Sheep Guarding Llama

It is another absolutely awesome day today. I am so glad that spring is finally here. I think that I am more glad to see spring this year than normal. I am not sure why. Maybe because I have spent so much time in Maryland over the last several years during the winter and really didn’t this year.

I slept in a little this morning but not very long. The phone kept ringing and that makes it awfully difficult to sleep. So I headed down to the office to get some work done. I am just wrapping up getting Eric’s new desktop for the office all set up for him. It is more than twice the speed of his last desktop so he should be pretty happy with it. He is still only moving from a PIII-450 to a PIII-1000 but it is still quite a leap.

My accountant called today and Min and I have to stop in to deal with our taxes. They are being e-filed. We are getting almost $1,300 back! I didn’t even know that I had paid that much this year. That made me very happy today. That money will really help around here. Next year we hope to do even better since both Min and I are doing so much volunteer work down at the school. That should really help.

I called Eric to see if he wanted to get some coffee and sit outside today but he had an “emergency” with a client in Elmira and he had to run down there for the day. I went out onto the deck early this afternoon but discovered that it is much colder than it looks and it really isn’t good weather for sitting around outside yet. Maybe next week. According to the weather channel, it is only fifty out today but feels like forty-four. That seems about right. It is supposed to be even colder tomorrow. Ho-hum.

For some reason, Google has bumped all of my pictures. That really sucks. I used to be so easy to find. How fickle they are.

I got Min up and we went out to Perry to take care of our taxes. Boy does it ever feel good to be getting a nice refund this year. After filing our taxes we went over to the Silver Lake Family Restaurant and got some dinner.

On the way home from dinner, Min and I stopped off in Leicester to visit with the family. Everyone was hanging out at Grandma’s. Dad was there. He just got in from Ohio where he was all weekend. We hung out until around 9:00 and then headed home so that Min could get off to work.

I got home and discovered that the awful contract that I have been working has been postponed AGAIN! I have had enough. I contacted the subcontractor that I am working through and told them that we were either getting a retainer or renegotiating my rate and terms. I expect that I will rapidly become far too expensive for this game to continue. But really, how bad could it be? It isn’t like this project is going to move forward anyway. I need to get my money and get out. I refuse to be left holding the bag when the bottom drops out. I have been in this game for too long to not see the writing on the wall. I used to not want to leverage what advantages I had but I have been screwed too many times over the years and it is time that all those hard knock lessons paid off. I might end up losing the contract all together, that is a real possibility. But the reality of the situation is that two weeks ago I turned down the work and was looking elsewhere for opportunities. Then they made a bunch of promises about the project starting and I caved. Foolish me. Well, now all of that is over. I am in the drivers seat and we are in for a ride. I have always threatened to try the continuously increasing rate strategy – they get a few days to go to contract at one rate and if they don’t pull it off, the rate goes up and we start again. Eventually, I get so expensive that it isn’t even worth considering me. Which would be a problem if I cared about getting the job. But since I don’t, they are not in a happy place. I will keep everyone up to date as this saga unfolds.

Dad is meeting Min and I are 8:00 for breakfast so I need to get to bed.

We managed to make it to Sunday School this morning. Our first time in a year or more, I would say. On the way to church we hit Burger King for some breakfast. That is like three times this week, I had better lay off of the grease.

Normally we go out for lunch after church but dad is in Ohio and since we had breakfast on the way to church, we just ran up to Perry to pick up my car that was up there since Friday and headed on home to Geneseo.

When Andy got up he wanted to get some lunch so I went along with him up to Henrietta to get some food. We went to the mall and he got some Arby’s and I got some Tom Wahls. Two days in a row. I got some food for Min too and we took it to her at the hotel. She was very happy to not have to eat the hotel food. After dropping off her food Andy and I went over to Borders and did some quick shopping but we didn’t get anything. We go there often enough that it is pretty unlikely that anything new will pop up while we are gone.

I decided to provide some links to people talking about Ithaca High School’s “My Favorite Year” that I found on a search from Technorati since Nate will never go there and look for himself. Today there were three articles listed including this one, this one and one from me – coincidentally.

I worked on getting ready for my XHTML Web Design class that starts this coming Friday evening. While I was working on it I watched the real Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie. I have never seen it before. I couldn’t believe that I saw Ben Afflect in the movie. Not who I was expecting to see. But Paul Reubens as the bad guy is just hilarious. Overall, the movie wasn’t bad. It is incredibly silly but that is the idea. It is amazing how different the television show is from the movie. The movie was SO much better than the television show ended up being. But the movie didn’t have any real potential for a sequel or for any kind of spin off. It was really a dead end concept. I think that it is really weird that they decided to use it as a basis for a long running television show. If you have never seen the movie, then you have to watch it and spend the entire time thinking about what you would have done if you were given the task of turning it into a television series.

Watching the original Buffy got me into a nostalgic mood (it was made in 1990 but really felt like the mid-eighties) so I decided to follow up with the John Hughes classic Pretty in Pink. You have to love old Molly Ringwald movies. They just have a special charm all their own. Watching these old movies and their bizarre take on networked computers is really weird. They instant message each other with pictures in 1986. People really thought that people were doing things like this at the library? UNIX and VMS systems did have instant messaging back then but no one was sending pictures around, that is for sure. So I have to start wondering, when did things like instant messaging start entering the American collective consciousness enough to cause it to show up in movies in the middle of the 1980’s. Looking back, I wonder what people were thinking back then. I know that the way we view computers in the media now is really skewed and weird but it was so much more so in the 1990’s and again even more so in the 1980’s. It is exceptionally weird for me because I lived through these eras making fun of the weird ways that computers were portrayed. But now, I can’t remember what I was thinking or feeling at the time. In some ways, I feel like I have known what the Internet was for forever but that doesn’t seem possible. It was only 1994 when people were talking about the Internet and referring to it as “The Information Superhighway”. What were people thinking? Did everyone think that by giving it a retarded new name that no one would notice that nothing had changed? People sure get weird when it comes to anything new. Even when it is 24 years old like the Internet was in 1993. [Note: When I decided to follow Buffy with Pink I had no idea that Kristy Swanson’s first ever film role was at the end of Pretty in Pink. I almost didn’t catch who it was because I wasn’t paying close attention but I looked up just in time to see her.]

I was in a movie mood so I continued with For Love of the Game with Kevin Costner and director my Sam Raimi. I managed to get a ton of work done on my XHTML presentation while watching the movie. I should have a pretty decently well thought out class on Friday – if I do say so myself. I think that everyone taking the class will be really impressed that I managed to put together a full blown presentation for it. This is, by far, the longest PowerPoint style presentation I have ever made.

I wrapped up the movie around 1:30 and decided that I wasn’t as awake as I had hoped that I would be and decided to call it a night. Maybe I will go and read a little before falling asleep. But I am tired of sitting at the computer.

Min and I really slept in today after being out so late last night. We didn’t get up until after noon! My sinuses are feeling much better today. I can breathe again. Sleeping is so much easier now.

Andy wanted to go up to Tom Wahls for lunch so we all went up there. Which, BTW, if you Google “Tom Wahls” you will find SGL listed on the fourth page. However, you will find a lot of inappropriate sites in between. I have no idea what Tom Wahls means to the adult industry but it sure appears a lot when you do a search.

Dominica wanted to spend the afternoon knitting so she knit in her room while I worked in the basement.

Min wanted to go shopping at Walmart this evening so we headed over there. We picked up some snacks and some movies. Walmart has an entirely new “Under $5” section with some really good, widescreen titles. We picked up FlashDance, Beverly Hills Cop, Beverly Hills Cop II, Beverly Hills Cop III, Orange County, Urban Cowboy, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, Rugrats: The Movie, Another 48 Hours and Season One of Dark Angel. So we made out pretty well.

We came home and ate some snacks while watching Beverly Hills Cop and Beverly Hills Cop II which I haven’t seen in forever. Those were great movies. It turns out that Min has never seen them at all. So that was a really good deal for us then.

My own other blog, SGL2 – The Blog about Blogging has betrayed me and is not ranked almost 100,000 places more popular than the venerable SGL that you are reading now. Et tu, SGL2?

The blasting has appeared to have stopped. We haven’t fealt any tremors for a whole week now. At least not that we have noticed. It has gotten harder and harder to tell since we don’t even realize that it is happening anymore. It has been almost a month. Also on a positive note: there appears to be no more mice. I only found the one and there have only been “signs” of their having been a single mouse and there hasn’t been any more mouse noise in the house either. All of that points to the probability of our mouse having been an isolated rodent incident. Cross your finers. We do NOT want to go through another infestation. That was rough enough the first two times. I think that there are mice who have spent more time in this house than I have. But, when you really think about it, it is probably also true that Mr. Humphries has probably spent considerably more time in the house than I have. He has been here almost the entire life span of the house and has never left the house since he was about six weeks old. So he racks up the time pretty quickly.

Min was up and moving really early this morning. She had to be out the door around 7:30 to get to the school in time to teach the sophomore boys. She can only squeeze them in before the rest of the school starts their day so she has to go in really early.

I didn’t get up until around 9:00. I showered and then ran over to Burdger King for some breakfast. Min did the same thing earlier this morning. It is her Friday morning ritual to treat herself to Burger King before teaching. I got down to the Castile school around 11:00 and managed to get some good work done while I was there. I was able to help out until 12:45 when I had to head up to Perry to work up there.

I worked in Perry until 4:00. Min got out of teaching and came up and sat outside where I was working, reading on a bench. It was a really beautiful day.

At 4:00 we hoped into the car and hit the road south. We stopped off in Dansville to get a bite to eat at Burger King since neither of us had had a chance to eat anything since breakfast. Then it was off to Ithaca.

We arrived in good time for the Ithaca High School musical “My Favorite Year” which Nathan Parker is the musical director for. Tonight is the second night of the show. I have seen the show before but not for a really long time. As always, the IHS production was amazing. We are really glad that we made it down. It was sad, though, because this year is the first year that Nate’s students from middle school are graduating. Three of the girls that I chaperoned in 2000 were in the cast and this is their final show at IHS. All three of them saw me from the stage, though, since I was in the front row sitting next to Bob Winans.

After the show, we met up with Bob and Lisa at the Nine’s but there were bands playing and it was far too loud to hang out. So we headed downtown and got some pizza at Sammy’s instead. Boy I love Sammy’s pizza.

By that time it was pretty late so Min and I had to head home. We had been hoping to swing by Trumansburg to see Nate, Tammy and the new baby but it was too late to be able to see everyone tonight. So home we went. We got in around 4:00 am and went right to bed. We were pretty tired.

I got in around 5:00 this morning. Work was okay last night. If I hadn’t screwed a couple of things up then I would have been home closer to 3:00. Well, maybe next time. One can hope. It is only a big deal to get to go home early when I am working at one of the local stores. Once I am out of town, it will just give me the chance to get back to the hotel earlier. Oh joy. I did managed to get a lot of reading done last night. I took six magazines with me and made it through at least four of them during the night. That is a really handy thing about this job – it is going to allow me to catch up on a lot of reading over the next six months since there is at least a solid hour or wait time likely at each store. That is a lot of mandatory reading that I wouldn’t normally managed to squeeze in.

I wasn’t able to go to sleep when I got in, though, because I was so congested that I couldn’t breathe with the CPAP so I tried taking a shower to see if that would help. That didn’t so I resorted to using a couple of different types of nasal sprays designed to deal with the inflamation problem that I have. That seemed to work okay and by 6:00 I was able to go to bed.

I slept until 12:30. That was nice. I had gotten congested again and was having problems sleeping. But I got plenty of sleep so it wasn’t a problem.

Min wanted to go up to the city to do a little shopping and we were both starving so we headed up to Aja Noodle at Twelve Corners. I had that the other day and it was awesome so I wanted to get it again. Min had had my leftover Pad Thai from the other day and wanted to try this place out too. So we went and had a really nice dinner. I went for the Pad Thai again but she got the Bangkok with is a different type of noodle in a coconut sauce. It was really good too but I like the egg noodles better, I think.

After dinner we went down to JoAnne Fabrics and did a little shopping. I just sat in the car while Min did the actual shopping. While she was there she finally found the quilt hangers that we have been needing for forever so that we can hang our wedding quilt up in the living room.

We swung past the hospital too. Eric is working the “B” shift tonight and will be there late. He recently found a nice computer in the trash that he wanted to replace his desktop at the office with so I picked that up so that we could get it all set up for him. It even came with a license for Windows 2000 Pro. How cool is that?

We stopped at my grandmother’s for a little bit on the way back to the house. Min wanted to pick up one of the A+ books from Jeremy so that she could get to the studying. She is thinking about making a career change away from the hotel auditing biz. She doesn’t enjoy it nearly as much as I did although she has done it for over half as long (I think.) She definitely likes it more than Andy did, though. But she is looking at going for a help desk position for now. It will give her time to build up some experience this year and to give her a chance to get some certifications under her belt. It is really a good move for her considering all of the resources that she has access to here.

I worked down in the office this evening while Min worked upstairs on school work for tomorrow. She is trying to get a lesson plan together for the next week or two. Next week I start teaching the Web Design class in the evening. I worked on getting SGL udpated and getting that new desktop ready for Eric. He isn’t going into the office tomorrow but I am going to have a busy day and won’t have any other chance to get to it if I don’t do it tonight. So I am trying to get it out of the way.

Min is teaching at Castile all day tomorrow. I will be going down with her in the morning to make sure that any technical issues are taken care of. Then I am going to be going up to Perry in the afternoon to do some work up there for a few hours. I am hoping to be done before 5:00 – before 4:00 if I am really lucky. After we are done working, we are planning on making a run for Ithaca to go see the Ithaca High School musical, “My Favorite Year”, which is at 8:00. We will try to see the Parker’s baby before we head back home.

Min ended up going to bed early because she has to be up and moving really early tomorrow. She is going to teach the tenth grade boys before the normal start of the school day and they get there as early as 7:45. I don’t know if I am going to be getting up with her in the morning or not. I am leaning towards not. We have to drive separately anyway so it wouldn’t be a big deal for me to go in later. I will be needing the sleep.

Art and Danielle decided to order a Netgear FWG114P firewall and VPN accelerator so that they are able to connect their network to ours. That will rock for AoE2 because we can have as many people at their house as we want and as many here and everyone can play like they are right here in the house. Josh was the first one to try it and it works great with him. This means that just about half of everyone playing can be located somewhere else. Pretty cool. Ideally, I would like to only have four people play here since that is the amount of seating that we can comfortably handle. Andy, Min and I each have our permament computers to play on and we have the one free desk in the basement that is always available. Other than those, someone always has to squeeze in somewhere. So this is going to be great. Even five people here is no hassle. But once you go to six, we start running out of space. Now if we can just get everyone set up and using Skype, then we will be all set.

It is almost 2:00 in the morning and I need to get some sleep. Min will be getting up in about four hours so that doesn’t leave a long time for me to sleep even if I don’t leave at the same time that she does.