June 11, 2003

Ok, I have been out of town for an entire week so I am going to do all that I can to catch everyone up. I am sorry that I keep letting the dailies get away from me, I am really being run ragged here. It is hard to be able to sit down at a computer every day and write something. As I write this today, my bedroom is completely crawling in small insects (they might be gnats, I can’t really tell.) I don’t know what is going on. They are all over me and all over the monitor and I can see them flying all around me. I don’t know where they have come from. It is exceptionally hot in here, all of the windows are open and my fan is blowing but the room is so hot that I am sitting here in the middle of the night in nothing but boxers and I am sweating.

I got up early this morning at Eric and Amanada’s new house in Livonia and hit the road to head back to Ithaca around 7:00am. It is nice that Eric’s new house is a little bit closer to Ithaca than everything else that we do out in that area so the travel time isn’t quite as bad. Livonia saves about fifteen minutes or so over Geneseo and twenty or more over my parent’s house. During my drive here, I listened to the first of the three Father Gilbert mysteries that I have on CD. They aren’t technically books on CD since they are just CD versions of a radio drama, but it amounts to about the same thing. Mysteries are about the best format to listen to in the car when driving (or when just sitting there, I guess, too.) These mysteries are really short, just over an hour each. Which makes them handier for short trips of for filling in a little left over time at the tail end of a longer trip. I am still waiting on my complete collection of the Chronicles of Narnia to come in. They are abridged (significantly) but dramatized from Focus on the Family and are pretty decent. The CoN are some of my favorite books from my childhood. When I was very young, my mother read the entire series of books to me (around age 4-5) and recorded them onto cassette while she read them to me. So for years afterwards, I listened to them off of cassette. So, unlike other books that I have read once or twice, I have heard the complete, unabbridged CoN probably more than twenty times. I know those books really well. I even have the Ford Commentary on them kicking around somewhere.

On my way back to Ithaca, I stopped in at Steve’s house in T-Burg and we worked for an hour or two there. So I didn’t manage to get back to my home until almost 11:00. But boy was I glad to be home. I have been gone for almost a week and I appreciate getting to spend some time working at my own computers and sitting at my own chair and everything. Speaking of my own chair, my replacement chair back came today. Only instead of sending me just the back of the chair, they would appear to have sent me the entire thing again. So now I have two awesome office chairs instead of one. And the only problem with the first one is aesthetic. So I have two perfectly good chairs now. I am pretty happy about that. I don’t plan on assembling the second one until we move to Geneseo because that will just make it harder to move. But it will be really nice to have two office chairs in my new office (I still have my old “kneeling” chair too but only Phil likes that chair.)

Today was a really stressful day. I have just a ton of work to get done around here before I have to head back to Rochester on Friday, early in the morning. Dell has a full day of work for me to do out there so I get to go back right away. At least Min is already out there so it works out pretty well as far as that goes.

I am working hard trying to get Eric’s laptop fixed for him before I return to Rochester on Friday as well as get his new Waste Watcher Workstation prepared for him. I thought that I had it all ready to go but then it died on me so I am attempting to reinstall it now (but the computer might be shot.) In addition to those two computers, I am also trying to get Linux installed on a new SuperMicro server that we have for streaming Internet radio over. I tried to install SuSE on it and that doesn’t look like it is going to happen at all. So, I have downloaded Red Hat 9 and plan to give that a try in the very near future (but it is after midnight now so that will qualify for tomorrow’s news instead of today’s.)

We got a barrage of harassing telephone calls this evening from (518) 339-0804. I list that number here because I did a reverse lookup on it and got nothing. It isn’t listed as residential or business. And because it happened at night, I really couldn’t do much about it. They called about fifteen times in two hours or so and would never say a word. It was really irritating. So, if anyone else gets called by them and does a search to see who they are, they will most likely find this web site and at least know that this is something that has happened before. I even tried calling 518 339 0804 to see if someone would answer and they did pick up the phone and make some noise but no one would talk.

Dominica got her car back from John Holtz today. Luckily, the brakes were fixed under warranty so it didn’t cost her anything. They aren’t able to get pads for a little while so she has to bring her car back in a few weeks to have new pads installed – but at least she won’t be having brake problems now. I am really encouraged that both of our cars got fixed under warranty and without any real hassle.

At least no one can complain about my daily updates being short after not having been at them for a week:) Leanne also told me today that she thinks that she found an apartment in Gononda and she hopes to be moving there soon.

Andy got home and we headed out for some dinner. I didn’t eat anything but a little ice cream today, other than dinner. We went out to the Dryden Queen to get “breakfast” for me and the Fish fry for Andy (he is Fish fry man.)

Eric and I are going to be in Washington, DC almost all of next week. We have to leave early Monday morning and will be returning Thursday or later. We don’t know the exact schedule yet.

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