I was up a little after 7:30 this morning after a restless night of sleep. I haven’t managed to get very much good sleep recently. By 8:15 I was on the phone with just about everyone getting everything sorted out. That ended up being an all morning excercise. The consulting office in Rochester got my messages from last night when they got into the office this morning and were scrambling like mad to get everything into place.
By 11:00, when I had to decide whether or not to check out of the hotel, the answer was that they didn’t think that they were going to be able to get everything straightened out by tomorrow but that everyone was really sorry and the hotel was going to be taken care of and because I had so much on my plate they were going to have me go back to New York and we would schedule my start for next Monday. The last thing that I wanted to have happen was for me to get stuck just sitting in the hotel day after day racking up bills while getting practically no work done except for some reading and keeping up with SGL. We all decided that it would be best if we didn’t risk me just sitting idle all week because if I didn’t manage to start tomorrow morning then the week would be mostly lost and there would be a really good chance of me not starting at all.
So at 11:00 I checked out of the hotel and started driving back to Geneseo. I stopped at the Dunkin Donuts in the plaze right next to the hotel and got some late breakfast since I didn’t go down to the complimentary continental breakfast in the hotel so that I could be on the phone all of that time. Verizon is loving me this month.
I am getting good at getting around in New Jersey. Last night I was able to drive all the way to the hotel without ever looking at a map and managed to not make a wrong turn the entire way here. This morning I managed to get all of the way back without missing a turn. Pretty impressive if I do say so myself. It is good because if I am going to be working down here I sure don’t want to have to worry about getting lost. I have plenty of things to worry about and that doesn’t need to be one of them.
I made it through Easton, Pennsylvania and was heading west on US80 and was at Exit 299 when my manager from Rochester called to tell me that it really looked like everything was going to go through and that it would be best if I pulled over and waited ten minutes. So I pulled into the Sunoco station at Exit 299 and got a drink and some chips. It wasn’t nearly ten minutes later that she called back to let me know that everything had cleared and that they would be ready for me at 8:30 tomorrow morning. Pheww. Everyone is going to be really relived about that.
So I got back onto the highway going east and headed back down towards New Jersey. What a crazy day! I decided to go by way of US80 into New Jersey through the Delaware Water Gap instead of going south to Easton and into New Jersey over the route 22 bridge. The DWG has the best views going into the state and I got treated to a very enjoyable drive through some very rural parts of New Jersey. I find that New Jersey can be a very surprising state at times.
It was about 1:30 when I made it back to the hotel on the Raritan River. I got checked back into the room that I just checked out of just a few hours before and I got myself unpacked and settled into the room. Now I can enjoy my time in the hotel and just relax and get myself mentally prepared for work tomorrow morning.
I just happened to check the website last night and again today and DesktopBSD 1.0 has just released. I played with this product a few months ago in a release candidate or late beta form and was pretty impressed. I am downloading the CD ISO now at the hotel so that I can try out the final product.
Dominica took her car into the shop this morning to have her break clips replaced. Now her car won’t rattle like it is falling apart when she drives. Dad took his car into the shop in Geneseo this afternoon. It turned out that his car was going to take quite a while to get fixed so he called Dominica to have her come pick him up so that he didn’t have to sit at the shop all afternoon. She forgot what shop he was at and drove all of the way to Pavilion to pick him up at his normal mechanic’s shop there. It ended up taking her more than half an hour just to get through York because the school buses were all just coming out of the school. She didn’t realize what she had done until after she got all of the way to Pavilion. Almost a twenty mile trip! So she turned around and drove all of the way back to Geneseo to get dad right there in town.
I didn’t get any dinner last night after having grabbed some McDonalds on the way to Ithaca in Ovid at the Fastrac and my breakfast/lunch at Dunkin Donuts was pretty small this morning so at 4:30 I did my usual hotel dinner and ordered a thin crust Domino’s pizza with onions and green peppers and some cheesy bread. John Nicklin got me hooked on the Domino’s thin crust back when we used to live in the condo on the Broadneck in Maryland.
I spent the entire afternoon and evening in the hotel room. I went out at one point to go for a walk but I discovered that the hotel is on a decently busy road without any sidewalk on either side. So I came right back in and sat, lonely, in my hotel room.
Pretty much nothing happened the rest of the evening. I did a lot of research on my laptop. I watched a tiny bit of television, Home Improvement, which I haven’t watched in forever. That really wasn’t that good of a show but it is nostalgic at this point. I have never seen any of the last several seasons. I might only have ever seen the first few. It feels like the type of show that I must have watched all of but that definitely is not the case. I watched it in high school but by 1994 I probably never saw it again or maybe just one or two more episodes. I didn’t have television at college nor did I watch it much at home ever during the nineties. I have no idea when it finally went off of the air, actually. It ran much longer than I remembered. Today I saw the next to last episode – one of the stupid looking back clips episodes where they save money by having the entire episode take place in a car with people talking and just show old shows. What a horrible way to end the series!
I was pretty tired after two nights of very little sleep and wanted to be well rested for tomorrow so around 9:00 I decided to turn in for the night.