Sheep Guarding Llama

Finally a sunny day again. I opened up the blinds in the office and Oreo went straight in there to enjoy his warm patch on the floor. He loves laying in the sunlight. Especially now that the house is never over 65F degrees. And much of the time much colder than that.

Since we didn’t go to bed until well after 3:00 this morning we slept in rather later. I was awake by 9:30 but Dominica wasn’t out of bed until a little after noon. Dad was supposed to come over after church to get lunch but he forgot his wallet and had to run home before coming over to get some food.

The roadbed that I layed down last night seems to have taken quite well and I am looking forward to attempting to ballast the track later today. Our plan is to do some shopping up in Henrietta. Dominica and I have some jointly assigned holiday money and we are thinking of purchasing some new furniture. Right now we have a futon in the living room that is not very useful for much except when someone is staying over which isn’t very often. It is not a very comfortable place to sit on normal occassions because of the bed frame underneath. So our plan is to replace it with a normal sofa that will be far more practical and take up less space in the living room and to move the futon down to the basement where we intend to finish off the first room at the bottom of the stairs to turn it into a small guest bedroom. That way when people do stay at our house they are not stuck sleeping in the living room but can have a small “private” room to themselves.

Dad arrived around 1:00 and we went over to the Omega. I lost .5 lb this by this morning over yesterday’s gain which was in addition to two pounds lost during the two weeks of South Beach Phase I that I did directly prior to that. So my total weight loss since starting dieting is 8.5 lbs. Far from my goal but it is a start. After lunch we went to Walmart and did some shopping. Mostly groceries. Dad also delivered my new Con Cor “Chicago, Burlington & Quincy” boxcar set that arrived by post yesterday. They are very nice looking units. Three matching red Burlington boxcars in a set so each one has a different number on it so it doesn’t look like three identical cars on the layout.

We got back home around 4:00 and hung out with Oreo for a little while. Then it was off to Henrietta. We went to Value City Furniture but we very quickly realized that Dominica had gotten an incorrect idea of how much furniture was going to cost so we didn’t shop there for very long. Not that the prices were high but we had been hoping for some seriously low prices. We are not really in need of furniture right at the moment and buying a bunch for no particular reason is kind of a bad use of our current funds, I think.

Since we were in the area we swung into PetCo and got Oreo a doggie seatbelt. We are worried about him travelling in the car without one. We then ran over to Borders and picked up a couple of books about Chicago so that we can plan out mini vacation that we are taking in a month.

We stopped by Andy’s apartment while we were up in the area so that we could borrow Star Trek: The Next Generation Season Three. We have been going through television series really rapidly recently.

Dominica and I came home and watched some of TNG while Dominica knit and I worked on laying the ballast onto the track that I have corked. I have never done this process before so I am learning as I go. I managed to ballast about three quarters of the 2′ x 2′ section that I am working on and should easily be able to finish the rest tomorrow. It is all wet tonight so I won’t have a good idea of how it worked until it has dried which it should by the morning. So far it seems to be going well. I think that it looks pretty good. The nice thing about ballast is that it really holds the track in place. There is a lot of material and glue to keep everything solid.

If I was Winnie the Pooh I would call today a blustery day. The is dark, gloomy, windy and there is a little rain too. Oreo and I slept in nice and late today until 10:30. It is definitely a lazy Saturday 🙂

I decided that the South Beach diet was way too lenient for me and that it was causing me to eat far more often than I really should given the way that my body processes food so I decided to alter the diet significantly to me appropriate for me personally. So I am now working on maintaining a diet of less than 900 calories or so (not keeping really strict track) which basically results in me having a large salad for lunch and just some veggies with cheese for dinner. That is so much less food than I am used to having. But I weighed in this morning to see how my first day of extreme dieting was working and so far I am down six pounds since yesterday morning. I won’t be able to keep that up for more than a day or two but it is a nice start.

Dad discovered that the Abbey of the Genesee has a website.

The British government was discovered to be secretly storing DNA information on tens of thousands of minors who have no criminal history whatsoever. Finally it isn’t us for a change.

Brainbench is now offering a series of fun tests for people to answer trivia about thinks like Star Trek and Dilbert.

Andy arrived at the house at 12:15 just as the rain that was coming down turned to snow. He and I had decided to get lunch today and dad was coming over to Geneseo to do some shopping so he decided that he would meet us over at the Omega at 12:30. I got my simple lunch salad like I did yesterday and two cups of coffee. This extreme diet thing isn’t very much fun.

After lunch Andy and I came back to the house and worked for about an hour or so on some Waste Watcher 2 designs stuff that needed to be taken care of before Andy could continue on the work that he was doing. He is at his current contract for just one to two more weeks before he will be back working on this project full time again. This will be, I believe, his first full time work on the project to this degree since we were in Pittsburgh six years ago. Can you believe that it has been almost six years (we moved to Pittsburgh on March 20th, 2000.) Boy time does fly.

While Andy was over at the house he was looking at the N scale model trains that we have sitting around and it brought back memories that he had of having model trains when he was young. He said that he must have had N scale trains when he was little because the size even seemed to be the same.

I haven’t seen Dana and her baby in over a year. Actually, since her baby is only six months old that means that I haven’t seen her at all yet but I haven’t seen Dana since she was just barely pregnant so it has been almost exactly a year. So I tagged along with Andy when he went up to Avon to visit with his family since Dana was over with the baby.

The weather is so warm here today that it is half raining and half snowing while Russia is stuck in a deadly cold spell that is killing all kinds of people who are unable to get to warm locations there.

I did a little maintenance on my Flickr site today and for those of you getting the RSS feed from there you should notice that the titles are now working properly.

Both Dominica and I independantly told people that our fiber supplements were like not as sweet versions of sweet-tarts! How funny is that. They really are good tasty fiber supplements. They are kind of like Flintstone’s vitamins. How funny is it that kids today eat Flintstones vitamins when they are really unlikely to even know who those characters are anymore. Boy how time does fly.

Does nobody pay any attention to their own websites these days? I mean the days of your website mattering were like ten years ago. I went to the web site of Rowe Photo today and noticed that they had posted a picture of their website (the mockup given to them by their web designer to show them what the site would look like, most likely) instead of the actual web site. Take a look at that site. Looks just like a normal web site except it is just a picture and there aren’t actually any links there. Who does that? That site has been there forever. I was thinking about shopping with them since they are local instead of going to an online retailer for the new camera that I want to buy but I guess my business is a pretty low priority to them. They don’t even let me look up prices, stock or anything. Abe’s of Maine it is then.

Dominica came home and headed for the living room to watch the final three episodes of the second season of Angel. We wrapped up that show and then watched In Good Company with Topher Grace, Dennis Quaid and Scarlett Johanson. That was a really good movie that was totally not what I was expecting. Nice to see a movie try to do something different for a change and with a lot of really good people in it.

Because of the diet that I am on I tend to get a lot of energy and don’t really need to go to sleep as early as I normally do so I stayed up and watched two episodes of Red Dwarf before finally deciding to wrap up the daily and head off to bed. While we were in the living room watching DVDs Dominica knit and I worked on laying cork down on the model train layout that I have been working on. I am working on a 2′ x 4′ layout in two pieces (each 2’x 2′) that is just a simple single track in an oval that will be built with four “scenes” for the train to pass through. It is kind of a modeling experiment to see how some things work. The idea is that it is really simple but complex enough that it will give me an opportunity to really exercise my modeling muscles. I want something that isn’t too ambitious and yet is easy to build and store but is still interesting for people to look at. I am only working on one 2’x 2′ section currently but I have the track laid out for that section and I have the cork roadbed down and glued for that entire section. I am hoping to have the track actually cemented into place tomorrow if all goes well.

I have also been working on trying to get my older N scale engines running again. My two old locomotives, a Life Like Union Pacific that was a birthday present many, many years ago was not running at all but I took it apart and it appears to be showing signs of life. It now moves irregularly up and down a straight piece of track that I have in place and its light works which is something since my two other older locomotives have lost their lights. I also have a Bachman Burlington Northern engine that is starting to work again. Its light is no good but it moves with a little more assuredness and should work pretty well again in time.

It is 3:30 in the morning and I think that it would probably be a good idea if I got myself off to bed. Dad is coming over after church to get lunch. Oh boy, another salad. I did really well today without messing up anything on my diet. I may not be staying under my goal of 900 calories but I am definitely close.

We didn’t make it to bed until quite late last night and ended up sleeping in until Dominica had to rush to ready for work. She rushed enough that she ended up being able to watch some of a DVD before actually leaving for work.

It is yet another dark and gloomy day. Not a rainy day. Just

Dad came over and picked me up at 11:30 and we went over to the Omega for some lunch. The diet that I have been doing hasn’t been working very well for me. I haven’t felt too good and I really haven’t been losing much or any weight as far as I can tell. So I am adjusting the diet myself to attempt to modify it to make sense for my metabolism. For lunch I just had a salad. Hopefully that isn’t so much food that I end up still gaining wait. Ugh.

After lunch dad and I went over to Walmart to do some quick shopping. While we were there I ran into Jeannie Piraino (actually she is married now but I don’t know her married name – she got married just several weeks ago on October 29th, 2005.) I have been running into Jeannie here and there ever since high school. She and I have crossed paths more than any other person that I went to high school with that I don’t pre-arrange to meet someplace. We went to high school together. And then, years later, we ended up at Monroe Community College (MCC) together and then, funny enough, we are both technically going to SUNY Empire right now as well. She is the only person that I know of to have been to that many schools with me.

When you have some time check out the Jello Museum. I hope to take a trip up to LeRoy one of these days and go through the museum. It is unbelievable that there is an important museum like that so close to where I grew up and I have never been there. The Jello Factory is one of those buildings that I have driven past my entire life and never really thought about it very much. It is such an important part of Genesee County heritage. I grew up in Wyoming County but right on the border. Wyoming used to be a part of Genesee County way back in the day and where I loved in Wyoming had a postal code in Genesee County. I think that it is interesting that Jello ended up being acquired by Kraft who has a current large plant just two towns to the east in Avon (here in Livingston County) where they make Cool Whip! I know a number of people these days who work at that plant. It is the big employer in Avon. Definitely on of the county’s largest employers overall (after the college and the hospital.)

A Geneseo School bus came into our circle today and, I think, dropped off some kids. If that really happened then the population of our little complex here must really be changing. We have not had anyone living here with kids that I am aware of up until now nor have we had anyone except for us who is of the right age to have kids still at home. Maybe things are changing in the area.

This week has been one of those “not very productive” weeks. Sometimes it just happens. Monday was a holiday and Tuesday was a scheduled project day that got rescheduled and Wednesday was a big project day that went totally out of whack so I suppose that there is good reason for me to be feeling that this week didn’t work out perfectly but still it would be nice to have more to show for a week. I had been hoping to get down to Castile at least by today to get more computers set up and ready for classes but it takes so much time to get one set up that my window of opportunity today just wasn’t long enough to do that. At least I can say that I managed to learn a lot of the basics of Perl programming and got tons of slides transferred over to digital. That is something.

After looking at old pictures of me this week at least two people commented that it is a good thing that my hair fell out because I had really awful hair and I look much better bald. From looking at old pictures of myself I have to agree.

The weather was pretty warm today and Oreo decided that it was time for him to roll in the poop again. He found a nice pile straight out from the deck out in the weeds and he went to town. I was lucky that I looked at there at just the right time to see him doing it so I was prepared for him when he got back to the house. It was straight to the bath for him. He wasn’t too happy. He knew that he was in trouble. I did learn today that he actually does like to take a shower rather than a bath. I normally run the shower but have it go beyond him while he stands in the bath so that it keeps the air warm and moist so that he doesn’t catch a chill. I had the water going a little lower than usual today and he was able to stand in it and did so by choice. It is must warmer standing in the water so I guess that is what made him do it. But he seemed perfectly happy to just stand there in the shower. What a weird dog.

A study looking into basic life skill literacy in college students that came out today supports my long standing mantra that we have lowered the bar so low for colleges and universities that we have made them totally irrelevant in modern society. In this study they discovered that MOST students about to graduate from college were finding it difficult or impossible to for them to do simple life tasks such as calculating tips, balancing checkbooks (which doesn’t even require multiplication or division) or comparing interest rates on credit card offers. Fortunately at least the average college student was able to identify their own location on a map. The sad thing here is that we are talking about college students and not about third graders. The skills that we are talking about are skills that were required of every kid that I knew somewhere in the second to fourth grade range and even then we couldn’t believe that they were “teaching” stuff that was just obvious. In seventh grade I remember Mrs. Clor teaching us how to fill out the IRS’ 1044EZ tax forms. No one in my class had problems with that. The real problem comes in when high school are sending students so academically inadequate to colleges that colleges have to start doing the job of the high schools at a time when students are no longer mentally pliable and have become accustomed to simple memorization and have no quantitative reasoning skills at all. How are colleges supposed to be turning smart kids into really useful citizens if the high schools aren’t providing any fundamental education at all? Perhaps more importantly, why aren’t colleges turning these kids away and refusing to take kids without the background that should be necessary to advance from elementary school into middle/high school? By allowing students with no futures beyond “would you like fries with that?” into our advanced education system we are both removing the opportunities for truly great students to succeed as well as providing tools to make those who will fail do so more dramatically than ever before. Little is as devestating to a person than to have spent five years in a private college racking up insane levels of debt just to graduate to find that they have accumulated no knowledge or skills that will allow them to get a job but now must face the heighten humiliation of attempting to get a “high schooler” level job at the age of twenty four or older while facing the insurmountable debt that can arise from attending college through loans. We have designed a system to take advantage of the weekest element in society and totally crush them. This is were classism rears its ugly head. Hidden beneath cries of “no student left behind” and “never tell a student that their answer is wrong” is a much more real attempt to divide the world into those who succeed because their education came from outside of the system and those who were destroyed believing that the system would actually provide them with a useful education and a realistic view of their post-educational economic potential.

I have recently received a “bill” both through email and through snail mail from Verizon (or so the letter claims) that I have a back due balance on my account for $149. I looked at the bill when it first was emailed to me a few weeks ago. I didn’t recognize the account number on the bill but assumed that I did not know what the account number was and ignored it as my father writes the check from the company to pay for my cell phone so I assumed that if there was a past due amount on the account that it was simply because notices had passed in the mail. Nothing to worry about. Then yesterday an actual paper notice arrived by snail mail. I looked at that notice and checked the account number. It definitely was not my account number. It was not even close. We checked further and the bill had a different sending and return address from normal Verizon bills but everything else looked totally legitimate. I called Verizon National where I deal with everything and had them look into it. They were unable to find anything past due on any account tied to my social security number nor were they able to find any account to match the account number that was sent to me. So I figured that at this point it wasn’t my problem so I didn’t worry about it. Dad called Verizon and talked to someone though who took an interest (although at this point we don’t know 100% whether or not he was actually talking to someone inside of Verizon or not) and said that it was very possible that a renegade employee was using real Verizon letterhead and mailing information to attempt to get people to send them checks to a different location so that they could cash them. That is all that we know at this point but I will keep you updated in case anything further comes of this. I am convinced that they whole thing is a scam and someone is trying to get money but it is hard to tell. So many companies these days aren’t able to keep track of their own customers and accounts that it is easy to see someone slipping through the cracks even when it is so easy to build computer systems that won’t allow that to happen. Not that we know that anything like that has occurred with Verizon. It is just so many other companies doing stupid things that it is easy to believe that one more isnt’ doing things right too. So far our actual contact with Verizon has been very good regarding this issue. They are definitely the only cell company I would seriously consider doing business with in the US.

I made myself cauliflower with cheese for dinner. I have decide to move to an all vegetable diet in an attempt to force down my caloric intake. I am going to get a diet that works for me one way or another. There has to be something that will actually allow me to lose weight.

I managed to record Episode 43 of the SGL Podcast tonight. I can’t believe how much material I have managed to record over the past six months or so. That is almost an entire day of audio that you can download and listen to. Awesome.

I did a bunch of cleaning around the house today including a lot of dishes that have piled up over the last few days. It is tough getting anything done around the house because Oreo constantly wants to play. I think that he actually wants to play more and gets himself into more trouble when he is on his medication that is supposed to make him drowsy. He seems to sleep more but then plays and plays and plays. He toenails are really sharp too after having gotten them cut the other day. Now my wrist is all cut up from him playing. Dad is all cut up too from playing with him a few days ago.

I found this link again: What Old People Do For Fun. It is just a really short Google Video but it is really funny so check it out. And for those who have not seen the Volkwagon advertisement for their new Polo check that out too: German Engineering vs. Arab Technology. While we are linking to good videos try Don’t Work So Hard.

Dominica came home and we did our usual of watching some Angel and then heading off to bed.