It is already June. The days seem to just rush by in a giant blur. I guess that I am getting old. On the way home from Wegmans last night, I stopped at the hotel for about an hour. Mary was training this guy, Mark, I want to call him a ‘kid’ but he is in his mid-twenties. He went to school with Mary and I: graduated in 2000. That meant that he was a sixth grader when I graduated. Oh boy. Now I feel old. I remembered his name and he looked vaguely familiar. Hard to say if it is him that I really remember or not.
Mary was working on her A+ book when I got there and was full of questions. We sat with Mark out in the hotel lobby and I did my best to answer her computer questions.
I went to bed around 4:00 am and, for some inexplicable reason, got myself out of bed around 10:00am. I only got a few hours of sleep last night and had a short night tonight. I am surprised that I am getting up of my own accord. It must be the heat. The house is in the high seventies today. Dominica would be proud of me for not turning on the air conditioning today. We don’t quite need it but it is close. The basement is staying reasonably cool without any form of cooling so it is worth holding off for a few more days at least. Our central air unit is not the most efficient in the world and it costs a fortune to run during the summer. I really wish that we had the money to replace it with something really efficient. Someday, I guess.
Mary and Jocelyn showed up around 11:00 to study their A+. Mary had decided not to go to sleep this morning so she was pretty groggy. I walked them through the material in the first four chapters of the A+ books that they were using till about 12:30 when we ordered a pizza, along with Andy, from Mama Mia’s downtown. I love pizza, I could eat it every day. Especially now that we live in Geneseo and there is so much good pizza here. Not that Ithaca didn’t have tons more, but we have a pretty good selection anyway.
We moved out to the deck with the pizza and enjoyed the warm day. It was over eighty outside and hot in the sun.
After lunch, Mary was very tired and ended up falling asleep while we were talking. Jocelyn and I worked on her A+ material until around 3:00 when she had to run off to a doctor’s appointment in Warsaw. She decided to leave Mary at the house sleeping and to come back and get her later.
I was doing some searching today and I discovered an awesome new piece of open source software: iPodder. iPodder is an awesome little program available on Windows, UNIX and Mac that provides the necessary software components to enable end user PodCasting. iPodder is totally free and a majorally cool piece of any true New Media Geek’s arsenal. That is, until I find something new. But for now, this is the coolest PodCast Consumer app out there. Go and download it and check it out.
Dad IM’ed me around 4:30 to ask if I wanted to get some dinner over at the Omega. So we met up at 5:00 and went over to get dinner. Some new Netgear equipment for the company had arrived today so he was taking the opportunity to deliver that as well. One of the units is the new FWG11P for his place. We use those at all of our branch offices. The other is the new 26 port rack switch for here. That is going to make our network a fifty port network. It also adds our first gigabit Ethernet ports as well. As well as our first real manageable switch. None of our competitors work with equipment like that at all. This is just one more way that we are setting ourselves apart from the competition. I am just excited to have new toys to play with.
Just before I left to get dinner with dad, Mary woke up with really bad heart burn and wasn’t able to sleep anymore. She wanted to watch a movie so I set her up in the theatre with The Aviator. It is her first time getting to really watch a movie in “The Theatre”.
After dinner dad dropped me off at home. Jocelyn arrived just a little bit after I did and waited for Mary to finish her movie and then they headed home to relax for a little bit before Mary had to go to work.
7:30 and I am out the door on my way to Buffalo for another exciting overnight. I am really getting used to this Buffalo commute this week. I am starting to know the exits on this side of town a little bit.
Today’s motto is taken from the wall of the office where I am working: “Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intentin of arriving safely in an attractive and well preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways, champagne in one hand – strawberries in the other, body thoroughly used up, totally worn out and screaming WOO HOO – What a Ride!”
I am still missing my tuxedo waistcoat (vest for those of you who don’t know what a waistcoat is). So if anyone has a lead on a greenish silvery waistcoat, let me know. I am completely out of ideas as to where it could possibly be. I thought that it was in my tux bag and that bag and everything else from the wedding night never left my car. So I am really at a loss for ideas.
Well, I had been doing pretty well tonight and was hoping to be able to get home at a decent hour. No such luck. I pretty much wrapped up around 12:15 or so but we had one glitch that was outside of the scope of the procedure and I had to escalate it to the team back in Rochester which means it will probably be another long night for me. The worst part about it is that because I am waiting on the phone the whole time, I am unable to really do anything but just sit here in the back office. This late at night, that tends to make me pretty drowsy. At this point I have already been on the telephone for close to an hour and a half. Ugh. And no end in sight. I finished reading all of the magazines that I had originally brought in with me. I try to get through at least two or three a night. It helps to cut down on the huge stack pending reading sitting around the house and it helps to deal with the trash issue since we don’t have to throw out nearly as many. So, after a while, I took a break and sat the phone down and went out to my car where I had two more magazines and a book. I figured that I should at least make some use of this time sitting here on the phone. It was a nice night out – almost good enough to go for a walk tonight but I am pretty tired and at the rate things are going, I am not going to be looking to get any excercise by the time I will be getting home.
I got a reprive from my telephone time when we deteriorated into attempting to contact Microsoft directly because we didn’t feel that we could continue to deal with the problem ourselves. My brake was only for a minute, however. This room is really cold because of the A/C running to keep all of the servers cool. I am in shorts because I was anticipating moving around quite a bit during the night but I ended up sitting still for a very long time and now I am quite chilly. At least it isn’t over 100 like it has been already in Texas. Ugh. I am tired enough and have eaten enough junk food since I have been here to cause my acid reflux to act up a little bit. What a long night.
Around 2:30 am we finally managed to start wrapping up. Looks like I will be out of here well before 3:00 barring any new emergencies.
Oops…. spoke too soon. It is now after 3:00 and I haven’t even packed up my laptop yet. This is getting to be a really long night. The only thing that is keeping me going is knowing that I only have a tiny bit of “The Great Gatsby” left and that I will get to finish that up as soon as I am done here. I probably only have fifteen minutes or less left. Once I am done with this book, I am going to treat myself to something a bit lighter like one of the “Cat Who…” books. I have one that I haven’t listened to yet. Gatsby is a pretty good book, though. I like it. Nothing totally gripping but the writing style is very good and decently easy to follow. The story is engaging. Hard to believe that this book is such an amazingly successful classic. It’s good, don’t get me wrong. I like it. But it isn’t outstanding like so many other classics that it is often compared to like Huckleberry Finn, To Kill A Mockingbird, Little Women, All Quite on the Western Front, etc. But it sure is a lot better than The Grapes of Wrath!
I have a bag of French Onion Sun Chips here tonight. I have been munching those all throughout the night.
Okay, I am finally out of here. Pheww.
On the way home I had a collision with a raccoon in Retsof. It was very sad. I tried really hard to avoid it but it didn’t give me anywhere to go. I am pretty sure that it died quickly. I am very sad, though. There is fur on my front right fender. I talked with Mr. Humphries and he comforted me.