March 2, 2006

Dominica is back on her usual schedule today. I was up early this morning because dad was picking me up at 8:00 so that we could go up to the city and run some errands. We wanted to get moving early so that we would be back for Oreo. Dominica leaves the house a little after 10:00 so we had a couple of hours.

We started off with breakfast at the Omega. Big surprise. Then we drove up to Greece so that dad could get a haircut. He has been going to the same barber right down the street from his old office at building 23 at Kodak for years. Dad dropped me off at building 28 – the Theater on the Ridge – so that I could head back to the ESL bank branch that is located in the back of the building. I haven’t been to that particular branch of the bank in forever. I used to go to that building all of the time because the basement used to house the Kodak Camera Club of which I am a member and I took classes there and used to use the darkrooms and labs extensively. Oh those were good times. It is very sad going in there now. The whole place is just kind of a memorial to times past.

In the upstairs lobby of building 28 there is a display that was put up back when I was taking photography classes there. I would guess that the display is probably from 1993 or maybe even earlier. One part of the display is aerial photography of Kodak Park talking about how it is the world’s largest manufacturing facility (once upon a time) and how many employees work inside of the park (well, worked inside of the park), etc. Another section of the display was touting Kodak’s awesome (ok, whatever) Advantix system that was going to revolutionize picture taking. Of course, Advantix was a joke. Just an attempt to get people who didn’t pay attention to the technical details to pay higher prices for lower quality and fewer features. Advantix was cancelled a year or so ago. So the display actually managed to outlive the product. How sad.

I walked down from building 28 to the barber shop where dad was getting his hair cut. The walk was very depressing. This used to be the center of Rochester. Unbelievable manufacturing, research, technology but now it looks like an old, run down factory like you would find in the older sections of Utica or Binghamton. It isn’t kept up and the place is mostly empty. You can see how the place used to be awesome, once upon a time, but now is just a shadow of its former self.

I finally got to meet dad’s barber after all of these years. I never even knew exactly where the shop was until today. After his haircut dad and I went over to Home Depot right down the road. We got a motion detector that is going to be installed into the server room. Every datacenter has a motion detector for the lights so I felt that we needed to have one too.

Coming through Avon we realized that we were hungry and I pointed out that I hadn’t been to Tom Wahl’s in quite some time. So we swung into Avon and got a quick lunch on the way home.

It was only 11:30 by the time we got back to Geneseo and, once again, Oreo was snug in the bed and very happy that I got home so promptly. He doesn’t seem to mind us being gone in the mornings at all. He sleeps so soundly in the mornings that I think he barely notices when we are or are not around.

I spent the day working on projects around the house. Work projects not house projects. I got a lot done. Originally we had thought that I was going to have to be in New Jersey today for an interview but that ended up not getting scheduled as we had thought and we aren’t very likely to know any more about it until tomorrow. Hopefully we will know something tomorrow. At least this way I will have clean dress shirts to wear. Dominica took them all into the cleaners yesterday morning and they will be ready for me to pick them up on Monday.

Dominica went to Walmart and did some shopping on her way home. She picked up a Walmart pizza for me. I cooked that when she got home and we relaxed in the living room eating pizza and watching an episode of Remington Steele. After all of this time we are only barely halfway through the first season. What a good bargain that show turned out to be.

We didn’t end up going to bed until almost 1:00 in the morning. I have no idea how that happened.

Leave a comment