I was awake at twenty after five this morning but stayed in bed for about half an hour before getting up. I checked email and did a few things before heading off to the gym to work out before going to work. I was quite happy to be able to make it to the gym early this morning. My plan is to make my gym time really early in the morning because it helps to keep me going all day and it is one of the few times that I can really squeeze it in. I wore my new New Balance sneakers today too to break them in so that I can use them without getting blisters in Walt Disney World.
Getting up extra early doesn’t really help me get into work early in any significant way. I get back from the gym but still have to wait until almost eight before I get start getting ready because I have to wait until Dominica is ready and leaves for the office. But it gives me more time to do other things around the house.
It was a busy day at the office but time passed quickly and I could barely tell where the day went. The original plan for this week was that Oreo and I would stay home tomorrow as my work from home day and then I would go into the office on Thursday and work the early shift so that I could be back in Newark with plenty of time to get out to the airport. But without any reasonible notice we have another fire drill at 1180 tomorrow which means that neither Oreo nor I should be home as having an hour long alarm at an unknown time in the middle of the day is just crippling for us causing him to panic and me to spend the entire day waiting for the alarm to happen. So he is stuck going to daycare every day this week and I am stuck going to work four full days this week. This is probably the worst possible week for them to pull this without any warning because Oreo can’t stay home on Thursday because of our flight and then he is being boarded all weekend. So he will be at daycare from Monday of this week straight until Thursday of next! He and I could have stayed home today had they given us any warning at all about the alarm but they didn’t even tell me until this morning about an hour or two after Oreo had already gone to daycare with Dominica. Had they told us earlier this morning we could have done something probably and if they had told us yesterday I could definitely have arranged it. Things like this make it extremely expensive and uncomfortable living in 1180. This is costing us between $50 and $100 just this week not to mention the distress of having to go to work an extra day, missing a day with my dog and having him go to daycare far too much. The quality of life factor is not doing so well here in Newark at the moment. We were told repeatedly that there were only two floors left needing to be tested (there have been five or six tests so far since they told us that there were only two more) but this morning we were informed that there is testing needed when each of the retail spaces gets filled on the first floor which adds a tremendous amount of additional fire alarm testing. Even the city told us that there were only two more floors to test! This is far beyond ridiculous.
I got home and ran over to Subway for a quick dinner as Dominica is really stressed out between work and her big A+ exam that she is taking tomorrow afternoon. She didn’t want to leave the house. We watched one episode, the pilot, of Arrested Development which we had never seen before and then spent the evening doing nothing but studying. We studied until Dominica was completely burnt out and then watched one more episode of the show before heading off to bed. She will need plenty of sleep tonight so that she is ready for tomorrow.