Dominica kept me up until after midnight helping her on her homework that was due last night. Then, after just over four hours of sleep, Oreo got me up to take him out for a walk. No matter how quickly I try to walk Oreo it always takes almost half an hour at least. So it was almost five when I got back to the apartment and tucked Oreo back in to bed. I decided that it would make a lot more sense if i just went ahead and got up. So my late night and early morning combination turned into a four hour long night. So another tired day begins.
I did a ton of trimming to our rose bosh last night in the hopes of saving it. It has been in horrible shape since drying out last week and a lot of it is dead. It didn’t have the best soil either or even that much of it so I filled up its pot with Miracle Grow potting soil that Dominica picked up the other day. I am hoping that the extra soil and the fertilizer will together make enough of a difference to keep the poor plant alive. It nothing else it has just been in desperate need of the additional buffering capacity that some extra soil could provide. This morning I moved it to the east facing living room window before I left so that it would have a nice morning of sunshine.
There was a discussion today between the New York and Toronto offices about whether or not Good Friday is a bank holiday. It turns out that it is in Canada but is not in the United States. I found a very handy bank holiday calendar specifically for the Foreign Exchange (FX) markets that will make it easier for people looking to see when I am working, off or just not busy because the UK is on holiday. The United Kingdom and Switzerland both have four day weekends this coming weekend as they are off on Good Friday as well as Easter Monday. So the weekend next will be very slow for me as my primary customers are in the UK and they are all on a four day holiday.
I learned this morning that in August, 2007, what are believed to be the final remains of the two missing Romanov children have been found from the 1918 assassination in Russia. The main burial site containing the Tsar, Tsarista and the now infamous Grand Duchess Anastasia Romanov was discovered in 1991 but hidden until the fall of Communism so that the remains would be kept safe. The grave was missing two of the expected bodies, however. Russian scientists have long held that Grand Duchess Maria, the second youngest Romanov daughter, and Tsarevich Alexei were missing from their parents’ grave but the American scientific community has made claims on what seems to be more supposition than evidence that it was Anastasia and not Maria that was missing from the grave. The Americans generally based their claim on the apparently ages of the bones found while the Russians were using dental records.
The two new bodies match Maria and Alexei as expected and fill in the missing gaps in the bone records for the family. They were discovered at a bonfire site as described in the journal of one of the assassins that said that one or two of the bodies would be taken and burned so that the burial site would be more difficult to identify. The final forensic analysis is not expected until April or May of this year but at this point we can be reasonably sure that all of the Romanov family members have been found and none of them survived contrary to the fairy tale rumours that have been circulating for eighty years now.
I stopped in at Airlie Cafe on my way to the office this morning. I got my usual breakfast sandwich which is egg, cheese, home fried potatoes and black pepper on a hard roll and I got myself my usual salad for lunch. My salad is mixed field greens, hard boiled egg, cheddar cheese, carrots, celery, craisins (dried cranberries), corn, chick peas and red onions with Russian dressing. The cheddar cheese and the dressing is kept on the side and I mix it all together at lunch time. It is delicious.
My day was busy but not crazy. By the middle of the afternoon I knew that I was going to be stuck working incredibly late so I took a chance during a lull at four thirty – which should have been my end of day anyway – and caught the PATH train back to Newark so that I could spend the evening working from home. It was still a long day but at least I got to be home for the last long stretch.
I beat Dominica and Oreo home and was working for half an hour before they arrived. Dominica cooked her new acorn squash dish and we ate dinner while I worked until eight thirty. It was a long evening. We played one or two games of the Settlers of Catan and then went to bed very, very early. It was around nine thirty when I got into bed. Dominica stayed up for a bit playing MySims but I pretty much went straight to bed. I have been terribly exhausted for days and just have not been able to get enough sleep. Luckily Oreo slept through the entire night tonight and didn’t even need to be walked in the evening.