Sheep Guarding Llama

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.

Work, work, work. Min did a ton of cleaning today and the house is looking really good. She is getting the house ready for the new dresser that we are getting today. My dad is giving us one of the old dressers that they had for years. I don’t know how old the dresser is but remember it from when I was really young. I am sure that we had it before I was around. Phil and Kate are coming down to look at the house next to dad’s this evening at 7:00 and then they are helping us move the dresser over to the house. It is a good thing that we know someone with a truck.

Min made me lunch today. We are trying out Yves Deli slices which actually make a really good sandwich. I am impressed. Yet another product that allows us to act like we aren’t veggetarians without having to eat meat. It is nice to be able to make regular sandwiches again.

Andy arrived in Puerto Rico early this afternoon. He still doesn’t have a car or any means of transportation and his company isn’t bothering to do anything about it. He managed to get to his apartment after spending $100 on a taxi just to discover that he has no Internet access and that his phone can only make calls to the continental US and Canada. So he is unable to call for another taxi or get food delivered or even look up phone numbers to call in case someone stops by to offer him a phone. He lives too far from any place that he knows so he isn’t able to walk and it is too hot anyway. Luckily he still has television and a few books to read or he would be going completely insane. Not that he isn’t, but we haven’t really noticed anyway. So he is stuck with no way to communicate and no way to get to work. He is not happy.

Min and I went over to dad’s around 5:30 to help get the dresser ready to move. There were a lot of memories in and on that dresser. Dad also found the books that had been stored back there when we were moving up from Ithaca. I knew that some books were missing and even knew what a few of them were but I wasn’t able to figure out where they could have gone. Two boxes were hiding back there. My subscription to Microsoft TechNet arrived today too. That is nice. New stuff to play with.

Phil and Kate came over from looking at the house, 877 Peoria Rd., and loved it. It is directly across the street from where Min and I hope to build some day. It would be really cool to have them living right across the street from us. We hung out with dad for a while and then got around to moving the dresser.

After moving the dresser, we all went out to Denny’s for some late night dinner.

Ah, back to the weekly grind. This morning I worked around the house as usual. At noon, Min and I drove Andy up to the airport so that he could fly back down to Puerto Rico. He is going to be there until March 13, or so the schedule goes currently. That will, most likely, be the end of his trips down to the Carribean.

Min and I met Eric at the UofR and we went over to Breugger’s for some coffee. Andy called while we were there to say that his flight was delayed and he didn’t know if he would be able to get out at all. So we were prepared. We headed back home and I did some more work around the house. There wasn’t a lot of work to be done today since it is a semi-holiday and few places were doing business.

Devin Richards stopped by this evening to pick up some ink that he had been waiting for. He hung out for over an hour and got the tour of the house and office. Andy called while he was here to tell us that he had been able to get out of Rochester but inept USAir had flown his connecting flight on to Puerto Rico without waiting for the flights that connected to it to arrive in Philadelphia. So he is stuck in Philly with no way out until tomorrow. Then, to rub it in his face that he took the wrong airlines, USAir tells him that they aren’t responsible for keeping their own connecting flights and schedules so that it is his own problem to find a place to stay in Philadelphia. (Too bad he doesn’t book his own flights or USAir’s attempts to get him to change airlines might be successful.) So he doesn’t know what he is going to do tonight. Then, to make matters worse, because he no longer has a flight to get to and because of the heightened airport security, they forced him to walk a very long distance outside of the airport in the freezing cold. And, of course, he has no coat because he was going to Puerto Rico and returning at the end of winter and was going to be inside the Philly airport the entire time inbetween so he had to pratically freeze to death out there. All this after they have lost his luggage on more than one occassion. Let me tell you, I will be sticking with AirTran.

Speaking of bad airlines, Northwest (on whom Josh, Andy and I flew some time ago) has violated customer privacy laws and sold our personal information, including credit cards, addresses and such, to some agency. I am hoping that there will be a class action lawsuit, like there was against JetBlue because I, for one, intend to pursue the issue. I think corporate officials should go to jail. They are involved with identity and credit card theft and then they hide behind big companies. I am putting this in here because I will forget to tell Josh and Andy that it was in the newspaper today and I just happen to read it. I am pretty sure that we all flew during the time period of the theft.

Min cooked us a nice dinner and we ate in a very quiet house. Andy has only been gone for a few hours and already the house seems empty and quiet. Strange, isn’t it?

Apprently in a World War II mood from last night, Min and I decided to watch The Pianist. Neither of us had seen it before but dad had and said that it was really good. Adrian Brody who stars in this film was also in The Thin Red Line that we watched last night.

Well, so far the updates have been rolling in fairly regularly in 2004. It looks to be an exciting year at SGL. Tomorrow I might hear something about whether or not I will be spending some serious time in San Francisco soon. It is unlikely but I am really hoping that I get to go. It would be really nice not to have to spend the winter in New York. And it would be really nice to have steady work coming in for a change. I do know that I will be spending next week down in Washington, DC. Eric and I are heading down on Tuesday morning and will be there all week. If anyone needs us, we will be at our usual spot, the Comfort Inn, Annapolis, Maryland on Old Mill Bottom Drive. We have been staying there for years. And luckily for me, this month is double air miles on my card for staying there. So good deal.