October 15, 2005

Dominica didn’t get any sleep last night. Dexter is a restless sleeper and insists on sleeping with us and it doesn’t give Min a chance to fall asleep. With my CPAP I can sleep through just about anything. Dexter probably jumped on me a hundred times during the night and never managed to wake me up. Growing up with Buffer as a kid (she was our Cocker Spaniel that I had from age ten until I was in college) I am used to dogs walking on me at night. Buffer used to wait until I fell asleep and then walk over me and leave the room. So Min was exhausted today.

Dominica had to get up early this morning so that she could go and get her hair done somewhere in Frankfort before the wedding. I stayed in bed with the dogs for a little while. It is very difficult to drag yourself out of bed when you have two snuggly Boston Terriers who want to snuggle with you!

Min and I drove to the wedding separately since we had to be there a little early because Min is doing a reading. We left the house at 10:15 and managed to arrive early enough over at Hamilton College that we stopped by the Nice’n’Easy and I picked up a quick breakfast.

The wedding was held in the Hamilton College Chapel which was built in 1827 and the interior was restored in the mid-1900’s as a war memorial. It was a really beautiful venue for a wedding. Simple and austere but elegant in its own fashion. The weather outside was perfect for an indoor wedding. It was heavily overcast but since the chapel did not have stained glass windows the overcast caused the light to be a cool, almost blue colour that worked perfectly. And the humidity caused the back windows to fog which kept there from being a clear view behind the priest which would have been distracting.

Dominica and I didn’t get to sit together. All of the readers sat together is the front left of the chapel to make it easier for them to get up and down without walking through the church. I sat on Min’s family’s side, the right, two thirds of the way back in a row with Joe and Brittany.

The service was very nice. Both Dominica and I commented on how impressed we were with the priest’s message. Towards the end of the service the rain really started. It was pouring by the time they were wrapping up and just about then the thunder started as well. So everyone stalled at the chapel as long as possible. Dominica and I had to stay for family pictures so that kept us out of the heaviest rain fortunately. After pictures we were over to “The Little Pub” which was on campus just across from the chapel where there was hot cider, donuts, sandwiches and cookies for lunch.

We went back to Min’s parent’s house to take care of the dogs and to change before the reception. We packed the car and watched a little television before we left. Oreo was very glad to see us. We are pretty sure that he gets pretty nervous when we leave him at Min’s parent’s house when we are not there with him.

We left for the reception at 5:10 which was a bit later than we had hoped to leave. Then, only minutes after locking the door and leaving, Dominica realized that the card that we had gotten for the newlyweds was still sitting on the kitchen table where we could not get to it. So we had to run to the store on the way out of town to pick up another card. That didn’t help our timing any. While I was in getting the new card Dominica was rumaging through my car and discovered her parent’s and discovered the house key that she has been missing for almost two years now. So that didn’t help much.

We actually managed to make it to the reception right on time. In fact, we were probably about halfway through all of the people that were arriving so it was perfect. From 6:00 until 7:00 was a cocktail hour. We hung out with Joe and Brittany and had snacks. “Snacks” is putting it lightly. We mostly “settled” for baked brie with raspberry drizzle, spring rolls, quiche, etc. There were a lot of really nice meat items as well but I didn’t pay much attention to them.

The reception was quite an affair. Save venue as last year, the country club at Turning Stone Casino. We had a really good time. Dominica and I were sat with the grooms parents, Min’s parents, Joe and Brittany and the priest. So we were one of the “mature” tables. Apparently Dominica and I have graduated from sitting at the kids tables. Dinner was awesome. Great service and presentation. Our vegetarian selection was some sort of ricotta based filling in a pan-fried eggplant wrap that was simply amazing. Last year we hadn’t been that impressed with the vegetables Napolean that they had done there but Min’s uncle Sam said that they had specifically made sure that the vegetarian selection was different this year and they had had the casino get this recipe from a different resort. Let me tell you: it was worth it. I only know of there being three vegetarians on Min’s side of the family: Dominica, Stephanie and I. One of the coolest things was a chocolate fondue fountain. It was a five or six tiered flowing fountain that you could dip fruit, marshmallows or rice crispy treats into. Very cool. The cake was amazing too. Kind of fudge layered with cake.

We partied until 11:00 and stayed just long enough to hear the last song and then we hit the road quickly to beat the rush out of the casino. Oreo had been in the car all night and we didn’t want him to have to be in there any longer than he had to be. We did go out around 9:20 and walked him and made sure that he was warm enough but we couldn’t do much to entertain him. We were on the road by 11:15 and home by just a little after 1:00. Boy were we tired. It was all that we could do to stay awake while driving home. If it had been any fartehr I could not have made it. Oreo was especially glad to be home.

October 14, 2005

Dominica and I are going out to Clinton, New York this afternoon for Min’s cousin Sam’s wedding rehearsal. Min is going to be doing one of the reading in the wedding so she has to be at the rehearsal. We spent the early morning packing and getting ready to be able to leave. Dad came over a little before noon and we all went to lunch at the Omega. We ate and then had to hit the road pretty quickly. The rehearsal is at 3:45 and it takes three hours to get there so we had to boogie.

We got to Clinton right on time. I have never been to Clinton before. I was really impressed by what an attractive town it is. It is a small village to the west of New Hartford which is just to the west of Utica. Hamilton College is just outside the village. It is one of the most beautiful campuses that I have ever seen. I got Min to the chapel – which was built in 1827 – and then took Oreo out to explore the campus. Oreo had an incredible time running around exploring everything. He dragged me from tree to tree trying to see and pee on everything. He had the most fun he has had in a long time. It was drizzling the whole time and he got very wet. After a while it started to rain and I had to take him back to the car. He was getting very cold.

After the rehearsal I drove Min over to the Stonebridge Country Club and dropped her off. I ran back to Min’s parent’s house to drop off Oreo and to change for the after-rehearsal dinner. I made it back to the country club just in time to get in line for dinner. Now that is good timing.

Before going to bed we watched Kingdom of Heaven with Min’s father. It was quite good. I really enjoyed it. It wasn’t strictly historically accurate. At least Saladin really was the sultan that sieged the city. That was about all that was accurate. There was a tiny bit of truth to some of the story. But not much. You can learn more about The Siege of Jerusalem in 1187 at Wikipedia.

October 13, 2005

The sun is almost out today. Not quite but it isn’t the total grey overcast that we have had for the past two weeks. I really prefer it to be dark and cool in colour. But this will do.

I finally managed to sleep in today and didn’t have to get up until almost 9:00. Min got up just a little bit after I did. She had to leave at 10:00 to get out to FLCC in Canandaigua in time for her test today.

Dad is over at Eaton-Watson this morning dealing with grandma’s funeral arrangements. The funeral is going to be on Monday morning in Perry and then internment is going to be, if all goes to plan, next weekend in Canton, Ohio where my grandfather is buried. So all seven of us left out here are going to go out there for the burial. It is weird to think of the family as only being seven people left in New York including Dominica.

Dad came over this morning and picked Min and I up for lunch at the Omega. Min had been at class this morning doing a test. She had to fix a computer that the professor had broken. She thinks that it went well.

I had to do some banking this afternoon so I ran up to the city. Eric and I were going to get coffee when I was done but he ended up having work to do so we weren’t able to schedule it. I stopped by Target and Best Buy after going to the bank to do a little gift shopping. While I was there I picked up the latest release from Nickleback as well as The Explorers with Ethan Hawk and River Phoenix which was a terrible movie but one that was awesome when I was young so I have been looking for it for years.

One of my projects tonight was getting the new USB switch and extension cable that we picked up last night installed and my desk cleaned off. I got that done and then moved Mr. Humphries from the bookshelf in the dining room into the office so that he is on my desk. We are hoping that this arrangement will make it far easier to keep him warm, save on home heating costs and make him much more accessible so that we are more likely to spend time with him. Being in the dining room is tough because we never use that part of the house during the hours when he is awake unless we have guests and then we don’t hang out with the hamster very much. So we are very hopeful that this will turn out to be a much better solution for everyone involved. Plus my desk is much larger so he can actually get out of his cage and explore a bit without being on the edge of falling to the floor at every moment. I have been really worried about how little time we spend hanging out with him. When we first got him he stayed in the bedroom and I had him right by my head when I slept and he seemed to really like that but now he is around us so little when both he and we are awake that he misses out on a lot of attention. Hopefully now he can wake up and come find me easily on most occassions so that he can gets lots and lots of attention. One of the problems that we have always had with him is that he has such an incredibly short attention span that it is very difficult to spend time with him. What he will do is rattle his cage looking for attention. Then you go over and spend some time with him but after about ten to fifteen seconds he will run away. As soon as you assume that he has given up on wanting attention and leave he returns and wants attention again. This is a pattern that can go on for hours and makes it very difficult to entertain him because so much of your time is spend waiting for him to come back and want more attention.

The hamster is out of his cage and wandering around on the desk while I am writing this update. It is so much more space than he is used to. I think that he is really gonig to like it, though, because this should make it that he can come and go from his cage when I am in here. He loves to go in and out of his cage. It isn’t like most hamsters that just want to be out of their cages. He likes to come out and walk around but wants to go back in after a minute. But just a few minutes later he will want to be back in again. And on and so forth. I guess that he is a rodent with very short interest cycles.

Well, the first problem with having the hamster loose is apparent: we need to block him from getting onto the portion of my desk that my computer is actually on. I think that a simple piece of wood will do the trick. Something that I can put in place when he is going to be loose and can hide when we don’t need it. He immediately comes over to where I am and starts to chew on everything – which unfortunately is mostly wires and picture frames. So that doesn’t work well at all. He is a very ornary hamster.

While I was working in the office tonight (with the crazy hamster running all over the place) I watched The Explorers since I have been wanting to see it again since I first saw it in theatres in 1985! It is has been a complete twenty years since the last time that I saw this movie. It is weird to finally be at an age when you actually can have gone twenty years without having seen a movie that you remember pretty well. I have almost never found anyone who remembers this film except for Min. It is one of the movies done in the style of Goonies but obviously not as well. It is weird how much watching a movie like this takes me right back to 1985. The clothing, the television, the furniture. This is how I remember the world from when I was nine.

I started working on getting my paperwork together for final submittal to Empire State College tonight. It has been almost a year since I worked on it last. Boy am I late! Luckily I recorded enough information last time that I worked on this paperwork that I was able to get right back into it again pretty easily.

While I was working I finally got around to watching Disney’s version of Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wringle in Time which I have been wanted to watch for a long time. “A Wrinkle in Time” was one of my favourite books when I was younger. I have the entire series of books. They were great.

Min got home around 11:20 and we headed right out to go to Walmart to do a little shopping. When we got back I was exhausted and went straight to bed.

So today I found the worst website of all time. What is the point of this page from American Rock Salt over in Retsof? There isn’t one single bit of information at all here. One image and a link to their internal email? There is a good security system. Lets make every single person who was ever interested in doing business with us get no information but give them a tool to attempt to hack us with. Great.

Okay, so here is the plan for this weekend as it now stands. The plans have been changed over and over again so I hope that they are solid at this point. We are leaving Geneseo around noon tomorrow. We will go straight to the rehearsal. Then we are going out to Frankfort and staying with Min’s parents on Friday night. Oreo will be with dad. So we won’t be coming back to Geneseo until after the wedding. The wedding reception starts around 6:00. We are hoping that we will be able to go straight back to Geneseo after the reception but it might end up being too late. We will play that by ear. So we will be home either really late on Saturday night or middle of the day on Sunday.

There probably won’t be any updates until Sunday evening since it is so hard to post while out of town. Have a good weekend everyone.

October 12, 2005: My Paternal Grandmother Passed Away

Euphemia Miller (Allan) Passed Away Today.   My paternal grandfather, her husband, died on November 27, 1971: Mahlon J Miller.

I got up first thing this morning and wrote a bit of updates but I decided to uninstall Window Blinds because it was bogging down my computer too much and the crappy software immediately closed all of my applications without warning and didn’t save anything so I lost all of the work that I had done. What a pain.

I was up by 8:00 this morning. I had hoped to sleep in until about noon. But that didn’t happen. By 8:00, the phone was ringing constantly and there was little chance of me getting any additional sleep. So I decided that it would just be better if I sucked it up and got out of bed.

Eric found out this morning that it will be at least three weeks before he is given a new computer for work. It has all ready been one week. It is pretty tough for a guy whose entire job revolves around using a computer and who doesn’t even have an actual office to work in to be without his computer for an entire month. Heaven only knows what he is going to do at work for the next three weeks.

The good thing about being up when I did helped me get outside to deal with the trash that needed to be taken out this morning. I took the opportunity to clean out both of the cars of all of their trash. That really needed to be done. I also managed to take out a bunch of recycling that has been sitting in a bin in the garage since one of the first weeks that we were in the house. At least eighteen months ago!

I went down to the basement and did some cleaning down there and got together another trash bag full and managed to get it out just in time to actually hand it to the LT Disposal guys as they drove by. Now I know exactly when they come: 11:00.

Last night I decided that I wanted to try out a desktop focused BSD project. So I downloaded DesktopBSD. DesktopBSD was super easy to install. Very impressive. It totally beat out any Linux or Windows system that I am familiar with. And it was fast to install as well. Once it was installed I was really impressed by how fast and responsive it was. The system is still pretty sparse and needs some work to meet all of the needs of normal home desktop users but DesktopBSD definitely has an amazing jump on most desktop UNIX projects and I will most definitely be keeping a very close eye on it. I am very interested in trying out DesktopBSD on some of the equipment that we have at the Castile Christian Academy to see how it compares to SUSE Linux.

I just noticed today that Bob Crissman has a podcast out now, with only one episode so far, that you can subscribe to. So give it a listen. I haven’t heard it yet but expect to listen later today.

Min got up around 1:30. She showered and got ready for work and then she and I drove down to my grandma’s to visit for a little while. She isn’t feeling well enough to talk to us and Min was going to be late for work so we were only able to stay for about twenty minutes. But grandma couldn’t handle any more than that so it worked on well. Min got to work and I came home to get ready to go to the Livingston County Chamber of Commerce monthly After Hours event with Eric which is being held over at Leisure’s in Lakeville today.

Before I was able to leave I checked the mail and discovered a huge bill from Associated Healthcare who provides my CPAP machine. I was really surprised since I knew of nothing that they would be billing me for. I had received a bill from them last month that was the first I had ever received from them. It had two monthly rental charges that I had assumed to be for May and June and it said that that was the total that I owed. Since I knew that I owed rental charges starting from May and since in late September they had billed me for two months I assumed that the two monthly charges must have been May and June and that that was the total that I would ever owe. Oh boy was I in for a surprise. With today’s bill I found out that those were actually a “mistake” and that those bills represented an accidental double billing of August’s rental. I originally hadn’t considered the possibility that the two bills for the same date were an accidental double billing since they were expected to have been back billings and I assumed that they were able to bill correctly. Who would let two rentals go out for the same item for the same day? I guess I shouldn’t give anyone the benefit of the doubt, should I? I had even called them back in September when the bills had come to talk about them but the billing person was not in and did not return my call. I was not too concerned as I assumed that I would receive another statement in October that would show the final amount again and I could talk to them then when there was a unified statement. The bill that I received today added mysterious and unexplained and previously unbilled “back due amounts” that had not existed at the time of my last billing statement as well as three more months of rental charges from May, June and July. So now, instead of less than $400 I owe more than $1,500! All of this over some items that I could replace online, new, by buying outright for under $400! To make matters worse, I asked when my “rent to own” would be over and I would no longer have to pay 50% of the value of the CPAP every month. Turns out they had no idea. The rental was going to go on forever until someone questioned it. The whole thing is a scam. They are supposed to call me back tomorrow to see what we can do. But I feel like my only reasonable course of action is to take them to court over this. Apparently it is their practice to totally overcharge insurance companies and to keep charging them until someone audits the books and notices that they have been paying thousands of dollars for a $250 item. This is the same company that delivered a much higher end CPAP model than I should have received and set it up not as a CPAP but as a C-FLEX which is a very different device which does exactly the opposite of what a CPAP does – but to their credit is preferred by most people who get CPAPs – that seriously aggrivated my central sleep apnea causing me to not be able to sleep with the CPAP for a month or more and causing Dominica to not be able to sleep well from the sounds that it creates. So, the bottom line is that everything that has gone on with this company has been awful with the exception of the delivery service. That part was fine. But now I am caught between a rock and a hard place and have no idea what I should do. I could simply refuse to pay and then dispute the charge later if they decide to try to put it on my credit. That might be the best way to go. I could send the amount I think that the machine is worth along with a letter from my lawyer and see if they drop it at that. Or I could pay the total amount and take them to small claims court in Erie County. Either way, it isn’t good. I am losing out no matter what because it will be a huge headache. But I really can’t stand unethical companies taking advantage of me and countless other people this way. I really don’t want to let this go but I don’t know what I should do. I guess I need to pray and wait. Maybe they will give me some halfway decent news in the morning.

After dealing with that for an hour (it took extra long because to get time to collect themselves they put me on hold and then disconnected the line after five minutes) I had to run over to Lakeville to meet Eric at the After Hours event. That was supposed to start around 4:00 and we weren’t doing to badly when we got there. It was the United Way hosting tonight and there was a good amount of food. We were really impressed.

On my way home from the Chamber event I stopped at McDonald’s in Lakeville and picked up a quick dinner. I really wanted a sub but I had been out of the house too long and I didn’t want to leave Oreo there any longer than I absolutely had to.

I got home pretty close to 6:00 and Oreo was bouncing off of the walls, he was so happy to see me. I was pretty tired so I laid down on the bed and listening to “1491” for about fourty-five minutes to relax. Now that I am not travelling nearly as much I get to listen to books at home as well as when I am in the car which is nice.

By 8:15 I had actually wrapped up listening to “1491”. “1491” is a nonfiction book that takes a look at recent research and how it effects our views of what the New World was like just before Europeans arrived en masse. It was a pretty interesting book very much along the lines of what I like to listen to. I wouldn’t say that it was as good as Jared Diamond’s “Collapse” but it was quite good.

Since Bob discovered the podOmatic service I decided to give it a try. It is very easy to use. It is too bad that they only give you 250MB of storage, which is very generous, because when recording so much audio you can fill it up very quickly. The average SGL show is almost 4MB in size and so you can do the math but we will eat through the storage limits very quickly. But the site is nice and easy to use and for people who are not doing really long posts or aren’t posting very often it seems like it is a great service. So I am trying it out and I will let you know how it is. Tony should really give this service a try because it is SO easy to post podcasts. I know that all of you are just going crazy trying to figure out how you can get ever simpler access to my voice so here it is: The SGL Podcast Website and for those of you with a podcatcher here is the SGL Podcast RSS Feed. You can subscribe now using your favourtie podcast reading software and listen to all of the great SGL podcasts as a feed now.

I had to call Turning Stone tonight and cancel our reservations in the Tower for Saturday night. With grandma sick we don’t have anyone to watch Oreo because dad is with her all of the time so we need to get back home as quickly as possible. So we are now going to drive out to Clinton for the wedding rehearsal on Friday and drive home that evening. That way Oreo can go with us and we can all sleep in our own bed. Then we will get up early on Saturday morning and drive briskly out to Clinton again for the wedding. The Ralstons are able to watch Oreo on Saturday so that dad doesn’t have to, fortunately. I called Eric tonight to let him know that I wouldn’t be able to make it to the ARC JobPath breakfast thing that we were supposed to go to on Friday morning. That is actually the one positive thing to arise out of all of this because I really did not want to have to go to that. After the breakfast that we went to last week I don’t want to get stuck going to anymore of those!

I have finally managed to get SUSE Linux 10.0 downloaded today so that I can start playing with that and getting ready to install it over at the school. It is always a big deal to me to be able to get my hands on the latest and greatest technologies. I also downloaded PC-BSD today so see what that project was all about. That one I actually took the time to install while I was working tonight so that I could play with it right away. My quick take on the BSD systems is that they are very nice. Obviously *BSD running KDE on the desktop is almost indistinguishable from Linux running KDE but the BSD systems seem like they might be a little bit more responsive. DesktopBSD seemed to be a little more responsive than PC-BSD was and definitely a lot faster to install. But both were incredibly easy. PC-BSD has a new and very simple software installation mechanism that works great – at least when I tried it. The downside is that there are very few software titles prepackaged for the PC-BSD installer so it isn’t as useful as it might appear. But DesktopBSD didn’t appear to have any software packing utility and I think that both systems would be tough for novice UNIX users because of the lack of apparent means to install new software. Both systems rely totally on the core KDE packages to provide all of the core software, which is great, but making more available easily would help things a lot. It is nice to be able to get a really bare system so easily but there are certain things that almost all users need that are not included and I think that it would be handy if they were easily accessible. Things such as an Office Suite and some simple games. I love that they aren’t included in the base install. But they should be just a click away to make users really love using these systems. In SUSE or Fedora Linux getting KOffice or OpenOffice up and running would be no problem at all.

I did do a little bit of cleaning tonight. Not much but I did manage to squeeze in a little reading up and a little vacuuming. Min is always happier when I do some visible cleaning. I got the dishes taken care of as well. She hates doing dishes.

For anyone who hasn’t heard the novel “Brace for Impact” – you can check out the MP3 Promo. No really, check it out.

I did get a chance to listen to Bob’s podcast of “The Jedi Council Speaks” where he speaks in depth about, yes you guessed it, Star Wars. I am going to make an audio segment for him so you might get to hear me talking on his show as well.

I managed to squeeze in the fifth SGL Podcast tonight. It is about twenty-five minutes long so you might want to save it for your drive into work. Now that I am done with Wegmans I hope that I will be able to Podcast a bit more often. Instead of providing a direct link to the MP3 file, I am going to encourage everyone to bop on over to The SGL Podcast and download the audio from there. Or even better yet: install iPodder and get the subscription.

Min got home from work around 11:20 and ran into the shelves on the side of the garage so left the car running, half out of the garage. Since I had to go out and move the car anyway and since she really hasn’t eaten anything today we decided to run over to Tim Horton’s (Timmy Ho’s as Art would say) and get something to eat. Min has been having an even worse day than me and is really upset and doesn’t feel like going to bed so it is good that we are going out. To make matters even worse on top of her having a bad day today in conjunction with me having a bad day today but she has a test, basically her mid-term, at FLCC tomorrow morning and she really isn’t able to deal with it because she is so upset about other things tonight. So timing is bad on top of everything else.

After getting a light dinner at Tim Horton’s, we stopped by Walmart because we wanted to get some USB cables so that we can rearrange the office to get the printer off of my desk and onto the printer stand. The plan is to move Mr. Humphries into the office so that he will be able to get more attention more easily.

We got back to the house and dad was looking for me. Grandma passed away at 11:00 pm tonight. That means that she died while I was talking about her on the podcast. Dad is doing okay. It worked out well that everyone managed to go down and see her today. Min hasn’t seen her in some time and managed to go down and see her today and all of the grandkids were there (that is Sara, Jeremy and I.) We are all very glad, obviously, that we got to see her today. We must have been there for one of the final moments that she could have known that we were there. She died in her sleep and it was very peaceful. She only had to be on pain killers since yesterday evening. She was going to turn 90 in nineteen days. She was born on Halloween Day 1915.

Well we really couldn’t have asked for anything more. Grandma isn’t suffering anymore and she went in her sleep which has been her biggest fear. Ever since mom died awake and gasping for air grandma has had a terrible fear of sufficating. Everyone seems to be doing okay. Dad and Aunt Sharon are exhausted but I think that the relief is keeping the grief at bay. There has been so much to worry about recently. Its hard to believe that it is over now. I don’t think that it will hit me until tomorrow.