Sheep Guarding Llama

Happy 19th Birthday to Joe Tocco

More driving today. Tons more driving. We were still in Maine when we crossed over midnight. We crossed the border effortlessly into New Brunswick and the Atlantic Time Zone (GMT -4:00) at 2:30 EST. From now on, all times will be AST.

Super heavy fog in New Brunswick made for some horribly slow driving all morning. I was getting very sleepy after all of this driving. We reached Nova Scotia around 10:00 am. The weather got awesome once we arrived here. Cold, foggy and drizzly. Perfect for me.

Four more hours travel time to get over to the ocean and Halifax. We arrived early in the afternoon in the maritime’s largest city. We managed to wrangle reservations at the Sheraton Four-Point right on the harbour. We checked in and then walked uptown to get some food. We stopped at a traditional pub and got some fish and chips. After eating, though, we decided that we were just too tired and we headed back to the hotel to get some sleep.

We slept most of the afternoon and got up in the middle of the evening. We went down to the harbour front and walked for a while. It was a beautiful night. The weather up here is really amazing. We didn’t stay up for very long, we still don’t have enough sleep to recover from the drive so we went back to bed around 1:00 am.

[Looking Back – Added September 18, 2007: Right after crossing into Nova Scotia Dominica and I stopped at the large Nova Scotia Welcome Center.  We were there for probably half an hour.  At that point we had no reservations and no real plans for what we were going to do upon arriving in Halifax.  We hadn’t been completely confident that we were going to make it to Halifax.

We spoke to the nice people who worked at the Welcome Center and one of them called the Sheraton Four-Points for us and made a reservation for us at an incredible price.  It was something like $97 Canadian funds which, at the time, was only about $75 in US funds.

The Welcome Center is my last memory in Nova Scotia before arriving at the hotel.  I was delirious with lack of sleep by this point.] 

Today is the traveling day. All travel, all day. I got out of bed and got moving by 8:40 this morning. I picked Min up from the hotel at 9:10 and we headed on out. Unfortunately, I didn’t sleep well last night at all so I only got two hours of sleep max. We have so much driving to do, it is insane.

Our first stop was Frankfort so that I could change into my suit and pick up my dress shoes that we had accidentally left there a few weeks ago. I showered and shaved and we quickly got back in the car and drove out to Albany. I had an interview in Albany at 2:00 (I thought that it was at 2:30 so we were running late.) That took about 3 1/2 hours out of the middle of the driving day. That didn’t help things.

We were on the road before 6:00 and headed towards Massachusetts. We drove all evening. We have the Camaro so Min can’t drive – so I am doing all of the driving. And boy is it a lot of driving. By midnight, and the end of this post, we were in central Maine, near Augusta. We still have a lot of driving left to do so there is practically nothing to write about today since we have just been sitting in the car all day.

Today was the day to run errands all over to get ready to head out of town tomorrow. There is a lot to get ready. Min had to work at the hotel last night and has to work again tonight so she has to do all of her packing today. We had to run up to Rochester to do some last minutes things like banking and paperwork at the car dealer (Holtz appears to be actually getting my refund back to me on some stuff… cross your fingers.)

Min spent most of the day packing while Andy and I spent much of the evening working on the Waste Watcher. Min headed off to work and I got to bed around 1:00 am.

I was supposed to be going out to Albany today for an interview but that was put on hold until Thursday so today I am hanging out in Ithaca for a little while. I went into the office and helped out with a few things on Min’s computer and took care of some morning communications that I needed to do. Then we went out to State St. Diner for an early lunch.

After lunch, I headed north up to Rochester to meet up with Josh to run some errands this evening. When I got up there, he was busy at work so I headed over to Brighton and picked up Eric at the office and he ran a couple of errands with me. When Josh got out of work, I ran over to Soundworks in Pittsford and met him there. We picked up the B+W 303 speakers that I have been needing to finish off the theatre system. They are the last piece in our matching B+W 3 Series puzzle. We have the whole thing now, fronts, rears, center and sub all with matching Marantz MA-500 monoblock amps. The basement isn’t quite done yet so we can’t set it all up but I am getting very anxious because we have it all now, sitting in boxes taunting me to play with it.

After stereo shopping, Josh and I went to The Mundo Grill for dinner. [Update from July 24, 2006: Dinner was excellent and the atmosphere was quite good. I have no idea why I didn’t write about our dinner at the time. Josh and I vowed to return at the Mundo Grill again. Definitely one of our better dining experiences in Rochester. One of the few Rochester restaurants that gives a bit more of the big city restaurant feel and taste. While we were dining there was a major fire at the bowling alley across the street or perhaps behind the bowling alley. The restaurant had the whole front wide open – no glass just free air – and most of the restaurant had gotten up from their seats and were standing watching the fire.]

It was a chore to drag by lazy butt out of bed this morning to make it out to Leisure’s for breakfast. Dad and I drove over to Lakeville in John’s Camaro. Dad really liked it. He would like to get a convertible. He has wanted a Camaro convertible since the mid to late 60’s. So it is probably about time that he got himself one.

Min and I ran up to the city this morning to get a copy of my birth certificate for the trip next week. I have never had one with a county seal on it so I need to get one anyway. The office of vital records for Monroe County is right by Strong Hospital so that was really easy to find. It cost $30 and took like five minutes to deal with. That was so easy, I couldn’t believe it. We ran over to Media Play because Min wanted her own copy of Neverwinter Nights since it was only $10. She also found the latest Broken Sword game and decided to get that since they had one copy of it for just $15 (all of the others were $40, it seems to be a trend there to do things like that.) Anyway, we had really liked the Broken Sword:Shadows of the Templars game for the GBA so we thought that we would give this one a chance. I have been skeptical of getting games from The Adventure Company as they have a tendency to look too much like Myst and Seventh Guest (which are awful games.)

We got home and Andy and I spent most of the afternoon working on Waste Watcher designs. Min and Andy spent a little time getting Broken Sword installed on her computer. Once they got that working she played it a little bit and we were really impressed. That is a really awesome game. The graphics are good and the story line is neat and the game play is really cool. It is a lot like the old Sierra and Lucas Arts adventure games but translated into 3D which no one has ever been able to do right before. But this one seems to have really done a good job and it is really neat. We were all really impressed with it. So, I am hopeful that we may have found a source of awesome new video games in the genre that we like so much but can never find anymore. Boy wouldn’t that be nice.

Eric, Amanda and Julia came over for a little while. I have Eric’s new CD burner here and he needed to pick that up and Andy and I wanted him to talk about Waste Watcher stuff a little so we talked about that.