I was awake around six but didn’t bother getting out of bed until around eight. Dad is supposed to meet us at the EconoLodge around eleven. He called at ten to say that he was seventeen miles south on Rt. 13 and that he would arriving around ten thirty.
We had brunch at the Ramada which was right across the street. They have a very good traditional brunch at a quite reasonable price. We visited until one thirty when Dominica and I absolutely had to hit the road to get to Wallington in time to pick up Oreo from daycare before they closed at seven.
The drive down to New Jersey went horribly wrong. Route 81 was all stopped traffic and nothing was moving. We lost about an hour before we were even ten miles into Pennsylvania. We decided that we didn’t have the luxury of risking continuing on i81 so we took the first exit and hopped onto PA 492 East and took our chances on the back roads running through the Poconos. The backroads weren’t very congested but it doesn’t take much to cause a pretty big delay.
We skipped any stops, including rest stops, that we would normally have made and pushed as hard as we could the entire way from Ithaca to Wallington so that we could get Oreo. We ended up pulling into Doggie Paradise right on the nose at seven in the evening! That trip ended up taking several hours longer than it should have. It was almost double the normal time to go that distance! But at least we managed to pick up our Oreo.
Oreo was extremely excited to see us when we got him. We ran to Burger King as it was the most convenient place to eat and then headed straight home to 1180. We were all quite tired.
We got to 1180 and were very excited to learn, even before heading up to our apartment, that the air conditioner that we have put in six or seven work orders for over the past two weeks has finally been replaced as no one has managed to fix it. We have been going crazy trying to get this fixed as we have put in several tickets for its repair with no one coming to look at it at all. And only one of the six times did someone actually do any work and it did improve the unit but it didn’t fix it. The other two people who came didn’t do anything to it at all as far as we know. The issue has been that either the thermostat or some other piece of the unit is not working and it shuts itself off long before the room gets cool, even on the coldest setting.
We got up to the apartment and Dominica immediately discovered that the good, working air conditioner in the living room had been replaced and the broken one in our bedroom had not been touched! Now we don’t even have as good of air conditioning throughout the apartment as we have been limping with for the past month or so. 🙁 So tonight will be another restless, sleepless night for all of us as we attempt to sleep in the very warm bedroom.
It wasn’t late enough to go to bed so I read a little of my book “Solaris 10 Internals” and worked on building a Windows XP Pro desktop on one of the computers that I had dad deliver to us this morning (Compaq EVO D500 SFF.) Dominica put in some Cosby Show and Oreo went right off to puppy dreamland.