Sheep Guarding Llama

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.

Today is a happy day. I actually got to go to work last night and I get to go to work tonight too. What a good feeling. I have been needing this for a while now. Especially with Min having been out of work for the last few weeks things have been a little bit stressful. Well, last night went pretty well and that is a really good sign. We are no longer under the “pilot” of the project and are actually underway now and there shouldn’t be too much to worry about from here on in. Things are bound to go wrong but at least we don’t have much that we know will go wrong yet.

I managed to wrap up around 1:30 last night but got stuck waiting around until 2:30 because no one was ready to sign off on my work yet. That was a pain. We will get things like that ironed out as the project moves forward though. That won’t be too bad for very long. I got home around 3:30 and got to bed around 4:00. I did some light work when I first got home because I wasn’t tired yet and wanted to take care of some things before falling asleep for an indefinite period of time.

Turns out people felt the need to call me and I was up at 9:30 talking about the project from last night. So I only got about five hours of sleep. I am not great at going back to sleep after really waking up to talk to people so I went ahead and got up. I was awake some in between there because I tend to be partially awake when Min is getting ready for work.

Today Min is down at the Castile school mirroring the seventh and eigth grade teacher so that she can take over the classes on Monday.

Our evening was super short tonight. I had to leave at 7:00 to get out to Buffalo to work so we just stayed in and hung out for a little while.

The Wegmans contract finally came through and everything got finalized this afternoon and I am writing today’s update from the back room of the Titus Ave. store in Irondequoit, NY near where Josh and I used to live many, many moons ago.

I slept in quite late this morning getting ready to work the overnight tonight. I am SO excited to finally be back working again and nothing could be better than this contract. I am working Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday nights from today until the first week in October. Only some of those weeks I am not working all three nights. In fact, almost half of those weeks I am only working two nights. But the pay is the same regardless – more or less I am salaried which is awesome for this type of work. On average, I will work 2.5 shifts per week and often those will not be eight hour shifts. In fact, they could be as little as four hours. And not only that, but there is generally a one hour lunch break during that four hours as well that is also paid. So, the job situation is actually starting to look a little bit better. For a change.

Min was up at some reasonable hour this morning but she woke me up at noon when my contact with the consulting firm called to make sure that everything was ready for tonight. What a good feeling to wake up knowing that you will get to go to work tonight. It has been a long time since I had that feeling. I worked for five weeks at the end of last year but this is six months of work stretching out in front of me. This will actually be one of the longest projects that I have been on since IBM in 2000. Everything else has been really short projects and, of course, the Niagara work that I always do.

Dominica had to go up to the city to take care of a few things today. She had to do her exit interview at the hotel that she wasn’t able to do last week and she had to do some shopping. Min accepted a one month teaching position, full time, down at Castile this morning that they had talked to us about last Friday. We prayed about it over the weekend and decided that it would be a good opportunity for now. She is going to use this month to work on getting her A+ and other credentials so that she will be able to get a job on a help desk or doing some basic tech work to get us through the rest of the year. We were really hoping that she would have been able to find something already but not a single place in Rochester that claims to be hiring has even bothered to call her back. John Stephens has been having a terrible time getting a hold of anything up this way as well. Times are still tough no matter what anyone says – especially in the Rochester area. Min had to do some shopping while she was out to get some clothes for teaching.

I spent the afternoon getting caught up on all of the things that I have been getting behind on. I have a lot of work still that needs to be done for the lecture this coming Friday evening and I have a really busy week since I am going to be in Syracuse on Thursday night. So I have no evenings at home left before I have to have all of my material ready for the class. I also had a lot of chores to do around the house because the place is a mess and it is mostly my fault. Lots of dishes that need to be washed and lots of little messes all over the house.

Min and I went over to the Wegmans Plaza and hit the new Chinese take out place over there to see how they are. We haven’t heard of anyone going over there yet and the weather was really nice so we decided to give them a try. We got take out and brought it back to the house and ate out on the deck. It was way to windy to be eating outside. We kept losing everything that was on the table. We were lucky that the food itself didn’t end up blowing away. The food was okay but only so so. Nothing special. Maybe we are spoiled having lived in Ithaca for so long but I don’t think that this new place is living up to the Main Moon on Main Street.

It was a really short evening for me. I had to leave the house at 7:45 to make it up to Irondequoit in time for work. That makes for a really non-existant evening. It feels like you should just be starting to kick back and relax and all of a sudden you have to head out the door to get to work.

I arrived at work on time, a little early in fact. I need to remember to keep track of my mileage because I am getting reimbursed for my driving which is really awesome. That makes a huge difference on a job like this. It doesn’t affect me all that much today but when I start going to central PA and eastern New Jersey it will really start affecting me. There are weeks where my mileage could add up to over $250 of extra cash! Of course, I have to pay for my gas out of that, but that is a lot more than gas money.

Things went pretty well and I was wrapping up around 1:30! I love it when a plan comes together.