March 30, 2007: Exhausted

I was on the road leaving Newark by a quarter after five last night and found myself immediately in rush hour traffic. I lost an hour right off the bat as I fought my way through pointlessly slow New York City rush hour. I was in stop and go traffic all the way into Pennsylvania. That put a huge damper onto my trip. It really set me back a lot. It took me over an hour just to get to the point that I would have been had I left from the office instead of from home!

It ended up taking me a full six hours or a little more to get from Newark to Pittsburgh. It would have taken much less had I just beaten rush hour. Lesson learned on that one. What a sinking feeling that gave me knowing that I had pretty much lost my window for having any level of convenience whatsoever.

It wasn’t long before midnight when I arrived in Oakland. The work ended up taking about two hours due to one of the computers had some major issues even just starting up. I think that we might have lost an entire hour just waiting for the one computer to fully start up! That was another huge waste of time. Had that computer been working normally at all the entire “fix” time would have been way under an hour. Maybe under forty-five minutes.

It was a quarter till two in the morning when I got onto the road in Pittsburgh to return to New Jersey. The first part of the drive wasn’t bad at all. I wasn’t really all that tired until around four in the morning. Then it caught up with me and I was really, really tired. It was a major struggle to get myself back to New Jersey.

To make matters worse when I got around Allentown, PA I was, once again, stuck in rush hour traffic. I managed to hit rush hour both coming and going. Rush hour on Rt. 78 ended up costing me another hour (about three and a half total hours lost during the trip!) So I ended up driving straight to the office instead of going home. Attempting to get an hour of sleep this morning seems to be pointless so being at work is more useful. So that is where I headed.

I arrived at the office in Warren at a quarter until six in the morning. I had a duffel bag with me prepped with a change of clothes just in case I needed them this morning. It is a good thing that I brought them – the clothes than I had been wearing smell like the autoclave dock! I discovered that my badge has been deactivated at the office because today is my one year anniversary.

It is really hard to believe that I have been on a single contract for an entire year! That is just crazy. This has to be the longest contract that I have ever worked. I have hardly ever worked anywhere for a whole year!

I am super wrinkly guy today. I got stuck wearing my emergency backup clothes that I had in the car with me last night. I hadn’t been planning on actually wearing them and it is a little embarrassing. I need to have a travel bag that is packed and ready to go at all times for emergencies like this.

Everything is soar today after being in the car for twelve hours and seven hundred and twenty miles. I can’t wait to go home and crash into bed. I am going to sleep for a really long time.

The house was supposed to close today but we haven’t heard anything yet so it isn’t looking very good. Not a good sign. We haven’t heard anything at all even after calling our attorney to get a status update. It would appear that they have not been able to get a response from the buyer. 🙁 I just wish that this would be over and done with. I definitely don’t want it to drag out for any amount of time. The house is all cleaned out and taken care of. No reason to hold onto it at all anymore. And now we need to deal with another month of mortgage and homeowner’s fees that we had hoped to have finished with in March.

Time actually flew by this morning at work. It was well after ten before I even knew. Almost four hours into my day already! That is my favourite thing about coming in so early – the morning just whizzes right by and I don’t even notice. When I come in later the day seems to crawl along.

Dominica and I had hoped to be able to go to Ithaca this weekend to see the Ithaca High School production of Beauty and the Beast but with last night’s emergency and with us not going to Rochester this weekend we aren’t able to go. Tomorrow Dominica and I have a housewarming with the guys from the office. Other than that I plan to sleep a lot this weekend. I have a lot of catching up to do and I do not want to drive up to Ithaca – that would be six more hours of driving or more. I can’t even think about that now. Ugh.

There is more news on the Pet Food front: Federal Officials are claiming to have found fertilizer in the wheat gluten in Menu Foods’ dog and cat food. This is in opposition to New York’s finding that the product was rat poison. What are the chances that there are different contaminates in different regions? The FDA has reported over 8,000 complaints so far about the pet food.

Even as tired as I was today I managed to get online and to keep up with my class at RIT. It isn’t too much work as long as I don’t let myself fall behind. I just have to make sure to do a little every day and it works out pretty well.

Dad went over to Geneseo today to oversee the carpet cleaning process. This is the final step in getting the house ready. Now if someone will just buy it we will be all set. 🙁

The morning flew by but the afternoon started to drag on pretty dramatically. I got my third wind but it didn’t help much. I nursed a Rock*Star Energy drink all day (after having had a Venti Starbucks coffee and a Rock*Star while driving) to try to keep the caffeine at an even keel.

During my drive last night I managed to listen to several more hours of the book “Brave New World” which is not exactly riveting stuff but it is an important book and I am enjoying getting a chance to read it. BNW is a socio-political commentary on the potential horrors of a Utopian society of the future through the eyes of 1932 United Kingdom. The title is taken from The Tempest in a speech by Miranda which is quoted by one of the key characters in the book:

“O wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beautious mankind is!
O brave new world
That has such people in’t!”
After they finished steam cleaning the carpets in Geneseo dad took some pictures that I posted up on Flickr so that we will be able to remember a little more what the house looked like. It is really hard to believe that our house isn’t going to be our house anymore. It was such a great house. We loved that house. And now it is so clean!
Having been so tired I forgot to eat today. I forgot about breakfast (technically I had a cheese danish as half past two this morning when I stopped at StarBucks for some coffee) and missed lunch. I might end up being too tired to eat dinner. We will see. Maybe I will get a burst of vitality when I get home just because I am home. Sometimes that happens. But most likely I will just fall asleep and be out for the night.
 
By a little after three I was just about dead in my cubicle.  That is when it really hit me.  I was SO tired.  It was all that I could do just to keep my eyes open at work.
 
I escaped the office around half past four and wasn’t feeling too bad when I left.  I will have to work from home for a little while this evening before I can get any rest, though.  🙁 

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