Sheep Guarding Llama

We had to be up very early this morning because we were meeting dad for breakfast at 7:00 at the Omega Grill so that Min could get down to Castile to teach by 8:30. Today is her first full day teaching.

Min took off to go down to the school and dad took me home. I walked up the driveway, put my key in the door, pushed forward and the door didn’t open. Instantly my mind clicked: Deadbolt! We don’t have a key for our deadbolt. I don’t have the garage door opener that Min used to get us out of the house this morning. Oh no! I took off running like a madman trying to catch dad before he was out of the driveway. It was all that I could do to catch up with him. I knew that he didn’t have his cell phone on so if I didn’t catch him on foot that I would be out of luck. I chased him all the way to the end of the “street.” Boy did I run like crazy. I really didn’t think that I was going to catch him! Right at the end of the driveway he saw me in the rearview mirror and pulled over and waited for me to catch up. He ended up having to drive me down to Castile to get the garage door opener from Min. So we left the house at 6:55 for breakfast and it was around 10:15 when I managed to finally get back into the house. That made for a different morning than I had been expecting.

My laptop was already in the kitchen and being the lazy computer guy that I am, I just worked from the kitchen for the rest of the day. I managed to be quite productive today at home by myself. I even managed to get some cleaning down around the house as well. I tend to be very productive when I am at home all by myself. And being upstairs makes it that much easier for me to clean up around the house since I can see the mess and can just take a minute out of whatever I was doing to do something about it. The carpeting in the living room had some scrubbing that needed to be done and I took care of that. Min was very happy.

Min got in from teaching around 3:30. She sat in the living room with me while I worked at the kitchen table and she studied for her A+ exam in the living room. She was exhausted tonight so we just went out to Wegmans for a quick and easy dinner. Our Federal tax return came in the mail today and so did Andy’s. I am not sure as to the benefit of telefiling if we were able to telefile two days before Andy did his taxes and he didn’t telefile and his came the same day as ours. That means that the telefiling added two days or so to the process instead of removing some days. That isn’t very good. That is a service that you have to pay extra for!

I am working at the Marketplace Wegmans tonight. This is the second closest Wegmans to home for me. Working the overnights in small offices full of computers reminds me of the old days of the Waste Watcher when I used to work long hours into the night at Washington Hospital Center – often not leaving until the sun was rising in the morning. Then driving back to a hotel and getting some sleep. That is exactly what I will be doing when I am working at Wegmans outside of the Rochester area in the very near future.

Wow am I behind here. This past week has been so hectic that I just can’t get to everything. I have only barely even been able to set up my laptop more than once or twice to even think about doing any updates. I did a couple of audio posts over at SGL2 this week to keep people up to date that at least I am still alive. Everyone will just have to hang tight over the next few days as I catch back up – hopefully. I am working in Rochester again tomorrow night so I have a short day in which to write and I have to pack up the laptop as well so that makes it extra tough. At least I am not going to be out of town quite yet.

Min was awfully tired this morning but we still managed to get out of bed and get out to Perry to go to Sunday School at 10:00. She shouldn’t be complaining about being tired because she kept telling people at church that she would prefer an earlier church service to the one that they do. I don’t think that we would ever make an earlier service.

After church we did our weekly run to the Silver Lake Family Restaurant in Perry with dad. It is nice to not have to rush out of church and then rush to eat lunch because Min has to get off to work. Now we get the opportunity to spend our Sundays together as well. Of course, losing her income isn’t fun. But at least we get to see each other a ton more often then we did before.

From lunch we drove up to the city and did some banking and paid a bill at Home Depot that we needed to get taken care of. Then Min went over to JoAnn Fabrics and I went to Borders. I found a really inexpensive copy of the New Revised Standard Bible that I picked up as well as a cool duo-tone copy of The Message which is a modern paraphrase that I have been looking for. Min stopped by after she was done looking at yarn because she was looking for a Bible that she would feel comfortable writing in to use for notes during Sunday School. It took her a while to find one that she really liked but eventually found one.

Andy took off some time while we were out at church or lunch. He is gone for five days up to North Bay in Canada. So, Min and I have the house to ourselves for the week. It is always weird having him gone because he doesn’t leave very often I get used to the house never being empty. I am pretty sure that he is in the house significantly more than I am.

We got home just in time to order some pizza and head out to pick it up and take it down to my grandma’s in Leicester. The family tries to eat together on Sunday afternoon’s but we rarely get to participate because Min has had to go to work so often. Grandma has been really sick recently. She got broncitus and is barely able to get oxygen. She has been in pretty rough shape for the last several days. We got Pizza Hut in Geneseo and headed on down there.

We had a good time hanging out with the family. We were there until almost 9:00. We came home and I had some work that had to be done over the weekend to get to and Min had plenty of studying for her A+ exam that she needed to do so she got to work on that. She is trying to force her way through that material but is having a really hard time.

Okay, a short update for today but at least it is better than nothing. I will be doing my best to get the last several days filled back in so that people can catch back up with my crazy life. Thanks for hanging in there. Remember that I do have other blogs that I am maintaining as well and you can feel free to check those out and on those you can even leave comments.

I can’t believe that it is the last day of April already. I feel like the month just started. Man am I getting old. Andy is getting his laptop prepared today so that he can drive to North Bay, ON tomorrow. He is going up to visit Miranda for the week. He will be home sometime on Thursday and we will be beginning work on our new waste tracking software at that point. That is our big project this summer.

John Stephens emailed me this morning to tell me that he was finally offered a job down in Binghamton. He has been looking for something for a really long time. It is about time that something came through for him. He has been working steadily for a long time now but not at a job that he really liked and it sounds like this position is going to be a fairly decent “promotion” for him. So that is very cool. Unfortunately, John “The Surfing IT Wizard” Stephens was planning on moving out to Geneseo and in with us in July when Andy moves out but he is, obviously, not doing that now. It is true that the contract is six months to perm but that usually just means perm. So he will probably be staying in Binghamton for a while now. So in three months we are going to be without a roomate. We don’t know yet whether or not we will be in a financial position to be able to not have a roomate. Right now, with Min being out of work, we really don’t know what things are going to be looking like in June. So, we could really use some prayers as we have so much up in the air right now.

Slept in this morning. Didn’t get up until around 10:00! Called dad and he came out and met us for lunch. It is Spring Weekend here in Geneseo so we decided to skip town and we went out to Lakeville and had lunch at Leisure’s. We haven’t been out there since just after Min stopped working at the Conesus Lake Hotel which is quite some time ago. It was a nice change of pace. They don’t have a big vegetarian selection there, though, so we don’t generally go there very often being vegetarians and all.

After lunch we hit Walmart because dad had some shopping to do. I managed to find a few movies, of course. I got What Dreams May Come, Swing Kids and Min picked up Left Behind II: Tribulation Force which she has been wanting to see because she just finished reading the first two books in that series and really likes them. We ran into Andy at Walmart. Small town.

Min is going to Joanne’s bachelourette party this evening so we just spent the little bit of afternoon that we had just hanging out around the house. Min had to be on the road at a quarter past four so our afternoon was very short. She took a short nap before leaving because she was pretty tired. Which is hard to believe because she managed to get some decent sleep in last night.

Dad called this afternoon and said that we finally got paid for a huge amount of back work that we had done and hadn’t been paid for in over a year. It isn’t everything but it is close to all and that really, really helps. We have been running on practically nothing for a year and times we getting pretty lean. That isn’t to say that times aren’t still really lean, but they are much better than they were not too long ago – like an hour ago, for example.

After Min left, I watched an episode of Red Dwarf Season IV. Michael and Danielle came over to drop off some movies and to pick up more. They borrowed First Daughter and the entire Herbie series of 1970’s Disney flicks. Those are classics. I love those movies. I wish that I had a copy of the recent remake that they made with Bruce Campbell. There is another new Herbie movie coming out soon with Lindsay Lohan, I believe. Then Andy and I headed off to Denny’s to get some dinner. The place was quite busy with all of the graduates back in town for the weekend. But it wasn’t too bad.

I went right down to visit grandma for a little bit after eating dinner. Dad was still there for a little while and they had wanted me to pick up some ice cream to go with some apple pie that they had down there. I only stayed for about an hour. Grandma isn’t able to handle people visiting for very long periods of time.

I was writing tonight’s update and my Windows XP Pro SP2 laptop totally died on my. It crashed and got the BSOD and everything. I am worried that this laptop might be on its way out. It has been crashing more and more when someone tries to use it to play AoE2 and that isn’t a good sign. But, we will wait and see. Just one more thing that I have to spend money on sometime soon. It would be really awesome if I could get another 18 months out of this machine. But it is already several years old and we lost two laptops last year so there isn’t a really good chance of it making it for a very long time. I do use it a whole bunch so it gets plenty of wear and tear. But I can say that it is really money well spent for me. This thing gets plenty of use since I don’t have a real Windows desktop anymore. I might go for a somewhat upgraded laptop for the next Windows machine that I get too because this seems to work out pretty well for me. Not perfect, but not too badly.

After visiting down at grandma’s, I came home and Andy, Art, Danielle and I played a round of AoE2. The Ralstons were home bored tonight so it worked out really well. You can find out the game details at the Friday Night Game blog site.

We only felt like one game so we wrapped up after that. Andy went to bed. He had a lot of driving to do tomorrow and he hasn’t packed yet so he needs to get to sleep early. I stayed up doing miscellaneous things around the house until Min got home from the party. We stayed up and talked for a little bit but we need our sleep for tomorrow so we got to bed between two and three in the morning.

Fridays have become our super nuts days the last few weeks. We have to get up around 6:00 am which is crazy for me because I have been working the overnights the last few days. Then we get ready and get out the door around 7:30 so that we can swing through Burger King and get some breakfast. That gets us up and moving. I need the big thing of caffeine that I get there on Friday mornings. Otherwise I wouldn’t be able to handle the day. Then it is off to school.

We arrived at the school around 8:30 and Min got right into teaching her first class, the sophomore’s, and I started working on my lecture materials for this evening. I haven’t had a chance this week to get anything ready for class and so I have a ton that I have to do today during the day.

I taught my lecture on XHTML web design this afternoon. This is my third lecture class and I think that it went fairly well. The material is pretty tough for the kids that I am teaching – many of them fairly new to computer and so they are having a hard time keeping with me. But I think that we are covering a lot of good material and that the materials that we are leaving behind on their server will make the class usable to them next year as well.

After my lecture, Min and I went to the Silver Lake Family Restaurant and got some quick dinner. Not a lot of time today between things. Then we went down to Leicester to visit grandma for a little bit. She is feeling pretty sick today and dad thought that it would be important that we see her this weekend. We only had a short time to visit, though, because our schedule is very full. But she doesn’t have the strength to have us there for very long anyway so that isn’t too bad.

After visiting, we headed on up to Caledonia to go to our Friday evening Bible study looking at Rick Warren’s “The Purpose Driven Life”. This is our second week with the group. Eric and Amanda are in the group. Min and I have been looking for a small group to be a part of for a while but we don’t really have anyone around our same age at LaGrange with us so we have been needing something else and we are really happy to have found this group.

We stayed at the small group until 11:00. Eric and Amanda hung out late too. We had fourteen people attend again this week. Pretty impressive. We had a really good time. We and the Millens are hoping that the group stays together after completely the PDL that they are working on now.

Today was my recovering day. I got home around 3:30 this morning and got into bed around 4:00. Rob called from the office at 9:30 so I only managed to get 5.5 hours of sleep at best. I got up as soon as the phone rang and stayed up the rest of the day. I had been up quite a bit in between because Min was getting up and getting ready for work and that makes me wake up occassionally. So I was pretty groggy today. I had plenty of miscellaneous things around the house that I needed to do having been out all week so I was busy taking care of those items. Min went down to Castile to spend a day split between teaching her regular computer classes and working with the seventh and eigth grades again that she will be taking over on next Monday. She is having a good time, though, and is looking forward to the challenge – although she is a little nervous as well. She has never taught a full blown class before and this is a style that she isn’t used to so it will be extra hard for her.

Min got home around 3:30 and we got ready and headed out the door for the ride to Syracuse. We got out there just in time to drop Min at the Carousel Mall and for me to get down to Onandaga Community College. I am sitting on the CIS Department’s Professional Advisory Board tonight and it is my first time there. Min is going to hang out at the mall and her parents are going to come out from Frankfort to have dinner with her (and to get lots of popcorn from the popcorn place in the mall.)

The board meeting went really well, I thought. I was really impressed by the school’s apparent dedication to the program and I think that they have a really good opportunity to really make it into a really impressive curriculum. I am excited to see what they will be doing in the future. Tim Stedman teaches at OCC and after the meeting he gave me a tour of the school and the labs in the CIS department. I don’t think that I have seen Tim since Min and my wedding! He and Becky are expecting their first baby in about four weeks. Everyone is having babies these days. We are beginning to feel left out. We are the only couple in our small Friday night Bible study group that doesn’t have any kids.

I picked Min up at the mall around 9:00 and we headed back out towards home. We got in around 11:30 and got straight to bed because we have to be up early in the morning so that we can get down to the Castile school first thing.