The wedding weekend has set me behind on my regular updates but I am back at Wegman’s overnights and am doing all that I can to get caught up with everything. I figure between the wedding and the SGL2 postings and the Memorial Day holiday that everyone is managing to survive without the SGL updates.
I was up super early this morning, 3:45 am. Min was up at 3:00 getting ready to leave. I waited until the absolute last second and jetted out the door seconds after getting out of bed. Min is leaving for Houston this morning and I have to get her to the airport in Buffalo.
We left the house by 4:05 and headed through Batavia up to the thruway and out to Depew. On the trip we listened to an audio dramatization of Margaret Atwood’s “A Handmaid’s Tale”. I have never read any of Atwood’s stuff. The book was awfully depressing but many good novels are. The dramatization was only two hours long so I am sure that it left a lot of the novel out. I expect that the original work was more compelling. But it was still quite good. One of those “must reads” of well rounded readers of the twentieth century. Min didn’t quite get to finish the book before having to go into the airport to make her flight. I parked in short term parking and came in with her for about fifteen minutes to make sure that she was checked in and going through security where I could no longer follow. She has a layover in Baltimore this morning and should be in Houston at Hobby Airport before noon.
I finished Atwood on the ride home and began listening to an unabridged reading of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby”. Gatsby is one of those classics of literature that has slipped past me all of these years. So many high school students are required to read this classic but I was never introduced to it in school. I had heard of the book, of course, but never knew anything about what it was about. While reading (read: listening to) “Reading Lolita in Tehran” I learned so much about Gatsby that I decided that it would be quite important for me to read it. Plus being written in 1925 when Fitzgerald had no idea of the coming depression gives a unique glimpse into the world of America in the 1920’s that we so often miss. To us, a world has never existed without the Great Depression era of the 1930’s. The Roaring Twenties can never be discussed without talking about the great crash. But to Fitzgerald, the crash hasn’t happened, the world might just go on like this forever. And what a world it was. It must have been quite an experience.
I was home well before 7:00 and took the opportunity to shower and get a little bit of work done on the Case’s laptop that I have been working on for the last two days. Man does it take a lot of work to get a computer ready for someone. Wow.
Dad picked me up at 8:00 and we went over to the Omega for breakfast. We have hardly seen each other this past week, things have been so busy. For example, just look at how much I had to do this morning before even going out to breakfast!
After breakfast we went over to Grossman’s in the old Ames’ Plaza and did some shopping for air conditioning units for the server room and looking at some screen options for the basement windows. Then we hit the Chamber of Commerce for a minute to pick up something and then we went back to the house and looked at some options for mounting the screen door in the garage and for putting in screens in the basement.
I worked on the laptop for the majority of the day. Anything that involves a fresh install always is an involved process because I always want to do it right and that just takes time. So I concurrently installed Windows XP Pro and SUSE Linux 9.2 Pro onto the laptop while I did all that I could to clean around the house. I have really been letting things go upstairs and I needed to put some real work into it. I did two loads of dishes, did a tiny bit of laundry and cleaned all over the living room and my bedroom. It is far from done, but I got a ton done today. While dad was at the house I made him help me move one of the servers that I had been working on from the living room down to the server room. That helped things immensely.
Andy and I did a late lunch around 2:00 out at Aunt Cookie’s downtown. Neither of us have been down there for their delicious toasted subs for a while so it was a nice change of pace for both of us.
After lunch Andy continued working on the new Waste Watcher system while I continued working on that dual boot laptop and started setting up that new server. I am excited about the new server because it is a pretty elaborate testing bed for us to use internally and should really help us have a lot more technologies at our disposal to work with. I finally got a hold of Jocelyn around 3:00. She was supposed to come over today to study but she went over to her dad’s this morning and wasn’t around. I never got a hold of anyone at the house because Mary was still sleeping at 3:00 in the afternoon. Oh don’t I remember the days fondly…
Mary and Jocelyn both came over around 5:20 and hung for about two hours learning the fine art of PC Tech under my masterful tutalidge. (I have no idea how to spell tutalidge.) They have both been reading the Mike Meyer’s A+ book but have only made it to the first one or two chapters so far.
Min finally called close to 6:00 to say that she had arrived safely in Texas. She fell asleep just after arriving and had forgotten to call earlier. She is lucky, she is getting to play with our new dog while she is down there.
I had to be out the door by 7:30 to make it out to Amherst in time to work tonight. Imagine me being in Buffalo twice in the same day. Who would have thought. I have to be back here tomorrow as well. At least I have Gatsby to listen to in the car on the way.
This morning when I dropped Min off at the airport, I noticed that the old Wellesley Inn that I used to work at occasionally in Buffalo (this is back in 1998-1999) is gone and has been replaced with a Best Western. Nothing ever stays the same, does it.
I got out to Amherst only a few minutes behind schedule. I had been doing really well but I accidentally got onto i990 north and then tried to get off of that highway and ended up on an exit that dumped me right into the UB campus. What a pain that was. I had to wander around for a while to find my way out since there were no signs.
I am writing tonight’s updates from Wegman’s in Amherst. Looks like I will probably be out at a fairly decent time. I plan to stop by the hotel and get some free bagels tonight but I can’t stay up for long because I have a lot to do yet tonight when I get home and tomorrow in the morning. Not to mention that fact that I have already been up for a very long time.