As I write this there is a strip of pink sky beginning to be illuminated behind the Manhattan skyline with the twinkling lights of the city in front of it. Awesome.
Last night I got home and Dominica was hard at work attempting to assemble her new office chair. We ordered take away from Food for Life next door and I walked over to pick it up. We decided that we needed a lot more food tonight because it was so good last night that we were left wanting more when we were done. But we got BLTs again tonight. I tried the mac and cheese which was really good and Dominica experimented with carrot fries which were pretty good as well.
I got back home and Dominica was just finishing up her chair so that she could sit in it to eat her dinner since we have no seating at the “breakfast bar” yet. One thing at a time. We will have that figured out soon enough. I hope.
It was another short night. Min put in almost an hour working on the stuff for her Java class. Now that she has a comfy chair she was able to read at her computer for a little while. I spent the hour paying bills. Oh the joy. I took Oreo for a walk in the park and then it was off to bed.
Oreo pretty much completely pushed me out of bed last night. I ended up right on the edge of the bed unable to move. I stayed that way as long as I could stand so as not to wake up the dog who needs all the consideration we can muster this week but by a quarter after five I had to get up. Oreo is very much the bed hog. And a cover hog. I had almost no covers all night.
I did a little more unpacking this morning. We are getting down to the harder stuff as we run out of spaces for things and wonder what to do with what we have now. Space is really limited here and we don’t want things just stacked up and sitting around. But finding nooks and crannies to jam everything into is going to be a challenge. Once we get a larger bookshelf (we have one of those tiny three shelf deals where two of the shelves are so short that only novels would fit on them and only the paperbacks at that) as we have tons of books that have no home at the moment. So they are stuck in bins that don’t fit anywhere.
Min got up around a quarter to six. The early shift is killing her this week. She has no spare time to do anything. Just putting that chair together last night ate up most of her evening. But next week she should be back to a normal fourty hour week and will get a chance to actually enjoy the shorter commute which she hasn’t gotten to take advantage of once yet. Although in actuality the commute is saving her two hours and the overtime is just one hour so she is still better off than before. But she is running home during her lunch to walk Oreo so she isn’t getting a relaxing lunch like she normally would although she does get to see the apartment a bit more than me during the day. That, again, is only for this week. Oreo will be back playing with his friends at Doggie Paradise on Monday. He is really looking forward to that. We think that he thinks that he doesn’t get to go there anymore because we moved. He will be very happy when he finds himself there again and we will be a lot happier as it will eliminate, probably, half of the times that we have to take him out for walks in the park which take a big toll on our free time and we feel that riding elevators and crossing big city streets are dangerous for little dogs.
Oreo was quite delited to have me staying home later than usual today. He hopped up onto the futon where his pillow is and napped near my computer. I am scheduled to work the early shifts at the office for the next two weeks (starting on Monday.) That will be a nice change of pace. Now that Min gets up early every day and Oreo goes off to daycare and my commute is so much shorter going in for the early shift is a breeze. I wake up on my own in plenty of time to make it in as it is now but I just bum around the house trying not to wake people up right now.
The guys that I was supposed to be meeting this morning in Newark had train problems and decided to take a different way into the office. That ended up good as my morning conference call was also cancelled. But I still had plenty to do.
I ended up having to deal with three fire drills (or fire alarm tests as we weren’t requred to line up single file behind our teacher and slowly march through the firey mayhem while contemplating our demise.) The first one sent me into a panic since I have never heard the fire alarm in this building before. And I had no idea that they would be doing a test. The alarm is so loud that I almost got sick and I couldn’t think straight so it took much longer than it should have to get Oreo out of the apartment. Boy was he scared. Poor little boy. He has no way to cover his ears.
We rushed down to the front desk but by the time that we got there the alarm had stopped and they said that everything was okay. Apparently I was about the only person actually hanging out in the building during the day. So we went back up to the apartment and got back to work.
It wasn’t long before a second fire alarm went off. I was much faster this time and got out of the apartment with scared Oreo in about half the time. My ears were still ringing from the first alarm. Boy is that loud in a tiny apartment with hard wood floors and very little furniture! I got down to the desk and had a discussion with them about the torture that they are putting the dogs that are trapped in the rooms through and that people need to be notified before false alarms are set off. Testing is fine but we are being trained to ignore the alarms and worse yet the animals are being hurt. (I truly believe that un-notified fire drills are a well known cause of fire disasters. It is obvious to anyone familiar with “The Boy Who Cried Wolf”. I mean seriously, does anyone know a person who actually takes a fire alarm seriously anymore? I wonder how many people burn to death each year because of schools and other institutions performing fake and/or prank fire alarms. Honestly, what is the difference between a test alarm and a prank? If a prank fire alarm is dangerous then obviously so is a drill! Just like either it is unsafe for cops to talk on cell phones while driving or it is safe for everyone.) So the concierge said that I would be notified should the alarms be tested again but that there were no more scheduled alarms.
I was probably not in the apartment for more than thirty minutes before the phone rang from the front desk letting me know that they were going to do a third alarm and that they would wait for me to exit the building with Oreo. So I gathered up the boy and we ran out to Military Park for a short walk. He loves his walks. He was much happier running around in the park than sitting through another fire alarm. So, it turns out, it was a good thing that I had had the discussion at the desk about needing to know before a fire alarm test was done so Oreo was saved from the agony. He gets scared enough during the day. He sure doesnt’ need to go through that pain. The pain is enough to make me ill I can only imagine what it does to him.
My morning turned out to be really busy and I didn’t get a chance to head into the office until about eleven. I ran over to the Commerce Market right across the street and grabbed and egg and cheese on hardroll and jumped in the car and headed for Warren. Luckily at this time of day there is no traffic at all and the trip is really fast. The Commerce Market looks like it is going to be good. It is a deli that does breakfast and lunch and has a lunch buffet thing with a lot of miscellaneous stuff and a bit of Chinese food. It is cheap and really handy but I think that they might just be open during the week which means that we won’t get the chance to actually use them very often.
The drive in was fast. My day turned out to be mostly meeting and time spent on the phone. Much like my morning was. Dominica decided to skip going home over lunch today as Oreo was walked at eleven just before I left Newark. He will not be happy having to skip his lunch and not getting to get his early afternoon walk but Dominica will appreciate the reduced driving and getting some time to just relax at work.
Dominica found an awesome David Hasslehoff video on Google today: Jump In My Car. I thought that this would be good to brighten up everyone’s day.
It was pretty late before I had the chance to head for home. A quarter after seven. That is a bit later than usual. But the commute was fast so it made up for it a bit. We had been toying with the idea of going out tonight but it was so late and Oreo had been alone so much today that we decided just to order in. So around seven thirty Dominica ordered subs from Steakhouse 1 which we had on Sunday night. It took two horus for them to deliver on Sunday night so we figured that it would be important to order as early as possible. But their subs are so good that they are often worth the wait.
Josh called tonight and made plans to come down to Newark to visit. He is coming down on Sunday the eighth – I believe that that is right. And staying on Monday at least long enough to get lunch. I will work from home that day. So Josh managed to be the only non-family member to come down and see our North Brunswick apartment and will be the first family or otherwise to come down and see the new place in Newark. No family members are current scheduled to come down although we think that Dominica’s parents might be planning on coming down fairly soon. Min, Oreo and I are planning on going to Geneseo on the Friday before Josh comes to visit so that we can drop off a load of stuff that we have no room at all for and then we are heading to Frankfort to celebrate Dominica’s dad’s birthday before returning to Newark on Sunday afternoon. But that is not this weekend but next. This weekend we will simply be staying home and spending the time putting away the apartment and discovering Newark.