Sheep Guarding Llama

Dominica, Oreo and I slept in until 8:30 this morning. We have nothing going on today except for a lot of driving. We got ready to go and we stopped by dad’s hotel room two doors down from us for a few minutes to visit before we drive back to New Jersey. I am really tired of driving and don’t want to go back at all. I really wish that there was some easy way to take the train but they don’t allow dogs on Amtrak which totally screws us. Amtrak runs right from New Jersey to Alliance very near the hotel. It would be perfect!

We ran to the McDonald’s in front of the hotel right at 10:30 and managed to get breakfast there before getting onto the road. Then it was drive time. Today we decided to take the northern route on US 80 through central Pennsylvania because Dominica’s parents are meeting us near Hazleton so that they can take Oreo. The plan this week is that Oreo will be going to Frankfort where he will be staying until probably the weekend of June 3rd which is very sad. I have only seen Oreo for about half of the time since we first got him a year ago and I really miss him a lot. Dominica is flying out to Houston, Texas on Wednesday morning from Newark. She will take the New Jersey Transit train up to the airport which makes it super convenient. Then she will drive on Saturday and Sunday with Francesca and the girls from Houston to Frankfort. She will stay in Frankfort, most likely, for the week so that I can pick her and Oreo up that weekend. So I am going to be alone in New Jersey for almost two whole weeks, again.

June 4th is dad’s sixtieth birthday!

The drive on US 80 is better than the drive on US 76 and there are no tolls – and no opportunity to test the EZ-Pass again. We got out to Hazleton a little ahead of the Toccos so we drove north on 81 and ended up meeting them at Mountain Top in southern Wilkes-Barre. We met at a Perkins and had a late lunch and then gave them Oreo to take back with them. It is very sad.

While we were at lunch I was stopped by a couple who mistook me for their son. They were very nice and we had a nice conversation and my twin, Leonard, who lives in Scranton.

We continued on to New Jersey. Dominica drove most of the way from Wilkes-Barre. It was getting late by the time that we got in, about 8:30. I wasn’t in the mood to sit down and work so we decided to run out and to do some shopping. Dominica needed to get a book on Microsoft Access 2003 as she is taking a database class from Empire State College this summer that uses that and she has not worked with it much for a long time and wanted to have a lot of the basics down. Our local Barnes & Nobles closes at 9:00 and that wasn’t going to give us enough time so we ran a few minutes further away to the B&N at Menlo Park Mall in Edison where the B&N is open until 11:00 everyday. And it is much larger. Unfortunately, even for being a giant book store it doesn’t have that many books in it and its technical book section was downright dinky compared to even a small Borders in New York.

We shopped for probably forty-five minutes or so. Dominica decided to just start off with “SAMS’ Teach Yourself Access 2003 in 24 Hours” which is a good series and generally pretty inexpensive. I picked up “SAMS Teach Yourself AJAX in 10 Minutes” and the “MySQL Phasebook” since I was there and doing some shopping anyway. I am happy that some AJAX books are starting to come out from some trustworthy publishers.

Dominica was hungry so we went to the Omega Diner on the way back to the apartment. I wasn’t really hungry but since we were there I decided to get some French toast (what do they call that in France?) It turned out to be the best French toast that I have ever had. I will be getting that there on a regular basis.

It was pretty late by the time that we got back to the apartment. We were tired but I had some work that needed to be completed before I could go to bed. Stuff that was left over from Friday that I was unable to do over the weekend. Dominica settled onto the futon in the living room and read in her Data Communications and Networking textbook while I worked. Then we got off to bed around midnight.

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.