March 27, 2006: Moving to New Jersey

Today is moving day! I can’t believe that we are actually to this point and nothing has gone wrong yet. At least nothing major, serious and/or show stopping.

Dominica and I stayed up kind of late studying last night. We didn’t go to bed until well after midnight. She made it to bed before I did but only by fifteen minutes or so.

Oreo decided that I didn’t need sleep on my last morning at home and got me out of bed at 4:00 am to take him outside. Of course, at that point I was pretty much unable to go back to sleep. Too much to do and to think about. So I ended up only managing to get three and a half hours of sleep all night. Great way to start the week. Actually it could be a lot worse. This will help me to shift my schedule for the rest of the week. I have to be up early tomorrow morning to go to work like normal people again!

Andy called just minutes after 6:00. He has the same abdominal pain that he had two days ago. We had thought that it must be something related to the food that we had eaten at the airport in Georgia but that isn’t very likely now. He decided that the pain was so great and the risk high enough that he really needed to go to the hospital. We are almost forty minutes away from him down here and I was not even dressed yet so he decided that he needed to go in the ambulance since he was in too much pain to drive safely. I would assume that he was in the hospital around 6:30.

Andy called at 7:10 from the hospital to let us know that he had arrived in the hospital and that he was doing okay. It will obviously be a while before they have any additional information and he will be really lucky if they manage to have any diagnosis today anyway. They had him on an IV to make sure that he was not dehydrated and that was probably making him feel a little better, that and not panicing from being home alone with the pain, and he definitely sounded a bit better on the phone. He had called his parents and had let them know what was going on. They are planning on getting him from the hospital later today whenever he is done up there. It is anyone’s guess how long that will take or if they will even let him come home today – but that seems pretty likely. He had me call Miranda so that she would know what was happening.

This morning I had to do the last minute packing of things like my CPAP. I really hate that I can’t pack that ahead of time. Of all of the things to not be able to guarantee that you have ready! Beyond that there really wasn’t much to get ready. I set my laptop up last night so that that would be ready to go. I had to install some software on there just in case since I have the new laptop and have never taken the time to get it loaded up with all of the software that I use on a regular basis. So that took some time. I packed my USB headphones so don’t be surprised if just maybe I manage to squeeze out a podcast from my hotel room in New Jersey. I am staying at the Clarion near the beltway. It isn’t too far from work and it should be a nice hotel. And I can keep racking up my reward points this way. I am really glad that I am a gold club member now because I get an extra 10% reward points for every night that I stay so Dominica and I will be able to get some free hotel stays pretty soon. I have over twenty thousands points (whatever that means) so far.

Dominica and I went to a late breakfast with dad at 10:00 at the Omega Grill. This is my last meal at home in Geneseo before venturing off to New Jersey. We ate and then Dominica and I left directly from there to go to Canandaigua to take our certification tests. Dad went over to our house to spend some time with Oreo while we were out.

Dominica and I took our tests at FLCC at 12:30. Mine took only fifteen or twenty minutes to complete. I took the CompTIA Security+ and passed. It was a much easier test than I had anticipated although they did have some completely off of the wall questions that were related to nothing I have ever seen. Really random stuff. Dominica took a bit longer but she also passed her hardware portion of the A+ exam. The A+ is a two part exam so she has one more test to take before she gets her certification. Let me tell you, she is really relived. This is her first IT test and she was really stressing out about it. She gets test anxiety and that makes these types of tests really hard since everything comes down to a single one hour session sitting at a computer taking one single test. She is very happy.

I left from Canandaigua and drove down to Ithaca to do a couple of minutes of quick work and to check my email to make sure that everything was set for New Jersey. I had told everyone that they needed to contact me by 11:00 this morning or it would be too late to catch me before I left in case anything went wrong. But I wanted to make sure that there wasn’t any bad news hiding in my email before I invested too much driving time. So I made sure that at 2:00 everything was kosher and that I could keep driving east. I was a little worried since they hadn’t responded as to when I was meeting with whom yet.

At 5:00 I spoke with my consulting manager in New Jersey and everything was fine but they had to find out exactly what time I should be showing up to work tomorrow morning. At 6:00 he called me back to tell me that I was not starting tomorrow because there was some problem with my fingerprints. With my fingerprints?!? How could it possibly be that there was a fingerprinting issue and that they didn’t do anything about it until AFTER BUSINESS HOURS the day before I was supposed to be arriving for work? It is passed the point of cancelling my hotel reservation at this point plus I am close to the New Jersey border and it is too late for me to be driving back to New York at this point. I am tired and looking forward to getting out of the car. I only got 3.5 hours of sleep last night and had a very busy day prior to doing all of this driving. So I decided to continue on to New Jersey and my hotel even though there isn’t any work for me to do tomorrow.

I got to the hotel at 7:30 – pretty much right on schedule since I left at 2:00 and spent a little time in Ithaca and went through Ithaca which isn’t on the way exactly. I unpacked and set up my laptop and made some calls and sent some emails trying to get something happening. Of course, they can cancel work after hours but you can’t reach anyone to find out what is going on. So much for a restful evening. That is the last thing that is going to happen at this point. 🙁

I did some reading and tried to relax. Once I was so agitated I started getting a little sleepy. I am ready an Exam Cram book that I grabbed at Borders on Saturday on the Linux Professional Institute exams. Now that the Security+ is finally out of the way I can actually focus on getting some more certs. I have put certification onto the back burner for the last few years and kind of let the Security+ get in my way of getting a lot of certs since I had started working on it but it had a lot of material that I had to learn and I just never got around to actually taking the test. So my goal is to get through as much of the LPI material as possible now while I really have nothing else to do. Being in the hotel is a perfect opportunity to get a lot done. I ordered a bunch of certification materials from Amazon but they have not arrived yet so I wanted something to get started on. Once the stuff from Amazon comes I plan to start work on my Red Hat certifications.

I finally got to bed around midnight or so. Maybe a little after. It took a while before I fell asleep but it wasn’t too late.

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