Sheep Guarding Llama

It is already June. The days seem to just rush by in a giant blur. I guess that I am getting old. On the way home from Wegmans last night, I stopped at the hotel for about an hour. Mary was training this guy, Mark, I want to call him a ‘kid’ but he is in his mid-twenties. He went to school with Mary and I: graduated in 2000. That meant that he was a sixth grader when I graduated. Oh boy. Now I feel old. I remembered his name and he looked vaguely familiar. Hard to say if it is him that I really remember or not.

Mary was working on her A+ book when I got there and was full of questions. We sat with Mark out in the hotel lobby and I did my best to answer her computer questions.

I went to bed around 4:00 am and, for some inexplicable reason, got myself out of bed around 10:00am. I only got a few hours of sleep last night and had a short night tonight. I am surprised that I am getting up of my own accord. It must be the heat. The house is in the high seventies today. Dominica would be proud of me for not turning on the air conditioning today. We don’t quite need it but it is close. The basement is staying reasonably cool without any form of cooling so it is worth holding off for a few more days at least. Our central air unit is not the most efficient in the world and it costs a fortune to run during the summer. I really wish that we had the money to replace it with something really efficient. Someday, I guess.

Mary and Jocelyn showed up around 11:00 to study their A+. Mary had decided not to go to sleep this morning so she was pretty groggy. I walked them through the material in the first four chapters of the A+ books that they were using till about 12:30 when we ordered a pizza, along with Andy, from Mama Mia’s downtown. I love pizza, I could eat it every day. Especially now that we live in Geneseo and there is so much good pizza here. Not that Ithaca didn’t have tons more, but we have a pretty good selection anyway.

We moved out to the deck with the pizza and enjoyed the warm day. It was over eighty outside and hot in the sun.

After lunch, Mary was very tired and ended up falling asleep while we were talking. Jocelyn and I worked on her A+ material until around 3:00 when she had to run off to a doctor’s appointment in Warsaw. She decided to leave Mary at the house sleeping and to come back and get her later.

I was doing some searching today and I discovered an awesome new piece of open source software: iPodder. iPodder is an awesome little program available on Windows, UNIX and Mac that provides the necessary software components to enable end user PodCasting. iPodder is totally free and a majorally cool piece of any true New Media Geek’s arsenal. That is, until I find something new. But for now, this is the coolest PodCast Consumer app out there. Go and download it and check it out.

Dad IM’ed me around 4:30 to ask if I wanted to get some dinner over at the Omega. So we met up at 5:00 and went over to get dinner. Some new Netgear equipment for the company had arrived today so he was taking the opportunity to deliver that as well. One of the units is the new FWG11P for his place. We use those at all of our branch offices. The other is the new 26 port rack switch for here. That is going to make our network a fifty port network. It also adds our first gigabit Ethernet ports as well. As well as our first real manageable switch. None of our competitors work with equipment like that at all. This is just one more way that we are setting ourselves apart from the competition. I am just excited to have new toys to play with.

Just before I left to get dinner with dad, Mary woke up with really bad heart burn and wasn’t able to sleep anymore. She wanted to watch a movie so I set her up in the theatre with The Aviator. It is her first time getting to really watch a movie in “The Theatre”.

After dinner dad dropped me off at home. Jocelyn arrived just a little bit after I did and waited for Mary to finish her movie and then they headed home to relax for a little bit before Mary had to go to work.

7:30 and I am out the door on my way to Buffalo for another exciting overnight. I am really getting used to this Buffalo commute this week. I am starting to know the exits on this side of town a little bit.

Today’s motto is taken from the wall of the office where I am working: “Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intentin of arriving safely in an attractive and well preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways, champagne in one hand – strawberries in the other, body thoroughly used up, totally worn out and screaming WOO HOO – What a Ride!”

I am still missing my tuxedo waistcoat (vest for those of you who don’t know what a waistcoat is). So if anyone has a lead on a greenish silvery waistcoat, let me know. I am completely out of ideas as to where it could possibly be. I thought that it was in my tux bag and that bag and everything else from the wedding night never left my car. So I am really at a loss for ideas.

Well, I had been doing pretty well tonight and was hoping to be able to get home at a decent hour. No such luck. I pretty much wrapped up around 12:15 or so but we had one glitch that was outside of the scope of the procedure and I had to escalate it to the team back in Rochester which means it will probably be another long night for me. The worst part about it is that because I am waiting on the phone the whole time, I am unable to really do anything but just sit here in the back office. This late at night, that tends to make me pretty drowsy. At this point I have already been on the telephone for close to an hour and a half. Ugh. And no end in sight. I finished reading all of the magazines that I had originally brought in with me. I try to get through at least two or three a night. It helps to cut down on the huge stack pending reading sitting around the house and it helps to deal with the trash issue since we don’t have to throw out nearly as many. So, after a while, I took a break and sat the phone down and went out to my car where I had two more magazines and a book. I figured that I should at least make some use of this time sitting here on the phone. It was a nice night out – almost good enough to go for a walk tonight but I am pretty tired and at the rate things are going, I am not going to be looking to get any excercise by the time I will be getting home.

I got a reprive from my telephone time when we deteriorated into attempting to contact Microsoft directly because we didn’t feel that we could continue to deal with the problem ourselves. My brake was only for a minute, however. This room is really cold because of the A/C running to keep all of the servers cool. I am in shorts because I was anticipating moving around quite a bit during the night but I ended up sitting still for a very long time and now I am quite chilly. At least it isn’t over 100 like it has been already in Texas. Ugh. I am tired enough and have eaten enough junk food since I have been here to cause my acid reflux to act up a little bit. What a long night.

Around 2:30 am we finally managed to start wrapping up. Looks like I will be out of here well before 3:00 barring any new emergencies.

Oops…. spoke too soon. It is now after 3:00 and I haven’t even packed up my laptop yet. This is getting to be a really long night. The only thing that is keeping me going is knowing that I only have a tiny bit of “The Great Gatsby” left and that I will get to finish that up as soon as I am done here. I probably only have fifteen minutes or less left. Once I am done with this book, I am going to treat myself to something a bit lighter like one of the “Cat Who…” books. I have one that I haven’t listened to yet. Gatsby is a pretty good book, though. I like it. Nothing totally gripping but the writing style is very good and decently easy to follow. The story is engaging. Hard to believe that this book is such an amazingly successful classic. It’s good, don’t get me wrong. I like it. But it isn’t outstanding like so many other classics that it is often compared to like Huckleberry Finn, To Kill A Mockingbird, Little Women, All Quite on the Western Front, etc. But it sure is a lot better than The Grapes of Wrath!

I have a bag of French Onion Sun Chips here tonight. I have been munching those all throughout the night.

Okay, I am finally out of here. Pheww.

On the way home I had a collision with a raccoon in Retsof. It was very sad. I tried really hard to avoid it but it didn’t give me anywhere to go. I am pretty sure that it died quickly. I am very sad, though. There is fur on my front right fender. I talked with Mr. Humphries and he comforted me.

The wedding weekend has set me behind on my regular updates but I am back at Wegman’s overnights and am doing all that I can to get caught up with everything. I figure between the wedding and the SGL2 postings and the Memorial Day holiday that everyone is managing to survive without the SGL updates.

I was up super early this morning, 3:45 am. Min was up at 3:00 getting ready to leave. I waited until the absolute last second and jetted out the door seconds after getting out of bed. Min is leaving for Houston this morning and I have to get her to the airport in Buffalo.

We left the house by 4:05 and headed through Batavia up to the thruway and out to Depew. On the trip we listened to an audio dramatization of Margaret Atwood’s “A Handmaid’s Tale”. I have never read any of Atwood’s stuff. The book was awfully depressing but many good novels are. The dramatization was only two hours long so I am sure that it left a lot of the novel out. I expect that the original work was more compelling. But it was still quite good. One of those “must reads” of well rounded readers of the twentieth century. Min didn’t quite get to finish the book before having to go into the airport to make her flight. I parked in short term parking and came in with her for about fifteen minutes to make sure that she was checked in and going through security where I could no longer follow. She has a layover in Baltimore this morning and should be in Houston at Hobby Airport before noon.

I finished Atwood on the ride home and began listening to an unabridged reading of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby”. Gatsby is one of those classics of literature that has slipped past me all of these years. So many high school students are required to read this classic but I was never introduced to it in school. I had heard of the book, of course, but never knew anything about what it was about. While reading (read: listening to) “Reading Lolita in Tehran” I learned so much about Gatsby that I decided that it would be quite important for me to read it. Plus being written in 1925 when Fitzgerald had no idea of the coming depression gives a unique glimpse into the world of America in the 1920’s that we so often miss. To us, a world has never existed without the Great Depression era of the 1930’s. The Roaring Twenties can never be discussed without talking about the great crash. But to Fitzgerald, the crash hasn’t happened, the world might just go on like this forever. And what a world it was. It must have been quite an experience.

I was home well before 7:00 and took the opportunity to shower and get a little bit of work done on the Case’s laptop that I have been working on for the last two days. Man does it take a lot of work to get a computer ready for someone. Wow.

Dad picked me up at 8:00 and we went over to the Omega for breakfast. We have hardly seen each other this past week, things have been so busy. For example, just look at how much I had to do this morning before even going out to breakfast!

After breakfast we went over to Grossman’s in the old Ames’ Plaza and did some shopping for air conditioning units for the server room and looking at some screen options for the basement windows. Then we hit the Chamber of Commerce for a minute to pick up something and then we went back to the house and looked at some options for mounting the screen door in the garage and for putting in screens in the basement.

I worked on the laptop for the majority of the day. Anything that involves a fresh install always is an involved process because I always want to do it right and that just takes time. So I concurrently installed Windows XP Pro and SUSE Linux 9.2 Pro onto the laptop while I did all that I could to clean around the house. I have really been letting things go upstairs and I needed to put some real work into it. I did two loads of dishes, did a tiny bit of laundry and cleaned all over the living room and my bedroom. It is far from done, but I got a ton done today. While dad was at the house I made him help me move one of the servers that I had been working on from the living room down to the server room. That helped things immensely.

Andy and I did a late lunch around 2:00 out at Aunt Cookie’s downtown. Neither of us have been down there for their delicious toasted subs for a while so it was a nice change of pace for both of us.

After lunch Andy continued working on the new Waste Watcher system while I continued working on that dual boot laptop and started setting up that new server. I am excited about the new server because it is a pretty elaborate testing bed for us to use internally and should really help us have a lot more technologies at our disposal to work with. I finally got a hold of Jocelyn around 3:00. She was supposed to come over today to study but she went over to her dad’s this morning and wasn’t around. I never got a hold of anyone at the house because Mary was still sleeping at 3:00 in the afternoon. Oh don’t I remember the days fondly…

Mary and Jocelyn both came over around 5:20 and hung for about two hours learning the fine art of PC Tech under my masterful tutalidge. (I have no idea how to spell tutalidge.) They have both been reading the Mike Meyer’s A+ book but have only made it to the first one or two chapters so far.

Min finally called close to 6:00 to say that she had arrived safely in Texas. She fell asleep just after arriving and had forgotten to call earlier. She is lucky, she is getting to play with our new dog while she is down there.

I had to be out the door by 7:30 to make it out to Amherst in time to work tonight. Imagine me being in Buffalo twice in the same day. Who would have thought. I have to be back here tomorrow as well. At least I have Gatsby to listen to in the car on the way.

This morning when I dropped Min off at the airport, I noticed that the old Wellesley Inn that I used to work at occasionally in Buffalo (this is back in 1998-1999) is gone and has been replaced with a Best Western. Nothing ever stays the same, does it.

I got out to Amherst only a few minutes behind schedule. I had been doing really well but I accidentally got onto i990 north and then tried to get off of that highway and ended up on an exit that dumped me right into the UB campus. What a pain that was. I had to wander around for a while to find my way out since there were no signs.

I am writing tonight’s updates from Wegman’s in Amherst. Looks like I will probably be out at a fairly decent time. I plan to stop by the hotel and get some free bagels tonight but I can’t stay up for long because I have a lot to do yet tonight when I get home and tomorrow in the morning. Not to mention that fact that I have already been up for a very long time.

Min and I finally got a little bit of a chance to sleep in a little this morning. Boy did we need it after this weekend. We were zonked. Min had to spend a lot of time today getting ready for her flight tomorrow. She is trying to pack light which isn’t easy for her. She doesn’t have me with her to carry her luggage and she doesn’t want to hurt her back so she is trying to take as little as she can get away with if at all possible.

We went over to dad’s around 3:00 to help set up a little for the picnic this afternoon. Andy went over to his family’s Memorial Day events closer to noon. I think that he is secretly very excited about having made macaroni salad.

I hit some golf balls around before everyone arrived at 4:15. Dad has a massive lawn now and there is plenty of room to hit golf balls around. It is really cool. Now I just need to invest in a large number of golf balls so that I can actually use the place like a driving range.

Uncle Leo, Aunt Sharon, Granda, Sara, Jeremy and Sara’s friend “Toast” all arrived around 4:15 and we ate near 5:00. Dad cooked on the grill. Min and I had the same delicious Morning Star Philly Cheese Steak soy burgers that I had had the other night. Boy those are good.

We got home around 8:00. I worked on the laptop for a little while. I went to bed around 10:30 and Min followed just a little bit later, closer to 11:00. Luckily, I was tired already so I was able to fall asleep. Tonight would be an awful night to not be able to fall asleep rapidly. I really think that my CPAP causes me to associate wearing it with sleeping and I pretty much fall asleep once I put it on.

The morning after! Dominica and I were up bright and early and on the road back to Farmington this morning. We were still pretty tired from yesterday. We were hoping to get to Josh and JoAnna’s close to 10:00 but it was more like 10:40 by the time that we finally got all of the way out there. We stopped in Lakeville on the way through at the McDonald’s and got some breakfast. We were in need of some quick egg protein.

We hung out with the newlyweds until about 2:00. When we went to leave (we had to leave when we did because we had to return by tux back to Marketplace Mall) we discovered that the waistcoat to my tux was missing. We searched everywhere for it. It was handy that we were out where the wedding was so that we didn’t have to wonder if it was somewhere else. We looked everywhere including in my car and in my luggage. I could have sworn that I had brought it in the night before but it was very dark out and I wasn’t able to see when I brought things in from the tent. So we are really hoping that Phil got the waistcoat somehow by mistake since we weren’t able to get a hold of him this morning.

Off to Marketplace Mall we went. I turned in my tux, that only took a second. They were very helpful about the lost waistcoat. We didn’t get anything resolved, but they were very helpful. Min did some shoe shopping at the Discount Shoe Warehouse Shoe Warehouse (no, I am not repeating myself, that is its name.) She found some flip-flops that she liked. She wanted to get some so that she would have something cool to wear when she goes to Texas in two days.

We got home around 5:00 just minutes after the Ralstons had called to see if we wanted to play a few games of AoE2. It was a long weekend and we figured that we needed a chance to relax so we decided that that sounded like a good idea. I called up Jeremy and he said that he was allowed to play. So I ran down to Leicester to pick him up. Dad also had the Case’s new laptop in his car that I needed to pick up so that I could work on that as well. No rest for the weary.

We played from about 6:30 till 11:30. It was an exhausting night. I needed that. I got Jeremy home around 11:45 and I collapsed into bed as soon as I was home again.

Today is the wedding. I decided to stay at home last night to make logistics easier this morning even though it meant considerably more driving. I got out to Josh’s at 8:55 – five minutes before Josh told me to be out there but he was already calling me by then to see where I was. Even when I am early I don’t get any credit for it.

Josh, Phil, Bob and I spent most of the morning getting the decorating done for the reception. We set up tables, chairs and did almost all of the setup in the tent. The tent was up the night before so we didn’t have to worry about that this morning. That was a relief. We would never have been able to deal with that today. We had been planning on playing golf this morning but we ended up barely being able to get everything done and to get to the wedding. After getting the decorating done, the four of us had to run up to Eastview Mall so that Josh could get his hair cut. Luckily we walked into the mall and there was a place right there that had no line so he was able to get right in or we would have been in big trouble. He managed to get right in and out. We ran across the street to Amiel’s and grabbed subs to go and ate them back at Josh’s while we took showers in shifts. We weren’t able to shower previously because we had been working outside so we were tight for time.

Phil and I went over to the Granger Homestead first to get everything in order since Josh wasn’t quite ready yet. Min and Andy were about the first ones there (unlike at Phil and Kate’s wedding where Min and Jenn were incredibly late.) It was kind of funny that Min and Andy sat together at Josh’s wedding where Phil, Bob and I were the best men since Min first sat just behind Andy and Josh at Phil’s wedding where I was the best man. Funny how things turn around like that. I bet no one else even noticed how that worked.

Bob and Josh made it over not too far behind us. Phil and Bob got everyone seated and we got the show rolling pretty promtly. The weather was absolutely perfect. We couldn’t have asked for a better day for the wedding. The rain held off for all of the times that there were actual wedding activities going on but the sun didn’t get so warm that it was ever uncomfortable.

The wedding went smoothly and afterwards we all headed over to Josh and JoAnna’s for the reception. Having the “village” park right next to their house really worked out well since they were able to put the reception tent onto the park lawn but it faced their house and blended right into their lawn it was really cool. Very easy to deal with. We got over to the reception around 5:00. Dinosaur BBQ arrived to do the catering at 5:30. We partied on until about 9:00 when people started to move on. Min and Andy took off and I stayed around to help out for a little while. I didn’t head home till around 10:00 or maybe a little bit later. Over at SGL2 there are three audio postings from the reception that you should go and check out.