I had planned to sleep in this morning but after eating Pakistani food last night my tummy wasn’t agreeing with those plans. So I was actually up before 7:30 this morning. As he does every morning, Oreo got right up and followed me around the house. Dominica hates that he always chooses the office with me over staying in bed with her.
I installed Visual Studio 2005 this morning while I was waiting for Dominica to get up. Andy did it yesterday. We got copies of VS2K5 from the Microsoft show that we went to on Thursday. This is one awesome door gift let me tell you.
Our plan had been to make it to Sunday School this morning but I don’t know how reasonable of an expectation that is since Dominica works so late on Saturday nights. She officially gets done at 9:00 but it is over half an hour to drive home and then we have to eat dinner. Even with her picking up take away that I had called ahead to order and have waiting for her took us until almost 11:00 before we were actually able to sit down to eat. By the time we are done eating and she takes a little while to relax after having just gotten off of a shift it is, at a minimum, midnight. It takes us almost half of an hour to get to church. Dominica really needs eight hours to sleep at a minimum. Put that all together and we are right down to the wire for managing to get to Sunday School at 10:00. Church at 10:50 is hard enough to get to. Having Oreo makes it a lot more difficult because we can’t just rush and run out the door anymore. However, if we don’t go to Sunday School then we are able to take Oreo with us and have him just stay in the car during church and he is much happier. He is a difficult dog to keep happy.
It is very windy here today. The Weather Channel website says that we are having 22mph winds but it sounds like more than that. It isn’t that cold out, though. In the sixties. Not bad at all for this time of year. Our furnace has only had to kick on a few times all year in order to keep the house warm enough. That is saving us a ton on heating bills now that the price of natural gas is sky rocketing. Just a year ago and for as long as anyone can remember natural gas has always been the cheap way to heat your house. It still is, as far as I am aware, but the margins by which it leads have shrunk to almost nothing at all. For us with the two of us, the small and well insulated house, the warm shared wall with our neighbour, the small amount of windows, the dog and the computers this tend to stay pretty warm in the house. We only really have two exposed sides of the house to the north and to the east (more or less, the house is on an angle.) Our west wall is shared with Linda and that doesn’t get very cold. And our south wall is buffered by our garage that is almost the entire width of the house. Only the office has an exposed south wall and that isn’t very big. So our heating cost isn’t bad at all. And we never worry about heating the basement. We really need to take the time to finish insulating the basement, though, because that will help keep the upstairs warm and the downstairs can go pretty cool without a problem. I would be perfectly happy if it fell to 50F down there.
We almost didn’t make it on time to church anyway this morning. Dominica refuses to believe that it takes half an hour to get over to LaGrange from here. I timed it on the way there this morning and it was pretty close to half an hour. I know that Dominica is reading this now so maybe this will reinforce her memory of how long it actually takes to get there:)
After church we went over to Perry and had our regular Sunday lunch with dad. We hung out there until about 2:00. Then we came back to Geneseo and did some shopping at Walmart. Min got some clothes for her new job, we got some additional clothes hampers and we picked up Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and the new first season of Creature Comforts based on the short film from 1990 which I also have.
It was around 3:30 when we got back to the house. Oreo was quite glad to finally be out of the car. He wasn’t being impatient but he was definitely happy to not be there anymore. I had some work to do today so I started with that as soon as we got in. Dominica is doing the laundry this afternoon because we are so backed up after having been on vacation for so long and then coming home to her working so much this week. She is really happy to have tomorrow off. She and Danielle are going to be hanging out most of the day tomorrow. I am scheduled to have lunch with dad over at the Omega at noon. So I will be out for just a little bit.
I have been having a lot of fun checking out cool alternative music over at the Podsafe Music Network which provides music that can be played on podcasts safely. It is a pretty cool idea. I hope to see more good stuff show up on there. There is all ready a lot to sort through if you are looking for stuff for your own podcast.
We went to church tonight at 6:00. The evening service is a lot more informal than the morning service and there is a lot more music which Dominica likes a lot. The Ralstons have been going to the evening service so it is nice that we have someone to hang out with them. We have barely seen them at all over the past month. With everything that has been going on our regular schedules have been really interrupted. We are finally starting to be able to get back to a fairly normal routine.
On our way home from church we went over to Cooks in Greggsville so that I could get a sub for dinner. While I was there my friend Steve Linus from high school came in. I haven’t seen him since I left York High School in 1994. But we both recognized each other right away. I introduced him to Dominica and we talked for a few minutes. It was really cool to see him again after all of these years. Hopefully he will end up giving me a call sometime and we will get together.
We came home and I ate dinner and Dominica called her parents. She hasn’t talked with them since before we left for Florida. They talk for half an hour or more while I worked on getting caught up on things like SGL!
Today in the news there is a headline about a potential border dispute erupting between Ethiopia and Eritrea. I realized that I had no idea who Eritrea was so I did some research on it and thought that I would share some of that with you. Isn’t learning fun? I also learned more about Eritria over at the wikipedia. I love the Internet.
To relax this evening we watched Charlie and the Chocolate Factory which we got on DVD just the other day. I am starting to become wary of purchasing movies and things on DVD because it seems like the format doesn’t have much longer that it will be very useful and it will be nice to own things in a higher quality format all ready. I don’t want to invest too much now at the end of an era. But the prices are really good right now. It is a tough decision. The next generation of media is just around the corner and it is tempting to want to be using that. I do like Charlie – I like it tons better than the old Willie Wonka movie from the sixties. I couldn’t stand that movie. I found it to be really creepy. The new one is fun and interesting. Definitely silly but I can get over that.
I still had a lot of stored up work that needed to be done this weekend so Dominica went to bed after getting some more laundry going and I went into the office with Oreo and got back to work getting desktops working all over the land. This is the curse of taking vacations: as soon as you are back there are a hundred things that demand your immediate attention. I am getting pretty tired and would like to be able to go to bed. Hopefully the stuff that I am working on will not end up taking all that long and I will manage to get some sleep tonight. But that is never very likely.
I ended up working until after 2:00 am. That is pretty normal for me. I am getting back to my routine, I see. I may have been up late but I do feel that I managed to get quite a bit done. It is nice to feel productive. After having taken vacation I have been feeling particularly unproductive the last several weeks and I want to get back into the swing of things and get out from behind the eight ball.
Surprisingly, even now in the middle of the night, our house is managing to keep itself totally warm without the use of the furnace. The thermostat is reading 72F and we only have it set to 66F so we have quite a buffer before the furnace should kick on. I have been trying hard to keep the curtains and everything like that in place to do the maximum to insulate the house. But overall I have done very little. Min has been doing a little laundry today and that has been enough to keep the house so warm that I am on the verge of sweating.
I did some site maintenance tonight while waiting for some things to syncronize. The page was getting a little slow to load with all of the content going on here. So far from the size of the fourth quarter archive, the past six weeks are all ready the second busiest quarter ever on SGL with a full seven weeks left to go including the traditionally busy Christmas season. I also did some more research into WordPress tonight. I am really excited about getting a chance to finally start working on getting everything moved over to that. The site will be a million times cooler if I manage to get that to work. There are so many awesome features that I would like to include that are just way too much work to do just using my own hand coded XHTML. I could do whatever I need in ASP.NET but I do not have the kind of time necessary to do that.