The driving continues today.  Last night Brian and I decided to give up on the quest to drive all through the night and stayed in Forrest City, Arkansas.  Our hotel room, we discovered this morning, had a wonderful view of a big pile of dirt.  How lovely.

We ate breakfast at the hotel and were on the road pretty much right away at around nine.  That give me roughly three hours of sleep last night.  Not much but enough to refresh me.

We still have a lot of driving to do today and it is exceptionally hot out and the sun is blazing.  We got onto the road and Brian drove most of the day.  I was on my laptop working as long as I could.

We were dying all day from the heat.  The car just kept getting hotter and hotter.  It was awful.  The air conditioning in the car was not able to keep up in the least with the hot air and the sunlight that just never ended.  We were driving into the sun all day too so we were sitting in the sunlight the whole day.

The BlackBerry that I had tethered to my laptop got so hot that it discharged its battery even while plugged in!  That wasn’t good.  So I lost connectivity and couldn’t work continuously.  What a pain.

The drive seemed to take forever even though we only had some of Arkansas and all of Texas to cross.  We stopped and grabbed Jack in the Box in eastern Texas.

It was around five when we pulled into Las Colinas and got into the apartment.  We were exhausted and did not bother to unload the car.

Tonight was pasta night at La Cima but we did not have the energy to go over there.  We relaxed a little but were off to bed on the early side.

I got up early this morning to make sure that I was all ready for the big day today.  There is a lot to do.  My sport coat and shirt were horribly wrinkled after the long drive to New York, several weeks of being in New York and now the drive down to Maryland so last night I hung them up in the shower in my suite and took a hot shower which seemed to get the bulk of the wrinkles out.  I then left them in the shower overnight and left them in the shower while I took another shower this morning.  Luckily the shower is large enough that they can hang in it and not get all wet from the shower while getting quite a bit of steam.

We were running a little late when Brian and I managed to hit the road and leave John and Michelle’s home on the Magothy River.  We had built in a lot of extra time, though, to make sure that we were not going to be late when we got to Washington, D.C.

The drive in to Washington, basically identical to my old commute from a decade ago, went pretty smoothly.  Brian drove to make things easier so that I would be able to just jump out of the car if necessary.

We ended up getting to the conference pretty early, which was good.  I wanted plenty of time so that I was not rushed.

We drove around the corner and stopped by Subway to grab a quick lunch before I headed into the conference.  It was a good use of the time.  Then Brian dropped me at the conference and Jay met me outside and got me checked in with my badge and everything.  We headed out to the expo floor to check out the speaking space.

The stage at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference was the “Live Stage” on the Expo Floor.  It was a really neat speaking setup consisting of a very large circle with broken sides for people to ingress and egress.  Seating was all on extra-firm beanbag style benches.  There were multiple commercial video cameras and sound equipment for high quality recording.  Pretty slick.

After checking in with the presentation staff and getting situated we went looking for some food for Jay.  There were really no options inside the conference so he was stuck grabbing a bite at Starbucks really quickly and we were on our way back to the stage area to prepare.

The talk started at one and just ran for twenty five minutes.  It was a very short talk but that made it a lot lower key and more casual for people to just sit down and watch.

At the beginning of the talk there were very few people in the theatre but as Jay spoke it filled up pretty rapidly.  By the time that it was my turn to speak we had quite a good turnout.  The session was recorded too so we will be appearing on “Microsoft Television” sometime tomorrow or possibly sometime tonight.

Overall I think that it went quite well.  People seemed to be really engaged by the talk and one person pulled me aside at the end to talk to me about what we had been speaking on – which was Social Media in IT Communities.  One of my favourite subjects.  This was heavily related to my talk at SpiceWorld 2009.

As soon as the talk was over I was out the door.  Brian was “circling” the building to be ready to pick me up and we were in the car and on the road in minutes.  We pulled over a few blocks away so that I could jump into the driver’s seat to get us out of DC since we were in an area where I used to work and knew pretty well.  I got us right out onto I66 without any problem and we were on the highway to Front Royal in no time.

While I was at the convention, Brian had managed to get to a Verizon Wireless store to pick up the cable that I needed in order to be able to work from the car while we were driving.  We had thought that we were going to have to get one of these on the road so this worked out great.

The drive went pretty well.  We were both pretty well rested and the weather was agreeable.  Brian took over driving pretty quickly so that I could get onto my laptop and work tethered to my BlackBerry Tour for much of the journey.

Coming from Washington, D.C. makes the trip much shorter than from just about any other location in the north than I ever drive to or from.  We were more than an hour “into the drive” than we would have been even leaving directly from John’s house let alone coming from Brian’s place in Chalfont or mine in Peekskill.  This is a shorter drive than we are used to doing.

My Verizon 3G connection did great and actually stayed connected all of the way through Virginia from Washington to Bristol!  You really cannot ask for much more than that.  It ended up being a very productive day.

It was between nine and ten o’clock when we got into Knoxville.  We were a little tired and were beginning to suspect that we may not be able to push on all of the way to Dallas tonight.  That is going to be crappy as I had really hoped to have been able to have gotten to the office around ten in the morning and to have been able to work a “normal” day once arriving.  We decided that stopping for a short break and getting dinner would be better than driving continuously.

Since we were in Knoxville we stopped at the SpiceRack and got fish tacos.  We did not stay long, though, as we wanted to get as many miles done as we possibly could.  We did pretty well for several more hours.  Around two or three in the morning I was just too tired to keep driving, though, so I decided that that was going to be it for the night.

We ended up getting a room at the Comfort Suites in Forrest City, Arkansas.  Not nearly as far as we had hoped to have been able to go but it is what it is.

Brian slept well.  I had insomnia a bit and only got three hours of sleep at best if not far less.  I did get a chance to take a nice, long, hot shower, though, which for me is almost as good as getting sleep.

Ship Found in World Trade Center Dig Site

Today Brian and I are hanging out in Arnold, Maryland with John until we head to Washington tomorrow morning where I will speak at the Microsoft convention.  Today is the one day of “downtime” this week – our one chance to catch up a little bit before the crazy driving starts.

Brian and John ran out this morning and picked up breakfast and coffee from the deli.  They make some awesome sandwiches down there.

It was a hot day today but not nearly as hot as it was a few weeks ago when I was down here.  Fortunately work was pretty slow today so I was able to visit with John and Michelle while still working all day.  I just set up at the desktop in the kitchen and worked from there.  Very convenient.

For lunch Brian, John and I drove over to Deep Creek.  The food there is just awesome.  I miss having them nearby.

I worked all afternoon and we pretty much just hung out at the house all day.  Nothing too much to report.  Just a day of relaxing before all of the craziness tomorrow.

So my original plan had me leaving at seven thirty last night.  That did not work out at all.  There turned out to be a major issue at work and I ended up spending several hours camped out working on it from dad’s house.  That dragged on and on and it was after ten when I was finally able to run out, jump into the car and get on to the road towards Peekskill.  Much later than I had anticipated and so late that it is likely to impact my day tomorrow.

The drive itself went fine.  Driving so late at night generally means near-zero traffic and construction.  Even where there is construction there is no traffic so you go right through it and don’t worry about it.  It was late enough that I just decided to skip dinner as it was too hard to find anyplace that was open that would not take a long time to eat.  I was in a hurry to get down to the house so I drove pretty solid the whole way down to get there as quickly as possible.

It was three in the morning when I pulled into Peekskill.  This is only my second time back to our former home since we left here in December.  It is unbelievable that we have been away now for seven months.  It has been nearly three months since my last time stopping in.  I used to go through this when returning to the house in Geneseo to some degree but we never went very long without going back to the house.  In Peekskill we have been going some very significant time without coming back.  Dominica has not been back at all since we left in December which I find unfathomable.  Owning a home that you never, ever visit is a very strange feeling.

I got in okay and found the house was only eighty-one degrees.  Not nearly as warm as I had guessed that it was likely to be.  I got the air conditioning fired up right away and headed around on a quick inspection of the house.  For the most part things were in pretty good shape.  I got to check out the damage to the back door which was pretty extensive.  The outside pane of glass is all but gone, but the inside glass completely held so the issue remains relatively minor.  Nothing else was amiss downstairs so I headed upstairs.

The upstairs, while very hot, was in good shape.  I got the ceiling fans on, brushed my teeth, set up the CPAP and was off to sleep.  There is not going to be very much sleep for me tonight, I am afraid.  Tomorrow is going to be one busy day.

I only managed to sleep for about three hours.  I was up at six this morning and could tell that I was not going to fall back asleep so I just got up and started working on the house.  There is so much to be done that I am really not very sure where I should begin.  It is very overwhelming.

Dominica’s parents are on their way down to the house, expecting to around between eleven and noon, to deliver some furniture for Francesca that needs to come down on our truck when we have it come down and to help with some of the packing while they are there.

I tried to take a shower first thing and discovered that there was no hot water in the house.  That isn’t good.  So I went down and tried to adjust the hot water heater.  It had been set to vacation mode and I turned it up to a normal temperature in the hopes of getting it to fire up.  It kicked on and off a few times.  Not sure what that means.

I went outside and discovered that the grass is recovering nicely now that Oreo is not outside peeing on it every day.  He really did a number on the grass right in front of the door on both sides of the side walk.  The one side is nearly all recovered and the other side, while still having a huge dead area, has grown back in over almost have of the previously dead areas.  That is something that I had been pretty worried about so I am very glad to see that by next year this should be all but fixed.

Being in the house, especially now when I am all alone and have time to myself to just think about it, is very strange.  My first reaction is that this is a very nice house and that I really miss it.  I am tired of living in the apartment in Texas.  I don’t want to come back to New York, I just miss owning a house.  I have lived in apartments for so long and it is always as if your life is on hold when you are in an apartment.  Having your own house really feels different.  The house really does look nice with all of the paint that was applied just before we moved out.  It is hard for me to remember the house like that.  I knew if for nearly all of the time that we were there with different colours and brightness.

Being alone in the house is probably not good for me.  We bought the house in Peekskill for the sole purpose of Liesl being born there.  We wanted her to be a New Yorker, like her parents, and so we had bought this house for her.  We only lived in the house for a few weeks before Liesl was born and so the house has no memories that are not directly involved with preparing for Liesl’s arrival and taking care of her after she had arrived.  This is, effectively, Liesl’s house.

As I went around the house taking down Liesl’s pictures from the walls I couldn’t help but hear the echoes of her laughter in the house.  There is the spot by the fireplace where her swing was located nearly the entire time that we lived in Peekskill.  She just loved that swing.

And in the basement, there was my desk.  She loved to come down to the basement and crawl around from the mirrors on one side of the room down the “hallway” formed between the desks and either go under my desk or pop around the corner to see me.  She spent a lot of time playing down there while I worked.  That is where she first used my computer as well.

Up in her room there is her crib.  The crib that she almost never used.  Most of the time that we were living in Peekskill Liesl was sleeping with us.  There was a time period when she would nap in the crib and there were several months of her sleeping there, at least early on in the night but mostly she did not sleep in her own room.  It is so strange to think of her having her own room in that house.  She never really played in there.  Many a night Dominica or I would cradle little Liesl in our arms and rock in the glider to put her to sleep then put her down in the crib.

Even our room, when Liesl used to fall asleep in the chair in the corner with Dominica holding her or where she would stand on the head of our bed every morning to look out the windows and yell to the people getting into their cars and going to work in the mornings.  I had forgotten all about her standing there and yelling until I was here, in the house alone, today.

I found Liesl’s foam letters that were her very first bath toys.  I had found those at the grocery store and thought that she should have them.  She loved taking baths there.

It is amazing how many memories come flooding back when you go back to a house, especially when you are on your own, and have time to walk around remembering.  This house is full of Liesl memories.

I was pretty hungry having skipped dinner last night so I drove down to the Maple Ave. Deli which is just down the street and picked up some sandwiches and a pastry to eat.  That was very quick and convenient.  It also gave me a chance to tell them that I had moved to Texas – which would be why they have not seen me in many months.

I ate back at the house and then got busy on the packing for the day.  So much packing to do for a single day.  I got a few hours of prep work in on my own early in the morning.  The house was nice and cool and I had brought some plastic bins with me from dad’s house who’s purpose was to collect the little miscellaneous stuff from around the house that will travel back to Texas with me directly in the Mazda rather than waiting for the movers.  I have a number of delicate items that will go back in that way which is going to make the car very packed for the drive down to Texas.

Before Dominica’s parents arrived I ran out to Home Depot to pick up boxes and bubble wrap that we would need to get things packed up.  The house is pretty much empty already so much of this type of stuff has already shipped to Texas.

Dominica’s parents arrived at around eleven thirty.  We got their car unloaded and set right to work getting more packing done.  It was just about half an hour before the potential new tenant arrived at noon to meet me.  We had both wanted to have a chance to meet one another and this worked out perfectly.  We spent almost an hour going around the house and discussing what was going and what was staying, looking at stuff like the attic, working out schedules, etc.  It turns out that they want to move in faster than we had thought so getting the house emptied is going to be a bit of a challenge, I think.  We can’t get movers scheduled until the paperwork is all signed and the movers can’t move the furniture until the glass is all cleaned up which is scheduled for the fifteenth.

Dominica’s mom tested the range and noticed that there was no gas there either.  This isn’t good.  Why would the gas be turned off?  The electric is not turned off so the power company must not have shut us down – the payments are automatic anyway.  I can only guess that our agent turned it off for safety reasons.

Once she left it was back to packing.  Dominica’s parents stayed for several more hours and the house was almost done by the time that they had left.  I would never have gotten all of this done today without their help.  As it is we had decided to leave the television on the wall and have the movers take it down and pack it for us rather than attempting to do it ourselves but I still had just more work that I could have gotten done on my own before midnight and bringing the stuff down from the attic is really a two person job.

It was around four when I had the car all packed, the house completed and photographed to show to the movers and was on my way to head down to Philadelphia to meet up with Brian and to get ready for our trip.  It takes about three hours to get from the Peekskill house down to Chalfont, Pennsylvania where we were meeting.  I stopped in at the first New Jersey reststop for fuel and food.  Grabbed a quick bite of pizza and fro-yo.  The drive went pretty quickly.  The car is quite loaded.  This is going to be a challenge getting Brian into the car as well along with his luggage.

Once I got to Chalfont we unloaded the desktops and servers and spent about an hour doing packing logistics.  From the house we ran over to WaWa to get dinner.  Just as we got there we discovered an issue at the office and my boss called to have me conference in.  That ended up taking several hours of both my boss and I working on the issue with several other people.  Busy evening.  I was on both BlackBerrys constantly to be able to keep up.  Fortunately it worked out that I was able to do the work from the car so we sat at WaWa until we were sure that we could drive and then I just worked while we were on the road.

The drive down to Annapolis went pretty smoothly.  As we came through the inner harbor in Baltimore we saw a huge neon sign of what appeared to be a mustachioed Italian pirate.  We laughed for quite some time trying to figure out what that might have been for.  Why would someone pay good money for a four story tall sign that makes no sense at all to be erected.  That can’t be cheap.

It was just after eleven when we arrived at the Nicklin’s in Arnold, Maryland.  We did not stay up for very long.  We were probably off to bed around midnight.

Very few plans for tomorrow.  We will just be hanging around the house.  I am working all day tomorrow as usual so we really don’t have the ability to do anything too much.

I woke up early at seven eastern this morning with a sinus infection.  Argh.  Not the day for this at all.  It isn’t a bad sinus infection, just one of those “one day” ones that I sometimes get from using my CPAP.  The CPAP dried out, I believe, which causes sinus irritation so that I most likely the cause of it.  At least it caused me to get up bright and early and get a start on my crazily busy day.  There is so much to do that I do not even know where to begin.

I checked in on some DVD archiving work going on upstairs.  The one laptop is moving about 450GB of archived data over to an external drive.  I had kicked that off last night before going to bed because the local drive had run out of space and it needs working room in order to continue.  When I checked in this morning there was six hours remaining on the transfer!  The original 2TB external drive that we bought for this filled up to capacity this morning.  So I am down to just the one external and the small, local drives from here on out.  I timed that pretty closely, if I do say so myself.  I should have very, very close to exactly 4TB heading down to Texas when all is said and done.

I took a shower hoping that that would help with my sinus infection.  It did a tiny bit but not very much.  That is going to make for a very long day all by itself.

I checked in with work but I did not have any eight o’clock work scheduled today and my nine o’clock work was pushed off until ten.  Not a good day for getting a late start but there is so much to do that I am not sure how I would have actually have gotten out of here any earlier anyway.

I got the two servers unmounted and loaded into the Mazda.  That was the first packing task.  Those are going on past Peekskill and will be heading down to Philly where Brian will be setting them up in the lab that is located there.  Dad is very happy to finally have them out of his house.  They have been running here for years now.

For lunch, dad and I decided to get pizza from Papa Roni’s, the new place in Pavilion that replaced Davis’ Farm Market that was our mainstay of pizza for decades.  I am interested to see how Papa Roni’s compares to Davis’ long standing tradition of pizza.

The pizza turned out to be really good.  Not quite up to the memory of Davis’ Farm Market but still the best pizza in the area that I have had.  Their menu has expanded a bit since dad last ate there too and he picked up a menu so we will be using them more often in the future.  They also deliver.  We are not sure if they would deliver way out to dad or not. It would be amazing if they did.  No one, and I mean no one, has ever delivered there.

Growing up in a world without cable television (it did not exist in our county) and without food delivery of any kind whatsoever really made my childhood experience a lot different than what a lot of people think of of the ’80s.  I was really basically unaware of cable television until after I was in college and I had no idea that normal people could get food delivered to their house for a very long time. What a crazy, foreign concept!

I’ve done so many DVD archiving procedures that the DVD drive on the oldest of the laptops gave out on me!  I’ve put years of wear and tear on these machines in the last two weeks.  I had to borrow dad’s external USB DVD drive to attach to that laptop so that it could continue working.  Once I switched to that I probably got a 25% increase in speed or possibly more on that old laptop.  I wish that I had been using that all along.

Since I am stuck waiting for stuff at the office all day I am taking advantage of the time to attempt to go through more stuff at dad’s and try to get as much stuff ready for recycling or donation as possible.  I eliminated one entire plastic bin right away which was very handy since I need a few bins down in Peekskill to use to cart away any loose items that I come across tonight.

I spoke to our soon to be, we hope, renters down in Peekskill and we arranged to meet tomorrow at noon at the apartment.  I am very glad that we will be meeting them in person.  That just seems like a wise move.

Dominica went to GameStop and bought Lego Harry Potter for the PS3.  This is the first of two Lego Harry Potter titles expected.  This game covers the first four years.  She really enjoyed the other Lego games on the XBOX 360 and has been looking forward to this one.

Speaking of video games, while exploring in the barn trying to clean up our mess I found the box of my original, first generation Sony Playstation and my Super Nintendo Entertainment System – the first video game system (other than my handheld GameBoy) that I ever purchased with my own money.

The Playstation has no sentimental attachment for me.  It was a system that I lent Mark the money to buy and he never paid me for it so it defaulted to being my system.  I was never very happy about that.  There were no games that I was really wanting to play on it at the time so it was a big waste of money for me back around 1997 when I got saddled with it.  Josh, Eric, Andy and I did use it a bit at the house in Greece at Greenleaf Meadows and I did end up getting some classic titles for it like Final Fantasy VII, Parasite Eve and Suikoden but mostly it languished on top of the nightstand going months without even being remembered.

The Super Nintendo, on the other hand, has a lot of sentimental value.  I bought it at the old Walmart in Geneseo when the Super Mario All Stars pack came out.  I had earned the money for it myself at my job and I bought it and just showed up with it one day.  It would have been December of 1993 as that is when that pack with Super Mario All Stars and Super Mario World together with the SNES console was released.  That is the console that just six months later I took to Michigan with me when I started college.

But I know that these are not items that I should keep any longer.  I should have given them away years ago when they had more value.  So they are off to the Leicester Rummage Sale now.

Altogether today I managed to eliminate seven bins from our storage!  That is practically an entire car load worth of stuff that now does not need to be transported or stored any longer.

What a dent has been made in the barn storage!  I can see real progress now.  We are hopeful that the next time that we drive to dad’s that we will have a large vehicle, perhaps a GMC Acadia which we really want to get, and will be able to pick up a number of bins to cart back to Texas.  A couple good trips like that and the bulk of the stuff might be shifted.

My goal was to leave at seven thirty but there was just one final DVD to finish and I wanted to take a shower because my sinuses were so bad today so I pushed off my leaving time just a little bit.  The car was loaded and ready to hit the road right away.

As I need to finish packing the car and get the finishing touches on everything so that I can leave I am going to sign off and post while still at dad’s house in Pavilion.  If all goes according to schedule I will arrive in Peekskill at roughly one in the morning.  The Toccos are expected to arrive at the house between eleven and twelve tomorrow to deliver a piece of Francesca’s furniture that needs to get on to our moving truck with our stuff so that it can make it down to Texas finally.

It will be unlikely that I will be online tomorrow at all.  Once the work in Peekskill is done I have to drive to Philadelphia and pick up Brian and then we will drive together down to Arnold, Maryland.  We are crashing at John’s house on Sunday and Monday nights.  If all goes well, I will be home in Las Colinas on Wednesday morning.

Today is my last day at my dad’s house.  Tomorrow morning I leave for Peekskill.  The last seven months have probably been the longest that I have been away from home.  I was  at dad’s house only for one night in roughly seven months.  That is pretty extreme.  We have no idea when we will be able to return at this point either. Dad is hoping to be able to come down to Irving to visit us right at the end of October.  We are not likely to see him until then.

I slept in a bit this morning after being up so late last night.  I woke to the phone ringing – the car is done and we can pick it up at any time.  There was very little wrong with it and it was just $250.  Not too bad.  It sure could have been a lot worse.

The girls made great progress on the road and were in Little Rock before I even had a chance to check in on them.

Since we had to pick up the car today, dad and I drove over to Geneseo and had lunch at Denny’s.  We wanted to go to Aunt Cookies for toasted subs but Main Street was crazy and we did not want to fight the crowds. We had forgotten about the airshow again.

Work was busy today, it is a Friday after all, so I was stuck on my Blackberry all through the meal.  I’m sure that the people at Denny’s think that I am crazy.  I am never able to place an order or do anything there because I am always on my phone.  Since people in New York for the past few weeks I have really begun to be aware of how difficult it is for me to be able to have meals with people – there is just never a break where I am truly free to eat.

We picked up the car and came right back home.  Still no paperwork from the renters today but supposedly things are progressing and one of the people who is going to be renting from us would like to meet me in Peekskill this weekend while I am down there.  That sounds like a good sign to me and honestly I would feel better having a chance to meet the people who are going to be renting our house as well

I continued working on the DVD archiving.  I’m not going to be able to finish everything but boy did I ever make an amazing dent.

For dinner, dad ran down to York Landing and picked up fish sandwiches for us.  Since it is Friday night it is best for me to eat at my desk rather than attempting to go somewhere.  There just isn’t time all evening to do that.

After dinner, without leaving the upstairs office, dad and I watched the new BBC Miss Marple Mystery The Blue Germanium that aired two weeks ago.  We watched it from PBS.com.  It was really well done.

We made an attempt at getting the air hockey table into the car.  That was quite a pain.  The bottom line is it doesn’t fit and the Mazda is not designed to be driven with the hatch open – it is not a truck – and so fumes would potentially come into the car.  It just isn’t safe beyond the obvious issues of not being able to transport the stuff that we need down to Peekskill other than the air hockey table and the risks of stuff being stolen from the open car should I have to stop somewhere (maybe from carbon monoxide poisoning?)

Dad is thinking that he may be able to get the table into his much larger car and drive it out to get it to Dominica’s parents who have to make a trip to Peekskill with the truck anyway.  That will work much better. Unfortunately we have no idea when we can get movers, who we can get and how we will orchestrate the whole ordeal.  Since we don’t have a lease signed yet, we really do not have any means of moving forward on that critical task and it is becoming a logistical nightmare and we haven’t even begun to address it yet.  I really have no idea what we are going to do.

Dad went to bed really early.  He has to be up quite early in the morning to go to his Saturday morning breakfast group.  I get to sleep in until eight.  So I stayed up working on DVD archiving and some painful OpenVPN issues.

It took many hours but I eventually figured out why the OpenVPN connections have not been working.  It is because the router is seeing the multiple OpenVPN clients as a UDP flood and has been closing the ports!  No wonder it has been a confusing mess.

So I eventually got that fixed.  What a relief.  And since I was up working on that I kept the DVD processes going until the wee hours of the morning.  I almost managed to get all of the DVDs done.  So close but there is not enough time to even hope to be able to complete them tomorrow morning before I need to be on the road down to Peekskill.

Tomorrow is going to be an insane day.  I have no idea how I am going to get everything done.

The alarm went off at seven this morning.  I woke up, rolled over to check email and noticed that Francesca and not only managed to get out of the door at the earliest of her projected range but had actually made it out even earlier than expected and was already around Palmyra when we were rolling out of bed. So we were in a very big hurry trying to get out the door as quickly as possible.

We did a good job of getting the car loaded, Liesl ready and everyone on to the road right away.  We headed straight up to Batavia concerned that Francesca was far ahead of us as she was past the Seneca Service Station ten minutes before we were able to leave the house.

Our timing resulting in absolute perfection – we pulled in to the Bob Evans’ parking lot at the Batavia Thruway entrance right behind Francesca.  We could not have possibly timed it better, even if we had been following each other all along.

I was feeling really sick this morning.  I think that I have caught whatever it was that Dominica has had the last few days.  I could not stay in Batavia even to wait for everyone to be fully loaded into the car – it was a mad rush to get back home.

I was at work by normal time so the morning trip, as well as feeling sick, all fit into the “before work” hours perfectly.  I am very glad that that worked out so well.

Dad called from Geneseo to tell me that his breakfast was done and that he was still waiting for his car to be finished being worked on at the shop and that if I wanted, the shop could get the Mazda in right away to work on it.  I made sure that work was good, which took about twenty minutes, and then ran over to Geneseo quickly and dropped off the Mazda at M&R.  They are not sure if they can get to it today or not but they will see what they can do.

We stopped at Tim Horton’s for coffee and donuts.  Actually, dad had a vanilla cream and I grabbed two danishes (ssh, don’t tell Dominica – fortunately for me, she does not read SGL, ever) one cherry cheese and one the limited edition caramel apple.  We ate the danishes there and I took the coffee back home.  The Geneseo Air Show is on this weekend so Geneseo is just wall to wall people.  The sidewalk sale is on and downtown is a zoo.

We skipped lunch since I had not been feeling that well and since I needed to get back to work.  The afternoon was pretty uneventful.  Lots of work and following Dominica and Francesca’s progress across the country via email.

Once work was over, around eight, dad and I drove over to Geneseo and had dinner at Denny’s.  We had been planning to eat at the Lumber Yard but my job runs so late now that it is based on Central time that it wasn’t possible to go there before they were going to close.  Denny’s is cheaper and faster anyway.

After dinner we just came home.  I spent the rest of the evening working on the DVD archiving, SGL and other miscellaneous tasks.  I ended up staying up until around two in the morning, in fact!

No word on the car today.  With any luck we will be able to pick it up tomorrow.  If I cannot get it tomorrow it is going to be a major problem and I am not sure how I am going to deal with it.

No word on the house in Peekskill either, today.  That is pretty depressing.  We are getting rather desperate for time and we need to start making some kind of plans for getting the house emptied out.  I talked to Brian and he is going to go to the house with me on Saturday evening to see what we can do.  It would be awesome if we could get everything done and ready for the moving crew on Saturday afternoon but I do not see how that could be possible.  I’m not completely sure what is left in the house but I am assuming that we have to take a bit out by car when we leave.  I might spend the night there on Saturday night and head down to Philly on Sunday morning.  It will all depend how much there is to be done and how much of it I am able to do.  I sure hope that the movers don’t need us to do anything that we don’t get done this weekend.  That would be awful.

The Texas-bound trekkers made it to Jackson, Tennessee where they got reservations at the Quality Inn for just $63 which is excellent.  They got in around ten, I believe, after a long day of driving.  They made it farther than they had originally planned and tomorrow should be a good driving day for them.

Liesl was featured on an article in the Smithsonian Magazine titled: Mamas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Broccoli Haters.   This is perfect for her as she does, in fact, love broccoli more than any other vegetable.  I just stumbled upon this article with this picture that I had taken of her.  How exciting that she is in just a prestigious publication.  We are very proud of her.

Oreo, back in 2009, was apparently used in an article on dog safety in the car on the website Will My Dog Hate Me in an article titled:  Buckle Up for Dog Safety.  A picture that my mother took of Buffer, our cocker spaniel in the fields in the back forty, was used as an example of the breed on HubPages.  My old Mazda 6 (not actually a 6S but a 6 with all of the S options individually to save on insurance – so identical to the S but minus the badge) was used on eHow on the Mazda and Nissan Showdown.  Gomestic has an article on dangers for cats outdoors and one of our cats from long ago from the barn  got his picture used!

One of my recent pictures from Las Colinas was used in a blog post about all fifty states getting snow this winter.  Oreo was used in a blog on When Nine Hundred Years Old You Reach.  And yet another picture of mine was used on a  recent article from Truth Out on Social Security on Wall Street.

Today is the last day with Dominica and Liesl (and Oreo) in New York.  They will be heading out first thing tomorrow morning to return to Texas and I will be without my family for a week.  I was up early and working this morning.

The archiving process is a great success and all of the movies are now archived and ready for transport.  Now I am on to the television content which I had not originally to get but now I am anxiously hoping that I may be able to finish everything while I am here.  Serious progress.

We skipped lunch today – after yesterday I was not feeling like trying to get food again.  Dominica had some shopping that she needed to do so she drove over to Geneseo to Walmart and did some shopping.  She looked for an SD card for the new high definition camcorder but Walmart didn’t have anything useful at any kind of reasonable price.  So we have to wait until we can order something from Amazon once we get back to Texas.

For dinner this evening we just ordered in a cheese pizza from the Chicken Coop.  That was easy and would not require me to leave the house for more than a few minutes.

Liesl spent the day mostly hanging out with her grandpa.  She is really going to miss him once she leaves in the morning.  She has been having so much fun up here.  She loves the yard, camping, the toys and the constant attention.  She made grandpa read to her a lot today.

Liesl has really come a long way in learning about animals and animal sounds this week.  For weeks, or maybe more, she has been really into monkeys and she goes “ooh ee ohh” anytime that you say monkey or she sees one.

Off to bed somewhat early tonight.  We have to be up early tomorrow and on the road right away.  Francesca is hoping to leave Frankfort at five thirty in the morning and we are going to meet her in Batavia so that they can get right on to the road and get down to Tennessee where they will be stopping for the night.

I got up early this morning.  After the holiday yesterday I knew that there was going to be extra work to be done this morning and that things were going to be really hopping at the office so I made sure to be up and signed in and working extra early so that I could stay on top of things.  I also knew that my boss was out today so I needed to be around to cover for him.

I worked very hard all morning.  Definitely a busy morning as I had predicted.  I waited until a quarter till one local time, which I always try to do when going to lunch here because it seems to be the perfect balance for work to be optimally lunch-ish both for the people that we support and for our own office.  Working in central time and supporting eastern time causes all kinds of problems that someone somewhere never thinks that you should be at lunch at that particular moment.

Of course, no matter how much planning I do to not take lunch at the wrong time, I get a call from my boss while still on my way to lunch: “Where are you?  I guess you are out of office today?”  What do you mean I must be out of office?  I’ve been working for five hours already.  Do I not get any lunch?  I’ve only been away from my desk for minutes and I am available still by email and phone while I am away.  That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.  Not only am I working but he was supposed to be taking a holiday today.

Then he tells me that I was supposed to be in the office today even though we had discussed more than once that I would not be coming back until sometime next week.  And it just gets worse from there.  Well now I’m just having a crappy day.  I do not handle this type of stress well especially when I am not in a position to deal with it right away.  I hate problems that linger and the last thing that I want is to have major problems at work and have it be an entire week before I am in the office to find out what is going on.  And as the new practice seems to be to tell me major bad news only after it is too late I live in a constant state of waiting to find out what has already happened of which I have not been informed.

So now I’m just going to be stressed for a week.  The biggest piece of news for the day is that we are no longer able to move to Austin.  Originally we were going to go straight to Austin but then had offered to go to Dallas for six months to help out.  That would have meant that we would have been heading to Austin right about now.  But as the house in Peekskill didn’t sell or lease we were really trapped and we needed to renew our lease in Dallas until we were able to get out from under the house.  But now everything has changed and we are staying in Dallas now.

It’s not that Dallas is the worst option but we have had our hearts set on Austin for a year and until today we thought that we were moving there as soon as we were done with our lease.  Now that we pretty much have renters going into our house we were very excited that Austin was finally going to happen.  We are extremely fortunate that we found out today that we cannot go there since we might have sent the moving truck there this weekend!  Talk about cutting it close.

At this point I’m a little sick from the stress and worry.  Dominica is very upset that we will no longer be living close to family like we had intended all along.  So instead of being three hours from the Grices we are going to remain five hours away making our weekend travel pretty awful for the indefinite future.  Just when we finally had a long term plan after so many years of moving around.

I’m assuming, but won’t know for a while, that this also means that our plans of spending our summers up north is no longer an option.  That was a really critical piece of being in Texas.  Our lives are in total upheaval now. It’s not entirely unlike I lost my job or got relocated again today.  Effectively we did get relocated and we are starting our planning all over again.

I’m stressed enough that I have a stomach ache.  Dominica is pretty upset as well.  The worst bit is not really having all of the details for a while.  We can make Dallas work.  We will get over that.  That’s just surprising.  It is extra crappy as Andy and Miranda will be in Round Rock soon and would have been just up the street from us.  Now they too will be hours away.

We are assuming now that we need to rent indefinitely.  Dominica was right that we are just too volatile to buy a house.  Even when we try to have a long term, safe house buying plan we get burned.  Our previous house buying we knew was somewhat short lived. Not as short as it ended up, months rather than years, but it was never supposed to be our “home” location like Austin was.

So we cut lunch short so that I could come home and deal with this as much as was feasible this afternoon.  I shouldn’t even try to have lunch; it just seems like a bad idea.

When we arrived back at the house from “lunch” the new Kodak 1080p video camera had arrived.  Unfortunately it needs a very large SD card to be of any use and there is no spare one at the house.  Dominica is tasked with finding one tomorrow morning when she goes shopping at Walmart for doggy cooking supplies.

Back to work all afternoon.  After work was over we went down to the Richardsons’ for take away Chinese.  I was pretty distracted and not very sociable.  I hate that work does this – leaves bad things hanging so that it is impossible to leave work behind.  Liesl had a great time though.  She played in the yard and went all over exploring.  She got Aunt Sharon to walk her down to the garden and pick strawberries which she ate right there.

Liesl had a great time going over to the lawnmower shed and just standing on the slope and then running down.  She was quite the card and everyone found her to be really entertaining.  She knows how to work the crowd, that is for sure.

We did not stay too late.  Dominica is still feeling pretty sick and obviously I don’t feel too hot today.  So we were home at a reasonable time.

The DVD archiving project is going gangbusters.  With three laptops running all day long as fast as they can there is just tons and tons of stuff being archived.  At this rate I am hopeful that we will hit four terabytes of data before I have to head off to Texas.

We were supposed to have the paperwork finalized for the rental of the house in Peekskill today but we did not receive it.  We are told that everything is still going alright and that we just need to hang tight.  It was a bad day, though, and it makes it that much easier to think the worst.  We don’t really have any cause for alarm or concern yet.  It would be very nice to know the official status of the lease sooner than later, however, as we need to be able to schedule movers, get some plumbing fixed, figure out when I am going to go down there, etc.  There is so much to do to get the house ready and not knowing for sure if we can move out of it or not yet is making things that much more difficult.

Dominica and I did go down to the barn today to figure out if we really care about the stuff that is down there.  Tons and tons of the stuff that remains is either going to get tossed or donated.  Sorting through it and making sure that we find the sentimental stuff is our big task.  We want to get as much of that done now as possible as we no longer know when we will be returning to New York and what is there might remain there for a very long time without us having any opportunity to sort through it.

Again tonight, when we went to go to bed, Liesl wanted to go out to the tent to sleep rather than going to bed in the basement.  She really loves camping, apparently.  We were surprised that it occurred to her that we might go out to the tent again after we had only done it for those two nights.

It is great to be in Ithaca again.  It has been so long.  I can’t remember the last time that I woke up here.  Liesl has never been here at all.  I bet that Dominica has not been here for at least three years.

We slept in a little this morning as Dominica was not feeling well at all today.  She must have caught a stomach bug.  By “we” slept in, I mean that Dominica slept in.  Liesl got me up at seven in the morning.

The big event this morning was that Liesl, barely nineteen months old, spelled her name this morning without any prompting from us whatsoever!  She was sitting in bed playing with her Leapfrog toy Violet (a talking dog) which has her name programmed into it and when it went to say her name Liesl spelled L I E S L right along with it.  Dominica is like “oh my, she just spelled her name!”  I couldn’t believe it either.  She is growing up so fast.’

Liesl and I played for a while and then I found Nick Jr. and put on some kids shows for her.  The first show I did not know what it was but after that Dora the Explorer came on and so she watched that.  That is still her favourite show.  She has gone from The Wiggles, to Elmo in Grouchland to Dora the Explorer.  So each favourite show seems to last a few months.  I wonder what will be the next Liesl craze.

Dominica got up around nine thirty.  I had been speaking to Bob via email and txt this morning so we knew what was going on.  We got out at a quarter after ten and drove up to Ithaca College and out to Danby to find Bob and Lisa’s house to which we have never been before but I had a pretty good idea of where it was.

We had a really good time hanging out with Bob and Lisa and getting to meet Emily.  Originally we had to be out of town by one this afternoon but our plans for this evening changed so we were able to hang out until around four in the afternoon which worked out much better.

We drove up to Trumansburg after visiting because we needed to stop in at the Parkers’ to grab Liesl’s other water bottle that we had accidentally left at the Parkers’ lake house at the ring of fire on Silver Lake on the third.  We swung in there just for a minute and drove on to dad’s house.  Dominica just was not feeling well at all all day.

Tonight, when we went to go to bed in the basement, Liesl kept saying “outside, outside.”   She loved camping out in the tent and wanted us to take her out there again to sleep rather than sleeping in the basement.  It is too warm to sleep outside, though, and we brought in all of the sleeping accoutrements so it would be rather a pain to take them all out again and set up the tent.  Liesl was very sad when we told her that she could not sleep outside.  It is nice to see how much she loved the camping experience though.  Hopefully we can do this regularly at dad’s.