I had to get up super early this morning. Eric got to the house at 6:10 am and we headed right out the door to go to the Microsoft Technet show in Buffalo. We grabbed a quick breakfast at the Hess/Dunkin Donuts in Lakeville and hit the Thruway west. We got to the show at just the right time. The show ran from 8:00 – Noon. It was good but pretty boring. Neither of us won anything this time. This was Eric’s first real show. He was ready to fall asleep during the second half when they were talking about security the whole time.
Part way through the show, we discovered that the Waste Watcher had gone down (because I am an idiot and did a change last night) and so we had to deal with some problems with that during the show. I figured out what I had done so I wasn’t too concerned. It did suck that everyone was away from our desks and no one could fix the problem until Eric and I got back from the show, though. We left Min at the house waiting for the furniture to get delivered and the plumber to stop by and fix up our plumbing for our washer. Danielle came over to the house and helped Min kill time.
While Eric and I were out, Danielle helped Min get her car into the shop. Nothing major, her driver’s side headlight was out and needed to be replaced. It is kind of fishy that that particular headlight went out since it isn’t an old headlight at all and it is the same one that kept going out in my PR5 when I had it. So we will be watching it carefully. Min also managed to get us set up with garbage pickup service – yup, after living in the house for just over two months we finally are having our trash picked up, can you believe it? They will start picking up from us tomorrow. We are very excited. Pretty soon, we will have that garage all cleaned out! Which is important as I found a tremendously huge spider in there yesterday so we need to nip that in the bud! We still have to take a couple of huge loads of cardboard out to my parent’s house, some to store in the barn and some to burn. There is just so much cardboard that we have to find something to do with it all.
Eric and I got back from the show and Min was still waiting for both the furniture and the plumber. Both were supposed to have come by in the morning. The furniture place called and said that they were just running late. But Min has been calling about the plumber all morning and hasn’t been getting any response from the construction company. I called and left some nasty messages and then went over to the construction site to see where it would get me. They told me that the plumber said that he had already been to the house and no one was home. Which really pissed me off since the excuse that they had used last week was that he had come to the house and talked to some guy who said that he didn’t think that there was any problem! So I went off in a huff saying something about calling my lawyer. Which I did and left a message. Then I called the builders back and gave them one hour before the plumber had better be back because we didn’t appreciate having to wait around for two whole days while no one showed up to fix anything. Apparently they got the message either from me or from the contruction guys because the plumber showed up in about fifteen minutes.
So, of course, both the plumber and the furniture arrive at the same time. The furniture got set up in the living room (it is awesome, we really love it.) We immediately put the new, low book shelf up on the wall between Andy’s room and the main hallway and put Mr. Humphrey’s cage on it. We think that he will really appreciate being able to live in the middle of everything again. It was nice having him in the bedroom to have him nearby when we were sleeping but he will see people during his more active parts of the day if he is in the living room. We also got him new hamster living quarters the other day so those are sitting out on the book shelf too. They will probably be all hooked up tomorrow. The new stuff will about double the overall size of his cage system. We hope that he really likes it. We want a happy hamster.
The plumber worked for a long time and was never totally able to identify what was wrong with the pipes. We knew for sure that they were leaking but we could never positively determine exactly where they were leaking from. So he cut out a huge section of wall and took out a huge section of pipe including the trap and a T and replaced it all. Everything seems to be fixed now (except for the huge hole in the wall.) So we will hook the washer back up and do some laundry and see what we get. It will be really nice to be doing laundry again (we got used to it in that one day that we were able to do it before.) And I am sure that Josh and JoAnne would really like to come down and get some laundry done as well. They were expecting to be able to do laundry here and haven’t been able to do any since the machine got here. So this will be a big relief to them as well.
While all of this was going on, Phil Ayers arrived at the house. Tuesday is his day off of work and we never get to see Phil so he stopped by to visit. Today is the release date for The Matrix Reloaded so he ran out to Walmart while we were moving furniture to pick it up. I hadn’t seen it yet so I figured that we would watch it even though I hated The Matrix. Min liked it though and I am sure that she wanted to see the next installment so that worked out okay since I would never go get the movie on my own. Before we watched it, Phil helped us move some of the wine racks down into the basement. While he was down there, he managed to drop one of the bottles of wine and we ended up with Lakeshore red all over the floor. Glass and wine everywhere. Luckily, it was a cheap bottle of wine (Lakeshore rocks but it was a special cheap wine we had picked up) and so it wasn’t a big deal at all. Probably the cheapest bottle in the entire collection. But, the downside to cheap wine is that it doesn’t smell nearly as nice when it explodes all over the place. So we mopped that up and got all the glass that we could find.
So then we watched the movie. I thought it was okay. A little bit better than the first one but it looks a lot like a video game. So much of the movie is digitally created that it starts to loose the feel of real people. Some of the scenes looked just like scenes out of one of the 3D acceleration test programs and the video game Max Payne. The movie was just so loaded with effects that it hurts it, I think. Much like the first one, they were so concerned with getting cool effects into the movie that they forgot about everything else. This one was a little more interesting and better thought out, though, I think. So for those of you who liked the first one, I would think that you would like this one as well.
Kate arrived just after we had finished the movie and we all sat down to dinner at our new dining room table. We don’t have dining room chairs yet so we had to use a combination of folding chairs and computer chairs. But it worked. It is really nice to have a real table now. Min cooked up a storm all afternoon and served a wonderful dinner. She made Autumn Delight (or something like that.) It was basically pumpkin stew served in the hollowed out pumpkin. She will probably never serve it again inside the pumpkin as that was way too much effort. The stew was really good. There were a couple of surprise chunks of ginger in it that Phil and I were lucky enough to get. That really surpised us. Min also made a salad and we had bread too. It was all very delicious. We also had grape pie from our recent outing to Naples so we had that for dessert. After dinner, we watched the first three episodes of Father Ted: Series I. Neither Phil or Kate had ever seen Father Ted so we told them that they just had to see it. They thought that it was really funny. None of us could stay up very late though. Everyone has a busy day tomorrow. I haven’t been lively all evening. I was up way too early in the morning for me and I have been exhausted ever since I was halfway through the Microsoft show. I was ready to go to bed somewhere around 1:00 pm! That is pretty unusual for me.