August 9, 2005

I am in the hotel all day today in Easton, PA. Nothing exciting going on here. This is quite an unbelievably nothing town. I was hoping to be able to post updates from the hotel like I usually do but something is wrong and I am unable to connect to the company network although I am online. So everyone will have to wait for updates until I get back to New York, I guess.

I slept in until around 1:00 today. I remembered to bring my CPAP on this trip so I was able to get a good night’s sleep this time. Unfortunately, my ability to work is severly hampered without access to the network. My laptop is in terrible shape and has to be reinstalled as soon as I return. That might be all the more problem that I am having and I should be able to get that fixed quickly when I return. I discovered the issue with not being able to log into the network when Min needed me to work on her laptop for her to get her sound card working. Apparently she had wanted to watch movies or something at work and was not able to do so.

I ordered myself a pizza and some cheese sticks from Papa John’s. They are local and the place that the hotel recommended. I don’t normally order from them but they pizza isn’t bad, just nothing special. But more importantly, it doesn’t agrivate my heartburn the way that Dominoe’s does.

I am having a lot of problems with my wireless connection dropping while I am working today. The connection in my hotel room is very week but it might be more than that. They might be having network issues of their own. The hotel that I was supposed to be staying in had their Internet access down altogether so it is better than nothing.

While we were out today, our house got sprayed for bees, hornets and wasps. Boy will Min be happy. They have been driving us absolutely crazy. They live all over the outside of our house and they swarm all over you whenever you go into or out of the house. You can’t be outside ever without them being all over the place. They are not very aggressive, thank goodness. No one has been stung or attacked but there sure is a lot of opportunity for it to happen if we aren’t careful.

I watched the Bill Murray and Gena Davis classic Quick Change today just before going in to work.

After work this evening, I noticed that my check engine light is back on again. It has only been two days since I got it from the shop for that purpose. So much for the car’s computer telling us what is wrong with the car. Now I have to deal with that this week as well. Once again, it means two more trips to the shop. One to deal with the computer. Then I will have to drive it for days before the inspection can be done.

I got back from Wegmans and hadn’t gotten a chance to take a walk like I usually do so I checked out Mappoint and set out from the hotel to get some excercise. I decided to walk to the east to see if I could make it to the New Jersey state line which appears to be three and a half miles away from where my hotel was on the west side of Wilson. That meant walking through Wilson, Easton and Northhampton before reaching the Delaware River and the bridge to New Jersey. I set out on my walk and spent three hours walking and listening to Simon Winchester’s “The Professor and the Madman”, a biography of the two men most responsible for the creation of the great Oxford English Dictionary. I am, I believe, over halfway through the book now which is extremely interesting. I know, I know, I read really weird stuff and I have a very skewed view of interesting. Dominica can’t believe that I read this stuff for fun. When I got to the New Jersey side of the bridge, I called Min at work to let her know where I was. While I was there a slow moving Norfolk Southern coal train sautered by at a lazy 1-2 miles per hour. There was no gate at the crossing so I guess they had to slow down enough to be able to stop in an emergency. I tried walking alongside of the train to see if I could really keep up with it, which is a weird feeling, and my regular pace was almost twice the speed of the train (I was only a few feet away from the train and had waved to the engineer.) This was definitely how hobo’s seeking to travel America managed to get onto trains. However, a coal train heading towards New York City would hardly be the exciting rail journey of my dreams.

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