Sheep Guarding Llama

Boy is it nice to be home. I left Erie at 11:00 this morning and arrived home around 3:30. But I had lunch at Wegmans in Jamestown and swung by Home Depot to pay off the line of credit that I have there. So that took some time out of the trip. Quite a while, in fact.

Dad is down at grandma’s all day today taking care of her to give my aunt Sharon the day off. So Min and I grabbed a pizza from Mia’s and took it down there and had dinner with them. I am lucky if I get to see grandma every other week so I try to make it down there when I can.

While we were visiting, a Re/Max hot air balloon came down in the field just behind the house. It was so close that I just saw the advertising pass in front of the window. Jeremy and I walked out into the field to say “Hi” and to see if they needed anything but they fired up the balloon and took off again before we managed to get out there.

Second day in the hotel. My first day is always a loss, more or less. But normally by the second day I am settled in a bit and am able to actually get work done. Today has been very productive. I also got a chance today to finally order my own birthday present (only half a year later.) I am getting an HP hx2400 handheld Pocket PC. I have wanted one for a really long time and finally feel confident that I have found one that is right for me. It isn’t a top of the line model but it seems to be the actually practical model that makes the most sense for me. The most important thing is that it has built in 802.11b wireless and bluetooth. That will make, I anticipate, the Pocket PC a really useful tool for me so that I am able to communicate with people without having to constantly be sitting at a desktop or laptop. So often, I find myself having to stay tied to computers just to keep in contact with people instead of being able to enjoy the living room, deck or yard (or coffee shop) because it is too much of a pain to bring my laptop to those locations.

Leanne corrected me today (proving that she keeps up with the site) and said that the Wegmans in Canadaigua sits on Rt. 20.

I decided to eat in the hotel today. The pizza I got yesterday was nothing to write home about so I decided to splurge on a healthy hotel dinner.

Dinner was excellent, I am very glad that I decided to try out the hotel fare. After dinner, I decided to take a walk out to Presque Isle and check out the views of the lake. I ended up not having nearly as much time as I had hoped so I only barely managed to make it to the isle but I still had a very enjoyable walk. I did find some incredible views and a condominium complex that I really want to get a condo in called the Presque Isle Shores.

After my walk I had to skedaddle off to work. This is my final night in Erie and tomorrow I am heading for home. It is just under three hours to home so I am hoping to be back around 2:00 in the afternoon.

I am posting this as I hit the road at just past 11:00 on Thursday morning.

Today is a hotel day. (Or as thr British would say, an hotel day.) Luckily I am in a nice, comfortable hotel. There is a restaurant in the hotel. I plan to treat myself tomorrow to some room service. If I stay here again, I want to stay in one of the even rooms 344-352 or 244-252 because they have interal balconies looking into the swimming and restaurant areas. It would be really nice to sit in the air conditioned “out doors” and work on my laptop instead of just being alone in my dark room writing in my diary. I am in the Clarion Bel Air hotel on 8th Street in Erie. I don’t know why I would ever have to come back to Erie but just in case I ever do, I will be prepared. I am planning on doing some sales trips this fall. Maybe I will be able to bring Dominica along with me and we could crash here. I got a room at the last minute this time and ended up with a smoking handicapped room. It is fine but not what I normally look for in a hotel room.

I tried to order some Dominos Pizza for lunch but discovered that the Dominos just up the road had gone out of business. So the front desk directed me to a local place that they recommended.

The pizza was good. Nothing special. I never did think of Erie as a big place for getting awesome pizza. It was cheap, however. But, of course, they forgot my blue cheese and they only had Coke, no Pepsi.

Luckily for me, the Wegmans that I am going to tonight is right down the road on Rt. 20, only a few minutes away. That makes things SO much easier. It is funny that there is a Wegmans here on Rt. 20 and there isn’t one anywhere on Rt. 20 in New York.

Today I am starting to listen to “The Basque History of the World” which is a pretty long book (read: good value) from Audible that I got a month or two ago and haven’t had a chance to start listening to yet. Luckily, most of the books that I have gotten manage to last me more than a week and often two or more which means that we are getting our books from Audible at a sustainable rate. Although it also means that I am not walking nearly enough as I should go through a book a week just while I am out exercising.

Besides going into Wegmans, my main project today is working on a commercial website project. There is always something that needs my attention and this week is particularly busy. I have two commercial web sites that need my attention, several internal sites that desperately need my attention that I have not gotten to yet and a big contract project for the UofR that I need to squeeze in. And somewhere in there I should drive home. Hmmm…

After work, I went for a short walk up to the peninsula that is not far away. Unfortunately, after making it all of the way to the peninsula, I discovered that it is a park that closes at dark and won’t be open again until morning. How annoying is that? So I turned around and came back to the hotel.

Today’s update is being written from the datacenter of Wegmans in Jamestown, NY. Oh yes, exciting Jamestown. I know that you all wish that you were here with me tonight.

Min and I slept in until around noon today. Our work schedules are have sure gotten our lives onto weird schedules. We are always going to bed super late and getting up in the middle of the day. It is really tough, though, because the phone always rings incessantly all morning and it makes it almost impossible to get any good sleep.

Dominica had some shopping that she needed to get done so I went with her over to Wegmans in Geneseo. She has to get food to take to work with her or she is tempted to eat the unhealthy food that they have there. I grabbed two slices of pizza while we were there. It is the one thing that I can never get when I am at work because the pizza shops always close just before I can get to them.

Min went to work just after 2:30. I spent the rest of the afternoon getting ready to hit the road myself. It takes a lot to be able to get out of town for four days. It is surprising how much stuff I need. Having to have my CPAP with me at all times doesn’t make things any easier either.

Dad came over at 4:30 and we went out to dinner at the Omega on my way out of town. That is his second time at the Omega just today! I guess we know where I get it from 😉 Dad had come over to Geneseo to pick up Oreo since Min and I are both gone the next two days. Oreo has a really hard time being home alone. He gets really scared as soon as Min puts on her uniform for work. He recognizes the green Quality Inn polo and starts having a panic attack as soon as he sees it. He definitely has separation anxiety. Today is his first day off of the anti-hystamies (sp) that he has been on. Now we will see what happens.

I stopped by the Richardson’s on the way out of town to pick up some stuff that I needed to work on this week and hung out for twenty minutes or so. Then it was off to Jamestown. I don’t think that I have actually been in Jamestown since I came here for a day trip in 1997!

I am working the Erie area this week. Monday night (tonight) in Jamestown and then Tuesday and Wednesday both in Erie. I am staying at the Clarion Bel Air in Eric up by the lake. I am hoping that I am close enough to be able to take walks out by the water. That would be a nice change. From the looks of the location from Microsoft MapPoint (most people use the Streets and Trips version) it looks like I am half a mile or less from the lake and close enough to the penisula to be able to explore that as well. I am pretty sure that I have never been out on the Erie Penisula. In fact, I am pretty sure that I don’t know Erie at all. I have driven through it a million times since it is on the route from home to Ohio as well as on the way to Pittsburgh. So I have gone through Eric four to eight times a year, every year, since I was born. And we used to stop off at Millcreek Mall a lot when I was young to break up the trip but it has been forever since I was there.

On the way out to Jamestown, I stopped by the Alleghany River Rest Stop. It is a new rest stop that was just built by the Seneca Nation. It is really impressive. I think that it must be the nicest rest stop that I have ever been to. It isn’t really large but it is really attractively designed, very clean, easy to use and has lots of really interesting flora exhibits in a small arboretum that displays native trees of the region with nice plaques describing how the native Seneca people would use them. It was very interesting.

I worked my normal shift, 9-12 (yeah, just three hours, baby!) Then I hit the road to Erie which is only just over a half an hour from Jamestown. Really, neither Erie nor Jamestown are very far from home. Just long enough to keep you from wanted to drive back and forth. It took me a few minutes to find the hotel but this is a tiny town so it can only have been so hard. I got checked in and up to my room. My Internet access is pretty weak here. I can get online but I get bounced off all of the time so things coming from me will be pretty sporadic. To be able to be online at all, I had to use the bench in the room instead of the table and I had to move it all of the way across the room to right next to the door coming into the room. So I am sitting in the doorway using my laptop sitting on a bench. As it is I can’t use my instant messaging because it cuts off so often. But I am able to get email and hopefully to post the dailies. If I move my foot back and forth, it cuts me offline. Isn’t that just great?

Min and I left first thing this morning to head out to Frankfort. It is about two and a half hours to get out there from our place in Geneseo. I am not sure why it is getting faster and faster for us, we haven’t changed the route that we take but it seems like we are getting there fifteen minutes faster than we used to do a year ago.

It was just before 11:00am when we arrived in town. We got to hang for about half an hour before I had to leave to get out to the golf course. Today is Dominica’s cousin Sam’s stag party out at the StoneBridge Golf Club. I know almost no one that is going to be there and I am going alone. So this is a bit of an adventure.

We played a full eighteen rounds today. There were so many people coming today that we got the entire course to ourselves. We must have had fifty people out on the course just in our group. It was pretty cool. The weather was great for golf. Just a little warmer than I would have wanted but well within the pleasant range. Too sunny though. I ended up burning me head completely (which is a result of having absolutely no hair whatsoever.) I didn’t wear a hat because that would make me way too warm but without one I ended up turning nice and red. I didn’t realize how much sun I was getting until I wiped my head on a towel around the sixteenth hole and felt how burnt it was. Oops. I played a pretty good game for me which is pretty bad for anyone else. But I had pretty good consistency all day so it was very enjoyable.

After golf we had a big dinner at the country club.