Sheep Guarding Llama

I couldn’t stop watching Roswell last night – I watched from just after 6:00 until 2:00 in the morning! That is a little bit obsessive, I guess. But, for those of you who have never seen the show, it is such an amazing show. Because it is a serial and not a sitcom, it makes it very difficult to stop watching because the story just continues right on. It must have been really tough watching it week by week when it was first on television. I think that this type of show really lends itself to the recorded media formats far better than televised. That is in contrast to a lot of sitcoms that get extremely little value through being able to watch them consecutively. Who’s the Boss, for example, has little need intraseasonly to be seen in any particular order. But with Roswell or a lot of British shows like As Time Goes By, you really have to see them all in a row to really get the emotionaly impact out of them.

The house is still having those occasional shakings that started a few days ago. It is only once or twice a day and always during the daytime but we still just can’t figure out what it could be. It is a little unnerving.

Andy left for work exceptionaly late today. I don’t know if he is going with the assumption that he will come directly home to see Tony’s show or what. He was just getting into the shower at 8:30 this morning but I didn’t actually see him so I don’t know if it was intentional or not. We had talked about going to the show last night but the last I had heard was that he was going to go on Saturday. But with Nate and Bob coming up this weekend, maybe he changed his mind and decided on tonight instead. I guess that we will find out.

Min and I ran out to dad’s to pick up some packing material so that we could get some stuff sent out from UPS. We made it to the UPS store just before 5:00 and got the stuff sent out and made a quick stop to the post office to mail a few things. Then we decided that we needed a break so we went over to the new Starbucks across from the Chamber of Commerce and gave them a try. It is weird being in the Delbucks (Starbucks in the old Del Taco buiding) because it only kind of looks like it was supposed to be a coffee shop. The space is really live which makes it rather uncomfortable to spend any amount of time in. It is so loud in there even though we were the only customers most of the time. We couldn’t talk at all. It just wasn’t a comfortable environment to hang out in. Which, I am thinking, is their aim. They seem to be moving away from the “place to hang out at” marketing strategy and really becoming just the fast food of the coffee world. So, it doesn’t look like I will be using the local Geneseo Starbucks as often as I had hoped that I would be. It is probably better this way – just ask Eric how many calories are in a Chantico.

When we got back to the house, Bob had called and said that he was reading the site (no really, he actually said that he had been reading the site, YOU are not the only one (unless YOU ARE Bob, then maybe you are the only one)) and realized that we were still planning on him coming up on Friday (tomorrow) and spending the weekend and that we had cancelled the all important AoE2 game because of it. Oops. He and Lisa aren’t coming until Saturday now. The moral of the story? Read SGL or you may miss something important. No, that isn’t it. Oh yeah, that there is a game tomorrow now 🙂 That must be it.

Ok, I have found some disturbing products online before but this one from Thinkgeek really takes the cake. I think that the most disturbing part is that I actually shop at this place! Eek.

We went to the show at 7:00. We passed Andy on the road on the way there. He was just heading home from work. We got to the show a bit early but we got a chance to visit with Andy’s family who got there just a little bit after we did. Andy did end up coming to the show just before it started.

My cell was off from 6:30 – 10:30 so anyone trying to reach me during that time – sorry.

The show was decent. Andy had never seen Oklahoma! before and Min had only ever seen the movie. I probably haven’t seen it since 1989 but I have seen it multiple times and both in live and movie versions. Tony did an amazing job – he played Judd and it was a really cool character for him. He got to be all dark and brooding. He sang really well too. He friend Rob played the peddler and did it in a totally convincing Hank Azaria style that was really entertaining. He sounded just like Hank playing the crazy doctor from The Simpsons.

We got home late and pretty much went straight to bed. I even saved the last of the updates for tomorrow.

Before I forget, Tony West’s performance in “Oklahoma” at Avon High School is tomorrow [Thursday] night at 7:00. I am pretty sure that Min and I will be going. I think that Andy is going on Saturday because it isn’t a work night.

I had to get up super early this morning and drive up to Henrietta to get Min from work again. We had anticipated the weather being really awful but it really wasn’t all that bad. But, I had a feeling that today was going to be a slow day and Min really wanted to hang out so I mostly blew the day off.

We went up to Mel’s to get some cheap breakfast. We called Eric to see if he was up for coffee but it was too early for him, I guess. This is the earliest that I have been out for breakfast in a long time.

After breakfast, I twisted Min’s arm into going over to Borders for a little shopping. She *finally* gave in – ha, ha. She looked through all of the knitting books and I looked through the geeky stuff. I tracked down their one hidden copy of Wil Wheaton’s “Just A Geek” that I have been searching for there for a long time. It sure took enough effort to buy that book! While I was hunting for it, Eric called back about coffee and decided to stop by and have some.

While we were waiting for Eric, Min and I looked through the Bible selection. They have a ton there. Min has been looking for something portable that she can carry around more easily because her good Bible is large and very heavy. Eric showed up while we were still looking at Bibles and ended up looking at them with us for about forty-five minutes. Then we went over to the cafe and had coffee and bagels. We ended up hanging out at Borders until almost 1:00.

I had to stop by dad’s to pick up some stuff we headed straight over there. We ended up staying at dad’s until 4:00 and convinced him to go out for some dinner. He has no car still so we have to drive him if he is going to go somewhere. We went down the hill to Greigsville and ate at the Barn right next to my old high school. It is a really weird, out of the way kind of place. Really hard to believe that there is an actual restaurant in such a location. It has been there as long as I can remember – but I have never gotten used to the idea of a restaurant in that location. They aren’t open late and are really just a local farmer’s hangout greasy spoon kind of place but the people are really nice and the place is quite inviting. The are famous for being the only place around that served sheep fried but I think that they discontinued that practice years ago. I used to walk past this place going to Cook’s gas station on the corner all during high school but never really thought about it much. They do a really good breakfast there and very inexpensively.

After dinner, before we took dad back, we ran over to York to take a look at York Landing which is available for lease. The Landing has been vacant for months and Min thinks that it might be an ideal location for her yarn stor slash coffee shop, if the price is reasonable. We would have to modify the building a bit to make it work and it would take a bit of effort to convince people to go way out into the middle of nowhere but it has the advantage of being in a decently easy to find location and it should be cheaper because there is almost no way to be getting any local traffic coming in.

We ran dad home after dinner and got ourselves home. It was after 6:00 when we finally got in. I was right about the day being slow, no phone calls at the office OR on the cell except for Eric. I can’t remember a day ever being so slow.

We came home and decided to watch some more of Roswell because I am still working my way through the second season. Min fell asleep about an hour into it. It took a long time before I managed to convince her to actually go to bed. I kept watching for about seven hours! Man I love that show. I still have a couple of discs left to watch of it too.

Last night, Min started going to work but turned around and came right back home because the roads were so bad that she couldn’t possibly drive anywhere. So I had to drive her into work. The roads really were just awful. It took more than forty-five minutes for me to get her to work. I ended up hanging out for a little while and getting coffee to give the road crews some time to work on the roads. But the snow came down so quickly that that didn’t matter much at all. The drive back to Geneseo was terrible too. That took almost an hour as well. So it was pretty late by the time that I got in last night.

I had to get up early to get Min from work. So I only got about four hours of sleep. I got home and had a bit of work to do after taking her in to work since I usually save work to do after she has left so that we can spend the evenings together. That plan didn’t work out so well last night.

I managed to get two more computers prepared to go to Castile on Friday. I have really mastered the whole SUSE install thing. It goes like clockwork at this point.

One of the more exciting things in a while is the fact that we are now able to take credit cards at work! That means that anyone who wants to buy computers and computer stuff can get it through us now a lot more like a normal company! That is going to make a lot of things a whole lot easier.

Also, Sierra has finally released the demo of Empire Earth 2. I am excited to give it a try. We haven’t found anything to replace AoE2 yet and are always looking. EE2 will be tough, though, because only a few of us have machines that are really capable of playing it. And by “us” I mean Andy is the only person I know that meets the recommended specs and Min and Art exceed the minimums. But that is about it. I don’t know if anyone else would be able to play it. The biggest problem is that it needs an amazing video card. But, it took a long time before AoE2 became our game of choice so EE2 will probably have to be judged over a long time frame.

Min and I watched some more of season two of Roswell tonight. Since we had to replace the disks some months ago, I have never gotten back around to watching all of it again. Now I am working my way through the show. Season three is due out this summer and I have to be ready. Min is excited about those too because she has only seen the first two seasons.

While we were watching Roswell in the theatre, I noticed that the hair on the back of my head is changing. I am starting to go bald very quickly now. It is getting to be really noticable.

Once again we had to fake the date to be able to wish Eric Millen a Happy Birthday.

I read until almost 4:00 in the morning last night so I was still asleep fairly late this morning. I was pulling myself out of bed at 10:15 or so when I felt what I was only able to guess was a truck plowing into the side of the house. The entire house shuddered and there was a loud noise. I threw on some jeans and a fleece and ran out into the cold in bare feet looking to see what had happened. It took me almost two minutes to get outside but there was nothing to see. Nothing had evidently touched the house, there was no obvious marks anywhere on it. There were no vehicles anywhere in the area. But then I heard sirens from the direction of downtown. I can only imagine that there was an earthquake, a mine collapse or maybe an explosion. We do live over the salt mine, or almost over it and we do live awfully near a major fault line – so those are real possibilities. I have never felt an earthquake myself and would imagine them to be silent. But maybe they aren’t when they are that strong. Whatever it was woke Min up after only being asleep for two hours. I figured that she would have slept through it but she sure didn’t. She even ended up getting out of bed for a little bit. So, as of now, I have no idea what it was. But I will try to find out and keep you posted.

Well, its official, Rochesterians have gone completely insane and have purchased the fast ferry at federal auction over the weekend. Now the city is burdened with the impossible task of making money with that thing. The mayor really has it in for the city and really appears to be out to ruin it. He knows that that thing can’t make any money and that the city just doesn’t have any infrastructure to support it. But he convinced those loser in the city that they needed it. Ha ha on them, I guess. Doesn’t hurt me, really. The city is going nowhere and if they decide to head more quickly towards bankrupcy, I guess it is no business of mine. It is tough for those of us who live on the outskirts of a city like Rochester because the outlying communities are affected by the collapse of the city. But at least it isn’t my tax money that will be bailing them out.

Today was mostly a slow day. Lots of returning calls. Monday’s are always slow. So are Fridays. It is really amazing that all work in the universe seems to be done from Tuesday through Thursday. How does anything actually get accomplished? I am very thankful for the curtains that Min got for my office, it is now dark down here during the day so that I am able to see my computer screens at any time of the day or night. The curtains in the living room have really made the house feel a lot more like a normal house as well. It was a little bit stark up there before. Hopefully soon we will get our wedding quilt mounted to the large, bare wall. That will really brighten up the room. It will also reduce noise, which as everyone knows, will make me happy.

Min is going to be teaching again on Friday. The school is having a “Winter Fest” day so they don’t have any regular classes but they are having Min teach one or two computer classes that the students will come in for. We don’t know what grades she will have this time yet.

The stats were released today and the Firefox and Mozilla web browsers have garnered 8.45% of the browser market share. That is a really big deal. Internet Explorer has fallen into the high 80%’s. They are losing ground and a phenominal rate. In case anyone hasn’t worked with one of the alternative browsers, I highly recommend making the switch. I use Firefox almost everywhere but I do use Safari on Mac OS X and Konqueror on Linux often as well (Safari and Konqueror are related browsers – both members of the KHTML family.)

Today is more or less Eric’s birthday… Mr. Leapyear himself. It is a strange and morbid coincidence that he has to drive out to Syracuse today to go to the funeral of Amanda’s grandfather who died last week. Amanda’s grandfather’s birthday was also February 29th.

For those who are wondering: There is no AoE2 game this Friday night. But plan on it the following week. Bob Crissman (aka Montana Bob) is planning on getting into the game soon and will be playing remotely from Binghamton. So that will make it easier for us to have get a full house. Bob hasn’t played AoE2 yet (boy is he in for a surprise) but he has played the Star Wars Battlegrounds game that is based on the same engine. I am hoping to have a machine to use other than my laptop by that time. We will see.

The router is still going strong, coming up on 88 hours. Boy is that a relief! I am going to try the risky maneuver of turning the regular logging back on to see if that will bring it down.

I had to do some remote configuration work at Castile today. That is turning into a pretty cool project. Having so many UNIX machines in one place is neat. My dad is so excited that he is probably going to install Linux at home on his main computer (dual boot, that is) and Min wants to make sure that she has access to it as well. We even have some people already looking into installing Linux at home that have kids in the school. How cool is that? I am converting the world very quickly, all of a sudden.

I have been very cold for days. My feet especially have been really cold. This is weird for me. I hope that this isn’t some byproduct of turning 29! Not that I mind being cold compared to being overly warm all of the time. But it is strange that suddenly my feet are always cold. I actually have to put an extra blanket over them when I am sleeping! Me, of all people.

I have a meeting in the afternoon tomorrow so I will be out of the office after lunch. I should be home before lunch.

For those of you who use Niagara Telecom email, I have, I hope, fixed the time and date issue that has been going on for forever. I am anticipating that there will now be a solid timeclock that will keep our mail labelled correctly. This has been an issue for months. It will take some time (ha ha, time) befor we know for sure if it is working or not.

Okay, so here is something weird. I was walking through the basement and the basement lights turned off. Only the three ceiling lights. All of the power in the house stayed on. No other lights were affected, just those three going off all together. They didn’t come back on. So I flipped the switch to off then on and they came back on. But before I could walk back over to my office, they went off again. So I went upstairs to be sure that there was not someone in the house who could be playing a trick on me but there was no one here. Min is fast asleep and no one could get near to the top of the stairs without me hearing them. It is impossible to move around this house without making a lot of noise. So I tried the light switch at the top of the stairs and it did the same thing again. Very strange. Then while I was sitting in my office, I heard a strange sound like some sort of an alarm. As I was listening intently, the house shook again. This time not quite as violent as before. At least, I don’t think that it was. I ran upstairs to see if Min was okay – the sound definitely did not come from the basement. She was still in bed but thought that something must have happened to me. So I ran outside and couldn’t find anything. I could hear a lot of machinery over at the new Walmart contruction site and I could hear what sounded like that alarm coming from some of the equipment. So I am pretty sure that that is the origin of that. I went back into the house and searched high and low for anything that could have been the source of the rumble but failed to find any possibilities. It is very disturbing. Dad said that maybe Walmart was using dynamite and that is the only thing that I can imagine. It is a quick blast that we are feeling. It is very strange.

I had to run out this afternoon to get an oil change for Min. I took a swing past the Walmart construction to see if there was anything visibly going on but I couldn’t see anything to indicate that they were blasting. So I am at a loss. I asked the managed down at Jiffy Lube if we knew about the blasting but he had no idea. I didn’t realize this but Jiffy Lube now carries (at least the one here does) Mobil ONE and they do state inspections. That is really handy to know since I live around the corner from the Jiffy Lube.

I managed to get another computer ready to take to Castile this afternoon. Only one more to do after this and I will be waiting for parts (unless I managed to dig up more computers than I was aware are here.)

Min got up at 5:00 and we decided on left over pizza from Josh’s LotR party and PH&J in case that wasn’t enough. We wanted to watch a movie while we ate dinner – then I realized that I still hadn’t set the theatre back up after having taken it apart to bring over to Josh’s on Saturday. Oh joy unbounded. So another project ensued.

Min and I watched Hildalgo tonight. It has taken us forever to around to watching that. We borrowed it from my dad. The dvd had a really hard time playing but we sort of made it all of the way through just skipping little bits here and there. It was a good movie, we really enjoyed it. A bit long though. Then we watched Shriek if you know what I did last Friday the 13th which was SO awful I can’t even describe it!

Okay, well I have to post very early because Min has to take the laptop to work with her. So I am posting now. Night.