Sheep Guarding Llama

Slept in late. Min got up and packed up the puppy and headed out for Frankfort. She will probably be coming home on Thursday night.

I have a lot of errands to run today. I did some work around the house this morning. Just as I was heading out the door, I got a couple of calls that I had to deal with. So I was running pretty late by the time that I got out of the door.

I went over to Josh’s to pick up my tuxedo vest. It has been missing since the wedding. When Josh and Joanne got back from Disney, they discovered that someone had dropped off the vest and left it on their porch while they were away. We can only guess that someone had picked up the vest while I was in the shower at their place before going home and must have taken it home with them. Luckily they only went on a one week honeymoon and that Tuxedo Junction was so cool about the whole thing. They could have easily charged me $100 for that waistcoat already by this point. So I picked up the vest and drove back out to Marketplace to drop off the vest. What a pain this vest has been. We have probably put over an hour into looking for it with four people looking and driven a total of about 90 minutes moving it around and made several phone calls to people and Tuxedo Junction to deal with it let alone TJ’s hassle in not being able to get that vest back out to someone else.

While I was at the mall, I grabbed some quick food over at Tom Wahl’s in the Marketplace Food Court. Can you believe that it has been ten years since I worked there? That is crazy.

I had to do some banking while I was in Henrietta and then I had to run to CompUSA to find an AC Adapter for my laptop. I found one but it was $100. At least it seems to be a pretty nice one. It should be for that much money. Man are those expensive. No wonder laptops cost so much.

After shopping, I was able to head for Syracuse. I was doing okay for time but I wasn’t sure how long it was going to take me to find the Wegmans in Liverpool so I left myself some extra time. It is a long drive today. In the car I am listening to “The Cat Who Went Bananas”. I like these low-key murder mysteries. That is something that I inherited from my mother. I find them to be very relaxing. But they hold my interest and make the drive easier.

I made it to Wegmans in good time and managed to get an early start on the evening. That was good because it ended up being a longer than usual evening. But not too bad. I did manage to get a late night snack before I left. I was done around 1:45am. Then it was off to Frankfort.

I got into Frankfort a little before 3:00. Min was still up watching Alias waiting for me to get in. She had both Boston Terriers on the bed with her and they were all waiting for me. Dexter was very excited to see me. Both dogs ended up sleeping all night with us.

Oreo got me up twice during the night. I was a little tired after that and Min was still exhausted from her drive so we ended up sleeping in with the puppy until around 10:30. That was too late to be able to make it to church. But the puppy needed lots of reassurrance from us. He seemed to be happy once we convinced him that he was allowed onto the bed. That put him more at ease. He sure is a sweetie. Very quiet and subdued. Not at all like Min’s parent’s Boston Terrier, Dexter.

I got up this morning to the phone ringing. I jumped out of bed trying to get to the phone. My glasses were on the computer desk. On my way to get them, the laptop power cable got caught between my toes and it got pulled off of the book that it was sitting on. Now it is dead. Crapola.

The telephone call was nothing. Discover card called us to talk about an online automatic payment program that lowered our interest rate. On a Sunday morning? I was NOT happy at all. I plan on cancelling that card. I can’t believe that they would have the audacity to call us on a Sunday morning. It isn’t like we owe them money. If we did I would understand. But we don’t. In fact, I paid a whole month ahead! They said that they had called just to get some information checked. I didn’t believe them, I was pretty sure that they were a scam. But they knew our purchasing history. Which might be better or worse, I am not sure. I made Min give me the phone and I asked for a manager. Once the manager was on the phone, she made up a lie that they had actually called to lower our rate even though the guy that we talked to had gone through the entire schpiel without ever mentioning it. He said that he had called to get information. There is no way that we could possibly be expected to believe that they had actually called for something legitimate and that they didn’t just lower our rate because I was furious. I was extrememly tempted to log on to our account and pay it off right on the spot and cancel the card. I can’t get over that they called us at home on a Sunday morning just to collect some personal information.

So now I have no laptop, that isn’t good. I really need that and I really need it this week more than normal. I am working in Syracuse this week and am going to be staying at Min’s parent’s house during the week to cut down on drive expenses and to spend time with the girls and Oreo. But I really need to be able to get to my email and IM and all of that. Plus I use my laptop at Wegmans so that is a problem too.

Early this afternoon Min and I took Oreo along with us down to my grandmother’s house for my dad’s 59th birthday party. We had a good time and everyone enjoyed getting to meet Oreo. He is such a sweetie. Everyone loved him. Taffy, my aunt and uncle’s dachsund, kept coming in to meet Oreo but she is nine years old and very low key. He was very excited to have a new friend to play with and she was very scared so she kept running to the nearest person and jumping onto their laps for protection. But she really wanted to meet Oreo and couldn’t resist trying to meet him over and over again. We got Chinese take away from the Shanghai in Geneseo and had brownies for dessert.

After dinner, Min and I took Oreo over to dad’s house where he is staying tonight so that he can get used to it with us there. We took a few movies along to watch while we were there. We ended up watching Good Morning Vietnam and Disney’s Get A Clue with Lindsay Lohan. You can check out the reviews of these movies at my new movie review blog Scott’s Reviews. I thought that that would be a nice way to keep this blog from being loaded full of movie reviews but make it easy for people who are reading this blog to be able to access my reviews while reading the dailies. See what a good job I do of leveraging blogs and tying them all together?

Dad had a multi-adapter for laptops and we tried that before we were going to try taking the laptop apart to fix it. Unbelievable as it seems, the power supply was actually the problem. The cable going from the adapter to the laptop actually snapped. Pheww.

We had decided that we were going to spend the night at dad’s and that we were going to drive out to Frankfort separately tomorrow so that she could go out early with the dog and I could go straight to work in Syracuse and then go out to Frankfort. But then we figured out that it would be silly to not sleep at home so we called Andy and he said that that was fine. So we went back home after watching the movies and got some sleep. It was pretty late by the time that we went home. We were pretty tired.

Today is my dad’s 59th birthday. Happy Birthday.

I got up around 10:30 this morning and Andy, Tony and Jeremy were all already gone. Jeremy has a parade today so he has to get home for that.

Dad came over at 11:30 to get some lunch. I tried to clean as much of the house as I could before dad came over but I only got a little done. But at least it was a little. Dad and I went over to the Omega Grill for lunch.

After lunch, dad and I worked (okay, mostly dad) on putting the quilt up on the wall. But the quilt is so large that it became a rather major undertaking and we weren’t able to get it done with the equipment that we had at hand. We also had to work on getting some updates for dad’s desktop done on my network while we worked on the quilt. While we were trying to figure out what to do with the quilt Dominica arrived from Texas. I got to meet our new Boston Terrier, Oreo, for the first time. He is a sweety. He is very cute but he isn’t very snuggly right now because he isn’t used to us yet.

Min was exhausted when she got home and pretty much went straight to bed for a while. I played with Oreo for hours. He really needed a chance to run around after having sat in the car for two days.

While working on today’s update, Andy and I sat in my bedroom (Min is sleeping behind me and Oreo is chewing a bone in the living room) listening to the Podcast from Dawn and Drew. They are currently the number four most popular Podcast according to Podcast Alley. Dawn and Drew are hilarious home podcasters from Wisconsin. Although the show is a little inappropriate some of the time. I am experimenting with Podcasts trying to find some interesting shows. There has to be tons of cool shows out there. I will find them. I will report on them. And you will know.

Andy, Min and I went out to McDonald’s for a quick dinner then ran to Walmart to pick up some much needed puppy supplies for our new dog. He needs a kennel to sleep in because that is what he is used to and we need a few other things for him.

We got back home very late and Art and Danielle came over for a while to hang out. Mary (Art’s mom) is babysitting Michael for the weekend and they are bored. Art brought over his tools and installed the water line to the refridgerator that we have been needing for almost two years now. Two years! Can you believe that we have been living in this house for almost two whole years? We moved in in late July, 2003. It is already June, 2005. Time really does fly. Eric and Amanda must have just passed their two year point. Nate should be closing in on his. Min and I first picked out this house about 26 months ago! Anyway, Min should be very happy that we now have the water line that she has been wanting so badly all of this time.

Art and Danielle hung out for a while and took off to go home around 12:30. Min was falling asleep while they were here so we went straight to bed after they left. I was decently tired too. Oreo spent half of the evening trying to be the center of attention and the rest of it alternately sleeping on our bed or in his new kennel. He seems to be adjusting rapidly to his new home. It is going to be rough for him, though, because he is going to be moving over to dad’s tomorrow and then will be spending the next week in Frankfort and then coming back to dad’s place until August when Andy moves out and he can come back here.

Min and I are going out to Frankfort on Monday. I am working in Syracuse this week so we thought that that would be really practical. She had wanted to go out there anyway and this will give me a chance to spend time with Oreo and the girls. Otherwise I will barely get to see them until Christmas. I miss so much of their lives that I have to take all of the chances that I can get.

Today is Tony West’s 17th birthday. Happy Birthday Tony!

I got up at noon today. I feel better having caught up on a little sleep.

I did some light work around the house this afternoon. Andy and I did a little Waste Watcher work this afternoon. Tonight is Castile Christian Acadamy’s graduation ceremony being held down at the Castile Baptist Church. Min was supposed to go but she didn’t know about the ceremony until after she already had her tickets to go to Texas so I have to go alone.

I left for the school a little after 6:15. The ceremony wasn’t very long, maybe an hour or so. After the ceremony, there were snacks and refreshmets for everyone. So I stayed and talked with people until a little after 9:30. Mostly I talked with Pastor Dan about the Case’s new laptop that they got this week. I also got to talk to the Jinks. Their daughter Jocey was my first girlfriend back in first grade! I haven’t seen her since I was in late high school. Her parents are moving to Tennessee soon because their son, Jacob, moved down there some time ago and runs a business down there now. They visited him recently and really liked the Knoxville area and decided, on the spur of the moment, to move down there. So they just recently managed to sell their house and they are moving down there soon. Their two daughters, Joanna and Jocelyn, are planning to move down there soon as well. Their kids are second cousins to Blogging Eric. One way or another, everyone I know is related to everyone else except for me. Jocey, Eric and I all were in the same class together at Pavilion Baptist School back in the 80’s.

On the way home I hit McDonald’s for a quick dinner and got it to go and went to the house. Jeremy, Tony, Andy, Art, Michael and Danielle were all playing a practice game when I got there. I will defer any more details of the game nights to the Friday Night Game site so as not to bore my regular readers here.

Played until about 3:30 and then went to bed. I spoke to Min from the church and she was in Memphis then. She was in Nashville at the beginning of the game so I am expecting her home around 2:00 tomorrow afternoon.

Boy was I tired this morning. Didn’t get to bed until almost 6:00 this morning. So I slept in pretty late until around 11:00.

I worked in the basement this morning. We got some new equipment yesterday and I wanted to get it installed this morning. That didn’t take too long but it was a slightly involved project.

Mary called early this afternoon and made some plans for her and Jocelyn to come over later.