Sheep Guarding Llama

What a busy week it has been! I am so glad to finally have a day to wind down a little bit. My week coming up isn’t going to be too awful because Wegmans bailed on the project that they had asked us to do so I am only going in to work there on Wednesday evening. I will be there all night on Wednesday night because it is the only window to do the work that they want to have done.

Min and I slept in really late today. So late that she had to get up and get ready for work and take off right away. Andy and I decided to run out to Wegmans for lunch. It is cheap and quick there and really close so we do that a lot. I did a little shopping while we were there and managed to get the new Dawn of the Dead and So Close on DVD for $6 each.

Slow afternoon. I worked here in the office and tried to get caught up from being away all week. I am sure that this week will be busy getting everything back to normal.

We woke up to the unbelievable blizzard that was expected to hit Ohio this morning. It was quite something after the calm of the last few days. Everything was white and we could barely see the rest of the city from the hotel. We spent much of the morning watching the weather channel. We were planning on being hit and the plan was to hit the road as soon as it let up because there was another blizzard coming right behind it and we had to get out of town between the two or we were going to be caught. We had ordered breakfast delivered last night and it arrived at 9:15 this morning. The Marriott chain has this french toast rolled in corn flakes healthy breakfast that I really like so I got that. Of course, I don’t know how healthy it is with syrup all over it.

At 11:30, by cousin Bill and his wife Carol came out from Louisville to hang out in the hotel with us. There wasn’t much point to travelling around and the hotel and a nice restaurant that wasn’t busy at all so it was a nice place to just sit and visit. We had a nice lunch there in the hotel and hung out until after 2:30. We haven’t seen Bill and Carol since our wedding a year and half ago and that was the only time that Min had ever had the chance to meet them so she didn’t get a chance to know them at all. So this was her first chance to really get to meet them.

At 3:00 we were on the road and attempting to get back to Geneseo. The roads were pretty awful but the storm was pretty light. The plows were out and doing enough to keep the roads passable. There was so much panic about the blizzard that really there was hardly anyone out on the roads. So that worked out really well. It was a slow drive but not too dangerous. It only took us seven hours to get back to Geneseo, two hours longer than it would usually take in good weather without stopping.

Since they had tried to fix our alarm and couldn’t get it reset last night, they gave us passes for a free breakfast downstairs so we decided to go down and take advantage of that. I didn’t have much time because my meeting was rescheduled for this morning so I took off from there. The meeting was at 10:00 over in Oakland and run until 11:45 or so. It went well and I think that the trip was a success.

I got back to the hotel just after noon and we checked out and hit the road west to go to Canton, Ohio and visit my family there. I haven’t been out to Canton in two years so we thought that it would be nice to go out there since we were so close. The actual travel time from Pittsburgh to Canton is under two hours. That is, if you don’t get lost. We, of course, did. Getting out of Pennsylvania and through West Virginia is easy. But once you are in Ohio, the road that you follow exits off of itself which is very confusing and both Min and I missed the exit and didn’t notice until we had hit Youngstown. So that made the trip much longer that it had to be. We didn’t arrive in Canton until 4:00 or so.

My grandparents were pretty surpirsed that we had shown up out there but they rallied the troops and got just about everyone able to come over after work. Min and I and my grandparents went off to a restaurant in Louisville (that is a suburb of Canton, pronounced LEWISville and NOT in Kentucky) and got a fish fry.

Almost all of my close Ohio family managed to get over to my grandparent’s house by 7:30 or so and we managed to hang out for the entire evening. It really worked out well that everyone was able to come over. We figured that this couldn’t really have worked out any better if we had planned it. The only person that I didn’t get to see was my cousin Monica who had to work while we were there. But Gwen made it out and I hadn’t gotten a chance to see her since she had come out to Ithaca to hang out for a few days almost two years ago – or maybe that was three years ago. Hmmm. I just check the SGL archives, they visited in the summer of 2002. Boy, that is a long time ago and boy is SGL handy for looking up things like that. It is going to be really nice to have such a great record of my life to look back on someday. Already it is really handy for looking things up that I would totally lose track of otherwise.

We hung out with the family until 12:30 or so and then we headed off to downtown Canton to stay at the Marriott McKinley Grand. It is a really old hotel, one of those neat ones from back in the era when every decently sized town had that one amazing hotel right downtown. It was pretty rundown just a couple of years ago, I understand, but Marriott and some developers stepped in just recently and poured all kinds of money into totally renovating it and making it really nice. Now it is the center of downtown Canton (whoo-hoo.) It was late when we checked in. The place seemed pretty nice. It seems weird to have a nice hotel where it is, just not a big enough city to support one, I wouldn’t think. Canton is definitely smaller than Utica.

It was nice waking up in such a nice hotel in Pittsburgh. We got up in time to be able to just squeeze in some breakfast before I have to go off to my one meeting. So we went down to the buffet and got a quick breakfast. The hospital called just as I was about to leave and rescheduled the meeting for tomorrow because the guy that I am meeting with had a chance to have a teleconference with his son who was serving in Iraq. So Min and I got the chance to spend the day relaxing together.

I had a phone conference at 10:00 and I had to spend a bit of the day working in the hotel. We were stuck in there until almost 4:00 between phone calls and emails that had to be taken care of. So Min watched television while I worked.

After I was able to leave the hotel, we went out for some lunch. We just wanted to walk and not go anyplace far so we went to the “saloon” that was right across the street and got some really good fish sandwiches. The food was really good even if the service wasn’t. It was just a bar anyway. But it was handy. After our late lunch, we drove out to Squirrel Hill so that Min could do some shopping. There is a yarn store out there that she wanted to go to so we headed out there. Traffic was awful, as always in Pittsburgh. I found a Starbucks that I was able to park and and could see the yarn shop from there so I got a hot chocolate and Min walked over to the yarn store. She decided that she was going to be there for a while so she found a Barnes and Nobles and sent me over there to hang out for an hour or so while she kept shopping.

After shopping, I drove Min around to show her where I used to live in Pittsburgh. It is almost exactly five years ago that Andy and I moved down there to work on the Waste Watcher. Boy does time fly.

We decided to make it a quiet night and just hung out in the hotel and watched DVDs on my laptop. Since we were out of town, I thought that I would take advantage of the quiet to catch up on some sleep.

The hotel room was super dry and I had a terrible time sleeping last night because when I get dry I start choking on the CPAP machine. Min has a really bad cold (we hope that it is just a cold) and really needed some humidity too. So we ran a hot shower with the bathroom door open to get some steam into the room. I didn’t realize that it was getting very steamy but Min did but didn’t think anything of it. The hotel room had really high ceilings so most of the steam was really high up and we couldn’t tell how much there was. Well, the smoke alarm went off from all of the particles in the air. Oh boy. Luckily it was only our room that went off. The alarm was about 10-11 feet off of the ground, though, so that there was no way to get to it to do anything. We tried fanning it but that didn’t help. Eventually, they sent up maintenance and had them bring a ladder and try to disconnect it. But the ladder was too short so they had to get a taller one. Then they returned and disconnected it. Oops. They left us the ladder so that it could be attached again later. They returned around 1:30 in the morning and tried to hook it up again but it went off because the system wouldn’t reset. So they took it and the ladder away.

Everyday has new exciting things happening around here. I slept in and figured that I would have some time before we had to deal with the computers. Nope. Igor, the drive that I had hired, had picked them up at 5:00am and was almost to dad’s. Wow did he make good time. So I jumped in the car and drove on over there. Igor brought a 25′ box truck with a lift gate. We needed the lift because we had no way to possibly move any of those machines without it. Good thing that I had hired a mover, because it turned out that there were TEN units instead of nine. Holy cow. There is SO much computer to be moved. It is unbelievable. We got the stuff off of Igor’s truck in no time and then he backed his truck up to ours and loaded all of our stuff onto the liftgate and we moved that into the garage as well. We are putting everything into the garage because we just don’t have anywhere else to put it right now. We were expecting only 1/5 of all of this stuff so we weren’t prepared at all.

After getting everything unloaded, dad and I drove to the city to get some food and to drop off the truck. Otherwise someone will have to deal with it tomorrow. We got the truck dropped off by the airport and then headed over to do some banking that dad needed to get done and then we hit Bill Gray’s for lunch. That was good. Then we had to swing by the hotel to pick up a form for Min and then back to my place. Quite a busy day already and it hasn’t even started yet.

Min and I packed and it took too long so we couldn’t go to the after hours social event from the Chamber of Commerce in Dansville that we had hoped to be able to make it too. Just too much going on today.

We managed to hit the road around 6:30. Off to Pittsburgh. The weather is pretty good for the trip down. We were able to make good time on good roads. We arrived in Pittsburgh around midnight and found our hotel easy enough. We are staying at the Marriott Courtyard downtown which is a brand new hotel. We were really impressed with the Courtyard. It is an absolutely fabulous hotel right in the heart of the city. The whole place was just gorgeous and the room was really nice. Really nicely furnished and pretty big and comfy. We were very surpised. Definitely the nicest Marriott hotel I have ever been in. Far nicer than any of the “real” Marriotts.