Sheep Guarding Llama

The “boys” slept better last night and I woke up with Dexter sharing my pillow and Oreo snuggled against my leg. This is the upside to having multiple dogs. They do get along very well.

At 11:45 we went over to the Omega Grill and met dad, aunt Sharon, uncle Leo, Aunt Betty and cousin Paula Jean for lunch. Paula Jean and Aunt Betty are returning to Ohio this afternoon.

Dominica and I had to cut lunch a little short so that we could drive up to East Rochester and drop off the Mazda PR5 at Vincent Mazda so that they can fix the back hatch this week. Then we headed on to the Rochester Amtrak station so that I could catch the train to New York.

On our way out of the house we ended up talking to a real estate agent who was having open houses in two of the other units in our complex. She said that she was getting a lot of interest in our place because we have the only ranch and everyone is looking for a ranch which is very encouraging to hear from someone on the buying and not on the selling end of things. We are very hopeful to be able to move the house over the next month. It would just be a huge relief to have that out of the way. Now if we could just get the Mazda PR5 sold we would be in really great shape.

The 1:52 afternoon train to New York didn’t come through the station until 3:50 or so. That wasn’t a good sign. My train was supposed to be the 4:17 and if the 1:52 was running that late there was very little chance of my train being on time.

Dominica waited at the station with me until around 4:45 then she headed back to Geneseo. My train didn’t arrive until 5:20. We have been worried about the train being late every since I got the ticket last week because it is scheduled to arrive at Penn Station in Manhattan at 11:45 tonight and the last New Jersey Transit train out on the North East Corridor leaves around 1:30 meaning that if the train comes in two hours late that I will be stuck in the station until the morning trains start running. So we hope that either I make it early enough to catch the NJ Transit or that the train is so late that I get to spend the night on the Amtrak line and can take the morning train just as I arrive.

I got dinner on the train on the leg from Rochester to Syracuse. I got a cheese pizza, some chips and a scotch. The pizza was just microwave fare but was quite tasty. The convenience of getting to eat on the train is awesome. This is my first time taking advantage of that options but I think that I will do it more often. It is quite the time saver.

As we arrived in Rome the conductor informed us that Rome is the home of the world’s first commercial cheese factory, home of the cheese museum and is known as the “Copper City”. I had no idea. He also reminded us that Utica has one of the most beautiful train stations in New York.

I was all prepared for this train trip. I brought seven episodes of the second season of Magnum P.I. and The Perfect Score to watch during the trip. The time just flies by. And to make the trip even better I remembered to get my GPS set up and running right from the get go. The best part is that I now have the Motorola Q on the train so I have access to email while traveling – a very nice upgrade.

Today, while studying the Amtrak and Via train routes available, Dominica and I discovered that it is possible to take the train out of New York up the north east coast of New England, hop the ferry in Portland, Maine to Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, take the Via line up to the north tip of Nova Scotia to North Syndey where we could catch another ferry over to the main island of Newfoundland where another train would take us all of the way across the island to St. John’s the main city there. We have been wanting to go there for a long time and taking a train seems like it would be a really cool way to do the trip.

I had the good fortune to manage to have my seat to myself for the whole trip down to Manhattan. That was awesome. You get space to spread out. Lots of people lay down and sleep. I just like having the extra space. Then I can sit my bag beside me and be able to easily get to all of my stuff while traveling.

Amtrak managed to make up some serious time on the trip down. I don’t know how they did it but it is awesome to know that I don’t have to sleep in Penn Station tonight. That was going to be awful.

Towards the end of the trip I stopped back at the snack car to grab an omelette and cheese bagle and a beer. It is great to be able to get food whenever you want while traveling. Even driving you don’t get this type of convenience.

I watched The Perfect Score which is a little known but recent movie about a half dozen high school students in a cast lead by the awesome Scarlotte Johansen and Chris Evans who attempt to steal the answers to the SAT test. There is definitely a reason that the movie is barely known. It was very lackluster. Whatchable but far from being anything special. And they were really foolish not to push it as being a Johansen film. I didn’t know that she was in it until after we had bought it. The actors were fine for the movie but the script was pretty rough. I wouldn’t make a point of trying to see it.

I got back to New Brunswick and grabbed a taxi to the apartment. It was about 2:00 am when I got home. I was not ready to fall asleep so I stayed up for about an hour before going to bed. While I was at the computer I had a run in with a centipede that was living beneath the computer desk. I hate leaving the apartment because this always happens when I get back. This time the centipede made a run for it before I could react and made it up the curtains and managed to hide for the rest of the night. So, for the first time since we moved in here, we have a centipede that we didn’t manage to kill “the first time” but I will be on the lookout for it for sure.

It was a rough night for sleeping with the two dogs. Dexter is still not feeling well from being drugged for his drive yesterday. He can get really restless at night and make it very difficult to actually get some sleep.

We got up “early” this morning to go to breakfast with dad and his cousin Paula Jean and my Great Aunt Betty. We met them over at the Omega and hung out for a couple of hours.

After breakfast Dominica and I went to Walmart and did some quick shopping. We got a few supplies that we needed as well as the DVDs of She’s the Man and The Perfect Score. Then we returned home and spent about an hour at the house in Geneseo before driving down to Leicester to go to Sara’s graduation party. We arrived around 1:00 and did a little helping with the setup for the party.

We stayed at the party until almost 10:00. Then Dominica and I drove back to Geneseo. We stopped at Pizza Paul’s on Main Street and grabbed a few slices to go and went to the house.

We took the opportunity to use the theatre to watch She’s the Man with Amanda Bynes. It was cute – not as good as we had hoped that it would be but it wasn’t bad. Definitely nothing too special. There were some very funny parts and Amanda Bynes is always really good.

After the movie it was time for bed. Tomorrow is going to be a long day. We are meeting the family for an early lunch and then I am spending the day on the train going back to New Jersey. Dominica is spending the week in Geneseo getting the house as ready as possible to sell while taking care of the dogs. She will have a busy week. She going out to Frankfort or Saturday night and then is probably coming to New Jersey on Monday.

Today is the busy day for the week. Dominica’s alarm went off at 5:10 this morning and surprisingly she managed to get herself right up and out of bed. I slept, sort of, for another fourty minutes before having to get up to load her car. We use every opportunity of going in and out of New Jersey to keep anything valuable from accruing in our apartment so the server that I had been working on this week is returning to New York. She is not meeting her parents in Scranton until 10:00 but because of pending rush hour traffic she has to leave exceptionally early to make sure that she makes it on time. So she was out the door by around 6:15.

Since I was up I decided to just get ready and go into work. I don’t have to be in early this morning but why waste being awake? I got to work nice and early and ended up having plenty of stuff to work on.

Dominica ended up getting to Scranton so early that she drove on up to Great Bend, Pennsylvania to meet her parents there. She could have met them much farther north but they didn’t have their cell phone on and she was unable to coordinate with them.

We decided that we want to get the Hillcrest Home at the Heights of Lebanon so the plan is that I am going to drive out there today during lunch to put down the initial deposit on the house. We had hoped that a smaller Crestmont II would have been available but there isn’t going to be one of those for a year and they are not even sure that that will happen since one has to fall through before any will be available so we decided to just go with the Hillcrest. The Hillcrest is more expensive but it is available a year sooner (that is a lot of rent to be lost during that time), has 400 square feet of additional living space, has an awesome theatre room that we expect will roughly rival that of our theatre in Geneseo and has an awesome view of the Raritan Valley.

The Washington Post talks about a survey of bloggers and determines that the average blogger is a fourteen year old girl writing about her cat. I think that they may have missed something in their survey though. I would be interested to find out their definition of “blogger” as they might be surveying a huge number of one time or short term bloggers and not the real, regular bloggers who right more than three posts and do so for an extended period of time. It is like saying that you interviewed a “writer” just to find out that it was a sixth grader who wrote an essay for English class or interviewing a “automobile mechanic” and discover that it is a teenager who works only on his own car and just changes the oil himself.

During my lunch break I drove west to Lebanon and bought the house – or at least I made the first deposit on the house. Thus the process starts. We are hoping to be into the house around November 15th of this year. Just about perfect timing, I would say, for us. That will give us time to relax some before actually moving plus time to sell our house in Geneseo and get that all squared away. We are hoping to have the money from that sale to put into the down payment on the house in Lebanon. We don’t need it so we are okay but it would really be nice.

After dealing with the house I took a quick drive to the south to see Round Valley State Park that we will be living directly against. I didn’t realize how close we are and we will be living within walking distance of the park. The park has the state’s deepest lake so we could even go boating there, in theory. It looks like there will be nice walking trails there.

I drove downtown and had a quick lunch at the luncheonette there. The food was really good and boy was it cheap. We are going to enjoy living out in the country. I am all ready starting to feel like one of the locals. We have been there two days in a row.

The rains from the tropical depression in the Atlantic hit us today as we had expected. Who would have guessed that on a day when I am going to be driving back to Geneseo that there would be torrential rains? Certainly not I.

Everyone at the office covered my late evening duties for me so that I could get onto the road as soon as possible. I left right about at 5:00 to head for Geneseo. The rain was heavy and it caused traffic to become really bad out on the expressway so I decided to take the opportunity to get some food without wasting any valuable drive time so I pulled off the expressway in Lebanon. The little General Store where I had hoped to eat again was closed for the evening so I went out on to NJ22 and stopped and the Bagelsmith and got a sandwich for right away and one for the road. It is nice being able to stop at all these local little restaurants and check them out knowing that in not too long we will be living here and these will be our local haunts, most likely.

The drive home was pretty good. I stopped at exit 299 on US80 (this is the same stop where I pulled over on my way back to Geneseo when they called to tell me that my job really was starting and that I needed to return to New Jersey) and fueled the car (mid-grade – ouch!) and felt that it was safe enough to put the top down to enjoy some fresh air while I drove the rest of the way. The rest of the trip went quickly and uneventfully. I pulled into the house in Geneseo just after 10:30. Boy is it ever nice to not have to arrive after midnight for a change. That makes a huge difference for how I feel when I arrive. Even so it was pretty much time for bed when I pulled in.

Today is my “work from home” day for the week. I love my work from home days because they give me a good opportunity to catch up on some sleep since I don’t have that long commute that I can just sleep through. Oreo really appreciates it too. I could tell that he was happy this morning when I didn’t get up and just hung out in bed.

I worked until almost noon when Dominica and I drove the 330 out to Lebanon, New Jersey to take a look at the Heights of Lebanon townhomes that we had driven out to see on Monday evening. We spent a good hour or more looking at the site plans and walking through the partially finished homes. We were pretty impressed and are leaning towards getting one of these homes. They are less expensive than anything else that we have been looking at and we are really happy with the area.

After looking at the townhomes we drove downtown to see what the village was like. We ate lunch at the Fox and Hound Tavern at the Lebanon Inn. The food was really good and we would like living right down the street from there. We then walked down to the local General Store / Luncheonette to get ice cream and see what that place was like. They serve a really inexpensive breakfast all day long which is a great selling point to anything nearby.

After lunch we returned to North Brunswick. Going both directions we tried out the new shortcut that I had learned about the other day and managed to shave several minutes off of each direction.

Dominica went over to the laundromat this evening and did several loads of laundry. She had been intending to have done laundry over the weekend in Geneseo but then realized that with me returning on the train and her coming back in the BMW that we would not have enough space to bring the clothes back down to New Jersey. So she had to do the laundry in a panic today.

While she was out I watched The Girl Next Door which I thought was okay. Dominica liked it a bit more than I had but it wasn’t bad.

We actually managed to get to bed early tonight. Tomorrow is going to be a long, busy day. Dominica has to get up at 5:10 in the morning so that she can drive out to Scranton and meet her family as they drive down to the beach on Topsail Island in North Carolina. She is meeting them to pick up Dexter so that he can spend the week with her in Geneseo playing with Oreo instead of going down to the beach. He hates traveling in the car. So he will have fun with Oreo for a week. They are buddies. Dominica is spending the whole week in Geneseo getting the house ready to sell. I am moving the Vonage phone back up there for the week so anyone who needs her should be able to reach her on the Geneseo line.

New Years Announcement: Scott and Dominica are NOT hosting the New Year’s Party this year.

A Carnival cruise ship off of Florida last night, Christened only a month ago by – of all people – Martha Stewart listed severly almost sending a large number of passengers into the sea on a night when the ship was scheduled to be showing Titanic. What! How do things like this happen? I understand cruise ships sinking, but Martha Stewart Christening a ship? That is just crazy. Who lets a felon Christen a cruise ship and who thinks that that qualifies as “good luck”?

After a ton of work, all of the SGL Dailies from 2005 have been moved to the WordPress database system. Or at least I think that all of them have been moved over. Now on to 2004. We are on the home stretch. In fact, a good chunk of 2004 got moved over today as well.

Today was rather uneventful. Tomorrow I plan to “work from home” and Min and I hope to use the opportunity to take the convertible up to Lebanon to take a good look at those condos. We are very hopeful. So far they are the most promising. And they are really well placed for people coming to visit us from Upstate New York because they are only about twenty minutes from Easton, Pennsylvania so it isn’t too long of a drive down from Ithaca (under three hours) or Geneseo (just over four.) That is a really nice feature but to still have the train station right there. A little investigating into the train schedule told us, though, that the train doesn’t run on the weekends out that far so we couldn’t use the onsite depot to go in to the city on a Saturday or Sunday which is really too bad but on the weekends we would have to take a short drive out to the Raritan Train Station about ten minutes away and catch the train from there. But for commuting during the week the train schedule us just fine.

Speaking of trains, I have a ticket for Amtrak’s 4:17 pm Empire Service train from Rochester to Penn Station in Manhattan. Dominica is planning to drop me off at the station on Sunday afternoon so that I can return to New Jersey from back home without needing to take an extra car. It is a long train ride but the trains are comfortable and I plan to have my laptop and a few DVDs of Magnum P.I. and a few other things that I want to get caught up on. And I can work on a lot of different projects on the train. And I will have my GPS so I can watch the map scroll by – I am easily entertained.

On my way home tonight I attempted to take some backroads to make the drive go faster according to a guy that I work with who lives very close to me in South Brunswick. Unfortunately at one point in Somerset I would have gotten stuck in a big line of stopped traffic so I started trying to work my own way through the backroads in the middle of nowhere and managed to get myself completely lost. I had to call Dominica and have her figure out where I was and get me back to the labeled roads. Oops. So that didn’t end up being faster.

I got home and was really hungry so we went out to Tanjore for dinner. They were really busy tonight and understaffed. But the food was awesome as always. We are really going to miss not living right down the street from them. There is very little in restaurant options in Lebanon or shopping options. It is very rural and we will have to do without a lot of conveniences. But, most likely, it would force us to live less expensively and healthier.

After dinner we came home and Dominica spent the evening playing her new video game Keepsake from The Adventure Game Company. She bought it yesterday while she was out shopping. She also bought new glasses and prescription sunglasses yesterday so that she could have sunglasses to wear while driving the convertible. She is completely addicted to her new game and has been playing it a ton the last two days.