Sheep Guarding Llama

Min and I made it to Sunday School. Seems like every other week is about the best that we can hope for these days. We are thinking about going to the Avon Wesleyan Church with Eric and Amanda next Sunday because they are having a big special thing for the ending of the Purpose Driven Life groups that we have been participating in.

Min drove my car to church this morning. She is relearning how to drive a stick. She never learned how to transistion smoothly between gears or how to downshift during regular driving so we are working on all of that. So far, things are going pretty well.

After church it was off to Perry and the Silver Lake Family Restaurant for lunch. We have become very predictable these days.

We got home and had to run over to Walmart to get some gardening supplies. Then Min spent the afternoon in the “garden” along the front sidewalk putting in new plants and flowers that we had picked up yesterday.

Min and I headed up to the city around 6:00 to do some quick shopping at Best Buy and to get dinner.

After eating, we went over to RIT for the concert. I managed to not tell Min what we were doing tonight. Even as we were approaching the concert she had no idea what we were doing.

It wasn’t until we were actually into Gordon Field House at RIT and walked by a table full of Allison Kraus and Union Station merchandise that she realized what we were doing. She thought that it was cool but was only so excited about it. But then the concert started and it blew her away. She thought that it was totally amazing. Union Station is so incredible live. They are just such outstanding musicians. Min said that it was the best concert that she had ever been to. I think that I probably would have to agree. Of course, it isn’t quite fair since Union Station is like my all time favourite band already. But boy were they good. Totally worth the $100+ that it took to get seats. If they are ever around, I totally suggest going to see them. Even if you aren’t a big bluegrass or country fan, their musicianship is just so amazing. And for those of you who liked O Brother, Where Art Thou, that was them as well. If you are thinking of buying your first AK&US album, I suggest getting their Live album on SACD. It is a double CD set in Hybrid. You will just die. It is so awesome.

One of the musicians talked about going to shop at Stutzman’s in Rochester. Stutzman’s has been my guitar shop since I was about ten! They are the best. It was cool to hear them talking about Dave Stutzman. I have used him to work on my instruments for as long as I can remember.

Jeremy was here until 11:00 when his mom came to pick him up. I was actually up and moving before she got here which is unusual for me on a Saturday morning. Min got up a little after me. Today we are doing some shopping for garden supplies like flowers and mulch.

Min is also taking today as a chance to learn how to drive stick. So she drove to Warsaw. Not all the way into town. She started driving from the Boyd-Parker Memorial Park in Cuylerville and went to the top of the hill in Warsaw and had me drive in Geneseo and Warsaw so that she wouldn’t be driving in town. Jen Warriner, for whom Min is teaching until the end of the year, owns and operates a garden shop in Rock Glen just south of Warsaw so we went down there to get the stuff that we needed. We were probably there for an hour or so. We got about $70 worth of plants. Nothing big, just lots of little stuff to put around the sidewalk. I am trying to get Min to switch to perennials from annuals so that the garden is sustainable. This “buy it and stick in the ground” philosphy doesn’t work for me. I expect gardens to take some maintainance every year but I don’t expect to have to replace the plants. I have never understood the point of annuals. You almost might as well use plastic plants, I say.

After shopping we went to Glen Falls and got an early dinner at Susan’s on Rt. 19A. That is a really interesting place. The owner is apparrently the previous chef of the Glen Iris. Susan’s is a strange combination of family restaurant and fancy restaurant. (You know that you grew up in Wyoming County when you refer to something as “fancy restaurant”!) The food was really good. They have a smoked trout appetizer that is really awesome. We really enjoyed our dinner.

Up and moving first thing and off to Burger King with Min for our regular Friday morning breakfast. Today is my next to last day of teaching at Castile. Next Friday is my wrap up day. Just doing some typing classes and then doing the final day of my six week lecture series on XHTML and Web Design.

I had some computer problems this morning and wasn’t able to get all of the kids in. We had to push off the first classes because there were so many problems. But it didn’t take me too long to get things fixed and back to working the way that they should be. Boy it would be nice if we were able to use machines that weren’t quite so flaky. That would make my life a LOT better. Actually, the problems this morning were mainly caused by me doing some configuration changes. I added one of our Netgear firewall units to the network and it ended up killing the main server for a while which caused just all kinds of problems. I had to lug one of the monitors up into the hall closet ceiling where we keep the server and work from a ladder for a while while I got the server running correctly again. So it was partly my fault. But only barely. It shouldn’t have reacted that way. There was even an “oops” error on the server waiting for me. But the cool new feature that we have now is that there is a VPN connection between my office here in Geneseo and the school so it is TONS easier to administer the school now and it is possible for those of us who are teaching at the school to be able to connect back to the house network so that I can work just like I am at home but more slowly. That is really important for me since I tend to loose an entire day each week because I am down at the school. Now I am able to work when I am in Castile. I also added the wireless network today so that I can add in the wireless workstation into Min’s classroom. That is a really cool new feature. And my laptop works wirelessly now too when I am there. Very cool.

I had to spend a considerable amount of the day today working on getting ready for my lecture this afternoon. I just get no time at all during the week to be able to work on these projects. It makes for really frustrating Fridays. But it keeps me busy and the days pass at an incredible pace.

Tonight’s lecture went pretty well. We did so much hands on examples that we didn’t even manage to make it through all of the actual material that I had prepared for the class. But that makes it a little bit easier for me next week since I have some of this week’s class to cover so I don’t need to produce as much material for next time. But it only helps a little bit.

After the lecture, Min, Dad and I went to the Silver Lake Family Restaurant in Perry for some quick dinner. The SLFR and the Omega have really become our two places to eat. It really shows how important having good, cheap food can be.

Tonight is the next to last night of our Purpose Driven Life Bible Study with Eric and Amanda’s church in Caledonia. That was from 7:00 till 10:30. After that we went back to the house where Andy and Jeremy were already embroiled in a warm up AoE2 match. They wrapped up and Min and I joined and we played three 2-on-2 matches. We played until about 2:00 in the morning.

I got up with Min this morning and Mary came over to pick me up around 7:30, just as Min was heading out the door to go to school. Mary and I went to the Omega Grill and got some breakfast. We hung out there until almost 10:00. That is so crazy that I finally found her again. Mary is always an enigma. It is unbelievable how easy it is to lose contact with her and then to always find her in the most random of places.

Updates Pending my Memory functioning again.

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.