This morning I had to be up and ready so that I could drive Dominica in to work in the city. We took her car into the shop last night to get an alignment and one of her front wheel bearings replaced. So we are without that car today. I hate days when I have to get up early and drive a lot. That isn’t any fun. We took Oreo along with us. He gets so excited about riding in the car. I hope that he never figures out that the reality of riding in the car isn’t anywhere nearly as exciting as what he seems to think that it is prior to actually hopping into the car.
After dropping Dominica (aka Dimitri – ask her if you see her) at work I drove down to Eric’s office at the University of Rochester and did a little work on his laptop. He had thought that his IT department had locked down his laptop so that he could not install software on it. But no, they had only locked out the Program Files directory so he just had to install software to a different location. How dumb is that? No virus writer would ever think of putting his virus into an alternative location from the default. That would make the virus extra difficult to locate. So now Eric is set up with an RSS feed aggregator, Thunderbird email, Juice podcatcher, etc. So I expect him to be finally reading SGL and listening to the SGL Podcast. He hasn’t had a working computer that was able to get online since we started doing the podcast. How awful is that?
After working on Eric’s computer we went over to Jay’s Diner on West Henrietta Road and got some lunch. Dominica left me with some errands to run so we took care of those after eating. Oreo was getting restless so we didn’t spend too much time shopping. While we were out I managed to pick up Sue Grafton’s latest novel “S is for Silence” which Min and I have been waiting for for a really long time. Probably more than a year. Those alphabet murder novels are some of the best mystery writing out there. It isn’t so much a mystery as it is a detective/suspense novel. But the stories are great and the characters are really deep and it makes it really involving. And with so many of them there has been some serious time to get the characters developed.
I got home around 3:00 in the afternoon. Some serious church turmoil has come up that I hate to talk about on here but this is my place to talk about things and if I don’t talk about things that are important to me then you have to wonder what the point of this site is. I won’t go into any details about what happened but there has been an issue recently that has come to light at the church that had prompted Dominica and I to consider seeking worship at a different location. The issue wasn’t major and it was more of just giving us a little nudge when we really should have been looking for another church just because there are so few people in our age bracket at the church and none at all who are anywhere near our ages and don’t have kids. Not having anyone at all that share our lifestyles or lifestages is really difficult when you are looking for small group fellowship. So we really should have been dealing with that anyway but, of course, we have been lazy about it. So I look upon the situation that came up as simply being God’s way of pressing the issue. But anyway, the issue expanded and Dominica and I will not be returning to church where we have been worshipping for the past three years. There is a lot of hurt and we don’t feel as though we are welcome there anymore (if we ever honestly were.) We have no idea why but it is very obvious that we are not appreciated there nor is anyone at the church even willing to talk to us about it.
So, as you can imagine, I have a lot of things weighing heavily on my heart. Dad came over and helped me get Min’s car from the shop and then we had dinner at the Omega and talked for a while. My new laptop arrived today and he brought that over as well. I am very excited to have a nice, new laptop. My old one was okay but it didn’t meet a lot of my needs very well. This new one is more powerful and more resistant to damage when I am constantly moving it around. It has built-in wireless and bluetooth and flash media readers. It is great. I am really looking forward to trying out my HP iPaq PDA with the bluetooth. I have never had anything to attach it to before.
I did some work on this site and talked to Mary on the phone for a lot of the evening. Mary is looking into college programs and we have been looking at a number of options. She is most likely going to be enrolling in the Computer Information Systems (CIS) program. There are an awful lot of course options to choose from what we had to look at.
I left just after 9:00 with Oreo to drive up to the city to pick up Dominica from work. It takes a little more than an hour and a half round trip. I took her car so that we could try it out before we drive it to Maryland tomorrow. Speaking of which, tomorrow is a very busy day for us. Dominica is working all day at Fuji. I am going to the Relyea Christmas Party for the afternoon. Oreo is going to dad’s house for the weekend. Min and I are meeting at the house around 9:30 and heading straight out for Arnold, Maryland. We are figuring that we won’t be arriving in Maryland until 3:00 in the morning or a little later. We are staying in Maryland all day on Sunday and Monday and will be heading back to Geneseo on Tuesday morning. At least that is the plan.
We got back from the city and went to Walmart to do some quick shopping. We were hoping to get a cheese pizza but they ran out of vegetarian options so we ended up just getting some donuts instead. We got to the house and Mary was there waiting for us so that she and I could look in depth at some classes before she has to talk to her counciler on Monday.
Dominica went to bed a little after midnight. I stayed up and did a short podcast, episode 36. Then I decided that I would write the daily update while I listened to the recording of the events that transpired at the church this past week. I am not sure if anyone was aware that it was being recorded and that we would obviously end up hearing it. It seems obvious that they knew and expected us to hear it. So I was up until almost 3:00 in the morning. Not really feeling much like going to bed. Around three Oreo came out of the bedroom to get me. He doesn’t like it when we don’t all go to bed at the same time. He really likes his snuggles.
I am sorry that I can’t say more so that you can understand what is going on. But I am afraid that I cannot. I can tell you that we would very much appreciate your prayers as this is a pretty serious and delicate situation. Mostly prayers for guidance. It is difficult to know what the right move is at this point.