Sheep Guarding Llama

When I finally pulled myself out of bed at eight this morning I was still very soar from the weekend but I needed to get up and get to work. It took me a while to get myself out of the house and I didn’t get into the office until just after ten! But it is a slow day today being a day with almost everyone on vacation and coming off of weekend with tomorrow being a holiday. My first awesome surprise of the day was that today is a short day for the stock exchange and that the market closes at one o’clock this afternoon so most everyone will be going home early. I wish someone told me these things ahead of time but at least it makes for a really nice surprise. A short day today and nothing tomorrow. That is awesome.

I did some catching up on HP classes today. It was a very slow day with the market only being open for half of a day – much less chance for things to go wrong. I love days like this. Days when you are sure you don’t want to go to work and then you get there and everything goes great and you can leave early. I managed to complete my Network Attached Storage and Advanced Network Administration Best Practices classes today.

Dominica was super tired and ended up sleeping in to the afternoon today! I am sure that Oreo appreciated that after his busy day yesterday. He was equally exhausted.

I was able to leave the office at three in the afternoon. That was great. Of all days today was a day when I really needed the opportunity to get home and get some rest.

As soon as I got home I grabbed Dominica and we ran down to Princeton to do some BMW shopping. They had three 330ci convertibles available for us to look at. One in silver, one in a weird mint green and one in a medium dark blue. We bought the dark blue one. Yup, you heard me right. We test drove and then purchased a 2004 330ci Sport Convertible. It is awesome. Only 16,000 miles. We aren’t sure when we will be picking it up yet but we are excited. Check out a silver BMW 330ci to see what it looks like.

When we went to test drive the car the saleman discovered that one of the guys who works at the dealer had been driving the car and had dropped it off at the lot, leaving his personal satellite radio in the car, with absolutely no gas left in it on a day when they knew four whole days in advance that we were going to be coming in to test drive that particular car that day. He was not happy. We took the car around the block and let Dominica drive so that she could get a feel for the car. Then we switched so that I could drive it the last little bit back to the dealer since I had only driven the 325 and not the 330. I went less than an exit before the gas was out of gas – on an uphill ramp to an overpass with no room to pull over. Oops. The guy had left less gas in the car than it would have taken to get to the very closest gas station. We had only gone maybe two miles at the most! The fumes in the tank should have gotten us farther than that. Luckily we had switched drivers because neither Dominica nor our salesman had ever driven a car that was out of gas before! (Those who know me know that I am used to the challenge.) I was able to take the car between neutral and drive and keep the engine turning over and getting power now and then just enough to get the car across the highway overpass and moving down the ramp to get onto US 1 to get us back to the dealership. It was tough merging with no acceleration and doing only twenty or less miles per hour but I did it. I would have driven on the shoulder but some construction equipment was parked there and took up the entire space. They eventually moved and I was able to get out of the way of traffic and just barely get us back to the dealer.

After buying the car we went to the restaurant Big Fish in Princeton for a celebratory dinner. The food was really good. We were both in the mood for fish so it worked out really well.

After dinner I was just exhausted. We came home and just crashed. Min finished watching Red Dwarf and then wrapped up Elizabethtown that we had started a few days ago.

No rest for the weary. We couldn’t bring ourselves to get up until just after eight and neither of us were feeling like we could drag our sorry butts out of bed at that point but we had to – there was just too much that had to be done today. The word of the day is “soar”. We did so much lifting, moving, cleaning, packing, organizing, etc. yesterday that we are seriously hurting.

There was more that had to be done this morning before we could leave because the house is going to be shown this week and we can’t have it being a mess. Se we started working on it right away today and put in about two more hours between the two of us getting the house into the best shape possible considering the amount of stuff that is still in the house.

I was loading the car while Dominica did the final carpet vacuuming when she called out of the garage crying. I ran into the house and discovered that Oreo who is a very nervous dog to begin with and who has separation anxiety and who gets extremely nervous under normal packing situations because he was abandoned by a family that moved to another country and who is afraid of the vacuum under the best circumstances and who had not wanted to go outside to pee yet today paniced and urinated on the white carpet from the back door all the way to the kitchen, on his pillow and on himself. When he panics like that he pees and runs and the same time so the devastation was immense. It was a swath maybe two to three feet wide and twenty to thirty feet long. It was simply unbelievable. We were both absolutely exhausted. We had thought that we were finally done for the weekend and were in a rush because we were all ready running late for getting down to Dominica’s aunt and uncle’s house in Waverly. It was just too much for Min.

I had her call her family to let them know that we would be later than we had anticipated and I set to work cleaning the floor. I had to scrub the carpeting with dad’s Bissell spot cleaner which took about an hour and a half of grueling work. Once Min talked to her sister for a little bit she calmed down and finished packing the car and then took the opportunity to do some minor stuff that helped get the house into better shape since there was only one spot cleaner between us. It took a huge chunk out of the day but we did manage to get the entire carpet cleaned and looking very good. That was exhausting. But boy are we glad that we went right at it and got it finished.

It was much later by the time we got to leave so we ran to McDonald’s and grabbed a quick lunch to eat on the way to Waverly. Once we were actually on the road we made good time going down to Waverly. It was around two in the afternoon when we arrived. We were really happy just to be able to get out of the car and relax for a while. We were going down to Waverly for an informal family reunion of Dominica’s mother’s family. Her eldest sister and her husband were in from Mission Viejo, California and no one has seen them in years so it was my chance to finally meet them and a number of other family members that I just haven’t had a chance to cross paths with. It was also the last chance that I will have to see Madeline and Emily more than a few minutes until Christmas time.

Oreo had an awesome time. There were probably forty people there and Dexter was there so they played and he ran around visiting with everyone. At one point some of the guys went out and played catch with a football in the yard and Oreo went out and chased the football between them. There were adults, not kids, so they were throwing the football a really long way. Oreo played with them for probably twenty to thirty minutes. Everyone had a great time just watching him. They couldn’t believe how fast he was and how long he would keep running. He was having so much fun. He would run so fast that if someone dropped the ball he would almost definitely beat them to it on the ground and they would have to fight him for it. By the time that they were done playing he was totally exhausted and ended up getting sick. I had to poor cold water all over him to cool him down. After that he didn’t move for the rest of the day.

Rain has apparently been neverending in the New York Southern Tier and today was no exception. A major downpour came in the middle of the afternoon – one of the heaviest rains that I have ever seen. It only lasted a few minutes but boy did it cool everything down. It blew away some temporary “party” structures that they had set up probably this morning. It may have only lasted five minutes but there was standing water everywhere when it finally subsided.

We stayed in Waverly until about six in the afternoon. We were the last to leave as we get the least opportunity to visit with everyone. The drive east along the Susquehana River to Binghamton and south into Pennsylvania was a real eye opener. We had been hearing rumours about the flooding but didn’t have any idea how bad it was. Up until this point I had only heard about lots of roads being closed – much of New Jersey was inaccessible but we hadn’t seen it, Herkimer County where Dominica’s family lives was under a state of emergency and had many roads closed and we had heard from John Stephens that his mother’s place in Owego, New York and been destroyed and that Lourdes Hospital where he works was evacuated and flooded and severly damaged but that was all that we had heard. Today we learned that US88 had had a bridge or culvert washed away and the highway was closed until they could rebuild. Two truck drivers died before anyone knew that the road was out. US86 (aka NY17) had definitely been under water in many places. I found out that the Village of Waverly had been under water but luckily Dominica’s aunt’s farm which sits directly on the river had not been damaged.

As we drove along US86 and then south on US81 the damage just continued and continued. All in all we heard that sixteen people died in the Binghamton region alone including the two truck drivers on US88 who died in Syndey. US86 runs right along the Susquehana and it was abundantly clear just how high the water had come. Mud was deposited several feet up the tree line. There were still businesses and vehicles under water. At one point we saw a full sized pickup truck with water up to its windows. And this is five days after the flood! There was water everywhere still but the mud showed how bad it had been. It is a wonder that the entire region hadn’t been destroyed. Just a few more feet of water would have done it. As it is the damage is pretty serious. Bob Crissman wrote about the flood a bit in his blog. Bob lives in Binghamton and is working over the summer at a Wendy’s in the city. His house sits very near the river but was not damaged although they were quite worried but the store where he and his wife works was flooded but survived. The whole region is a “you have to see it to believe it” kind of thing. I have never seen flooding like this before and I have seen the Genesee region under some pretty serious flooding (I was drove over the Avon bridge when water was flowing over the bridge) but that was nothing. We could see the mud on the sides of bridges and could tell that no one could have been crossing them.

Bob has supplied a number of links to images from the flood. Here are images from the Binghamton Flood on Wednesday, June 28th from the Press and Sun Bulletin. Here are images from Thursday, June 29th, also from the Press and Sun Bulletin. And then, finally, Friday, June 30th’s, images of the Binghamton Flood from the Press and Sun Bulletin.

The real devastation seemed to stretch from Waverly in the west (although I am sure that the river carried the disaster south into Sayre and on into Pennsylvania) to Binghamton and Kirkland in the east and then south again to Great Bend, Pennsylvania. We drove slowly through that area just trying to see as much as we could. It was really something.

We stopped, as usual, at the Waffle House in Clarke’s Summit, Pennsylvania and got some food on our way through. It is the best place to stop. The rest of the trip went pretty quickly and we got to the apartment in North Brunswick by around eleven. Late but not too late. Boy were we glad to be in. The apartment was way too warm from the air conditioning being off so we turned that on and didn’t go to bed until after one in the morning because it was way too warm.

Even though we were totally exhausted from the long drive last night Dominica and I had to get up around seven thirty this morning to get started on getting the house ready to sell. What a depressing project to be stuck doing at last minute’s notice after a long drive arriving late at night on a holiday weekend! We were not looking forward to today. Being tired going into it is going to make it extra difficult.

We managed to get a fair amount of work done right away in the morning. The house was a total disaster when we arrived as it has been for months. When I took the new position in New Jersey we had so much stuff that had to be done right away that everything just got stacked in the living room and the dining room and the office and left there. And both Dominica and I have been so busy whenever we have been in Geneseo that cleaning, packing, sorting, or whatever have been non-options. Now that is all catching up with us.

Sara and Jeremy came over around nine to help out with the project. Jeremy was sent out to work on the gardening and Sara did cleaning and DVD sorting and packing. One of the big things that we wanted to do was to empty the house of everything valuable that we could before people starting coming to look at the house. The CDs and DVDs were the big items that needed to be moved because they are easy to pocket and there are the type of things that a few could go missing and you wouldn’t be able to verify that for months or years – especially when we are moving three times probably this year. So Sara’s big job was to take the list of movies that we believed that we had and to go movie by movie on the list finding the movie in the basement and putting it into a box marking down what box it was going into. No small project!

I made a run to Walmart to get some necessary supplies for the moving, namely cleaning supplies and nineteen big plastic storage bins. I also picked up Failure to Launch which was on sale and the only interesting looking movie that released this week.

Shortly after Sara and Jeremy got started working dad came over with his “new” Mercury Grand Marquis that he purchased this week. The car is perfect for moving our stuff. What good timing. We were able to get his car loaded up almost immediately and he made a round so that we could load the car up again. Art and Danielle came over a little after eleven. They jumped in and helped with the house preparations. Danielle helped Min with projects upstairs and Art helped me downstairs. Art also changed all of the locks on the house as well as installed a handle on our screen door in the garage. If only we had so much nice stuff when we actually lived in the house!

Art, Danielle and Jeremy took off at one thirty to play some Call of Duty. Dad, Min, Sara and I did lunch at the Omega. All in all dad did three trips with his car loaded with stuff. That helped a lot. The garage would have been packed to capacity if he hadn’t been making runs back and forth.

At two our real estate agent came over to check out the house and get the paperwork in order so that we can sell it. She was very happy with the work that we were doing and felt that we were on the right track. She said that we should keep the theatre intact for the time being so that we could demo it for any prospective buyers who might want to buy the theatre with the house. So, as of today, the house is on the market for $174,900. The sign goes into the yard tomorrow.

Sara was the last one to go working until almost five. She managed to make it through the entire movie collection! What a relief that was. Dominica and I kept working until ten thirty. Then we decided that we were so exhausted that we needed to take a break so we took the one movie that wasn’t in the collection list yet and therefore wasn’t boxed, Failure to Launch and watched that in the theatre. It was very sad because there is a very real possibility that this will be the final movie that Dominica and I get to watch in the theatre together. We are really going to miss this theatre room. We don’t know if we will ever have an opportunity to have such a perfect room again. It was a major reason for us picking the townhouse that we did. The theatre is huge and a fourteen foot screen is just amazing. Now we don’t know what we will do. Apartments are not the best for home theatres. We might do something simple like getting the same LCD that dad has and going down to a small, compact system to get us by until we own a theatre space again. After twelve years of trying to get an amazing space like this we are giving it up after having it for less than two years. 🙁

After watching the movie which was pretty good we went back to work for about another hour. At that point there was still plenty to do but we were just too exhausted to keep working at it. We had to get some sleep. We wished that we would have been able to have gotten a lot farther than we did but there was just no way to do it over such a short weekend.

Today marks the halway point of 2006.

Having been an avid cyclist in my youth I always take an interest when governments attempt to cripple the hobby/health and environmentally conscious form of transportation/means for the poor to still get to work in a world without good public transportation and you can check out this awesome website showing the UK Government mocking and attempting to hinder safe bycycling. There is some seriously funny stuff on there but be sure to remember that for cyclists this is a very serious matter. I am very glad that in the US cyclists are legal vehicles and have all the right of way of motorized vehicles. And for those of you who are unsure – it is illegal and a ticketable offense to ride a bicycle on the left side of the road and in most villages the sidewalks are off limits to bicycles. Bicycles are governed by regular DOT vehicle code and ride in the traffic lane just like a motorcycle does. If you have kids never, ever let them ride on the wrong side. It just causes a really high speed, head on collision. Oh and yes, you can get a speeding ticket on a bicycle. I tried once but the cop wasn’t paying enough attention – he was speeding so fast that he pulled away from me.

I got the call this morning that the BMW 330 that we had been interested in had arrived at the lot. We are not able to go look at it today so we are scheduled to go in and look at it on Monday afternoon. Our salesman said that there is also a second 2004 330 that came in in a different colour with just five thousand additional miles that is also available. So we will have two to look at on Monday. Very exciting.

Today is a big day for the city of Montreal. Yes, Wil Wheaton was just there but that is not what I mean. The Montreal Olympic Stadium that they built in 1976 (yes, the year that I was born a full thirty years ago) was paid off today and the city now owns the stadium.

Today is definitely a Friday before a long holiday weekend. I expect that just about everyone is taking Monday off because Tuesday is Independance Day so with one vacation day people get a four day weekend. So this place is super slow today as nothing is going on going into the weekend and lots of people are all ready out for the weekend. I am sure that everyone is going to be attempting to escape as quickly as possible this afternoon.

Our plan this afternoon is to have Dominica drive up to Crystal Mazda on route 22 and drop off her PR5 around 5:30 and I will pick her up there. She is having a minor brake issue that needs to be addressed. Then from there we will head for Geneseo. We expect, if traffic is okay, to get to Geneseo between eleven and midnight.

With everything being so slow today I got a chance to catch up on the news, catch up on Bob Crissman’s Jedi Council blog and to catch up on all of my HP classes. I also signed up for two new classes starting in late July: Making Business Documents and Designing a Tape Backup Strategy. Neither are very tough topics but they both sounded valuable and were the best options for the month. HP seems to run their classes on a four to six week schedule or something like that. I decided to add the Introduction to Access 2003 class too since Dominica has been doing a lot of work with Access 2003 recently. I figured that it was a good time to get familiar with it. While I was loading my plate I decided to throw on Windows 2003 Administration just for fun.

It was such a slow day that I decided to additionally pick up a class from HP on Firewall Basics that was all ready underway. It was one of the longer classes but I have a really good background in the technologies involved so it was really just to see if there was anything additional to learn from the class and to get credit for having taken it. I learned long ago that by covering similar material over and over again in different ways you can learn a lot whether it is from getting material that no one else covered or by having the same material presented in a different way or by seeing things in the light of additional knowledge and experience.

I wanted to leave work before five but there was some “after hours” work that had to be done so I was stuck there until about a quarter after. Not bad by any stretch but still later than I had been hoping for. The traffic going down to Green Brook where Min was dropping off her car wasn’t bad and I made good time getting down to pick up her and Oreo. From there we hit the road as quickly as possibly heading for home.

Traffic was pretty awful. They were anticipating the holiday traffic and the New Jersey / Pennsylvania Bridge Authority or whoever administers the tolls on the Delaware Water Gap bridges had closed the tolls and had all of the toll operators standing out there waving people through as quickly as possible to prevent backups in New Jersey. It worked pretty well for the most part but the backups came pretty quickly once we were into Pennsylvania. We ended up losing an hour or more just in the 33 to 80 are which is pretty short the way we go. We just sat there never topping five miles per hour for about an hour or so. That was awful. All in all it took us more than seven hours to get back to Geneseo, although we did stop for some Waffle House as we went through Clarke Summit like we always do. There was a really bad accident on 390 between Cohocton and Wayland and we had to be rerouted onto the side roads between those exits.

It was after midnight when we finally arrived in Geneseo. It was nice to be back to our house even if it isn’t going to be our house for very much longer. We are both really torn with the idea of selling it. We love that house so much and we like the location and we have some really important memories there. It was really the perfect physical house for us. Just the right amount of space both in living space and in basement space. It was easy to take care of, the dog loves it, the deck is the perfect size, etc. We are really sad to have to get rid of it. But we spent a lot of the drive up reminding each other of all of the reasons why we don’t want to keep it no matter how much we like the house itself.

I have a feeling that today is going to be a quiet day. I like quiet days. Quiet days are good.

I am still getting into the groove of working days again and I slept in until eight again this morning. I expect that I will be back to normal by next week although having a holiday on Tuesday is really going to throw me off. Dominica got a chance yesterday evening to talk to our real estate agent in Geneseo about selling the house. She, the agent, was really enthusiastic about our prospects. She said that ours would be the only ranch on the market in the village which will put it in demand. We are hopeful. We also have more usable space than the “larger” capes that are left to sell. And there are only two of them. And we have a deck, air conditioning, partially finished basement, etc. I think that we have a lot going for us. Now if we can just get it sold.

So the plan is for Dominica to go to Geneseo in a week or two and spend a week up there just boxing and cleaning and tossing. Tossing out everything that we don’t need, that is. And there is a lot that we don’t need. And a lot that we can’t use anymore. We need to learn to live lighter. We could learn a lesson there from Andy who attempts to own so little that it will all fit into a single room. He can move himself without any problem at all. Moving Dominica and I is a major undertaking. We are going to do as much as possible to fix that. A lot of the space at the house is taken by servers and computers and that will be going to Scranton which will help a lot. And some amount of stuff will be going to New Jersey to actually use day to day. But there is an awful lot that just needs to be stored. It is rough storing so much stuff but it has to be done.

This morning was very slow. Almost no one talked to me at all. There wasn’t even very much sound in the office. A nice, relaxing morning. I managed to get caught up a little more on my HP classes that I have been taking. Three more lessons were released this morning so there was plenty for me to do. Not that I was concerned about being bored. There is always lots for me to do.

I called this afternoon to check on the status of the BMW that we are interested in but it has not yet arrived on the lot at Princeton BMW. We will have to wait until next week for Dominica to test drive it now. She is very excited, though, and really feels that she is going to like it. She rode in the back seat when I test drove it and she thought that that was really impressive even though it is a very small car. It is smaller than her PR5. It does seat four adults but just barely. Definitely no fifth adult and no one would want to ride in the back seat on a long trip. But it had a lot more room than more sport convertibles. The car will probably be on the lot tomorrow so we are planning on taking a look at it on Monday.

Great article today called “so it doesn’t poop all over your office.” And just think, if you weren’t reading SGL you would have missed out on that.

I managed to leave work at a quart to six. Unfortunately I ended up getting stuck in terrible traffic on the way home and it ended up taking me almost an hour and a half to get home. Argh. I was really hungry having only had a tuna fish salad sandwich all day so Min hopped into the car and we ran out to Tanjore for more dosai like we had last night. We are hooked. We ate until we could hardly move, again. That is two days in a row. They know us pretty well there by now. The entire staff knows us as soon as we walk in the door. We feel confident that this must be pretty good southern Indian cuisine because the clientelle is almost entirely Indian. The place was packed tonight and there was only two tables in the whole place who weren’t Indian.

I had plenty of work to do tonight so I spent the evening getting things wrapped up. Dominica coordinated with the family in New York and Sara and Jeremy will be coming up to Geneseo to work all day on Saturday to help us get the house ready to show during the week. It is going to be a really busy weekend but it needs to be done.