Sheep Guarding Llama

The snow started falling last night and some of the roads still aren’t plowed today. It is finally winter, I think. But with as late as it started, it probably won’t get a chance to last long.

Eric and I are planning on heading down to Washington during the last week of this month. We are going to be trying to get their truck based system working again. What a pain that system has been.

I had a meeting in Perry and a little bit of work to do there too so I ended up spending most of the day there. Then I drove out to Pavilion to take dad down to drop off his car for repairs. Min spent most of the day knitting and watching the Godfather movies. She has never seen them before and after Phil and Kate were attempting to watch all of the movies on the AFI Top 100 list, she felt that she had to see them.

I moved some old stuff into the archives today. I realized yesterday that I had forgotten to move November so the main page was getting unweildy again. The fourth quarter of 2003 ended up being quite busy for SGL. I thought that we were going to have a light season but we ended up having plenty of boring stuff to say and for everyone to read.

The four of us watched some Father Ted Series I. Miranda has never seen the show so we wanted to get her hooked on it early.

Today is Min and my three month (one season) anniversary. Today our job was to pick up our furniture for our dining room. We got up and called Ruby Gordon and asked the warehouse how late they were open today. So we drove up to Henrietta and borrowed Phil and Kate’s pickup truck in order to get the chairs. So we went to lunch at IHOP with the Ayers and then went to get the furniture. When we got to the store, they informed us that the warehouse was not open at all on Sundays. This was rather confusing as the warehouse phone line connects you to a person who tells you that the warehouse is open that day. But then again, everyone keeps telling us that we are idiots for shopping there at all so it is getting obvious that this is the case. So we scheduled to pick them up on Tuesday and returned to Phil and Kate’s apartment and watched Bridge on the River Kwai. None of them, including Min, had ever seen this classic war film. It is a little slow and kind of weird but it is a really beautiful and touching story of British POW’s held captive in Thailand or Laos during World War II by the Japanese.

After the movie, we all went out to dinner at the King and I because Min had been wanting Thai food since yesterday. Then we decided to go see a movie but weren’t able to find one that we wanted to see. We went to a couple of movie theatres and there just wasn’t anything good showing. So we hit Walmart to look for some movies. I found 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, The Apple Dumpling Gang and Batteries Not Included which was a classic movie that I loved to watch when I was younger. Kate really wanted to find a certain movie so we drove around to a bunch of different places, mostly closed, but at Borders, Phil found Bend It Like Beckim. So they got that movie and we went back to their place and watched it. It was really good. I didn’t know anything about it before today but I was really impressed. I had no idea that it was an Indian film made about an Indian girl soccer star in England. It was a good plot.

Right now, Andy, Miranda, Min and I are watching Disney’s classic 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. It is always a debate as to how strange a measurment Jules Vernes used to denote going under water. A league is not meant to be a measurement used underwater. The fathom is the standard measurement of distance under water and is equal to two yeard or six feet. A league is three nautical miles. Each nautical mile is 1.151 regular miles or just over 6076 feet. So the title of this movie denotes a distance 69060 miles beneath the water’s surface. This is an absolutely ridiculous figure. The deepest point of the ocean is only just under seven miles. Quiet a difference. It is very clear that Jules Vernes had a massive lack of grip on concepts such as distance, depth, pressure or just plain common sense. The distance denoted here would suppose that the earth was more than four times THICKER than it was ROUND which makes no sense at all. It is very noticeable in this movie just how little Disney cared about nature and the environment and how little the industry was regulated back in 1954 when the film was made. The treatment of real undersea life in the movie is pretty awful.

I stayed up really late last night so that I could sleep in with my wife this morning. We didn’t end up getting out of bed until the middle of the afternoon. Dad came over and he, Andy, Min and I went up to Avon for some Tom Wahls dinner. That was really good. We don’t go there often enough. It is just far enough away that we never feel like driving quite that far for dinner.

After dinner I drove down and borrowed The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen from my cousin. Min really wanted to see that. We watched it. The basic storyline was okay but the movie itself was terrible. The directin, effects and acting was all just pathetic. We are really glad that we didn’t buy this movie. After that we watched one of Spielberg’s few good movies, Empire of the Sun. Christian Bale delivers a totally amazing performance in this tale of a British child taken captive by the Japanese during the occupation of Shanghai in the 1930’s. I hadn’t seen the movie since 1988 or so and Min had never seen it at all.

Since it is Friday of a vacation week, I decided that no work was going to be done today so I slept in late and made it a relaxing day. Min informed me that she really wanted to spend some time today playing The Sims so I planned accordingly. Andy and I went up to the city and did some shopping at Borders. I found a book on MUD programming that is incredibly interesting and the first book that I have ever seen on the subject. Andy found it recently and had told me about it so I was anxious to get a look at it. We were there because Andy needed something particular. He is doing a ton of work on a video game engine of his own so that we can develop a real time strategy game. While we were there I found a ton of Golden books on bargain. These are reprintings of the same books that I still have from my childhood that I have used for years to look up all kinds of information from Astronomy to Meteorology to Entimology to Geology. I learned tons from those little books. So, since they were on sale and I get a corporate discount at Borders, I decided to pick some of them up for Michael. Eleven of them actually. Quite the stack of books for a six year old.

Min spent the evening playing her game and I spent it relaxing at the computer. It was a very uneventful day, but you need those from time to time.

The morning after. Leannne and Bob got up and disappeared early this morning before anyone else was awake. Min had to go to work last night and she was hoping that some of us would make it out to have breakfast with her before she made it back home. So I got up early and Jen was awake so the two of us drove out to Lakeville to have breakfast with Min at Leaisures.

Everyone decided that we were going to take advantage of the day off and have a big AoE2 day. Bob and Lise took off late in the morning after sleeping in a little bit. Arti and Phil came over midday around the time when Andy got up and we played a bit. Josh came over later in the afternoon. Kate, Danielle and Joanna came over and hung out upstairs. They watched movies while we played. Phil had to take off kind of early because he had to work tomorrow. His schedule really sucks. He gets Sunday and Tuesday off every week. That means that Saturday and Monday nights are the good times for him to play when Friday is typically good for everyone else. The rest of us stayed up for a little while and played a little longer. Our final game went on for forever. It was a really good, well matched game but it was so late in the night that we were all hoping that the game would end soon.