Sheep Guarding Llama

Never a chance to sleep in. Min’s alarm went off this morning and the sun was blazing down on our heads and I couldn’t lay in bed any longer so I got up. Even though it was her alarm I was up at least half an hour befor she was if not closer to an hour. We didn’t get to bed too late last night but late enough. It sure would be nice to get a full night’s sleep one of these days.

I am working in Central Pennsylvania this week. Tonight I am in State College and tomorrow night I am in Williamsport.

This morning I have spent the entire morning on the phone with DSL.net trying to troubleshoot their line that we have in Washington. We pay for a 256K line but we actually only get about 16K which is pretty ridiculous. We have had pretty bad service from them over the years and this has been on ongoing issue that they will turn down the line and not tell us or get authorization to do so. Now the line is unusable and we are having a hard time getting them to fix anything. We are only under contract with them until January and believe me I have very little intent to resign. I have had to spend far too much time dealing with this company to make any deal on the line worth it. And the worst part is that they are completely unable to do anything without someone being there to do things for them. They really need to have solid remote access to their equipment if they are going to not allow us to manage it.

Min got back home a little after 12:30 and dad came over around 1:10 so that we could go to lunch. It was 1:30 before I was finally able to get out of the office long enough to get some food.

Dominica went back to bed as soon as we had returned from lunch. I had to shower and get ready to head out to State College. I was bidding on some items from eBay and actually won some stuff today. I won a three volume set of Edward Gibbons “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” which I have wanted for a long time. I also won “Grandia II” for the Dreamcast. Dominica will be very happy about that. She is very excited about having a mostly modern video game console again.

Eric was working up at the hospital today and was unpacking some new plastics totes (these are big 96 gallon totes that have their own six inch wheels so these are nothing small) and discovered a black widow spider living in the totes. Always a fun thing to find.
Scott and Eric Railroad in 1988

Today we have another picture from the great Scott-Eric Railroad of 1988. This is a picture from the right hand approach. The table was in an L shape with two long sides against a back wall and two long sides and the two ends exposed. It was a very convenient size for what we were doing. As you can see in this picture, we hadn’t gotten very far. There is only one piece of rolling stock even on the tracks.

I am about to leave for my trip. Short and sweet. I will be back on Wednesday. Only a two day week this week. What a relief!

I was up at 8:30 this morning and ready to leave for church before 10:00. Min didn’t get up until 10:00. She had been really exhausted between work and school and all of our other activities. She hasn’t been getting enough sleep for weeks. She is working the “B” shift this evening after church.

We almost made it to church on time today. But at least I was ready early. Art and Danielle brought Michael to church today for the first time.

After church the Ralstons, my dad and us went over to Perry to get lunch at the Silver Lake Family Restaraunt.

So I decided that it was time to post this picture on the site. This one will prove whether or not Eric reads the site on a regular basis. This picture was taken sometime around fifth grade. It was taken during the winter, in case Eric’s winter coat didn’t give that away. This is a model railroad that Eric and I were working on in the basement of my grandmother’s house when she used to live down the road from my parents up on Peoria Road in Covington. Back then she was just three houses away but more have been built since then and she now lives with my aunt and uncle in Leicester. Dad built the train tables for me down there in my aunt’s old graphic arts studio. She ran a studio out of the basement for years but had moved to Leicester at this point. Probably just about a year before this picture was taken. Then the studio was converted to be a model railroad. We never got very far into the modelling bit of things. The track was set up and working which you can kind of see in the background and there were some buildings on it. In this picture we are holding one of the train cars to commemorate the opening of our railroad. You can see some fake shrubs sitting around and some trees and a little tiny church. It was an N scale model so everything was really small. I still have the trains and all of the scenary packed away in the basement.

Holy Cow we were dorks! Oh wait… ARE dorks. Darn.

Min went to work at 3:00 as usual on Sunday. I got to spend the afternoon and evening at home with Oreo. He loves his days being lazy with his daddy. He just sits quietly beside me while I am working on the computer.

I played the MUD this afternoon. Saw a couple of different people hop on and off throughout the day. I also watched some stuff on eBay that was ending today. I had been very hopeful to get this one item but it just ended up getting to be too expensive for me. So I had to let it go. I do think that shopping on eBay is good for me because it lets me “do a lot of shopping” without buying very much and what I do end up getting tends to be at a very good price. At least I think that it does.

I got Danielle hooked on listening to podcasts tonight. She downloaded iPodder and I hooked her up with some cool podcasts and now she is excited about it.

Chicago had a train derailment today caused by an engineer driving the train at almost seven times the speed limit (69 in a 10 zone). It turns out that the engineer was new with that company but had been at CSX for years previously. I guess that explains it. CSX was the same company that had their trains going at totally ridiculous speeds in Rochester and killed an elderly couple just last year. I think someone needs to begin an investigation.

Min got home at 11:30 after stopping at Tim Hortons to get me some treats like a danish and a hot smoothie. Mmmm, butter cream. She was very impressed by all of the work that I had done around the house. It looked completely different when she got home.

She had been excited about trying out the new Sega Dreamcast now that we have one game for it. So I hooked it up in the office to my computer monitor (one of the really cool features of the Dreamcast is that it has VGA output and since we have VGA input on every device in the house that works exceptionally well.) We fired up Shenmue and gave it a try. We were instantly impressed by the amazing quality of the graphics output by the Dreamcast. It doesn’t seem like an aging system at all. The audio and video in Shenmue are amazing, for a console system, and seem to me to just about compete with any 3D games that I have seen on the current reigning systems. We do always get the impression that the Dreamcast is a lot older than it really is just because it is no longer on the market. But the reality is that it was the first member of the current console generation and even though Sega is now out of the console business it is hardly obsolete. We don’t yet have a memory card for the Dreamcast nor a good place set up to play it so Min played Shenmue for fifteen minutes or so to try it out but then we gave it up. Now that we know that everything works I am going to be working on buying some much needed parts like additional controllers, memory cards and additional games. Thanks Andy, we love the Dreamcast.

We weren’t quite ready for bed yet and Min had just cooked herself some dinner so we popped in Are You Being Served? into the Mac and watched an episode (the one where Mrs. Slocumb gets hit on the head with a golf ball) and then we went to bed.

Today is going to be an extrememly busy day so I expect that this post will be early and short. Today is Rocco Lucente’s Bar Mitzvah in Ithaca. He did the service at temple Beth-El last evening and this morning. Dominica and I were invited to the services but between our schedules, Oreo and Min’s broken toe it just didn’t seem to be feasible to be gone all day. Not for both of us anyway.

I tried to sleep in today but that didn’t work out so well. It seems that the more important that it is for me to get a full night’s sleep the less likely it is to occur. Jeremy called just after 9:00 this morning because he needed something that he had left at the house. After that I failed to fall back asleep because my stomach was bothering me. So after a while I got up because of that and before I had gone back to bed I had noticed that the hamster’s cage was open again and that Mr. Humphries had once again made a foolish break for it. He has always been extrememly good about not trying to escape but he does climb out when his cage is left wide open. His brain is only the size of a pea, you know. So anyway, I had to wake Min up and we had to round him up again. Luckily he is very good about hiding under the book case that he lives on so he is very safe and easy to find. He even keeps a stash of food under there for emergencies. I just want to point out that I have only allowed Mr. H to escape once in over two years. And in that time I have fed him well over 80% of the time, maybe significantly higher. And someone, who shall remain nameless, has fed him far fewer times and has had two succssful escapes both of which happened after I had set the example of what not to do!

Before I forget: Danielle is looking for sponsorship for Walk Far for NAAR – The National Alliance for Autism Research. She and Michael are walking in their fundraiser. Just click the link and put in “Danielle” and “Ralston” with no other information and you will get “The Quirks” which is her walking team.

So, by the time we had dealt with the hamster I was pretty wide awake and decided not to return to bed. I figured that I would feel better having gotten things done instead of having layed in bed and getting nothing done and probably not sleeping well either. Oreo came into the office to hang out with me even though Min was still in bed. He is definitely daddy’s boy. He follows me everywhere.

I spent the rest of the morning working at the computer but it was a very short morning. Oreo didn’t leave my side until I packed him up to take him to my dad’s to be watched for the day. He doesn’t get too nervous if he goes over there. He knows that dad is his puppysitter and they have a good time together. So I took him over there at 2:30. Andy arrived to pick up some of his stuff that we had found since he had moved out. There wasn’t too much stuff but there were a couple of big items – like the martini lamp that was hiding in the basement. I only got to see him for a second before I had to run out with Oreo though. I don’t know how long Min got to talk to him but it could not have been long since she had to run to Walmart to get Rocco a card before I got back from dad’s.

It was around 3:30 when we finally got out of the house and onto the road. Andy was gone by the time that I got back and Min was just a minute behind me getting back from Walmart.

The reception this evening started at 5:45 on the MV Manhattan, a dinner boat on Cayuga Lake. They used to be owned by the Bistro Q but now that the Bistro is gone I am not sure who owns the place. Neither Min nor I have ever been out on the boat so it was a neat experience. I have done Finger Lakes dinner cruises before but never on Cayuga Lake.

There was a lot of food brought around by the wait staff before dinner and an open bar. Min got to visit with Georgia and Thomas that she had worked with last summer when she was working for Lifestyles down in Ithaca. There were a lot of great people on the boat and I had a really good time meeting new people. You know how I am.

The whole reception was really nice. We were really impressed and had a really good time. Min was definitely hurting by the time we were done with her broken toe. The boat ride wrapped up around 9:30 and Min and I were on the road home shortly thereafter. We had to swing over to dad’s and pick up the puppy before going home so that added an additional half of an hour to the trip. We were home around 12:30 and went straight to bed.

Last night, when I had returned home from taking Min’s car to her at work (and stopping at Tim Horton’s on the way back to pick up the very last of their toffee glazed donuts) I got home to discover that the dog had been extremely upset by my leaving him at such an odd hour. He had made a mess on the floor and torn up one of the waste baskets. Not what I was wanting to come home to so late at night (or so early in the morning.) So I set about cleaning up the mess and comforting the dog who was so scared that he was shaking terribly. He was definitely terrified when I got home. I am not sure how much he was scared because I had left him or home much was from him knowing that he had been bad. But he definitely looked guilty when I got home but very remorseful. I had to hold him for quite a while before he was doing okay. So I finally got into bed around 5:00.

But I didn’t manage to get to sleep before the phone rang and I had to get up and get more work done. I ended up not getting to bed until very close to 5:45! Boy was I tired.

Dominica and I slept in until around 2:00 this afternoon. Boy did I need that. I didn’t get to bed last night until almost 6:00 so sleeping in until 2:00 was only like a normal night’s sleep. We had a busy day planned and had to get moving right away. Before we even really got up Oreo had made a mess on the floor again. This time we were pretty sure that we had been so sound asleep and our schedule was so messed up that he was able to wake us up when he had needed to be taken outside. Then before we left the house I discovered where he had gotten sick, probably last night, in the office and I had to deal with that as well. What a great start to the day.

Min is starting a Bible study group with some of the girls from the Avon Wesleyan Church today. So we were planning on going over to Eric and Amanda’s house and Min and Amanda could ride together over to the place where they were meeting. Before we managed to leave the house, however, Dominica managed to crash into the closet in the upstairs office (don’t ask me to explain how she walked into a built in closet) and she broke the ring toe on her left foot. She was screaming pretty loudly and we are pretty sure that it really upset the dog. It took about fifteen minutes before we were able to leave the house to get over to Eric and Amanda’s house. There really isn’t anything that you can do for a broken toe. So we are just keeping an eye on it. As we were driving through Lakeville, Oreo got sick in the car. He was definitely still upset from last night and had felt terrible about the mess that he had made this morning and with Dominica screaming and yelling (and she had been carrying his pillow and blanket when it had happened so he might have associated that as well) so we are pretty sure that that is what caused it. Poor baby. He has been having a really rough couple of days.

So, as you can imagine, we were late getting over to the Millen’s house. Eric and I hung out and babysat while the girls were at their study group. Oreo, of course, came with us as he hates being left alone. It is a good thing that he is such a good and polite dog.

The girls got back at 7:00 and we ordered a pizza for dinner. Eric and I ran down to Pizza Paul’s and got it and we all had dinner back at the house.

We had to get moving right after dinner because the Ralstons were coming over to hang out this evening. We got home a little after 8:30 and the Ralstons were right behind us. We just hung out at the house. Art helped Min with a couple projects around the house like putting up a new shelf in the laundry room (holy cow have we been needing that – more shelf space for starters but much more importantly it has a hanger on it so that we can dry clothes in there instead of having to put that stupid portable folding rack out in the hallway!!) and hanging a new Roman shade in the master bathroom. The shade really does a lot to improve the look of the bathroom. It looks more or less like a finished room now and not just a room waiting for us to figure out what we wanted to do with it.

At almost 2:00 in the morning the four of us (Oreo rode along too, no leaving him at home today!) went out to Super Walmart to do some shopping. While we were there I picked up The Transporter which I have never seen but I have heard good things about. Art said that it was really good and the sequel is coming out soon so I figured that it was probably a safe buy. We have gotten so few movies in such a long time that it really isn’t too big of a deal to get one now and then.

After shopping we all went to Tim Horton’s and got some hot smoothies. Everyone got desert and I got a sandwich since I had only eaten some pizza all day.

We didn’t get home until quite late. I was totally exhausted.

The Ides of September already! Only one last week of summer.

I wrapped up with work tonight really early and was home at half past midnight. It is always nice to get done early on the last day of the week. That is the best. I got home and took three loads of magazines out to the dumpster. We have had them sitting in the dining room for the past two weeks waiting for the dumpster to get emptied. Boy is it nice to be done with them. That cleared up a lot of space in the house. I have been putting in a lot of work the last few days trying to get as much stuff as we can do without either sold on eBay, given away or thrown out. I have worked on consolidating boxes of stuff down to as small of containers as they will fit into. Yesterday I managed to condense a laundry basket full of bicycling stuff that I have had for over fourteen years (fourteen years in the same laundry basket) into a small Amazon box that is now stored in the garage taking up almost no space at all. Three boxes of video game stuff has been reduced to just one plastic storage unit. So things are going well, I think.

I contacted Vonage to see if it is possible to bring my phone line down to just a regular home line. It is my personal line so I think that they might be willing to do it. We will see. If they are willing to, that might be enough to pay for a second DSL line to be brought to the house. Yeah baby. Or Road Runner. Actually, that would make more sense. Two DSL lines from the same provider doesn’t do much for you if one goes down. They would both go down together. I would like to have a separate line because my Vonage doesn’t sound very good going over the line that we have because it is so busy all of the time. I did try changing a setting on the Vonage line tonight that has a little chance of improving the phone quality. We will see what the impact is. Our network here is just so completely saturated with traffic all of the time. I can’t believe how much goes in and out through here. Speaking of Vonage, can you believe that I have been on VoIP instead of traditional phone service for over two years now? So many people still aren’t familiar with the concept even now. It is beginning to take hold but it is wild to think that I was such an early adopter. No one got it then. I was definitely the first person that I knew to have it and even now I only know one guy at Wegmans that has it.

I found this old picture of myself and I just had to share it with everyone. This one was taken on the front porch of the house that my parent’s built on Peoria Road in Covington, New York. We built the house next to the old farm house that we had purchased in 1976. This was the house that was built when I was seven in second grade. So I know that I am at least that old here and since the house was completed in winter I have to be at least eight. I have the boots because they were required for the summer camp that I used to go to in Delevan, NY – Circle C Ranch. I went there for four years from ages 9 – 12. So my guess is that I was nine in this picture taken during the summer just before I was going to leave for camp. The year after this picture I didn’t have my boots with me at camp which helped to explain the broken ankle incident. I added this in as part of my “spicing it up” campaign to make the site a little more interesting. Having pictures like this around really do a good job of making me realize just how old I am now.

Eric got me up right at 8:00 this morning because we had some services down. Always a fun way to start the day. Why do these things always go down in the middle of the night? So I had to get up and head to the office. Oreo quickly got out of bed and came into the office with me. He hates to be away from me.

Min left for school at 10:00. She will get back and have to go right off to work. She does the “B” shift again today. It is going to take me a while to figure out her schedule now that she is in school.

I got the printer hooked back up again, the laser that is. We have been doing without it for a while now and it has been very irritating. We have an inkjet that we keep in the living room in the armoir and any computer can print to it at any time because there is a print server attached to it. So that made things tolerable. But now that the office is together the laser is back in service which makes me much happier.

Last night I won the video game Shenmue for the Dreamcast on an eBay auction. I am very happy that almost any game that I have ever wanted to own is now dirt cheap one way or another. As long as you are willing to be patient, you can get just about anything without spending too much money. It makes me very glad that I held off buying so many things. Video game consoles are the perfect thing to buy old since they aren’t “up to date” with PCs anyway it isn’t like you ever getting modern graphics and features on them. So at least this way they are cheap.

I ordered Time Warner Road Runner service today. We already have Frontier DSL but we use so much Internet access that it seems like it would be a really good idea to have two lines both for redundancy (we got NUTS if we lose access) and also so that we can get that much more total speed. The new line is 5Mb/384Kb. Not the fastest thing in the world but not bad. It will do a lot for us to add that to the 1Mb/512Kb that we already have.

SGL was down for a while today. It went down at some point during the morning but it took a while before we realized it. Due to the problem, part of today is being posted early but everything after this line will be added later in the day.

Okay, the site is back up and running again. I finished reading (read: listening to) David McCullough’s “Mornings on Horseback” – a biography of the early like of Theodore Roosevelt the younger. I have been working on getting through that book for at least two weeks now. It is a hard one to get into, at least for me. One thing that I learned from the book is that incest was very popular in that family and I later noticed that FDR had married Eleanor Roosevelt (NOT her married name) his own cousin AND God-sister.

For those of you who use Pocket PCs, I discovered another “must have” free software product (a lot of its “must have” status is probably because it is free) – Tonaya’s Weather To Go. It is a simple application that docks on your Today page and gets automatic web services updates from NOAA and displays the current and predicted weather for three locations of your choice in the US. Very handy and very simple. Just the kind of thing that you need on your PPC.

Min got home around 1:00 and we went over to the Omega for some lunch. Things were really slow over there today. Then she was off to work. I drove her there and dropped her off. She called after being at work for about an said that she had switched some shifts around and that she is working a double tonight and so doesn’t need to be picked up until morning. So I will probably drive over there sometime tonight and drop off her car and walk back so that I can get a regular night’s sleep instead of having to get up early in the morning and drive over there. It is always better to get a nice walk in. I need to stop at Super Walmart anyway. I like to mention Super Walmart to rub it in that it is so close that I can stop there on the way to and from places that I am walking to!

Since I had the evening to myself, I decided to play a little MUD. The character that I am playing right now, Scotticus the Mage, spends very little time doing anything interesting and a whole lot of time sleeping which makes me able to play pretty intently and still get a lot of normal stuff accomplished.

Our living room and dining room carpetting is a nightmare to deal with and normally Dominica does the shampooing but today it is my chore. Fun, fun, fun. It really needs it badly. We both really hate our carpet. It looked great when we put it in but little did we know that the continuous traffic from the neighboring hard surfaces would bring all kinds of ground in dirt and stains. And with the dog and hamster it adds up quickly as well. So it always needs to be dealt with. We are really hoping to have the entire area professionally cleaned sometime soon. We haven’t done that since we moved in and it has been over two years. With the unfinished basement, there is just no other way to get it clean.

So today I decided to learn what bergamot is since I like to drink Earl Grey tea. It turns out the the bergamot orange is a small, sour orange popularly cultivated in the south of Italy. It is believed possibly to be an ancient hybrid between the sour orange and the asiatic pear lemon. It is a small member of the citrus family. That is the fruit that produces the flavour in Earl Grey tea. However, there is also an herb native to the United States that is a member of the mint family that is also known as bergamot. That plant can also be used to make tea but it does not make Earl Grey, it instead makes a product known as Oswego Tea that was popular during colonial times. This herb is proported to have a lemon like taste and must be similar to asiatic lemon gress. Deducing from its name and the time period when it was popularly used, it must grow well in parts of New York. Once again we see the educational value in reading SGL. An SGL a day keeps the teacher away. (Or a bergamot orange in this case.) I did a bunch of CD to MP3 conversions tonight as well. I have come to realize that having “Books on CD” in MP3 format is far more useful that the CDs themselves since I like to walk with my MP3 player but have no way to walk with a CD. Also, it would be awkward and annoying to have to carry a pack of CDs around with me when walking. Often I walk for over an hour and a single CD wouldn’t cut it at all. Especially if I was already part way through one when I started walking. I managed to wrap up “Mornings on Horseback” which is a biography of Theodore Roosevelt. I started listening to that book on the drive back from Woodbridge, New Jersey.

Dominica decided that she wanted subs from Wegmans, again, for dinner. So I drove out to Wegmans around 8:00 and picked up subs for her and myself and also picked up some carpet cleaning solution for our Bissel carpet cleaner so that I wouldn’t have to clean each spot using Resolve by hand. That would get really annoying very quickly. I took the food over to the hotel and we ate together. We didn’t get to see each other hardly at all, though, because someone came to check in right as we sat down to eat. And from the looks of the parking lot that must have been the only person checking in all night.

I spent a lot of the evening listening to podcasts. I often find listening to well selected, on demand audio is much better than anything else. Podcasting has made me much more picky than I used to be. I like that I am able to get NPR and PRI material that I really like without having to wade through the radiowaves waiting for something good to swim by. There is starting to be a lot of good podcast content out there from large providers like PRI, NPR, CNN, BBC, etc. There is a lot more than just news from these content providers as well.

John ended up needing me to do some work with him tonight and we spent over an hour on the phone working together and didn’t wrap up until after 1:00 am. Nothing like having the night off – normally I would be done at Wegmans before now! At least it is a pleasant night and I have been able to turn off the A/C and the windows are open now. I am enjoying the fresh air and the sound of the insects outside. Oreo is way past being ready for bed. He has been camped out on his pillow right beside me all night long. He sure does love being in this room. He wasn’t very happy while I was using the scrubber on the carpeting, though, he gets really upset whenever appliances like that are running. It is funny that it bothers him so much and the hamster doesn’t seem to care at all.

Oreo has been exceptionally itchy today. We haven’t yet been able to determine quite what has been making him have good days and bad days. I think that it might have something to do with the fact that he went out into the tall weeds this morning and there was a lot of dew or maybe a light, early morning rain. His allergies seem to be at least party in the “contact dermatitus” vein and having his fur get all wet might exacerbate the problem. He has been doing much better since he has been on the anti-hystamines but the last few days have been worse than before which is strange because the A/C has been turned on. We had thought that having the windows open would make his skin worse but maybe that isn’t the case. Maybe the moist air makes things better. We are very happy to have finally gotten him off of his steroids. From what we can glean from his medical records he has been on steroids for his skin problems since he was a puppy. Taking steroids for that long is definitely going to have a detrimental effect on his life span. Which is so sad because we are already very upset that we only got him now that he is a mature dog. We will be really fortunate if we even get to spend half of his life with him. He really is the best dog that I have ever known. He is just so incredibly sweet. He can’t stand being apart from us and is noticeably upset if even one of us goes away for just a few minutes. He waits by the garage door leading into the house everytime I go out to the garage to do something. He stops whatever he is doing and just stands there waiting for me to walk back in. When we leave the house he watches us go looking through the low office window facing down the from sidewalk. If just one of us is gone for several hours we have to be very careful not to greet him too excitedly when we walk in the door or he will piddle himself. When he wants to be let outside he comes and stands next to me and looks at me kind of funny. He is exceptionally polite and will never go anywhere or do anything without “asking” us for permission first. If he wants to jump onto the bed or onto a piece of furniture he will wait at the foot or bottom of it and look at us until we invite him up.

At some point during his youth, apparently his tail became infected and had to be removed. A normal Boston Terrier has a very short tail but Oreo has basically none at all. What little tiny bit he has was obviously broken and fused into a solid little piece. If he gets really excited sometimes we can see his muscles attempting to wag it but it doesn’t really move. It must have been broken to be the way that it is. Perhaps whatever caused the tail to become like this is also what caused it to have to be docked so short. We are pretty sure that he is trying to wag his tail at certain times because he walks funny when he gets excited. A normal dog would be swinging his tail all around and it would look normal. But for Oreo that same motion makes him look like he is walking strangely with his rear end maneuvering to the sides as he walks. It ends up looking like his butt is overtaking his torso in a race to great you. And when he gets really, really excited he does a little dance around the house. If he gets even more excited than that he will be forced to race from room to room trying to keep himself from exploding. I have never had a dog be anywhere nearly as expressive as Oreo is. And that really says something for a small dog without a tail to wag. It is amazing how much expression dogs get out of their tails.

Our other big concern with him is his left eye which has a large brown patch that we are worried is spreading. The vet looked at it once and said that it was nothing to be worried about but his left eye is definitely not very responsive to anything and I am not totally convinced that he can see out of it. He definitely has not depth perception and doesn’t really react to anything happening on that side of him. Dominica saw somewhere that there is a problem with dog’s eyes that looks like this and can spread and will eventually cause blindness so we want to be absolutely sure that nothing is wrong.

I had to install a scanner tonight that we never, ever use. What a pain it is to setup. First of all, heaven only knows where the disk that came with it is. It is in the basement, I know that much because I come across it so often. But I know that I could never find it when I need to.

So for all of my whining I go down to the basement and walk straight to where I thought that the driver disk should be located and find it within thirty seconds which proves that all of my cleaning sprees as of late have not been all for naught. Even with the house and especially the basement being in complete disarray I am still able to find the things that I need relatively quickly.

Okay, it is currently 1:44 am and a jogger just jogged past my house. For those of you who know where I live, that is a really weird thing to happen late on a Thursday night. This front office room is so completely a part of the outdoors that I could totally have talked to this guy as he jogged by. No wonder Andy always felt like this room was so exposed. I looked out to find the guy because he was jogging so close that I could hear his shoes hitting the pavement and I could hear his breathing! Before Andy had left we had been commenting about how this bedroom was so completely different than any other part of the house being the one single room with any kind of sunlight or any views that face anything but scrub. Here you actually feel like you are a part of the larger complex. I can see half of my neighbor’s front doors and can almost see half of the remaining neighbors. I can see my own sidewalk and the edge of the driveway as well. I can hear people and see the next door neighbors in their driveway and garage. It is very weird. I have never lived so close to people in this way before and it is neat. It sounds like a weird thing to think is neat but having lived my entire life in the most extreme isolation I really love close proximity living. It makes me feel connected to the world at large. I grew up on a farm with the neighbor’s houses so far away that you could barely even tell that they were there. When I lived in Greece with Josh was the first time that the neighbors were close but somehow we never really ended up meeting any of our neighbors when we lived there. Even though people were really close to us, sharing walls in fact, they seemed decently separated from us. I liked it there. It was the closest to other people that I ever was and it made me a lot more comfortable than being so isolated but it wasn’t nearly enough for me. I really need to be in the middle of people to be really comfortable. It is a strange thing and very few people ever feel that way. It is tough for Min because she grew up in practically the opposite circumstance and feels quite differently about it. I don’t think that it is a natural trait for me. I am pretty sure that it is an environmental behaviour caused by my childhood. Living in the country with no real neighbors, having no family that lived nearby (I grew up in New York and my family was from Ohio – my first near relative of my same generation was my cousin Sara who wasn’t born until I was almost twelve years old), having my parents move to a new place right after I was born so that they had no established social network, having my family attend church always at some distance to where we lived, having my father work in the city about fourty miles away and going to a tiny private school where no one that I knew lived anywhere near me at all (so far in fact that even my nearest friend had a long distance telephone number from me) all added up to me feeling like I was totally isolated in the world. Today we think about kids growing up with the Internet and everyone being interconnected and communicating all of the time. But when I was a kid there wasn’t even the concept of being able to make local telephone calls to anyone I knew. My parents always let me use the phone. But it is still very isolating. And it meant that almost no one was allowed to call me.

Well, it took about forty minutes before I managed to get that old scanner up and running. What a pain it is. Thank goodness for Windows XP having every utility necessary built right in or we would have really had problems. The software that comes this thing is absolute garbage. And it was completely incapable of installing its own drivers too. I really wish that I had an HP scanner. I had one long ago. I remember owning it when I lived in Observatory but it had to be right when we had first moved in so that must be four years ago or more by now. I had gotten it really cheaply at one of those Staples Christmas sales things but it had ended up only lasting for ten scans or so. So that ended up being a really bad investment even though it had only been a few dollars.

Well, I finally wrapped up working with John around 2:30. Much later than I had anticipated when he first called me to tell me that we had some work to do at 8:00. That means that we put in just shy of a full day’s work just now in the middle of the night with no warning.

I did a little more work on my Bible recording that I started the other day. I have actually managed to complete the book of Lamentations. I didn’t know that book very well so I thought that it would be a good place to start. It isn’t all that long and it doesn’t have any complex language or difficult names so I thought that it was as good as anywhere to start. I am not sure how good I think I sound. It is a very difficult thing to do – recording a book like that. I have never really tried it before. When I was a child my mother read to me the entire Chronicles of Narnia series by C.S. Lewis. Every night she would read me a chapter or two working through all seven of the books and eventually she had recorded (onto old Radio Shack “Archer” cassettes) all seven books. I kept those old cassettes and used them for year after year. It was obvious that my love of recorded books started then. I must have only been age three or four. I know that by age five I had been listening to them for some time and already knew the stories very well. I used to go to my room in the old farmhouse that overlooked the swimming pool and the valley and, funny enough, could see the spot where my house is now. In fact, if I could travel back in time to 1981 and could stand on top of my house here in Geneseo (assuming that my house travelled back in time with me) then I could go up and stand on the roof and wave to my younger self who would, with a telescope, be able to see my older, time travelling self right out of my bedroom window. I used to have to go to my room for at least an hour a day to entertain myself. I would play with Legos and listen to the Chronicles of Narnia, Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book or Lyle the Crocodile. Those were the three books that I had recorded. I have no idea where Kipling had come from and I didn’t have the entire book, only two stories from it. One I don’t remember and one was Riki Tiki Tavy. I remember getting Lyle the Crocodile from the Richmond Memorial Library in Batavia when I was very young. It is an awfully strange memory to have lurking around in the back of my mind but there it is.

So I was wondering whether or not Andy was going to start reading the site now to keep up with what goes on back at the house that he isn’t living at anymore. He never used to read the site when he lived here but maybe he does now. I know that Bob reads the site all of the time now that we don’t live together.

Anyway, it is getting late. I am going to go ahead and post for the night. I am leaving in a minute to drive to the hotel and drop off Dominica’s car for her so that she can drive home in the morning. I am going to them walk back to the house and collapse into bed. I expect to be getting in around 4:30 or maybe just a little after. I will almost for sure stop at Tim Horton’s on the way back and get a donut because they are probably making the fresh morning donuts already and their toffee glazed donuts are to die for. Have a good Friday everybody!

I also recorded a short and slightly delirious SGL Podcast to go along with today’s massive update. We just might have set a new record today. It has been a really long day. I have been at the computer in the office without any major interuptions since 8:00 am. That is twenty hours! That is a long time to be adding to the update.