June 28, 2006

I was awake at six thirty this morning but couldn’t bring myself to get out of bed so I decided to sleep until eight. I got up and drove into the office. I don’t like this commuting thing, it isn’t fun. I was appreciating being able to work from home most of the past month. That was really great.

I almost forgot that we have a holiday coming up on us quite quickly. Dominica and I are going to Waverly, New York for one day this weekend although we don’t know the exact schedule yet. She has family coming in from California that she hasn’t seen in probably ten years so we are going up there to visit. It isn’t too far of a drive from down here. I don’t get a long weekend for the holiday but I do get Tuesday off.

It was a Thai lunch day. Lunch was quite good. I spent a bit of the afternoon working on the Hewlett-Packard classes that I am currently taking and am a week or two behind on. I got caught up on my Network Attached Storage class and worked on my Project Management class.

The other day Dominica and I were talking about some people that I went to college with and I thought of Gabe Bolt who lived across the hall from me at GMI in Flint, Michigan (now Kettering University.) I hadn’t thought about Gabe in years. So I did a quick search for him online and, like most of the people that I went to college with in Michigan, his only online presence that I could find was from our old college days. Apparently Gabe went on to found the Kettering Chapter of Delta Chi. That is the only Google reference to Gabe’s full name anywhere. I did a further search under his full name Gabriel Bolt and only got his master’s degree graduation information from Oakland University. That is all the Internet knows about Gabe Bolt. Soon, if someone does a search again, the top reference to him is very likely to be SGL. Maybe someday he will do a search for himself and find this page and leave a comment and I will know how to get a hold of him. If you are a friend of Gabe’s drop a note. I can’t get it to him but maybe someday he will check in and see that you left a note. Ah, the power of the Internet.

Wil Wheaton is hanging in Prince Edward Island today – one of my favourite places anywhere. And he even went and got ice cream from Cows of Prince Edward Island – my favourite ice cream place. Too bad he was only able to go to Charlottetown and didn’t get to explore the island which actually gets much better as you leave the city nor did he get to get ice cream at the REAL Cows up in Cavendish.

Originally Dominica and I had been planning on going down to Maryland next weekend to visit but instead Dominica is helping Francesca drive Madeline and Emily back down to Houston. So I am driving Min up to Geneseo on Friday night where we will spend the night – I think. Then Francesca will come through on Saturday and pick Dominica up and off they will go for another fun two days of driving. I will spend the weekend getting servers ready in Geneseo. Oh the excitement. But it will give me a chance to visit and an opportunity to spend time with Oreo. I will return to New Jersey on Sunday and Dominica will fly in on Monday night. (This is not this coming weekend but the following weekend of July 9th.)

We were sort of hoping that the BMW 330ci convertible would be ready today so that we could go and take a look at it and give Dominica a chance to drive it but they didn’t call so we are assuming that it isn’t ready yet. Today was the earliest that it was going to be ready so there is a decent chance that it will be ready tomorrow. We are very excited about it but it is a lot of money so we also appreciate having an additional day before we need to make any decisions.

Speaking of cars, it looks as though my Mazda RX-7 convertible is going to be towed down to Ithaca in about two weeks. The plan is to have Autoworks take a serious look at it and get together a plan for getting it running again. I figure that it will not be cheap and it will have to happen in stages. Right away we will just have to try to get the thing running again. It has been sitting idle for the past four years which is a really long time for a car to sit. It is going to be needing every consumable component replaced right down to the wires, tires, gaskets, seats, roof, etc. No small project. And that isn’t even dealing with the engine and powertrain. Heaven only knows how much damage has been done there. I just know that it is going to be bad. But that car is awesome and I want to be able to drive it again. Even if we don’t decide to get the BMW we would still like our third car to be a working one.

Work was super slow this evening so I headed for home not long after five. That was a nice change. I called Dominica and she was going to meet me at Tanjore for some Indian cooking, but when she went to leave the apartment she had some emergency brake lights on so she couldn’t drive her car. Well, she could but she shouldn’t. So I drove down to the apartment and picked her up before we went to dinner. Tanjore was closed when we got there so we ate some ice cream next door as a before dinner dessert while we waited for the restaurant to open.

For dinner we decided to be brave and try a new type of Indian dish that we had never had before called dosai. Dosai is a crepe like food stuffed with different types of fillings. Dominica tried a spinach dosai and I had a rava dosai which was a specialty of the house. The dosai was really awesome and very filling. We were totally stuffed after eating. It was much heavier than it looked. We have been seeing people get dosai often when we are at Tanjore but we have never known quite what it was or how to order it. Now, I expect, we will be ordering it all of the time.

After dinner we just came home and relaxed. I did a little work for one of our customers in Ithaca that Dominica had been working with during the day. It was not a stressful evening.