Sheep Guarding Llama

I am writing tonight’s updates while working in the server room of Wegmans in Elmira. So far, so good. I have been here almost half an hour and nothing has gone disasterously wrong yet, so I am hopeful for a smooth evening of migration fun.

I got into Bob’s apartment this morning around 6:15. Just in time to hear his morning alarm going off. I was so tired when I got there that I couldn’t even handle waiting for Bob to actually get up to say good morning. I don’t think I ever even moved as long as he was there. I was out cold. I did, at least, remember my CPAP.

I slept with my cell phone by my head with an alarm set for 9:15 so that I would be able to get up at a reasonable time. It work me up but I snoozed for another fourty-five minutes or so before actually getting out of bed. Then I showered, dressed, packed, read-up the living room a little and went out to my car (which I had to park out on Fall St. last night). I drove over to the middle school and joined Nate, Bob and Zach on their lunch break. I was able to hang out there for about an hour which was nice since I almost never get a chance to see anyone anymore.

After the “lunch” break, I had to go to Varna for a little while to do some work on the computers there. There were a couple of issues that I had to deal with. Mostly having to do with the printers. Nothing too exciting. I was there until about 1:30.

Steve met me down on the Commons at Simeon’s on the Commons for a quick bite of lunch. I had a delicious pear and gorganzola salad with blueberry vinigrette dressing. Yummy. Oh how I miss Ithaca. We couldn’t stay long, though, because Max was home sick today and we had to get back to the house to keep an eye on him.

I didn’t get much of a chance to relax this afternoon because I had a bunch of work that I needed to do up at the house. Mostly networking issues. So I worked on that all afternoon over a couple of Irish whiskeys. I didn’t end up having enough time to get everything done that I had wanted to but I got the most critical issues taken care of, at least. I did wet Steve’s appetite a little bit about blogging and podcasting so we may see him posting some material of his own in the near future.

I met Bob at the Boatyard Grill at 6:20. They tried to give us a hard time about seating. This is the second time this week that Bob has bad problems there. Earlier in the week he had gone down there after making reservations for 8:00. He arrived at 7:50 which at most restaurants would have gotten you seated early as they would have been holding a table for your party at around that time. Instead he ended up waiting until 9:15 before finally leaving with no end to the waiting in site. They never apologized and kept telling everyone that they would be seated soon even though they knew that there were far too many people in their reservations to be able to handle. So he already wasn’t very happy. Then tonight, he had arrived at 6:00 and asked for a table for two so that we would be able to eat promptly. They told him that when I arrived that they would seat us. So, when I arrived we walked up and could see numerous empty, clean tables that we could sit at. At that point, we were told that we would have to wait approximately twenty minutes until they seated all of the people that had gotten there after Bob had asked for a table. The manager was standing there and explained to us that it wasn’t anything personal but that used statistics (apparently in place of customer service.) But when we explained how discourteous it was to seat people who had arrived after we had asked for a table he decided that he would give us a table. Which, of course, prompted us to wonder why they hadn’t just seated us before if they were able to do so without any problems. He didn’t need to clear the table for us. There were tables next to us that were empty. In fact, it appeared that the restaurant was no where near capacity and that they were just making people wait to be seated to give the appearance of being busy when they in fact were not. Needless to say, we were not impressed with our dining experience and in Ithaca, it is far to easy to go to any other really awesome restaurant and I expect that in the future, we will.

At 7:45 I got on the road to go to Elmira. I arrived here at the store at just after 8:40 and got settled in. I am really hoping that I can get out of here really early tonight because I am totally exhausted after that long, long night last night and very little sleep since. I am planning on driving back to Geneseo tonight after finishing up here but I might not be able to handle it and might have to get a hotel room here in Elmira or something. I can barely keep my eyes open sitting here in the office waiting for the computer but maybe by the time I am able to get onto the road I will have gotten a second wind. But that doesn’t seem very likely. I am really glad that I have “Reading Lolita in Tehran” to listen to in the car because it is relatively engaging and really helps to keep me awake although the woman that they chose to narrate it is very monotenous and has a really think, slow South African accent that encourages you to fall asleep. But it is better than nothing.

I have been figuring out what my travel schedule is going to be like over the next several weeks. I have nothing exciting until late June. I will be bouncing back and forth among Rochester, Syracuse and Buffalo until late June with one trip to Johnson City on June 20. Then, on June 27, I will be in Downington, Pennsylvania. I don’t even know where that is. I expect that I will be staying in a hotel there but I am not sure yet. Then on July 5-6 I am in Princeton and Bridgewater, New Jersey. That is the first “exotic” destination on my itinerary. Ithaca on July 25. No more distant travel until August. It is going to be a pretty slow summer, I think.

I am setting some serious records tonight. It is just about midnight and I am about to put in the call to the operations center to have them check to see how things went tonight. I have never called them before 12:30 and only one time before 1:00. I am really hopeful that this will wrap up here and I can go home shortly. It would be so nice to be home before 2:00. I haven’t seen my wife since yesterday afternoon! That makes me very sad 🙁

This Wegmans closes at midnight! I didn’t know that there were any non-24 hour stores left. I can’t believe that the city of Elmira doesn’t produce enough business for its largest grocery store to keep them busy through the night. Elmira is a pretty big town. Geneseo is a 24 hour store. And we are just a dinky little town. Elmira is a real city. Much larger than Ithaca but the grocery store is just a fraction of the size.

Well, in the hopes that I manage to actually get out of here in the next few minutes, I am going to shut down my laptop and get it all packed up so that I don’t have to stay later just to do that. I will try to audiopost over on SGL2 when I get out on the open road. I already posted twice on there today!

Min is teaching still this week so she was up super early this morning. I got up at 6:40 to get ready to go to breakfast with dad and her. We met dad over at the Omega at 7:00. We didn’t get to hang out long, though, because he had to get up to the city to do some banking and Min had to get down to Castile to teach.

Today is the first really full day of development work for Andy and I. From here on in, we are going to be really busy with that. We got a lot of really good work done today.

Andy and I did lunch at Denny’s to celebrate the real beginning of the project. It is weird having Andy around during the day since he has never had days off since we moved out to Geneseo. So this is a whole new house paradigm for us. Min is working days out of the house. Andy is working out of the house and I am working three overnights a week all over the place. It is almost exactly opposite of what all of us have been doing since moving out of Ithaca. So it feels really strange.

I got a lot of work done for dad this afternoon and did some bill paying too. It feels SO good to finally be able to actually put some money into some of our debt. That has been a real source of stress for quite some time.

Min came home but we only got a little while to hang out. I had a lot of work to get done this afternoon and had to get ready to leave. I am working in Corning tonight at 8:30. After I get done with my shift, I am driving up to Ithaca to crash at the Casa d’Bob. Then, tomorrow night I am working in Elmira so it seemed to be a better use of time to stay in Ithaca. So call the cell if you need me tomorrow.

I swung by Leicester to drop off some stuff for dad and Jeremy before heading south. Then it was off to Corning. It is just over an hour to get down to Corning.

The night started out rough with a power supply failure as soon as I arrived. That was a bad omen. It cost me fifty minutes right up front. So I knew that I was going to be in for a long night. Most of the night went relatively smoothly but when we went to do our final check so that I could leave the store, we ran into some major issues and had to escalate the issue. It was around 2:20am when we ran into the issue. But it took a long time before we could get anywhere. The upside of the event was that I had plenty of time to write all of today’s updates while I was sitting in a noisy back office computer room on the phone with like six support people all from different departments trying to deal with tonight’s issues. What a blast. It isn’t any fun having to wake everyone up in the middle of the night to deal with things out at the store. Everyone was really groggy.

For anyone who is interested, I have two extra copies of the really awesome movie Indian Summer. One of the copies is DVD and the other is Laserdisc. If anyone is interested, let me know. I just thought of that while I was sitting here for hours waiting for everyone on the phone so I thought that I would through it out there.

I managed to wrap up in Corning around 4:50am. Oh boy, only four hours later than I had been hoping. Ugh. That means that I won’t be arriving at Bob’s place until after 5:30. That is SO much later than I had been shooting for. I am going to be really dead tomorrow. And tomorrow night is Elmira and then I will be driving home. Maybe I will make them get me a hotel room on Wednesday so that I can get some sleep before I drive. But I need to be home on Wednesday to work with Andy. So we will see. This is a really busy week. Three nights out of town, working on the Waste Watcher, trying to sleep, teaching all day Friday, my regular lecture, and then I am taking Min out for a special surprise date on Sunday evening. She knows that we are doing something but she doesn’t know what we are doing yet. I can’t tell it on here since she might read the updates while I am out of town to keep up. She probably won’t, but she might.

Min and I are in Frankfort this morning. Due to a network issue, we are not able to update the site while we are out here, so everyone just has to wait until we get back home to see the latest updates. But since you can’t be reading this until we are back and have updated the site, I guess that there isn’t a whole lot of point to me even pointing this out.

I managed to actually sleep last night. I had only got about four hours but that is a lot better than nothing which is what we were worried about. We slept with the window open and I held my head with my hand to allow me to breathe as much as possible.

We had breakfast at Min’s parent’s house, bagels and donuts. Then Min and I watched Alien Versus Predator while everyone else was at Mass. It wasn’t quite as bad as I had imagined but it was definitely pretty bad. What a cheesy idea. I really can’t believe that they made that.

We headed out from Frankfort around 2:30. We listened to more of “Reading Lolita in Tehran” on the way home and stopped at one of the rest stops to get some quick lunch at a McDonalds. We also got some ice cream at Ben and Jerrys. We haven’t done that in a while.

We got home and Min ran out to Walmart to return that bad movie and to do some quick shopping. I took care of some things on my laptop that needed to be done and then we drove down to Leicester to visit with the family for mother’s day.

After visiting with the family, we came home and watched Resident Evil: Apocalypse. It was a relatively mundane rip off of Dawn of the Dead. It was okay but nothing special at all. Then it was off to bed. Early day tomorrow again.

Tomorrow I am having breakfast with dad at 7:00 at the Omega Grill. I will be at the house most of the day tomorrow working with Andy. Then tomorrow night I am working in Corning. Tuesday night in Elmira and Wednesday night in Hornell. I will probably be staying in Corning or Ithaca on Monday morning to reduce the driving and to catch up on some sleep time. I expect that I will be going into the Castile school on Wednesday during the day to do some work down there that I don’t have any other time to get in.

Okay, plenty of updates for everyone from over the weekend. See you all next week.

We slept in a little today. I needed it. I have been really tired for days. Andy and I were planning on working some this morning but his computer died last night and he is still working on rebuilding it. He has a lot of rebuilding to do so we didn’t have any work to do this morning.

We had some miscellaneous work to be done this morning. Min did the packing. I cleaned the garage. I took my car in for an oil change at Jiffy Lube in Geneseo and got my summer wheels put onto the car. While the car was at the shop, Min picked me up and we went over to Walmart and did a little bit of shopping for Mother’s Day.

We picked up the car and drove up to the city and did some banking. Then we went to Borders because we wanted to get a book on CD to listen to in the car. We got “Reading Lolita in Tehran” which I have been wanted to read for a while. I finally convinced Min to let me get it. She claims that she was interested in reading the book but she never acted very interested whenever I mentioned it. I also got “The Cat Who Went Bananas” which is cool because I really like the books in that series. We also found the seventh installment of As Time Goes By which we have been waiting for for forever. Unfortunately, season seven is quite short as well. Min got a few miscellaneous books and I got a couple of magazines and then we headed out to go to Frankfort for Mother’s Day.

We arrived in Frankfort just in time for pizza. Joe is home from college – finals were last week.

We tried to watch The Phantom of the Opera that we got the other day but we only made it about twenty minutes into the movie before the disc didn’t play anymore. So now we have to deal with returning the movie to Walmart. So instead we watched the first five episodes of As Time Goes By Season Seven. Boy is that show good. That is my favorite television show ever.

We forgot to pack my CPAP for this trip. This is only the second time that we have travelled overnight since I first got the CPAP in January and we haven’t gotten into the habit of packing the CPAP yet. So we are worried that I won’t be able to sleep tonight at all.

Another super busy Friday. Only a few more weeks until school is over. Our bible study ends on the same day so we will be suddenly inundated with free time. But that is weeks away yet.

We got our regular breakfast at Burger King on our way out of town. That resulted in an incident involving a lot of coffee falling onto Dominica’s lap.

Because Dominica has been teaching the seventh and eighth grades, I have to teach the computer classes today. This is an exceptionally busy day for me. I was up until late last night and got only about five hours of sleep before heading into the school. I still had a bit of work to do today for the lecture this evening so that kept me extra busy. I taught all day while Min taught her classes. It went pretty well. The kids love typing class and we did a bit of that.

After school I had my fourth lecture on XHTML and CSS. I had a shorter lecture than normal today. I wanted to slow down a little bit to give students a chance to take it all in. After the lecture, we spent about forty-five minutes working with some of the kids that wanted help getting web pages working on the school’s server.

We drove the Case kids home and then went down to Leicester to visit with grandma for a little bit. She has been feeling really poorly over the past week.

Min and I went to Cook’s in Greggsville and got some subs on our way to Caledonia. Cooks makes really good subs. They toast them. We have a plethora of really good sub shops around us: Cooks, Aunt Cookies, Wegmans and the Silver Lake Country Market.

Then it was off to Caledonia for our Purpose Driven Life Bible study small group. This was our third week of the group. We are really happy to have found the group and Eric and I are hoping that the group stays together after we have finished up with the forty days of purpose.

Min and I got home around 10:30 and since Art was out at a bachelour party we called Danielle and played a round of AoE2. With just the three of us we had to play the two of them against me. I won, of course. 🙂

Then it was off to bed.