Liesl decided that it was time to get up very, very early this morning at three thirty!  THREE THIRTY.  Ugh.  So no sleep for us at all.  Maybe four hours at most.

Dominica got right up and started doing our last minute packing – the stuff that could not be done until this morning.  I did not get to go back to sleep but I did get to stay in bed and keep Liesl and Oreo from needing lots of attention until Dominica could get the packing done.  That ended up taking an entire hour so it was really important that Liesl got us up so early or else we would have have been able to beat rush hour traffic at all.  We had originally planned to get up at four thirty but ended up needing every spare minute that we had.

We got onto the road just before five in the morning.  We are fully loaded and ready for our trip north.  The wind today is really crazy.  It was quite hard to drive with the gusting.

The wind ended up being a real problem and through our car top carrier to the back of the roof rack before we were even out of Houston.  We had to pull over a couple of times to check it and readjust it.  We ended up having to drive quite a bit more slowly that we normally would because the wind kept lifting it up and moving it around on us.  After having it on the roof all of the way from New York to Texas now that we are making a short trip just around Texas we are having issues with it!

Once we were past the Houston traffic area and were heading north from the metro area we got a little faster on the roads and discovered that there was no way to keep going with the car top carrier.  We were physically unable to fasten it down enough to keep it from blowing off.  With the gusting side winds it just lifts up and repositions itself constantly and it loosens itself up and away it starts to go.

Dominica ran into a Kroger while it was still dark out and picked up some bailing twine.  That is our last possible plan for keeping the carrier on if things go badly.  We did one last normal repositioning job in the parking lot of the grocery store and then go on our way again.

We crept along but it was clear that the carrier could not stay on on its own.  Once the sun was up we looked for a safe place to pull over and then got out and discovered that it really was loosening and going to come off soon.   So we tightened it back up and tied it down tight with the bailing twine.  We really tied it down in every which direction hoping that there was really no way for it to pull the twine.  Twine does not stretch at all so it should keep it in place pretty well.

We got driving again and to our pleasant surprise the twine worked great and really held the car top carrier down well.  We were able to drive at full highway speeds without any lifting or anything.  What a relief.

It ended up taking us an hour or more longer to get up to Irving than it should have because of  the car top carrier but we eventually arrived at Tuscan Villas and got set up to move in to our new apartment there.  Getting into the apartment did not take very long.  They already had our paperwork and cheque and were all set for us to move in.  Maybe took twenty minutes at most.  This is our first time actually meeting anyone from the apartment building or company.

We parked the BMW out in front of the apartment building and we unloaded the car top carrier which was no small job considering that we have no step ladder or anything of the sort to use to get it unpacked before taking it off of the car.  So I had to pull the whole thing down myself.  Then I schlept all of the contents of the carrier, and the carrier itself, up to the apartment up a few flights of stairs while Dominica stayed down with the car and the “kids”.

We made it just in time for AT&T to call about our Internet access.  They were scheduled to have it hooked up for us today sometime between noon and six this evening so that was the schedule against which we were racing all day.  They ended up being ready at ten till noon while I was still carrying stuff up to the apartment but I managed to call them right back and we had our Internet access turned on, set up and working by around one thirty!  That went incredibly smoothly.

Now that we have an apartment and Internet access we are more or less doing okay.  All we have is an air mattress but that will get us by for now.  Liesl has her Pack n Play.

After the Internet access was hooked up we spent the afternoon getting things unloaded from the car and put away around the apartment.  We have very little so so far it is not hard.

We ran out and did some shopping this evening to stock up on things that we need around the apartment.  We went out to Target and picked up supplies there.  We also discovered Target’s own line of “wine cube” wines and box wines.  The packaging looks intriguing and the cost is right.  In Europe box wine is how it is done because wine lasts better that way so we decided to try out the Target wines for ourselves.

We spent a total of around $500 getting move in supplies tonight.  Ack.  Not the kind of money that I wanted to be spending on our first day in Irving but at least we have what we need to get through including some basic groceries.

We have discovered that we have a ton of great looking food options right in our shared parking lot and adjacent areas.  We wanted to get dinner tonight so we decided to go investigate.  The options right out in front include two sub shops, Thai, Indian, sushi, upscale Mexican and a French Provincial restaurant.  Not bad for walking distance.

Tomorrow I will be hoofing it into the office for the first time.  We can see the office from our balcony which is pretty cool.

Today we simply play the waiting game.  Not the best situation for getting a lot of sleep.  Although getting in at two in the morning doesn’t allow for a lot of sleep anyway.  It actually worked out well being my late night out in addition to being a night of getting poor sleep.  I was not likely to have gone to bed and gotten any good sleep anyway.  At least I made productive use of my awake time.

At two thirty this afternoon we finally got some additional information to help clarify the situation both in terms of what was definitely happening as well as what options there were and what was likely happening.  There is a ton of stuff up in the air but at this point we have a pretty likely scenario that is going to play out and we know what our role is going to be in that scenario if it all comes to fruition.

So, this is the likely scenario going forward.  Sometime no sooner than December and most likely in the first half of next year (2010) we will be relocating to Texas instead of New York.  The job options and future potential look to be far better in Texas than they do in New York and the work environment looks to be better there as well before we even take into account any tax and pay advantages or housing cost benefits.

Most likely we are going to be living in Austin, not Irving.  Our plan is to buy a house in Austin after we have rented just long enough to learn our way around and to figure out where in town in makes the most sense for us to be living.  We are not looking to buy in Austin as a short term plan like we did in Geneseo or in Peekskill but this is a long term, strategic plan where we intend to keep this house for a very long time.  This will be the location that we call “home” for the foreseeable future.  We have never bought with that intention previously so we are hopeful that this will pan out.  This in no way implies our intention to live and work solidly in Texas for forever but simply that we are finally in a position to have a “base of operations” from which to reach out and live the rest of our lives.  We need at least a certain amount of space and stuff in our lives to be unmoving instead of having everything that we own traveling with us from house to apartment to house, etc.

We do not know too much else at this point and none of this is official.  The office has not officially posted any job positions which means that there is nothing officially to which I can apply and there is nothing into which I can be accepted.  All of the other key people who need to be doing similar things have not yet committed to anything yet either.  So there is still a lot that can go wrong but mostly it appears that we have a pretty solid path and plan and chances are pretty good that it will pan out exactly as described.

We definitely feel much better now that we have some semblance of a plan and that we know, basically, what is going to happen.  The biggest problem is going to be selling our house here in Peekskill.  We are allowed to rent it as of mid-October and that is one option if we can find some people interested in renting a furnished house.  That would make our lives a whole lot easier.  Ideally we will want to sell it as early as possible but we know that the market is not good now and we probably want to stall on that as long as we can.  Ideally we probably do not want to go to Texas until as late as possible which, could be, late next year or possibly even 2011 at a stretch.  Although now that we know that we are moving we kind of feel like we would like to just move on and get the moving started.  There is something about knowing that you are in a long term location rather than a temporary place.  Now that we know this house is really short term we don’t want to keep putting physical and mental energy into it.  It’s just an apartment to us now.

Overall this should all work out well.  Selling the house is the one challenge.  Other than that everything really works out well.  We had decided a few weeks ago, without having even the remotest clue that the office might decide to relocate me, that we wanted to move to Austin to call that our home base.  Dominica’s parents had already decided that they, some time down the road, were going to move to Austin.  My father had already decided that he would likely be okay with coming down and spending some time in Texas during the worst cold and snow months.  Dominica’s sister is already nearby and we just moved her brother a few weeks ago.   Ramona is already considering Austin for nursing grad school which will likely take about four years and she is not planning to start for another year – so we could overlap in Austin by four years just during her school time and possibly more if she decides to stay in the area.  The Ralstons had already decided that they were going to “move in with us” in Texas to make that their official American home rather than Art’s mother’s house in New York.  Calling Texas home is a major advantage for them in several ways.  And then, it turns out, that Andy and Miranda have been talking about Austin for some time and are very seriously considering it as a place to which to move as the market there is so much better than almost anywhere else for Andy to work!  Talk about serendipity!  Everyone we know is in or moving to Austin – a city to which almost no one that I know has ever been including Dominica or, I think, her parents.  Of course it looks like most everyone from my team at work will move down to Texas as well so we will all have each other too.

So the bottom line is… it sure looks like we are moving to Texas and doing so quite soon.  I will have a more definite answer on that in about two weeks and the final answer is likely to come in about eight.  But until then we are operating under the assumption that we are moving to Texas.  And very likely, we think, doing so as part of the vanguard to go prepare the site for others as we know Texas more and are more mobile than most everyone else.  So we are guessing that as early as December or January we are very likely to be down there in some capacity.

I showered and finished my packing by five thirty.  I woke up Francesca so that she could drive me to the airport.  I am flying out of Houston Hobby which is the small airport on the southeast side of the city near where the Grices live.  We always use this airport as it is so much more convenient than using Bush Intercontinental.

We left just early enough that there was no appreciable traffic and the trip went quite quickly.  Francesca dropped me off and I was right through security in no time at all.  Allowing one hour at Hobby this early in the morning is definitely fine.  It was as easy as could be to get to my plane.  I had plenty of time to stop by at Subway and to grab a breakfast sub that I ate in the airport at the gate while I waited for my plane.

This morning is my first time ever flying on SouthWest.  They have great prices but do not have assigned seating which I do not like at all.  I like knowing where I am going to sit.  I don’t mind aisle or window seats (I prefer aisle) but I definitely do not want middle seats.  I need a little extra room and like some airspace around myself for air circulation.  The flight today was very sparsely populated so I actually got an entire three seat row to myself which was great.  The flight was over in no time and everything went perfectly.

I hit Budget in the airport and rented a Chevy Cobalt for the day.  I figured that it would be easiest to just have my own car for getting around Austin today.  I have never been to Austin before and do not know the lay of the land so this will be a little challenging but I have my mobile phone with GPS on it so I am hoping that that will save the day and make this relatively easy.

The GPS on my phone did not end up making things easier.  I drove in several wrong directions before realizing that the phone was consistently stating the directions backwards.  I have no idea why but as soon as I used the GPS to provide the street names but drove in the opposite direction (north instead of south, west instead of east) everything was fine and it showed me approaching my destination instead of driving away from it.  I don’t know what that was about.  I did managed to get to the SpiceWorks offices just fine.  I only lost ten or fifteen minutes at most figuring out the GPS.

The drive to SpiceWorks was just under twenty miles but went pretty quickly.  Traffic in Austin is nothing like Houston.  Austin is a much smaller city and a lot more like a desert than Houston which feels more like a swamp.  I did not get much of a chance to actually see the city today although I did drive in a big loop from the airport on the southeast side to SpiceWorks which is on the northwest side.  While there I always felt like I was a pretty good distance outside of the city but when checking the locations on the map I realize that I was actually rather close to downtown the entire day and just never really got a good look at it because of the hills.

I was not sure how to find the SpiceWorks building in the complex that they are in.  Finding the complex was super simple but finding their building was a bit tough.  I lucked out, though, that I parked and immediately as I got out of the car with the intention of wondering around and just looking for the building and saw someone walk right by me wearing a SpiceWorks t-shirt!  I grabbed them and they recognized me after a minute and then took me right in to the offices – which it turned out I had parked directly at.

The SpiceWorks folks set me up in a conference room so that I could work and, when there was time, throughout the day I wandered around the offices talking to all of the people that I talk to so often but have never met previously.  A group of us went out to lunch at a well known TexMex spot nearby.  That gave us a good chance to talk about SpiceWorks and SpiceCorps and to get to know each other.  The food was good too.

It was a good day and well worth the trip over to Austin even if I was exhausted all day.  I was really fighting to stay awake for much of the day.  It was fun and a good use of my time, though.  I am definitely glad that I went over there.  Dominica and I have been interested in Austin for a while anyway as there is a definitely possibility that we will be buying a house there at some point.  Austin is a major tech center – one of the four big IT centers in the United States – as well as being inexpensive and close to most of her family.  Her family keeps moving to Texas making it make more and more sense for us to be there.  Due to the lack of state taxes Texas also has some major financial advantages.  We will definitely be considering Austin when we make the decision about where and how Liesl will be doing her schooling.  We have several years before we need to make that decision but it takes a long time to get to know an area remotely so that you can make good decisions about it.  Right now western Connecticut and Austin are our two big contenders.

My plan was to wait until the very last minute and then head out for the airport but there ended up being some problem with my tickets and I was unable to print them out so I ran to the airport “early” so that I could deal with that.  The ticket issue was nothing really and I was able to print my tickets from the United Airlines kiosk as I entered the airport so I ended up having about forty-five minutes to kill before needing to go wait at the gate for my flight.  I hit the bar near the gate and had a few whiskeys while waiting my flight time.  I spent my time there on my BlackBerry trying to wrap up everything that I could for the office as I had to leave earlier than expected and there were a number of items needing my attention.

My flight from Austin to Washington/Dulles left on time and without any incident.  I sat on the aisle next to a military forensic photographer who travels more than anyone I have ever met.  He too carried multiple BlackBerry devices so that got us talking and we talked over half the way to Dulles.  That made the trip go by pretty quickly.  It would have been even faster if I was not so groggy.

My layover at Dulles was supposed to be really short – just twenty minutes or so.  It ended up being longer as first we had mechanical difficulties and then weather problems in the northeast causing all kinds of delays for everyone.

As always seems to happen at the airport I got to witness someone completely losing their mind and almost going to jail.  Some guy determined not to miss his flight even though his connector got in too late ran past the airport staff and manually opened the “do not enter” doors leading to the tarmac because he was going to get on his plane one way or another.  Alarms sounded, the police were summoned, screaming and belligerent jerkiness ensued.  It took a lot of explaining to make him sort-of understand that just because he was running late and that he had been on planes all day and that, according to him, it was not his fault that he was too late for the plane would make him understand that he was about to be arrested and that people being arrested do not get to board their planes regardless of the fact that the plane might be sitting on the tarmac just several yards away from him.  He seriously asked if he could just get on the plane as the police were on their way to get him!!  It took even more explaining to tell him that the plane he was attempting to board was the broken down plane bound for White Plains, New York and not the working plane that had already left long ago for St. Louis, Missouri that had been gone for so long that no one waiting for White Plains even knew that it had ever been there.

I called Dominica and put her on standby for picking me up.  No way to know when I would be leaving Sterling, Virginia.

My flight ended up being only about one hour late which was pretty good all things considered.  At one point they were not telling us anything but our flight had been removed from the departures list making us pretty confident that it had been canceled and that we were going to need to look for alternative means of reaching New York tonight.  I was intending to get a rental car and just drive up rather than waiting until tomorrow and going through all of this again but we got our flight rescheduled and we were off.

The plane from Dulles to White Plains was a little propeller plane with just one seat on the side of the plane on which I sat.  It was loud and it jerked around a lot as we got caught in some of the big storms hitting the northeast.  The pilots attempted to go around the storms but were unable to really avoid them.  It made for a very rough ride.  It also made the flight longer than necessary as we had to fly around other cities that had all of their planes in holding patterns like Newark, New Jersey.  So the flight was physically a bit longer than originally expected.

Dominica was at Westchester Airport waiting for me when I got off of the plane.  She had arrived just a few minutes before I did and had seen my plane landing so she knew that I was going to be there soon.  She had spoken from Dulles and she knew that my cell phone might die at any time.  That is one thing that I am not happy about with my new Blackberry Tour – the battery dies in under one day of use.  I can never leave the house and be confident that I can make it back with a working phone.  It died while I was out at SpiceCorps in Houston and while I was traveling home tonight – in both cases I had charged it overnight the night before and it discharged completely during the single day while I was using it.  Partially this is because I am using several Internet features plus GPS all which puts a toll on the battery but still.  It is going through the battery way too quickly.  Hopefully with some conditioning this will improve.

Dominica picked me up just a little before one in the morning and we drove back home.  Liesl figured out that I was home when we got to the house and she wanted to stay up and hang out with me for a while.  I ended up being awake until after three in the morning!  What a long day.  I am going to be exhausted tomorrow again as well.  No getting around that!

While I was at GameStop, though, I did pick up some needed supplies like the Classic Controller for the Wii which allows us to play games that are downloaded via the Wii’s Virtual Console (you can store them onto an SD memory card.) The games are normally re-releases of NES, SNES, Nintendo 64, Sega Genesis / MegaDrive, Neo Geo or TurboGrafx 16 games. I think that they need to figure out how to emulate the Sega Saturn. That would probably have a few games (Panzer Dragoon, anyone?) that people would really be willing to shell out for. Perhaps the games are too large or the Wii doesn’t have the power to emulate the Saturn. I also think that they should get it to emulate the Game Boy, Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance systems. Those games are small and I bet that there are many people who would be happy to be able to play some of their favourite games on the big screen for a change. My plan is to get Paper Mario for the Nintendo 64 via the Virtual Console to try out the system. This is a handy list of all games available for the virtual console.

I also picked up a third party wireless GameCube controller to use with the Wii. The biggest draw, for me, in getting the Wii is that it is able to play Nintendo GameCube games. Since I never owned a GameCube I am now able to go and get all of the old GC games used very inexpensively and have a nice collection of just the best games after all of the wheat has been separated from the chaff after years of people playing these games. So in addition to the wireless controller I picked up three games for the system that Dominica will be very happy with: Super Mario Sunshine, The Legend of Zelda: The Four Swords Adventure and The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. She pretty much has the definitive Zelda collection sans the old Game Boy titles in the series. We own the GBA remakes of the original three titles (Z1 and Z2 from the NES and Z3 from the SNES), all of the N64 titles (the collector’s editions even), all of the GBA original titles, all of the GC titles (as of today) and the one Wii title. There is one new game for the DS that is just now out that she does not have yet.

Dominica and I made some Christmas plans today. The plan is that we are going to leave New Jersey on December 21st, that is Friday, after work and drive up to Frankfort and spend the night at Dominica’s parents’ house. In the morning they will take Oreo by car and drive with him to Houston, Texas. Hopefully that long of a trip with Dexter panicking will not teach Oreo to worry about car travel. Then Min and I will go to my dad’s house that Saturday morning and stay there until Christmas morning.

At six in the morning on Christmas day Dominica and I are flying out of Rochester to go to Houston to meet everyone there for Christmas. I will be working both from “home” and from the Houston office while we are down there. It will give me a chance to scope out the Houston facility. We will be in Houston all week and will come back the weekend after Christmas. Dominica will ride back with her parents and Oreo and I will most likely fly back to Newark but might ride back with them as well. While in Houston I will be working from Williams Tower – the fourth tallest building in the state of Texas and the fourth tallest in Houston and the tallest outside of downtown (Williams Tower is in the heart of uptown.)

I ordered my textbook for my class from Amazon today. It turns out that one of my two remaining textbooks for my class is available online through the university so I only need to buy one of the four since I already own the other two (and have read them both in the bast nine months.) I overnighted the textbook so that I can work on my homework this weekend easily. I can’t be falling behind or I will never catch up again.

My day was pretty busy today. Lot’s of work rolling in all day long. I can never decide if I should be coming into the office to “be in the office” or staying home to actually get work done.

Tomorrow, after work, we are planning on having a Dungeons & Dragons game at our apartment but, at the moment, we have no managed to secure a dungeon master yet nor do Dominica and I even have so much as dice to play with so we are in pretty rough shape. We are waiting to see how this plays out. Tomorrow night is rather up in the air at the moment.

The chair that Dominica ordered from Target had a matching love seat that is currently on sale so we needed to make a decision about it before we got the chair. We decided to just bite the bullet and get the loveseat too. So now we are going to be going from a rather spartan living room to a rather cozy one with a lot of seating locations. But no television to watch yet so just a lot of seating. Hopefully we can address that after Christmas spending is over or when the year end budget is a little more clear. Getting the chair and loveseat didn’t help things any.

After work Dominica took Oreo to the vet for his regular checkup. So far he is looking to be pretty healthy. They love him at the vet. He is everyone’s favourite little boy.

I got back to Newark around seven and walked over to GameStop on my way home (it isn’t really on the way home) and found out that Wiis had come in this morning just ten or fifteen minutes after I had left there! No Wii love for us I guess. I did pick up a memory card for the GameCube that I had forgotten about this morning and also got Skies of Arcadia Legends and Tales of Symphonia for the GameCube used.

I also walked over to the comic book shop on Broad in the hopes that they would carry game dice but neither do they appear to carry them nor were they open.  It was a lot of walking for me this evening.

I got home and ordered in pizza from Nino’s for dinner.  Dominica was home just minutes after me.  She had done some shopping and had not found any dice either but had, finally, managed to find a ten foot long white grounded extension cord.

Dinner arrived and we hooked up the GameCube stuff and started playing Skies of Arcadia Legends.  We have the original Skies of Arcadia for Dreamcast but this very has the wireless controller, no disk swapping and supposedly better graphics.  We only got about thirty minutes into the game tonight though but so far it looks pretty good.

Ryan came over to test out some of his stereo equipment that he was having problems with.  His “new” stereo from eBay is having issues and he wanted to see how ours was working to verify which piece of equipment is not functioning correctly.

After Ryan left we tried using the Wii Virtual Console and downloaded the Nintendo 64 version of Paper Mario.  Neither of us ever player this game back when the N64 was our main systems (we each independently had the Nintendo 64 back in the day.)  Dominica had never even heard of it.  We fired it up and it played well.  The graphics are very impressive for the N64.  This must have been quite the game in its day.  It was released in the United States in early 2001.

We were tired and were off to sleep a little earlier than usual.