Sheep Guarding Llama

I worked last night until 4:00 in the morning so today I slept in until I felt like getting up. I woke up around 8:00 but went back to sleep until 9:00 or so. Dominica got me up this morning. She is working at TMobile in Pittsford and needed to talk to me about some things. So I decided that it was as good a time as any to get myself out of bed.

I took the morning leisurely getting ready. I left the apartment a little after 10:30. I stopped by at Panera Bread on Route 1 and got myself two cinnamon crunch bagles with light cream cheese. Those are so awesome.

It was just a little before noon when I arrived at the office in Warren. I had a throbbing headache which is a result of being up way too late and then sleeping without my CPAP. I can tell that it is going to be a long day.

Tomorrow my Linux 301 class from Hewlett-Packard starts. It is a free class that is done a lot like a class from Empire State College. It is totally online and has a forum system for the students to interact with each other and the professor. I have been interested in seeing how the HP education system works and so decided to take this class to get a feel for it. The classes are free so I think that it is a really awesome service that HP provides to people. Anyone is eligible to take classes as long as they are not yet filled.

I logged into the class today and did the “welcome to the class” activities that typically take place before the classes start. All of the students introduced themselves and there were a few online conversations in the forums that I responded to.

Dominica found out today that she has an interview set up for Tuesday, May 16th down here in New Jersey with the company that she is currently with. Currently she is a contractor and the position down here is an additional contracting position but doing basically the same job that she is doing in Rochester. And the site where she would be working is very close to the apartment that we have right now. It is really encouraging that they called her about the interview. We were sure that they were not going to because that site had a large round of layoffs this past Friday!

I didn’t stay at work for too long today. I took off a little after 5:15. I was exhausted and it wound up being a really slow day. Of course leaving work at that time results in driving in incredibly crazy rush hour traffic the whole way home which is a pain. But it was nice to be home early.

I was super lazy tonight and I had skipped lunch so I ordered pizza from Dominos. I really need to stop doing that. I popped in Remington Steele and started working on the phones that have not been working. I also worked on the new Windows desktop that I got on Sunday. I finally managed to get its network adapter working and got it started on its updates. It took several hours for all of the updates to download. But at least that is done now. Now I can spend the evening tomorrow getting all of the software that I use installed and set up. That takes several hours as well. There is so much software that I have to put onto a computer when I first get it going. In addition to my standard software I should get all of my Microsoft software installed on that machine as well but I don’t have any of those disks with me. Things like Microsoft Office, MS Project, Visio, etc. This new machine is going to be my new, dedicated Windows desktop so I should have everything that I need loaded onto it. It has a 160GB hard drive which should be quite adequate for me for quite some time since it is just the Windows desktop. My other machine is going to be turned into a SUSE Linux desktop once I am able to get that downloaded. SUSE Linux 10.1 is due to be released tomorrow but it will take several days to get all of the downloads.

I worked until 11:00 tonight. I wasn’t going to stay up so late but I got down to the final episode of Season Three of Remington Steele and needed to finish it. I couldn’t go to bed knowing that there was just one episode left to be watched. I didn’t manage to get anywhere on the phones. In fact I managed to completely kill the one that I have with me so it doesn’t work at all anymore. I am hoping that tomorrow night I will have time to do a full reset on it and start from scratch. Maybe I will get lucky and it will be fine.

I woke up before my alarm went off this morning. It seems like that must be a good sign. No CPAP and I am still waking up. Actually I think that it is easier to wake up without it because I sleep lighter. I don’t feel as good when I wake up but I that initial waking up is easier.

Jeremy got his new computer last night but did not have a chance to get it put together. Maybe he will have it up and running tonight. I am concerned that he may not have matching components though so it might be a while before he has it all together.

I got out of the apartment in good time this morning and go into the office a little after 8:00. I would have been much earlier but traffic was exceptionally bad today.

I had a crazy day at work today. I was so busy that I had to eat lunch at my desk. That isn’t any fun. And Dominica wasn’t down this weekend so I didn’t get to see her yesterday and today 🙁 Only one more week before she moves down. But she is thinking about flying down to Houston for a week and then driving back up with Francesca and the girls so that will mean another week apart after she is down here for just a week. And since no one will be home during the day Oreo will have to stay with dad instead of with me so I will be very lonely again.

By the end of the day I was absolutely worn out. It was just go, go, go all day long. I was really looking forward to the end of day (EOD) and a chance to just collapse.

Fortunately, for me anyway, Dominica is attempting to do the lingering TMobile project from February that hasn’t been completed yet. It isn’t much work and it is just in Rochester but we haven’t been able to get it completed and they are waiting on it. I hate having projects hanging over my head. I like things cleaned up and neat. Completed projects make me happy. And it will be nice for Dominica to get to do some other typs of tech work. She is broadening her experience.

Eric and Amanda are going over to the county pound in Hampton Corners between Geneseo and Mt. Morris this evening to see about a puppy that they have over there. For those who don’t know, Hampton Corners was a thriving village in the late eighteenth, early nineteenth centuries but, for some reason, it just upped and vanished at some point so long ago that there is no structure left to attest to its existance. Those of us who grew up near by had never heard its name. Eric and I used to bicycle right through it and he has even worked there once or twice. It is the crossroads now of NY Route 408 and NY Route 63 (which I grew up just off of.) In the mid-1990’s the salt mine was relocated from Retsof to Hampton Corners after the collapse of the original mine. This began an era of construction at the corners. The railroad was extended into it. And then the county began placing public services there and the state police relocated there. This location probably became popular with low traffic services because of its prime location in the dead center of the county directly between Mt. Morris and Geneseo with very easy access right into Dansville and also because it is just dirt cheap to build there. So now there are tons of things springing up that you would never guess would go there.

I didn’t leave work until after 8:30 so it was quite late by the time I got back to the apartment. I had some leftover pizza in the fridge and I ate that for dinner while I continued to work from home and watched Remington Steele. It ended up going from a late night at the office to a really late night at home. I worked until almost 4:00 in the morning! I was totally exhausted and delirious by the time I finally managed to get to bed. I am really wishing that I had that CPAP right about now!

It is Monday morning, once again.

It looks like I am not the only one who feels that the Mission Impossible movies are prime examples of internally inconsistent cinema.

Today dragged on and I was really tired when I got back to the apartment a little before 8:00. I plopped down in front of the computer and started trying to fix the telephones that aren’t working properly and turned on my laptop to watch some season three of Remington Steele. I was hungry so I ordered a few days worth of pizza from Dominos. I figured that it would be a lot easier and more cost effective if I had some in the fridge instead of ordering food every night.

I made it through three episodes. I couldn’t bring myself to go to bed. I spent a lot of the evening working on the HP D325 that I got on Saturday. The unit was in pretty rough shape and wasn’t working anymore. It could only run for about five minutes before it would shut itself off. No wonder Jeremy was running it with the case wide open when I saw him using it. I put some serious work into it and it appears to be able to keep itself running now but I am going to have to be really careful with it. Fortunately it is still under warranty for quite a while but the downside is that it has been so abused that HP might not honor the warranty.

Dominica was able to get out to Carousel Mall in Syracuse this evening and wrap up the onsite survey work that we have been doing for TMobile. What a relief it is to have that site completed. Now to get all of the paperwork completed. That is as much work as the project itself. It worked out nicely that Dominica’s parents were able to meet her at the mall and they were able to have dinner together.

I got the desktop running and finally got Windows XP installed but now I need the HP drivers for the box and after trying all kinds of different things from HP I decided that I needed to give up and get off to bed. It was not that far from midnight when I finally got to bed. Now I have to face my second night without my CPAP. Hopefully I won’t become increasingly exhausted as the week wears on but it seems likely.

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.