Sheep Guarding Llama

The weekends are so short when I come back to Geneseo. So much driving with so little time at home. This weekend was the worst yet. To make matter even worse, I was supposed to have worked at TMobile in Pittsford to wrap up an earlier project for them but ended up not being able to do that because of the car being in the shop. Fortunately I didn’t have a chance to really look for the materials for the project until later and I hadn’t scheduled the thing at the store so I didn’t have to cancel on them.

I spent the morning getting ready to leave. Isn’t that depressing. Dad came over after church and the three of us went to the Omega Grill for lunch. I can’t believe how long it has been since I have eaten over there. Weird.

Dad came over to the house to get a load of stuff to take down to Jeremy as well as a load of packing trash that had accumulated at the house from all of the stuff that has been delivered recently. The living room and the dining room have just been packed full of boxes and packing materials. There is still a lot but at least a big chunk of it is gone.

I had to be on the road south by 7:00. Boy was it a short day. Pretty much we spent the entire day getting me ready to drive. Dominica sent me with a load of stuff that we will need at the apartment like some pots and pans and a rack to hang drying laundry onto. I also am bringing down the computer that I just got from Jeremy. It is going to be my slower, older Windows XP machine and I am going to convert my new Athlon 64 machine over to SUSE Linux 10.1 when it releases later this week. I figured that since I am working as a Linux Admin full time that using Linux as my desktop would be the right way to go. And the Linux box doesn’t have a DVD player in it but the Windows one will so the Windows box will be perfect for simple background tasks like playing movies while I do the real work on Linux.

I had to stop in Endicott and Johnson City on my way through to drop off two more IP phones. That took a big chunk out of my evening. I was probably stopped in the Binghamton area for about an hour but I felt better knowing that the two phones were both delivered and hooked up.

I was hungry for dinner but I knew that there was a fairly new Waffle House open in Clark’s Summit, Pennsylvania so I held out until I got down there. I got off of the highway and drove through down and found myself to be the only person eating at Waffle House the entire time that I was there! I have never been anywhere near alone at a Waffle House before. The food was good and I got a chance to chat with the guys who were working. One of the was training and the other was like a Waffle House consultant who travels all over the place working with new stores and stuff. He new the spot that I was talking about in Georgia near Savanah where there were two Waffle Houses that faced each other across the street. He said that he used to work at one of them. Pretty weird that out of the thousands of Waffle Houses out there that we might have crossed paths there.

It was late – close to 1:30 or later – when I finally arrived in North Brunswick. I was really tired but wasn’t able to fall right asleep. I didn’t end up getting to bed until after 2:30! When I did finally get ready to go to bed I came to the horrible realization that I had not remembered to pack my CPAP and it will be more than a week before Dominica returns to New Jersey. This could end up being quite the disaster. We will see. I have never gone this long without my breathing apparatus since I first got it over a year ago. This is going to be really tough. I might have to have Dominica ship it to me or figure out something to get a CPAP here.

First of all we have to celebrate a little today because I finally had a chance to do a word count again after quite some time and SGL has significantly surpassed the King James Bible in length! We are just a day or two away from topping 800,000 words. That is a lot of writing.

I had to get up quite early this morning and take Dominica to work. Her car needed new tires for the summer as she is was still driving on her winter Nokian snow tires and that was getting us bad gas mileage, bad handling and burning up her expensive winter tires. So I drove her to work at 8:00 in the morning. I was not very thrilled about getting up that early on Saturday. We had to be up around 7:00 🙁

I got her to work at 9:00 and then I ran over to Tim Horton’s on Ridgeway to get bagles and muffins for her and her coworkers. Normally she grabs the goodies in Geneseo before she goes in on Saturday.

I hung out at Fujifilm for about half an hour. Then I drove down to Henrietta and dropped off her car at Dunn Tire. I had called ahead and had ordered her tires yesterday afternoon so that I knew that they would be ready for us. It is a pain because both of our cars have really odd sized tires and it makes it really difficult to find any. Our selections are never good. Luckily Dunn was able to find her some nice B.F. Goodrich tires that will work well for her and should last for a while.

By the time I got the car in and everything taken care of it was around 10:30. Andy came by and picked me up so that we could go out and get some breakfast. He was running a little late because he had his fourth kidney stone this morning! He is in really rough shape.

We had breakfast at Jay’s Diner around 11:00. We haven’t seen each other in about a month. I know, tons of my readers only see me every six months at best.

I found out that Min’s car needed more work done than we had anticipated and so it ended up taking all day. I dropped it off just after 10:00 and wasn’t able to get it until 4:00. Her front suspension needed a lot of work. Nothing outrageous, just the result of being a car with almost 70,000 miles on it. But, including the tires, it ended up being almost $1,100 which was a bit more than I had anticipated paying.

It turned out to be a really good thing that I had Andy pick me up and didn’t attempt to just sit at the shop while they did the tires. That would have been awful. After lunch we went back to Andy’s apartment in Brighton and I installed his new IP phone in his office. Then we just hung around for a while. Andy’s little sister Lindsay came over around 2:00.

Andy drove me out to the bank so that I could take care of making a deposit of my paycheck since I have not yet had any chance to set up direct deposit. That is a real pain. It will be nice when that is working again.

At 4:00 Andy ran me back over to Dunn Tire so that I could pick up the car. I drove back down to Geneseo and swung into the house for about fifteen minutes to take care of a few things and then I had to run down to Leicester to pick up Oreo from dad because dad was down there having dinner. Oreo was very happy to get to go home with his daddy. I also managed to pick up the HP D325 desktop that I was buying off of Jeremy while I was there. One less thing to have to deal with tomorrow. Art was just dropping Jeremy off just before I was leaving so I go to see him for about fifteen minutes.

Then it was back home for my longest stretch of the day – forty five minutes. That was my entire, relaxing Saturday at home. My only day without traveling or work. What a busy day. I just sat in the office and talked to Min over AIM and played with Oreo.

At 7:15 I had to pack little Oreo into the car and drive up to pick Dominica up from work. She was waiting outside for us when we got there and we drove down to Henrietta and we got a late dinner from Bill Gray’s restaurant on Jefferson Road. That was really tasty. We don’t eat there often enough although the prices are pretty high so it is probably best. We got some frozen Abbott’s custard too.

After dinner we went to Buffalo Wild Wings with a bunch of Dominica’s coworkers. Apparently they go there fairly often. We stayed for several hours and they even goaded me into getting up and singing “Come Crying to Me” by Lonestar.

Today is my driving back to Geneseo day. My first time back in three weeks! That is kind of weird, isn’t it?

I got into work this morning kind of early to make sure that I would have an easy time not staying late tonight. I don’t want to stay late on driving days.

I left the office at 5:00 and got stuck in bumper to bumper stop and go traffic for quite a while – pretty much until I got out to Pennsylvania. From there on the traffic was light and I made really good time up to Binghamton.

In the Binghamton area I had to stop off in Endicott to pick up some stuff from John Stephens (aka The Surfing IT Wizard) before heading home. He was borrowing our digital camera and Dominica is going to need that on Monday because she is doing a job in Syracuse. I stopped at McDonald’s and got some quick dinner. As I pulled back out onto Main Street I got pulled over for making a left onto Main St. What a pain. The cop was really nice and didn’t give me a real ticket, though.

It was around 11:00 when I got to the house. Dominica pulled in just minutes behind me with Oreo. He had been with dad all day and she had stopped at dad’s house to pick him up on her way home from work.

I was really exhausted and pretty much went straight to bed.

I am glad that I got to bed a little early last night. I felt pretty good this morning.

I had a nice drive into work and today, for the most part, is a relaxing day. Not relaxing because there is nothing to do but relaxing because there is a good level of things to be done. Enough to keep me working but not enough to make me sweat.

Tomorrow I am driving back to Geneseo after work. My first time back in three weeks! I think that this has been the longest stretch away from the house since we bought it in July, 2003. It will be weird to be back at the house. Not that I am going to get to see it any. I am working in Rochester on Saturday for TMobile out at the Pittsford Plaza and hopefully going to Dunn Tire and getting new tires mounted on Min’s car before she has to do any additional long distance driving. That will eat up my entire day. Then I come back down to New Jersey on Sunday afternoon. So it will be a very short weekend for me. I will be plenty exhausted come Monday morning.

At least I do get to pick up my “new” computer on Sunday. I bought Jeremy’s HP D325 off of him. He is getting the new parts for his new machine delivered on Monday, he thinks. This will be his first attempt at building his own machine so it will probably prove to be quite the adventure for him. His friend Ben is going to come over and help him get it together.

After work I came home and just relaxed. I watched some more Remington Steele and broke down and ordered a pizza from Dominos. The Sicilian pizza that I ordered the other night was awful and I decided to just through it away rather than to suffer through it. I won’t be getting pizza from that place anymore. It is too bad because they have good prices and fast, friendly service. They do have a wide Italian menu so once in a while I will probably get something else from there.

Today was my insanely early day. I was up and out of bed at 4:30 in the morning. Way too early for the likes of me. This is the earliest that I have had to have gotten up since starting in New Jersey. I am glad that I don’t have to do this all of the time.

I was out the door just before 5:45 and arrived at the office in Warren just after 6:15. That is the fastest that I have ever made that commute. That was awesome driving all that way without any real traffic. I wish that it could be like that everyday.

I had about half an hour to kill so I went down to the pond with the fountains in front of the building and sat there with the ducks and checked my email on my BlackBerry. It was very pleasant out and the ducks were having a good time swimming around the two big fountains there.

I got on the Manhattan shuttle at 6:45. It took a little more than an hour to get into the city via US78 and the Holland Tunnel. The drive was a bit worrisome as the transmission was dying in the shuttle and we really thought that the shuttle was going to die at any moment and leave us stranded in the middle of the highway. But the transmission held and we arrived just fine. The poor driver had to take that piece of junk all the way back out to Warren before he could have it repaired. That had to be really bad. I didn’t hear whether or not he made it.

The shuttle dropped us off downtown and we had to take the subway up to midtown to the SUN event. This is only the second time that I have ever ridden the New York subway if I remember correctly. I am not very enthralled with subways so it is possible that I have ridden it more than I think. I really don’t remember but it hasn’t been very much. I have ridden the Washington and Toronto subways so much that I really don’t remember the NYC one. It sure isn’t as nice as either Washington or Toronto though.

We got up to the Parker Le Meridian Hotel for the event in plenty of time and had quite some time to just sit around having breakfast and talking. I stayed at the event until about noon. I had planned on staying later but there wasn’t a lot of stuff that I wanted to see and I didn’t want to spend the entire day there if possible.

My the time that I got back to Columbus Circle to catch the subway at 59th I discovered the station entrance had been closed so I ended up walking around quite a bit and finally deciding to take a different line from 57th which dropped me off quite a bit farther away from the shuttle pick up than I had been planning on. So I did a bit more walking to get back to the shuttle and ended up missing it by minutes. So I was stuck in Manhattan for an hour with nothing to do.

So I decided to get some lunch and a beer. I walked over to the Greenwich Street Pub and got some Bass Ale and some fish and chips. It was nice to get a chance to just sit and relax for an hour with absolutely nothing to do at all. I used my BlackBerry to keep up with everyone via email.

I caught the 2:00 shuttle back to Warren. On the way back the driver had the misfortune to have a piece of the ceiling of the shuttle come lose and swing down and nail him in the nose while he was driving. To make matters worse it continued to swing in front of him practically blinding him. Someone at the front of the shuttle jumped up and grabbed the loose piece and pulled it out of the way so the driver could safely get the shuttle over to the side of the road. It had hit him hard enough to have given him a nose bleed.

I went into the office for a little while but not too long and then headed back to the apartment. I spent quite a bit of the evening working from home so it wasn’t like having the evening off. I worked until almost 8:00. I popped in Remington Steele and watched a couple of episodes while I did a few things. I experimented with using rsync as a remote backup system to see how that would fare against Microsoft’s backup system. Tomorrow I hope to try out some speed tests to see how it works performance wise.

I also got a chance to finally install Solaris 10 on my SUN SparcStation that I got two weeks ago. I had accidentally left the house for the unit at home and was not able to do the install without it. Dominica had brought that down for me so I finally got to do that. Now the machine is finally working and useful. I am looking forward to getting to play with that.

I got to bed at a reasonable hour – just a little after 10:30. But I was pretty tired.

Have you ever wanted to know more about spelling bees? I thought that you did. I mean really, who doesn’t? Check out this great blog posting on Spelling Bee Winning Word Reporting in the Media. It really helps illustrate how pointless reporting often is – even in such simple things as spelling bees.