October 1, 2008: Georgian Cuisine in NJ

51 Days to Baby Day! (32 Weeks and Five Days Pregnant)

Got up at five thirty this morning and did a little reading.  I finished reading “Dynamic Software Development” by Timothy Wells.

Dominica dropped me at the train station and I was off to Warren.  I actually made the early train today and remembered to use the off-peak round-trip tickets, too.

This is my first time working out at Warren in almost a month, I think.  It has definitely been a while.  Just one thing or another has been cropping up making the trip rather impractical.

Today was a nice, slow day.  For lunch, a friend and I went to a Georgian restaurant on Route 22.  We’ve been trying to go to this restaurant for weeks and just have not been able to schedule it.  We turned out to be the only people looking to eat there during the entire lunch hour!  It was completely empty when we arrived and not one person came while we ate out entire meal except for one woman, just as we were paying, who was just looking to see a menu.

The food was quite good.  The menu was tiny.  The only main meal that they had from the menu was the chicken kabob and the only appetizer was the eggplant wraps.  I told them that I was a vegetarian so they made me an awesome mushroom and potato stew.  It was very good.  I also got the eggplant wraps as an appetizer, they were really excellent.

We also tried a bottle of Georgian cherry soda – which was really good.  If I had had a car there I would have bought several bottles from them.  I love Georgian soda.  It has far less carbonation as American sodas do and is sweetened with cane sugar not high fructose corn syrup.  The combination means that it has far fewer calories as it does not need as much sugar and that the sugar that it has is better for you.  It’s kind of like a blend between soda and kool-aid.

The afternoon went by pretty quickly.  Nothing exciting at work but there was some additional house excitement.  It seems that after last week asking us to move the closing date forward for them the sellers are now asking that we move it back as far as possible.  It’s not a big issue since they don’t want to move back past October 25th, which is when our paperwork from the bank will expire.  They know that we have that limitation and that delaying past there means that they have no buyers for their house and this is a pretty bad market to be losing buyers in.  Most likely if they did do that we would renegotiate to buy the house in several months at a lower cost but that would be rough.  We can’t be doing anything extra like that with the baby right around the corner.

So the original closing target date was October 15th.  The originally asked, last week that is, to target the 7th to which we agreed to try to accomodate and now they are shooting for the 24th which is the last possible day that the attorneys could schedule (the 25th is actually on the weekend.)  The 7th was going to be awful for us since we are away that weekend and the extra time would cost us money and not give us any benefits since we wouldn’t even be around to spend the weekend in the house or to move anything.  Going past the 17th, though, means that we lose the one weekend that we do have to do casual moving.  The 17th is our perfect date so we are hoping that that is what gets scheduled.  It means two days less escrow, both Dominica and I will have another paycheck before the closing and we still get two weekends in which to move.

We are just waiting for some closing date to get scheduled so that we can hire our movers.  That is our biggest point of stress at the moment – other than the stress of paying for this house – just trying to find movers and get that scheduled and to know that there really is a window in which the moving can be done.

If we get the extra weekend, the 18th and 19th, then we are planning to take the Mazda PR5 (which we are picking up when we go back home for Joe’s wedding next weekend) back and forth two or three times with loads of small items to take to the new house if at all possible.  We are guessing that with just a couple of good loads in the hatchback that we can move just about all of the small stuff from the apartment to the house.  Only the furniture and boxes of books would be left for the movers.  The books are just too heavy and too likely to hurt my back to bother moving.  It will only take about two boxes for all of them since so few are here in Newark with me that it is totally worth having the movers just take them with the furniture.  If we manage to get the Verizon FIOS hooked up before the movers come then we might even move the computers early and have that out of the way.  At least everything but the workstation that I use to work for Citi.  But even that I might be able to reduce to a laptop.

The only really tough piece to coordinate will be the plants and the daily use computer equipment.  None of it is hard to move just hard to get moved when it all needs to go right at the last second.  The plants might be staying in Newark until a week after the movers take the furniture away.

My trip home this evening went great.  I caught the Summit shuttle and did a little listening to IT Conversations on my iPod and then managed to just make it on to the express train to Broad Street without any problems.  They really need to move the shuttle schedule up by like one minute so that we never miss that train.  There are several people on the shuttle running for that train every day.

On the train ride home I manage to finish reading “Getting It Right: Business Requirement Analysis Tools and Techniques” by Kathleen Hass, Don Wessels and Kevin Brennan.  I am on quite the roll reading-wise this week.  Three books in three days completed.

Dominica decided that she was in the mood for salad and a sandwich from Eli’s tonight.  So I ordered in and we had food in around an hour.  I messed up the order, though, and had to run down to the deli downstairs to complete the order.  Oops.  I really hate placing orders by phone, especially when I have nothing written down in front of me and no one listens to make sure that I ordered everything.  I am very had at that.

We watched a little bit of Magnum P.I. and The Fresh Prince of Bel Air and both went to bed very early.  I am trying to make sure that I am not falling behind on sleep this week to give my back as much opportunity as possible to repair itself.  Today was better than yesterday so we continue to move in the right direction.  I am home all day tomorrow with no need to walk around outside except to walk Oreo so I am hopeful for a good day of progress.