Sheep Guarding Llama

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.

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.