July 8, 2008: The Baby Stuff Starts

I managed to get a bit more sleep last night.  We went to bed around eleven and I listen to half an hour of a talk from the SuperNova conference and then went to sleep.  it was a bit interesting because the talk that I listened to was discussing technological innovation in the Mohawk Valley in the nineteenth century.

Oreo was still really tired today and very itchy still from his weekend in the grass.  We decided to have him stay home again today because he needs time to sleep and for his skin to hear.  Going to daycare would just take more energy out of him that he needs for his body to repair itself.  He was pretty excited when he figured out that he was spending the day with his daddy.

Dominica started the Hewlett-Packard Linux 101 class today.  The class doesn’t officially begun until next week but she is trying to get a jump start on it and had me download Red Hat’s Fedora 9 so that she could do an install with it as the HP Linux classes are based on Fedora.

Today we got our very first items for the forthcoming baby.  We got the Winnie-the-Pooh collection by A. A. Milne in hardcover.  All four books, When We Were Young, Winnie the Pooh, The House on Pooh Corner and Now We Are Six. Normally we would have waited to buy baby stuff but we are up to the stage where we are supposed to be reading to the baby so we wanted something to get started with that is nice stuff that will be long lasting and something that our child will always want to own.  So our child already owns four books!

Also arriving today is the first Business Analyst book on my reading list: Writing Effective Use Cases.  As I am suddenly very responsible for BA education I am taking it upon myself to read, and to some degree define, the ultimate Busness Analyst Reading List.  Everyone seems to agree that this and the BA’s UML book top the list so I am starting with those.  You can’t go wrong with Alistair Cockburn and I am looking forward to this book.

My day at the office ended up being so busy that I didn’t even manage to have lunch.  I started trying to get lunch around one thirty and it was five before I even knew what happened.  I was on a conference call solid from around one thirty until five which really ate away the day.

Dominica decided that tonight she would be cooking so it is vegetarian corn dogs, corn on the cob and macaroni salad for us.  I was really tired after my incredibly long afternoon of supporting a single issue for hours – hours past my “end of day” since I am on the early shift this week.  That will wear you out pretty quickly.

We watched some of the fifth season of Third Rock from the Sun and relaxed for the most part.  At one point, probably around ten in the evening, I took Oreo out for his usual walk around the block.  When we went outside we noticed that all of the streets were blocked off around our building and that the sidewalks were covered in electrical and lighting equipment.  A large tour bus sat on the street.  It was all very strange.

As Oreo and I walk across the street to Airlee we noticed that the half of the building not used by Airlee for their cafe had all of its signage replaced with “Mars Cometh – One Night Only”, a velvet rope was set up and a red carpet was down and a security guard was sitting on a stool in front of the building.  This caught me by surprise as this building has been empty for the entire time that we have lived in Newark and no work has been being done on it.

I asked around and learned that Commerce, behind our building, is being used for the filming of the upcoming movie The Perfect Age of Rock and Roll.  So Oreo and I got to walk through the set just as filming was about to begin.  Working on Wall Street means that I see television and film shoots all of the time but this was pretty neat as the filming is literally happening just a few feet outside of our living room windows and part of the movie is in a building that I eat in several times a week.

Long ago I walked through the filming of Blues Brothers 2000 while I was in Toronto with Kelley’s Heroes for the Santa Clause Parade.  That was either 1996 or 1997.

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