Sheep Guarding Llama

We went to church in Geneseo this morning because Min’s back was bothering her and she couldn’t sit through a service on LaGrange’s pews.

After church Phil and Kate came over for some dinner and to go over to look at the house that they are interested in again. We hung out and then watched a ton of movies. Kate had never seen the Romancing the Stone movies before so we watched those. Those are some classic films.

A nice relaxing Saturday. Since we cancelled the game last night, I was able to sleep in and actually have enough sleep today. Eric called and woke me up this morning. So I got up and went downstairsand played a game of Empires: Dawn of the Modern World. This is only the third full game I have played after having the game for months. I managed to beat the computer on a very hard level this time. I have not decided what I think of the game yet. It has some interesting features but it is too simple still, I think. There doesn’t seem to be enough to it. And the different civilizations are made too much different from each other that it makes it extremely important to have memorized the strengths and weeknesses of each, even for a beginner. The graphics are really nice though, that is a plus. And the game lets you have up to 80,000 units in the world population which is pretty cool. Not that any computer we have to ever come close to handling that at all.

After watching The Killer Meteors last night, I needed to watch a better Chan film to make up for it. So I watched the Columbia-Tristar transfer of Snake and Crane Arts of Shaolin.

Min and I went over to dad’s house at 5:00 for some pizza. My family was over and we watched a movie and played some foosball.

I got to sleep in a little this morning but Min wasn’t able to fall asleep until after I had to get up.

The roads were really bad around here today. Dad had to drive out to Perry twice today and said that it was terrible.

Eric stopped by this afternoon and did a little work from the house. I continued to work on stuff for college. I am moving along pretty well.

Min got up kind of late today so we didn’t have a lot of time to spend together. We did take the time to watch the 2002 Academy Award Winner for Best Foreign Language Film Nowhere In Africa. It is a really great film. It is a true story about Jewish refugees from World War II era Germany who escape to Kenya before the war begins.

Mary finally called tonight. We haven’t been able to get a hold of her in months. She is working at Northern Lights Candles in Wellsville and is living down there now as well.

Min and I then watched The Moon-Spinners with Hayley Mills. Min has seen it before and said that it is really weird. The collection is down to $4.76 now. It gets more cost effective everyday.

I am supposed to be driving to Binghamton early in the morning to do some sales. But John Stephens and I decided that weather wasn’t supposed to be really good tomorrow and it would be better to wait until it was more prudent.

I stayed up working on my recipe database system that I plan to call phpRecipe and to release as open source software when I am done with it. It is just a simple web application for looking up recipes so that we don’t have to look through all of the books to find things that we want.

I finished watching The Killer Meteors which has to be one of the worst Chan movies ever. After that I watched the BBC’s Are You Being Served? Tribute to Mollie Sugden that they made in 2000 to celebrate her 80th birthday. It is better than the other AYBS looking back shows because they got most of the cast back together to reminisce about the show and they showed footage from both series and of some earlier stuff that Mollie had done. They didn’t talk about Come Back Mrs. Noah, though, which was a series that Mollie did in 1978 in the middle of AYBS.

This morning I headed up early to a meeting at Empire State College up in Rochester. The weather was awful and so were the roads. The wind was really high and it was hard to stay on the road.

Ok, weird website of the day. All About Bellybuttons. Apparently written by a girl who doesn’t have a navel. I know you all always wanted to meet one, so here is your chance.

I spent the evening getting stuff done for college. I have a ton of work that I need to do and I am trying to get it done as soon as possible. I really want to get my degree this summer.

Min and I watched Road to Bali which is a hilarious and cute old Bing Crosby and Bob Hope movie. I love those old, quirky movies. They don’t make anything like those these days. After Min went to work, I watched Jackie Chan’s Young Master. It is one of the really early and horrible movies that Jackie did before he was very well known. Actually, of the early Chan films, this one is one of the best. It is one of the few films from the era that can be easily followed. The storyline actually makes sense and the fighting scenes are pretty good for the period.

I stayed up really late working on stuff for college. I watched Road to Rio, the prequel to Road to Bali. It is in black and white and not nearly as weird as the second movie. It was cute.

I did a little research and discovered that Crosby and Hope did an entire series of “Road” films. In fact, the series spanned 23 years from 1940 to 1962. The movies that I have are two of the later films. The series started with “Singapore” in 1940 and followed with “Zanzibar”, “Morrocco”, “Utopia”, “Rio”, “Bali” and “Hong Kong” in that order. Here is a write-up that I found on the films – Road Movies. If you are looking to get into these films that did so well for Paramount in the 1940’s, you can start with this collection at Amazon. I found the two that I have at Walmart in the bargain bin for just $6 for the pair!

THE JANUARY 2004 LLAMA OF THE MONTH IS PHIL AYERS

Phil wins our llama of the month award since he has been helping us with moving things around in his truck this month.

I had to get up and get moving early this morning. Danielle and I had a meeting up in Fairport at 10:00 and her car isn’t working and Michael is sick so I had to drive over there and get them and we had to drop Michael off with Min so that she could babysit. It was hard getting out of bed this morning, I have gotten used to getting up late. I was sure that I was going to be late for the meeting but we ended up actually being early. The meeting went well. We have to get a proposal into them tomorrow. Not bad for our first day in the city. Danielle and I hit Pellegrino’s for lunch since I have always heard about it and never actually seen one. It was pretty good.

Min is still in a war movie mood so we watched Casualties of War and Hamburger Hill. I had never seen either movie before, which I realize is amazing since WUHF 31 used to show it every Sunday afternoon. But I actually did not ever see it. With watching so many movies recently and not having any money to buy more, the cost per view has dropped to just $4.78. This is a pretty big deal since we used to work so hard to get the CPV anywhere near $5. Not only that but we have only 20 unwatched DVDs and only 7 unwatched LDs. That is pretty good. There used to be many more unwatched movies than that years ago when the collection was much smaller. Emily used to complain about that.

Min has to work again tonight. She is so happy to be heading back to work. Phil got to go back to work with a smile today 🙂

Tomorrow morning I am going up to Rochester to go to Empire State College to get back on track again after taking a year off. One of these days I might actually get my four year degree done. I will have been in college almost continuously for ten years come June. How awful is that? Ten years, hundreds of credits, five colleges and no degree.