Sheep Guarding Llama

First thing this morning I put in some time making sure that the dailies were caught up. Dad IM’d me around 11:00 to say that FedEx had just dropped off my new cell phone. It is the LG VX8100 just like Min’s. So dad came over to Geneseo at 11:30 and we did lunch and I got the cell. It will take me a while to get used to having this new phone and to learn how to use all of its features. I have never had a cell phone that was so feature loaded so I am looking forward to carrying around so much power with me. It should be really cool. I like being able to have a 1.3 megapixel camera that I will have with me always because there is often moments that you would like to get a quick picture of and are not able to because you aren’t carrying your camera. But I always have my cell phone. So now we will have to wait and see whether or not I actually end up using that feature. I can’t really do anything with it until I get a MiniSD card for it so that I can actually store things on it. The included internal memory is really small so it isn’t very useful. But having a MiniSD expansion port is awesome. Time will tell whether or not this is actually a good phone for me. I am really hoping that I find the extra features handy but somehow I imagine that they will not actually be all that useful when I try to use them in real life.

Today is a super grey or maybe even a brown day here in Geneseo. There is a light rain and it is incredibly warm for January. When I went out for lunch I didn’t even need to wear a coat. I am wearing a sweatshirt and that was plenty to keep me warm. I don’t remember ever having a January like this. Normally we would be heading into some pretty serious snow weather. The Weather Channel just reported that Buffalo has just had its longest sunless stretch in over thirty years! Now that is some serious overcastness. Overcastness?

Today is my day to get back into the swing of things. My first regular day of work since the holidays began.

I found a really neat Java application today called jlGUI. It is a neat audio player that you don’t need to install onto your computer that you can run through Web Start that allows you to listen to Internet radio streams or listen to podcast or other localized content such as MP3s and, even cooler, Ogg Vorbis files. So for those of you who want to listen to high quality OV files but aren’t happy with other OV players should check out jlGUI and see if it meets your needs.

Some days I find all kinds of cool new stuff. The Amazon folks who make the A9 search engine have block level views of a bunch of US cities. It is a really neat idea to not only see a map of where you want to go but be able to get a view of what it looks like there. Go check it out at A9 Maps.

I spent the afternoon and evening working in the office. Nothing exciting just the usual drudgery (actually I really love what I do.) I managed to listen to several hours of tech seminars and conferences while I was working. I get a ton of stuff from IT Conversations and I am trying to catch up with their back catalogue. The content that they provide is just so good that I don’t want to have to have missed any of it. I am getting closer to having listened to the whole thing. There is a lot to go but it is small percentage wise.

Mary called and asked me to run her over a soda from Tim Horton’s because she really likes their shaved ice. I made a run to Walmart to look for some special Scotch brand spray adhesive that Dominica and I need for our model train layout but I had no luck there. Then it was over to Timmy Ho’s and then to the hotel. I hung out at the hotel for about an hour before coming back to the house.

Dominica got home and we popped in Star Trek: The Next Generation and she got to work on painting the train station that she has been working on. I am still working on the database design for our new purchasing database. It is always fun building new systems.

Mary stopped by after work. She gets out at 11:00 tonight. Next week she starts her new three days a week Friday through Sunday schedule so that she can go back to college at GCC. She hasn’t gotten her schedule at school adjusted yet but her plan is to pursue an IT/CIS degree program. We talked some shop until half past midnight. Then she headed home. Dominica and I stayed up to watch one last episode of TNG before going to bed.

Today is model railroading day. We did our planning yesterday and we know what we want to do next.

Dad came over to Geneseo and we did a late breakfast/early lunch at the Omega. Then the three of us went over to Walmart and did some quick shopping. Dominica and I managed to find some simple modeling supplies and got a widescreen copy of Hudson Hawk from the bargain bin. Eric will be jealous. Min also got a new pink fleece and I got a new red sweatshirt. My grey one is in rough shape.

We went home and spent some time with Oreo and pretty much just relaxed for a few hours in the living room. We are meeting Andy and Miranda for dinner tonight up at Aja Noodle in Brighton so we are timing our day around that. While we were relaxing Dominica made a detailed list of the supplies that we were going to need to be able to move forward on the next stage of our model train layout. The list is quite extensive. It is amazing just how much it takes to do train modeling. And we still aren’t doing anything with the actual trains. Just the landscaping.

We left home with Oreo around 3:30 and drove up to East Rochester and checked out the other Despatch Junction. This one had a lot more modeling stuff than the one on Lyle did. We spent more than an hour in the store and Dominica managed to find almost everything that we needed so that we could get right to work on the new model. We got a ton of supplies and then it was time to rush over to Aja Noodle to meet Andy and Miranda.

We had dinner at 6:00. We had a good time. The food always rocks at Aja. Craig introduced Eric and I to the place several months ago and we have all been going there quite a bit ever since then. After dinner we went over to Andy’s apartment to see the place. Niether of us has been there since he moved in in September! I haven’t even seen his new InFocus projector yet. We only stayed for fifteen minutes or so. Oreo has been in the car all day and needs to get home. He gets upset when we are away all of the time. He needs somewhat of a regular routine to keep him happy. Before we left we borrowed Andy’s first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation which I have really been looking forward to watching. Andy has the entire series. There are quite a few episodes that I have never seen and many that I have not seen in forever. Maybe not since the late 1980’s!

On the way home we stopped at Michael’s in Henrietta to get a last few supplies for our model railroad. We were only supposed to be there for a minute but somehow, one way or another, it always takes at least an hour to get in and out of that place.

We got home and popped in TNG and started watching that. We made it through the first four episodes, the first DVD, before heading off to bed. Dominica has never seen a lot of the first season so this stuff was new to her. Boy was it bad. The early seasons of TNG were really weak. It took them a while before they figured out who they were supposed to be. We did some foamcore construction to get the model platform ready. Dominica did a bunch of work painting miniature buildings to get them ready for the layout. We are trying to do a really serious layout so it takes a lot of prep work and a lot of detail work.

Everyone slept in a little late this morning. Late considering how early we went to bed. The Grices had to hit the road fairly early this morning as they have a super long drive back down to Texas. They drive straight through so being tired before getting started is a very bad idea.

Dominica and I did breakfast over at the Omega Grill. More or less an early lunch at that point. After lunch we came home and got Oreo and drove up to the city to do some shopping. Dominica has recently, as in the last few days, become really interested in model railroading and wants to give it a try. She isn’t really all that interested in trains themselves but she thinks that the artistic side of modelling sounds like a lot of fun. My dad was into model railroads and got me into them when I was young so it has been something that I have always enjoyed. Dad was into HO scale but I always like the smalled N scale trains. Easier to do more with, I think. I never really got into the modelling side very much – mostly because I never had the ambition. I always like the idea but failed to ever really do it. Although real modelling is really expensive and that was quite the hinderance to me in my youth so that was a factor as well. So I am pretty excited to be giving it a try again after all of these years. Maybe this time I will manage to actually do something interesting.

We made a stop on the way up at Best Buy to check out LCD HDTV’s for dad. He is thinking about getting the Westinghouse 37″ 1080p LCD screen for his basement theatre. It is the only 1080p screen that we could find in the normal product ranges. So we spent a little while investigating television options. Then we swung into Target next door to pick up one of the 20Q games that some of us got for Christmas. We thought that he would really enjoy it.

From there we were off to do some model railroad shopping. We started at Dan’s Crafts and Things in Irondequoit. They have a little bit of model railroading stuff but very little and the stuff that they have is kind of expensive. We picked up a few modeling items there, some magazines and a book that walks you through building an N scale layout in lots of detail that we wanted to try. We thought that doing a project like that might be an easy way to learn how to do a lot of the things that you need to do when modeling this kind of stuff.

We heard about a gigantic model railroading store out in Holley so we drove out there to check it out. It took us an hour to get there just to find out that there were closed on one of the busiest shopping days. How obnoxious. It ended up not really mattering because we did some Internet research and discovered that the place was just a toy store and not an actual model railroading store like they were making it look like. That is a real issue when trying to do model railroading. Toy railroading is so popular that there are no dedicated modeling stores anywhere in Western New York. It is almost impossible to find anyplace that even does modeling let alone specializes in it.

So we drove back to Rochester and tried the Despatch Junction on Lyle Avenue just two doors down from Nick Tahou’s. They had a little bit of stuff and we were able to pick up a couple of supplies that we weren’t able to find at Dan’s. But still the selection was nothing to get excited about. Just enough so that you could get started with a simple layout but not enough to do anything serious without ordering the parts that you need.

We had dinner at Tahou’s right down the road. I introduced Dominica to the grilled cheese plate which she really liked. That is my new favourite item there. I will be getting it all of the time now.

Our last stop before going home was Home Depot in Henrietta. We managed to take back a bad door knob that Dominica and Andy had purchased there about six months ago and had then lost the receipt. We were able to exchange it for a hopefully working unit that we will have to try shortly. Currently we have mismatched keys from when we first moved into the house and the door knob was broken. We also got a new door knob set for dad as a belated Christmas gift. We picked up some plywood to use as our first modeling platform.

We got home and popped in Allo, Allo which is a very funny BBC comedy about the French Resistance during World War II. We own both seasons of it. It was made by the same people that made Are You Being Served? and the main star of Allo, Allo was on Are You Being Served a couple of times. Some of you might know him as having played the Candid Cameron character who was shopping for a quiet mack.

We had picked up two learning kits today. One kit teaches how to build realistic plaster based roads and one kit that teaches some scenary basics like grass and shrubs. So we opened those two kits and began building a pastoral scene on one of our 2’x2′ pieces of plywood. It took us several hours but we managed to get it looking pretty decent and added a small church, a farm house and its barn. It was a good experience because we managed to learn a lot of basics and figured out some things that we were thinking about incorrectly. We didn’t do anything to put a train onto the layout. We are just working on learning the basics of the modeling right now. The rest will come later.

By the end of the night we had watched the entire first season, two DVDs, of Allo, Allo and have made plans for our next model railroading project.

As we say year after year: I can’t believe it is 2006 all ready! How time flies.

Okay, that is out of the way. Dominica was totally exhausted from her long day yesterday and slept in until early this afternoon. She had to get up to get to work at 6:00 am yesterday and then came home to work on getting ready for the party for the rest of the day and then cleaned when the party was over so she was totally beat.

We spent most of the day relaxing at home. We didn’t get out of bed until early afternoon so the day wasn’t all that long to begin with. Dominica had some work left to do on Francesca’s “new” computer that she hadn’t gotten around to taking care of yet so we set that up in the living room and she started to work on that. Of course, being cursed as we are, as soon as she plugged the computer in the power supply failed to start up and we were left with a hunk of scrap metal. I dug around in the basement and fortunately was able to come up with a new power supply that was down there still in the box. Dominica replaced that and the machine power right on. That took up most of the time that she had allotted to herself to have been working on that machine.

Bennie and Francesca stayed up really late last night and didn’t manage to get moving until this afternoon. They had originally intended to have left early this morning so that they could be back to Houston in time to make it to work tomorrow but they have no way of making it that early now. Dominica talked to Francesca and they decided to stop here and get some sleep instead of driving straight through. We are almost three hours closer to Houston than their parents’ house is in Frankfort. Our house lies almost perfectly along one of the routes that they would take. They were really exhausted and the drive was going to be really tough.

The Grices arrived at our place around 4:30, I think. Two adults, two kids and two dogs. It is a lot of people for a very small house. We all went to dinner over at the Omega Grill with dad who came over to visit with everyone. He is feeling a little better today. At least he is able to drive.

After dinner we returned to the house and we all went down to the theatre to watch Mr. and Mrs. Smith which was a very weak attempt at an action movie. The plot was just downright absurd but given that plots normally are lets look at the characters in the film. Oh yeah, they were terribly absurd as well. In fact the movie just didn’t make sense in general. And, come to think of it, nothing really happened in the movie either. There was a lot of action but nothing really happened. I am not saying that it was a really bad movie. If you are watching it on television or it is laying around and you have nothing else to pop in to the DVD player you will probably not be too disappointed but if you are looking for some quality entertainment and a night a fine cinema then you had better look elsewhere.

Everyone was really exhausted and we all went to bed by 10:00. I can’t remember the last time that I went to bed that early. But I was really tired so it worked out pretty well. Madeline and Emily decided to sleep with Dominica, Oreo and I. That didn’t last too long. Madeline was squashed and decided to go out and sleep on the couch in the living room. That gave us a tiny bit more room. Oreo is quite the bed hog and makes it really difficult to fit into even a king bed. Emily is even worse. She turned sideways and kept pushing on me with her feet really hard. I was squashed between her and Oreo. I was curled up into a ball because there was no space for my feet because Dominica had run out of room and was sleeping diagonally and Oreo was in my stomach and Emily was pushing on my back. I was making due until Emily decided to put her feet on my head. I realized that there was going to be no sleep for me at all so I moved onto the floor between the bed and the closets. It wasn’t long before Emily pushed Oreo out of bed as well and he had to beg Dominica to give him some place to sleep.

I checked and at the end of 2005 SGL’s Dailies have topped 653,000 words. If I manage to keep writing at approximately the same rate it will take an estimated four to six months before we top the length of the King James Bible including both Old and New Testaments. 🙂

Oreo decided to be super snuggly boy after being neglected so much yesterday so we ended up staying in bed until near 11:00 am. When I did get up he immediately followed me into the office and went right back to sleep on his pillow. I have a busy day today and need to get crackin’ on getting the house cleaned. Dad leant me his carpet cleaner the other day so that I could use that. The carpeting is terrible in the house but we didn’t want to hire a professional carpet cleaner to come in just before the party so we are doing our own spot cleaning and then the plan is to have a real carpet cleaner come in afterwards and see what we can do to get the carpets back towards their original condition. Then maybe we will put down plastic runners or something because there are areas of the carpetting that just get such high traffic that nothing seems to help.

WordPress 2.0 released today. I am excited. WP is such awesome software. I am really looking forward to seeing all of the updates that they put into this new package. It will probably be a couple of weeks before I will have a chance to try it out.

By 11:00 we got our first weather based cancellation for the party. This is the problem with New Year’s Eve parties. The weather is always awful for us and lots of people are always travelling from some distance and it makes it really tough.

At 11:30 I had to run off to Wally World to get some supplies of which we have run out. I ended up having to hit Wegmans as well because Walmart doesn’t carry the carpet cleaning solution that I needed to pick up.

I started using Delicious today which is a neat idea. It will take a while before I learn how to make it useful probably. But I am sure that I can find some neat uses for it. Like maybe have an SGL link feed that you can subscribe to so that you can automatically get a feed of all of the cool sites that I send you to on a regular basis.

I found a really cool website called Opacity that is a collection of photographs of urban industrial ruins. There are some really amazing photographs on there.

Thanks to Ben (or MBen as he is known around here) for linking to the BBC’s List of 100 Things We Didn’t Know Last Year.

My big job for the day is cleaning. Carpet cleaning to be exact. Oreo and Mr. Humphries 🙁 have really taken a toll on our flooring over the past two years. It is a constant battle to keep our almost white carpets, well, almost white. It is a losing battle I am afraid.

My plan is to get tons of pictures and videos of the party tonight to put up on the site. If everything goes really well I might even manage to pull off a podcast from the party. That would be really cool.

Dominica spent the entire afternoon cooking and I spent the afternoon cleaning. It takes a lot of work to put a party together. Especially if you want the house to look nice. Oreo was freaking out all afternoon. He doesn’t like change very much and we were rearranging furniture and doing thing that we don’t normally do and he didn’t like it one bit. He kept running around the house trying to be with us but also trying to play or sleep or whatever.

At 7:00 we had just about everything done and the food was out and we started waiting for people to arrive. We had all ready had some cancellations some due to weather, some couldn’t get a babysitter, one got called into work because someone had been fired that day and some were sick. New Year’s is a tough time to attempt a party because it is so late at night, the past week has been so busy and the weather is often quite awful. And now we are at that age where almost everyone has small children which makes going anywhere a lot more difficult and unpredictable.

Andy and Miranda were the first people to arrive at the party around 8:45. That means that Dominica and I had sat around by ourselves for just about two hours. We hadn’t actually expected anyone until closer to 8:30 but we did have to be ready at 7:00 which caused us to feel a bit like losers sitting around waiting for people for almost two hours. There was a lot of food ready adn we were getting really worried that we wouldn’t have anyone show up to eat it. Andy had called earlier and said that they would be coming between 8:30 and 9:00 so we knew that someone was coming. Mary called at 7:00 and said that Jocelyn wasn’t feeling well and that they would be coming later after she had taken a nap.

Eric, Amanda and Julia arrived just minutes after Andy and Miranda did. They hadn’t been planning on coming to the party but we had called them and begged them to come over and help to eat all of the food that we had sitting around. The party was extrememly low key but that was what we were expecting. We did manage to have music this year. Dominica gave me a hard time about not having any so I work frantically to get some Ogg Vorbis files moved over onto the Mac Mini in the living room so that it could play some tunes while we were hanging out. That actually ended up working really well.

Nate, Mary and Jocelyn all arrived close to 10:00 which surprised us because we figured that no one else was coming by that point. So all together we ended up having ten people at the party which was roughly what we had been antipating this year. We knew that it was going to be a really small group this year. We had just about no time to plan or to make sure that everyone was invited and that everyone knew that we were definitely going to be having the party (although by now everyone should really just know.)

Everyone was gone by 1:00 and Dominica and I got the house cleaned up before going to bed. That is a good feeling to know that you don’t have to get up and deal with that in the morning. Oreo was exhausted from having been begging for food for several hours straight. He went right to bed the moment that everyone had left. It wasn’t long before we had gone to bed as well.

No luck getting a podcast out tonight. Hopefully I will get one out tomorrow. I do have a song picked out that I wanted to play and don’t want to miss the date.

Thanks to all of our readers here at SGL. This is the end of our sixth year of blogging and we hope to see you all in 2006. We look forward to a lot of new and exciting changes as SGL continues to grow and evolve.