Sheep Guarding Llama

Busy day today. Today is Josh’s bachelour party. My grandparents are still in town so Min and I are meeting them, my aunt and my dad for breakfast this morning at the Omega. We went over there at 9:00 and had breakfast. After breakfast everyone came back to see our house since they haven’t been here in a very long time and have never seen the basement since we put in some of the walls.

My family left here around 11:00. I have to leave at noon to pick up Eric so I was running around doing all of the last minute things that needed to be taken care of before leaving for the party.

I picked Eric up just a little after noon and dropped Min off to spend the day with Amanda. They are going up to the city to pick up Min’s car and then going and doing some shopping while the boys are out.

Eric and I got out to Farmington around 1:10. Phil and Chris were running a little bit late too getting out there so we all ended up racing out to the golf course. It was a slow day out on the course, apparently because of the pending storm, so there was no problem getting right out onto the tee. We had to split into two groups. Josh, Chris and I played best ball against Eric, Phil and Bob. We played 18 holes out at Victor Hills. There was no one else out on the course really and definitely no one behind us at all, we were apparently the last people of the day to decide to play even though we tee’d off at 1:20, but they still yelled at us and told us that we had to play without overlapping (I guess because we were moving too quickly and they wanted anyone who potentially played behind us to have to wait.) It ended up running too late for us to play the entire course, though, so we had to skip the last whole so that we could get some dinner and still make it to the movie. After the ninth hole, Eric, Bob and Phil decided to abandon the golf outing and head to the corner store for some Coors instead. They were almost two holes behind us when they disappeared and we couldn’t, for the longest time, figure out what had happened to them. We were on the twelth or thirteenth hole when they reappeared. We could hear them in the distance peeling out in their golf carts.

We went from golf to McGreggor’s in the south wedge. There Andy came up and met us. We had a single round and all got some quick dinner. I ordered fish and chips which, as everyone knows, is a British specialty which involves fried fish and french fries which, in England, are known as chips. The thing that is important is that there is a dish called “fish and chips” that is served at pubs which is what McGreggor’s claims to be. Well, they bring fish and potato chips. I mention this to the waitress that fish and chips is fish and fries and she tells me that “well this is how we do it.” Apparently they are just rude people trying to rip off some customers. Nothing else on their menu that is served with crisps (or as we American’s refer to them, potato chips) was listed as being “and chips” so they can’t even begin to claim that they really meant potato chips. Half of their menus is served with potato chips but the only thing on the entire menu that has the name chips in its title is the fish and chips. So there is no question that they are doing that simply to mislead people. I was very unhappy and everyone that was there agreed that it was completely ridiculous and that the waitress was very rude in the way that she dealt with it. It was like ordering a hamburger and getting turkey with gravy and being told “well, that is how WE do hamburgers.” I don’t think that I will be choosing McGreggor’s ever again. I can get treated poorly at many less expensive restaurants that at least serve what I order.

Tonight was my second time through Star Wars: Episode III along with Andy and Bob while Chris, Josh, Eric and Phil were all seeing it for the first time. I can’t believe that this crew, after all of this time, didn’t manage to go see it on opening night. It doesn’t seem possible. Even Min went opening day. I guess this is how you can tell that we really are getting old. At least a few of us are at least attempting to fend it off for a little while. I wonder if Tanner made it out on opening night. You know: Tanner_the_Jedi_Master

Andy and Eric took off after the movie. Eric has to speak at church twice tomorrow and Andy has to work so they need to get home and get some sleep. The rest of us went back to Phil and Kate’s place. Josh and I stopped by Tops to pick up a few things (some bachelour parties are Topsless but not this one… ha ha – oh brother) before going over to meet everyone. We all watched Team America which only Phil and Chris had seen before. I can’t say that it is one of my favourite movies. In fact, I definitely suggest that no one ever watch it. But if you are into puppets, I guess go knock yourself out (I mean, whack yourself over the head with something hard until you pass out instead of watching that movie.)

I drove Chris home up to the city and then swung down to Farmington to drop off Josh and Bob who is staying at Josh’s house. Then back home to Geneseo. It was about 4:30 when I finally got home and got into bed. Boy was I tired.

Today is my last day of teaching this year. My last day filling in for Min and my last day of lecturing. Not only that but it is also the last day of our Purpose Driven Life Bible study. So, after this weekend, both Min and I are going to be a lot less busy. She still has to teach all of next week but it is her last week so everything is just wrapping up for the year. So it will be a light week. My grandparents and my aunt are driving up from Ohio today to visit for the weekend. They are staying with dad. We are planning on having a quick dinner with them this afternoon between my lecture and the bible study and then we will have breakfast with them tomorrow. Min and I have to pick up her car from the dealer tomorrow since we have no time today and then most of tomorrow will be Josh’s bachelour party. We are golfing and watching Star Wars Episode III again. At this point, Josh still hasn’t let us know his schedule so we aren’t sure what time we can get rolling yet.

We managed to get up well before we needed to this morning and we were able to get ready to go to school at our leisure. We were ready earlier than we had thought but we were so used to running late that we left as soon as we were ready. We were past Burger King and already in Leicester when we realized that we had left the house much earlier than we had expected to do.

Min taught her regular seventh and eighth grade classes and I taught the computer classes. I didn’t have a full plate of classes today. That worked out well because I ended up having to work like mad all day dealing with a selection of things all day outside of the school.

My day was really busy but I managed to keep up with everything – just barely. After classes I taught my final XHTML lecture. This is the wrap up after six weeks of lectures. After the lecture, Min and I went to Perry and met dad, my Aunt Gayle and my grandparents for dinner at the Silver Lake Family Restuarant.

After dinner we stopped by dad’s house for about an hour to visit before going to our Friday night Bible study. This is our last week of our regular Bible study as well. Quite a bit of stuff wrapping up this weekend. My plate is finally almost empty. After next weekend, I will finally be able to almost completely relax for a little bit. Especially while Min is in Houston I will probably take a few days off to just colapse.

After our Bible study, we came back home and pretty much went straight to bed. I watched one episode of As Time Goes By before actually going to bed. Min and I have very busy days tomorrow. Min and Amanda are hanging out all day tomorrow. I am picking up Eric at noon to go up to Josh’s and play some golf. Before all of that Min and I have to meet my family in Geneseo for some breakfast since it is going to be the only chance that we have to see them this weekend. They are going back to Ohio on Sunday morning. We are planning on going to church at Avon Wesleyan on Sunday because Eric is speaking at both services giving his testimony.

Oreo had to go to the vet today. He has kennel cough and isn’t feeling too well. Francesca took him. He has some medicine and should be fine soon.

One of the teachers at school today said that she had been doing a search this week and had accidentally ended up coming to SGL through a link from a site that she went to while researching a trojan horse on her computer. How cool is that? That is the second person that I have heard from in the last few weeks that has discovered the site accidentally and only afterward figured out that this was my site. We must really be getting pretty popular. Cool.

I have to get to bed early tonight so that I can handle the long day tomorrow.

On my way home last night I stopped by the hotel and hung out with Mary until 4:30 in the morning. Even then I wasn’t tired but I felt that I needed to get home and get some sleep so that I wouldn’t be worthless today. Mary kept tempting me with cinnamon raison bagels and donuts. So how could I leave?

There were a few phone calls this morning. Eric made me get up and work as early as 7:40! That was mean! But I went back to bed.

Last night, Min took the Brainbench Computer Fundamental on Windows XP exam and passed with flying colours. That is awesome because it puts her that much more ahead of the competition when looking for tech jobs.

I knew that everyone was just dying to see a picture of our new little puppy so here is the best one that I have. His name is Oreo, like the cookie, and he is a four year old Boston Terrier currently staying with Francesca in Houston until he comes up to join us in about two weeks. She found him at the SPCA and we couldn’t resist. She says that he is very sweet and very happy to be home with someone. He is 29 pounds so about five pounds heavier than Dexter, Min’s parent’s Boston.

Min will be bringing our new family addition back with her from Texas when she goes down there on the 31st. She was already going down to help Francesca drive back up to New York with the girls. But now there is a puppy too! Andy is moving out in July so Oreo is going to live with my dad for two months while Andy is still here. Once Andy moves out, Oreo will move in. I think that dad is pretty excited about having a little dog around for a while too. As soon as we bought Oreo, I found he and Min looking at dogs for dad to rescue.

Mary and Jocelyn called around 11:30 to say that they were coming up to Geneseo to get some lunch with me. Apparently there is a cool Asian cuisine place on Main Street that I wasn’t aware of. Hard to believe that there is a restaurant in Geneseo that I don’t know. Hard enough to believe that there is one in the county that I don’t know.

So we went down to Lunahsea for lunch. It was really good. It is a very eclectic place. Apparently it is where the who’s who of Geneseo go for lunch. Everyone knew everyone there. It was very different. I am sure that Min and I will be going there all of the time now that we have found it.

We stopped at the coffee shop on Main St. to check that out today too. Today was my day to discover new stuff in Geneseo and to see Jocelyn for the first time in a year and a half.

The three of us got back to the house just about twenty minutes after Min had arrived with the Case kids. Mary and Jocelyn stopped in and said hi really quickly but then took right off so that we could get up to the city to watch the movie.

So off to the city we went. We had to run to East Rochester quickly to go to Vincent Mazda to drop off Min’s car for some quick service. She is getting her 55,000 mile service done plus getting her brakes checked and a headlight replaced. We have had the worst problems with the headlights on those PR5s. They go out all of the time.

We were really fortunate that we had decided to go to the early matinee because the theater wasn’t even full. We got there in plenty of time to get a really good set of seats dead center and towards the front.

I will try to not give away anything of the movie. It was really good. Far better than either of the other two early movies. Much closer to being on par with the original trilogy of the seventies and eighties. Can you believe that the first Star Wars movie was made in the later mid seventies? That is SO long ago. A twenty-eight year legacy has come to an end! I was definitely happy with how they decided to end the story. They managed to mix together the early and later movies rather seamlessly and that worked pretty well. Unfortunaley, the barely literate George Lucas felt the need to attempt political commentary in the middle of the film and through in a quick jab at our current president. It was really obvious but was, unfortunately, not thought through in the context of the movie and was, in fact, in opposition to what George was saying in the rest of the film. Even just seconds after making his poke at Bush he said something contradictory in the movie. It is almost like he made the six movies and realized that they were totally in support of the Republican establishment and then decided to through in a quick politcal statement to inform his liberal buddies that he wasn’t making the most expensive advertisement ever for our president and the war in Iraq. But the context was so poor that it just made him look like an idiot and will, in the future, not make sense to audiences that don’t know current political quotes. I won’t go into what it is because if you are fortunate enough to miss it, you might not be adversarily affected by Lucas’ low regard for his own movie.

The real star of the film was the amazing DLP projector that they used to show it with. We were lucky enough to be able to get tickets to one of the digital theaters and got to see the movie without there being any digital to analogue transfer until the final projection. Quite simply – this DLP technology is going to revolutionize the movie industry! The picture is so many orders of magnitude better than traditional film projection. The colours were way more vibrant, the contrast was higher, the image was brighter and tons more crisp. Even more exciting, there were no image deterioratin artifacts from the film getting scratched, overheated, faded and dirty. I cannot believe how awesome that movie looked. I was so impressed.

I am working on my laptop while working the overnights again hoping to get caught up with the updates. I know that everyone is desperate to find out all of the going’s on’s in ScottWorld.

I stayed up until 4:30 this morning working in the living room even though I had gotten home just after midnight. I had some real work for regular clients that needed to be done so I was taking care of that while other things were slow. When Min’s alarm went off at 6:30 this morning, it was me who jumped out of bed. I was so tired at that point that I couldn’t understand that it wasn’t me that had to get up. Min had to work to convince me that I should go back to sleep. She eventually did and I slept until around 10:00.

By the time that I finally got up, Andy was not far behind. We did a little Waste Watcher work and some miscellaneous work at the house. Then, around 12:30, Eric came down from Rochester and the three of us went out to the Omega Grill for some lunch. This is my third consecutive meal at the Omega Grill and Andy’s second. I eat there WAY too much. We hung out there for a while talking about the Waste Watcher and how progress was going on the new system.

After lunch we came back to the house and Eric and I went out to the deck and did some design work on the Incidence Tracking system that we are going to be soon integrating into the new Waste Watcher product. It is a system that already exists in the old system but the new one is going to implement it in an entirely new way so we have a bit of design work to do before it is ready to go.

Min got home while we were working and she tried to convince us to play AoE2 with her but we were all busy. Eric went home at 5:15 and dad came over at 5:30 to teach Min how to operate the video camera that she has to run during my lecture on Friday evening because dad can’t make it. My grandparents are coming down to visit this weekend and are arriving on Friday night so dad is going to be busy entertaining while I am teaching. So, consequently, Min is running the camera to record the class for him. I haven’t seen any of the videos yet so I don’t know how well they are turning out.

While I was waiting for Eric earlier today, there was a knock on the door and Airborn Express dropped off a box for me. I didn’t think that I had ordered anything but there was a copy of Visual Studio Professional 2003 that I had been expecting like six months ago and thought that it had been forgotten about. So that was a very pleasent surprise. That is about a $1000 software package. Andy had to buy his but I won mine. Which makes it that much nicer. Mine is also the “special edition” which comes with some decent software that Andy’s didn’t come with. Nothing that blows you away, but some nice extra stuff.

Francesca called just before went to dinner with dad and said that she had found this adorably cute four year old Boston Terrier at her local SPCA near Houston that she thought that we should get. We can’t have a dog while Andy is living with us but he is planning on moving out in July so we can have one soon. So we decided that we would rescue this sweet Boston. Francesca got into his kennel with him to see how he was and he was very excited to see her. She couldnt’ resist him. Min was very excited that I let her have a dog. She is going down to Houston in two weeks and is driving back with Francesca and the girls so she will have the perfect opportunity to bring the new dog, “Orea”, back with her. He is black and white. His previously family moved to England and wasn’t able to take him with them which is very sad. But we are very excited to have a new dog. Min’s parents offered to let him stay there until Andy moves out and so did my dad. We are going to have dad take him so that we can see him almost every day. Min has wanted a Boston for a very long time so she is incredibly happy.

Dad, Min and I went to the Omega for dinner. That is four consecutive meals for me. We had a quick dinner because dad wasn’t feeling well. He caught bronchitus from grandma and isn’t feeling very well at all. He probably went home at about 7:00.

I only had a little while after getting back from dinner before I had to hit the road to get to work in Canandaigua. This job of mine is giving me the chance to work in every little town anywhere. Tonight is kind of neat for me because I was working part time playing classical guitar for the Wegmans in Canandaigua when I got the Waste Watcher contract in Pittsburgh and I haven’t been back to this store since I quite in January, 2000! That is a long time ago. I worked there roughly from 1997-2000. Except for Niagara Telecom, Wegmans was the longest held job ever for me. And now that I am contracting here, my time is sort of racking back up again. I will have almost four years under my belt of having worked with Wegmans as a subcontractor by the time that I am done here.

The drive out was pleasent. Canandaigua is only about thirty-five minutes away from Geneseo. I finished another disc of “Reading Lolita in Tehran” on the way here. Only about five left to go. That is a really long book – but very good. I can’t believe how gripping it is.

All kinds of problems tonight with the store so I didn’t manage to get started for quite some time. No chance of setting a record tonight. But it shouldn’t be too late by the time that I am done. I need to get home and get plenty of sleep tonight because tomorrow is Star Wars Episode III and I want to make sure that I am wide awake for it. Min, Andy and I are taking the three youngest Case kids, Abby, Jenny and Danny, to see it at the 5:15 showing at Tinsletown. Tinsletown as the new DLP projector in the theatre that we got tickets to and I am very anxious to see how the movie will look on one of those (which is funny because that is what we use at home!)

Even with the rough start at the store – I was done by 1:00am. Not too shabby. This would have been the record if it wasn’t for the slow start. But that is okay. Nothing too much going on tomorrow and I can be casual tonight. I am not tired until a bit later anyway. I will probably stop by the Quality Inn on the way home and see what Mary is doing anyway. She worked the audit a week ago tonight so I am guessing that she is there tonight but it is a hotel and I know how the schedules can be so heaven only knows if she is there tonight.

I got home pretty early last night because we were wrapping up just before midnight. Boy that is nice. I was able to get home by just after 1:00. I was early enough that Andy hadn’t even gone to bed yet when I was getting in from work.

I spent the day today working on the Waste Watcher at home with Andy and getting one or two things underway for the class this Friday.

Andy and I went over to the Omega for some lunch while we kept working on the new system. Things are really coming along rapidly. The product is already in a skeletal working form and we are starting to see how it is going to work down the road. It is very exciting. A tiny bit reminiscent of the Pittsburgh project in March, 2000 to get the original system online.

I worked all day until Min got home. For dinner, we went back over to the Omega. They had spanikopita on special today and I couldn’t resist. They also had cream of vegetable soup although their’s isn’t nearly as good as Amanda’s is over at the Silver Lake Family Restaurant.

Tonight I am working up at Driving Park. Dad says that that area is pretty scary. Well, I got up there and he was definitely right. That store is located just east of the Rochester red light district. Not a good section of town at all. This store closes early for safety reasons. It is one of the really old, small stores. They have huge security posts up in front of the store so that people can’t drive cars through the front of the store. Instead of sliding doors the actually have ancient folding doors! It was weird. The staff there was some of the best that I have run across so far though. They were right on top of everything and were able to get my up and running right away. I broke my record tonight and was done at approximately 11:40. That was awesome!