I slept in this morning until 6:20 to give myself a little extra time with Dominica and Oreo. It was a lot better to sleep in today rather than yesterday while sleeping on the floor. The new bed is pretty soft for me though and my back is soar this morning. It is made mostly out of that Swedish memory foam and that stuff does not support my back very well. It just lets you sink in wherever there is pressure which makes for a very unsupported situation. Even worse is that it has “memory” and does not spring right back which them makes moving around in bed very difficult since the bed is shaped to the position that you were in and not the position that you are trying to get into which I find causes a lot of strain as well. But boy is it a lot better than sleeping on the floor.
I managed to get ready quite quickly this morning and was out the door around 7:15. Leaving that early allowed me to still drive the slow route to work and get there in just 45 minutes. Quite an improvement over yesteray. I figure it I leave at 6:30 that that could shave another fifteen minutes from that time.
I got to work at 8:00. It was really warm at the office this morning. It makes it difficult to be productive when you are being lulled into sleep with the mumbled office sounds and the warm air.
Dominica is stuck waiting around the apartment this morning waiting for Cablevision to come in and hook up the Internet access. They are scheduled to arrive between 8:00 and 11:00. Then the plan is that Min is going to do a little more shopping for me and then she is going to pack herself up and drive up to Warren and we are going to get lunch together at the Thai House right in town.
Dominica called at 10:30 and let me know that Cablevision had been there and had hooked up the Internet access and that it was working. She said that the install guy was really nice and friendly and that Oreo kept trying to play with him. The tech’s girlfriend’s family apparently has three Boston Terriers. How awesome would that be? So another interaction with Cablevision and we are still really happy with them. Cool. Wouldn’t it be awesome to just have a really nice Internet provider for a change? I think that I am due for a change in that direction. I am excited to get home this evening and see how fast the connection is. I also want to see how well the VoIP phone system that I finally got working over the weekend sounds over it.
I got my taxes done today. Nothing like the eleventh hour, huh? Unfortunately we had thought that we were going to be getting a significant amount back this year but ended up, after the accounting fees, getting only $9 back. 🙁
Before leaving the area of the apartment Dominica managed to do some additional shopping for me. There are some basics that I still need around the apartment and it is really difficult for me to do my own shopping. The biggest thing is that I need bottled water. Now I am pretty resilient to the quality of tap water but the tap water in North Brunswick is so awful that it makes me gag.
Dominica left North Brunswick at 11:45 to come up to Warren to get lunch at the Thai House. She made good time coming up (thanks to my awesome directions) taking only about half an hour to get up here from North Brunswick. I guess that the drive isn’t too bad in the middle of the day. Maybe today I will try going home a different way to see if I can cut any additional time off of my drive. Even if I can’t save time I might still save mileage and that is a big deal with gas prices pushing $3.00 a gallon. I actually saw gas all over the place at $2.999 a gallon on the way down here on Sunday and that is as close to $3.00 as it gets.
We got lunch at the Thai House and hung out there for a little while. We got tofu in a spicy curry peanut sauce and some sticky rice for dessert. Very yummy. If I can just cut out the pizza I might manage to eat really healthily down here. But pizza is awfully tempting. After we ate I went out to the car and spent ten or fifteen minutes with Oreo. It was pretty warm out today and he was hiding on the floor of the car to stay cool.
Min was on the road towards Geneseo a little before 2:00. This is her first trip back home on her own. She is going to stop in Endicott to drop off something for the Surfing IT Wizard before she goes all of the way back to Geneseo.
Today was another one of those days with an afternoon that I can barely manage to make it through. I was so tired after lunch that I just needed to take a nap but you don’t get to do that in your cubicle when you snore as loud as I do. I hate drowsy afternoons. They drag on forever and you just can’t get anything done no matter how hard you try.
Dominica got to Endicott at 5:00 but had problems finding the Surfing IT Wizard’s house. It took her fifteen or twenty minutes to finally find it. I headed for home at 5:30. I tried the back way through all of the small towns and I think that it did cut ten minutes at least but it is really hard to tell. I will have to try it for a while before I have a good feel for how efficient it is.
Dominica got home a little after 8:00 but she stopped in Endicott for a while to deal with The Wiz and she went to Walmart to get dinner. So she didn’t really make too bad of time for her first time driving from Warren to Geneseo.
I got back to the apartment and spent the evening all by myself. It is weird. This is actually the first that I have ever lived alone. I have never had an apartment to myself before. I have spent a lot of time alone in hotels before. Tons of time, in fact. But having an apartment to myself is kind of weird. I don’t know how Andy does it. I can all ready tell that this is a really lonely experience. I am really missing Dominica and Oreo. I think that it is a lot more dramatic because not only am I alone in the apartment but I am also physically very far removed from everyone back home. There is no one that I know living anywhere around here. It is a really feeling of isolation being in a lonely apartment with no regular telephone, no radio, no television and no way for anyone to show up at the door and surprise you. No one can just run over if you need anything. Weird. Lonely.
I spent the evening trying to get the telephone system working to no avail. I can connect the VPN and have the phones work just fine. But once I try to do it without the VPN it stops working. I can’t figure out why it would do that when it seemed to be working fine when I had tested it before. The only factor that is really different is that I am working from the Cablevision network now instead of from Road Runner. Hard to believe that that would make the difference but you never can tell. I really need to get this working. I can’t believe what a pain this has been. One road block after another. Always something.
I kept working until 11:00 and decided that I really needed to call it a night. I could work on this forever and not get anywhere. I am really convinced that there is something wrong with the Internet provider here but I don’t want to jump to conclusions. It will be a really huge pain if that is really the case. It is hard to believe that that is the problem. It seems like it must just be something that I am overlooking because there are so many people using this Internet provider in this area that there is no way that they could be blocking these commnunications. Especially because it would affect so many other services like Vonage. I will look into it further tomorrow.