Sheep Guarding Llama

The last day of August and summer is almost over. Just three more weeks left. Castile Christian Academy was back to school this past monday and the public schools are back in session next week, I believe. Tomorrow I am scheduled to go into CCA to look into how we are going to be setting up their new computer lab and they new computer stations. Last year’s kindergarten room is being converted into a computer lab for Min to teach computer classes in this year but it is going to be a challenge. We have to figure out how to squeeze in all of the computers and desks that we need to be able to accommodate the largest grade in the school using them all at once while having room for a teacher to walk around and help people and for someone to stand at the front of the room and teach. Plus there is a lot of wiring and electrical needs that have to be met. It is going to be tough. But, fortunately we are not forced into using the room as an ad hoc computer space for students who just need to work on a paper or practice some typing. There is also going to be a separate computer space in the middle of the school that will also be where the laser printer is located. So that means that we don’t have to figure out how to accommodate all of the students in a single class along with all of the students who need to work on their own projects all at once in a single space. That was going to be exceptionally challenging. This will be far easier.

Last night’s Wegman’s project didn’t go too badly. In fact, I was done just half an hour later than usual. What a relief that was. The drive out to Syracuse involved a lot of rain. It rained the entire time that I was there. The entire trip back to Geneseo was totally downpour the entire way. I had to drive much slower than usual because of the hydroplaning. It wasn’t horrible but it was bad enough. I got home at 2:30 am and remembered, for once, to take out the garbage before going to bed. We forget to do that so often that the garage is constantly filled with bags of garbage. We can take out up to five bags and one box of recycling each week. I put out the five bags and have two or more still in the garage and heavenly only knows how many around the house. And Andy is sure to generate one or more while moving out this weekend. Only three more days until he moves out. How weird is that?

I have had some time recently to work on cleaning out my emails. I always save so much of the dumbest stuff thinking that I will need it someday. Well, I am fixing that this week. My corporate email has swelled to over one quarter of a gigabyte of storage and I am fixing that as quickly as possible. No reason to have that much stuff in there. It isn’t like I could find anything that I needed in there anyway should I ever need to find anything. So I am going through all kinds of stuff trying to cut down to just what I actually need and even then a lot of it could be converted to some other form of storage so that it is not all sitting in my email. What a dumb way to store things. But it is weird going through emails and finding tons of correspondance with people from four or five years ago. Especially when they are people that I had only known for a year or less at the time. I found one email from late 2001 bugging John “The Surfing IT Wizard” Stephens to pick up a copy of AoE2 so that he could play against us. He still doesn’t have a full copy – only the expansion pack that he got as a gift some five years ago and has never been able to use since he didn’t have the actual game portion.

I tried to work once I got home but Oreo insisted that I come to bed. He walked around the room impatiently and pointed out repeatedly that his pillow – which he sleeps on by my feet when I work on the computer – had been moved over to the bed signifying that it was bedtime and not work time. So I conceded and went to bed. Oreo was very happy.

I was up and moving a little before Min. I had to get on the road before 3:00 to be able to make it tonight. I have a lot of driving ahead of me so I am doing my best to be rested to make the trip as painless and as safe as possible. I got ready and finally made it out the door at 2:30. I stopped by the Mobil station in Geneseo on the way out to i390 Exit 10. Holy cow is gas getting expensive quickly. You can listen to the podcast to hear me talking about it from the station. There is a link to the SGL2 Feed and Podcast on the Navigation list now. If you subscribe to the feed in a standard text based reader, you will get the SGL2 updates. If you use a Podcatcher like iPodder or iPodderX, then you will get the ScottCast. Handy, isn’t it.

I drove down to Big Flats and stopped by at the Barnes and Nobels there and did a little shopping. I wanted to have some CDs to listen to in the car in case I needed them because the Samsung Yepp that I use ran out batteries or something. I also managed to find a copy of Thomas Paines’ “Common Sense” for five dollars so, of course, I picked up a copy. How cool is that?

I was sitting in my car in the B&N parking lot and the person who pulled next to me in a Chevy Blazer opened up their rear door (this was an adult in the back and not a kid) and whacked my car really good. I turned around. It was so loud that I thought someone was banging on my car trying to get my attention. The guy walked away. He didn’t even bother to check my door or to apologize or anything. His kids were obviously appalled and embarrassed. The were standing there in disbelief. I got out and discovered that he had only taken a little paint off and luckily there was no dent. Not a big deal but how incredibly rude and inconsiderate can you be? And what an excellent example to set for your children.

I stopped at the Taco Bell there in Big Flats and got a quick bite and a big diet Pepsi to get some caffeine into my system. I figured that I would need it. This isn’t a short trip. Then I continued on hoping not to lose too much time.

It was just after 8:30 when I pulled into the Wegmans at Woodbridge, New Jersey. I hadn’t realized but this little town is a suburn of Perth Amboy which I had never been to before. And I was only a couple of blocks away from the river separating New Jersey from Staten Island which I have also never been to. I wish that I would have had more time in the area because I would have liked to explore it some. But there was no time for that tonight. There was so little time because of the way that the process ran that I didn’t even have time to take my nightly walk which I really missed.

Things went well tonight and I managed to wrap up just after midnight. So I was on the road back home at 12:30. Jersey is tough at night because everything is closed everywhere. It is not a state that is very condusive to overnight travel. Fortunately it is a very small state and you can almost always cross it in a relatively short span of time.

I finished listening to Simon Winchester’s “The Meaning of Everything”, the history of the Oxford English Dictionary. I had read through most of the book previously but had lost my place and took the opportunity on this trip to work my way through it again. After that I started listening to David McCullough’s “Mornings on Horseback” which, so far, I have found to be very depressing. The writing is good and the reading of the work is excellent although it appears that the book was originally recorded abridged and then the missing portions were filled in my a completely different reader (as opposed to a partially different reader like a cloned copy of the original or something like that) so it is slightly disjointed at points. But the tale of the book is about the family of Theodore Roosevelt and to be completely honest it appears that almost everyone in the Roosevelt clan and their extended in-laws were just plain horrible people. Teddy’s mother’s family were slave holding, murdering, incestuous, pathetic losers who are commonly believed to have been the model for Scarlett’s family with Teddy’s mother as Scarlett in “Gone with the Wind” which portrays the horrors of the south in the most favourable light. Even though McCullough seems to approach Teddy as a fan even he seems to not be able to come up with a single nice thing to say about almost anyone in the entire family. It seems like Theodore Senior, Teddy’s father, may have been the most non-horrible member of the entire family simply because he managed to feel bad when he did something terrible. And we get the impression from this book that we are supposed to be awed by what a good person he was? Because he had a conscience? Sure he did many good things. I don’t doubt this. But not one member of this family would I be proud to have the acquaintance of and I would have been downright embarrassed to have one of them call themselves my friend. I would be offended. Teddy actually refused to associate with anyone below his class. Only the rich were to be talked to. His father’s “good work” mostly involved taking poor kids in New York and shipping them out of the city to be farm labourers. This was good for everyone but, in reality, it was financially advantageous to him. Theodore was often presented as not being politically motivated and always acted as if politics were beneath his class but when Hayes was coming to power he was involved in plenty of political posturing. Teddy’s mother’s family was far worse and just plain made me sick. They were outright disgusting people and were involved in such gross acts that I wouldn’t even dare to talk about them here. This family was an embarrassment to our country. It is too bad because I really like reading McCullough’s histories. This one is definitely well written but I find that biographies of evil people just make me feel upset.

It was six o’clock as I rolled into Geneseo. The trip went really well and relatively quickly. I wasn’t even all that tired as I got home but I knew that I had to get to bed right away since I have a busy day coming up tomorrow.

I did some site maintenance yesterday and to my amazement, when I went to look at the file size for the second quarter of updates this year, we managed to pull off the second or third busiest quarter ever even with all of the days that I missed updating. So I guess that I am not doing all that badly. And I am doing much better now.

Last night was terrible at work. For some reason, two other projects were scheduled to happen at the same time as my project in the same tiny space. So instead of just me in the server room, there were five people. And to make things even worse, all of the work that they were doing was totally dependant on my completing the work that I was doing. And just the fact that they were there in my way added an hour or more onto my process. But on top of that, we had technical issues that we weren’t able to solve so that ended up making the project take all night. So I was planning on being home around 1:30 but didn’t actually get home until 6:00. And, of course, the store was in a total panic because the other two projects had totally dismantled the store’s ability to operate come morning and had done it all on the guess that there would be no problems with my process. I left long before any of them did. I can only imagine what the rest of their mornings must have been like.

Min had to work the overnight last night at the Quality Inn so she went in at 11:00. Poor Oreo was alone all night. We had thought that he would only have been alone about two to three hours which wouldn’t have been bad but instead it was closer to eight hours. Under normal circumstances, he would not have to go out for twelve hours or so during the night but with both of us gone he gets nervous and his stomach gets upset so he had an accident. He was definitely nervous about it when I got home but also extremely glad to see me. I had a hard time convincing him that he wanted to go to bed.

Dominica got a call back about that job that we are very hopeful for. She interviewed there two weeks ago and they called looking for references last week. Now she has a second interview this Friday at 2:00. So we would appreciate if everyone could keep her in prayer. This is a really great job opportunity and could really make a difference for us and be a great career move for her.

Min didn’t get to go to bed this morning but had to stay up for a little while and then head to Canadaigua around 9:00 for class. She had to go early to make sure that she could deal with parking and so that she could hit the bookstore and pick up her textbooks for the class. Unfortunately, the textbook that they use is not one that we are able to get easily any other way so she had to buy it there and it isn’t cheap. At least it looks like it is a good book. Very big and from a good, well known auther and a publisher that I have been very impressed by in the past.

I slept until a little after 2:00. I had a really hard time getting consistent sleep last night (today, whatever) and had one of my “bad sleep” migraines when I got up. I wish I knew what was causing them. I know that I get them when I sleep poorly at weird times but there has to be more to them than just that. It seems to have gotten a lot worse now that I have the CPAP and I wonder if it is somehow related to me sleeping more deeply than I used to do.

It has been overcast here for two days. When I looked at the national weather map yesterday around noon, we could see an arm of the hurricane that was still over the gulf reaching up and covering this part of New York. I have never seen a tropical weather pattern so large before. It is so weird that we are being rained on by water coming from the gulf WHILE the Mississippi Basin is still be pounded directly by the storm! Last night it was raining in Rochester according to Min and it was definitely raining the entire time that I was in Syracuse. Quite a bit of rain. I couldn’t believe how much and it was raining the entire drive back to Geneseo with heavy fog in northern Livingston County. Min was at the hotel and said that when I came through that the fog was actually beginning to lift and that it had been much heavier during the night. Min said that CNN or the Weather Channel had mentioned specifically Rochester and Syracuse as being extrememly distant cities that were being pounded by the storm. So it was neat to get included in on the big hurricane news. We can feel a sort of connection to the soaked populace down there. I haven’t heard from Craig and Emily yet to see how things are there in central Alabama. They must be really wet.

There is still no world out of Louisianna as to how bad the destruction is. They think that there must be tons of people dead but they have no idea. The levees against the lake to the north of New Orleans have broken and the lake is flowing into the city. So even now with the storm more or less past, the water is still rising and things are just getting worse. It is a real disaster. There are ten thousand plus people in the Superdome which is in the middle of a lake so they can’t leave. They have no idea how many people are trapped inside attics but they can’t get rescue workers into lots of bad areas. Things are really bad. Mississippi has already reported at least 54 deaths. Biloxi and Mobile got blasted with the storm. Biloxi appears to have gotten hit the worst of it all. Mississippi officials said that there are lots of outlying villages and cities that can’t be contacted and they have no idea what the extent of damage is in those areas. It is evident that it is going to be several days before we have any idea of just how bad things are down there and it could be quite some time before New Orleans has any sort of way to stop the flooding. It has been almost a day and a half since their initial beating came from the storm and the water is still rising now so they are in extrememly bad shape.

We have been under flood warning here all morning. It is 4:45 now and the weather maps show the storm center is entering Ohio now with quite a bit of the heavier parts about to hit us here in Geneseo. Southwestern New York must already be getting some pretty serious rain and wind. We expect to have it here in less than two hours. Of course, we finally get a good rain here and I have to work in Syracuse again tonight and then go straight out to New Jersey tomorrow. My plan is to try to not have to get a hotel in Jersey but will try to make it back home right after work. If things go smoothly, that shouldn’t be all that bad. I have so much that I have to do this week that I feel that it is a bad idea for me to be away any more than is absolutely necessary.

One of my projects this week and last has been the design for a new website for a small manufacturing company up in East Rochester. I have their site up and running now as a demo so it is far from finished and there is a lot of fleshing out to be done, several pages that go nowhere at all and lots of tweaking needed to make it just right, but you can get a pretty good feel for how it is going by visiting Robinson Tools. I am pretty happy with how the page has turned out. I am always nervous doing web design because mixing technical and creative skills like that is very difficult and it is easy to get one or the other or both messed up pretty badly so I am glad to see the site coming together pretty nicely.

I talked to dad this afternoon and he is coming over to Geneseo to get some dinner before I go off to work. Min is still asleep so I don’t know what she is going to do. She had initially decided that she was just going to take a quick afternoon nap but it appears to be turning into a bit more as it often does. She has been awake for a very long time but she doesn’t have to work tonight so she had been hoping to sleep during the night tonight. But she could easily not make it to dinner tonight.

Since I have to leave to get to work shortly, I felt that it was better to wrap up the update again and get it posted so that everyone can keep up.

Five days until Andy moves out. Dad came and picked me up at 8:30 this morning to head over to the Omega to get some breakfast.

I spent a bit of the morning today doing SGL updates and maintenance. I have been watching the weather unfold on CNN.com all morning. It is really something. Hurricane Katrina is tearing the gulf coast apart. Every fifteen minutes or so they have an update to the damage that is going on. It is really unbelievable. Luckily it appears that there isn’t going to be as much damage as they had thought was possible but there is still a lot of storm left to weather. I am sure that we won’t know the extent of the damage for weeks.

I have an extremely busy week this week. Lots of paperwork to do, three nights for Wegmans and two big projects that are taking a lot of my time. I am really looking forward to that trip to Disney in November.

Jeremy finally got a job and started yesterday, I believe. Or mayby Saturday. But anyway, he did his first eight hour shift this weekend. He is washing dishes for one of the cafeterias on the SUNY Geneseo campus just down the street from here.

I am at Wegmans #35 in Liverpool tonight. So I have to be on the road by 7:00. I appreciate these semi-local stores, though, when I have a lot going on that I need to be able to get to. And since I am going to be so close to home, Oreo doesn’t need to go to dad’s to be taking care of for very long this week. And Oreo really appreciates that. After I finish doing the store in Woodbridge on Wednesday, the project will be totally on schedule and I am still expecting to wrap up and be free on October 5th.

I did some cleaning around the house today and yesterday. With Andy leaving in a few days, we have really been taking advantage of the opportunity to get the house in order and moving forward as if we really lived here. We have decorating that we need to do like painting Andy’s old room (old like he used to live there long ago) to be more of an office looking space because it will be serving as my office for the next two years or so and painting the bathrooms to add some colour to the house since everything is mostly stark white now. Of couse, I love stark white. I am totally into the sterile office looking home but Min likes her home to be colourful and lively. So the main part of the house is remaining white but the bathrooms, our bedroom and the upstairs office are going to be changing colour soon. Min has already put a small swatch of green on our bathroom wall to see how it will look. Also, in making our house come alive, Art is going to work on building Min and I an actual platform bed for us to sleep on since Min hates sleeping on the floor. So now we will have an actual bed, thing, more or less like normal people and our room will look a LOT more normal. Hopefully, we will also be able to come up with some sort of shelving above our heads so that we can put some stuff up there like my CPAP machine which is a huge pain to deal with, a lamp and some speakers because we are going to have a computer at the foot of the bed that we will be able to watch movies on but we won’t be able to hear them without some speakers.

Oreo spent the entire morning and much of the afternoon sleeping on his pillow by my feet while I worked on the computer. He is so sweet.

Today is the first day of my Audible month and I was able to select my two books for the month. Min has been wanting something to listen to and doesn’t like the stuff that I normally get so I got “Eragon” which she has already read but not for two years and the first volume of “Eldest” which is the sequel novel that she has been waiting for since having read the first book. I haven’t had much of a chance to read much good fantasy in a long time so I am looking forward to them as well.

I spent most of the day today working on some web design work that I have had to do for a week or two. Web design is really challenging because it requires you to be really creative but also to be really technical and being both at the same time is really tough for most people and especially tough for me. And then, on top of it all, you have to then convince someone that your creative ideas were the ones that they will want to use. It is all very stressful.

I did some work on our email server today too. For the past few years, all of the spam notices in the entire network have come to me and it can get to be quite a challenge to constantly deal with them. So I decided to send them elsewhere as the system seems to be working so well at this point and to no longer deliver spam at all. What a relief that will be to everyone. And let me tell you, it will make my life a lot easier not having to see hundreds of spam notices come by every single day. I must get one a minute or so, all day long it seems like. I deal with it every single time I look at my email which is pretty often.

It is 6:50 and I need to leave for work in Liverpool so I am going to go ahead and post today’s update and actually be on time for once.

After being up so late last night, Min and I slept in nice and late today with the puppy. He is so snuggly!

I had a lot of paperwork to do today so I was working on that even before Min left to go to work. She is just working the “B” shift today, 3:00 pm to 11:00 pm. Her schedule is all weird this week because she is starting college again on Tuesday.

Eric, Amanda, Rachel and Julia stopped by around 5:30 to pick out some movies to borrow. They were here for about an hour.

Six days and counting until Andy moves out. We are all really excited. He is excited about having his own place all to himself and we are excited because we desperately need to reclaim needed bedroom, closet, garage and basement space. He doesn’t take up very much but we need all that we can get.

Andy and I went up to Avon to go to Tom Wahl’s for some dinner right after Eric and Amanda left. We figured that it was one of the last chances that we would have to do that before he moves out. It is going to be weird not living with him after all of this time. And I am going to be gone most of the week. I am working Monday and Tuesday in Syracuse and Wednesday in Woodbridge, New Jersey.

I took a walk this evening at 10:15 and went over to the new Super Walmart to see if they had a protective covering for my PDA that I need. They didn’t. I wasn’t figuring that they would. But I needed the excercise anyway. From there I walked on to the hotel and had Min drive me home. On the way home, we decided to stop by the brand new Tim Horton’s that just opened up on Friday to see how it was. We are really excited about them too because they are also open 24 hours a day and are right down the road from us. It is about a twenty minute walk to there from here the way that I walk. We got some donuts and coffee and came home.

Min is working the overnight tomorrow so she stayed up late watching DVDs but Oreo and I went to bed around 3:00 am.

Oreo destroyed another binkie (stuffed animals that he sucks on for weeks and then suddenly kills with significant ferocity.) So I had to find him another tonight. His last one was a yellow star and this one is a green moon. We got these from the humane society’s fund raising booth at the Avon Corn Festival a few weeks back.

It’s my last day of the week. It has been nice being in Rochester all week. No travel necessary. It’s a nice change from the three days a week in a hotel that I have been doing for the past several weeks and that I have to return to next week.