Sheep Guarding Llama

Andy is moving out today. Min and I have the house to ourselves – for the time being.

I was pretty exhausted when Andy came in to wake me up this morning. Only about four hours of sleep. I had an email waiting for me from dad saying that the latest shipment of “toys” – demo equipment from a partner company – had arrived last night which is perfect timing because Andy needs his wireless adapter back that we have been using and there is a new one in the package of demo gear. Since he is moving out today, that works out pretty well.

It is really weird that he is moving out today, though. I know that I keep saying that but it is true. It is almost like I am moving on to another phase of my life. This is a pretty significant demarcation that my twenties are over soon. Only a few months to go and I will be in my thirties and not living with a roomate.

Those of you diligently reading the site yesterday and today should slowly notice the look and feel of the new site taking shape. I have managed to keep the site working, more or less, as I have been making changes to it which is pretty impressive, I think, considering just what all I am doing to it. Modifying a table based background on the fly to a fully CSS positioned one is a little challenging with so much site content to work with.

Andy woke me up just after 8:00 so that we could get “moving.” I need to run him to Henrietta to pick up his rental truck, stop at the bank to make a deposit and swing by dad’s to pick up the new networking gear that has arrived. I am dreading going out and seeing the price of gasoline this morning.

On the way out of town we stopped at the Mobil station near to the house and filled up on gas. When I was pumping it, it was $3.39 a gallon and by the time that I was leaving, it was $3.49 a gallon. While I was there, my old school superindent was at the pump behind me and he talked to me for a second about the incredible price of fuel. I didn’t realize who it was until he drove away and then it snapped that it was Superintendant Dalton that I haven’t seen in a dozen years.

We got the truck in Henrietta then I went over to my bank and took care of my day’s banking and then I drove down to dad’s house to pick up the latest shipment of stuff that had come in there. There is a new wireless print server that I plan to use to hook up our two printers in the living room, at least for the time being, and to hook up the Macintosh Mini in the living room since that doesn’t have a dedicated ethernet outlet anywhere and the print server doubles as a bridge. So that is really handy. Also in the shipment is our new wireless adapter that we can use for Min’s desktop in our bedroom which is perfect timing since we have been using Andy’s wireless adapter and I am sure that he is going to want that back today as he moves out.

I got home around 10:30 and Andy was just ready to load his desk into the truck. So I helped him get that onto there and that was about all of the loading to be done until this afternoon. Unfortunately, the truck smells of urine and Andy is pretty sure that a homeless guy was using it as a port-a-potty or something because the back of the truck is all stained with it. It is really gross. We got the desk loaded and then drove over to Taco Bell and got a quick lunch. While we were there I spotted my aunt and uncle coming out of the Omega which is really something because that is so far away I can’t believe that my eyesight was good enough to make out who it was. They spotted me getting into the Mazda and waved. They were heading over to the new Super Walmart.

We got home and Min had just gotten up. Andy had to get moving and get up to his new apartment to wait for Value City Furniture to deliver his new furniture sometime between 1:00 and 4:00. I hate waiting for stuff like that because you have no idea when anyone is actually going to get there and you could easily blow your entire day waiting for them. Furniture is awfully tough because quite often you have nowhere to sit while you wait since that is the stuff that you are waiting for.

I was totally exhausted this afternoon so I decided to lay down for a short nap. Oreo came in and lay down with me which was very sweet. I talked to Nate this afternoon who is working up at the Great New York State Fair. The Party at the Pond has been, more or less, cancelled this year. He is trying to figure out when some people can get together but the regular party is off. That has been going on for a really long time like almost ten years now.

Andy and Tony got down to Geneseo after taking delivery of Andy’s new furniture in Brighton around 4:30. Then the real moving began. Luckily, Andy only has a couple of large items so moving really isn’t all that big of a deal. And he is able to get all of his usage of a truck done in a single day so he doesn’t have to deal with very much truck logistics either.

I talked to Art this afternoon and he has Min and my new bed halfway done already. We didn’t think that we would be seeing the new bed for at least a week but I guess that it is a holiday weekend. Boy is this weekend the weekend of our house changing. With Andy moving out, his bedroom is being turned into my temporary (but very long term) office. That will be a huge change. For Min and I it is almost like that front room wasn’t even a part of the actual house. So that is a big time change for us. Then there is the redecorating that Min wants to do very soon. She wants to repaint at least four rooms of the upstairs. And with a new bed going into our bedroom, that is going to completely change things there as well.

Originally dad was going to come over and we were going to go to dinner with him but we ended up not being able to work that into our schedules. So Min ran over to Wegmans and picked up subs for everyone before we took the truck up to Andy’s new apartment. After subs, Andy drove Tony home in the moving truck and Min and I drove up to the apartment with Oreo who insisted on coming along. He hates to be left behind. It was probably around 6:30 when we got up to the apartment. It took Andy and I until just after 9:00 to get the truck unloaded. Then we had to drive back down to Henrietta to drop off the truck at Budget. On the way down to Henrietta we remembered that we had packed things into the car that Min and I were driving as well so we had to go back to the apartment to drop off those items. On the way back north we stopped into the Abbott’s Custard on West Henrietta Road and got some cool desserts to reward us for all of the hard work that we had been doing.

It was around 11:00 when we finally got back to Geneseo. All of us were exhausted. It has been a long and busy day. Min has to work a double at the hotel tomorrow so she was hoping to stay up late this evening but she laid down on the couch and was out in no time. Andy had been planning on doing some more packing tonight and taking another large car load up to his apartment with him but he gave up on the idea and just took a few items when he left just before midnight to go to his new home. So it is official that Min and I are now here in the house alone. Almost like a normal married couple.

Andy currently is without telephone or Internet access. He will be ordering that stuff on Tuesday, I guess, when businesses open back up. But it will probably be a week or two before he has any real form of communications in his new apartment. To see what his options were, I took my PocketPC with me up while we were moving stuff this evening and used some software to do a site survey and discovered that a bunch of his near neighbors had open wireless access points so that it was really easy to get onto the Internet in the interim either way. In fact, my PocketPC was just online without having to do anything. It was really handy. Now I need to figure out where in Geneseo that I can go for walks and not lose Internet access because that would be really handy.

It was nice and cool out this evening. It was hotter during the day but tonight it was decent. So we took the opportunity to shut down the air conditioning (hoping that we won’t have to turn it on much for the rest of the year) and opened up the windows.

Today is the last day of Andy living here in Geneseo with us. I am taking him up to the city tomorrow to pick up his moving truck at 8:30 so that he can start moving. This is a momentous occassion for me. I haven’t lived without a roomate since I first moved out from my parent’s house to go to Michigan in 1994. That is just over eleven years of not living on my own. Now, it is true that I am married now so I am not really living alone because Dominica lives here but still it is different. No more roomate. Of course, John Stephens, the Surfing IT Wizard, might be moving up here at some point which would mean that we have a roomate again for a while. But that isn’t looking too likely at this point. He has a pretty decent job down in Endicott that he isn’t likely to be leaving anytime soon.

I have decided that it is about time for SGL to have a face lift and maybe some serious structural change. Down the road I hope to completely reimplement the site using XML and RSS but until I get to that point I am going to be settling for a CSS redesign with a new look and hopefully no tables used for structure. I would also like, if at all possible, to finally do away with all images used on the site and go to a totally CSS and XHTML designed page. I only use the images for a tiny bit but I don’t think that they are making the site all that much more attractive and I think that I can do better without them and the pages will definitely load a bit faster without them. And it would be nice to have a new look for the beginning of a new school year since I know that there are a ton of students at York that will be ready the site diligently again.

Jeremy decided last night that he wanted to spend the night but hadn’t worked that out with his parents yet. But, since it is the last time that he will be able to come over and play the MUD before school starts most likely, I drove him down to Leicester so that he could leave a note that he was up here. On the way down we noticed that gas in Geneseo had climbed to $3.19. So that is $1.61 to $3.19 in just 48 hours. Doubled in just two days.

Also, it is now September, so it is time to celebrate SGL’s FIFTH ANNIVERSARY! That is right. Five whole years of non-stop blogging action even before there was such a thing as blogging. Whoo-hoo. Happy birthday to us. Yeah baby.

I decided that I wanted to start working with the site live last night as very few people read the site at night and I just felt like being lazy. So there is plenty of site damage going on today and I have to apologize for that. But it makes my life a lot easier to just do it this way so I guess that everyone just has to deal with it. The good news is that it is coming along, I guess. Also as a quick technical note: somehow Blogger got my site feed messed up for the SGL2 podcast but it appears to be working now just fine. I had to spend about an hour tweaking it, however, just to get it to register at all.

Art came over around noon today to go over the plans for Min and my new bed with Min. He is building us a stylish, European platform bed so that we won’t have to sleep on the floor anymore which Min can’t stand. I have been sleeping on the floor since 1997 so I really don’t mind at all. But Dominica has only been sleeping on the floor over the last few years and she doesn’t really like it. She especially doesn’t like being close to things that may or may not be crawling around on the floor. But I do admit that the floor bedis not the most attractive way to go in bedroom furnitings but I have always had a really difficult time justifying spending any type of money on a bed just to have something that looks better than I enjoy less than sleeping on the floor. I really like the floor and find it to be incredibly comfortable and simple and cheap.

Art was only intending to be over for a little while but ended up hanging out until 5:00 or so. Then he ran home and picked up Danielle and Michael and they all came back over to the house to get dinner. Art and I stayed at the house with Michael and Oreo while Min and Danielle went over to Wegmans and did some shopping and picked up some subs for dinner.

Mary and Jocelyn were supposed to come over tonight. We had been planning on seeing them all week. They called and made plans with us this evening and headed on over from Silver Springs. But they never ended up making it. We called over there several times looking for them and started getting worried after a while. Mary called at 1:10 am to let us know that they had gotten a flat tire between there and here and had just gotten back to their place after getting it fixed. So we didn’t get to see them at all tonight.

Min’s friend Rebecca or Big Bec as she apparently goes by came over at 10:00 from the hotel to hang out with us all. She, Art, Danielle and Michael all stayed until about 1:00. At that point I had to get to bed so that I could get some sleep. Andy is moving out tomorrow as you all know and I have to have him in the city at 8:00 to pick up his Budget rental truck so that we can get him moved. He is waking me up in the morning when it is time to go so I need to get to bed. Have a good night everyone and I hope that you all have a good Labor Day weekend.

Andy moves out the day after tomorrow. Weird.

I was pretty tired when I pulled myself out of bed at 11:30 this morning. Driving twelve hours can take a lot out of you. But I managed to get up without an alarm this morning even with Dominica having gotten up just two hours before I did and Oreo being very snuggly.

I showered and headed out to go down to Castile where I had an appointment with Pastor Joel this afternoon. We are working on coming up with a plan for the new computer lab at the school. The school has grown so much this year that we really need to do something to be able to accommodate all of the students that they have there now. So we are working on getting together a main lab that can handle a dozen students at a time which is significantly more than the seven that we were able to take at a time last year. And we are also looking to add an additional three computers in another area for non-computer class work where students can go just to work on papers or whatever they need to do. It is going to be quite the project and will take quite a bit of time. We have a building project which will take a little while so that we have places to put all of the computers and then there will be a lot of wiring to be done. Then we have to get the computers put into place. That is always a pretty decent challenge on its own. We still need some more computers if anyone out there has one that they would be interested in donating. Anything in the PIII 600 or faster category would be greatly appreciated. We are hoping to phase out most computers that are slower than that mark which most of what we have currently is. Definitely nothing slower than a PII 350. But the 133MHz memory interface of the PIII 600+ machines makes a really big difference. Machines faster than 866Mhz are even better. We only have one that is that fast currently. We do have one fast machine, hopefully, going into the school this year but one is not much. About eight new machines would be really great. Even better than more computers is more monitors. Currently we are pretty short on monitors. We really need a minimum of 17″ with a resolution of 1024×768 which isn’t too hard to come by and lots of people have gotten rid of monitors like these but we can still use them. We have a computer of monitors that do us no good because they are either way too tiny or their resolution is way too low. So almost anything that anyone has would be most appreciated. What we are really hoping to get is 15″ LCDs but we will probably be a year or two away from getting more than one or two of those.

I got back home around 3:00 and Oreo was very happy to see me. Min had just gone to work about half an hour before I got home so he was alone for a very short period of time today.

Supposedly the builders working on the complex here were going to come over and look at the house this morning to see how much that they would think that it would cost to install one or two new windows into the house. We could really use some extra natural light and we are really for want of more air flow. We want to add one window to each bedroom if possible. That would make a huge difference. And since we are hoping to paint the rooms shortly, now is the perfect time to do some light construction. But it will probably cost way too much to have it done. We will see.

The news coming out of the south today is exceedingly grim. New Orleans is still under several feet of water and there are thousands expected dead. The remains of the city has descended into total chaos and there is little aid that can be brought into the city as large numbers of militants are taking up arms and seizing control of the city. The convention center has fifteen to twenty thousand people trapped inside with, apparently, a number of teenage boys with guns killing and raping with little anyone can do. Forty thousand National Guardsmen have been called up and are on their way down to suppliment the large number of troops that are already in place there. There were even snipers going after the people attempting to evacuate the hospitals. There is no food or water and people are doing anything to get it. This is truly an unbelievable American tragedy. This event will surely be remembered in our history as one of the low points. How embarrassing that the world must watch our second poorest city become so uncivilized. FEMA has stated, quite rightly IMHO, that with all of those people still in the city so long after a mandatory evacuation was ordered it really is difficult to feel that they didn’t bring this upon themselves. Sure there is a small percentage that simply were unable to leave the city. Many sick, elderly and some extremely poor (as well as some tourists) who were unable to get transportation were trapped. But the tens of thousands who were left in New Orleans were surely not mostly of this type. They were people who thought that they would take their chances, were dumb, arrogant or as it now appears, were planning on taking advantage of the situation now that we see widespread looting in the city.

One of the most upsetting stories of all though is that of a group of tourists who were lied to by their New Orleans hotels telling them that they would be able to come down without a problem just to arrive and realize that they were in a war zone and that they had nowhere to go. A group of tourists banded together and spent tens of thousands of dollars getting hired bus transportation arranged to get them out of the city before things go too bad. Many of the people trying to escape were elderly with some with walkers and some with wheelchairs. People who had nowhere to go. No legal means of doing anything as all business was closed. And then the military, while the tourists were standing outside their hotel waiting for the buses, stole the buses from them and used them to evacuate Louisianna residents instead of the toursits who had paid for and owned them. This is an act of total prejudice, lawlessness and slaughter. The tourists who were mislead into going to New Orleans or who simply became trapped there had less means of escaping than anyone and have many disadvantages like not knowing the layout of the city, not owning anything or having anyone at all to turn to and now they have no money as that was stolen by the National Guard. The locals that the military chose over the tourists chose to live in New Orleans and chose not to leave when they had the chance. But many tourists found out too late and were unable to get out of the city. I hope that New Orleans never recovers its tourist industry. It has long been a blemish for America. Now is our chance to start over. Unfortunately, it is probably not in the interest of the state of Louisiana to do so. They have long capitalized on their loose Napoleonic code laws and vice industries to make them money while keeping the vast majority of their population in abject poverty. When I visited there I was appalled by the third world status of so much of the city.

Anyway, it is incredibly sad. And we have maybe a month or more of this before we will see anything really get any better. There are so many people displaced now, at the very least. So much business disrupted. This is a major national set back. The entire city of New Orleans will have to be rebuilt. It is hard to imagine that there is a single building left that will be worth saving. It is a substancial loss as New Orleans is one of our oldest, most historical and most unique cities. So much incredible history is lost forever. Not something that we think about happening very often in America. To us, almost everything we have is permanent and safe. Our museums, our historical buildings, our monuments all stand for all time. But we are a young country and we forget that we can lose our past as easily as anyone else can. I am so glad that I travelled to New Orleans and saw the French Quarter a few years ago. I know what the city looked like and I know its famous sections. I drove along the Mississippi there and over Lake Pont

Anyway, gas is super expensive. It has been shooting up like crazy. Just two days it was $1.61 a gallon. Today, Andy filled up at $3.09 and we have heard reports of it being higher in different areas. Rumor has it that Atlanta hit $6 today.

Min went to work at 3:00, she is working the “B” shift today after having been at FLCC for college this afternoon. I went down to my grandma’s today to visit for about an hour with her and dad. Then Jeremy came back with me so that he could play on the MUD for a little while. He came over around 7:45 and is planning on heading home around when Min gets home.

Remember to keep Min in prayer (in addition to everyone in Louisiana, Mississippi, etc.) because she has her second round interview in the city tomorrow (we might have to move up there if she gets it so that we can afford to have her commute 😉

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.