Sheep Guarding Llama

I slept in until 7:00 this morning. It is going to take me several days to get caught up from the past ten days or so being so exhausting. Dominica had to get up just a little bit later than me. She is attempting to catch the 9:00 NJ Transit train into Manhattan for her interview this morning. In theory, the 9:00 will provide her with plenty of time to spare.

My car has a soft tire and I don’t want to drive on it so I went over to Walmart and got some Ultra Tire stuff. I don’t know exactly what it is called. But I used that and hopefully it will plug up wherever the tire is leaking from. That cut into my morning a bit. I hate having to errands before I can get to work. Getting on and off of the highway during rush hour is not convenient. At least by stopping where I did I was able to run into McDonald’s and get some breakfast.

I got to work and discovered that there was a paperwork problem and that they lost some of my security paperwork so I had to spend some time getting fingerprinted again and getting that paperwork moved around. So much for getting a lot of work done today.

I did something to myself and my joints are aching today. First it was my left knee and now my right elbow is killing me. I can barely move it. I suppose that it could be the damp weather that we have been having. Maybe I am getting old and arthritic but that seems to have come on awfully suddenly for it to have been that.

I got home from work and got Min ready and out the door as quickly as I could so that we could go out to get some dinner. My evenings are really short (get home around 8:00 and need to be in bed by around 11:00!) and so I really hate doing anything that involves long transition times between activities such as going into the house and doing nothing while we get ready to go to dinner. People with lots of free time forget how easy it is for “getting ready” to take thirty minutes and when thirty minutes is one sixth of your entire free day it adds up quickly.

We ate dinner at Tanjore on Route 1 not far from the house. The food was just amazing. Just as good as last time. Unfortunatley the restaurante took a really long time getting us “to go” containers and our check after we were done eating. In fact, it took them longer to do that than it took us to order and eat! So that ended up blowing a lot of my evening too. See how quickly this stuff adds up? Running to a quick dinner just around the corner from the house took over two hours!

We got back home and pretty much did nothing but watch a couple episodes of season four of That 70’s Show. Dominica did some work on the computer and I relaxed with the dog. Then it was off to bed.

We got in so late last night that it was all that I could do to get out of bed this morning. It was my first night with the CPAP again in over a week. Using the CPAP makes getting up in the morning harder than when I don’t use it even though I get better sleep.

Today was a rain day. It was raining yesterday evening and most of the night. Everything is soaked and even our raised lawn is about half under water. There is standing water everywhere. It was really heavy rain on my entire drive into the office. Several places I had to drive through a couple of inches of water.

It rained pretty much all day. I was very tired and, of all days, was completely swamped with work. I was totally burned out by the end of the day and decided to take off early at 5:15 and get back to the apartment.

Today was Dominica’s interview with the company that she is currently working with’s office in Edison, New Jersey. She thought that it went pretty well. We will see.

Dominica cooked dinner tonight and we spent the evening just relaxing at home. Oreo has had too much disruption recently and needs us to spend solid time with him. That and I just don’t feel like leaving the house all that often now that I am leaving for work for twelve hours a day every day. We watched some Magnum P.I. and then watched the fourth season of That 70’s Show. We watched several episodes before going to bed.

We got the printer hooked up and working. I have an old, beat up but working well Hewlett – Packard LaserJet 5L that uses an old parallel cable. Min had hooked it to the new Linux box but didn’t have root priviledges needed to install it. So we got that working and she updated her resume so that she is ready for her interview tomorrow. She is really nervous about that. Not really about the interview but about the travel to and from the interview. She will be taking the train and the subway all by herself.

It was after midnight by the time that we finally got to bed. I had a lot of work that I had to get done tonight. I had been hoping to have been in bed closer to 10:30 but that never seems to actually work out. We are going to need to get another computer desk so that Dominica will have a place to work while I am using my computer. We don’t have to deal with that for two weeks at least because she is barely going to be around at all for that long.

For those who were paying attention yesterday – we had a day without SGL. We still have no idea what happened. Our network connection was down for a few hours and somehow we also had a database issue so anyone who went to SGL just got an error screen. As you can see, everything is working now but we have no idea why just the database shut down.

It was hard to get back onto the normal work week schedule this morning. I got to work around 9:00. Dominica left Frankfort around 9:30 and decided to go east to US 87 and to come south down past NYC and to come into New Jersey from the North East. This was the first time that either of us was attemting that route.

I had a busy day at work and didn’t manage to get lunch until quite late. That ended up working out really well as Min made it to the office just as I was ready for lunch so she and Oreo picked me up at the office and we went into Warren to eat at the Thai House.

I got home at 7:30 and we decided that we really needed to get out the door and make an attempt at getting into Manhattan tonight so that Dominica would be able to see what she needs to do to get to her interview there on Wednesday. She is really nervous about riding the trains and wanted me to walk her through it before she had to do it on her own. So we drove out to New Brunswick to catch the train. We learned that the station really close to us, Jersey Avenue, only allows boarding during commuting hours in the morning for going into the city so it is useful for work but not useful for going in in the evenings. So we had to drive into our local city to catch the train.

It took us about forty five minutes by the time we figured out where we needed to go, how to park, how to get tickets, etc. We just missed the 8:21 train and ended up having to take the 8:54 which was running a few minutes late. The ride into Penn Station was about 55 minutes or maybe a little longer. The train stops in Newark and at the airport along the way which is really handy.

We got into Penn Station and had to figure out how to get to the subway. It is a little confusing but not too bad. We finally figured out how to get onto the A Train Express to Downtown. We hopped that and road to Canal Street. That took another twenty minutes or so. Not too bad but not great either.

The subway dropped us off on Canal and it was only about a ten or maybe a fifteen minute walk westwardly over to Greenwich and then down to the office where Min will be interviewing on Wednesday. It was pretty late, just coming up on 11:00, and everything in the area was closed. People can say all that they want about New York and specifically Manhattan being the “City That Never Sleeps” but the reality is that NYC is an absurdly early closing city. For a city its size there should be fifty times the late night ammenities that there are. So we decided just to walk right back to the subway and ride back up to Penn Station and maybe eat there.

We got to Penn Station right as they were boarding the train for New Brunswick and the next one wasn’t going to come along for another hour so we ran for it and got right on foregoing dinner. It was another hour back out to New Brunswick and then we had to drive home. It was really late but we were both pretty hungry.

We stopped at the Omega Diner on Route 1 since they are open twenty-four hours a day. The place was packed with college kids. Rutgers is very close. We ate dinner and then got back to the apartment. Oreo had been alone for a very long time at this point and was very glad when we got in. But he was a good boy and hadn’t made any mess in the house while we were gone. At least none that we found.

I got to bed at 4:00 in the morning last night and even then didn’t manage to fall asleep probably until close to 6:00 Then I was up at 10:00. Not a long night of sleep. I am looking forward to getting my CPAP back.

Dominica left Geneseo around 10:30 this morning to head out to her parents’ house. I went out to the living room, the only real room in the apartment, and got to work on the computer again. I continued off with the episode of Magnum P.I. that I left off with last night. What a great, classic show that is. This is wonderful stuff. I wonder what my kids will think of shows like this and Remington Steele. The 1980’s were such a bizarre time in history.

Today was another day dedicated to just relaxing for me. I spent most of the day casually working on the MyVid video collection system that I have been working on. I didn’t make a ton of progress today but I learned new stuff and got some additional functionality added in. It was a good educational day. I learned a bit, watched a bit and managed to unwind a little.

I watched a couple of movies before calling it a night. I watched one of, if not the, worst movie I have ever seen: National Lampoon’s Last Resort with the pathetic “Coreys”. I should have known better but it was cheap and I always enjoyed the National Lampoon “Vacation” films so I thought that I would give it a chance. What a dumb move that was. Do NOT waste time on this movie.

I had to wash the taste of that out of my mouth so I watched Detonator with Pierce Brosnan, Patrick Stewart and Christopher Lee. It was another bargain bin film but it wasn’t bad at all. It was one of the better bargain bin values that I have gotten in a while. Nothing outrageously awesome but an enjoyable film that I will watch again someday and I am sure that some of you will borrow and enjoy as well.

I got to bed around 11:30. Back to work tomorrow. Dominica leaves Utica in the morning to head down this way. She is finally moving to New Jersey.

Today is my first day posting the SGL updates from my new SUSE Linux workstation. So far so good. I am really liking my high powered Linux desktop. Since Linux has had full 64 bit support for a while I can really take advantage of my hardware as opposed to running Windows in scaled down 32 bit mode.

I slept in until 10:00 this morning. Boy did that feel good. John called me from Ithaca. He was working there and needed my assistance. That kept me busy for several hours. I finished watching Once Upon A Time in the West this morning. I kind of feel like I may have seen it or have seen part of it long ago but it is just a vague memory.

I ended up putting in six hours working today. Not much of a day off. I finished watching Once Upon A Time in the West and then moved on to watching Marlene Dietrich in Morrocco which is a really awful movie from 1930 with no plot whatsoever. It was massively boring. The character development was so poor that it was impossible to follow. The film quality was really low.

I ordered in some lunch from Pizza Plus Cluck U. What a stupid name. I got an eggplant parm sub, corn nuggets and mozzarella sticks. Nothing special but at least it wasn’t pizza. I worked until 4:30. I started watching Blonde Venus with Marlene from 1932. It had Cary Grant in one of his earliest roles but even he couldn’t save this movie. I turned it off. Not a happy movie. Just a poor movie about rotten people. I decided that I needed happier things to watch so I headed out to Walmart and Pathmark to do some shopping.

At Walmart I managed to pick up some DVDs. Mostly bargain bin stuff. I got super cheap Grease 2 replacing my old laserdisc for Dominica even though I totally hate the movie, Dead & Breakfast, Cool World with a young Brad Pitt, Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express with Sean Connery and Ingrid Berman, Black Ball, Detonator with Pierce Brosnan and Patrick Stewart, Last Resort with the awful Coreys and Season Three (it was all that they had) of Magnum P.I.. Not the best selection ever but the Walmarts here have very little to be desired. There is little reason to go back there now. I cleaned them out. They don’t have any television shows left that I want to see and they only have a few full priced movies that are sort of tempting. Nothing that really calls to me.

I hit Pathmark and picked up some basic supplies. Water and chips. Can’t drink the tap water here. It is so bad. I made a cool discovery though. I discovered that down here they stock the shelves with Diet Cherry Pepsi in two liter bottles!! That is so awesome. So I grabbed two bottles of it.

I came back to my lonely apartment and watched Magnum P.I. It isn’t an exciting life but it’s what I have. I watched several episodes while I worked on the computer. Since it was my day off I worked on my pet video collection project. Dominica wanted me to get more of it done so that she could use it this week to enter some data into the system since she will have a lot of time alone (with the dog) at the apartment. She has two interviews this week and other than that her week consists of studying for the second A+ examination.

Tomorrow is another lazy day at home. I will have to figure out food again. The house is still completely devoid of anything but the chips that I bought today. At least I have something to drink now.