Sheep Guarding Llama

Dominica and I had a hard time getting out of New York last night so that we could head south to Maryland. We had some car trouble and ended up having to switch cars and take mine instead of hers after we were completely packed and all ready into that car and halfway out of the drive. That didn’t make for a happy start. We had originally hoped to have left Geneseo around 9:30 or a little later but we did not, in fact, end up leaving until just about 11:00. That is a long drive to make very late at night and we were both pretty tired.

The drive ended up being mostly uneventful. It is a neat time of year to drive from Geneseo to Annapolis because you can see the weather go from near zero degree Fahrenheit in Geneseo to well above freezing in Annapolis. That was a welcome relief. It has been so cold the last two weeks or so. During the drive we started listening to Sue Grafton’s “S is for Silence”. We are almost three hours into the book now. I am itching to hear more of it. Sue Grafton rocks. Her books are so good. She really manages to reel you in and get you hooked.

The weary travellers arrived in Annapolis (Arnold to be exact) just after 5:00 in the morning. We pulled into the driveway and Tommy came out to welcome us down. There were still a couple of stragglers hanging out at the party. Tommy and Cookie were just about to leave and their car was even running in the driveway. Adam, John’s brother, was still up but winding down quickly. Tommy and Cookie left just a few minutes after we arrived and the rest of us stayed up talking until 6:00 or maybe 6:30. It was so late that we didn’t even bother with a tour of the new house.

This morning we slept in until 1:00. That seems like it is really late until you realize that that is only a maximum or about six hours of sleep and then it doesn’t seem so bad. John came in to wake us up so that we could all go out to “breakfast.” Originally we were going to be quite the group, ten or so, for breakfast but Adam and his girlfriend decided to take off as did her sister and her boyfriend (or so we assumed that is who he was – it is hard to keep up with people you only see once every several years.) They hadn’t been up when we got in last night so we hadn’t had a chance to talk at all. So breakfast ended up being just John and Michelle (plus Frankie) along with Dominica and I. We went to Annapolis to the Double T Diner. Where else is there to go in Annapolis.

I ordered cheese blintzes for lunch. When they came and there was a small Greek salad on my plate as well. Dominica decided to complain about the salad against my wishes. It turned into a big joke at lunch that she had complained about more or less an extra garnish being on my plate. They didn’t even give me dressing for it. But I had thought that the blintzes didn’t come with anything so I didn’t feel like I was missing out. So it became the big joke at lunch and I had promised to mention it on the blog so that we would remember it later. So here it is.

After lunch it was back to the house. John gave Dominica and I the grand tour. The house is unbelievably huge. You don’t really realize how big a 6,500 square foot house has to be until you are walking around one. Let me tell you, it is BIG. Huge. Massive. They have a three car garage, five or six bedrooms. Many baths, I have no idea how many. Seven I think but I really don’t know. There is a cool loft above the garage that John is using as his temporary office. There is a library that is really cool. As we got the tour I took lots of videos with my Kodak digital camera so I should have those up on the vlog sometime the middle of this week along with the videos that we took last night at the Relyea’s Christmas Party. I know that people from that party are all ready logging on to SGL to look for those videos. Well sorry guys, I am out of town. It will just have to wait.

After the tour John and I went into Annapolis to do some quick shopping. Min and Michelle stayed back to relax at the house. John and I went to Petsmart and got some pet supplies and did some movie shopping at Blockbuster. I got a good selection including Spanglish, Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants, Batman Begins, Ocean’s Twelve and In Good Company. Cheap movies rock. We stopped and had a quick drink on the Gov. Richie Highway before coming back.

On the way back to the house John and I took a swing over to their old house which is only two blocks away and picked up the cats who have been living over there alone for the past several weeks. The cats were really appreciative of the company and were relatively happy to be coming back with us even if it meant being in a cat carrier.

We got back and the four of us got some Domino’s pizza for dinner. It was really funny: John called and the Domino’s had the phone number on file with my name and knew what we wanted to order. How funny is it that after years of living down here at the same place with the same phone number John has never called and ordered Domino’s pizza until one time that I was here and they happened to have my name on file with the phone number? That is pretty wacky. We got the pizza and we watched Land of the Dead. John all ready owned it but we had gone to Blockbuster looking for it anyway. We spent probably twenty minutes looking for it before we finally gave up. Once we got back to the house he remembered that he thought that he might have bought it previously. So we got to see it. It is definitely not a classic. It is a really weak fourth member of the “Dead” quadrilogy. Dawn of the Dead was so much better. It is kind of like they had decided that “Dawn” was way too dark at the end so their made “Land” to ease up the dispair of it all.

After the movie we all decided that it was a good time to get off to bed. John and I are going into Washington in the morning for a meeting at Sibley Hospital on the northwest side of town. Then the plan is to take the afternoon off and we will all go up to Baltimore to the famous aquarium that I am always hearing so much about. Dominica will kill us all if we work all day and don’t do something fun. We are planning on heading back to New York late tomorrow evening so that we can get the puppy from dad and get some sleep before Dominica has to get up to get to Canandaigua for her final day of class. I hopped onto the new laptop and checked my messages and wrote today’s update. Min found a copy of C.S. Lewis’ “The Last Battle” which is the final book in the Chronicles of Narnia but the only one that she has never read. So she read a considerable amount of that while I wrote the daily.

I accidentally left my cell phone in Dominica’s car last night so I am without cell phone today. Oops. Good thing that it is the weekend.

Dominica has her regular Saturday work day today, 10:00 am until 9:00 pm. It is going to be a really long day for both of us. I am spending the little part of the day that I am at home for preparing for our trip this weekend which includes getting my laptop ready to travel. Having a new laptop right before travelling is a little dangerous because I could forget something that I need to have on it and be stuck without some important management tool for a few days. Or worse yet, without having the tools needed to make the podcast!

I slept in this morning so that my day would be shorter before having to drive all night. It has been a while since I have done a long overnight drive. I am not as young as I used to be, you know. But we have a new book to listen to while I am driving and that always makes a huge difference.

Today is my cousin Sara’s birthday party although her actual birthday is not for almost a week yet. Dad is going to her party today but I am not able to make it because I am going out to the Relyea Christmas Party that was scheduled first. If you want to get on our calendar you have to get up pretty early in the morning. Because dad is going to be there most of the afternoon and evening we are not able to drop off Oreo with him until after I come back from Farmington. So I have to make a short evening of it because Oreo just can’t handle being alone for very long. He is improving but we figure it will be some time yet before he realizes that we are not going to be abandoning him.

I know that things are going to be super busy tonight so I decided to post very early so that there would be an update today. The new content management system really makes working on the site easy! I talked to Andy for a while this afternoon and we looked at a number of themes for the site. So today is the first day of the new themes. I think that it adds a lot of zing to the site. Now I can change them easily for different occasions.

It is 4:00 pm and I am off to the Relyea Christmas Party. I hope to have an update for you tomorrow after we get to Maryland.

This morning I had to be up and ready so that I could drive Dominica in to work in the city. We took her car into the shop last night to get an alignment and one of her front wheel bearings replaced. So we are without that car today. I hate days when I have to get up early and drive a lot. That isn’t any fun. We took Oreo along with us. He gets so excited about riding in the car. I hope that he never figures out that the reality of riding in the car isn’t anywhere nearly as exciting as what he seems to think that it is prior to actually hopping into the car.

After dropping Dominica (aka Dimitri – ask her if you see her) at work I drove down to Eric’s office at the University of Rochester and did a little work on his laptop. He had thought that his IT department had locked down his laptop so that he could not install software on it. But no, they had only locked out the Program Files directory so he just had to install software to a different location. How dumb is that? No virus writer would ever think of putting his virus into an alternative location from the default. That would make the virus extra difficult to locate. So now Eric is set up with an RSS feed aggregator, Thunderbird email, Juice podcatcher, etc. So I expect him to be finally reading SGL and listening to the SGL Podcast. He hasn’t had a working computer that was able to get online since we started doing the podcast. How awful is that?

After working on Eric’s computer we went over to Jay’s Diner on West Henrietta Road and got some lunch. Dominica left me with some errands to run so we took care of those after eating. Oreo was getting restless so we didn’t spend too much time shopping. While we were out I managed to pick up Sue Grafton’s latest novel “S is for Silence” which Min and I have been waiting for for a really long time. Probably more than a year. Those alphabet murder novels are some of the best mystery writing out there. It isn’t so much a mystery as it is a detective/suspense novel. But the stories are great and the characters are really deep and it makes it really involving. And with so many of them there has been some serious time to get the characters developed.

I got home around 3:00 in the afternoon. Some serious church turmoil has come up that I hate to talk about on here but this is my place to talk about things and if I don’t talk about things that are important to me then you have to wonder what the point of this site is. I won’t go into any details about what happened but there has been an issue recently that has come to light at the church that had prompted Dominica and I to consider seeking worship at a different location. The issue wasn’t major and it was more of just giving us a little nudge when we really should have been looking for another church just because there are so few people in our age bracket at the church and none at all who are anywhere near our ages and don’t have kids. Not having anyone at all that share our lifestyles or lifestages is really difficult when you are looking for small group fellowship. So we really should have been dealing with that anyway but, of course, we have been lazy about it. So I look upon the situation that came up as simply being God’s way of pressing the issue. But anyway, the issue expanded and Dominica and I will not be returning to church where we have been worshipping for the past three years. There is a lot of hurt and we don’t feel as though we are welcome there anymore (if we ever honestly were.) We have no idea why but it is very obvious that we are not appreciated there nor is anyone at the church even willing to talk to us about it.

So, as you can imagine, I have a lot of things weighing heavily on my heart. Dad came over and helped me get Min’s car from the shop and then we had dinner at the Omega and talked for a while. My new laptop arrived today and he brought that over as well. I am very excited to have a nice, new laptop. My old one was okay but it didn’t meet a lot of my needs very well. This new one is more powerful and more resistant to damage when I am constantly moving it around. It has built-in wireless and bluetooth and flash media readers. It is great. I am really looking forward to trying out my HP iPaq PDA with the bluetooth. I have never had anything to attach it to before.

I did some work on this site and talked to Mary on the phone for a lot of the evening. Mary is looking into college programs and we have been looking at a number of options. She is most likely going to be enrolling in the Computer Information Systems (CIS) program. There are an awful lot of course options to choose from what we had to look at.

I left just after 9:00 with Oreo to drive up to the city to pick up Dominica from work. It takes a little more than an hour and a half round trip. I took her car so that we could try it out before we drive it to Maryland tomorrow. Speaking of which, tomorrow is a very busy day for us. Dominica is working all day at Fuji. I am going to the Relyea Christmas Party for the afternoon. Oreo is going to dad’s house for the weekend. Min and I are meeting at the house around 9:30 and heading straight out for Arnold, Maryland. We are figuring that we won’t be arriving in Maryland until 3:00 in the morning or a little later. We are staying in Maryland all day on Sunday and Monday and will be heading back to Geneseo on Tuesday morning. At least that is the plan.

We got back from the city and went to Walmart to do some quick shopping. We were hoping to get a cheese pizza but they ran out of vegetarian options so we ended up just getting some donuts instead. We got to the house and Mary was there waiting for us so that she and I could look in depth at some classes before she has to talk to her counciler on Monday.

Dominica went to bed a little after midnight. I stayed up and did a short podcast, episode 36. Then I decided that I would write the daily update while I listened to the recording of the events that transpired at the church this past week. I am not sure if anyone was aware that it was being recorded and that we would obviously end up hearing it. It seems obvious that they knew and expected us to hear it. So I was up until almost 3:00 in the morning. Not really feeling much like going to bed. Around three Oreo came out of the bedroom to get me. He doesn’t like it when we don’t all go to bed at the same time. He really likes his snuggles.

I am sorry that I can’t say more so that you can understand what is going on. But I am afraid that I cannot. I can tell you that we would very much appreciate your prayers as this is a pretty serious and delicate situation. Mostly prayers for guidance. It is difficult to know what the right move is at this point.

Two months from today Phil and Kate will be moving into their new house in Rochester!

Oreo was in a real “needs his daddy” mood today. He slept all night with his head on my hand and snuggled up with me. He is very sweet. He spent the morning following me around the house. He really wants to be with me today.

Dominica’s car is scheduled for maintenance tomorrow so that it is safe for us to take when we drive down to Maryland on Saturday. It is going to be a really busy weekend. Min is working Friday and Saturday as usual. Saturday during the day I am going to Josh’s house for their Christmas party. Then I am leaving there to get back down to the house to meet Dominica as she gets out of work so that we can hit the road to drive to Maryland. I am going to be really exhausted by the time that we are arriving down there. Min’s car needs an alignment after we just put new tires on there. It would be awfully crappy if we ruined brand new tires because we didn’t bother with getting an alignment right away. She has a front wheel bearing that is about to fall out, supposedly, and that is going to get fixed. And I am pretty sure that she has a sticky brake so they are going to look at that as well. It is quite a bit of work. If we are really lucky they might have a chance to work on her rear windshield wiper that is broken but I think that that might be asking too much. We are very fortunate that they are able to squeeze her car in as it is.

In the process of moving the site over to WordPress one day at a time I have started to do some of that much needed editing that Dominica likes to remind me about. I rarely if ever have gone back and read much of the site so there is a ton of typos and weird sentances that don’t mean anything. I am trying to fix that where possible. The site is so huge that it will take a really long time to work my way through all of it. I am almost done with 2001 but that was a super light year. From 2002 until 2005 will be a completely different animal. It is really neat going through some of the older material. It has been long enough that I don’t realize all of the things that were happening when the site was just getting started. It really does make me sad that I didn’t start working on the site until so late. As I read the earliest saved entries I realize that I really wish that I could read even further back. But that will never be possible. Those days are gone forever. It sure helps my resolve to keep up with events as they happen now. I can see how much enjoyment I get out of even bad early posts. In twenty years this site is really going to be special to me. Soon I hope to begin making new “looking back” posts that are modern “dailies” that I make for important events that I remember from before the site began. Luckily my dad was really diligent about keeping a log of dates of special events in our lives so he has a ton of information for me to build off of. I think that that will be a really neat addition to the site.

I got all of the archives from 2001 moved over by late this afternoon. There were about seventy five entries or so from that first year. Once I had that much of the archives moved over I decided that it was time to begin the process of switching over to the new site for real. So far I have been the only person using it and that isn’t much fun. I am anxious to start getting feedback and to get other people excited about the new site. I did some research in the WordPress Codex tonight and discovered that they have a really great system for supporting Podcasting so I am going to begin the process of moving the SGL Podcast over to there as well. That will be awesome to not have to support two separate systems and get all of the flexibility of running the entire system ourselves. Can you tell that I am excited?

The weather is nasty today. It is a little warmer out than it has been recently and it started to rain. Then the temperature dropped so the roads are just sheets of ice. Dominica has to drive home tonight (read: I can’t go pick her up from work) because her car is supposed to be in the shop tonight and we can’t leave my car at her work or we will be in really rough shape.

At 5:40 this evening I switched us over to running on WordPress. For the time being you can check out the old site by going to old.sheepguardingllama.com. I will keep that up and running until everything is transfered over and we have had time to determine that the new site is actually working and is backed up successfully. That is a big step right there.

Dominica is going nuts at work tonight because she discovered Green Mountain brand Blueberry flavoured coffee and she has determined that it is her all time favourite flavoured coffee. She has been going on and on about it for an hour.

I spent most of the evening simultaneously talking to Mary on the telephone and working on moving the old SGL site over to this new one. I put in many hours of it and managed to move all of 2001 and half of 2002 before I had to leave to meet Dominica at the shop. The weather outside is frightful. Seriously frightful. It has been freezing rain all afternoon and evening. The roads are dreadful. If Min’s car wasn’t going into the shop in the morning I would have driven up to the city to get her but since her car had to go into the shop there really wasn’t any way for us to do that. But she made it home just fine. I drove out to meet her and decided that the roads were so bad that I took a quick swing over to the Quality Inn to tell Mary not to drive down to Silver Springs but she had all ready left by the time that I got there. Hopefully she will be able to make it home okay. It is supposed to be getting worse all night and not tapering off until morning.

We dropped off Min’s car at the shop down the road and stopped in at Walmart on the way home to pick up some pizza for dinner. We love their fresh prepared pizza. You just pop it in the oven and fifteen minutes later you have a fresh, delicious pizza for only $6. That is cheaper than getting a nice frozen pizza and it is a lot tastier.

Dominica wanted to watch a movie tonight. We popped in the pizza and we went down to the theatre to watch The Fantastic Four which Dominica has been wanting to see for a while. My take on The Fantastic Four? It is awful. Pathetic. I can’t believe that if the original comic was anything like this that people would read it. This was a truly pathetic movie. They didn’t even bother trying to make it good or even make sense. Apparently if you don’t know all of the dumb things that they did in the comic book they just leave you out in the cold to their weird inside jokes. I never even heard of this comic book so it leaves me thinking that it can only have so big of a following. Not big enough to justify making a horrible movie just to satisfy without even considering making it appealing to people who haven’t read the comic. Unlike movies like Batman Begins or Spiderman which at least stand on their own and have their own inherent entertainment value, The Fantastic Four leaves you wondering why they bothered.

I recorded Episode 35 of the podcast tonight. I am really excited to be able to start moving that over to this site now. No more double hosting one part on SGL and one part on podOmatic. The idea was that the two parts went together so finally we are putting them all together. Now people looking for one of the other will find both and be able to pick and choose from the media types that they want to use.

So as we were going to bed tonight Dominica let Oreo out the front door and there was a cat right there. So, of course, Oreo takes off like a shot and is gone in no time. Good thing the snow was coming down and the ground was covered in ice. He wasn’t able to make it any distance before he was in real pain and scared from the cold. Dominica took off after him wearing her snuggle sack. Good thing she had that on so that she was able to run straight out the front door. I threw on my dress shoes that we handy and went out right after her since I had heard her screaming at the dog as he took off. It only took a minute to get him back. He made it around the neighbour’s house and into the wooded area behind the house but didn’t go far. Dominica ended up carrying him back to the house he was so cold. He gets cold really quickly. I can’t believe that he would even consider chasing an animal out there considering how quickly he starts to limp from the cold.