to try.

I started the day by finishing reading “The Thoughtworks Anthology”. I almost finished it last night but didn’t quite make it.

I managed to get a lot of Handbraking done last night. With all of the traveling that we have been doing recently that project has fallen by the wayside a bit and I am attempting to get back on track with it. We have some time before we will be traveling back home with stuff to put into storage, but I really want to get everything that we have here converted for the AppleTV before the next trip and there is quite a bit of stuff here.

Today was very slow at the office. Extra slow. Much slower than I would have thought that it would be.  It was the perfect day for it to be slow because I had to take off at four thirty to pick up Dominica from work so that we could drive up to Peekskill to do some house hunting with our real estate agent.

The first house that we looked at was 960 Orchard Street, Peekskill.  Orchard is pretty much right downtown.  We weren’t too impressed with the neighbourhood of old, falling down houses and loads of people milling about on the streets as we approached the house.  We had all but ruled it out as a possibility even before getting out of the car.  It sits directly next to a restaurant / Western Union check cashing location where the owner was arrested last July for something involving screwing over his employees of pay or insurance or something like that.  And next to that business is a cigarette and beer wholesale warehouse.  Um, no.

We figured that something was really wrong with the house since they put up no good photographs of it and the price has been jumping all over the place.  It was listed at $339,000 when we had agreed to go look at it and during the night it jumped to $380,000.  Fishy.

The first thing that we noticed was that the “completely fenced yard” meant that the front corner of the yard was fenced in but not the back of the yard nor the side against the driveway.  Just enough fence existed so that a perfectly positioned external shot of the house wouldn’t show where it ended just off-camera.  They even installed a locked from gate just four feet from the end of the fence.  It was quite clear already that the description of this house was going to be nothing but lies.

There “enclosed front porch” that they advertised was truly that but it was so narrow that we couldn’t figure out why they had enclosed it.  It is a completely pointless space that is unusable.  If you were to sit on the porch on a chair you would literally be one foot away from the outside wall staring straight into drywall.  Had the porch been left to be natural at least there would be fresh air and a view (of the cigarette dealer.)  As it was the space had completely zero value unless, given the neighbourhood it is in maybe this is the way to go, you just throw anything that you want to store out onto it and just forget about it looking nice.

We stepped into the tiny, outdated foyer and immediately noticed that the house was incredibly tiny and that all of the walls and ceiling in the foyer were completed destroyed and ripped out as if there had been some massive plumbing problem.  It was a complete disaster.  I can’t believe that they would even attempt to sell a house in that level of disrepair (but as we will see.. that was hardly the worst of it.)

The back yard, were we had thought that Oreo would get to play, had zero fencing protecting it from driveways on either side and the “nice landscaping” was nothing but half dead grass and dirt.  The back deck that we thought that maybe we could grill on was actually the back stairs and there was no deck at all.  Not like the porch which was just pointless and useless but there was actually no deck.  Total and complete lie, just like the fence.  No attempt at all to make a small, shoddy deck.

We went down to the basement.  The stairs leading down to the basement were ridiculously tight and dangerous.  I can’t believe that they are legal.  There was no railing as it wasn’t wide enough to allow for one.  The basement counted as one of the bathrooms and one of the bedrooms.  I am positive that that didn’t meet code as there is no safe escape from the basement through the house since the stairs are almost impassable.  The ceiling in the basement was approximately five foot ten inches.  I know this because I am five foot nine, more or less, and when standing float footed in the basement with shoes on my head hit the ceiling!!!

We didn’t bother going upstairs to see what was there.  We knew well enough.  Even stepping into the house was a waste of time as we had ruled it out outside.  This house was clearly bought by a “flipper” in 2006 just before the market collapsed.  It was someone who knew nothing about real estate and bought it for far too much money at the height of the housing boom in Westchester County thinking that they could do some drywall and simple stuff and make six figures of “improvements” and then flip the house as quickly as they could like people claim that they can do on all of those television shows that were popular recently.  Just like on those shows the people doing this one were definitely not qualified to do the real estate nor the repairs portion of a flip and the house was a total train wreck (if they could be so lucky to have a train run through the house and put it out of its misery.)

The house was originally listed at $450,000 which, obviously, is beyond ridiculous.  If this house was in Perry, NY it would literally have a hard time selling at $30,000 (yes, thirty thousand.)  And being in Perry would automatically put it into a better neighbourhood!  They dropped the price to $339,000 and fooled us into looking at it but apparently, we were told, did the math and realized that they couldn’t pay their bills if they sold it for that so now it is at $380,000 and only someone completely insane would pay anything near that for the house.  My estimation is that it is worth no more than $280K even being in downtown Peekskill.  The house is completely garbage, and I am very upset that they lied to get us to waste out time looking at it.  The whole thing is a scam to get a few bucks quickly off of desperate or unknowledgeable house buyers.  I’m sure that all of the work was just facade and that the place is likely to fall apart shortly after someone moves in (or, it would appear, before they even manage to sell the place.)

So we quickly moved on to greener pastures (or oranger as the first place that we looked was completely done in shades of orange.)  We went up to the Woods were there are a ton of townhomes and condos on the market right now and looked at several.  We didn’t find anything that would meet our needs but we got a feel for what is available up there and will be keeping a look out for something.  It is clear that house hunting is going to be hard.  When we wanted to move to Geneseo we pretty much found what we were looking for right away.  Now even looking over an entire county with the smallest towns being the size of Geneseo (and even considering a large town in Rockland County and some in Putnam) we are having a hard time finding something even remotely as nice as our place in Geneseo at three times the price!

We stopped at a rest stop on the Garden State Parkway and ate at Burger King.  We were encouraged that we could see the type of stuff that we are interested in becoming available in the near future but depressed that the first house was such a disaster and that nothing else fit what we were looking for yet.  It is still slightly early and we haven’t even done our mortgage approval yet so there are those steps to deal with sooner than later.

It was around ten when we got back to Newark.  We watched a little Third Rock from the Sun and fed Oreo and it was time for bed.

I got to sleep in a little this morning which was nice.  I was pretty tired.  Dominica decided that her back hurt sleeping on the floor in the living room so she moved to a couch on one side of the room.  Oreo wanted his own space for a change so he slept on a couch on the side by me just over top of me.  So I ended up having the floor-bed all to myself although I didn’t notice and stayed all curled up in a ball on the one side so as not to take up Dominica’s space.  Dexter isn’t able to sleep with us these days because he gets so nervous and/or excited that he pants and licks and runs around and doesn’t let us sleep at all.  It is very sad because he is so happy to have us visit.  He really misses us but we just can’t get any sleep if he is trying to sleep with us.

Joe made French toast for breakfast this morning.  We had that and donuts from the Friendly Bakery.  They have the best donuts ever.

For a late lunch we had shish-kabobs – which isn’t actually true as the word kebab (or kabab) meants fried meat and can mean grilled meat but certainly doesn’t mean grilled veggies like Dominica and I had.  But we had grilled veggies on skewers anyway.  We also had grilled pineapple which was really good.

While looking up kebabs to make sure that I knew what the word meant, as I thought that it required meat but wasn’t completely positive, I discovered what a Döner kebab is.  It really sheds a foreshadow across the Donner Party.  (A döner is a slab of meat roasted on a skewer – they were sort of the “roasted meat” party.)

Anyway, we left Frankfort around three in the afternoon and drove out to Newburgh on the Thruway making good time and then decided to head east on i84 and then to take the Taconic Parkway down through Dutchess, Putnam and Westchester Counties to see what they were like a ways farther east than we had been last time through.

We quickly discovered that you can see nothing from the Taconic Parkway and that it is an extremely unpleasent road to drive on in the more northern counties as it is so narrow and has so many people driving twenty to thirty miles an hour over the speed limit.  There is no room at all.  We will be avoiding that in the future.

By the time that we got down to Westchester County we had decided that driving on the parkway wasn’t doing us any good.  Just as we decided to get off of the parkway the exit for Peekskill came up.  I looked at Min and said that that seemed fortuitous so we got off and started exploring Peekskill from the east.

We decided that we really were meant to get off at that particular exit and to go to Peekskill as we, at total random, drove right past the development that we had been looking at recently and were really interested in!  We had been saying that it was too bad that we hadn’t bothered to look up addresses before driving because we could have driven past places that we were interested in – and just after saying it I looked to my left, saw the place and turned it.  So we were able to see it anyway, and so far we like it.

This was our first time actually being in Peekskill and not just driving by and we were really shocked to discover that it is just like Ithaca.  It is a similar size (but without the “strip” district with all of the chain stores and restaurants) and without the colleges, but it has the quaint, artsy downtown area, has the waterfront and the high hills on the side much like Cayuga Heights East that looks down on the city.

We went down to the Division Street Grill in downtown Peekskill and had dinner there.  The table that Dominica and I sat at is actually in the picture on the web site.  Just go to the link and we sat at the table in the dead center of the image.  (That is, the center of the image not the middle of where your eye is drawn.  We sat at the small, two person table in the corner by the outside window and the wall.)  The food was really good.  It was a very Ithaca-like experience.

We did a tiny bit of walking after dinner and then drove towards “home” in Newark.  It was around eleven when we got back home.