Doggy-Daddy Week Begins.
The alarm went off at three thirty this morning. We barely had time to close our eyes, it seems. It was tough getting out of bed to go to the airport. I can’t believe that Dominica was able to get up on just three hours of sleep, shower and get herself ready to fly.
There was some communications issue downstairs this morning as we were trying to leave and the car that we needed before a quarter to five didn’t arrive until after five so we were in a panic driving to the airport. The airport only opens at five so we didn’t want to get there before then but since the airlines are not required to take your luggage unless you are there forty-five minutes before your flight you definitely don’t want to be very late.
So it was a mad dash to the airport. We just barely made it in time and got Min onto her flight. The nice thing about flying first thing in the morning is that everyone is more friendly and there are no lines at all. You can rush right from the front door to the airplane without too much of a hassle.
Oreo and I returned home and returned to bed, as you can imagine that we did. Dominica sent an email from her BlackBerry in Atlanta at seven past ten to let me know that she had completely the first leg of her flight. It was around half past noon when she finally got into Houston.
Oreo was a very sad little doggy all day. At one point he went into the bathroom, which is directly across the hall from the front door, and just lay on the little rug there so that he could watch the front door waiting for Dominica to come home. He really hates when one of us is gone and he can tell that it is Sunday and that the schedule is different from the norm. He gets upset so easily. It’s tough being a little dog sometimes.
I did some cleaning today. I am excited to have some time to myself around the apartment to really get some cleaning done. I did the dishes and got the kitchen cleaned up pretty much right away and started putting things away from all around the apartment. It will take all week to really make a difference but I got a nice start on it today. I will be home more than usual this week as I have to take care of Oreo all week. He is going to be going crazy without any daycare at all. So he will be upset because Dominica is gone and rambunctious because of not playing with the other dogs.
Speaking of other dogs, I found out today that Barney, the little Boston Terrier puppy who lives nearby, is moving into Eleven80 this week. So there are going to be two super cute black and white Boston Terriers living here.
My day was spent doing pretty much nothing but Java homework. The project that I have due at the end of the week is really immense and I have dedicated the whole week to it. While the project is a lot of work and really wearing on me it is also a lot of fun. I am learning a lot from doing it and I am learning to use new tools as well. I am really getting used to the Eclipse IDE and have started using ANT for automated Java builds too. And I am using KDESVN as a front-end to an online Subversion repository.
I worked late into the night. Around two in the morning I gave up for the night and went to bed. Oreo and I snuggled and watched two episodes (episodes two and three) of the first season of The Brady Bunch. The thing that I really like about that show is the bizarre and yet awesome architecture and styling that was popular in 1969. The Brady Bunch is one of those shows, like the movie The Glass Bottom Boat, where a certain extravagant style quite unique to the 1960s can be seen. I love those crazy 60s style mansions. They took on weird colours, angular lines and massive horizontal sprawl. A very different style than ended up becoming popular in later years. Today open space is achieved by going upwards not by going outwards.
As the second episode ended I turned off the lights and prepared to fall asleep after a long day of Java programming and took one last look at my BlackBerry which had recently turned back on after being recharged.
One of the issues with BlackBerrys is that they turn off their radios long before they actually run out of battery leaving you with a day of “running them down” before you can recharge them. And then once you get them plugged in it takes a little while before they have enough internal power to turn the radio on again. This leaves a huge gap of time when you have no cell phone service as a result.
So today was my “day without cell phone service”. It lasted from mid-afternoon until sometime tonight. It is only so bad as I am online most of the day with email and instant messaging and I have the house phone. But once in a while something happens only over the mobile network and I miss something. Today, that was a page from the office. No one emailed my home email or called the home line so I missed the text message until after The Brady Bunch was over.
So at a little before two thirty in the morning I headed out to the living room and logged into the office. The sun was up and people were in the office in London and Belfast so we got right to work. I ended up on a conference call for a very long time. Oreo came out just a minute or two after me. He doesn’t like to be alone. So he lay on his pillow beside me while I worked through the night.
It was around a quarter to five in the morning when we finally wrapped up and signed off of the conference call. I felt surprisingly wide awake, though, for having not gotten to go to bed until the sun was thinking about coming up.
I was pretty wired so I did a little Java until after five. The wind picked up and it started raining. The east-facing windows were covered in rain before I went to bed. Good morning to be stuck working during the night.