Sheep Guarding Llama

The post title says it all. Today was my cousin Brett’s graduation party and that was about it. He is my middle cousin out of five. Can you believe that I only have five cousins? Can you believe that my oldest cousin is only 22, two are 18 and two are 16? I am so much older than any of my cousins.

Dominica slept in a bit this morning. I got up at 7:40 because Oreo wanted to go outside. I have to take him out early in the morning because Dominica doesn’t wake up to his pacing around the room that he does to tell us that he needs something. So I didn’t get very much sleep, again.

We left the hotel at 11:00 and went across the street to the “Country Diner” and got some lunch which was really just a late breakfast – vegetarian skillets with grits. Then we drove the fifteen minutes over to my grandparents’ house to see them for a little while before the graduation party. We visited for about an hour or so before we went to the party. Oreo and Carmie chased each other around the house for quite some time. Oreo really wanted to play but Carmie couldn’t decide. She would sort of play and then get a little vicious and then play some again. Oreo is enough bigger to hold his own. We don’t have to worry about him.

The graduation party started at 2:00. We got there just before it started. We had a good time getting to visit with everyone. Just about everybody made it so that was nice. It was a ton of driving for us but it is awfully nice to manage to go out to Ohio and get to see everyone all at once for a happy occasion. It is tough being the relatives who moved away. My parents moved from Louisville, Ohio to Rochester, New York in 1967 so I was raised relatively far from the bulk of my family. And since 1994 I have lived all over the place and mostly even farther away from Ohio (although I did live in Michigan and Pennsylvania in 1994, 1995 and 2000 which was a little closer.)

Dad didn’t come out last night but drove out this morning and arrived at the party around 3:00. We would have liked to have come out this morning but we are far enough away now that that would have been just too much for us.

My cousin Monica just stared working at Yoder’s Country Bulk Foods and Deli just up the street from her house (.6 miles, in fact) just three weeks ago. It turns out that she is working for my dad’s first cousin (my first cousin once removed) – Wilbur. She talked dad into going over to see him. They haven’t seen each other since my grandfather’s (dad’s dad’s) funeral in 1971. Wilbur was seventeen years old when dad was born so they never knew each other much at all. (This is yet another example of the two sides of my family interacting. It is really weird. My cousin Gwen on my mom’s side who is Monica’s older sister is named for my dad’s cousin Gwen!)

So I went over to the store with dad where Wilbur, now 77, was working. It is a new store just opened for a month and a half. He had owned a store previously but it had closed some time ago. Wilbur is the first member of my paternal grandfather’s family that I have ever met! Can you believe that? I am thirty years old and finally meet the first person from that side of the family. We talked for a while at the store and we met his wife as well. Wilbur talked dad into taking a quick drive up past the old farm house where he grew up to Wilbur’s place because his mother, my great aunt Naomi was there. This is my grandfather’s oldest sister (I think that I have that right.) She is 97 but doing pretty well. It was neat to get to meet one of my grandfather’s siblings since I never got to meet him. (By never meeting anyone on that side of the family that includes my grandfather himself since he died five years before I was born. He had throat cancer from smoking. I have heard conflicting reports of it being one type of throat cancer or another so I have reduced it to throat cancer.)

We didn’t visit for too long and returned to the party. Today also happens to be my Great Uncle Wendel and Aunt Shirley’s 50th Wedding Anniversary. Uncle Wendel is my mother’s mother’s brother and it was in his basement that I learned to shoot pool when I was very young. It was also at his house that I first got to have mincemeat that my grandmother made for me long, long ago.

My aunt Cheryl and I got to talk a little about some of the genialogical research that we had both done. She has managed to trace family records in Europe back as far as 1495. This is my Dutch heritage from Hees in Holland in the Netherlands. I also discovered from her records that my family had settled somewhat in Somerset, New Jersey in the later seventeenth century. For those who didn’t put two and two together, Warren where I work is in Somerset, New Jersey so I could be living right where my family was over three hundred years ago. Weird.

As it headed towards evening we went back over to my grandparents’ house to hang out so that the kids could party without the old folks. The family visited for about an hour or a little more and then dad and Min and I decided that we needed to get back to the hotel to get some sleep. Dad has a busy day of visiting tomorrow and Min and I have to get back to New Jersey so that I can get to work on Monday where I can sit down and get caught up on the SGL Dailies! 😉

On the way back to the hotel in Alliance Min and I ran into the Taco Bell in Alliance to grab some dinner. We were the only people in the restaurant and it took just about twenty minutes for us to finally get some food! I was not too happy about that. There was no one at the counter and they just left us standing there waiting for someone to show up with food. They totally just didn’t make our order and ignored us standing there. We were there so long that the girl who took our order saw us and asked us if we wanted to place an order. I showed her the ticket and she paniced and got us our food herself at that point. How she could forget her only customers who had just been standing right there in front of the register for twenty minutes with their drinks and their order receipt in their hands complaining about how no one was making their food is beyond me.

It was after midnight by the time that we finally managed to get to bed. Oreo decided that he was in a snuggly mood and he snuggled all night long.

I was really tired this morning. It was all that I could do to convince myself to get out of bed and to go to work. I knew that I had a really busy day ahead of me and I wasn’t looking forward to it.

I had a lot of work to do at work today. I was supposed to get started on a major project at 9:00 but it ended up getting held off until 10:00. That made the day even more of a crunch. I worked hard all day trying to get things taken care of in the hopes that Dominica, Oreo and I would be able to leave for Ohio tonight instead of early tomorrow morning.

It rained all day here. It has been raining a lot recently. Today was some major thunderstorms. It stopped raining hard right around four or five o’clock which was quite a relief as I did not want to do any serious driving in heavy rain. I love it when it rains while I am at work or at home but not while I am traveling.

I managed to get everything wrapped up at work before 4:30 and was out the door just before 5:00. I got down to North Brunswick and helped Min get ready to go. I had loaded some of the computers into her car this morning before I left the apartment so that she would not have to worry about them. I needed to have the computers in the car so that I could transfer them to dad when we see him in Ohio. Min got the rest of the car loaded while I was at work and got Oreo all set to travel. This is his first trip with his full car seat and harness to protect him.

It was just after 6:00 when we managed to pull out of North Brunswick to head towards Ohio. We decided to attempt the southern route which means driving south on Route 1 and through northern Philadelphia and then west through Harrisburg and Pittsburgh on the Pennsylvania Turnpike – US 76.

Oreo’s harness worked out really well and he seemed to be quite comfortable and content almost the entire way. He seems to like the new car seat and harness because they allow him to be a lot closer to us and to get a much better view of stuff outside of the car than before. And we like it because it makes him a lot safer.

We stopped at a rest stop in Pennsylvania and picked up an EZ-Pass for Dominica’s car. We have been meaning to get one for a long time and figured that this was as good a time as any to try it out. Living in Geneseo we really never needed to have one since the only toll road was the New York Thruway and we almost never used that. But now in New Jersey we end up on toll roads all of the time and go through tons of change so the EZ-Pass seemed like a good idea. We tried to use it today but Pennsyvania does their EZ-Passes differently than New York and New Jersey do and we didn’t feel comfortable testing it because they don’t have mixed EZ-Pass/Cash lanes so if our pass didn’t work we would be stuck. So we paid cash. Strike one against the EZ-Pass. First time we try to use it there is no safe way to know whether or not it would work.

In Ohio we also took the turnpike but Ohio doesn’t take EZ-Pass. They are cash only. So now we have managed to drive all of the way from New Jersey to Ohio without the EZ-Pass working. It is beginning to feel like less and less of a bargain.

We arrived in Alliance, Ohio at 2:00 in the morning and were really exhausted. We stayed at the Comfort Inn on State Street that is directly attached to the Carnation Mall. It is a nice hotel and they take pets for an extra $10 which is really awesome. We will be using this hotel a lot. It is very close to my family in Ohio and Alliance is a really small town so staying there is really convenient.

It was around 3:00 when we finally got to bed. I am really getting tired of weekends that involve endless driving and no relaxing!

By the time I got to bed last night my right arm had escalated from being a painful elbow to being almost useless. It was in such bad shape that it was hurting constantly no matter what I was doing. I have absolutely no idea what I might have done to make it hurt like this but boy is it bad.

We got to bed at 11:00 last night and I slept in until 7:00 this morning. A full eight hours of sleep. It is amazing.

Not much to report today. Overall the day was pretty “normal”. It is funny – now that I leave the house to go to a “regular” job there ends up being tons less to report each day. Party that is because I really can’t talk about work anymore but also because one day is a lot like the next in many regards.

I got home a little before eight. We watched two episodes of That 70’s Show before going to bed. I spent a huge chunk of the evening on the telephone talking to a contact in Binghamton. I did a little work on the computer and we called it a day. It was a really short evening. We had leftover Southern Indian food for dinner.

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.