Sheep Guarding Llama

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.

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.