I got stuck working from home for a little while this morning going from one emergency to another. While I was working a large fire broke out in Newark as two abandoned buildings went up in quite a blaze fueled by the high winds. I was on a conference call when I looked over and saw the thick black smoke billowing up from near the Passaic River where the fire was visible on the ground. The sounds of emergency vehicles whizzing past came just a few minutes later. I ran to the window to get a picture but as I went to focus and snap the shot the battery died and I was not able to get it. When it first happened half of Manhattan was obscured from view from the smoke. But by the time that I got a picture there wasn’t all that much to see. I am getting better at having a camera always at the ready, but my second battery wasn’t close enough to switch to quickly.
My morning was absolutely crazy. I had a few emails that I wanted to address before heading for the train so I logged in (always my first mistake) and got stuck immediately going from one crisis to another all morning. My morning was just nuts and I never got a chance to have breakfast or to relax at all. I was doing fairly well – more or less keeping up – until someone decided to powercycle my workstation a few times to boot me off of it resulting in my Outlook being corrupted which affects me a bit as I use it for everything all day long. So I had to spend quite a bit of time working on and around that. Today was not the day for this to happen. I had been looking forward to getting into the office as there is someone there that I really need to meet with this week.
The upside was that I was pretty much forced to go get lunch as I was completely useless sitting at my desk for a while until someone got back from lunch to look at my workstation. There is always a silver lining (or a nickel lining as Alex P. Keaton would say.) I went over to Food for Life and did a little reading in “The Art of Project Management” and watched by BlackBerry.
I did manage to make more headway cleaning in the apartment today and the living room is really coming along. I did the dishes and the kitchen is in good shape. I am so domestic.
There was more “plant management” today as we attempt to get the rose bush healthy again. It has been doing well but today there was some mildew that went to spore that we hadn’t caught. I think that the bush is holding up alright but we really have to get the mildew under control.
Today dad hooked up the G4 Mac Mini running Mac OS X to replace his two laptops that died yesterday. This will be his first time using Mac OS X for any amount of time. It will be interesting to see how he likes it and how the Mac works out for him.
My office chair died today. The back got caught on the underside of my desk twice when I was attempting to zip back and forth between Dominica’s desk space and my own so that I could use all of the available computers. The backrest put pressure on the main part of the chair and ripped it apart. So Dominica ran to Staples to get me a replacement chair. They had one that she liked but not in stock so it is being delivered on Wednesday. I will make do with the remnants of my chair until then.
My day was exhausting. Dominica got home and we ordered in dinner from the Japanese/Mexican place that we have recently discovered. We ate and watched some A Different World and relaxed.
We played a little Settlers of Catan tonight but not very much. It was a short evening. We were both quite tired.
So our plans coming up are to go see My Fair Lady at NJPAC on Thursday night (we have season tickets) then travel up to Frankfort, New York on Friday morning to spend the weekend there. My father is coming out to Frankfort on Saturday to visit for the day. The the following weekend I am scheduled to work all weekend on a major migration project at work and Dominica is going to be gone most of the weekend in Philadelphia hanging out with Jenn.