Sheep Guarding Llama

When I finally got to go to bed a little after eight in the morning I was pretty tired. Totally exhausted, in fact. I collapsed into bed and was out in no time. I only ended up sleeping until 12:30 and was up and not feeling too bad. This week will be a bit tough to adjust to but last night is the only night that I am expecting to be very bad. I am really looking forward to having the entire week at the apartment with Dominica and Oreo after having been alone for the past two weeks.

I did a little work around the apartment and then around 2:00 Dominica and I went out for lunch and some shopping. We ate at the Omega and then went to Office Depot and bought a second office chair to match the first one that we bought a few weeks ago so that Dominica will have one too and we bought a second small desk for her to use. The newer one is nicer than the one that I am using. We would like to have bought nice desks but we know that we are going to be moving before too long and it didn’t seem like a good idea to invest in large, heavy furniture taht we will just have to disassemble, pack and move in a few months. So small, light, cheap furniture for us for the time being. It is tough knowing that we have nice office furniture doing nothing in Geneseo that we can’t use. I also got some markers and a large dry erase whiteboard for the apartment. That will be our one decoration in the apartment.

We came home and I set to work on the computer and Dominica got to work on putting furniture together. We watched the seventh season of Red Dwarf. This is the first season that I haven’t seen any of yet. I am pretty excited. I took the evening pretty easy as I headed into my second overnight shift. Around 11:00 I went into the bedroom and laid down for a quick nap before starting work. Oreo came in and slept next to me for a little while.

This afternoon I ended up getting a luncheon meeting with the consulting firm that I work for scheduled for noon tomorrow up near the office. That is a bit of a pain. I have to get up just a little after ten in the morning to be able to make it. That is just two hours of sleep. That is going to be awful.

My dad turns 60 today. Happy birthday dad!

I was awake early this morning but Oreo decided to be the snuggliest dog ever and I couldn’t get out of bed for several hours. He snuggled right up against me and put his head on my arm so I couldn’t move.

I spent the morning working on one of the new servers trying to get it ready for deployment. There is always a ton of work to be done when I am home over a weekend. I am trying to get this “new” HP DL360 server set up and ready to replace the Asterisk phone system that I built recently on unstable hardware. The old machine was a home built 3U box but this new one is a really nice commercial server that fits into just 1U of space. Now that is nice. One really nice thing is that the Asterisk package that I was using previously was Asterisk@Home 2.7. Since I built the last machine they went to 2.8 and then went to what would have been 2.9 or maybe 3.0 but changed the project name to TrixBox and released version 1.0. And that is what I installed on the new hardware.

Dad came over to the house around 1:00 to get Min and I for his birthday lunch. We went over to the Omega Grill and met the Richardson clan over there. The seven of us had a really nice time at lunch. Now that we are down in New Jersey Dominica and I hardly ever get a chance to see anyone.

After lunch Dominica and I came back to the house and spent the rest of the afternoon working to get ready to head back to New Jersey. Dominica did a ton of laundry this weekend because it is much better to do it in New York than to do it in New Jersey at the laundromat. She kept working on that and on packing for the trip. We don’t know how long it will be before we are back in Geneseo again. We don’t have any scheduled returns until the weekend of July 22nd for my cousin Sara’s graduation party.

I managed to get a lot of work done and have two servers put into position so that I can work with them remotely from New Jersey. That was quite an accomplishment and I am very happy with the work that I managed to do over the weekend.

There was a lot to do and we didn’t manage to leave the house until after seven o’clock. That was a lot later than we had planned but we got more done that we had planned too. The downside is that my schedule was changed for the week and I am working the overnight shift all week starting tonight from midnight to eight in the morning so there is barely time to get to the apartment in New Jersey before I needed to start working. The schedule is tough tonight but the rest of the week it will be great. Because I am working the overnight I get to work from home. That saves me ten hours of commuting! That is awesome.

The drive south wasn’t too bad. We stopped in Clark’s Summit to get dinner at the Waffle House. It is always good food at the Waffle House. We arrived in North Brunswick a little after one in the morning. Boy were we tired when I started working. It is going to be a long night. Dominica decided to stay up with me while I worked. We watched That 70’s Show while I worked to keep me awake.

Happy 18th birthday to Tony West!

We don’t get a lot of time when we come up to Geneseo for the weekend. Today is our only full day here. I called dad when we got out of bed this morning and he came over to Geneseo and the three of us had breakfast at the Omega Grill.

We hit Walmart on the way home and picked up a few basic supplies. While we were there we took dad back to the sports section and got him his birthday present – a set of Dunlop golf clubs with a bag. Now that he has ten acres of carefully manicured lawn he has plenty of space to be playing golf all of the time without ever leaving the house.

After breakfast we came back to the house in Geneseo and Min went over to her nail place to get her nails done and dad went back to his house to wait for us to finish up stuff in Geneseo. I got some work done on one of the new servers and got some cleaning done around the house. It is such a mess with the move and all of the new equipment that has been passing through. There are empty boxes everywhere and packing material just piling up. It is awful.

It took Dominica over an hour to get her nails done then she came back to the house and we drove over to dad’s to spend the afternoon. We spent a little time outside checking out his new frisbee golf equipment and discovered that Oreo knows how to play frisbee! So we are going to go shopping and get a dog frisbee for him sometime soon.

Around dinner time Dominica decided that she was really hungry so the three of us drove back over to Geneseo and got dinner (or maybe a late lunch) at the Omega. Dad had to take off early because he is going to a piano concert at Union Presbyterian Church this evening. So he left around 5:30. Min and I went home and hung around for about an hour before leaving to go to Perry.

We went to the Silver Lake Drive-In and Mary and Jocelyn (aka J-Dog) met us there. It was a light rain all evening and a little chilly but not terrible. We got a pizza from the Corral. Mary and I got some ice cream and Min and J-Dog got nachos and fried dough. We say Over the Hedge which was really good. I highly recommend it. Then we say X-Men 3 which is okay but not nearly up to the standards of the first two X-Men movies and I only liked them so much. This one had a really poor story line and really poor character development. I was completely unable to understand any of the character motivations and it turned into one of those movies where the characters in the movie have so much opportunity to do obvious things to fix their situations so that I become confused by the fact that they don’t do them. The problem is that I become immersed in the world of the movie moreso than the writers and I can’t understand why the characters in the movie don’t see themselves inside their own world but it is because the writers do not. This is a common problem with comic book and similar styled movies. The writing is not taken seriously and it really shows. The audience knows more about the characters than the people who actually made the movie.

We did see trailers for two movies that we are really looking forward to: Pirates of the Caribbean 2 and Superman which looks to be a really amazing remake.

My day started off a little later than I had planned and I had to rush around for about an hour getting everything packed and ready to go because I am not returning to the apartment after work today. I did a lot of packing last night and the majority of stuff was ready to go but nothing was in the car yet because we had heavy rains all evening and I didn’t want all of our stuff getting wet. I did remember to pack up my CPAP this morning. I am getting better about that after having had to spend a week without it.

I got to class late but didn’t miss a thing. They hadn’t even started yet. I had emailed one of my classmates to let him know that I was running late and that he should tell the instructor not to wait for me but then I ended up passing him on the way to class at the corner of New Jersey Route 22 and Warrenville Road. He is the first person that I have ever noticed from work out on the road.

Class only went from 10:00 until 3:00 today. That was awesome. We had done almost everything that we had needed to do the past three days and were just doing some light stuff today and a ton of people didn’t even bother coming today and one person didn’t come until 1:30.

On my lunch break today I drove down to Green Brook and found a Jiffy Lube. I have Min’s car and it is a little over due for an oil change so I wanted to make sure that it had it before I took it all over the place today. Her car has been sitting since we took it to Ohio two weeks ago. I was very happy to discover that that Jiffy Lube carries Mobil One. Not all of them do but we always try to use it. I grabbed a quick bite at the Taco Bell that is right there and then went back to class.

I was in the car and pulling out of the parking garage at 3:15. Boy did that make me happy. I made it west and didn’t hit any traffic really until I got to the Delaware Water Gap toll booths where I ended up having to sit for fifteen minutes. But that was my longest delay so I was pretty happy. I finally got a chance to try out Min’s EZPass and it worked great. I am really happy to have that now. It is so convenient and fast.

I took the normal route up to Binghamton but from there I decided to try the more direct and more backwoods route of going northeast on US 88 to Sydney where I caught NY 8 north and took it through the wilderness of eastern New York up into the outskirts of Utica. I think that it went really quickly and that it is the right way to go when you are going to Frankfort from New Jersey. I made really good time and cut a lot of miles.

I was just outside of Frankfort when I talked to Dominica on the mobile and found out that she and her family had passed me going west as they went to get food at Lot-A-Burger in North Utica. So I turned around and took the backroads west back to Utica and drove around Utica on my own. I managed to go straight to the restaurant without much of a problem.

We ate and it was nice because I got a chance to see Madeline and Emily. Min has been able to spend the last two weeks with them but I hardly get a chance to see them at all so at least I managed to a little. I will get to see them next weekend as Dominica’s entire family is coming down to New Jersey and staying with us so that we can all go to New York City and do tourist stuff for the weekend.

We had to run back to Frankfort to get Min’s luggage and to pick up Oreo. Boy was he glad to see me (and vice versa.) He was so glad, in fact, that he accidentally peed on Dominica’s foot when he saw me. We packed everything up and left Frankfort after just fifteen minutes or so.

The trip back to Geneseo was uneventful. We did manage to test the EZPass on the New York Thruway and that worked too so we are really happy about that now. We don’t use any particular toll road very much but we use a bunch of different ones a little all of the time. So having the EZPass work in a bunch of different states is really important to us.

It felt weird coming home to the house in Geneseo. It has been so long since I have been here. It is hard to believe that I have a house out here that I don’t live in. What a bizarre concept. Actually dad gave a tour of the house to my aunt and uncle in law (my dad’s sister’s husband’s sister and her husband) this week to see if they might be interested in renting it while Dominica and I are in New Jersey or wherever we end up. But for now the house remains our Geneseo hotel room.

Pretty much we went straight to bed after arriving. We did a little unpacking but we were both really tired and it was after midnight.

My second day of getting to actually sleep in and relax. This is really awesome. I woke up plenty before needing to leave and I continued with the packing and cleaning that I had started last night. I have a ton of stuff to return to Geneseo.

Class was good again today. Some of us went out to the Thai House for some lunch. It was good.

I hit the Omega again on the way home. It is convenient when I manage to get out of work early. I came back to the apartment and it was warm and fairly sunny. Before long, though, it was a tremendous thunderstorm and extremely heavy rain. We were under water out here in no time.

Even though it was hot and muggy out I opened up the windows so that I could get the fresh air and listen to the rain. I just love the sound of rain.

I did some light work, finished watching Magnum P.I.>/em> the first season and then watched Cocoon: The Return.

I am really enjoying this new Sandisk Sansa C150 MP3 player. It is so easy to use with Audible and it does such a good job of keeping track of what I have listened to. I can be in the middle of listening to several books at once and it keeps my place in each of them which is a featuer of the AA format from Audible which is a really important feature when you are listening to really long books.

The plan tomorrow is to go to class and take off quickly as soon as class is over and head straight to Frankfort to pick up Dominica and Oreo. Then, if we are stilling doing well on time, we will be able to get back to Geneseo and actually sleep in our own bed for the first time in forever.