Sheep Guarding Llama

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!

Way behind again. Oh well. What can I say. I am super busy these days – not much that I can do about it for the time being.

I was super tired last night when I went to bed and was really looking forward to sleeping in this morning. But that didn’t work out so well. Min’s car’s interior light was left on last Thursday and when she went to drive it this morning it was dead. So I had to jump out of bed first thing this morning and drive her down to Castile so that she could get to school. Dad had been planning on picking me up at 8:30 this morning to get breakfast at the Omega Grill but obviously that would be a pain since I will be in Castile. We had a hard time getting a hold of him, though, because he no longer has high speed Internet access and is currently using dial up. So his phone was in use. But we eventually got a hold of him.

So dad met me down at the Castile school and we went over to Lorraine’s in Castile for some breakfast. Neither of us has been there in forever. We ran into Pastor Tom of Castile Baptist Church having breakfast there as well.

After breakfast I went back to the school and worked for about half an hour getting the wireless workstation in Min’s classroom working. Now that I have figured out the process of setting up those machines, I have it working like a charm. I think that wireless workstations are totally the way to go. They are so easy to deal with and so easy to move around to wherever you need them.

I had a short day at home today. I didn’t arrive home until almost noon and had to leave again to pick Min up in Castile at 2:30 so I didn’t have much chance to get anythng done and definitely no chance to get caught up on SGL at all. I have been falling way behind on all of my blogs. I will try to do what I can to catch up a little bit over the next week or so. Things are crazy, though, tons of work to do during the day and working the overnights with Wegmans adds a lot too. This coming Saturday is Josh’s bachelour party and next weekend is his wedding. So that will make things a bit more busy as well. And don’t forget that Star Wars III is releasing on this coming Thursday! Finally, the end of an age. The last Star Wars movie. We have only been waiting for 28 years! I ordered our tickets for opening day today. I have seen every Star Wars movie on opening day since 1983! In 1983 I saw Return of the Jedi on the Cineplex Oberon in Toronto with my parents. I was seven years old. I still remember all of the high schoolers from around the city that were on school field trips to see the movie and they would cheer when one of the heroes appeared on the screen for the first time and would boo when the villians appeared. Dad and I still reminise about that.

When Episode I released in 1999 (I believe), I hadn’t planned on going to see it because everyone was under the impression that it would be impossible to get into the theatres on opening day and that it wouldn’t be worth it at all. But in the late afternoon, Emily called me and said that she had managed to just buy some tickets for the opening show at midnight. So we decided to go. Andy had to work that night so he called Esther who was working the shift before his and he offerred to pay her $50 to stay for a couple of hours into his shift so that he could come in late. He had to work hard to convince her even with the $50 which had to be more than a shift of income for her at the time. Tanner was able to go and at the last minute Dana decided to tag along too.

Andy went with me down to Castile to pick Min up. I dropped off a computer and we drove to Lorraine’s for some dinner. Yup, that is twice in one day.

After dinner we got back home and I had just a little while before I had to head out to work in Rochester. Working in the city this week, the real city. All of the dumpy stores. Tonight is the store on Brooks by the airport. Tomorrow is Driving Park. I hear that that one is REALLY bad.