It's now one week until my office closes and I start working from home. I'd already packed two boxes of seldom-used references, but there's a lot of stuff that just can't be broken down until the last minute.

Today, I ceremonially packed up all the personal stuff from my desk, the breakable items not so much wrapped as enmeshed in bubble wrap. That box will spend some time in storage in the basement, at least until I find out whether I'll eventually find a place where I can work from that isn't home that's closer than a 90 minute commute from my house.

To the first approximation, that's being voted on next Thursday, when the Sun shareholders vote on whether not to accept Oracle's offer. After that, if the acquisition goes through, there's some possibility of jumping to Sun's Itasca office.

We'll see how it goes.

It's been a while since the last entry in this series, so let's see what my work-fogged brain remembers at this point. :) As you may recall, we'd just gone to bed on Saturday night, so next up must be Sunday morning.
( Another Concertino Sunday... )

Originally, we'd planned to have pork stir fry tonight, but after daisy_knotwise had to get up extremely early this morning to beat the house into submission before the cleaning lady arrived, and got to wrangle the girls down to meet me for lunch and a trip to see Dr. Bob (hers and mine, not the girls), I suggested that I could take her over to Sweet Baby Ray's for dinner. Gretchen agreed that this sounded reasonable, so when I got home (late already), we mustered the troops, got everyone into the van, and headed out for the restaurant.
( And then all hell broke loose... )

I've got less than ten business days left before they close my office, so I'm busily trying to get all of the things done that need to be done before the move. Today, I put some books in a box (wow!), signed up for a VOIP account so that I can test the hardware that I bought (which I won't be able to do until they actually disgorge the account number, which may take five business days), checked into upgrading my home DSL (stupidly expensive), and tried to make sure that my desktop had the necessary software on it (a big mess that required crawling through the registry to expunge the Cisco VPN software so that I could reinstall it successfully).

Oh, and the folks who run our support website finally confessed that the information on it has nothing to do with current reality. Updating it would be useful.

Mostly, I dogpaddled in place.

This isn't encouraging.

On Friday, I took Katie over to Sam's Club while Gretchen tried to beat the house into submission. Naturally, Katie headed over to the kids books where she found a Curious George PBS Kids omnibus collection. The challenge then was keeping her moving, as she first was reading it while walking into other shoppers, then reading it while sitting in the middle of the aisle, then reading it while sitting on a couch that was convenient to nothing that I actually needed to pick up. I tried putting her in the seat in the cart, but that was apparently not a good place to read.

But eventually I managed to find everything that I thought we needed and got us through the checkout lane and back to the car. I fastened Katie into her car seat, the Curious George book still firmly in her grip. She opened the book to one of the counting lesson pages full of hats and pointed as she counted. "One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten." And I think I heard eleven and twelve as she continued.

daisy_knotwise isn't sure that she actually knows what the numbers mean. I'm not so sure.

Yesterday, I went to put the rolling trash cans away after the garbage and recycling was picked up. The cans sit just to the right of my car in the garage, so I have to take my car out before the cans can be put away. Normally, daisy_knotwise would do this during the day while I was at work, but there were two problems.

It was a holiday, so I was at home.

My car hasn't been in the space recently, because we're garaging catalana's car while she's visiting her parents in Las Vegas.

I'd taken both sets of keys with me so I could back my car down the driveway, then back out Erica's car, then move the cans into position, and then put the cars back. And I looked at Erica's car. And the blue rolling cart that was in front of the ladder that was between the driveway and the spot where the cans go.

So I picked up the cart, moved it out of the way, and rolled the cans into their accustomed spot in the garage without having to do the automotive shuffle.

Erica's car is a Ford Fusion. Mine is a Ford Five Hundred. That apparently makes all the difference.

Maybe I should get a smaller car. :)

We took Katie and Julie to the water park today, joined by our friends, samwinolj, Bonnie, and Jerry. Katie was much happier with the pool today than she was last year. In fact, we couldn't keep her off the kiddie slide. Julie is still skeptical about this whole water thing, although she did walk off the edge of the pool into about two feet of water as Daddy was paying too much attention to Katie and not enough to her. (This is not to say that no one was watching her, but rather than Julie wanted Daddy's attention.)

Katie, meanwhile, wants to go into the deep end of the pool. I towed her out near there and let her float around attached to me, but solo expeditions to the deep end will have to wait until she's a bit older and gets swimming lessons. Right now, she's limited to the depth where I can conveniently walk.

I got the new dual monitor KVM switch yesterday and brought it into work to try it out. It seems to work, mostly, although I'm having trouble getting the hotkey switching to work at all.

But it will make things much better when I have to take all this home.

So Saturday morning, I crawled out of bed while daisy_knotwise, Katie, and Julie were still sleeping, because I had a workshop scheduled for 10 AM.
( Saturday inside... )

When Katie persisted on throwing things around the living room on dangerous trajectories -- including her blocks -- we told her she was going to bed. And she has.

Although she has popped out to get a second bottle. But she's back in bed again.

Lather, rinse, repeat, as required. :)

Well, I figured out how to get my computer back on the network at work. That was about 4 hours before the support guys finally called.

Now, I just need to fix up the remaining collateral damage.

I've just picked up Dorotha from the El station after she worked crew for the suicide prevention walk here in Chicago. We've had breakfast and now she's cleaning up before catching her flight back to DC.

We've been pretty much unable to fly the flag on holidays since the late Bilbo peed on the previous flag that fit on the flagpole that we had. (That one was properly disposed of in fire, but that's a longer story.) The new flag and the old pole didn't get along.

Today at Wal-Mart, I found a suitable flag pole and bracket. The old bracket has been replaced and disposed of and the flag is now waving in the very small breeze that we have today.

I'm now hiding inside underneath a ceiling fan on high.

When the DHCP service says "Access is denied", you start to get the impression that you won't be getting online from the work computer. I've filed a support ticket. We'll see how long this takes to get resolved.

On Friday, you will hardly be surprised to hear, we slept in and finally staggered out of the room a bit past noon. We ran into various folks in the lobby, including Gary, Robin, Kathy, and Dean, who we chatted with both before and after grabbing lunch at the hotel restaurant.
( And as Friday continues... )

So now let's talk about the con in perhaps a bit more detail than my quick posts on the way to, at, and from the con. :)
( Getting there is always part of the fun... )

We're home after an 18.5 hour trip back from Concertino. Mapquest rates this as a 16 hour drive of 975 miles, so I think we did pretty well, given that we actually stopped for two meals and several fill ups. And diaper changes. :)

More later, but right now, we're thinking seriously about going to bed.

We had a wonderful time here at Concertino. Everyone has been really nice -- especially Rachel, who handled our official babysitting, along with MEW and Sarah, who served as unofficial child wranglers from time to time. Our concert yesterday went well, the committee dinner was great fun, and we enjoyed listening to the various concerts that we managed to catch during the course of the con. daisy_knotwise had to vanish upstairs with the girls between their being restless and her having some substantial congestion, so she missed the dead dog filking tonight, but that was also a nice circle of reasonable size.

It's still going now, but we need to get to bed so we can start back to Chicago tomorrow.

Thanks, everyone!

We're having a wonderful time here at Concertino. Rachel has been immensely helpful with wrangling the girls, which meant Gretchen was able to spend a bit of time in the open filk before collapsing last night. Opening Ceremonies and the following memorial sing-along went really well, and the open filk was just fine. I would have stayed later, but I had a 10 AM workshop this morning.

Against all odds, I managed to get dressed and out of the room without waking anyone. The workshop went well too, as more people filtered in during the hour.

Now, I'm back to the room to collect Gretchen, Katie, and Julie and figure out what to do about lunch. :)

Thanks to a late start (prompted by one of the things that we forgot being Julie's favorite blankie, a suitable replacement obtained at Target), getting lost in Cleveland due to a wrong turn and a missing detour sign, rain, and construction, and a wrong turn in Worcester, we finally got to the hotel about 3 AM local.

Bed is looking very good. :)

We picked out this motel by stopping at the first rest area in Ohio and picking up the motel coupon book there. Not only did we get an extremely favorable rate, but it's one of the nicer rooms we've stayed in. The motel has a continental breakfast (which we slept through) and a pool (which we enjoyed looking at), but the most important things were the large comfortable beds, the working air conditioner, and the really nice bathroom.

Now we just have to get things packed up and get back on the road. Right after I find the nearest Target so we can find a blanket for Julie to substitute for her favorite blanket that's still at home.

Well, you know you're going to forget something.

We've landed south of Toledo in a very nice motel at a very reasonable price. We got off way later than we intended, but we made good time once we did.

Now, if we can just get the girls to go to sleep, we'll be ahead of the game.

Well, we should be rolling soon. The one-hour demo that I was giving this morning blossomed into a 2.5 hour long demo, but it's done, my bags are packed -- except for the laptop which is busy updating itself and is going in a bag just as soon as that'd done -- and all I have to do is get everyone into the van, stow catalana's car in the vacated spot in the garage, and then we can get lunch.

After that -- and a stop at the Post Office and bank -- we'll be on the road. :)

See some of you at Concertino!

So as I was standing on the concourse eating my dinner at one of the condiment stands -- dinner consisting of a foot-long hot dog with everything except peppers and a pepperoni calzone, the dinner that nutrition forgot! -- I was more than a bit surprised to see someone walk up to the dispenser and squirt ketchup onto his Connie's deep-dish pizza.

I don't eat ketchup on pizza. Katie -- who eats ketchup on Katie -- doesn't eat ketchup on pizza.

This guy, well...

Well, just as I picked up the phone to call daisy_knotwise at abour 7:15 to tell her that I was just about to give up and come home, because there was no way they were going to start this game before 9 PM, they announced that the game had been called on account of rain.

Up until then, I was dry. After standing in the rain for half an hour waiting for a bus, not so much.

*sigh*