Sheep Guarding Llama

We were up at at’em this morning. Dominica and I were up around 9:00 and easily ready for church on time. Jenn got up at 10:00 and rushed quickly so that she could join us over at LaGrange for the morning service. After church we went with dad over to the Silver Lake Family Restaurant. No surprises there. Jenn is getting to see our normal routine today.

We got back to the house and checked in on Oreo. We didn’t take him with us this morning because he has been in the car way too much recently and we don’t want to make him sick of it. He enjoys it so much normally. We don’t want to do anything that risks ruining that. We packed him into the car and then the three of us drove up to Dominica’s office. She had gotten a call early this morning telling her that she had forgotten to submit her hours for the week. So we had to go all of the way up there so that she could put in her hours. It took all of five minutes. Then we drove down to Borders to hang out for a little while. I had some shopping that I had wanted to do so that worked out pretty decently. The really unfortunate thing is that I had meant to have done some shopping at Home Depot and I totally forgot about it. At Borders I wanted to look at some Bibles because the Scott Reads the Bible Podshow needs more material. Today the podcast made the podOmatic top 100 for the first time. That is pretty cool. There are a number of Christian podcasts on podOmatic that are in the top one hundred. I figure since I podcast daily on there that it will probably get me up in the ranking pretty quickly. Once people realize that I am there and doing that. I picked up an English Standard Verions, a Today’s New International Version and an easier to read King James Bible while I was there. Min did some looking too and ended up getting a new TNIV Women’s Study Bible. Jenn just picked up some greeting cards that were on sale. We all got some coffee and spent some time relaxing in the Borders cafe. We all had a little dessert as well.

It was a little after 7:00 by the time we got back to the house and I was ready to just be in the house for a while. This week is really busy for me. I am working with Jeremy at the Castile school on Monday and Tuesday. Also on those days I have a lot of web design work that has to be completed as well as some preparation for a big job that I am doing on Wednesday that is going to take the entire day. I am starting at 7:00 on Wednesday morning up in the city at the university and will be there all day long. That will be exhausting. And then it is Tofurkey Day! We don’t know what we are doing for Thanksgiving yet. We had tentively been planning on driving out to Frankfort to have Thanksgiving out there but currently the weather forecast isn’t sounding very promising so we are kind of rethinking that whole plan. I am, of course, planning on being back to Rochester in time for the gang’s traditional Thanksgiving Day dinner at Nick Tahou’s. Haven’t missed one yet and I don’t plan on starting now. Min is, of course, not thrilled in the least about that.

Jenn and Min ran off to Tim Horton’s to get some dinner and more coffee and then went shopping at Walmart. I stayed home to get sort of caught up on everthing that has been being neglected the past several days. I got the latest Bible reading recorded, edited and published. Haven’t missed a day yet. That is seven consecutive days so far. I caught up on SGL which was two days behind. I am continuing to work on getting WordPress up and running so that I can test that out and see how well it is going to work as the code underneath SGL. That is an ongoing effort. Oreo was glad that I stayed home. He was happy just to take a nap in the house. I had to gather things so that I could get everything out to Castile early in the morning. My plan is for it to just be a short morning over there but last time that I was there I managed to kill one of their computers and I don’t want them to have any fewer than they all ready do so I need to take care of that.

The girls didn’t get back until 10:00. Good thing that I didn’t go with them. That was a lot longer of a trip than it was supposed to have been.

Just for fun Oreo decided to roll in poop again so Min had to give him another bath. That kept us from being able to do the podcast as early as we had hoped to. Actually I had hoped to do have done the podcast in the afternoon when everyone was more lively but that wasn’t possible. So we didn’t end up getting started until after 10:30 so we didn’t wrap up until almost midnight. Then it was time for me to do the post processing on the show. That always keeps me up a lot later than I want to be awake. The hamster likes to make a lot of noise while we are doing the show so Jenn forced him into his red ball and he rolled all over the house while we recorded the show. We were all really tired by the time we reached the end of the show. I am not able to stay up very late tonight because I have to get up to the city in the morning to get to Home Depot so that I can get Jeremy and get down to Castile so that they are able to get some work done. I was hoping that I would be able to find the parts that I needed around the house but that hasn’t worked out as of yet. I will make one last effort before going to bed to try to find the stuff that I need because it will make my life a LOT easier if I don’t have to do all of that extra driving in the morning. My week is more than busy enough this week without having to make an extra and unnecessary trip to Rochester.

Today really does not feel like a Saturday to me. I got up with Min as she headed off to work in the city. I did some cleaning this morning trying to keep the house up to par with where it was last night but once we get the house clean it is a tough place to keep it at.

My main project this morning was building a computer for Castile that I plan to install on Monday morning. This is the first full SUSE Linux 10.0 install that I have from scratch on a fresh machine. I was really impressed. This new version is screaming compared to the stuff that I am used to. The school is going to be really happy with this. This will make classes so much easier because it will take so much less time to get computers up and running when students need to use them. They will also be quite happy just to have a new computer arriving as well.

Dad called and we got together for lunch at the Omega Grill. After lunch I came home and spent several hours working on the telephone with Andy. Our project is really coming along. He has been doing tons of work on it and we are really starting to get excited about having it working pretty soon.

I did a short SGL Podcast to make sure that there was something up for today. I didn’t want to leave everyone hanging with so many people listening to the show on such a regular basis. I also had to record my Saturday show of Scott Reads the Bible. My new Saturday show is me reading my way straight through the King James Bible one chapter at a time. The whole podcast is me reading the Bible one chapter at a time but I skip all around in the Word and use lots of different versions of the Bible – almost twenty different translations – but on Saturdays I am doing a special thing starting from Genesis 1 today and going all the way through directly.

I tried to shave my head this afternoon while I was waiting for Jenn to arrive. I have been lazy about shaving my head recently and I have gotten pretty scruffy. I started shaving it tonight but after not too long I realized that I had let it get way too long. It ended up taking me almost two hours to get my head shaved and I ended up eating through four razor blades and still getting pretty severe razor burn on my head from the number of times I had to drag a dull blade over it. What a pain.

Jeremy’s friend Ben who has been working on trying to find a free, host based solution to playing AoE2 over the network finally got something working today and we were able to test it. That was a relief. It is nice that we have another group of people that will be able to play now because of that. No one was around this afternoon so Ben and I played a quick game of one on one while I was waiting for Jenn to get to the house.

Jenn arrived at the house around 7:00. We hung out for a little while and then at 8:30 we had to drive up to Rochester to meet Dominica and Tricia at Basha which is an awesome Meditteranean restaurant up on Clinton. Tanner and I used to hang out at Basha a lot back in our old college days at Monroe Community College, MCC. The restaurant isn’t very far from there and isn’t very expensive so it made for a great place to head to when we wanted a nice lunch. We got there right on time and Min was only a minute behind us coming from work. She claims that I gave her bad directions but she called and I talked her through a couple of turns and she was there so quickly that it wasn’t a problem at all. Personally I think that she just missed the exit but I will have to try driving the same way sometime to see if there is really an exit there or not where the map had said that there was. Maps are often wrong, though. Tricia was a few minutes later than us. We pretty much had the restaurant to ourselves. There was only one other table there and they were almost done eating by the time that we were starting so it was very private.

Dinner was very good. I really like Basha. I wish that we would eat there more often. Too bad it is so far away. We almost never drive all of the way up to the city itself to eat. We always have to combine the trip with something else. After dinner the four of us went over to the Olde Toad on Alexander Street in the Medical Arts Building where I used to work for Pilato Entertainment many moons ago (1998 – 1999 maybe?) Tricia’s girlfriend met us there and we all hung out for several hours. It has been a really long time – since my bachelour party, I do believe – since I have had a chance to be up there and to get to have some real ale (that is an actual category of beer, real ale.) We had a really good time. Oreo was happy just to hang out in the parking lot waiting for us. I think that he is starting to get tired of the whole “waiting in the car indefinitely” thing that he has been having to go through over and over the past couple of weeks. His enthusiasm about riding in the car is beginning to wane a little.

Oreo the alarmclock got me up again this morning. Apparently he no longer has any qualms about going out into the snow. It is easy for him to get up early because he just climbs right back into bed and snuggles with whomever is around and sleeps all day. It doesn’t make any difference to him at all when he decides that he wants to go out. But he always does it early enough to cut my night short.

Here is a happy news item for a change: children overseas save mother they see collapse on living room webcam. It would appear that the Internet really does have positive uses beyond being a delivery mechanism for SGL.

After Min left for work this morning I had my hands full doing some last minute cleaning. There is always more to be done, isn’t there? I did some vacuuming, the dishes, red up the office and did some general house cleaning. Now if I could just teach Oreo to wipe his feet and the hamster not to throw his bedding all over the place we will be in really good shape.

While she was at work Dominica found a site that talked about how to make mincemeat pies. I hope that the fact that she is looking means that she is planning on baking me one sometime in the near future. When we used to go to Ohio for Thanksgiving sometimes my grandmother would bake one for me since I was the only member of the immediate family who likes them. There is a lot of that in my family. It seems that my tastes are completely my own.

I left home around 11:00 and took Oreo over to pick up dad so that we could go down to Castile to get some work done down there. It was after noon by the time we actually managed to get down there. We had to do some banking and I had to get gas. The car must have been exceedingly empty today because I put a lot more in than the tank is supposed to hold. We had to stop at the lumber shop in Perry too because we needed to pick up a shelf to install down at the school.

We got some work done. Not as much as I had hoped. We got some critical cabling runs put into the ceiling and that is likely to really help as we continue to try to get the computer lab up and running as quickly as possible.

I did a bunch of work on a computer for the school this afternoon and did a bit of checking out of a number of hard drives that we have here that have been having problems. We have had so many hard drives die recently and we have no real machine to work with them with that they are piling up waiting for me to determine with drives are still useful and which ones are not. That is turning into a real chore.

Jenn was at the house when I got back from Castile. We managed to hang out for about an hour or two before she had to run out to go to Buffalo where she is crashing tonight with friends out there. Eric came over while Jenn was still here to use the computer. He still doesn’t have a computer at work and they are starting to email him all of the time with stuff that he has to do. It has been more than a month now, I think, that he has been working with no means of communicating with the company that he works for. I don’t know how they expect him to be able to do anything. It isn’t like there is another computer at his site somewhere. The company doesn’t have a single computer at the entire location. So he can’t sneak over to someone’s office and use their computer when they aren’t there if he has to. My house is his only option.

Dominica and I were really tired tonight by the time that she got home and we decided that we didn’t have the energy to put on a good podcast so we decided to skip it for tonight and ended up going to bed a little on the early side.