Sheep Guarding Llama

Tonight I am actually working in Rochester up on Mt. Read. Only two stores left after tonight.

For those of you who didn’t watch CNN today, here is another great reason not to visit Puerto Rico and why we wish we could give them back to Spain.

I got home from work around 2:00 am and I set to work to make one last effort at getting the Road Runner service hooked up through the new router that I spent the evening attempting to build. I had to pull the router out of the rack again, change some hardware in the unit – again – and set it back into place. After having worked on that machine almost all day I finally had it working from a hardware perspective. That is when I discovered that the Road Runner service was barely working. It could connect but we weren’t getting any usable connection since it was dropping so many packets. It is extrememly windy out and I am extrememly tired so I decided to just let it wait for the morrow in the hopes that it would just fix itself.

Again, I was up quite early this morning so that I could pick Dominica up from the hotel. I got in from Wegmans around 3:00 last night and got to bed around 3:30. So I was totally exhausted this morning. I laid back down from 7:30 until 8:00 but didn’t manage to get any more sleep before Time Warner called at 8:00 to let me know that the technician was on his way out to the house. He was there by 8:15 installing my new Road Runner cable Internet service.

The cable was installed by 9:00. I decided not to try to go back to bed right away as the house was going to be busy shortly. It was a good thing that I didn’t because the phones were ringing like crazy for the next fourty minutes. Min’s alarm went off at 9:40 so that she could get up to get to class and dad pulled into the driveway just as her alarm was beeping.

Min decided that she just wasn’t feeling up to going to class today. She was totally exhausted when she tried to get up and she was definitely not going to be able to get anything out of her class whatsoever.

For those of you who haven’t tried out Age of Empires II, then click the link and download it because Microsoft has made it available for free (although you still have to buy the expansion if you want to play the same game that we play.) You can also get the original Age of Empires as well as the Rise of Rome expansion.

Dad finished up around 12:30. I am very excited that we now have a screen door going into the garage. That helps a lot with getting some airflow through the house. That is the only window or anything that we have facing south so it makes a huge difference. I really wish that we had at least something facing west but there is no place to put one.

I went to bed close to 1:00. I managed to get one sleep cycle in and was up at 4:00. Min’s calipers came in to Autozone so I have to run over there to pick them up and run them over to Art so that he can work on her car tonight.

We got out of bed and went over to Autozone to pick up Min’s new calipers and then drove over to the Ralston’s to drop them off for Art to work on. I also dropped off the two laptops that Eric killed at the UofR so that Danielle can sell them on eBay. Better to get a couple of bucks for them than to have them sitting in the garage getting older and older until we finally end up throwing them out. One way or another, I am going to get this house cleaned up and organized one little mess at a time.

We went to the Omega Grill and got some dinner before I had to go to work up in the city. Then we headed home and I took a quick shower and headed off to Greece. Of course, like an idiot I got the schedule wrong and tonight was a night off and I am actually doing that site tomorrow. I figured that I had to screw that up at least once after doing 64 stores and this was my once. Not much chance to mess anything up after this. Only two stores left to go after this one!

I stopped at Border’s on my way back through Henrietta for about twenty minutes and then came back home. Min and I spent the evening hanging out in the office watching more of The Vicar of Dibley while I worked on building a new filewall that will allow us to get online with our new Time Warner Cable line. It can be a real pain having multiple Internet connections if you don’t have any specialized hardware to deal with it.

I was up way too early this morning at 6:45 so that I could get to the hotel and pick Min up from work. (For those of you who wonder why I chronicle when I get up almost every day, it is my opportunity to document just how fluctuating my schedule is. If I didn’t keep track of it, no one would ever really know.)

I got to the hotel just after 7:00 and Min and I went over to the Omega and met dad for breakfast. I was without caffeine all day yesterday and just had coffee this morning. I felt awful but I am guessing that it was from withdrawl. After the coffee I was just fine.

Min went to bed as soon as we got back home a little before 9:00 and I got ready to head up to the city. I have a lunch meeting with Craig at noon at our favourite “new” eatery: Aja Noodle in Brighton on Twelve Corners.

On the job front: I was told over the weekend that I am currently in the top two contenders for the job that everyone has been praying for. By top two I mean that there are only two of us left. I should find out shortly when my next interview (that is interview #5, two phone interviews, one in person off-site and on in person on-site already completed) will be. It should be sometime this week. So please continue praying that the Lord will lead in this decision both on their end and on ours.

For those of you interested in getting global news and have had a hard time getting an RSS feed for Qatar’s al-Jazeera, there is an RSS Feed from Purdue that will bring you the latest Middle Eastern news. I like to use several disparate news sources to get my news giving me, I feel, a more global view of world events. I also subscribe to Fox News, BBC World Service, CNN and Deutsche Welle. It is very important to get DW through an RSS feed as their website is so incredibly slow since, I am pretty sure, it is hosted directly in Germany and is not mirrored here in the states. You can also get The Wall Street Journal but I don’t know how much I recommend them. Like Gannet papers, they have a pretty poor reputation amongst those who know better. I have many articles from them related to technology and they are incredibly poor journalist and very far behind the curve and often quite willing to be misleading just so that they can sound authoritative. But no one is as bad as USA Today and its affiliated papers. The bottom line is, paper based news organizations are, by definition, behind the times and not truly competitive (with the possible exception of the Lawrence Journal World.)

I am working in Cheektowaga (Buffalo) tonight for Wegmans. This is my final Buffalo store. Tomorrow night is the final Rochester store. Altogether there are only four stores left, two this week and two next. On Monday next I am in Dulles, Virginia and on Wednesday I will be in Manalapan, New Jersey wrapping up. So only nine more days until the project is complete. Jeremy’s birthday party is going to be this evening at 5:00 down in Leicester and I will be leaving from there to go to Buffalo. Min is working the overnight tonight and it JUST occurred to me that she doesn’t have any way to get to work tonight. Getting her in the morning isn’t too bad but tonight is going to be an issue since I am going to be out of town. Hmm, probably should have thought ahead about that. One more thing to do today. Hopefully Oreo won’t have to be home alone more than a few hours. My projects are going very quickly now that the process is so smoothed out. So far 64 stores have been completed plus several practice run throughs during the project design phase so I have done this install procedure more than seventy times already. I think that we have worked out just about all of the kinks by now.

Tomorrow morning I am going to be at the house waiting for Time Warner to come out to install my Road Runner cable Internet service. It will be awesome having two lines. Boy will things be fast, I hope. I still haven’t taken the time to figure out how I want to hook up two separate lines. I probably should get on that too. Boy am I lazy this week.

I am going ahead and posting at 11:00 am since I will be gone for the rest of the day. Have a good week everyone.

Happy Birthday Jeremy! Jeremy is sixteen today!

I got up just after ten this morning and was prepared to get ready quickly and get to church. Min didn’t feel like getting out of bed (she works her weekly double today so getting up “early” for church makes it really difficult to make it through the entire night) and we knew that Michael was probably not feeling well today and that Danielle was walking Far for NAAR at Frontier Field this morning so we called over there to see if Art and Michael were going to go to church. Art said that Michael wasn’t really up to it so Min decided to sleep in. She didn’t get up until just after noon.

Art has been having some problems with his computer and discovered that he has a bad stick of memory. What a pain that can be. So he had to pull it out and is running on only 256MB now. Ugh. And he tried to install the demo for Age of Empires III and discovered that it requires a minimum of Windows XP. And since Art only has Windows 2000, he is out of luck.

I played the MUD a little this afternoon and Min cooked some lunch. Before I took Min to work I tried out Grandia II. I only played for about fifteen minutes but it looks like it is going to be a really good game. It has a very “Final Fantasy VII” feel to it with better everything and not as weird.

Min has no car since the brakes are apart so I had to take her to work today. The worst part about her not having a car is that I have to get out of bed at 6:45 in the morning just to go pick her up from work again. Ugh.

I did some work out in the garage. There was a garbage leak and I had to clean it up. Oreo really wanted to come out so that he could be with me so I brought him outside and brought out his blue ball so he could play in the yard. He had a grand time chasing it all over the yard. He was exhausted when I finally told him to go back into the house.

The Ralstons got a new dog today! They got him from someplace in Attica. His name is Maximus but they think that they are going to change that as it isn’t a very good name for a dog. He is a terrier mix and about eleven months old.

Min has a creepy guy at the hotel tonight who keeps coming down to the desk and bothering her. One of her co-workers decided to tell this guy that Min was going to be alone tonight so she is more worried that she would normally be.

I am in a blah mood tonight and don’t really feel like doing anything in particular. I went out and did some serious garage cleaning. It needed cleaned very badly. We had one or more (maybe as many as four) garbage bags start leaking with something really nasty coming out of them and so I had to clean the garage floor twice today to get rid of it. While I was out there I did some organizing and got some more space available now. What a mess that garage has been since we moved in.

Danielle read SGL today and saw the listing of furniture and has dibbs on the dresser. There are still a few items left so see if you want anything before they are gone. Oh, and they have decided to name the dog Obadiah or Obie for short.

I decided that I wanted to relax a little bit and so I popped in one of my all time favourite television shows The Vicar of Dibley. It is such a good combination of funny and emotional. Unlike shoes like Are You Being Served? which are hilarious but lack any depth, VoD really gets you emotionally connected to the characters in the show. “Well, I guess that there is no time like the present.” “Except for the past, I really enjoyed that.”

I got up this morning and hung out with the puppy in the office while Min slept in. She didn’t get up until after 11:00. Min and Danielle went out to the Appleumpkin Festival today in Wyoming. They went out around 1:00 and came back at 4:30 or so. While they were out Art worked on Min’s car’s brakes. She has been having a terrible time with them. For about four months they have been making all kinds of noise and last week they started dragging. Art got them apart today and discovered that the calipers are shot and that they have to be replaced as well as the pads. The calipers won’t come in for a week so we are stuck with only a single vehicle until Tuesday or later.

I drove over to the Ralstons around 5:00 to pick up Min. Obviously she was trapped as her car is no longer drivable. We stayed over there for dinner and came home around 7:30. We had to swing by dad’s place to pick up the latest shipment of Dreamcast stuff. Grandia II came today.

We came home and relaxed a bit. I brought up Min’s yarn stash from the basement and she worked at putting them away in the office. We watched some Are You Being Served? while working.