Sheep Guarding Llama

Fortunately Friday nights are very slow. After a long week of work it is very nice to know that Friday nights have almost nothing going on. It was extra slow tonight and I got to spend almost the entire night relaxing. I needed that. I was really tired, mentally not physically, after a long week. Everyone who does the night shift says that by the fifth night you start to lose the ability to do to much.

I found a centipede in the “dining room” area. Will they never end? I managed to kill it pretty quickly. I am getting better at this. I have to do it so often.

I also got a ton more done on the web site. All of 2002 and a lot of 2003 have been moved over as well as some of the podcasts although that will take a bit longer to get them all moved. That requires coordination with OurMedia. I did managed to record the first SGL Podcast in quite some time. That felt good to finally get moving again. It has been over two months since the last episode! It was tough to record because of the incredibly loud air conditioning. Boy am I getting tired of that. I can’t wait to move to a nicer place where the air conditioning actually keeps the place cold, there aren’t centipedes crawling everywhere and there is nice stuff that I can walk to.

Around three in the morning I discovered yet another centipede. This is really awful. This one I didn’t manage to kill. It made a run for it in the dark and made it into the furnace “room”. I hate that that small “room” or “hallway thing” has no light or its own nor does it have a power plug to allow me to add one. So there was nothing that I could do and I just had to wait him out.

Throughout the night I kept coming back and looking for the centipede but had no luck. I doubted that he would go to far but you can never tell with these things. They are big creatures and really travel. I kept watching the area for hours in the hopes of seeing it again. At seven or so I went to use the bathroom which is right next to that area and, as luck would have it, the centipede decided to take the opportunity to make its appearance. What a pain. He started by running out of the linen closet, the farthest point in the room from me, and making a dart to go under the sink, the nearest point of the room. The sink wasn’t installed very well and there was a good 1/8″ to 1/4″ space under the cabinet for him to be able to roam around in. Just great. I thought that the old adage “he is as scared of me as I am of him” must be true and trusted that he would stay under there. Nope. He decided to make a run at me! This thing is aggressive. He knows that I am after him. I managed to get him with a magazine but before I could step on it he was gone around running around the back of the toilet and making a loop back for the sink. Argh. He went back under and hid this time. I got a glass of water and tried to “swoosh” him out. That didn’t work but he did poke his head out to look at me! I think that I might have seen him give me the finger. But I can’t be sure. It took another couple of hours before he showed himself again. I caught him in the “hallway” making a run for his furnace room hiding place. This time I was ready with the mop and managed to get him – sort of. He started climbing up the mop! But he did make the mistake of getting caught between the top of the sponge and the pressing plate and I managed to get him in there. I doubt that any amount of pressure in that manny would actually kill him so I took the mop into the bathrub and drowned him. Finally. The good news is that even with all of these centipedes – we have yet to have found a single one that we didn’t manage to kill eventually. It is also encouraging that we have not had any that once we have found them have not remained very obvious so we are pretty certain that we are currently aware of any current guests and that we find them shortly after they decide to move in.

I watched a couple of movies this morning like Not Another Teen Movie and Road Trip. Stuff that I have seen before but haven’t seen in a while.

For some reason I wasn’t all that tired when the end of my shift came so I decided to stay up for a while. I got an email from dad early this morning saying that his Buick’s engine had seized up on him and the car was dead. Totalled, in fact. So he is quickly shopping for a new car. My aunt is helping him to get a rental today to hold him over until he finds something. He has been looking at the Saturn Sky but didn’t think that there would be any way to get one. So this morning I walked over to the Saturn dealer that is right next to where I live and sat in one to see how it was. They have two on the lot there and one of them would work for dad. I called him but he doesn’t want a black one. So I called all over New Jersey and found a dealer with a perfect silver one that could be traded to the local dealer. So dad had to run up to Rochester to find a Sky to test drive so that he can decide whether or not he wants one.

Dad got a Nissan Altima for a rental. That is a pretty nice rental. He is really liking it. He would never have looked twice at a Nissan before but now he is driving one we will see how this affects him.

I went over to the Omega Diner at 3:00 to get some dinner. It is Friday and they have their crab cakes with mac and cheese on Fridays and it is really awesome. I didn’t want to miss that like I did last week. So I ate alone and then came right back to the apartment. It is very sad. The upside to the crab cake/mac and cheese meal is that it is huge and I have plenty of left overs from it. So that should make for another meal for me later. Hopefully I will get a chance to eat it before I leave.

Once I got home and had some food on my stomach I decided that it was time to actually go to bed. I suppose that I should get some sleep before I have to go to Frankfort for the weekend. I basically have ended up skipping an entire night’s sleep at somepoint. Weird how that happens. I am starting to miss my bed. It feels kind of weird going to bed now.

Dad called at 4:30 to let me know that he had looked at the car and that it was too small and low for him to be able to use all of the time so he is going to pass up his dream of owning a Saturn Sky. He also looked at the Ford Mustang convertible but decided that it, too, was too low for him to use. So he was going to look at cars at a dealer in Batavia that he likes. He is looking at a Mazda 6 that they have there.

I slept until about ten o’clock this evening. I was very well rested and decided that it was time to get up. It is a bit earlier than I had hoped for since I am going to have to be awake until I arrive in Utica at two tomorrow afternoon and then I have lots to do all day. So I am going to be up for quite a while at this point. Ugh. But I feel good so we will see.

I watched some more Magnum P.I. Season Two and continued working on the SGL Dailies from 2003. I am about halfway through the year now.

It is weird, as always, changing the day that I am writing as even though I am still sitting at the computer as I have been for the past eleven hours or so. But switching at midnight is about the only thing that makes sense and is consitent so let Thursday begin. I have been working since five in the afternoon yesterday and am scheduled until eight in the morning but I have a server checkout that isn’t likely to start until then so I could easily end up getting stuck a bit later than that which is really not what I am hoping for. I will be really exhausted by morning. I am adjusting to the overnights well and have no been doing too badly, in general. I am staying on the overnight now until Monday (that is I will work from Sunday night into Monday morning) but on Tuesday I will be back to days. Or so I have been told. But there is a decent chance that I will be on overnights again on Thursday and Friday working with the new, full time overnight guy. That means that I won’t be able to work from home, though, and will have to go into the office those nights which will not be nearly as nice.

I finished watching The Thomas Crown Affair that I started in the evening. I had gotten mixed reviews of it and I can see why. Brosnan is always good but this was not a particularly exciting role for him to be in. Rene Russo is generally hot and cold and I don’t find her very likable in this role. The movie isn’t bad but not gripping. The characters are kind of flat and boring and the female lead could be given a positive spin by calling her a top notch insurance investigator or you could give her a negative spin by calling her a seven figure prostitute. Likewise our investment banker male lead could be a world class art thief or perhaps just a big time practical joker. This is a film that leaves a lot of room for “spin” but ends up just spinning out.

I moved on to Lethal Weapon 2 which I haven’t seen in a long time. Strangely Walmart only had 2 and 4 available. It seems like they would have an easier time selling them if they sold all four films together. I realize that 2 and 4 are the “bargains” of the series with 1 and 3 being the classics but still. Who buys only the sequel and never the original to anything? You just don’t do that. I did but only because I have all ready seen them all and plan to get 1 and 3 when I find them.

The night dragged on and my six I was totally exhausted. I went in and lay down a little a few times. At one point I think that I slept for a good fifteen or maybe even twenty minutes. That helped – a little power nap and I was pretty good for another hour. I was really happy that they decided not to do my server checkout until after I had signed off at eight so that I didn’t get caught having to do that while being so tired. I went to bed a few minutes before eight and I was out like a light.

I slept for a solid seven hours. I don’t think that I woke up once the entire night. Boy did that feel good. I was up at three in the afternoon and felt great. Funny how just seven good hours of sleep can do so much revitalization.

I did more site maintenance today and there is a ton of the old dailies on the database now. What a relief that is. Soon, I hope, they will all be moved over and the site will be whole again. This afternoon I went outside for a few minutes and took some pictures of the apartment and the complex so that people could see what it is like where we are living. I put up two pictures of the apartment taken from the parking lot that you can see here and here. Plus a picture of a wooded area in the complex and one of the main complex driveway leading out to US Route 1.

I watched The Road Warrior which is the better know sequel to the film Mad Max. Everyone knows the name of the movie Mad Max but very few people have actually seen the film. Most have seen the sequel and confuse it for the original although if you actually see the first one you would realize that they are not the same movie at all. And then a lot more people get really confused about the third movie in the series, Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome which was a really awful movie with Tina Turner. The first two were sort of serious movies and were very important in their genre but the third was just crap. And everyone thinks that you mean that one if you ever say Mad Max. Frustrating.

I was running very low on DVDs to watch so I decided to go out to Best Buy this evening and do some stocking up. I am doing the overnight again tonight and then at least one day next week and these overnights cause me to go through a ton of stuff when otherwise I might go for a week with only watching one show or so. I also looked for CDs but didn’t find anything that I had wanted but I didn’t find a good deal on the soundtrack to the musical made into movie Paint Your Wagon. I had a cassette copy of that soundtrack as a kid that I made from my parents LP. What an awesome soundtrack. I would own that movie as well but dad has it.

I did manage to get a bunch of movies. A bunch of really stupid movies, for the most part, but stuff that I kind of wanted to have and that are perfect for semi-watching late at night: Old School, Not Another Teen Movie and Road Trip. I also got some good serious movies like Pride and Prejudice and Broken Flowers as well as Ocean’s Eleven which seemed appropriate since we recently got Ocean’s Twelve. I was really glad that I went because I also managed to find a one buy, get one free deal on the Magnum P.I. series so I bought seasons two and four so I have all four of the first series now! That saved a lot of money.

While I was in the Best Buy parking lot I decided to walk over to the grocery store and see if there was anything there that I wanted. There wasn’t but there was a Dunkin Donuts inside of the grocery store (they have one like every ten feet down here.) So I grabbed a croissant sandwich for dinner.

It was nine thirty when I got back to the apartment. I discovered another centipede tonight. Argh. This one died pretty quickly. I really hate centipedes.

I did some additional work on SGL and watched Old School before my shift started. Nate and Bob had raved and raved about Old School so when I found it fairly cheap I figured that I shouldn’t pass it up. I am not sure that I would go along with their rave reviews but it was a passable movie. Luke Wilson is always good. It is definitely not a classic by any stretch.

I was doing some meandering on Amazon tonight and found this awesome CD that everyone has to own. Ok, just kidding. But can you believe that CD actually exists?

I love doing the overnight shift because it means that my week has ended by first thing Friday morning. My four in the morning today I am all ready halfway through my week – except for the fact that I am scheduled to work a double tomorrow. I start at six o’clock this afternoon (that is Wednesday afternoon) and work straight on through until eight o’clock on Thursday morning. So I am expecting to do nothing today but work and sleep as soon as my shift wraps up and then get up and work until I collapse tomorrow morning. It is going to be a long “day”. Pulling a double is always tough but doing it with a “B” shift / “C” shift combo while doing swing shifts is not easy. By Thursday when I am done I know that I am going to be really, really tired. Then Friday I do the overnight as usual and I am done. The plan for this weekend, as it stands at the moment, is that I will grab a taxi early Saturday morning to take me to New Brunswick station where I will take the New Jersey Transit line to Manhattan’s Penn Station where I will grab the Amtrak to Utica. If all goes well I will be in the jewel of the Mohawk a little before noon where Dominica will pick me up and from there we can go to her cousin Erica’s high school graduation party in Frankfort. Our plan is to be in Frankfort until Sunday when we will drive back to New Jersey together.

Tonight was another big movie night as I continue to work through the titles of the collection that I have at my disposal down here. I was still watching The Game when my shift started and that got me a bit into the night. Then, being in a dramatic mood, I decided to tackle Brokeback Mountain which Dominica all ready went and watched without me. I am not sure what my opinion of this movie is. The actors were phenominal and it is no wonder that it was nominated for so many awards and the directing by Ang Lee was, of course, spectacular. The story line seems to be very contrived to me and it is, once again, one of those movies where I find it impossible to find a real protagonist. I realize that real life doesn’t necessarily have a protagonist all of the time but good literature does or else you just don’t care and that is how I ended up feeling with this movie. Sure there was a lot of drama but nothing bad happened to anyone that I cared about. This was a problem with the original book or perhaps the screenplay. The crew making the actual film once the story was set did a truly amazing job although by about halfway through you begin to realize that the storyline has played out and now we are inching along with minimal character development and from there on the movie just kind of winds down into nothingness and then just ends. Not the best film to watch in the middle of the night when you are trying to stay awake. It wasn’t gripping in the least.

After Brokeback Mountain I watched Duplex which Dominica, and the DVD cover, had warned me about. This is one of those awful “feel bad” Meet the Parents kind of movies where it just leaves you feeling like crap and being upset that you watched the movie. They play it like a comedy but it isn’t. It is a movie about horrible, evil people including a crooked NYPD cop and his real estate lover and his mother robbing poor couples of their money and mentally torturing them while doing it. Oh yeah, great entertainment. Ben Stiller has really become an “indicator” actor – he only takes horrible scripts. I can’t remember a really good movie that he has ever done. Or a good television show that he has appeared on. He himself is okay but you can tell that if he has read a script and liked it that you are going to be disappointed by the movie.

I took a break for a few hours and just worked on getting lots of paperwork done for work. Some work that I do lends itself really well to watching movies while working and I had a lot of that to do early on and then later in the night. So I took a break to get the other stuff done in the middle. A little before seven I decided to start the director’s cut of The Thing Called Love which is a really awesome movie starring River Phoenix, Samantha Mathis, Dermot Mulroney and Sandra Bullock. This movie is a bit of a rarity because none of the stars ever did a movie as good as it again. It is also River’s final movie ever. He and Samantha started dating during this movie and she was with him when he died shortly thereafter. Although from watching this movie you would have a hard time believing that he was ever a star. This is one of the first movies that I owned on laserdisc back in the good old days of my little bedroom cinema with the 13″ computer screen and watching it always takes me back. It might have been the first movie that I discovered through the home theatre thing rather than from the regular theatre. I had never heard of it when I bought it but I had thought that it looked good. Not long after that I learned that I needed to stop using traditional cinema as my source for picking movies to own because most of the movies that I really fell in love with were rare, happenstance finds. The Thing Called Love is one of the few really good movies that talks about the huge country music phenomenon of the time. The movie deals with a group of aspiring song writers living in Nashville in the early 1990’s. From the mid 1980’s until the late 1990’s country music came from nowhere to be the most popular music in America and it really created a major culture at the time that just sort of faded away as time passed. But in the early 1990’s when this movie takes place the country scene was really something.

Eight o’clock and it was time for me to hit the hay. I had hoped to be able to sneak away fifteen minutes early but I was needed to do some work and actually had to hang around a little extra. Can’t win for tryin’. Actually, I have no idea what the expression means and I don’t know where I learned it. I turned the air conditioning back on a little before I had to go to bed hoping it would keep the house cool. It is supposed to be another hot one today reaching close to ninety but not quite. The sun is bright and shining hard. I am missing the rain that we had just a week or two ago.

So much for a long night’s rest. I was awakened by one o’clock by a series of phone calls. By the time that I had dealt with them and had gone through my email from work and then went through my regular email, etc. I was wide awake and didn’t feel like I should go back to bed as there wasn’t enough time for safety margin before I would have to be up to work tonight. I am scheduled to start work around six but there is prep work that has to be done and the final schedule hasn’t been given to me yet so I have to be awake by five at the latest. Ugh. I am way too busy.

Dad said my fourth Proliant DL360 arrived today and he had an opportunity to check it out while I was on the line so we know that it is working. One less thing that I have to worry about.

I put in some time this afternoon moving old SGL dailies over to the current database system. I have been putting that off for way too long. I got all of October, 2002 moved over during the afternoon. At four I ran out to Walmart to grab some much needed supplies for this evening. I had hoped to get some snacks but they had pretty much nothing. I did pick up some DVDs including Lethal Weapon 2, Lethal Weapon 4, Sleepover, Frequency, the Pierce Brosnan version of The Thomas Crown Affair and the piece d’resistance of today’s take Alfred Hitchcock’s classic The Trouble with Harry which I have been looking for for years. I have been watching it for release on Amazon but I must have last checked on Monday because it finally released to DVD yesterday. The Trouble with Harry is one of those classics that I watched with my parents when I was a kid and managed to love as a child and as an adult. It has been a few years since I have seen it and I have always told Dominica about it but she has never had a chance to see it herself so I am excited to get a chance to watch it with her. I am sure that dad is going to want to watch it again as well.

As I was leaving Walmart I stopped at the McDonald’s inside of the store and grabbed some lunch to go. While I was there my phone rang and I had to talk to the office and I didn’t manage to check the food that was given to me because I was in a hurry. When I got back to the apartment I realized that I had been given only partly the right food and that some of the food was chicken that I can’t eat. So I had to throw about half of it out. So much for making my food situation fast and easy. At least I managed to get some cheap movies while I was out. That will help my long shift pass a little more quickly.

I got a chance to talk to Dominica this afternoon. She said that her final day of dental work went pretty smoothly and she is really happy with how well the entire process ended up going. Oreo was super excited to see her when she got back from the dentist today. She said that he appears to be really happy having Dexter to play with all day long. She is going to see “Care Bears On Ice” tonight in Utica with the girls.

I got home and spent the entire evening working on a server build. Nothing too strenuous but it was a lot of work. That burned up my entire evening, as expected, but it went well as far as I can tell and I am happy with how it went. I am getting a lot more acclimated to the environment and things are coming more smoothly now. While I was doing the build I got a chance to watch Sleepover which is one of those “teen” movie but it is cute and has a good story and characters. Very predictable and nothing out of the ordinary but well done. Then I started watching the recent remake of The Thomas Crown Affair but got so busy that I had to stop watching it and save it for later.

In between other tasks I managed to keep pluggin away at the SGL updates and almost all of 2002 has been moved into the database and is searchable and accessible now. Enjoy.

My mother would have been 58 today.

My shift started at midnight. It remained warm even though it was supposed to drop into the 60’s outside. The rain that was predicted all day still did not come. I was hoping for it so that it might cool it down.

I finished watching Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express for which Ingrid Bergman won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress in 1974. My movie got interupted by a conference call that I had to be on for forty minutes or so. They loves conference calls at work. I can’t figure out why. It is impossible to figure out what anyone is saying and there are so many people that you can never tell who is talking or to whom.

I set to tackling a stack of mail that needed to be dealt with. It adds up quickly. And more bills than I had realized earlier when I was doing the bills. What a pain. I automated some of them to make it easier in the future. Boy am I ever productive. 🙂

A little after two I started the Doris Day and James Garner classic The Thrill of It All. Dominica watched it recently and said that it was really good. One of my favourite actors of that era, Carl Reiner plays one of the stars of the show in the show.

One of my all time favourite pop duets, Boy Meets Girl, have opened (I have no idea how recently) their own website where you can buy any of their four albums directly from the artists. Just last year they remastered their deput album from 1985 for its twentieth anniversary and made it available again. And they rereleased their 1991 album “New Dream” that was selling as high as $700 on eBay recently.

At four in the morning it was still seventy degrees outside and the apartment was closer to eighty. The fresh air was good and the bedroom wasn’t too hot since that is where the air was entering the house but the rest of the house was pretty warm. This is about the coolest time of day and about the best temperature that I can hope for in here. With no air circulation at all in half of the house there just isn’t much that can be done to cool it down. I decided that it was time to switch over to air conditioning in the hopes that it would be able to keep up for the rest of the day although I am not getting my hopes up.

At five I put in If A Man Answers with Sandra Dee and Bobby Darrin. Dominica has watched this one all ready as well. I am way behind on my movie watching. I had forgotten that Dominica had told me that this movie had adorable Boston Terriers in it. Watching it makes me miss my puppy even more. Five days until I see him again. After seeing Bobby Darrin in State Fair it is impossible to see him as anything but a big loser. The dogs are so cute but the movie itself is pretty weak. The characters are dim witted, manipulative and annoying. One of those “romantic” movies where you would only be happy if the couple end up breaking up because the last thing that you want is for them to be happy because they are annoying. The movie wasn’t awful but it wasn’t good. Not exactly a classic. Although it is sad considering how few movies Sandra Dee and Bobby Darin did (separate or together) that so many of them are so bad.

I had some more time to kill during my shift while I did paperwork so I watched some of Maverick with one of my all time favourite actors: Alfred Molina. Molina was really awesome in Chocolat. Here is an interesting point that I wonder if they really considered for the movie. In the movie every poker player getting into the All Rivers Championship Poker Tournament had to bring $25,000 and the final winnings were $500,000. Now it sounds like a lot of money but I think that people watching the movie forget just how much that really is. We are talking about seriously rich people here. If you were to consider the movie to be taking place in 1890 then the minimum value of $25K would be over one half million dollars in 2006 dollars and a maximum value of almost three million dollars. So the Maverick character is actually significantly rich. They point to this a little when he states where his custom tailored clothing was made but other than that you feel that he is just a poor western wanderer. The winnings of the tournament in modern money could be as high as fifty seven million dollars! This is one serious tournament. Now that is if you consider the movie taking place in 1890. If you push the date back to 1870 which is plausible the figures actually drop slightly as post-war America had reverse inflation for a few decades but nontheless the numbers are staggering.

Today I wasn’t nearly so exhausted when the end of my shift rolled around. I have gotten good at adjusting to the shift quickly. The sun was out in force this morning. It is going to be another hot one. I didn’t end up heading to bed until after nine in the morning.

I didn’t need a lot of sleep last night, apparently, and was up by two thirty in the afternoon. I felt pretty good so I settled into the living room on the computer. It must not be quite as hot out today as the air conditioning is keeping up, more or less, with keeping the apartment at a reasonable temperature. Once every four hours or so it will turn off for about five minutes. The sun is pretty bright, though, and is keeping the living room much warmer than the rest of the apartment which is, of couse, where I sit all day. I did figure out that we don’t pay for our water and that I can set up a fan to blow air through the shower and the ground water is pretty cold. So I have a makeshift air conditioning augmentation system with built it air filtration set up that seems to help a little. I don’t run it all of the time but it keeps part of the house a little cooler and it adds some moisture to the air that is getting sucked out by running the air conditioning all of the time.

I renewed two more domain names today that were about to expire. It is nice to be able to register them for nine years at a shot now. I have eleven domain names that I own currently and the first one that I have to worry about again is dominicamiller.com that isn’t set to expire until 2008 and most of them are around 2015. That is handy. I have gotten used to having to renew all of them every year and that means that on average I would have to log in and deal with them every month. That got to be annoying.

I did very little this afternoon. Just relaxed. I put a few movie images into the movie database, surged the web, did a little work for the office, etc. At seven I decided that my pizza yesterday was so delicious that I needed to get another one. But this time I figured out that I did not need to get cheesesticks because the cheesesticks from Papa John’s just aren’t that good and the pizza is really cheesy so I don’t need the extra cheese. When I get Domino’s I get the thin crust which is like a cracker with barely anything on it (it is really good but not very filling) so the cheese sticks are important. So I am learning.

I decided that Dominica and I were never going to get a chance to watch a lot of our DVDs together so I put in Red Dwarf Series VIII. I saw most of the eighth season some years ago but I can’t place where. But it was nice to finally wrap up watching Red Dwarf that I started watching sometime around 1990.

“I am so gorgeous that there is a six month waiting list for birds to appear every time I am near.”

“The future’s the future and, like your underpants, there is little chance of changing it.”

I talked to dad and Dominica tonight. Dominica says that her dental work is going well. Two days down and just one left to go. Tomorrow night she is going to see “The Care Bears Live” in Utica. How exciting. I miss everything fun 😉

In general I am doing pretty well with dealing with mom being gone. Subconsciously I think that it affects me more than I realize. My trichotillomania or trich is awful today. Really, really bad. It is aggrevated by the weather and the lack of good air conditioning. If I am warm all of the time it gets bad but today is exceptionally bad. I almost ripped out my entire left eyebrow before I even realized that I was having an attack. I don’t normally talk about my trich, I have had it for twenty years or so, but this is one of the worst attacks that I can remember. It is a constant battle for me that has been improving in recent years, in general.

I did some work on the movie database system tonight. Now you can enter “views” into the system so it is easy to register when a film has been watched. Very handy.

I put in The Game – one of the best movies ever. This is the movie that really shows off Michael Douglas and Sean Penn. This is amazing stuff. This is right up there with Romancing the Stone for Douglas.

Midnight and time to get back to work. The overnight shift is a strange world to be in.