Today is a defacto work from home day for me because the Mazda is in the shop and I have no real way to get into the office. It is the perfect day for it, though, because today is a British bank holiday and my normal workload is decimated. So today Oreo and I are just relaxing and getting stuff done around the apartment in Newark. This works out very well because I can oversee the repair of our air conditioning unit in our bedroom that we just haven’t been able to get fixed for weeks. More than two weeks at this point. The first repair work was scheduled for August 12th when the handyman never showed up.
The guys came by around nine this morning to work on the air conditioner in the bedroom. I put in a bit of time doing my “housewife” chores around the apartment. I did the dishes and cleaned the kitchen, took out the trash, did the normal cleaning, did some laundry, etc.
I uploaded some pictures from my little Kodak camera today to Flickr. I have some from South Carolina, Georgia and Toronto that have been waiting on the camera for me to upload them. I got them all labeled and mapped appropriately so that they are useful.
For lunch today I just ran across the street to Queen Pizza II on Commerce to try them out. I can’t believe how long we have lived here and we haven’t tried the pizza place directly across the street! We can even see them from our living room window. The pizza was good. Nothing to knock your socks off but quite tasty. It is quick and cheap to eat over there. The place was packed. It is a happening lunch spot on Commerce. Commerce appears to be the main food street for the downtown Newark lunch crowd.
There is a new cafe going in across the street from us that is set to open in September. We don’t know anything about it yet but I saw them working on it today. We are excited about that. A nice cafe across the street could be very handy and it is taking over a store front that has been empty since we moved in here so that is very positive movement for our street. And the Market Deli that is located in our building is set to open soon adding one more food location to Commerce Street. That is one street where we have really seen some improvements since we first moved in.
The shop called this afternoon to let me know that almost everything for my car had arrived except for the fuel tank which they hope will arrive tomorrow. So I am stuck at home for another day.
For Dominica’s birthday and to prepare for our trip to the UK I bought her a pink Kodak V1003 10 megapixel digital camera for her to carry around and use while we are away. She says that she is working on the ultimate collection of pink electronics.
I ended up having a ton of work to do very late in the day – even though the whole day itself had been amazingly slow – and so spent the evening mostly sitting at my computer. Our new platform bed arrived today so Dominica spent the evening assembling that in our bedroom. We have been sleeping on the floor ever since we first moved to New Jersey a year and a half ago. But Dominica has gotten tired of that and decided that we needed a real bed. It took a few hours to get it all put together but with just a little help from me we managed to get it all assembled and in place. It really makes a huge difference in the way that the bedroom looks. Quite the improvement.
I did some eBay shopping today and Dominica and I decided to buy an HP DC7700 desktop that we got a really good deal on on eBay. eBay shopping is always a risk but this was an extremely good deal so we took the chance. The current plan is that Dominica is going to be getting this new desktop (which is a nice dual core Intel Core 2 Duo 1.86GHz machine with 3GB of memory!) And Dominica’s current desktop will go to dad whose desktop is getting a bit long in the tooth. I believe that he currently has an HP d330.