Sheep Guarding Llama

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.

John woke me up around 6:00 this morning and I hopped in the shower to get ready. We headed out the door around 6:45 to drive up to Annapolis to pick up the truck that I rented from Budget. We got the truck, a ten foot box, and I was on the road to Washington by 7:30. Boy is this going to be a long day.

I drove through rush hour traffic in a truck and finally got into the hospital center. Luckily Sonny did most of the loading and got the equipment that was there for me to pick up onto the truck really quickly. There wree about four or five servers there that I needed to get because John needed the office cleared out. So I picked up my old Pentium desktops that were there as well. I had three of them down there. So there was quite a bit of stuff that I was picking up. Then it was off to Owen Mills where the real load is waiting for me.

I found Owen Mills and the place that I was going to without any problem. I hate driving a truck through heavy DC and Baltimore traffic, though. So I got to the place and went in to talk to them to find out how we were going to go about loading the AS/400. Ha ha. I guess this wasn’t a trip that was planned out all that well. I was under the impression that I was picking up two AS/400 modules (that is, one 3/4 rack sized unit and one half rack sized unit each weighing 500-1000 lbs.) But hey, what do I know about the computer that I bought? Turns out that it was actually NINE modules of that size!! We managed to get two of them loaded onto the truck but it was all that four of us could do and we only managed to move the smallest two modules and had to means to load anything any bigger than that. We also then decided that the truck wasn’t large enough to get the rest of the machine into. Oops. So we had a dilema. I spent the rest of the afternoon, five hours, sitting in their offices reading and making phone calls trying to figure out what we could do to move the rest of the machine. At the end of the day we finally gave up and I hired a moving company to pick it up and deliver it to us. I just couldn’t come up with anything else to do.

Now begins the real adventure, driving the truck back to New York loaded with computers that are sliding around. I didn’t make it more than a few blocks before the AS/400 modules broke through the cable that was holding them down and they starting flying around in the back of the truck banging into everything. That was a real problem. I made it for a few miles without any way to pull over to deal with anything. Eventually I found a large driveway that I could pull into tnad get into the back of the truck to assess the situation. It wasn’t good. Everything was sliding around and I had to do something. So I laid the two AS/400 modules down. This was not easy at all to do all by myself. They were easily 500 lbs each and they have a lot of their weight up high so they don’t want to lie down without just falling. The one was part way over against the side of the truck, it was easier to lie down. The other unit was totally upright and I had a terrible time getting any leverage on it. I had to jump on it and use my weight to pull it over, it was not safe at all. My worst fear was getting pinned under it since I was outside in 15 degree weather. I could be trapped for a while. I could get it off if it fell on me or my leg, but if my hand got caught I would be in an awkward position and might not be able to lift it. I did end up dropping it on three fingers but just on the tips and was able to pull those out. Boy did that hurt. Felt just like the loanshark and stopped by with his little hammer and went for those three fingers. Once I laid them down I was able to cram them into a decent position and tie a huge metal cable through the casters of the one unit pinning everything else into place. I got back into the truck and got back underway. What a pain!

I made it back to New York without any more incidences. Pheww. Once the computers stopped rolling around and falling all over the place, the drive was much easier. I really wish that there was a CD player in the truck though. Just listening to the radio is pretty boring and there are only one or two stations in a lot of the area that I had to drive through.

It was close to midnight when I finally pulled into dad’s. I talked with him for a few minutes and borrowed his car to get home. We are dealing with unloading the truck tomorrow.

Today ended up being a long and boring day, but I was expecting that for the most part. I slept in a little and then packed and get everything ready to go. I didn’t take my laptop with me because it just wasn’t going to be practical to be lugging that thing around for two days without hardly a place to even think about using it. I am pretty much getting myself back to Geneseo as quickly as possible.

Dad picked me up and we went to Mel’s Diner for some lunch on our way to the city. Then dad dropped me off at the airport around 1:00. Plenty of time to make a flight in Rochester. It never takes more than twenty minutes to get from the front doors to the terminal waiting area. I got myself checked in and went through all of the extensive security checks that I always get selected for and made myself comfortable waiting for the plane. I brought some books and magazines with me so I read a bunch while I was waiting. The plane was delayed because of the bad weather. It is bitter cold and the airport is in a spot of pretty low visibility.

The plane got off the ground around 2:40, just half an hour late. Better than all of the poor people waiting to go to Orlando who were supposed to have left around noon and were still waiting to see the plane that they were supposed to be boarding. The flight was quick and uneventful. I ordered a bloody mary and they forgot to charge me for it. That was nice. I don’t think that drinks are free but maybe they are. Maybe they were free because we were running late.

I arrived in Baltimore around 3:45 and checked my cell phone. John had forgotten that I was coming into town and wasn’t able to pick me up for a while. So I got to spend the afternoon in the airport hanging out. I got some food and moved to an area near the baggage claim that had some nice seats but I could still get outside quickly and plopped down and did some reading. I got quite a bit of reading done while I was there. John came by to get me around 7:00.

We went over to Blockbuster Video and John rented Shaun of the Dead and I picked up a few new movies. It is a long story but I ended up with How to Deal with Fires, Big Girls Don’t Cry (both German films) Gothika and Monty Python and the Holy Grail. So the collection just keeps growing and growing. Min used to have Grail but it disappeared some years ago and we have been without it ever since.

We headed back on over to John’s house and Michelle made grilled cheese sandwiches and we all watched Shaun of the Dead. That movie is hilarious. It is really good, everyone should watch it. I didn’t stay up long after the movie because I had to get up pretty early in the morning and it is going to be a long day tomorrow.