I am writing tonight’s updates while working in the server room of Wegmans in Elmira. So far, so good. I have been here almost half an hour and nothing has gone disasterously wrong yet, so I am hopeful for a smooth evening of migration fun.
I got into Bob’s apartment this morning around 6:15. Just in time to hear his morning alarm going off. I was so tired when I got there that I couldn’t even handle waiting for Bob to actually get up to say good morning. I don’t think I ever even moved as long as he was there. I was out cold. I did, at least, remember my CPAP.
I slept with my cell phone by my head with an alarm set for 9:15 so that I would be able to get up at a reasonable time. It work me up but I snoozed for another fourty-five minutes or so before actually getting out of bed. Then I showered, dressed, packed, read-up the living room a little and went out to my car (which I had to park out on Fall St. last night). I drove over to the middle school and joined Nate, Bob and Zach on their lunch break. I was able to hang out there for about an hour which was nice since I almost never get a chance to see anyone anymore.
After the “lunch” break, I had to go to Varna for a little while to do some work on the computers there. There were a couple of issues that I had to deal with. Mostly having to do with the printers. Nothing too exciting. I was there until about 1:30.
Steve met me down on the Commons at Simeon’s on the Commons for a quick bite of lunch. I had a delicious pear and gorganzola salad with blueberry vinigrette dressing. Yummy. Oh how I miss Ithaca. We couldn’t stay long, though, because Max was home sick today and we had to get back to the house to keep an eye on him.
I didn’t get much of a chance to relax this afternoon because I had a bunch of work that I needed to do up at the house. Mostly networking issues. So I worked on that all afternoon over a couple of Irish whiskeys. I didn’t end up having enough time to get everything done that I had wanted to but I got the most critical issues taken care of, at least. I did wet Steve’s appetite a little bit about blogging and podcasting so we may see him posting some material of his own in the near future.
I met Bob at the Boatyard Grill at 6:20. They tried to give us a hard time about seating. This is the second time this week that Bob has bad problems there. Earlier in the week he had gone down there after making reservations for 8:00. He arrived at 7:50 which at most restaurants would have gotten you seated early as they would have been holding a table for your party at around that time. Instead he ended up waiting until 9:15 before finally leaving with no end to the waiting in site. They never apologized and kept telling everyone that they would be seated soon even though they knew that there were far too many people in their reservations to be able to handle. So he already wasn’t very happy. Then tonight, he had arrived at 6:00 and asked for a table for two so that we would be able to eat promptly. They told him that when I arrived that they would seat us. So, when I arrived we walked up and could see numerous empty, clean tables that we could sit at. At that point, we were told that we would have to wait approximately twenty minutes until they seated all of the people that had gotten there after Bob had asked for a table. The manager was standing there and explained to us that it wasn’t anything personal but that used statistics (apparently in place of customer service.) But when we explained how discourteous it was to seat people who had arrived after we had asked for a table he decided that he would give us a table. Which, of course, prompted us to wonder why they hadn’t just seated us before if they were able to do so without any problems. He didn’t need to clear the table for us. There were tables next to us that were empty. In fact, it appeared that the restaurant was no where near capacity and that they were just making people wait to be seated to give the appearance of being busy when they in fact were not. Needless to say, we were not impressed with our dining experience and in Ithaca, it is far to easy to go to any other really awesome restaurant and I expect that in the future, we will.
At 7:45 I got on the road to go to Elmira. I arrived here at the store at just after 8:40 and got settled in. I am really hoping that I can get out of here really early tonight because I am totally exhausted after that long, long night last night and very little sleep since. I am planning on driving back to Geneseo tonight after finishing up here but I might not be able to handle it and might have to get a hotel room here in Elmira or something. I can barely keep my eyes open sitting here in the office waiting for the computer but maybe by the time I am able to get onto the road I will have gotten a second wind. But that doesn’t seem very likely. I am really glad that I have “Reading Lolita in Tehran” to listen to in the car because it is relatively engaging and really helps to keep me awake although the woman that they chose to narrate it is very monotenous and has a really think, slow South African accent that encourages you to fall asleep. But it is better than nothing.
I have been figuring out what my travel schedule is going to be like over the next several weeks. I have nothing exciting until late June. I will be bouncing back and forth among Rochester, Syracuse and Buffalo until late June with one trip to Johnson City on June 20. Then, on June 27, I will be in Downington, Pennsylvania. I don’t even know where that is. I expect that I will be staying in a hotel there but I am not sure yet. Then on July 5-6 I am in Princeton and Bridgewater, New Jersey. That is the first “exotic” destination on my itinerary. Ithaca on July 25. No more distant travel until August. It is going to be a pretty slow summer, I think.
I am setting some serious records tonight. It is just about midnight and I am about to put in the call to the operations center to have them check to see how things went tonight. I have never called them before 12:30 and only one time before 1:00. I am really hopeful that this will wrap up here and I can go home shortly. It would be so nice to be home before 2:00. I haven’t seen my wife since yesterday afternoon! That makes me very sad 🙁
This Wegmans closes at midnight! I didn’t know that there were any non-24 hour stores left. I can’t believe that the city of Elmira doesn’t produce enough business for its largest grocery store to keep them busy through the night. Elmira is a pretty big town. Geneseo is a 24 hour store. And we are just a dinky little town. Elmira is a real city. Much larger than Ithaca but the grocery store is just a fraction of the size.
Well, in the hopes that I manage to actually get out of here in the next few minutes, I am going to shut down my laptop and get it all packed up so that I don’t have to stay later just to do that. I will try to audiopost over on SGL2 when I get out on the open road. I already posted twice on there today!