Sheep Guarding Llama

Lots to do today. This job in New Jersey is running us ragged as we try to get everything ready so that I can go. On Friday I had to run to Rochester to deal with fingerprinting. This morning Dominica and I got up and drove up to a medical center right across the street from her office and I did my drug test. That ended up taking a lot longer than it should have. Maybe an hour or so. At least it gave Min a chance to just sit in the car and study for her A+ test. She had brought study materials along with her so that she could be productive. Oreo was just happy to get to be in the car.

After the drug test we drove around looking for “Dogs At Play” – a doggie day care facility that we are considering for Oreo when there is no one to watch him. Once again, hardships of me moving. I have been his stay at home doggie dad ever since we got him. I really enjoy getting to spend the day with Oreo. This is going to be tough on both of us. We had a heck of a time finding “Dogs At Play”. They are located on a one way street in a really awkward and hard to get to area of the city. We probably drove around for more than twenty minutes just trying to find the street and being within a block or two of it almost the entire time.

The day care place looked nice. They have alternating big dog / little dog days. Today was a big dog day but there were two Boston terriers there too. Both of the women who run the place have Bostons and they are there everyday. Apparently Bostons are really good at holding their own with larger dogs. They really don’t realize how small they are. The two Bostons that live there are both girls and much smaller than Oreo. Oreo is about 25 pounds and on the large side for a Boston. He is all muscle and in very good shape, not pudgy (like his daddy.) He is also quite tall. So he really seems like a much larger dog than most of the Bostons that we meet. Oreo didn’t get to go in and visit today. They think that it is usually too much for a dog to be suddenly introduced into the world of doggie day care. They prefer to bring them in with just a few dogs and let them get acquainted before letting them in with the larger numbers during the day. So Dominica made an appointment for next Monday to bring Oreo in and let him play with the two Bostons for a little while to see how they get along.

We were hungry and drove down to Jay’s Diner for some lunch. We called Andy on the way down but weren’t able to find him to see if he wanted to get some lunch too. We went right past his apartment on the way and even pulled into the parking lot to see if he was there but there weren’t any signs of life so we went on to lunch by ourselves. At Jay’s we tried their new stuffed French Toast which is basically regular French toast sliced in half and covered in cream cheese. Yummy! But boy is that ever a filling meal.

Oreo and I got out of bed before nine this morning. A bit of snow fell overnight and Upstate New York is white once again. We managed to go all winter without hardly having any snow at all and half of the time not even needing to wear coats and now that we are just a week away from spring we are bitter cold and covered in snow! What a place this is.

Dominica slept in and I put in some serious work on the email server that was having problems the other night and got caught up on the SGL dailies. I know that while I am in New Jersey the dailies are going to be just about everyone’s sole means of communicating with me so I have been trying to be really diligent about keeping them up to date and full of actual information.

I got Andy and my reservations all set for our trip to South Carolina this week. We are flying out of Rochester on Wednesday afternoon at 5:00 and arriving in Atlanta, Georgia just after 7:00. We will rent a car and drive east out to Anderson, South Carolina and be checked in to the Comfort Suites out on US85 by 10:00 at the latest. That will give us plenty of time to get some rest in before spending all of Thursday at the hospitals. Then we are returning to Atlanta on Friday at 9:00 and flying back to Rochester and should arrive just after 11:00. I should be able to get home just an hour or an hour and a half after Dominica.

Dominica’s Saturday schedule has changed and she is now working an hour earlier than she used to. That is going to make her Saturdays that much more exhausting. She barely has enough time to get home, sleep and get back to work. In theory her weekend will start an hour earlier but she will be even more tired going into it. I am not sure that it is worth it.

Dominica got out of bed just in time to shower and be ready when dad came over after church so that we could go get some lunch at the Omega. I am all ready starting to miss the Omega Grill and I have not even moved away yet. How sad is that?

After lunch we spent the afternoon studying, me for the Security+ exam and Dominica for the A+. I think that I am ready to take the Security+ after all of this time. I can’t believe how long I have put this test off. I will be very happy to have this out of the way. While I am working in New Jersey my plan is to focus on the Red Hat certifications since they will directly apply to exactly what I am doing down there. I shouldn’t waste the opportunity. And I am certain that my manager will be happy to let me flex my hours in order to take tests directly related to my work. They will probably let me take any tests I want regardless of its relevance but I am not so sure about that. We will have to see. It would be really nice if I was able to test all of the time down there because I could get a lot of stuff out of the way while I am stuck down there all by myself. Studying at night is a good way to pass the time. That is how I did most of my early certifications – I would study in a hotel room by myself when there was nothing else to do. It made me be really productive.

Dominica went to Walmart and did some shopping. She found some new clothes for me. I need new clothes since I am starting the new job in New Jersey and don’t have enough “office” clothes to be anyplace full time unless they want me in jeans and polos all of the time. On her way home she went to Pizza Paul’s and got us some dinner. A cheese pizza and one of their giant brownies. Min really likes their pizza and I really like their brownies. I still prefer my pizza from Mia’s but these are the sacrifices that one must make for one’s marriage. 🙂

On her way back to the house Dominica got pulled over by a village cop in training because her headlight was out. We are planning on taking the car in tomorrow to deal with that. Dominica only discovered that the light was out yesterday and told me while she was at work. I called but the shop was closed for the weekend so tomorrow is the first chance that we will have to get it fixed. She didn’t get a ticket but she was pretty annoyed.

We spent the evening watching a few episodes of Remington Steele Season One. Only one episode left to go after tonight. Min picked up Season Two while she was at Walmart and Season Three is due out in just a few weeks. We did some additional studying and then it was time for bed.

While she was at work today Dominica posted a MySpace like site up on Dogster just for Oreo. What a cute idea that site is. A great way for people to show off their best friends. And Oreo is such a cutie. Everyone needs to check out his page and “Leave Him a Bone”.

In the mail today I finally got a letter from Empire State College telling me that I actually completed a class that I had actually finished taking in December of 2004! Now if you think that I have been procrastinating about getting my degree sent to me you need to realize that I have been waiting for a year and a half for four of my classes to have their paperwork go through saying that I actually completed them. I have been done with all of my graduation paperwork for over a month now and not all of the school’s paperwork for my classes has come through yet. Heaven only knows how they expect people to be able to take classes one semester after another if it takes this long for the last class to complete. You could make it all of the way through your degree program before you found out that you failed out your first semester. Apparently I am still a long way away from actually graduating. There hasn’t been any word from the college about my degree in well over a month. Maybe two!

Dad and I went to lunch today. On the way back we stopped off at Walmart and looked for the treadmill that he has been trying to get there for months. They still don’t have it. He has been trying to get it one way or another for a long time now and Walmart is doing a really bad job with this. They keep their display treadmill on display but it would appear that they no longer carry the item. None of their locations stock it and the web site dropped it since dad started looking to find a way to get it. And since they won’t deliver it to your house he didn’t want to order it and have to deal with it arriving in Geneseo at the store. So he is probably going to just get a different treadmill from Sears or Dick’s or someplace like that.

Oreo and I drove over to the Millen’s in Livonia at 7:00. Dominica is going to go straight to their house when she gets off of work. We have hardly had any time to see them in the past several months and now we will have no time at all to see anyone for the forseeable future so we wanted to try to get together at least once before I left town. Sorry to everyone that we haven’t been able to get together with at all – move closer and be available last minute on a Saturday night is about all that I can suggest. Our schedules are just crappy for getting together with people. It is very sad. We have gone for so long without seeing almost anyone.

Dominica came down from work and got lost on her way to Livonia. She got pretty close but ended up on Dutch Hollow Road instead of on Bronson Hill. Luckily she was able to get down to the Millen’s before the snow started really coming down. Just after she arrived we got quite a bit of snow and the ground was completely covered when we left. The roads were really slippery and we had to drive really slowly to get back to Geneseo.

I started studying again for the CompTIA Security+ exam. Yes I know that it has been forever. I can’t put this off anymore. Dominica is planning on taking the first test of her A+ exam on Tuesday and I am going to go along with her so I figured that it would only make sense for me to take my test at the same time. I am not actually ready for it but I will see what I can do between now and then. This is one test that has been hanging over my head for far too long and I really need to just get it out of the way. It has never been a priority for me and I really should have chosen a different certification to have worked on but I didn’t and now I just need to face the music and have done with it.

Today is the one day this week that I don’t have to go anywhere. What a relief.

I spent the morning working around the house. I had some paperwork to do for New Jersey along with plenty of work here that just needs to be completed before I can go. Plenty to keep me busy.

I scheduled my drug test for first thing on Monday morning. I have never done a drug test before so this should be interesting. I have to drive up to the city for that. No big deal. Dominica decided that she will go along with me and we will get breakfast and then go look at doggie daycare places for Oreo.

I also had to schedule my fingerprinting. Now this is going to be a problem. The paperwork says that I need to get to New York City to have it down. Um, what? That is a little ways away and not exactly something that is going to fit into my schedule over the next week since I only have five days left before moving (five business days that is) and they need me doing my drug test on Monday, I am lecturing at FLCC on Wednesday, flying to South Carolina on Wednesday night and returning on Friday night. That doesn’t leave much of a window for an unplanned trip down to New York – especially when I wanted to use that window to get new tires for my car before I have to do so much driving.

Fortunately someone in the Rochester office managed to work their magic and managed to get me fingerprinted in Rochester. But it absolutely had to be done today. So that is tough to do but way better than trying to deal with a trip to New York. Boy are things getting busy. Ugh. And I thought that today would be a nice, relaxing day at home.

While I was going through the paperwork for the job in New Jersey I noticed that my employment agreement was changed from what our verbal and email agreements had been and they were lowering my pay rate significantly. This was hidden in the form of us having agreed (verbally and in writing which I had kept) to an hourly rate but the contract was written for a hybrid salary system that involved me only getting paid for eight hours a day but being required to work up to ten (a professional daily rate is the term.) Well, since I am expected to be working long hours down in New Jersey I figured that this was a pretty big deal, 20% cut in my expected pay expected and possibly more. That wasn’t going to fly. So I called down to see what was up with that but my rep was on the other line and had to call me back.

I called up to the Rochester office to warn them that I probably didn’t need to do the fingerprinting today and to stop wasting time on my paperwork since I was definitely not going to be accepting the job given the drop in pay. We had actually been a little nervous about the low rate that I had taken in the first place but I have had a really good relationship with this consulting firm in the past and I felt that it was worth taking a much lower rate than I usually ask for. Also this position is an incredible experience for me. Tons of really great experience both from a technology side but also from a corporate culture and peer interaction perspective. The woman who does my paperwork was out to lunch but the receptionist asked what company the job was for and the world wide rep for the contract just happened to be in Rochester today! What are the chances? Actually they must have been pretty good since this had to be God watching over me. No way this was coincidence since it required that the world wide rep be in Rochester, not be on the phone, the person that I was calling to be out and the receptionist to decide to find someone to handle me instead of sending me to voicemail like any other time.

So the rep called down to New Jersey after talking to me. Then the rep in New Jersey called me back to explain what had happened and profusely appologized about the miscommunication. After he explained what had happened I could see how he had missed one step in the process and had thought I knew how they were doing their billing and payment systems. He admitted to having missed telling me that piece. I wasn’t too happy, though, and was definitely not going to be accepting the position whether the mistake was intentional or not. (It is important to note that my BASE rate, i.e. the amount that I would be paid should I work forty hours a week, had not changed – only the amount that I would get paid between forty and fifty hours a week. But we have been expecting me to be working long hours down there so this dramatically affected our expected pay.) So I turned the job down.

After I turned the position down they decided to raise my base rate (the “hourly rate” if you will which is difficult to explain because I am only hourly after ten hours a day.) Dominica and I talked about it and felt that the mistake was legitimate and that no one was trying to pull a fast one and that the raised base rate would probably be better for us in the long run. Here is the quick explanation:

Old System (what we had agreed to originally): Hourly at a set rate. Forty hours a week at flat rate and then overtime at time and a half. We are expecting that I will be working long hours and I will be on call almost all of the time. This is expected but not guaranteed. Any budgeting that we do would have to be based off of the “hourly rate times forty hours” equation.

New System (what we have now agreed to): Daily Professional Salary Rate. I am expected to work eight to ten hours a day at a fixed rate. If they need me less than eight hours I don’t have to stay but I get paid for eight hours anyway. Between eight and ten hours on a given day I get paid nothing, basically. Then, after the tenth hour I get time and a half overtime based on the higher hourly rate. So with the new rate I have over a ten percent pay increase in the base rate, the minimum that I would get in a week. But if I work a fifty hour week then I am getting less than before. So, under the new system I make out significantly if my day is less than ten hours long and very significantly if it is under eight hours long. I also make out if a single day is over seventeen hours long – but that isn’t very likely. I make out the best if I get called in on the weekend.

So the whole thing is a gamble because we don’t know how much I will be working or how it will be divided up. It is a very complex system and you would have to do some cool linear algebra using an awesome tool like Microsoft Excel (or, I suppose, a calculator and a piece of graph paper and a nice No. 2 Staedtler mechanical pencil) to show the comparison between hourly, daily professional and salary and to see how different base rates compare to different hours works. The thing that makes it so complex is that now my overtime is a day to day item and not a week to week item. Very strange. And hard to keep straight in your head.

The bottom line ends up being: We are still on for New Jersey and everyone is pretty much happy. After really looking at the numbers Dominica and I felt that this really ended up being to our advantage. We lessened the gamble on our end. We are less likely to make tons of money but more likely to make enough. This is the “safer” way to go. And is better for preventing burnout since I am not as encouraged to work insanely long hours.

I had to run to Rochester quite quickly after dealing with all of that because I still needed to be fingerprinted. I had to run to Bushnell’s Basin. It is almost a forty five minute drive. Then it took about forty five more minutes to do the fingerprinting and associated paperwork. Then I had to drive back home. Oreo was riding along with me. I got home and dropped off Oreo and changed so that I could go to the Castile Christian Academy’s Teacher Appreciation Dinner in Castile. But before I left I realized that our email server was effectively down (probably slow to the point of being down.) So I got stuck working on that trying to get it functional enough to make it through the evening. No rest for the weary… again.

I finally got down to Castile and walked in just as everyone was finishing their desserts. There was plenty of food for me, though. It was really good and I was really glad that I had gotten to eat because it was 7:00 in the evening at this point and I hadn’t had a chance to eat a single thing all day! Dinner was delicious and I was early enough that I got a chance to hear dad’s speach. He did the “sermon” portion of the evening talking about the importance of teachers and their role in a Godly education process. He did a really good job. Tonight was really hard for him because tomorrow would have been his and mom’s anniversary so being at the dinner tonight was on the anniversary of the rehearsal dinner in probably a very similar setting.

I drove back to Geneseo and stopped off at Pizza Paul’s to get dinner for Dominica and I for later. Yes I was just coming from dinner but remember it was my only meal of the day and I didn’t get all that much because I was so late. So I got the pizza for Min and I to share when she got home from work.

On the way home I talked to Josh and he said that Phil and Kate’s house warming party was this evening. We have been so out of touch recently it is just horrible. We haven’t talked to just about anyone in months. I have been so busy with work that I just never get a chance to do much of anything and Dominica’s schedule is just murder for seeing other people. She gets home late enough that we can’t even call people once she gets home and she works both Friday and Saturday nights so nobody is able to do things with us on nights when we are available. I called Min at work and we talked about meeting up in the city so that we could go to the party and see everyone but Friday nights are the worst night of the week for Min. She gets out the latest of any night (same as several nights) and Saturday is her early day and by Friday she is all ready exhausted and not looking forward to returning to work. So we decided to pass on the party even though we really wanted to get up there and see everyone. What a lonely life we live 🙁

Dominica got home a little before eleven as usual. We ate our pizza and watched an episode of Remington Steele before heading off to bed. I stayed up a little to keep doing some server work but not very long.

No rest for the weary. I had to get up this morning and get out the door pretty quickly. I had a bunch of paperwork that had to be done for New Jersey before I left the house. How annoying to take a job with a technology consultancy just to find out that they don’t even have the capability to work without using legacy fax machines.

I had some Slim Fast and headed for Rochester. First thing today is the Symantec data protection seminar being held at the Microsoft offices up at Corporate Woods in Brighton. That started at 9:00 and went until noon. Fortunately they actually got out quite early and I had enough time to run up to the hospital and pick up Eric and we got a quick lunch at Jay’s Diner. Neither of us had very much time.

I took Eric back to the hospital and headed on over to the Regal Cinema on Marketplace Drive to go to the Microsoft partner show that is this afternoon. Two shows on the same day at two different locations. Not very good planning if you ask me. But they did allow enough time to get between the locations and eat so it wasn’t too bad. I suppose that the theory is that if you are all ready taking time off of work you are better off taking one entire day rather than two half days.

After the Microsoft show I ran over to Verizon Wireless and picked up a car charger and a bluetooth headset for Dominica. Since she is going to be doing a lot of traveling soon as well and since we get free mobile to mobile minutes it seemed like a good investment for her to have. Plus New York does not allow cell phones in cars so it will allow her to use her phone while she is driving. And she can call her family on Verizon for free too so it works out well.

Dad came over just a little after I got home and we went over to the Omega to get dinner. He had been watching little Oreo today and so that gave us a chance to get him back to Geneseo too. Dad had picked Oreo up at the house just a few minutes after Dominica had left for work.

I spent the evening working on a couple of server projects. Nothing could possibly be as bad as that last one. What a pain that was. I can’t even tell you how relived I am to have that over and done with. Now I am working on building another replacement server that needs to be ready before I leave for New Jersey. Projects, projects.

Dominica got home and we went down to the basement and watched an episode of Remington Steele. We are still on the first season. We watched one episode while I worked on the server and then we headed to bed.