It is starting to be weird when I actually wake up in Geneseo. Kind of like waking up in an apartment that you used to live in but haven’t lived in for a long time. Now that the place is mostly empyt it feels a lot more like an apartment and we have been there so little over such a long period of time that it really doesn’t feel like home anymore even though it is still our house and it is looking more and more like we are going to be holding on to it for a long time yet. I suppose that the original plan had been to keep the house so we shouldn’t be complaining now. If we could just rent it out I would be happy keeping it indefinitely. We love the house so much but it is just so difficult maintaining a residence when you don’t live there. But really with housing values as bad as they are right now maybe it would be beneficial to wait out the market anyway. Owning it sure does make returning to the area very convenient and we do seem to be back quite often and it gives us enough garage space that dad shouldn’t have to keep storing one of my vehicles in his barn.
One of our projects today is switching cars. The Mazda 6 is being left behind in Geneseo and I am taking the PR5 back to New Jersey. It is still for sale should anyone be interested but for now we are going to continue using it. We are trying to make the best out of our extra house and car situations.
Dad came over to Geneseo and picked us up for breakfast at ten. We went to Denny’s and hung out until almost noon. We get to see everyone back home so seldom these days.
Dad went back home and Dominica and I did some work around the house for about an hour before going over to the farm to help move the RX-7 into a position so that it can easily be picked up by the wrecker. I was quite pleasantly surprised when I climbed into the RX-7 to discover that the car was pretty much all intact after having sat in the barn for several years. The tires are still okay and the seats are dried out but not destroyed. Pretty much everything is pretty decent. It is still going to take a ton of work to really get it back into driving condition but at least it will take a lot less work than we had expected that it would.
We went back to Geneseo and packed the cars for the return journey to North Brunswick. We are taking a lot of stuff back with us. We are hoping to get the first servers and network equipment into Scranton this week or maybe next so we are hauling a lot of that stuff down in this trip.
On the way out of town I swung into Aunt Cookies and grabbed myself a sub. Getting a good sub is a hard thing to do in New Jersey so I wanted to take advantage of my limited opportunity to get one. Dominica left straight away and had a lead on my on her way south. We ended up meeting at the Pennsylvania Welcome Center on route 81 and from then on I was ahead of her.
During the trip I finished listening to “The Devil Wears Prada” which I found to be way too close to “The Nanny Diaries” both of which I thought were boring, had no plot and were filled with either evil, dumb or just uninteresting people. The protagonists of the stories were very difficult to identify with as they both placed themselves into obviously horrible situations and no matter what happened to them or how much damage they were doing to themselves or others they just kept letting things get worse and worse. The stories were practically identical and must be being pumped out of a “women mocking women” literature factory. I think that women should feel offended by the poor portrayal of women in these books and I can’t believe that this crap made it onto the best seller’s list. It just shows how sad the state of American literature is. Or at least the state of the average American reader.
After punishing myself with “The Devil Wears Prada” I went back to something written by someone who finds something interesting other than fashion, getting drunk and just living in New York and listened to more of “Lake Wobegon Boy” by Garrison Keiler which actually deals with human relationships and has a plot and characters and identities and humor, etc.
It was not far from midnight when we pulled into the apartment in North Brunswick. We were very tired but I had some work to do and didn’t manage to go to bed until almost two in the morning.
[A quick comparison between The Nanny Diaries and The Devil Wears Prada – both of which were written at approximately the same time and both of which were turned into movies at about the same time.]
Both books deal with an early twenties girl living in Manhattan beyond her means with “top notch” but totally meaningless liberal arts educations. Both take really ridiculous jobs that should be totally embarrassing to even mention having for a college graduate. (Nanny and Gopher.) Both are hired by mean, evil and apparently mentally challenged middle-aged women. Both let their personal lives far by the wayside in the attempt to please these women that they totally despise. Neither girl is intesting in any way whatsoever nor does either have any hobbies, real friends, good family ties or interests whatsoever. Both go on a “trip” with their bosses. Both get fired while nearing the end of the trip. Both feel better after being fired. In fact, I would venture to say that these were actually the same book. I can think of almost no aspect of these books that makes them different at all. In both cases the protaganist is so self destruct that I have no interest in seeing them happy at all.