Sheep Guarding Llama

I am in the hotel all day today in Easton, PA. Nothing exciting going on here. This is quite an unbelievably nothing town. I was hoping to be able to post updates from the hotel like I usually do but something is wrong and I am unable to connect to the company network although I am online. So everyone will have to wait for updates until I get back to New York, I guess.

I slept in until around 1:00 today. I remembered to bring my CPAP on this trip so I was able to get a good night’s sleep this time. Unfortunately, my ability to work is severly hampered without access to the network. My laptop is in terrible shape and has to be reinstalled as soon as I return. That might be all the more problem that I am having and I should be able to get that fixed quickly when I return. I discovered the issue with not being able to log into the network when Min needed me to work on her laptop for her to get her sound card working. Apparently she had wanted to watch movies or something at work and was not able to do so.

I ordered myself a pizza and some cheese sticks from Papa John’s. They are local and the place that the hotel recommended. I don’t normally order from them but they pizza isn’t bad, just nothing special. But more importantly, it doesn’t agrivate my heartburn the way that Dominoe’s does.

I am having a lot of problems with my wireless connection dropping while I am working today. The connection in my hotel room is very week but it might be more than that. They might be having network issues of their own. The hotel that I was supposed to be staying in had their Internet access down altogether so it is better than nothing.

While we were out today, our house got sprayed for bees, hornets and wasps. Boy will Min be happy. They have been driving us absolutely crazy. They live all over the outside of our house and they swarm all over you whenever you go into or out of the house. You can’t be outside ever without them being all over the place. They are not very aggressive, thank goodness. No one has been stung or attacked but there sure is a lot of opportunity for it to happen if we aren’t careful.

I watched the Bill Murray and Gena Davis classic Quick Change today just before going in to work.

After work this evening, I noticed that my check engine light is back on again. It has only been two days since I got it from the shop for that purpose. So much for the car’s computer telling us what is wrong with the car. Now I have to deal with that this week as well. Once again, it means two more trips to the shop. One to deal with the computer. Then I will have to drive it for days before the inspection can be done.

I got back from Wegmans and hadn’t gotten a chance to take a walk like I usually do so I checked out Mappoint and set out from the hotel to get some excercise. I decided to walk to the east to see if I could make it to the New Jersey state line which appears to be three and a half miles away from where my hotel was on the west side of Wilson. That meant walking through Wilson, Easton and Northhampton before reaching the Delaware River and the bridge to New Jersey. I set out on my walk and spent three hours walking and listening to Simon Winchester’s “The Professor and the Madman”, a biography of the two men most responsible for the creation of the great Oxford English Dictionary. I am, I believe, over halfway through the book now which is extremely interesting. I know, I know, I read really weird stuff and I have a very skewed view of interesting. Dominica can’t believe that I read this stuff for fun. When I got to the New Jersey side of the bridge, I called Min at work to let her know where I was. While I was there a slow moving Norfolk Southern coal train sautered by at a lazy 1-2 miles per hour. There was no gate at the crossing so I guess they had to slow down enough to be able to stop in an emergency. I tried walking alongside of the train to see if I could really keep up with it, which is a weird feeling, and my regular pace was almost twice the speed of the train (I was only a few feet away from the train and had waved to the engineer.) This was definitely how hobo’s seeking to travel America managed to get onto trains. However, a coal train heading towards New York City would hardly be the exciting rail journey of my dreams.

I had to get up at a normal time this morning because dad was meeting me for breakfast and then taking me up to the city (East Rochester) to pick up my car from Vincent Mazda. My computer, in the car, apparently died or something and had to be replaced. So now I have to drive the car for a few days (my trip to Allentown should do the trick) so that it will allow the New York State inspection computer to talk to it. What a stupid way to design a car. So, supposedly, I have a ten day extension on my inspection so that I can continue to drive the car during this time to get it able to be inspected. But the sticker on my car didn’t change any and I didn’t get any paperwork to hand to a cop if and when they pull me over. So I am not too confident with how this process works.

We had breakfast at the Omega, imagine that. I really do eat there four or five times a week on an average week. Then we went up to the city and picked up my car. I hit the bank on the way back to the house and deposited my paycheck. I really wish that I had direct deposit. But not many places are too keen to do that for short term contractors. Then I got back to the house and helped dad get Oreo ready to go home with him. Dad is watching Oreo the next two days while neither Min nor I are at home.

I had to take a shower and get packed so that I could get down to Bethlehem in time for work this evening. It is about a four or five hour trip down to the Allentown area. It is an easy drive: i390 south to i86 east to i81 south to PA Turnpike 476 south and there you are. Very direct from here, for the most part. No cities to drive through the entire way unless you include Scranton which you can bypass if you take 476 out of Clark Summit but I prefer not to because they have all of those annoying automated toll stops along that route. I feel that it is better and faster to just take i81 right through town and pick up the pike on the south side of Scranton and only get the regular ticket tolls down there. Min did most of my packing for me. She is much better at remembering everything that I need than I am.

I managed to get on the road just a little after 2:00. Min had to go to work at 3:00. She is doing her regular Monday/Tuesday double double again. I was excited to get onto the road because I am part way into Bill Bryson’s book “A Walk in the Woods” and I want to finish it. I am also excited that Audible has a bunch of Bryson’s books available. I am always on the lookout for good stuff to read. He has a number of books that sound good.

I finished my book just a little before arriving in Allentown. I got to the hotel a little before 7:00 but it turned out that there wasn’t any Internet access there and they hadn’t called me or put information on their website. I wonder why they take my phone number when I make a reservation if they aren’t going to call when the services that I booked for have changed. It isn’t like I booked the room a long time ago either, I booked the room early this morning. So I cancelled my room and drove on to Wegmans so that I could get some Internet access and try to find a hotel. Luckily, Wegmans was just around the corner. I tried a few hotels and finally found a Comfort Inn in Easton. I ran over there before starting my shift and got checked in.

Jeremy ended up hanging out late today. Sara was working until 4:00 at McDonald’s so he hung out late enough for her to pick him up and take him home. Min, Jeremy and I went over to the Omega Grill for some lunch before Sara picked him up.

The latest season (season three) of Monarch of the Glen arrived from Amazon today. Min and I have been patiently waiting for this season to come out. It is one of our favourite television shows. We ended up going down to the theatre and watching half of the season in a single go. The BBC doesn’t normally do really long seasons but it was still a lot of television.

This afternoon, Min and I went over to the Ralston’s with Oreo to hang out for the evening. Art had some computer work for me to do and then we played some SongBurst and Trivial Pursuit. Oreo had a good time playing with Michael. He is very happy as long as he gets to travel with us. While we were there, Min discovered that Art and Danielle were selling a laptop for a friend of theirs. The laptop’s modem was dead so the person who had owned it wasn’t able to use it anymore and was selling it. Min’s birthday is coming up in two weeks so I bought her the laptop. It is the same laptop that I have except it is one model newer so it is a little faster. It is handy that we are able to swap batteries and power supplies.

Around 11:15, we swung through Leicester and picked up Jeremy so he could come over and play on the MUD. I didn’t manage to stay awake for any length of time and ended up going to sleep very early. For some reason, I was really exhausted.

Today ended up being a disaster. I left the hotel at noon in Scranton and headed up to Ithaca before going up to work in Syracuse. I took care of a few things around town. Then I went over to Steve and Pat’s and hung out for a while before heading up to work.

The real disaster happened when I got up to the store in Cicero. There was a mistake and I was supposed to be in Woodbridge, NJ tonight. I didn’t even know that they had a store in that town. I was so confused. I was sure that the mistake had to be mine but I couldn’t figure out how it could have happened. I had even called the day before to verify that I had all of the right information. I couldn’t believe that I had gotten it wrong. It was five hours travel time from Cicero to Woodbridge so we decided that it couldn’t be done and would have to be rescheduled. It wasn’t until after I had had my phone conference with everyone that I finally took the time to go through my paperwork and discovered that I had not been told about the store at all. I had no way to know to go to that store. It completely wasn’t my fault. Boy was that a relief. I had really felt like an idiot trying to figure out how I hadn’t known to go to Woodbridge.

The good thing was that I got to go home early and got to spend some time with Min before I had to go to bed.