Congratulations to Josh and JoAnne Relyea who just had their first baby, Lilly Allison Relyea, on Wednesday night!
Dominica and I slept in quite a bit this morning. We got very little sleep last night because of Oreo and Dexter and their competitive drinking, eating, peeing, pooping activities. They will just drink and eat every bit of water and food made available to them and then will get me up every two hours all night long to take them out for walks. So I almost never got a chance to sleep at all.
Joe and I spent a bit of the morning working on the Netgear router and the Sony Playstation 3 trying to get his Playstation and Bennie’s Playstation 3 in Houston to talk to each other. We are not having very much luck, though. We put in a few hours working on it last night as well and didn’t really get anywhere. There is some issue with their machines connecting and we have tried everything including default port forwarding for both machines (Netgear calls this a DMZ) but that did not work either. So we are stumped.
Dad left Peoria this morning around nine thirty and arrived in Frankfort just a little bit before one in the afternoon. He said that he had a pretty good drive. We are really fortunate that the weather has worked out so well this weekend with Dominica and I driving so much and dad driving almost as much as well. It was bright and clear today. Probably the first really good weekend that we have had since Christmas!
We went out to Herkimer for lunch at the Albany Street Cafe & Pub. Neither Min nor I had been there before but we had eaten next door at the Empire Diner when we had come out to Herkimer so that I could play trombone in Dan Waltermire’s wedding on October 12, 2002. I drove the Toccos’ new 2008 Chevy Impala SS to lunch to test it out. They just got it recently and this is the first time that we have seen it. They got rid of the Oldmobile Bravada that they had been using as their second car and not just have the Impala and the Chrysler 300M.
Lunch was good although it took a really long time. Dominica and I both got crab cake sandwiches which were really amazing. We will be wanting to eat there again sometime.
After lunch dad hung out in Frankfort until just after five when he hit the road back to Peoria. He took our rather large load of stuff to transfer back with him. We are very glad to have some extra space reclaimed in our tiny little apartment. Now we can move around again. Although we will almost instantly discover more stuff that needs to be put into storage.
Dad also brought out three months worth of mail including some Model Railroad magazines that I have been having sent to his house and some Amazon and eBay shipments that went there on accident including “Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight” the graphic novel that I got for Dominica for Christmas that she has not had a chance to get yet. So she is excited to finally have that. I have a set of books that went there as well that I have totally forgot that I owned which include “What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Literacy and Learning”, “Rome’s Greatest Defeat: Massacre in the Teutoburg Forest”, “The Day of the Barbarians: The Battle That Led to the Fall of the Roman Empire”, “The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians” and “Dreaming in Code”. So now I have a lot of reading to work on. I need to get busy with that.
After dad left, Dominica, her father and I went out to Best Buy and Circuit City to do some quick shopping. We picked up a 1GB stick of PC2700 (a.k.a. DDR333) memory for the Toccos’ Dell Optiplex 170L desktop which has been suffering from being too low on memory. It had only 256MB before so the additional 1GB will have an enormous impact taking it from .25GB to 1.25GB total memory. Quite a nice upgrade.
I spent the evening working on my Systems Analysis and Design homework. I have two assignments due by midnight tonight and then discussion work that I need to get to tomorrow at some point. I am behind on my reading for that class (I know that this sounds incredible but I have been putting a lot of effort into getting the book that I am in the middle of out of the way before putting too much effort into reading my textbook and this has been proving to be a challenge.) So I read three chapters in the textbook today which took a really long time and I re-read “No Silver Bullet” by Fred Brooks and wrote my essay on that. Then I had to do some small UML diagrams. It was about eleven thirty when I wrapped up. Dominica had already gone to sleep by the time that I was done.
We are having Easter Dinner with the family tomorrow afternoon around two o’clock. We are having dinner early so that Dominica and I can get onto the road as early as possible. We are anticipating really bad traffic on the drive back down to Newark. Also, tomorrow evening two of my colleagues from the Toronto office are flying into the NY Metro area. One is coming to Newark and so we are hoping to get together for drinks before he drives out to find his hotel. But we will see. He is scheduled to arrive at seven which is too early for me to be able to make it but with Newark’s infamous delays and the time needed for him to find luggage and rent a car it might be feasible if we get out early and make really good time down to Newark.