Sheep Guarding Llama

TGIF! I was up early this morning with only three hours of sleep. Ugh. I was supposed to go up to Greece to spend the morning with Craig. No sooner was I awake than the phone just started ringing and ringing. Everyone needed me to do something or else. So I ended up rescheduling with Craig for the afternoon and then eventually cancelling altogether because I just got so busy. So I spent the entire morning and early afternoon working on a couple of different projects for different companies. What a busy day.

At 5:15, Dad came over with Oreo to drop him off for his weekend stay with his parents. Oreo is always very excited to see us. He loves us SO much! Then Dad, Min and I went to the Omega Grill to get their Friday Night FIsh Fry. They have changed their batter recipe and it is really good now. They were packed as they are every Friday night. Min got her baked fish and Dad and I got the fry up.

Min and I got home and Jeremy was already at the house playing Call of Duty down in the basement. Andy was just pulling out of the driveway so that he could go to Avon and pick up Tony. We were only home for about fifteen minutes playing with the dog before we had to go over to Jim and Susie’s house at No. 20 for the semi-annual Thornapple Homeowner’s Association meeting. That ran from 7:00 till almost 9:00. We got back and no one had started playing yet. Apparently the party doesn’t start without us. So we called the Ralstons and got the game moving. We didn’t play too late, just till around midnight. Then Min, Andy and I watched a little bit of Red Dwarf. I went to bed a few hours before Min and Oreo did. She slept most of the day while I was working. But I was totally exhausted.

Now that I am done with Wegmans for the week things can get really busy!

Today was the Microsoft quarterly show in Rochester. I pulled myself out of bed after four hours of sleep and got ready to go. I drove down to Leicester and picked up Jeremy – this is his second ever show. Yesterday was his last day of school for the year so he is very excited to be done with that. Min was just pulling herself out of bed when I went out the door. She got less than three hours of sleep because she worked until 7:00 am. It is worse because it was her first night back on overnights in several months so she is not used to the schedule again yet.

Jeremy and I got back to the house and we left to head to the show right about at noon with Min and Andy. The show started at 12:30 and ran until 5:00. Jeremy was pretty bored, I think, as there was very little of the show that was covering topics that he was familiar with. Andy and I had a really good time and picked up tons of useful information because this show was totally geared towards our current projects. Min was hoping that she wouldn’t be bored out of her mind as she sometimes is but it ended up working out really well and she really enjoyed the session that she attended and had a lot of things to tell me about when she was through.

Dominica went straight to bed as soon as we got into the house in the hopes of getting slightly rested up before having to go back to work again. She had managed to get a hold of her manager, Chic, who said that she didn’t even have to come in tonight if she didn’t want to or she could come in for part of the shift or something. So she wasn’t too worried about being too tired.

Min and Mary started their shift, their last one together, at 11:00. I went down around 11:15 after watching an episode of Red Dwarf Season Six with Andy to work with the two of them and Jocelyn on their A+ exam material. I got there and for some reason they had sent Jocelyn over to the house to meet me there but thought that she might have gone to Wegmans first since we hadn’t crossed paths yet. So I ran up to Wegmans and found her there in line just checking out and we drove back down to the hotel. Min and Mary were very busy at the beginning of their shift so Jocelyn and I went back to the house for a little while.

While we were waiting we watched two or three episodes of Coupling Season One which is one of Jocelyn’s favourite shows since I introduced her and Mary to them a week or two ago. We drank a small bottle of ice wine during the show. We really need to work through all of this white wine that we have that isn’t going to last very much longer. Min and Mary hadn’t called yet to say that they weren’t going to be busy but we knew that they wanted a pizza and Mama Mia’s has gotten into the habit of closing early without warning so we wanted to get down there and get a pizza before it was too late. Their official hours are until 3:00 am but they sometimes close earlier which is really cruel to those of us who routinely wait to order a pizza from them because we know that they are open late.

We went downtown and ordered the pizzas for dinner and then walked around Main Street waiting for the pizzas to be ready. They were ready around 1:15. Then we took them over to the hotel and had a late night snack with Min and Mary. The hotel was relatively busy, however, so we didn’t get to hang out there for very long and decided that we shouldn’t stay so we came back to the house. Jocelyn and I ended up sitting out on the porch going over A+ material until Min got home sometime between 5:00 am and 6:00 am. Then we sat out for a little while with her as she was winding down. Min and I ended up going to bed a little after 6:00.

Mary came over sometime around 9:00 to pick up Jocelyn. Neither of them was around when I got up in the morning.

I was planning on sleeping into today but the phone rang incescently starting right at 8:00 so no sleeping in for me. The phone must have rang no less than once every half hour between 8:00 and noon. So I just moved to our bedroom computer and worked from there and Min attempted to keep sleeping even with the phone ringing and ringing.

I added a link on the left to iPodder because I think that it is some really awesome open source software and I think that everyone should be using it. So go download it for yourself (c’mon, it’s free) and give it a try. More importantly, it is available for Windows, Mac and UNIX (Linux, BSD, etc.) so just about anyone anwhere can use it.

Tonight is Min’s first audit at the new hotel. Her third night overall. I am working in Cicero tonight. My last night in Syracuse this week. I took off to go to work around 7:00. It is a long drive to Cicero on the far side of ‘Cuse. I started listening to “The Island at the Center of the World” on the way out now that I have finished “1776”. This book is really interesting. It talks about the newly discovered history of the New Netherland colony that existed prior to the English colonies of New York, Pennsylvania, Delaware, New Jersey and Connecticut. Very interesting stuff.

Work went very quickly tonight. I got started a few minutes late and still managed to wrap up at 11:26. That is half an hour earlier than I have ever finished before. What a good feeling. So I headed home long before I had intended to. I went to the hotel around 1:00 to visit with Min and Mary. I hung out for a while, probably until 4:00 am. Then I went home to get some sleep. Busy day tomorrow with the Microsoft show in Rochester.

I woke up on my own at 8:00 this morning. I can’t believe that. I decided not to jump out of bed and layed around until 9:00 or so and then checked my mail and stuff before leaving the hotel. I am glad that I stayed in Ithaca last night because I don’t have to drive anywhere this morning. Makes for an easier day today. And I am never ready for bed right as I leave Wegmans so it worked out well.

My first stop today was up to Varna. Georgia, who works at Lifstyle Properties, is having problems with her laptop so I am going up there to take a look at it.

Georgia’s laptop ended up only taking half an hour at most. That worked out perfectly for my schedule today. Then I headed off to Trumansburg to spend the rest of the day.

I thought that I was going to get to Steve’s house a little early and that he was still going to be in the study recording when I got there. But he was sitting on the front porch with his bass player when I arrived. They had wrapped up early because he had a switch short out and blow an effects box. So that ended their recording session early.

Steve and I hung out for a little while before going downtown (T-Burg that is) to the Little Venice. I got my usual, the amazing fried eggplant parmesian and some very good mozzarella sticks. I know, not the healthiest lunch, but boy was it good. Min is completely off of her South Beach diet now. It really was a bad diet because it created massive cravings and now she needs sweets constantly. Many of the concepts of the South Beach Diet are okay but the bottom line is, if you make a diet so difficult that it makes you think about food all of the time, you are already doomed. You will create your own cravings and in no time you will not have the will power to continue on the diet and when you call off the wagon it will be far worse than it was before.

I spent part of the afternoon working on Steve’s laptop that has been having issues connecting to the Internet on a regular basis. So I worked on that for a while. I also worked on getting him set up to listen to podcasts using iPodder. We ended up being around for a while so I had dinner over there as well before heading up to ‘Cuse to do some work.

I went to work at 7:00 pm. Tonight is the Fairmount store. While working, I listened to the rest of David McCullough’s “1776”, it was very good. It was an interesting approach to the time period looking just at the events of that one year in American history with only a tiny bit of the time just before and after to add some context. Tomorrow, I am going to start listening to “The Island At The Center of the World” which I am very interested in listening to. It is about the history of the Dutch colony at New York.

I wrapped up really early tonight and managed to be in the car heading home by 12:10am! Not bad at all. Andy and Min were both still awake when I arrived home. Min finished work at 11:00, her second night at the Genseo Inn – soon to be the Quality Inn. Tomorrow night she is doing her first audit there. Mary is training her all three shifts this week. Boy are we realived that she is working again. And we were very excited to learn that her hotel benefits (the part of her benefits package that gives her discounts on hotel rooms) starts immediately. So I will be able to stay cheaply next week while I am in Philadelphia and again the week after when I am in Princeton. And there is a good possibility that I will have to go to South Carolina in the next few weeks so that will be perfect for that as well.

Mondays. Why are Mondays always so busy? Min starts her new job today. We didn’t get up super early this morning because we arrived so late last night. I am feeling better, however. So that is good.

Andy and I spent the day working on the Waste Watcher around the house. At 2:00ish, he and I went down to Leicester to help Jeremy deal with his computer that isn’t working. He bought Everquest II for his computer but it won’t load. Turns out his DVD player isn’t working. The CD portion of it works fine but the DVD portion is shot. So I loaded the game by remoting to my laptop with a crossovre cable. That transferred reasonably quickly. But after all of that work we discovered that the game wouldn’t run because the computer was dreadfully shy of the minimum requirements for the game to run. The most important short comings including the lack of a serious hardware based 3D accelerator as well as the necessity to be online for the game to even attempt to start. So he won’t be using that game anytime soon. He doesn’t have Internet access on his desktop.

Andy and I went over to Cook’s in Greigsville and got some subs for dinner. They have really great subs there. Rumor has it (okay, Art told me) that Heather Schaeffer is back in town having moved back from Florida just recently and that she is working down at Cooks. I left one of my business cards with someone who worked there to give to Heather. So we will see if she calls me or not. I haven’t seen her since she had dinner at TGI Friday’s with Josh and I back in 1997 or 1998 the evening before she left for Florida.

Min started her new job at 3:00 working until 11:00 this evening. Mary is training her on the desk. She will do the same shift again tomorrow and then the overnight audit on Wednesday night. Her regular shifts, though, will be just 3:00 pm to 7:00 am on Mondays and Tuesdays once she is done training. She will probably only get one week of training since this is her third hotel position.

I headed off to Johnson City (Binghamton) at 5:30. It is a bit of a drive so I had to leave early. I got to work a little bit early which helped me get all of my ducks in a row and everything rolling right as the shift started at 9:00. I made good time and was able to leave before 1:00.

Originally, the plan had been to crash at John Stephen’s home in Endicott but I decided that I needed to just go up to Ithaca and stay at the hotel. That way I could just get up in the morning and go straight off to all of the things that I had to do.

So I got to the Comfort Inn around 2:00 am. The hotel room was really nice. It had a full sliding glass door with direct walk out to the parking lot. I was realy impressed. I got a decent rate too, $85. I will definitely be staying there when I am in Ithaca. Especially now that I get a discount from Min’s hotel. Whoo-hoo.