Sheep Guarding Llama

Ah yes, another exciting evening of writing my daily updates while on the clock 🙂 This is working out really well. I have already managed to read an entire magazine that I brought with me before I even got around to opening up my laptop. I am finding myself to be very productive at this job.

I arrived home in Geneseo just after 2:00 this morning and was in bed by 2:30. Nothing went seriously wrong last night and so no one needed to wake me up this morning to talk about the project. What a relief. This is the first day that that hasn’t happened. I was really glad because I desperately needed to get some sleep. I can’t believe that I managed to drive all of the way home last night.

I got up just after Andy this morning. We did some project planning and design first thing and then drove up to the city to do some work at the hospital. We got lunch at McDonald’s in Geneseo on the way out of town. Eric wasn’t in the office today because Amanda was with Rachel’s class at school on a field trip to Sonnenburg [sp] gardens in Canandaigua for the day. So Eric was home babysitting. Andy and I tested out some VPN equipment up at the hospital to see if it would work. It didn’t. Bummer. But we grabbed Eric’s old computer while we were there that we are bringing down to get set up for Min to use in her classroom at Castile. There is a very limited number of classroom computers there and her room isn’t wired for ethernet so I am setting up this machine with wireless 802.11g to see if that will work well in the school.

I worked in Hornell tonight. I always forget how close Hornell is to Geneseo. It always seems like it is more than an hour away, maybe even two. But the reality is that it is just over half an hour away! Too bad there isn’t anything interesting there, it might be worth going there from time to time. Actually, there might easily be something interesting there but it is in such a remote location that I never go there for anything. One of the problems with it is that the US Route 86 interchange with i390 happens just to the north of the city so that you never end up driving into the city at all. I don’t think that I have been into Hornell since the time that my Aunt Elizabeth died and I was driving my grandmother and my mom out to Ohio to see her. Mom’s dad, grandpa, was in the same hospital in Canton, OH so we managed to see both of them while we were there. Aunt Elizabeth died that weekend, as we had expected and grandpa was fine, also as expected. That was a long time ago now. Mom was healthy then. At least, mostly so.

On my way home from Hornell, which was pretty early because the store went so smoothly that I was done just after midnight, I stopped off at exit four in Dansville to get some gas across from Noyes Hospital because the gas in Dansville is like ten cents cheaper per gallon than it is in Hornell. While I was pumping gas, a guy who was pumping gas at the pump next to me leaned over and looked around the pump and asked me if I was a local. I said yes and he asked me if I could help direct him to a hotel where he and his buddy could stay because they were from Winchester, VA and driving up to Rochester to pick up a motorcycle that they had just purchased online. They had looked around at the potential places to stay in Dansville and were not too impressed and were hoping that they would find something decent as they travelled towards Rochester. For some reason, I forgot about the very nice Country Inn and Suites in Mt. Morris and instead directed them to the new Quality Inn in Geneseo. I guess that that happened because they had asked me if I knew where a Days Inn was instead of asking for just a generic hotel. I had forgotten momentarily that the Days Inn in Geneseo had been purchased by the Quality Inn just a few weeks ago and was undergoing the reformation at the time. So my mind jumped right to the Geneseo hotel. (This is actually a part of the story, bear with me.) So, I gave them directions to the hotel and sent them on their way.

While travelling north on i390 towards home, it occurred to me that the hotel might be full because the college students going home and having events at the end of the year. So I thought that I would be nice and call ahead to the hotel for these guys and make sure that there was at least one room available there before they went to Geneseo and ended up with no place to stay. I know that not all hotel auditors are willing to help wayward travellers find a room at a competing hotel if they don’t have a room available so I figured that, if there were no rooms, I would head to the hotel and get there before them since I sent the easier but longer way up to exit eight. But I called and there were a few rooms available so it wasn’t a problem. The girl working the desk answered the phone and said “This is Mary.” I hadn’t thought anything of it until I had hung up the phone. After I was off the phone my brain was processing the voice that I had heard and realized that it was, or at least I thought that it was, Mary Johnston who disappeared a year and a half ago. Just after Min and my wedding, Mary had moved to Wellsville and we had lost track of her. Mary has a tendency to do this from time to time. She is really hard to keep tabs on.

So I decided that I would investigate this mysterious Mary at the Quality Inn person to see who it was for myself. So I drove to the hotel on the way home and, sure enough, Mary Johnston has resurfaced in Geneseo. Boy was she surprised to see me. Apparently she has been reading SGL from time to time to make sure that I am still alive but never bothers to actually email or call or anything. She CLAIMS to even have stopped by the house a couple of times after work but has never managed to find anyone at home when she has done so. It is crazy that after a year and a half of wondering where she was, she has been working for the last six months just one block away from the house! And not just working nearby but working the infamous audit shift. I swear that there is something about me that causes the entire universe around me to work the audit. I did it first in 1997 after having had left Tops. I worked the audit at the Days Inn Rochester Thruway off of West Henrietta near LeHigh Station Road. That place was awful but the hours and pay were decent for what you had to do. I had never heard of anyone working a hotel audit before that. Then I convinced Andy that he had to work the opposite hours as me when all of the other auditors left the Days Inn. He was hesitant but he eventually decided to give it a try and ended up working there for a while. Then both Leanne and Megan decided to try it out and ended up working for a while together over at the Comfort Inn Airport on Buell Rd. in Rochester. That was probably 1998 or 1999. Then both Andy and I managed to move over to the Wellesley Inn by MCC. That was after the girls were working at the Comfort Inn, I remember, because Peter Parks had been working at the Comfort with Leanne, Megan and Tristan (who, like Mary, fell off of the face of the earth) and had gotten a position over at the Wellesley and had said that it was awesome. Because he talked to the Comfort, they knew when the audit opened up at the Wellesley and I was able to apply before anyone else even knew that the audit was open. Then Andy came over a few months later. Then, many years later, Miranda started working the audit after she started dating Andy. So, even though she was working in hotels before that, we will count her in the list. And then, Dominica started working at the Conesus Lake Hotel in 2003 and moved to the Fairfield in 2004. And then, in late 2004, Mary started at the Days Inn Geneseo which has now changed to the Quality Inn Geneseo (or the Geneseo Inn as they are calling it at the moment.) So, the Scott gang has quite the history of working the hotel audits in the Greater Rochester area. I would be surprised if more than a handful of people anywhere have such an associated entourage of hotel auditors who all knew each other before they worked unrelated or mostly unrelated hotel audit jobs!

So, I ended up hanging out with Mary until after 2:00 in the morning. We decided that we would do breakfast so I had to get home so that I could get a little bit of sleep before she came over to pick me up early in the morning.

I am writing tonight’s updates while working in the server room of Wegmans in Elmira. So far, so good. I have been here almost half an hour and nothing has gone disasterously wrong yet, so I am hopeful for a smooth evening of migration fun.

I got into Bob’s apartment this morning around 6:15. Just in time to hear his morning alarm going off. I was so tired when I got there that I couldn’t even handle waiting for Bob to actually get up to say good morning. I don’t think I ever even moved as long as he was there. I was out cold. I did, at least, remember my CPAP.

I slept with my cell phone by my head with an alarm set for 9:15 so that I would be able to get up at a reasonable time. It work me up but I snoozed for another fourty-five minutes or so before actually getting out of bed. Then I showered, dressed, packed, read-up the living room a little and went out to my car (which I had to park out on Fall St. last night). I drove over to the middle school and joined Nate, Bob and Zach on their lunch break. I was able to hang out there for about an hour which was nice since I almost never get a chance to see anyone anymore.

After the “lunch” break, I had to go to Varna for a little while to do some work on the computers there. There were a couple of issues that I had to deal with. Mostly having to do with the printers. Nothing too exciting. I was there until about 1:30.

Steve met me down on the Commons at Simeon’s on the Commons for a quick bite of lunch. I had a delicious pear and gorganzola salad with blueberry vinigrette dressing. Yummy. Oh how I miss Ithaca. We couldn’t stay long, though, because Max was home sick today and we had to get back to the house to keep an eye on him.

I didn’t get much of a chance to relax this afternoon because I had a bunch of work that I needed to do up at the house. Mostly networking issues. So I worked on that all afternoon over a couple of Irish whiskeys. I didn’t end up having enough time to get everything done that I had wanted to but I got the most critical issues taken care of, at least. I did wet Steve’s appetite a little bit about blogging and podcasting so we may see him posting some material of his own in the near future.

I met Bob at the Boatyard Grill at 6:20. They tried to give us a hard time about seating. This is the second time this week that Bob has bad problems there. Earlier in the week he had gone down there after making reservations for 8:00. He arrived at 7:50 which at most restaurants would have gotten you seated early as they would have been holding a table for your party at around that time. Instead he ended up waiting until 9:15 before finally leaving with no end to the waiting in site. They never apologized and kept telling everyone that they would be seated soon even though they knew that there were far too many people in their reservations to be able to handle. So he already wasn’t very happy. Then tonight, he had arrived at 6:00 and asked for a table for two so that we would be able to eat promptly. They told him that when I arrived that they would seat us. So, when I arrived we walked up and could see numerous empty, clean tables that we could sit at. At that point, we were told that we would have to wait approximately twenty minutes until they seated all of the people that had gotten there after Bob had asked for a table. The manager was standing there and explained to us that it wasn’t anything personal but that used statistics (apparently in place of customer service.) But when we explained how discourteous it was to seat people who had arrived after we had asked for a table he decided that he would give us a table. Which, of course, prompted us to wonder why they hadn’t just seated us before if they were able to do so without any problems. He didn’t need to clear the table for us. There were tables next to us that were empty. In fact, it appeared that the restaurant was no where near capacity and that they were just making people wait to be seated to give the appearance of being busy when they in fact were not. Needless to say, we were not impressed with our dining experience and in Ithaca, it is far to easy to go to any other really awesome restaurant and I expect that in the future, we will.

At 7:45 I got on the road to go to Elmira. I arrived here at the store at just after 8:40 and got settled in. I am really hoping that I can get out of here really early tonight because I am totally exhausted after that long, long night last night and very little sleep since. I am planning on driving back to Geneseo tonight after finishing up here but I might not be able to handle it and might have to get a hotel room here in Elmira or something. I can barely keep my eyes open sitting here in the office waiting for the computer but maybe by the time I am able to get onto the road I will have gotten a second wind. But that doesn’t seem very likely. I am really glad that I have “Reading Lolita in Tehran” to listen to in the car because it is relatively engaging and really helps to keep me awake although the woman that they chose to narrate it is very monotenous and has a really think, slow South African accent that encourages you to fall asleep. But it is better than nothing.

I have been figuring out what my travel schedule is going to be like over the next several weeks. I have nothing exciting until late June. I will be bouncing back and forth among Rochester, Syracuse and Buffalo until late June with one trip to Johnson City on June 20. Then, on June 27, I will be in Downington, Pennsylvania. I don’t even know where that is. I expect that I will be staying in a hotel there but I am not sure yet. Then on July 5-6 I am in Princeton and Bridgewater, New Jersey. That is the first “exotic” destination on my itinerary. Ithaca on July 25. No more distant travel until August. It is going to be a pretty slow summer, I think.

I am setting some serious records tonight. It is just about midnight and I am about to put in the call to the operations center to have them check to see how things went tonight. I have never called them before 12:30 and only one time before 1:00. I am really hopeful that this will wrap up here and I can go home shortly. It would be so nice to be home before 2:00. I haven’t seen my wife since yesterday afternoon! That makes me very sad 🙁

This Wegmans closes at midnight! I didn’t know that there were any non-24 hour stores left. I can’t believe that the city of Elmira doesn’t produce enough business for its largest grocery store to keep them busy through the night. Elmira is a pretty big town. Geneseo is a 24 hour store. And we are just a dinky little town. Elmira is a real city. Much larger than Ithaca but the grocery store is just a fraction of the size.

Well, in the hopes that I manage to actually get out of here in the next few minutes, I am going to shut down my laptop and get it all packed up so that I don’t have to stay later just to do that. I will try to audiopost over on SGL2 when I get out on the open road. I already posted twice on there today!

Min is teaching still this week so she was up super early this morning. I got up at 6:40 to get ready to go to breakfast with dad and her. We met dad over at the Omega at 7:00. We didn’t get to hang out long, though, because he had to get up to the city to do some banking and Min had to get down to Castile to teach.

Today is the first really full day of development work for Andy and I. From here on in, we are going to be really busy with that. We got a lot of really good work done today.

Andy and I did lunch at Denny’s to celebrate the real beginning of the project. It is weird having Andy around during the day since he has never had days off since we moved out to Geneseo. So this is a whole new house paradigm for us. Min is working days out of the house. Andy is working out of the house and I am working three overnights a week all over the place. It is almost exactly opposite of what all of us have been doing since moving out of Ithaca. So it feels really strange.

I got a lot of work done for dad this afternoon and did some bill paying too. It feels SO good to finally be able to actually put some money into some of our debt. That has been a real source of stress for quite some time.

Min came home but we only got a little while to hang out. I had a lot of work to get done this afternoon and had to get ready to leave. I am working in Corning tonight at 8:30. After I get done with my shift, I am driving up to Ithaca to crash at the Casa d’Bob. Then, tomorrow night I am working in Elmira so it seemed to be a better use of time to stay in Ithaca. So call the cell if you need me tomorrow.

I swung by Leicester to drop off some stuff for dad and Jeremy before heading south. Then it was off to Corning. It is just over an hour to get down to Corning.

The night started out rough with a power supply failure as soon as I arrived. That was a bad omen. It cost me fifty minutes right up front. So I knew that I was going to be in for a long night. Most of the night went relatively smoothly but when we went to do our final check so that I could leave the store, we ran into some major issues and had to escalate the issue. It was around 2:20am when we ran into the issue. But it took a long time before we could get anywhere. The upside of the event was that I had plenty of time to write all of today’s updates while I was sitting in a noisy back office computer room on the phone with like six support people all from different departments trying to deal with tonight’s issues. What a blast. It isn’t any fun having to wake everyone up in the middle of the night to deal with things out at the store. Everyone was really groggy.

For anyone who is interested, I have two extra copies of the really awesome movie Indian Summer. One of the copies is DVD and the other is Laserdisc. If anyone is interested, let me know. I just thought of that while I was sitting here for hours waiting for everyone on the phone so I thought that I would through it out there.

I managed to wrap up in Corning around 4:50am. Oh boy, only four hours later than I had been hoping. Ugh. That means that I won’t be arriving at Bob’s place until after 5:30. That is SO much later than I had been shooting for. I am going to be really dead tomorrow. And tomorrow night is Elmira and then I will be driving home. Maybe I will make them get me a hotel room on Wednesday so that I can get some sleep before I drive. But I need to be home on Wednesday to work with Andy. So we will see. This is a really busy week. Three nights out of town, working on the Waste Watcher, trying to sleep, teaching all day Friday, my regular lecture, and then I am taking Min out for a special surprise date on Sunday evening. She knows that we are doing something but she doesn’t know what we are doing yet. I can’t tell it on here since she might read the updates while I am out of town to keep up. She probably won’t, but she might.

Min and I are in Frankfort this morning. Due to a network issue, we are not able to update the site while we are out here, so everyone just has to wait until we get back home to see the latest updates. But since you can’t be reading this until we are back and have updated the site, I guess that there isn’t a whole lot of point to me even pointing this out.

I managed to actually sleep last night. I had only got about four hours but that is a lot better than nothing which is what we were worried about. We slept with the window open and I held my head with my hand to allow me to breathe as much as possible.

We had breakfast at Min’s parent’s house, bagels and donuts. Then Min and I watched Alien Versus Predator while everyone else was at Mass. It wasn’t quite as bad as I had imagined but it was definitely pretty bad. What a cheesy idea. I really can’t believe that they made that.

We headed out from Frankfort around 2:30. We listened to more of “Reading Lolita in Tehran” on the way home and stopped at one of the rest stops to get some quick lunch at a McDonalds. We also got some ice cream at Ben and Jerrys. We haven’t done that in a while.

We got home and Min ran out to Walmart to return that bad movie and to do some quick shopping. I took care of some things on my laptop that needed to be done and then we drove down to Leicester to visit with the family for mother’s day.

After visiting with the family, we came home and watched Resident Evil: Apocalypse. It was a relatively mundane rip off of Dawn of the Dead. It was okay but nothing special at all. Then it was off to bed. Early day tomorrow again.

Tomorrow I am having breakfast with dad at 7:00 at the Omega Grill. I will be at the house most of the day tomorrow working with Andy. Then tomorrow night I am working in Corning. Tuesday night in Elmira and Wednesday night in Hornell. I will probably be staying in Corning or Ithaca on Monday morning to reduce the driving and to catch up on some sleep time. I expect that I will be going into the Castile school on Wednesday during the day to do some work down there that I don’t have any other time to get in.

Okay, plenty of updates for everyone from over the weekend. See you all next week.

We slept in a little today. I needed it. I have been really tired for days. Andy and I were planning on working some this morning but his computer died last night and he is still working on rebuilding it. He has a lot of rebuilding to do so we didn’t have any work to do this morning.

We had some miscellaneous work to be done this morning. Min did the packing. I cleaned the garage. I took my car in for an oil change at Jiffy Lube in Geneseo and got my summer wheels put onto the car. While the car was at the shop, Min picked me up and we went over to Walmart and did a little bit of shopping for Mother’s Day.

We picked up the car and drove up to the city and did some banking. Then we went to Borders because we wanted to get a book on CD to listen to in the car. We got “Reading Lolita in Tehran” which I have been wanted to read for a while. I finally convinced Min to let me get it. She claims that she was interested in reading the book but she never acted very interested whenever I mentioned it. I also got “The Cat Who Went Bananas” which is cool because I really like the books in that series. We also found the seventh installment of As Time Goes By which we have been waiting for for forever. Unfortunately, season seven is quite short as well. Min got a few miscellaneous books and I got a couple of magazines and then we headed out to go to Frankfort for Mother’s Day.

We arrived in Frankfort just in time for pizza. Joe is home from college – finals were last week.

We tried to watch The Phantom of the Opera that we got the other day but we only made it about twenty minutes into the movie before the disc didn’t play anymore. So now we have to deal with returning the movie to Walmart. So instead we watched the first five episodes of As Time Goes By Season Seven. Boy is that show good. That is my favorite television show ever.

We forgot to pack my CPAP for this trip. This is only the second time that we have travelled overnight since I first got the CPAP in January and we haven’t gotten into the habit of packing the CPAP yet. So we are worried that I won’t be able to sleep tonight at all.