Sheep Guarding Llama

Today was a really short day. Dominica and I really slept in. We didn’t get home last night until almost 2:00 and then we stayed up for a little while hanging out with Andy so we didn’t get to bed until 3:00ish. Min woke up in the middle of the night with something really wrong with her leg and she wasn’t able to walk. So that didn’t make for a very restful night. And the room was really cold so I decided to try shutting the windows. Well, then it got really warm and that made up not wake up at all.

We got up just in time to run to the Omega Grill, eat lunch and for Min to run straight off to work at the Fairfield Inn. She is working her double shift tonight which really sucks going into our one year anniversary tomorrow.

I spent the day working on homework and the basement theatre. I got the first coat of the super reflective white paint onto the screen early in the afternoon so that it would be dry by this evening. That didn’t take too long. Then I headed out onto the deck to do some reading for my project management class.

Andy and I ran up to Avon to have dinner at Tom Wahls. After we came home, we set up the theatre – threw down the carpeting, set up the front speakers, got the projector and stereo in place – and fired up Jackie Chan’s Gorgeous. Boy does that picture look good. With the black walls and the bright white screen the contrast is really exceptional. We did notice that we do need a second coat of white paint to make the screen more even, but I don’t think that that will be too hard to do. So that is planned for tomorrow. I am sure that Min is going to want to try out the theatre in the morning. Right now we only have it set up to handle two channel stereo. I don’t know if we will be moving to surround sound soon or not. The next major project down there is getting the system mounted into the ceiling. Once everything is up off of the floor, then the couch that is going in there can be brought in and there will be enough room for people to actually sit. That will then clear up a ton of space in the storage room and we can get to organizing that as well.

Andy had to get to bed early tonight, tomorrow is his first day of work at Wegman’s in Rochester. He has to be up at 6:00 am which is going to be a major shock for his system as he has been going to bed around 5:00 am and getting up mid-afternoon for months on end now.

After watching the movie and Andy going to bed, it was back to the homework for me. There is so much for me to do, it is a major project for me to catch up on.

Congratulation to Lori and Perry Hughes who were married today!

Today was the big wedding. We slept in (boy I saw that a lot) and snuggled with Dexter because it isn’t very often that we get the chance to sleep with the puppy and we miss him a lot. And he must miss us too because he always wants to sleep with us.

We had to start getting ready for the wedding around 11:00. The wedding is an all day affair with a breather in the middle, so there is a costume change do to the afternoon wedding with an evening reception. So it is a little bit more casual than usual for the wedding itself but formal for the reception – I am explaining this for all of the men out there who have no idea that there are different standards of dress depending on the time of day of the event for weddings.

The wedding was in Frankfort at the Roman Catholic church. For you non-Roman Catholics out there, that means a full mass which takes over an hour. This was actually the first full Roman Catholic wedding that I have ever been to. It was a really nice ceremony and there were tons of people there.

Following the ceremony, the wedding attenders went down to Doc’s on Maint St. in Frankfort for the early reception which was very informal and was mostly just a light lunch to hold everyone until they could go to the formal reception four hours later. This early reception was not attended by the wedding party.

After the light reception, we went back to Min’s parent’s house for a couple of hours. I did some work on their computer while I was there. Min ended up having to give Dexter an emergency bath because he ran out and rolled in poop and was stinking up the house. He had gotten a flea treatment the day before and apparently he wasn’t very happy with how it was working out. Min tried to spray him with an apple scented body spray but that just made him smell like he had eaten a lot of apples before having an accident. So she had to bathe him, he wasn’t very happy about that.

At 5:00 we headed out to go to Turning Stone in Oneida where the reception was held. That is about fourty minutes away from Frankfort. That was really convenient for us since that was on our way home. In fact, it is only about 1/4 of a mile out of our way at all, if that. It couldn’t have been more convenient for us. The reception started at 6:00 with a cocktail hour. There was some really amazing baked brie at the cocktail hour, boy was that yummy. Unfortunately, I only got a chance to get a single bite of it.

We were seated for dinner around 7:00. I don’t know what time we actually ate at. Dancing started after dinner and went until 11:00. We had a really good time. We were really surprised how quickly the time passed. Min spent much of the evening dancing in high heels which she never does and her feet were absolutely killing her by the end of the evening.

It was almost midnight by the time we packed it up and headed for home. But, it is only just over two hours to home from the casino so that wasn’t too bad at all.

Min’s brother, Joe, is planning on coming out to hang out next weekend. He claims that he is coming out to look at the leaves and to go down to Letchworth but we know that he is really coming to see the new theatre that is almost complete. Andy did some more painting down there to get it ready for the final bright white of the screen tomorrow.

Well, the sad thing is that last season’s archives are the shortest since the beginning of 2002! That is very depressing. I really will try to do better this season. Look, I am already doing updates and it is just the first day of the season. I am really on top of things.

I did a bunch of work here during the day trying to get things taken care of as much as possible before heading out of town for the weekend. We are trying to get some polo shirts embroidered for this week because we have a number of Micrsoft events that we are going to be attending and we want to have everyone organized and showing off that we are with Niagara as much as possible. But we weren’t able to get the shirts that we wanted in town this morning so Min and I ended up running up to Rochester to find some. That was a pain. But it ended up going pretty quickly so it wasn’t all that bad.

We managed to hit the road around 4:30. The drive was good, we made it a little early for the rehearsal dinner at the country club in Frankfort. Dinner was really good, it was a buffet but the vegetarian selection was delicious.

After dinner it was over to Min’s parent’s house and off to bed. They still are without a television after their old one burned up a few weeks ago so there isn’t even television to watch. That was good, though, because it encouraged us to get off to sleep early so that we can be ready for tomorrow.

See, a whole week behind again. This is just the way it is. It is the constant changing between laptop and two different desktops that make it really difficult to keep up with the site. But at least I am keeping up for the most part.

Dominica is interviewing over at Livonia Central today. She put in a resume last year and they weren’t interested. Then suddenly out of nowhere they called and wanted her to come in. I don’t know that she will be interested in subbing for them this year but at least she will have some information. The funny thing is is that it is almost completely her interviewing them, not the other way around, since she is the party less likely to be interested in the position. After her 7:45 interview (yeah, that is AM) she is going to run up to Rochester to do some banking and see if she can pick up a new hamster call for Mr. Humphries because he got a little too rambunctios with his old one and managed to crack it almost in half. So, to protect his tiny toes we had to throw it away.

I know that almost everyone knows this site already but just in case someone doesn’t, I want everyone to go try out Homestar Runner, it is definitely one of the weirdest sites on the web.

The new and improved Minca Knits web site is now up and running. You can always find it by linking from the button to the left. Let me know what you think of the new page design, I really like it. I am still tweaking things, like the FAQ menu that doesn’t appear on every page. But for the most part, it is coming along nicely. I will be adding pictures and stuff of items very soon. I have been really swamped with work recently and have had very little opportunity to get to it.

Dad has his new lawn mower being delivered today. Now that he has converted a significant portion of the farm into lawn he needs a serious lawn mower to be able to handle it. There are just acres and acres of lawn now. He is very excited. His old lawn mower has been breaking almost every time that he goes out to mow so this new one should really make his life a ton easier. I told him that since he spends so much time on the lawn mower, we should get him a handheld wireless PDA and attached it to the front of the mower and put a wireless antenna up on the house so that he can get emails and instant messages while he is out mowing.

Dominica was gone for a long time this morning and didn’t manage to return home until 11:00. Then she needed me to go out to Walmart with her to get some paint and, of course, that turned into an all afternoon project. Almost three hours it took to get paint and stuff and lunch. We did get enough paint to hopefully complete the theatre as well as some dark burgundy paint and primer that Min is going to use to paint the garage. Our neighbors all have painted garages but, for some reason, ours was skipped. So we are doing it in a wild, dark red colour. I think that it will look nice but it will be almost impossible to find anything in there because it will be so dark and parking the cars will probably be difficult as well. We also got some “green twig” paint that Min is going to use to paint our bathroom because she is tired of white walls.

Jeremy called in the middle of the afternoon and said that he wanted to come over and help paint the basement so we had him come over and we put him to work. We managed to complete the second coat of the matte black of the back walls and we got the primer onto the screen surface. It is really coming along, we should be ready to watch movies in that room as early as tomorrow! But, Min and I have to go out of town tomorrow so we will be lucky if we get even close to being able to see anything in there before we leave.

After getting the basement painted, Min and Jeremy headed out to the garage to start getting it painted with its first coat of primer. Min chose Rave Wine as the colour that it will be. It is a really deep red so it will be pretty exciting for a garage, let me tell you. Okay, I went out to look at the garage and it is freaking hilarious. The primer that they have is pink, and I don’t mean just sort of pink, we are talking serious Pepto Bismal pink here. About half of the garage is done. It is SO funny. Walmart mixed the pink primer up for us because they thought that it would help give better coverage to the deep red that we are planning on putting on top but I think that we should leave it with just the primer because it is so funny. I have never seen a pink garage before and I am willing to bet that I might not ever see one again. I wish that it would show up in a photograph just how pink it is because I don’t think it is possible to really appreciate the pinkness of the situation without really being here.

By the way, tomorrow is October. I can’t believe that September is almost over. For those who don’t remember, Min and my first anniversary is coming up in just four days. A whole year, now that is hard to believe.

Jeremy has tomorrow off from school (no reason, they just don’t have very much to teach) and so he decided to crash here tonight and get at least one game of AoE2 in. There is no game this weekend since Min and I are leaving for Utica tomorrow afternoon around 3:30 to go to Lori and Perry’s wedding on Saturday. Tomorrow night is the rehearsal dinner. We are spending tomorrow night at her parent’s house in Frankfort but we are driving back to Geneseo on Saturday night because we just don’t have enough free time to spend another night out there. We wish we did but I have been going crazy all week just trying to get to my homework and to this email server that I have been working so diligently on. I have been working on the server for an entire week now and I have made a lot of progress but I have run up against some serious roadblocks and it is really wearing on me. I could use some time off but that would just make matters worse because I am so far behind on everything. And now with next week being almost solid with all day events, I have a crazy week to look forward to in addition to trying to catch up with everything that I haven’t completed yet this week. Ugh. At least the site is mostly up to date now. That is one less thing to have to worry about.

I moved the old stuff out to the archives, finally, as of today, I am a complete season behind. Not only that but these latest archives are some the smallest that we have ever had, which is very sad. I am really falling behind. Well, tomorow begins a new seasons (for the archives at least) so we will try to do better.

It has been a long day and it isn’t over yet but I am going to call it a night since there isn’t much to say and I need to get off of the computer before I go insane.

We are all so happy that the weather has finally changed and we no longer are needing to run the air conditioning all of the time. That has been killing us, the electric costs have been astronomical. We are hoping that we won’t need to turn it on for the rest of the year, but Indian Summer is bound to get us in a month or so. Min and I have three fans set up in our bedroom to try to keep it cool. For some reason, our room heats up something awful if we don’t keep air moving through. Even with it being the only room in the house with windows open, it is still the warmest room. We haven’t been able to figure out what makes this happen. It does have a running computer in it but almost every room has that. So we are at a loss. No idea how it is happening.

I spent most of the day couped up in the bedroom working diligently on projects. Still no word about either of the jobs that I am “supposedly” getting soon.

For those of you who utilize the Niagara Telecom SharePoint web site, I did a bit of work today on that server and that page loads dramatically faster now making it far more useful. It used to be painfully slow but it appears that those speed problems were caused by Microsoft’s software and not by our machine. Microsoft updated the package and it works much, much better now.

It was a gorgeous day today so I went over to Wegmans and got some take out and Min and I sat out on our deck enjoying the autumn weather. We have had a rough summer for enjoying our deck because there have been wasps everywhere and Min is very afraid of them. But now that the weather is cold, they are really slow and not a problem anymore.

We needed to get things moving on the basement but I have tons of work to get done so Min decided to hire my cousing Jeremy to come over and to do some work on the basement. He swept, scraped and mopped along with Andy to get the theatre room ready for painting. We are really anxious to get the room finished both because we are really excited to have a real theatre finally but also because the basement is such an incredible disaster that it will be really helpful to have it useful. The biggest thing is the huge couch that we have down there that needs to be moved into the theatre room to clear up space for everything else. And all of the stereo and projector components are all over the house just taking up space. So it will, in theory, do a lot to clean up the rest of the house as well.

After Jeremy finished, he had some dinner and I drove him home. When I got back, Min, Andy and I headed on down to the basement to begin the first coat of painting. That took a couple of hours but we got all of the non-screen areas completely “primed” with their base coat of matte black paint. Boy did that darken the room. Even the doors are painted black. We painted some of the white PVC as well. That room is going to be the darkest place on earth by the time we are done with it.

Min had to get to bed shortly after we finished painting because she has an interview in Livonia first thing in the morning (before first thing for me.)