October 6, 2006: TGIF and It’s Time to Drive

I don’t normally look forward to Friday like I was looking forward to it this week. I couldn’t wait to get out of work. The past several weeks have been so busy that I really need a break and even though I am on call all weekend I am not expecting that there will be very much work.

Josh and I got to hang around a little this morning but not for long. He had to get out to the airport to drop off his rental car and then had to hop from train to train all day to get to all of the places that he needed to go. I worked from home today. My week has been so busy that I really needed a planned day at home. That gave Oreo a chance to spend the day with me and to recover from his very busy week of playing at Doggie Paradise.

My day ended up going quite late and I worked until around nine in the evening. That was really late considering that we have a lot of driving to do yet tonight. We pulled out of Newark as early as we could which was almost half nine as we needed to completely load the PR5 before leaving. We put everything that we could into the car as this is our first trip back home in quite some time.

The drive went fine and we discovered that living in Newark put us a bit closer to home than we had been in North Brunswick. Maybe half an hour closer or more. We are now north of Rt. 78 instead of very south of it. And we are able to almost immediately hop onto US 280 that takes us north west up to US 80 which takes us quite quickly across northern New Jersey and meets up with US 380 in Pennsylvania quite conveniently. So our new route gets us to the highway in minutes instead of in fourty five minutes. It gets us to a more northern highway that moves faster and goes shorter and completely eliminates the whole 78 to 33 to 80 to 380 mess that is often where the bad traffic is. So we are very happy about all of that.

We got a very late dinner at the Waffle House in Clark’s Summit. We haven’t been there in quite a while. It is funny to have a restaurant that we frequent so much so far from anyplace that we have ever lived. Clark Summit is one of those “familiar” areas that I have been to so many times that it feels almost like a place that I have lived in. A lot like the Twin Pines area much farther south on US 81. That whole Binghamton to Scranton stretch must be the single most traveled highway in my life. And in such a bizarre location. I can almost do the whole thing with my eyes closed.

We pulled into Geneseo at three in the morning. Boy were we worn out. It has become very strange to have a house waiting for us in Geneseo. In some way almost like we had never left and in other ways very, very foreign and strange. The house was never quite like this when we lived here and it feel weird to be here. But boy is it handy having a house to return to that is back home.

Dominica and I ended up staying up for an hour or two talking. We have had so little interest in our Geneseo house that we have decided that we are just going to deal with the fact that we have a house there and are going to hang on to it for the time being. That doesn’t mean that we won’t be willing to sell it if someone comes along and is interested in it but we are not going to be keeping it on the market. We figure that with the housing market the way that it is right now that we will probably loose little, if anything, by holding on to the house for a few more years. The original plan from six months ago was not to sell the house but to keep it because we love the house and the area and it isn’t that expensive. And we do use it several days a month ourselves in addition to using it as a garage and for storage.

We are going to be really tired by tomorrow.

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