Finally a day off. More or less. It is a bank holiday so I am not expected to report to the office and I am only covering important stuff. All of the less critical items just wait until tomorrow. So it is basically a day off but not quite. I put in about an hour or two of work today which is as close to a day off as I am likely to get for some time although I am hopeful about this coming weekend. Dominica is not so lucky and had to get up early this morning and drive into the office. She does appreciate my days off, however, as she does not have to get up nearly so early because she does not have to take Oreo to daycare and she gets home faster because she doesn’t have to pick him up. Oreo appreciated his day to lay in the sun and catch up on his rest. He has had a four day weekend but traveling all weekend makes him nervous and he doesn’t get good rest when he has to do that.
I had a number of projects that I had wanted to have worked on today but that just didn’t happen. I decided to just crash and do just about nothing today. I put in a lot of time working on setting up my new Linksys WIP300 VoIP wireless phone. That unit is really cool. It took several hours for me to get it figured out but finally it is working and I was able to place a call from it and was able to place calls to it. I am looking forward to getting to use that.
I talked to the Ralstons today. They have decided that they are going into the mission field and are almost totally sure that they are going to Papua New Guinea. (For those unaware, Papua New Guinea or PNG is a nation located on the east half of the island of New Guinea which is the world’s second largest island after Greenland and is located just north of the northeastern tip of the Autralian continent. PNG has a population of almost six million in a space just larger than California. PNG is a member of the Commonwealth and is a subject nation of the crown (i.e. they are subjects of Queen Elizabeth.) PNG is a relatively poor nation and was the last large population in the world to be totally isolated when it was discovered by a European pilot flying over the region in 1938. The interior is almost competely physically isolated from the coast and although Europeans had been living on the coast for some four hundred years no one knew that million of people lived in the interior until seeing them by plane. One city in the interior had a population of over fifty thousand making it much larger than Ithaca, NY. The western half of the island is a part of the Indonesian nation and is a semi-autonomous region simply known as Papua. Unlike the rest of Indonesia which is primarily Islamic, Papua is primarily Christian with large Muslim population.) They don’t know how long it will be before they are going to go down there but they are hoping to be able to leave in about six to nine months. They have a lot of preparation to do such as selling their house in York (anyone looking for a house in York very near to the school and to my dad’s house?), selling the bakery that Art just finished building, selling vehicles, etc. I know that that stuff can be quite difficult. At least they will be able to sell stuff prior to actually moving to PNG. Unlike us who moved to New Jersey and then decided to sell things once we weren’t there anymore.
I managed to somehow forget to eat today and it was so late before I was going to go out for food that I decided to just wait for Dominica to return. She got home and we immediately went over to Food for Life to get dinner. I tried my new phone over there but, of course, as soon as I take the phone with me they decide to shut off the wireless for the day because too many people were using it from outside of the restaurant. So I will have to try it another day.
Dominica had to work on homework tonight for her Java class that she didn’t manage to do over the weekend. I went through mail that we brought back from dad’s and the big news is that all of my credits have been finally approved at Empire State College so twenty-one advanced standing credits were just added to my total and now everything is finished for the final submittal to go to Saratoga Springs in the hopes that I will actually graduate. We are really hopeful that I can finish this year and not have this go into 2007.