Sheep Guarding Llama

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.

I realized today that I left my house keys in the ash tray of my rental car from Enterprise. Oops. Hopefully they will be able to find them for me. There is nothing too valuable on there so it isn’t too big of a deal but it would be nice to have them back.

Dad came over and picked up Min and I to go up to Avon to get lunch at Peppermints. Normally we just eat here in Geneseo but with the college kids coming back to town this weekend, it isn’t worth the effort. Better to just get out of town.

Dad delivered our latest package of stuff and in it was Min’s new USB sound system for her laptop and my new Pocket PC. I got the HP hx2400 iPaq. It is really cool. I have really been looking forward to having a unit like this. I really feel that I need one with the way that I work. I have had some Pocket PC

This afternoon, Min decided that she really wanted to test drive the Kia after we had done some math and realized that we didn’t actually owe as much on her car as we had thought that we did. So we drove up to Henrietta and she took the car out for a drive. She was really impressed and really liked that the car felt just like her car but that it got 4 mpg better fuel efficiency which, with today’s gas prices, adds up pretty quickly. So we were up there for a while and talked about financing options. But, in the end, it was just too expensive to justify getting the Kia right now. But it could be a really good car for us in just a few months or maybe by first thing next year.

We got back home and had Art and Danielle order a pizza from Wegmans while we were driving back so that I could pick it up as soon as we were back in Geneseo. So I dopped Min off at the house and went and got the pizza.

Art and Danielle had already arrived when I returned with the pizza. They hung out at the house until almost 3:00 am. We played a couple rounds of Cranium – Min was very excited.

Today begins the seven day countdown to Andy moving out. Can you believe that he will be gone is just a week?!? Andy and I have lived together since 1998! Weird. He is moving to Clintwood Apartments in Brighton just two miles from his office downtown.

I went up to the city today and did some work at the UofR for Eric and then he drove me over to East Rochester so that I could drop off my rental car. Like an idiot, I left my house keys in the rental car’s ash tray. So now I have no house keys nor do I have the leather Johnstone family crest that I kept on my keychain ever since Min and I were in Nova Scotia for our honeymoon. There was nothing of any real value on there but it still sucks a bunch. I talked to Enterprise later and they hadn’t found the keys but they have a note in their system to check the ash tray of that car as soon as it is returned. Not much chance of getting them back, however.

After dropping off the car, Eric and I went down to Aja Noodle in Brighton to get some lunch. I don’t get to eat there often enough so I am always excited to get to go. I really get a craving for their Pad Thai in between trips.

After lunch we had to get up to East Rochester again to pick up my Mazda 6 that has been in the shop for two full weeks. There was some pump or something that was having a problem and needed to be replaced but they were having a problem getting a hold of the part. But it is finally done and thank goodness for warranties. Only 3,000 miles left before I am out of warranty. Ugh.

Most of the day was already blown so Eric and I decided to go down to Dorschel in Henrietta and test drive one of the new Kia Spectra 5’s that Min and I have been thinking about getting. Her car is already at 60,000 miles and she might be commuting to the city soon and she is definitely commuting to Canandaigua starting next week so a new car might be in order. I drove the Kia and was very impressed. It is practically an exact replica of the 2003 Protege 5 from Mazda. I mean everything is the same. Except that it is dramatically less expensive and comes with a longer warranty which is of great interest to me.

I got home around 5:30 and Min was out with her friend Rebecca from the Quality Inn having their nails done at the nail place next to Wegmans. So I got to work catching up on a few things while she was out. It was 7:30 before she got home and we were already supposed to be in Castile. So we went running out the door and had to first run back over to the nail place and pick up Rebecca and take her home before we could get out of town.

It was after 8:00 when we finally arrived down in Castile at the school. We were there for the Open House to show off the new High School Wing that had just been (or was just about to be) completed. We were really impressed, they totally doubled the size of the school with a seemingly simple addition. It is amazing how much more classroom space they have now. We also found out that the school has a more than 50% increase in enrollment this year which is very exciting. We ended up staying there until after 10:00 which made for a very long evening and we were hungry having skipped dinner.

After the Open House, Min and I and one of the senior girls and one recent grad went out to the Charcoal Corral to get some pizza before heading home. We had a good time hanging out and didn’t get home until around midnight.