Sheep Guarding Llama

Happy Tofurkey Day? Or is that Happy Faux Turkey Day!? Good questions. Happy Thanksgiving.

Everyone was tired here this morning and had a really hard time pulling ourselves out of bed. We didn’t get moving nearly as early as we had hoped. We were not on the road until almost 11:00. We had a hard time decided whether or not we were going to drive out to Frankfort which is almost three hours away because the weather was kind of ify and it could easily turn into bad snow. We looked at a bunch of web sites and talked to dad and finally decided that it seemed to be safe enough considering that I had just put my winter tires on the car last night so we would have pretty good traction. I have Nokian snow tires and they are just amazing.

Most of the drive was pretty good. Before we got to Syracuse we started hitting some serious snow and that made the drive a lot slower. The roads were not bad until we got to Utica. Then it started getting really slippery and a lot of people were having problems keeping their vehicles on the road. So the last bit of the drive was bad but not terrible. With my Nokians it wasn’t any problem at all.

It was just after 1:30 when we arrived in Frankfort. We ended up making much better time than we had thought that we would have been able to make. We ended up making it in enough time to be able to put our Tofurkey into the oven and to get it cooked before we went over to Dominica’s grandfather’s house for Thanksgiving dinner. We hadn’t thought that we were going to have made it out so quickly so that was a pleasant surprise.

While we were at Min’s parent’s house we took the opportunity to look through all of the Black Friday specials in the newspaper just in case we wanted to go shopping tomorrow for anything really awesome. There is always a lot of stuff that we would like in the big sales but normally nothing that we want so badly to make fighting through those crowds worth it at all. But saw a number of items that we were interested in but didn’t think too much of it.

It was just a little after 3:00 when we went over to grandpa Tocco’s house for dinner. We ate around 4:00. The Tofurkey Feast was awesome. Much better than real turkey because real turkey gets dry and tough but this was really tender and delicious and a whole bunch less work than the actual bird. The feast came with all of the fixings. It was just like a traditional Thanksgiving dinner. Dominica and I will definitely be getting that again. We were really happy with it and there was a lot left over as well so we will get some mileage out of it. Thanksgiving at Dominica’s family is now one third vegetarian! It always seemed to me that we were a pretty small minority but in reality we are a pretty big sub-section of the family. Only need to convert two more people and we have a majority! Ha ha, the plot thickens. Resistance is futile.

After dinner but before dessert we were all standing around and Dominica’s brother Joe accidentally bumped the small kitchen television with his elbow and it turned on and we saw the Weather Channel doing their coverage of the snowy conditions along i90. We looked outside and the weather wasn’t looking like it was going to be all that cooperative so we deicded that it would just be safer if we hit the road right away instead of waiting for it to get really bad and then getting stuck out in Frankfort. Both Dominica and I have to work in the morning so we need to get back. Dominica definitely can’t miss her job tomorrow. She hasn’t even been there for three weeks yet.

The drive back to Geneseo wasn’t too bad. There was a lot of high speed winds and some snow. None of the roads were horrible but I am very glad that we came back when we did because it could have gotten pretty bad. As it was the drive took an extra hour.

We got to Geneseo at 8:00 or a little after. Dominica decided to stay home and not to go to the ninth annual Sonic Brass Thanksgiving Dinner at Nick Tahou’s. She has a really long day tomorrow and needs to get some sleep so that she will be able to work. So she stayed home and went to bed early. I left at 9:30 to go up to the city for some Tahou’s. Nate and Tammy forgot to call to see if I was home or we would have carpooled since they were coming from Perry.

Like every year, the Tahou’s dinner was at 10:00. We started this tradition in 1997 and we are still going strong. This year we had a pretty weak turn out but that happens from time to time. Last year we had seventeen people show up, I think. This year there was only seven. Nate, Joe and I have made it every year so far. Next year is ten. We had better have tons of people show up next year. The big news from tonight is that Jeff Simpson, who hasn’t made it to the Thanksgiving Dinner in several years, returned unexpectedly. He and his wife Danielle have recently moved back to the Rochester area from Madison, Wisconsin and have yet to hook back up with everyone out here. This is the first time that I have seen Jeff in probably four years. It is really cool that he is back in town. Hopefully we will be able to get together sometime soon to hang out.

Joe Howlett took the old Sonic Brass music today. I have been storing it for as long as I can remember. Some of it since 1993. There have been two good sized bins in the basement that have been being used for that and it is actually pretty nice to have them out of here. We need the space more than we need to store brass ensemble music. It isn’t very likely that Sonic is going to be getting together anytime in the near future. Joe and Josh still play a bit and I am pretty sure that Crissman is playing all of the time. But other than that. I have played since Waltermeirer’s wedding and Nate and Jeff haven’t picked up their instruments since the ensemble broke up in the mid 1990’s. It is hard to believe that it has been that long. We were still playing in 1997, I think, but things were winding down at that point. Joe and I should get together and put together a little history and an informational web page. It would be great to play again but it is tough living in a townhouse with neighbours that actually share a wall.

We all left Tahou’s around 11:15. It was getting late and we are all getting old. I drove home and pretty much went straight to bed. Dominica had been asleep for a while by the time that I got in. We had decided that there appeared to be a number of sales tomorrow that we wanted to take advantage of so I have to get up really early in the morning for that. Black Friday shopping should be an experience for me.

Don’t forget that tomorrow is Tofurkey day! Yummy delicious Tofurkey!

I was up at 5:30 this morning. Boy did I not want to have to get out of bed. To make it even harder to get out of bed Oreo was sleeping right next to me sharing my pillow and laying across my arm. He is SO snuggly! But I had to drag myself out of bed since it is a busy day.

I was out the door just after 6:00 and discovered that there was actually a real covering of snow on the ground. I wasn’t expecting that when I got up this morning. This is the first that I have gone out and really had snow. The ground was totally white. I remembered to take out the trash too. So far so good this morning. On time and remembering things.

The drive up to the city was tough. My summer tires on my Mazda are totally shot. Bald as can be and scalloped really badly so I was sliding all over the road from the little bit of snow that we had. That slowed me down a lot this morning. I finally got up to the University of Rochester and discovered that neither was there any space anywhere where you are allowed to park if you are not a student (not even employees apparently get a place to park) but there also was no one working in the visitor or parking information boothes so that there was nothing that you could do about parking should you be like me and need to be able to park.

I worked at the UofR from 7:00 am until 11:00 am. I had been planning on being there all day but it ended up being only a half day project and the second half is expected to be happening in late December or early January. That was good because I was tired and there is just a lot going on today and I didn’t feel like burning the whole day up in the city.

Dominica took Oreo over to dad’s house before she went to work so he was only over there for about an hour before I called to say that I could come to get him. Dad had to run some errands today so he decided to bring the pooch over to Geneseo with him and meet me for lunch at the Omega Grill. That saved me a bit of driving today and I am relieved.

Oreo and I were back home a little after 1:00. Eric popped over to use the computer for a little bit. He has gotten a bunch of new computer stuff at his “office” except for one key piece of equipment: a computer. Yup, another week has gone by with no sign of any type of machine on which for Eric to do any type of work at all. It is going to take him a month to catch up on all of the company email that has been backing up in the account that he has never seen. He has had a corporate email account for months and has never even seen it. Isn’t that a statement about corporate America. Its amazing how little this company cares about doing anything at all.

I spent the afternoon working in the office at the house. I managed to get a new proxy server built for the Castile Christian Academy. That is going to be useful down there. Everyone has really been looking forward to getting that into place. At lunch today dad actually volunteered to help out teaching computers down at the school.

I was totally exhausted when I got up at 7:30 this morning. I feel like I haven’t had a enough sleep in weeks. I am still fighting a cold a little and that isn’t helping me feel wide awake. All of the work that I have to do over the next two days isn’t making me feel any better either.

Jeremy and I left to go down to Castile just a little after 9:00. Not as early as I had been hoping but I just didn’t have enough energy to have gone any earlier and it was an effort to get Jeremy out of bed as it was. We worked until around noon or so before we broke for lunch. We got a lot done in the first few hours. I was very happy with the progress. We are hoping to get enough done today that the school will be able to use the computers at least a little on Monday when they return from their Thanksgiving holiday. So far this year there hasn’t been any computers available to students and only three for the faculty so there is a lot of work left to be done and we need to do it as quickly as possible.

We went to Lorraine’s for lunch right downtown in Castile. They have really good food and the prices are extremely low. It is cheaper than eating at home, I am sure of it. We were both starving having skipped breakfast and then having worked hard all morning. Jeremy got some shrimp and I got the country fried fish sandwich. Our lunches were so good that we both decided that instead of getting dessert that we would both have another round of lunch. Yummy.

I hadn’t planned on being at the school very late but there was so much to do that we didn’t end up leaving until almost 3:00. But we did manage to be productive. We got a new computer hooked up and working in the new “hallway” computer spot. There is a spot that is really wide in the main school hallway where we are planning on putting two computers that students will be able to use at any time. We only have one machine to go there currently and it is up and running. That new machine is both the fastest computer in the school as well as the first machine in the school that has an LCD flat panel monitor. We got some wires run and some computers updated to SUSE 10.0. All in all it was a victory day.

I took Jeremy home and then came home for a busy evening of web design. I have a ton of work that needs to be done tonight so there is not fun for me. Dominica spent the evening sitting in the moon chair in the office reading her new TNIV Study Bible while I worked. It made for a really long night not having any real time to do anything relaxing.

Dominica did make a Walmart run this evening and picked up some new lamps for the house. We have been short a bit of lighting recently and needed something to fill in the gaps. She got a small touch lamp that is to go beside the bed so that she can read in bed without having to wake me up to turn off the main room light. And she finally moved the main room light back to a wall socket that is connected to the light switch on the wall so that we can use the actual light switch once again. That is very helpful. She also got a nice desk / lamp combination unit to put in the office. She spent a bit of the night assembling that unit. It goes beside her moon chair so and lets her store a bit of stuff beneath it and have a drink and snack on top while she reads or knits or whatever. It is nice to have a decent light in this room now so that I can actually see things from time to time. One of the first things that she did with the light was to play with the hamster for a while. Mr. Humphries is starting to get pretty old. He is coming up on three years. It is very sad. He definitely isn’t the spry young rodent that he used to be. I managed to take a few seconds of video of he and Min playing before the camera batteries died. I really wish that the camera didn’t eat through batteries so quickly. That is really a pain.

Before going to bed Min and I managed to quickly record a short episode of the podcast and I managed to squeeze out the daily Bible reading. Then it was off to bed. Only 10:30 and all ready going to bed. Boy do I ever feel old. I have to be up at 5:30 so that I can get to the city to work at the UofR at 7:00. Tomorrow is probably going to be a really long day so I need as much sleep as possible tonight.

Oreo was super snuggle boy last night and shared a pillow with me and layed right against me. It is really hard to get yourself out of bed in the morning with a dog that is so affectionate. I had to get up and call Castile because I killed their main computer on Friday and they are without it this morning. But they said that they really didn’t need it and could easily make due today without it. So that saved me from having a crazy, awful morning. I was going to have to make a run to Home Depot in Henrietta first thing this morning just to pick up a few dollars of parts and then run down to Leicester, get Jeremy and then run down to Castile all to fix a single computer to get them through today. Then be there all day tomorrow. I am really relived that they don’t need me to do that. It would have been even worse because Dominica and I are planning on going to see Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire early this afternoon and that would have been yet another trip to Rochester. Now I can combine the trips and not waste nearly so much time. HP&tGoF is playing at the Tinseltown DLP theatre in Gates so we are really excited. We have not had a chance to see anything in that theatre since Star Wars III was there and that was the first movie that they ever showed there. So this will be exciting. We are really hoping that The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe will be shown there. That would be awesome.

Because my plans got totally changed this morning I was able to catch dad just as he was about to walk out the door and tell him that I was able to do breakfast this morning. Now Jeremy doesn’t have to get up early either on his first day of vacation. He and his mom are going acoustic guitar shopping today now that I don’t need him to go work in Castile with me until tomorrow.

I managed to get a lot of work done on the new WordPress system last night and I am really excited that we might be able to have that up and running in a trial mode in the very near future. So far it looks like a really nice and easy to use program with lots of really cool features. I am really looking forward to being able to use it to run the site. Once we have it in place we will have an opportunity for people to leave comments, for Internet crawlers to actually be able to search the site more effectively, for people to link directly to specific stories and for everyone to be able to subscribe to the site via RSS instead of having to go to the page everyday. That will all be really cool when it is done. The site is so big though that it is going to take a really long time to get everything moved over. There must be well over one thousand entries and possible two thousand that have to be moved over manually and there will probably be some editing to do as well during the transition process. So I can imagine that this will end up taking quite some time.

My Chia Herb Garden seems to be growing well so far. The sweet marjoram is doing really well and the house crop has a nice set of leaves now. They are just tiny but they are just starting to be able to pull in energy from the light source so they should be thriving soon. The dill is doing decently well and is really tall. Only one or two of those plants has any leaves yet but it is just getting started and I expect it to have lots of leaves within forty-eight hours. The chives are just getting going. There are a few sprouts but nothing really exciting yet but they seem to be fine. The cilantro might be dead. I can not quite tell. It started off strong but seems to have collapsed under its own weight and there hasn’t been any noticeable growth for a few days now so I am not convinced that it is doing all right. I might have to replant something else in there. That is okay because Dominica really didn’t want cilantro anyway but hadn’t told me what she did want so I went with that. We still have two seed packets left so we could grow something else quite easily. It has been a little cold in the house and the cilantro might just be wanting some warmth.

I got out some of the rockwool last night and got three rockwool cubes cleaned and soaked and put some of the pepper seeds in them. I think that some of the seeds had sprouted while I had them soaking but I can’t really tell. It will take a few days before we really know if they are doing anything. It only takes a two or three of them to take root and we should have a decent amount of peppers. I planted orange bell pepper which are my favourites. I need to get some Miracle Grow today for all of the plants. I really should get something more complete from the hydroponics store but it is a lot cheaper to go with the Home Depot stuff.

Dominica got back to the house just after eleven. She and Jenn had breakfast at Tim Horton’s – that is two meals in a row there – and Jenn left to go back to Philadelphia straight from there. Unfortunately Min forgot to get copies of the pictures that Jenn took with her digital camera before she left so we don’t have any new pictures from her to put up on the Flickrcast for everyone.

Dad returned the first season of Roswell today. He finished watching it last night. He is hooked now.

I recorded my eighth Scott Reads Bible Podcast today. For the past two days it has been on the podOmatic top 100 list. Not a lot of listeners but a few everyday. I have been looking through the copyright information on some of the newer translations of the Bible and can’t figure out whether or not I am allowed to be recording them the way that I have been. There is no clear definition for how a podcast works since it is in some ways like a radio show and is ongoing and in some ways is an individual recording and is combined audio and text. That makes it really unclear whether or not I fall into the “needing permission in writing” category. I am definitely recording so little at a time that I am not breaching the “length” requirements but the audio constitutes a good portion of the “work” but it is impossible to define what exactly the “work” is. Is the “work” the entire podcast show, in its entirety, ever? Or is it just the portions of the podcast that are available any any given time? Or just a single show within the podcast context? I have no idea. If I was archiving all of the readings somewhere I think that that would clearly need written permission but since I am not I think that I might be okay since no one could ever go out and download whole sections of the Bible. It is a really grey area since there is no definition of “work”. I don’t know. I think that as long as I am only on podOmatic that it is fine the way that I am doing it. There are so few people listening to the show right now that it really doesn’t matter. But just in case it becomes popular I don’t want to have to ask for permission later and be like “Oops, should have asked before.” I am carefully putting in a lot of stuff like the King James Bible so that no single copyrighted version is a very large percentage of the whole. As I write this I think that I am beginning to see that I am fine and that the only way that a problem would come in is if I was reading the Bible straight through, which I am only doing with the KJV, or if I was archiving it someplace like on the Internet Archive where, eventually, there would end up being a complete audio recording of the Bible in every known version. But since we have a total storage area of only 250MB on podOmatic there will only ever be several interspersed chapters from any given translation and never a significant percentage of the whole podcast. Good, that settles that. Eventually I would really like to have all of the work that I am doing hosted on the Internet Archive in a higher quality than I am doing now (32kb/s) but I will most definitely have to have written permission for that.

Dad told me today that Niagara has spent in excess of $1700 on breakfast meetings at the Omega Grill so far this year. That is just over ten months. That is a lot of breakfast.

Today’s great headline: French woman attempts to exit flying aircraft to smoke!. She admitted to taking sleeping pills and alcohol before flying. Umm, okay. Can anyone say drug addict? Sleeping pills, mixed with alcohol and almost killing dozens of people to get a tobacco fix. Just great.

At noon Dominica and I left to go up to Gates to see HP4 at Tinseltown. We were very excited. We have been waiting for this latest installment for some time now. We got there just in time to see the first digital show of the day. There were only ten to twenty people in the theatre. The movie was really good. Maybe the best one yet of the series. I was pretty impressed. Cutting that huge book down to just a single movie was no small project and it had to have been really hard to do. It is too bad that they had to cut so much important personal and character development out to make the movie but it would have been really long and difficult as well. The resulting movie was very action oriented but quite entertaining and really well done. Maybe the most disappointing part of the entire thing was that it was so apparent that the original movie was shot on traditional analogue film and not in a digital format since the digital projector was so good that we could still see the grain from the original! But it still looked awfully good. But definitely not as good as Star Wars III which was totally digital. The thing that really gets me is that at the same theatre they convince people to pay quite a bit extra to see the same movie in the Imax theatre. That makes no sense to me. Imax theatres are not widescreen so watching something in there is like watching regular movies converted for old, legacy televisions. And, since the original film resolution was not good enough to even stand up to the rigors of regular projection using a good projector what would be the benefit of seeing it blown up even more? Imax theatres crop off a large portion of the image and blow the remaining portion up to many times the original size. That means that you only have about half of the original film material to work with and giving you about a 50% reduced film quality over the regular DLP theatre. Then they project it so large that the human eye cannot see things happening at the top and the bottom simultaneously resulting in another effective image quality loss. The end result is a far inferior movie experience that costs more for a silly name that wasn’t even cool when it was new twenty years ago. And, contrary to the apparent popular belief, Imax move are seldom in 3D. In fact, so many people think that Imax means it is in 3D, they have started labeling all of the Imax movie as 2D. Trust me, the digital theatre makes the Imax theatre look like a joke.

Here is another great news RSS feed for you news junkies out there: Reuters. Reuters is a major source of news for everyone else. Another major news source is the Christian Science Monitor which has RSS feeds as well. Just add either of these link locations to your RSS feed aggregator and you will be good to go with plenty of news.

After the movie Dominica and I went to the Pakistan House to get some dinner. We made it just in time to get the buffet before they tore it down. Yummy. Then we went to Home Depot so that I could get some supplies for tomorrow and then did some banking and back home we went.

I have a lot of work that needs to be done tonight so I am quite busy. After getting home Dominica realized that she has a test tomorrow that she has not yet studied for so she got to work on that as quickly as possible. Jeremy called and is coming over tonight to use the Internet and then is spending the night so that it is easier for us to go down to Castile in the morning and get to work right away. We are planning on being down there for pretty much the entire school day to get as much done as possible. There is a lot to do so we are going to be really busy. Hopefully we won’t have too much trouble fixing the one computer that I killed on Friday. That could prove to be a real roadblock if we are not lucky.

Phil called tonight to make plans to go and see The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe when it releases. We haven’t talked to the Ayers in forever. Several months at least. Everyone keeps asking us if they are still alive and we haven’t had a definite answer. Too bad that we didn’t talk to them yesterday when Jenn was still here.

A little before midnight Dominica and Jeremy made a Tim Horton’s run. This will be Dominica’s third trip to Timmy Ho’s in just twenty-four hours. They must really love us there. When they got back Min said that almost nothing that we had wanted did they still have. Everytime that we go there we find out about more stuff that they are not offering in the late evenings and during the overnight. She is wondering why they are even attempting to stay open a full twenty-four hours if they are not serving during that time. It used to be that they only did not offer soup at night but now they are stopping making donuts, bagels and just about everything else. I understand that they need to have a scaled back menu at night and that it is a lot slower there than they had originally anticipated but if they don’t offer anything than how do they expect anyone to buy anything. It would be like General Motors saying that they had considered selling a personal spacecraft for $80,000 but since no one was buying any that they had proof that no one was interested in any. That hardly makes any sense. People don’t buy what isn’t for sale very often, do they? I can’t believe how many stores use that very logic when determining when to stay open or what products to sell.

I discovered a web site that has some information on Walt Disney World rides that are no longer around. Here are some links to rides that we loved that we didn’t get to ride and tell you all about. My old standby favourite and my parents’ favourite as well from our trip to Disney in 1987 was Horizons presented by General Electric. It was really dated even then but it was a really well done ride. Dominica remembers it from her first time in WDW and she really loved it. Also great in EPCOT was General Motors’ World of Motion. From these pictures you can kind of get a sense as to why Disney felt that they needed to remove these rides and replace them with something more current. But the current rides aren’t any more fun than the dated ones. I never got to see the Magic Kingdom’s Swan Boats because they closed four years before I first went to Disney or even Florida but I think they were a great idea. I have long wondered what those dock like buildings were designed for along the Magic Kingdom’s waterway. Dominica and I were even talking about that while we were there. Of course we can’t forget the original Tiki Room or more appropriately “Tropical Serenade”. The 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea ride vanished several years ago and was never really a cutting edge ride but it was a real ride in Fantasyland and it was fun, especially for kids. This one turned into nothing but a playground. Very sad. The current Winnie the Pooh ride replaced Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride which was pretty bad but better than Snow White used to be. I only ever rode the Skyway once but it was a nice way to skip over boring Fantasyland without being harassed by the rude people and their kids who are far too young to be out in a park with other people. Another ride that was removed and nothing done to replace it. Now the whole thing is nothing but stroller parking. Dominica and my favourtie Magic Kingdom attraction, the Carousel of Progress, has changed a lot over the years. After reading this it takes me back to the things I have seen change from time to time that I have been there. I only barely remember Take Flight but I do remember that it used to be a lot better than a lot of the stuff in Tomorrowland. I do remember Mission to Mars quite well and it was awful. But by awful I don’t mean that it was nearly as awful as the Stitch attraction that is in its place now. My all time favourite thing in all of Walt Disney World will always be Discovery Island – the real, original one that is not its namesake in the Animal Kingdom – and in these pictures you can see some of the classic spots on the island, get some history and there is even a picture of the two capybaras that lived there that I am always telling people about. For those of you who have been to WDW in the past. This should have taken you on quite the trip down memory lane.
Scott in Disney World circa 1992

Who is this total loser? Look at those glasses! Those sneakers! Those old Nike shorts/swim trunks. Are those dolphins on that tee shirt? What a loser I was. I am pretty sure that this picture was taken in 1992. This is me in Disney World on my family’s second vacation there. I figured that since I had found that great web site with information on so many of the old rides that it would be a perfect day to include a picture of me in Disney back when EPCOT was just turning ten.