Sheep Guarding Llama

I didn’t get out of work last night until much later than I had anticipated. I had wrapped up before midnight but we ended up having a problem as I was walking out the door and I had to stay for a few more hours. We never did get everything fixed. It was a long night. For two hours I was just sitting there waiting for things to happen at the end. That was pretty boring. I managed to plough through all of my magazines that I had brought with me and I take a lot of magazines with me every night just in case. At least I managed to get a ton of my magazine reading out of the way. I will be bringing even more with me from now on. The overnights make for a really good opportunity to get that light reading out of the way. I have so much of it.

After work I went over to the Geneseo Inn and hung out with Mary until after 5:00. I wasn’t tired at all and couldn’t convince myself to go to bed. I went home and did some work for a while. I had an update on one of our servers that needed to be taken care of sometime during the night so I took care of that. I was happy to get that out of the way.

Mary came over around 7:30 and we went out to breakfast when Min went to work. We went over to the Omega. Mmmm… potato pancakes. Yummy.

I took care of a few things around the house and then tried taking a quick nap for an hour before I had to go to my lunch meeting today. But by the time that I was supposed to leave I wasn’t feeling very well and decided that I was going to reschedule if at all possible because I was going to be completely out of it by the time I had driven to the city. I was supposed to try on my tux today but that just wasn’t going to happen so I will have to do that tomorrow. I called the guy that I was meeting for lunch and he said that tomorrow would really be better for him as well. That was a relief. So I am meeting him tomorrow at 11:30 for lunch.

Andy and I ended up doing some design work for a couple of hours this afternoon during my second wind. Around 2:30, I went to bed. Boy was I tired. Min came home from school and came to bed too.

We got up around 7:30 and went out to Wegmans to get some dinner and to do some shopping. We finally found a widescreen copy of Mira Nair’s Vanity Fair. So we picked that up. Then we went to the dollar store and to Walmart. We also picked up The Aviator which won five Academy Awards this year. It is the story of Howard Hughes, the famous billionaire.

We got home just in time for Andy to decide that he wanted to go to Wegmans so I had to turn around and go back with him. He said “Ha, ha, being a whiney bastard pays off.” He really said that. He is standing right here.

The three of us decided that we would play a game of AoE2 two on one tonight. We haven’t played in two weeks and we don’t get to play this Friday so it sounded like a good idea.

After the game, Min went to bed and I watched Matchstick Men which I have been borrowing from Eric and Amanda for over a year now. This movie really shows off Nicholas Cage’s ability to act. He really is a good actor but he so often does flat action films that it was nice to see him doing something different. It was an interesting film. Glad that I borrowed it, not something I see myself wanting to watch again but it was good to watch once. Kind of like The Sixth Sense which is great once and not very interesting to watch again.

I didn’t get to bed until around 4:30 last night so I slept in a bit today.

Working in Henrietta tonight. It is nice when I get to work very close to home.

I wrapped up early tonight, around 11:45. I was just about to walk out of the door when a bunch of stuff went wrong and I ended up not being able to leave the store until after 2:00. I ended up just sitting for a long time waiting for things. That was pretty boring.

I went down to the hotel and hung with Mary for a little while. I went home a little after 5:00.

I got up as Min was leaving for school this morning. Only four hours of sleep, which isn’t awful considering I took a nap yesterday afternoon for several hours, but it is still pretty light for a night’s sleep, even for me. I had to get up this morning because I have a meeting at Wegmans at 10:00 that I have to get to. So I got up and got moving and out the door roughly on time.

After my meeting wrapped up around 11:00, I went over to the hospital and Eric and I went to the Mt. Hope Diner for some “breakfast.” I will call it breakfast since I had eggs, toast and hashbrowns and it was my first meal of the day. We had three or four cups of coffee but didn’t stay long. I had some errands to run so Eric came along. We went to Home Depot. The idea was to pay off my credit line that I have there but for some reason I am having an issue with my debit card working there and I am not able to pay off that debt no matter what I do. So I put a big chunk down on it and gave up for the day. What a pain that credit line has turned out to be! Not worth it at all for all of the pain it has taken to make payments on it. After that we hit the bank and deposited my paychecks for the last few weeks. Then we went to Kaufmann’s and finally returned that pair of Dockers that didn’t fit that Min and I bought almost two months ago that has been sitting in the plastic Walmart bag by the front door for forever. Then we went across the street to Border’s for a minute. There was a book that I was interested in but they didn’t have it so I didn’t buy anything. Nothing. Nope. I know you can’t believe it but it is true.

I took Eric back to the hospital and headed for home myself. Min got home from work just about half an hour before I got in. It is a short evening today. I arrived home around 3:30 and have to be back on the road at 7:30 to get out to work in Geneva. I had to do some regular work at home until 6:00. I had to get a package out to an account in South Carolina. So I did that until 5:30 and then Andy and I ran out to UPS really quickly to get that sent off. Min spent most of the evening on the telephone with her sister in Houston who is looking to adopt a Boston Terrier of her own. She had had a one year old rescued puppy visit her yesterday and she was going to take that one but today she discovered a two year old Boston female that was at the county shelter that euthenizes after just three days and she thinks that she wants to possible take that one instead. So she doesn’t know what she wants to do at this point. So she and Min have been discussing it and discussing where all of the dogs will be staying this summer while Francesca is up in New York visiting.

Min made veggie hot dogs for dinner. We didn’t get much time to spend together, though. It was a busy evening. Luckily I am working only two nights this week. Tonight and tomorrow night. Tonight in Geneva and tomorrow up on East Henrietta. Then I don’t work again until Tuesday of next week. That will be my longest break for a long time.

I left for Geneva just a little after 7:40pm. It takes just about an hour to get out to Geneva going the back route through Richmond. It is not an exciting drive by any stretch but I have “Reading Lolita in Tehran” yet to listen to so I popped that in for the journey. I am about eleven CD’s into it which is almost fourteen hours or so. I think that there are four or five CD’s left to go.

As soon as I got into Wegmans I realized that I forgot something that I have to have in order to do my job. I tried calling the house and went into a panic when I realized that Min’s cell phone was off and the house phone was in use. The reason that this is so bad is because we have call waiting disabled because it doesn’t work very well so we have it set up to go directly to voice mail which generally works really well because my voice mail system immediately sends out an email alert to let me know that a message has been left and often the actual message gets delivered right behind it so that I can get to the message through my email without ever having to even check in with the voicemail service at all. Normally this is fine since the calls are usually for me. But tonight, I am here trying to contact people at the house. And those email alerts only go to me. Uh-oh. I tried a few times and had no luck getting through. So I called Eric and he said that he could run over to the house to let them know that I needed to talk to them. But he couldn’t go over for a little bit. I tried calling dad but couldn’t get through to him either. Luckily I do not have to have this cable absolutely first thing or I would already be in really bad shape. I tried dad again and managed to get through. He drove over to the house and had Min get a hold of me. Then she drove out from Geneseo to bring me the cable in Geneva. She wasn’t very happy about having to come out just to bring me a cable. But there was nothing that I could do once I was out here. I have a limited window to get everything done in and there is no place in Geneva where I would be able to buy a cable like that. I tried to call her and meet her in Canandaigua which is about two-thirds of the way between Geneseo and Geneva but her phone was still dead and on the charger back at the house so I wasn’t able to reach her once she was on the road and I wasn’t able to tell whether or not I would be able to leave until it was too late.

Min made it out to meet me just about 10:30. She was definitely not happy when she arrived. She was probably half asleep when I first called and she would almost certainly been asleep by the time she made it out here. It will be around 11:30 by the time she makes it back to Geneseo which means that not only will she be upset with me tonight but she will also be mad at me tomorrow since she won’t have gotten enough sleep. It might be a good thing that I have to work tomorrow night too.

I am writing tonight’s update, in case you couldn’t tell, from work in Geneva. I got a little time to write the update tonight because, for some reason, I actually managed to get ahead during the process tonight and I am actually stuck waiting on the computer. Normally, it has to wait on me.

Min and I had been hoping to have been able to pull ourselves out of bed and make it to the early 8:30 service at Avon Wesleyan this morning. Ha ha ha. That didn’t happen at all. Min didn’t even wake me up to ask me what time I wanted to get up until 8:50. Man was I tired. We ended up sleeping until the very last possible minute and rushing to get to the 11:00 service in Avon. Eric is speaking for a few minutes this morning as the spokesman for our 40 Days of Purpose Small Group so we thought that we would go to lend some moral support. We have been wanting to visit their church for a while now so it was a good chance. Unfortunately, today is a special service celebrating the end of the six week small group thing that they have been doing so the service this morning was nothing like a regular service so we didn’t get a chance to see what that would really be like.

After church, Eric and Amanda and us went to the Village Restaurant in downtown Avon. None of us had ever been there before so it was a good chance for us all to try something new. The food was pretty good. I was surprised that there was even a restaurant where it was. I had no idea that there was one there.

Eric and Amanda headed home and Min and I went over to Woody’s II right next to the Village Restaurant because Min wanted to get some dessert after lunch. As we walked by I noticed that they had ice cream from the Mackinac Creamery in Michigan! I was very excited because I am familiar with their ice cream having visited the actual creamery before back when I was living in Michigan. Mom and dad had come out to Michigan for a weekend to visit since I really didn’t have any time to make it back home. For the weekend we had driven up to the northern tip of Michigan where it comes to a northern point between the great lakes. I am pretty sure that it is still the farthest north that I have ever been. It is pretty far up there. While we were there we stopped by the real Mackinac Creamery. They have the most amazing ice cream. Right up there competing with Cows of Prince Edward Island! (Why does all of the really awesome ice cream come from such isolated locations?)

I was totally exhausted by the time we got home. So I laid down and ended up taking a pretty serious nap. I even put my CPAP on so you know that I was taking this seriously (you could say that I was taking this nap lying down, ha ha – oh brother!) I ended up falling asleep sometime around 4:00 and didn’t get up until pretty near to 8:00! That is quite the nap. About as long as my whole previous night’s rest.

After I woke up, Min and I went down to the theatre and watched Swing Kids with Christian Bale and Robert Sean Leonard. It is a movie about German teens in the 1930’s living in Hamburg during the Nazi occupation. It was pretty good. We got it really cheaply so I think that it was a good deal.

We watched Swing Kids and then Andy came down to the theatre and the three of us watched Star Wars IV: A New Hope. I haven’t had a chance to watch it on DVD yet. Boy did it look good in our theatre. Not as good as Episode III looked on the Kodak DLP at Tinsletown, but it gave a generally similar effect. It has been some time since I have watched Episode IV. It was pretty cool watching it right after having seen Ep. III twice because it really helped show what a good job they did tying the two story lines together. Now that you have a better grasp on the backstories from III, it is really weird to watch IV because you perspective is completely different. Suddenly you have a different appreciation for the things that are going on in the movie and who everyone is and why different things are important. It really is like a new movie now. And it is funny because there are often subtle looks between characters in IV that take on whole new meanings now that III explains them. I don’t know how much of that was intentional and how much was coincidental, but it works out really well.

Min was exhausted and ended up going to bed early on through the movie. I stayed up until the end and even then had a hard time falling asleep right away so I went to bed with my laptop and worked from bed for a little while.

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.