Sheep Guarding Llama

I was not looking forward to getting up this morning. It is too hot and I had to be up at 5:30 to get to work on time. I thought that that was going to make my commute nice but no, horrible traffic this morning and it took me forever to get in. And that bad traffic was all in the South Bound Brook area. A sign? Perhaps.

Dominica decided to come up and meet me for a quick fast food lunch so that we could look at the condos at Birch Glen today. She is beginning to learn her way around the area so she feels that she can drive up there on her own. All of this home shopping is fun yet stressful. We want to be ready so that we don’t have to stay in an apartment any longer than necessary but we really want to be able to sell the house in Geneseo first too. It is hard to coordinate. And now we have to deal with selling a car too which adds extra complication although I expect that that will not be all that bad.

I was listening to tons of awful music on the Podsafe Music Network (attempting to filter out the good stuff for the show) and thinking of so much bad music made me remember SnMnMnM, the horrible Rochester band that Andy used to live with around 1998. Apparently they moved to Los Angeles and are now in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. I can’t believe that they are still together as a band. They were so awful it was unbelievable. I can’t believe that they have a half decent looking website (these were absolutely not computer literate people and it is surprising that they have heard about the Internet.)

Between yesterday and today I managed to make it through all of the back postings on the Podsafe Music Network for July and now I am working my way back through June. Do you see all of the hard work that I put in to make the SGL Podcast awesome?

It was a little after one o’clock when I finally made it down to Piscataway to meet Dominica to look at the townhomes there at Birch Glen. It is an older development with only a few buildings left to sell which makes it a lot less attractive to us. The prices go up and the selection goes way down as it near the end and the buying is always under pressure and we don’t need to do that now. The place was okay but lacked enough that we are just going to let it go and look elsewhere. It is on the pricey side of things for us. It offers a ton of space but we really don’t need that much space so it is a waste of money for us. We don’t really entertain in our home here and are not very likely to do so for quite some time so it seems like a poor way to be spending our money right now. So back to searching again. We are still excited about the placed in Lebanon that we hope to look at on Thursday.

After looking at the condos we stopped in Middlesex and grabbed a quick bite at McDonald’s there for lunch. I didn’t have much time as Cedar had been closed and I had to drive all over the place to get to the condos. Not what I needed to deal with on my lunch break.

Sometimes it takes a long time to find web sites that are talking about SGL but here is a post from January of 2005 from Record Label No Tie Generation.

SGL is no longer hosting the Llama of the Month like we used to but we did find some places that still are like: Morgenstern Ranch.

I got home and Dominica and I went out to the Omega for some dinner. They have been having Salmon Cakes on special there recently (seafood cakes are a major food item on the mid-Atlantic portion of the Eastern Seaboard) which are really awesome so I have been getting those.

After dinner Dominica spent the evening working on her database design homework. She is really enjoying that class and seems to be learning a lot from it too.

It is a hot one today. We are expecting 100 degrees in the shade. Ouch. I really wish that we had a place that wasn’t so hot as the apartment. The air conditioning is running around the clock and we have two fans blowing on us while we sleep to keep us as cool as possible. It is in the high 70’s in the apartment even so. Every windows is covered all day long to keep the sunlight from heating the house any more than necessary. When I use my computer I have a fan there to blow on me as well. It is seriously hot.

I made it out the door a little on the early side this morning. Dominica is keeping the convertible to herself so I am just driving the “6” to work. Ho hum. How sad not to have a convertible to drive to work.

Today at work I discovered that I am able to listen to music from the Podsafe Music Network so I am able to don my headphones and audition music for the SGL Podcast. That is awesome – a great use of my time sitting at the desk all day.

Bob Winans had been planning on driving down first thing this morning and meeting us for lunch today but he wasn’t feeling really well and held off on his driving plans until this afternoon. He is coming down so that he and Dominica can go to look at the condominiums in South Bound Brook. We need an outside opinion to keep us sane. It is easy to go crazy when thinking about spending that kind of money. There are just so many variables.

Bob ended up leaving around noon which got him to my office at 3:15. That confirms my theory that from work to Ithaca is three and a quarter hours of drive time. Not too bad. Easy enough to get back and forth when you want to. Not far enough to be a real pain.

Bob arrived and came right to the office since it is so easy to find. He couldn’t come past security so I walked out to the road and met him in the one hundred degree heat with no shade and no clouds. Ugh. We sat in his car for about fifteen minutes before Dominica arrived. Then the two of them headed off to South Bound Brook to look at the condo and I returned to work. It is tough paying the bills.

Bob liked the condo and agreed with us that it was a good price for the amount of space and amenities. But he got a chance to meet the building company and I don’t think that he was impressed. The builder had promised us on Saturday that the electrician would be calling us today to tell us how they would be able to meet out wiring needs but he never called. I called in to the builder to see if he was at the office today since it was so hot I figured that maybe they were not working today. They said that he was in but that he was not calling me because they were not confident that their electrician could do basic network wiring. Now, for those who are not aware, basic network wiring is far simpler than basic telephone wiring or regular electrical wiring. It is also far safer because it does not carry the moderate voltages of a telephone ring signal. Network wiring is really the most rudimentary wiring work that one can perform and I am perfectly capable of doing it myself as is Dominica or my cousing Jeremy who helped do it for T-Mobile and for the school in Castile. But K. Hovnanian doesn’t think that their electrician is up to the task which basically means that they don’t have the slightest confidence in him at all and that if there is a fire or an electricution at Canal Crossing that they will most likely be legally culpable since they were aware that the electrician was completely unqualified to be touching the wiring. They were rude and definitely claimed that their buildings were shoddy construction and that they didn’t care in the least. They also said that there was no customization available and that they were not that kind of builder and they would have to check with a manager (who I am sure will call me back right away just like the electrician) to see if some elementary wiring changes would even be allowed if the electrician could pull it off. Basically they said, “We build cheap, crappy apartments for easily duped first time homebuyers who don’t know any better.”

But there is good news, it is not all bad. Believe it or not. While Bob and Dominica were in the Raritan at Canal Crossing looking at the upstairs loft they got into a conversation with a fellow home buyer who told them about some condos buying built in Lebanon, New Jersey that we needed to go look at. They said that they were less expensive, closer for me to get to work, closer to a train station and in a much better (read: safer) neighbourhood. It sounded interesting so we are planning on taking a look at that.

It wasn’t quite the end of day when Bob and Dominica finished looking at the Canal Crossing townhomes so they made a quick run over to Birch Glen that we had tried to look at yesterday while we were driving around the area but they had closed early and we didn’t get to see the model. Well, it turned out that they had closed early yesterday because of a medical emergency and they were closed today as well so we will have to wait to look at those. We don’t think that they are going to meet our needs but we definitely wanted to check them out. They are very attractive and look like a nice community. The only thing is that they are not walking distance to the train station so they have a huge negative over a lot of other potiential locations. If Dominica or I were to always work in New Jersey they might work out great but we know that almost all work is in Manhattan so planning for the commute is rather important, we feel.

Since they were still in the area they called me to see if I could get out of work on the early side. I had just finished putting in a regular, full day so I drove down to Warren and met them for some Thai at our regular place. Bob wasn’t feeling all that well and had decided that he wasn’t going to stay in New Jersey but was going to return to Ithaca this evening. So we had dinner and hung out for a little bit before he left. It is too bad that after all of that driving it was for a condo that we had to decide against and he never even got to see our apartment or even the city that we live in right now. Josh remains that only person who has made it to our apartment so far. Weird.

Before he left Bob dropped off a number of computers for me. He has three desktops that are likely to work really well down at the school in Castile (I guess that is UP at the school in Castile these days.) He dropped off a Celeron 466, Pentium III 500 and Pentium III 600 machine as well as an old Pentium laptop that we might be able to get to do something. Maybe. We will see. He was just going to through it out so it is worth investigating I guess. One monitor for the school as well. The school is really going to have a ton of new stuff come the new school year. Probably twice as many computers as they had last year and last year was quite a shock for them.

Bob took off from Warren and Dominica and I decided to run out to Lebanon to look to see if we could find the contruction going on on those condos that we had heard about. We didn’t really know where Lebanon is so we ended up doing a bit of exploring which is fun when you are on country roads in the BMW. There was a lot of nice scenary out there. It took us a while but we finally found the village of Lebanon, New Jersey. It is a cute, quaint little town. We drove down Maint Street and really liked the village. It took a little while but we found the condos as they were right by the train station. There are no models yet but several buildings are framed and sided. The builder is Kaplan and I have heard good things about them from people at work so that is a much better start than the place in South Bound Brook had. The places are definitely not as fancy looking but the price is right and it looks like the location would be amazing. The condo property literally touches the train station! How handy can you get? The sales office won’t be open until Thursday so we are left wondering a number of things but we feel that these units are a real consideration. Less expensive, plenty to choose from, better access to my work and to the train station, really nice village instead of bordering a slum, maybe lower taxes, etc. It is a funny location but it could be neat.

From there we went home. Oreo was very happy to see us when we got back. He couldn’t travel today because of the heat. I took him out and fed him his dinner. We went online and did a little research on the condos and got some solid prices, floor plans, etc. We aren’t sure that they will meet our needs. The biggest problem is that they have no three bedroom units but they do have two bedroom units with either two and a half or three bathrooms which is really nice for a two bedroom and they mostly have dual “recreation” spaces which are generally a living room as well as a basement den that just might work as a theatre which would be a huge bonus.

We got to do very little research before it was time for bed. I have to be in the office early tomorrow so I can’t stay up late at all tonight. I have to be up at five thirty in the morning.

We both slept in way too much this morning. It was after nine thirty when I finally pulled myself out of bed and Dominica was probably half an hour after me. We were up for about an hour when Andy and I got on the phone to do some work and Dominica decided to go to sleep on the futon in the living room with Oreo and the two of them slept for another two hours while Andy and I talked on the phone. So Dominica got plenty of sleep today.

When Andy and I got off of the phone it was after one in the afternoon and Dominica was still asleep. I woke her up and we got ready to face the day and around two we went out to the Omega for some breakfast, lunch or whatever. Our plan had been to work on her homework while we were there as she has a major assignment due tonight but instead we spent the whole time talking about the condo that we are interested in. We are really upset about the whole situation and really love the condo but are really scared of the direputable builders and the potentially poor community that is developing there. There are too many unknowns around the whole Canal Crossings development with the potential for a really bad commercial space to be put in right in the middle of the condos, it is all ready not in the best of neighbourhoods and apparently the people living there are not very afluent which could mean that the complex is headed for rapid deterioration. It is such a huge decision that it is really taking up a lot of mental energy.

After lunch we decided to take the 330 out and drive up to the Somerset and South Bound Brook areas and drive around to get a feel for the region to find out what we think of the surroundings. We tried calling both of our parents to see if any of them would be able to come down to take a look at the condo to get an outside opinion on the whole thing. It is really tough only having a first person perspective and being as isolated as we are down here makes it really tough to get any outside perspective. Dominica thought of calling Bob so she called him and he, miraculously, is able to come down tomorrow to look at the place with Dominica while I am at work. He is just in the process of closing on his own house in Ithaca in about a week and is getting married in about seven weeks so he is really busy this summer but is taking the time out of his schedule to come down and give us an opinion on the condo.

We spent a couple of hours driving around getting to know the area around South Bound Brook. Overall it isn’t had but the area right around the condos is not the best. It gets pretty poor right there and Bound Brook itself is exceptionally poor and run down. That is not encouraging. So really the excursion was a break even, I think.

We came home and Dominica spent the rest of the afternoon and all of the evening working on her major assignment for her data and network communications class. She is really frustrated and disappointed in this class as they are covering almost nothing about data and networking which is why she is paying for the class but instead is using some generic networking topics as the basis for some really random business stuff but not in depth like you would expect from a business class nor is any of the business stuff being taught – they are just assuming that she will know how to do a bunch of this stuff that she has never even heard of before which is making this extrememly tough. I know how hard of a time I always have whenever I have to do really abstract assignments for classes. But the worst part is that this class is taking a huge amount of her mental energies when she is getting very little value out of it. It isn’t meeting her need to understand computer networking and she will have to do a ton of work on her own now because she is not prepared for what she will have to do in the workplace nor is she prepared for future classes. This is a perfect example of where the collegiate system so easily completely fails. Worthless. At least her database class is really good and she is learning a lot and being encouraged to learn more and is getting interested in the topic. The upside to the bad class is that the stuff that they are making Dominica do, even tough it is completely outside of the scope of the class, is material that Dominica really does need to learn and it is good that she has to do it. But considering that she has me as a resource it is amazing that other students who are on their own are able to do this stuff with no one to turn to for guidance.

Dominica got her project completed just before midnight, when it was due, and turned it in. Once she had turned it in it automatically unlocks the area so that she can see what other students have turned in so that she can compare her work. The good news is that she was the only students who was able to complete the project. I guess we were right wondering how anyone is supposed to do this who doesn’t have me as a resource (or some other IT business professional – not and IT technical professional but someone with business experience.) The only people who can get through this class are people with outside assistance or enough knowledge to make the class useless anyway. We are pretty sure that they got a professor for cheap from a different discipline and he is not aware of the subject matter and is skirting the issue trying to get the class to resemble a networking class as much as possible. This has become a really common occurrance in academia these days.

While Dominica was wrapping up her homework I managed to squeak out a new SGL Podcast. Check it out.

I originally wrote all of today’s post and just before I saved it my web browser, which was using Adobe Flash, crashed on a Flash page and took all of the day’s update with it with no way to recover it. I could ever get a shot of the page because it died that much. It was very sad as it takes a long time to write the updates and especially today when there was so much going on that I had “all ready told you about” and now I have to recreate it again. I am sad. (Insert imaginary pouty face here.)

This morning I was up at 7:30. Nice and early. I got mostly ready to leave the house before Dominica even got out of bed. At 9:30 I had to do some work for the office before we could leave but it didn’t take very much time and we were out the door before 10:00 to head down to Princeton BMW in Princeton, New Jersey to get our new to us BMW 300cic convertible.

It took us one or two hours to go through the entire car buying process but it was a surprisingly pleasurable process and I am very impressed by the entire BMW experience so far. It turns out that because we are buying a certified BMW that is still under the original warranty that we not only get the remainder of the original warranty but we also get it extended out to 100,000 miles as well as, far a small fee, getting all of the maintenance for the car covered out to 100,000 miles. Let that sink in – all of the maintenance on the car included the oil changes is covered for another 84,000 miles! That is amazing. That makes it so easy to budget the automotive expenses for the next several years. I have never had anything like that before. We were also very pleased that we ended up getting a really good rate on the financing as well. Half a percent better than we had been expecting. The dealer even installed an auxillery jack connected to the stereo for us for free that allows us to plug our MP3 players into the car’s stereo without having to have any weird car adapter or going through the radio or something like that. And the MP3 player can be safely stowed away and not just sitting out in the car. We also found out that the car has a six disc CD changer in the trunk. We had no idea.

Before we left the showroom the salesman who sold us the car went out to the car with us and walked us through how to do everything with the car from the blinkers, windshield wipers and radio controllers to washing, fuel and maintenance instructions. I have never had a car dealer do anything like this before. It was awesome.

Dominica is still afraid to drive the 330cic so I drove it back to North Brunswick where we dropped off the PR5 and Oreo at the apartment and then drove up to South Bound Brook to look at the condo that we are really interested in up there. We ended up spending an hour or two at the condos looking and talking to the salespeople. They had two models open for us to look at. One was a “Delaware” two bedroom unit and one was the “Raritan” three bedroom unit. We really liked both of them but really fell that the two bedroom units are just not big enough for us in the near future and are not a good investment since we would probably have to sell it and move to a bigger place in not too long. The Raritan not only has an extra bedroom but also has a space where we could put in a small home theatre (not like Geneseo but enough to get by for the time being whereas most places that we have looked into wouldn’t have any capability to have anything like that at all.) It has a living room, dining room, eat in kitchen and a loft/den so there is a lot of living space. It is a three bedroom, two and a half bath. Just huge. Almost 2100 square feet. Plus it has an attic where we could actually store some stuff. That is really, really handy for people like us. Dad will appreciate that. The complex is dog friendly, affordable and has easy access to an area to walk Oreo which he will really appreciate. We were really excited about the whole place. Unfortunately they are almost all built and almost everything has been sold so if we are going to get a place there we are going to have to move very quickly on it which is very stressful.

Unfortnately our good feelings about the place evaporated quickly once we started asking about option details and needing to find out what they were supplying as data ports in the condos. It turns out that we opened a can of worms and discovered that the builder was not the high end home builder that they were pretending to be. They had been going on and on about the awesome high end data options that they offered and how most of the people who were buying the houses were IT professions who demanded the very latest in technology. But it turns out that they had never heard of the concept of having a house wired for data and all they were doing is putting in a cable (and by cable I mean the kind you use to watch television) running from the garage to the living room so that you could plug in your television and/or modem. Oh, the technology! It is bad enough not to do data ports standard but to not even offer them, know what they are or believe that any person would ever use them is a bit ridiculous. Now I am aware that I am from rural New York where there tends to be a bit more sophistication in the average home buyer or renter than in heavily popularted New Jersey but I would have though that since in rural Upstate New York having data ports standard in mid range rentals built almost ten years ago was standard that having them as at least an option that could be discussed and having sales people that could, at the very least, say that they weren’t offered when buying almost half million dollar homes in New Jersey today would be expected. This opened our eyes to a lot of things that were going on like the misleading descriptions of the services that they were offering (since they were claiming that these homes were “wired for fibre” but have no data ports suddenly being wired for fibre takes on a whole new meaning since my car is just as “wired for fibre” as those homes are), misleading descriptions of the resident population who, evidently, do not even have a modicum of data networking in their homes and have to have everything wireless to have anything at all (attention would be war drivers: huge, non-serious and completely wireless population to exploit with wireless networks extending to commercial, residential and state park land heavily wooded and protected!!!), and once called on it, description of the high integrity of the builders themselves. This last move by the salesperson caused me to do some Internet research into the reputation of Matzel & Mumford, a local operating division of the huge Fortune 100 builder K. Hovnanian. What I found was very discouraging. No one anywhere had anything positive to say about the company but there was an awful lot of really awful stuff. Matzel and Mumford is involved in a major legal tangle on the New Jersey coast where they are caught in a conflict of interest with a city council where the city council, for reasons that you can only imagine, gave complete control over an area to Matzel and Mumford and the company decided to enact New Jersey’s emminent domain law and stole the homes of a number of senior citizens so that they could be developed into condominiums. Not the kind of integrity that I was hoping for. More along the lines of big, evil corporation with no soul.

So we are really depressed. We love the condo and we don’t know of anything that is going to compete with it both from a cost and from a location standpoint but we really are concerned about doing business with a massively unethical builder – not to mention obviously not very competent from a wiring or sales perspective. (One of the salespeople even decided to try to trick me by telling me that all of the data and phone cables were wired directly into the circuit breakers!! – Um, can you say lawsuit?) We don’t know what we are going to do at this point. We are really upset and torn.

We went to the Omega and got a really late lunch. It wasn’t a happy lunch as we looked over the materials that we had picked up from the builder. We discovered some of the stuff that they were doing to confuse their own salespeople so that they would be more likely to mislead us through their own lack of knowledge of what they were selling. That made me feel worse about having been so mad with the salespeople but even more mad at the builder as it really showed how much forethought they had put into the whole thing. I would have said that the salespeople could not be blamed for the misdirection but they are the company’s representatives and they didn’t get a hold of anyone with more definitive knowledge for us (remember that this is a high pressure sales situation because these units are selling fast and there were only two left that we were really interested in and one of those two sold today as it was!!) but only offered to get a hold of someone in a few days when there might not be any units left to even discuss! They couldn’t even tell us what was installed in the model or in the unit that they had walked us through. And, in addition to being the company’s representatives, they didn’t take enough interest in their own jobs in know the basics of what they were selling and, and this is the clincher, the salesperson decided to stake her own credibility on the integrity of the parent company. Oops. Now no one has anything to stand on. Would that be the same parent company that told you that the data wiring was carrying 110 volts? Or the parent company that sent the elderly packing so new condos could go in with ocean views for those who could afford them? The one that made an illegal deal with the city council?

After lunch we went for a long drive in the new car. It had been raining while we were looking at the house so the top had been up. We packed Oreo into the car and headed east with no clear idea of where we were going to go. We started by driving out to Perth Amboy since neither of us had ever been out there before. Not the best area. Pretty much a slum, I would say. We drove down to the waterfront where there was a little public park and tons of people enjoying the warm weather (the sun was now out.) We drove down to the “scenic waterfront drive” and took the top down on the car. Oreo thought that that was the coolest thing ever. He got up and hung off the side of the car and looked at and smelled everything. He absolutely loved it. We drove down the water front all through the city and then on down to South Amboy across the bridge. With the car up to speed the dog was a little concerned about everything for about fifteen minutes but he calmed down and ended up having a great time.

From South Amboy we hopped onto NJ35 and headed south along the coast. Dominica couldn’t decide where she wanted to go so I decided that it was high time that went and saw Port Monmouth where my dad’s parents had lived during World War II. My grandfather had been a “consciencous objector” during the war and worked as an orderly, or something like that, in a military hospital there. My grandmother had lived there with him working as a receptionist or something along those lines in the same hospital. A year or two ago my grandmother managed to find some photographs of herself working at the hospital and we had talked about her time there. So I was the only person who knew where they had been. It must have only been a year ago, just before she died, because I think that we were talking about it because I had been doing some work in New Jersey for Wegmans and so she was talking about when they used to live in New Jersey.

So we drove down the coast and saw all of the little towns along there. It was a cool town. We took NJ36 out to the water and drove right along the beaches for a really long way. We met back up with NJ35 and drove that all of the way down through the intercoastal to Seaside Heights. It was a great drive and we discovered lots of really cool portions of the New Jersey coast. It is just wonderful to drive in a convertible by the ocean. I love that we live so close to the coast now. We can go to the ocean anytime that we want now.

While we were in Seaside Heights we decided to eat dinner at Rockafellas by the Seaside (which is technically in Ortley Beach.) (Funny that in Travel and Leaisure they mention this restaurant in “Driving Topless“.) It took over half an hour to get a seat in the completely back restaurant which we had expected, even though it was after nine in the evening, since the entire Jersey Show is packed for tourist season. The vegaquarian selection was incredibly weak considering the theme and location. The food was only so-so for the most part but the shrimp cakes were totally worth the wait and the bill. Delicious shrimp cakes done in a Maryland crab cake style (FYI: New Jersey crab cakes beat Marlyand crab cakes hands down anyday) with a hot Dijon-honey sauce. After that I was really happy that we had stopped even if the meal itself was even worth eating and Dominica ended up feeding her salmon to Oreo and I just threw mine out mostly.

The drive back didn’t take too long considering how many hours we put into the drive down but it was after midnight when we finally pulled back into the apartment. We are really happy with the car and are really excited to get to drive it everyday. It is too bad that what should have been such a happy day ended up being pretty upsetting in the grand scheme of things and instead of a great, relaxing drive it a was a necessary diversion and a chance to cool down.