Sheep Guarding Llama

Min stayed at work an extra hour on her long double again giving her a seventeen hour shift. It is a good thing that she works at a place that has good there or else that would be really rough. But she gets breakfast in the morning so it isn’t quite as bad as it might be. She was pretty tired when she got hom. They had her doing laundry through her entire seventeen hour shift because the previous shift that had multiple people on didn’t do any and left it all for her to do.

Eric and I are supposed to be going to Washington today to do some training but we can’t find anyone in DC who can verify that a meeting has been scheduled and that there will be anyone for us to train at all.

Today was a big homework day for me. Min is working her double tonight so I have tons of time to myself to get it done. We slept in very late today after staying up until 3:30 this morning playing video games. We got up around noonish and Min made pear and cheddar wraps for lunch. Those are pretty good. She had me spend the time between lunch and her leaving for work to try to get some computer based training modules loaded onto her laptop so that she could use them to do some studying at work tonight on her long shift. She is working hard at completing her CompTIA A+ exams and getting that boring cert out of the way. We thought that the CBT’s might be a good learning method for her, they sure worked for me. I did a ton of work but there was a problem with the site to download them from so I wasn’t able to get them done before she left.

I did some homework, mostly reading (I am about 400 pages behind in reading right now) between 2:30 and 7:00. At 7:00, I drove up to Henrietta and picked up some McDonald’s and brought it over to Min at work. She had a really busy evening though and didn’t really have any time to eat with me. But at least she got food this way. Otherwise she has to brown bag it. I took the laptop and plugged in in the lobby of the hotel and got to work downloading those CBTs for her and doing some reading while I was doing it. I managed to get quite a bit of reading done while I was there. I am up to date with my Project Management reading which is insanely boring and I am reading the vastly more interesting Systems Analysis and Design books now and that makes it all a lot easier. I am flying through this material. A lot of it is stuff that I have read before in a different edition of the same textbook so I can go over bits pretty quickly.

I finished up at the hotel around 11:30. I ended up staying with Min through half of one of her shifts. I got all of the stuff that she needed downloaded for her so she has plenty of studying to do now. I drove home and got back to reading while I waited for the hamster to wake up so that I could clean his cage. Mr. Humphries has been sleeping in later and later recently so it took forever before he decided that is was time to wake his lazy butt up. I got tons of reading done while I was waiting for him, but it was really late before I got to go to bed. I put Mr. Humphries in his new ball and he ran around the house like a lunatic while I got his cage all nice and sparkling clean. I got him back into his apartment and searching for hidden treats around 3:45am. Boy am I tired. Okay, time for bed.

Jeremy crashed here last night so Min got him up this morning and put him back to work in the garage. It is starting to come along. They got about 2/3rds of the garage painted with its first coat of Rave Wine. The garage is going to look really weird once they are done. Weird and dark, but the colour is really cool so I am hoping that it will turn out pretty nice. Definitely not what you expect from a garage. I am really tempted to keep the cars outside, lay down some carpeting in there and have another room of the house. Since the ceiling is fully finished and now the walls are painted a very interior looking colour, it really makes you feel like it isn’t a garage anymore. Especially since the cars are all outside while we are painting it. Actually, before getting to the painting, we all went over to Denny’s and had some breakfast. We aren’t that much of slave drivers.

The painting went on all day, there is a lot of garage out there. After the painting was over, Min and Jeremy went down to the basement and watched more of “Homestar Runner” on DVD.

We ordered a couple of pizzas from Mama Mia’s for dinner and had them delivered. I love living in a place where you can get pizza delivered. I haven’t been able to easily for so much of my life that it is still a novelty to me. We ate out on the deck. It has been a little bit chilly but not too bad. We are really appreciating our new deck furniture that we got this year. It makes our deck into another room of the house. John and Michelle have that in DC, that really treat their deck as another room. But in New York, unfortunately, we are stuck with only being able to use the deck for a few months and the wasps and bees are so bad here that it makes it really difficult to use it for a lot of that time as well.

Friday. Finally. And a holiday weekend too, sort of. Min’s brother decided that he wasn’t coming down until next weekend so we have this weekend free to work around the house.

Today was the Rochester Microsoft Across America show. I didn’t manage to get to bed until 3:00 this morning and I had to be up at 6:20 to be able to get ready and make it to the show on time up in Irondequoit. I haven’t had enough sleep in a few nights so I really wasn’t ready to get up this morning when the alarm went off. I felt like crap when I pulled my lazy butt out of bed. I was up very late working on homework last night.

We got to the show at 8:15 or so and luckily had time to get our free breakfast. That is to encourage you to get to the show a few minutes early, they have bagels and coffee and juice. Otherwise, everyone would be running late because they would be driving around hunting for some caffeine to get them through the morning. Dominica and I were scheduled for different shows today so we hardly got a chance to see each other all day long. She did the same sessions that I did in Ithaca on Tuesday while I spent my time in the technical sessions. We did manage to have lunch together at Taco Bell just up the street from the theatre. There was a 45 minute lunch break between the sessions so we ran out and grabbed a bite. The show went on until 5:30. I managed to win a t-shirt and get two shirts as free gifts. Dominica didn’t get any so she wasn’t very happy about that. I did win something at the MSDN event but I don’t know what it is yet, I am hoping for a frisbee, because they didn’t have the prizes there so there are sending them out later. It is cool that I managed to win a “participitory” prize in both sessions. It is especially good since I won nothing in Ithaca on Tuesday. The best thing was that the TechNet session this morning was mostly on managing Active Directory and their free gift was a $50 Microsoft Press book specifically on Active Directory on Windows 2003. That is so cool because on October 25th I am starting my new job as an Active Directory administrator and I have a lot of boning up to do before then. I am planning on attending Microsoft’s AD workshop series that start tomorrow as well.

We got home just in time for Andy to want to go up to Avon for dinner. I never did figure out why he really wanted to eat in Avon, especially on a day when all three of us had just driven through Avon and on down to Geneseo so we all had to drive right back up again. But anyway, we went up to the Peppermint for dinner.

I have tons of homework and other “sitting at the computer” work to do so I headed into the upstairs office and Andy and Min went to work in the garage. They were originally planning on painting tonight but decided that their time would be better spent collecting all of the empty recycling cans out there and taking them back to Wegmans. We had about $25 of cans and bottles out there. The garage has a lot more space in it now too. Tomorrow I have to send out all of the remaining T-Mobile equipment that has been sitting in the basement. That will undoubtedly give us a ton more room down there too. I also have to stop by and drop off a box of stuff for Kelley’s Heroes that has been sitting in a big box in the laundry room hallway for a few days now. Once I get all of that stuff taken out of here, there will be quite a bit more room. There is a ton of garbage still in the garage that we need to get caught up on – I didn’t pay the collection bill in a while and we went for a few weeks without pickup and now we are trying to catch back up. We also have a lot of cardboard in the basement that needs to be taken over to dad’s at some point. That stuff alone should get the house pretty close to being ready to start seriously organizing. The last big move will be to get the theatre equipment mounted up into the ceiling and to get the sofa moved into the theatre room proper.

While I was working, Min headed on down to the theatre to watch the new Aladdin Special Edition. I managed to get a bit of homework done. I am starting to catch up a little bit. Not a lot, but a little. I am gaining on the deadlines at least. That is the best that I can hope for at this stage in the game. While I was working, I let the computer do some work and I got a handful of new CDs transferred over to Ogg Vorbis.

We are meeting dad for breakfast at 8:30 so no staying up late tonight. However, I have ten chapters of textbooks to read by tomorrow so I have a lot to do. This college thing can keep you busy! Goodnight everyone!