Sheep Guarding Llama

Friday. It’s game night tonight. Arti, Phil, Josh, Jeremy and I all made it. It was nice to have five players. Art and Jeremy both came over before 5:00 pm. So the three of us got two games in before dinner. Then Jeremy, Min and I went to the Omega Grill for some dinner before the real games started. Everyone else arrived around 9:00. We kept having problems with computers crashing, though, and so we ended up playing three games that we weren’t able to finish. We played until almost 6:00 am. We only managed to get a single game in! That is a total of about twelve hours of playing.

John and I went into Washington to do a little bit of work this morning. I took down one of our servers so that we could move it up to New York. Phil came into the office today to clean out his desk. We spent some time standing out on the dock in the rain talking. We got back to Annapolis just in time to get everything packed up so that Min and I could head out of town to get back home. Min has to work tonight so we have to get back.

The drive took about seven hours and there was fog and rain for a lot of it. I was really exhausted by the time we got back to Geneseo and Min was already about half an hour late for work. We got into the house and within thirty seconds of walking into the house, the Christmas tree collapsed onto the hamster’s cage. What a mess. The tree stand was full of water with chemicals in the water to help keep the tree alive and it poured out all over the floor. We also had some ornaments break (luckily nothing sentimental.) The hamster and the cage were okay, just had to be put back together (although Mr. Humphrey’s keeps asking us for valium.) He seems to be under a lot of stress recently. I moved the tree out to the garage so that we could clean up the floor and ended up breaking a lot of ornaments as I carried it out. Min ended up being over an hour late for work and I stayed up until 3:00 am cleaning up what I could from the mess. I am pretty sure that we managed to avoid any permanent carpet damage. But boy was I tired by the time I finally got to bed.

Can you believe that updates continue to come through even when I am out of town? How long has it been since that happened? Min and I slept in late this morning at the hotel and didn’t go over to John and Michelle’s until 11:00. That actually worked out well because John hadn’t even showered yet anyway. And Michelle is always awake/asleep with the baby so she doesn’t care what the schedule is. Min and I ran out to the Double T Diner for some lunch. Min loves going to the Double T when we are down here. They are very similar to Jay’s back in Rochester.

I spent most of the day with the laptop sitting on my lap. I sat on the futon upstairs with Nila sitting next to me. What a great cat. I need a cat like that. She is so cuddly. More cuddly than almost any dog I have ever known. Min spent most of the day in the living room knitting. She got lots done today. In fact, she did so much that she ran out of knitting projects to work on. She only brought so much with her and she did too much today. Andy ordered his new computer today. He is getting a Shuttle XPC because Min’s is so cool. Andy will be home on Monday and will be staying in New York for almost a month. He won’t be heading back to Puerto Rico until January 8. So he will REALLY be loving his time in good old New York.

We watched movies this evening while I worked on the laptop. We watched Spirit, some Dr. Seuss cartoon and then The Re-animator which is one of John’s all time favorite movies. It is an interesting film. Not up to par with the Evil Dead movies, though.

For those of you who use SmoothWall Firewall, version 2.0 final came out today. You can download it now. Also, Mozilla Thunderbird 0.4 released.

Leanne hates her evening job at the car dealership so she has decided to give that up. She has been answering phones for a dealership on the east side of the city but it hasn’t been very much fun. John Stephens just told me that he is in the process of moving to his first appartment. He got a place in Endicott where he is working now. He is very excited.

Min and I are going down to Annapolis today. We got up and had a lot of stuff that needed to be done before we were able to leave so we spent the first few hours of the day working frantically trying to get things more or less caught up so that we could leave. We ended up being able to hit the road around 11:00 and head south. The trip went really well. The roads were completely clear so we managed to miss all of that heavy snow. So that worked out really well. We stopped just outside Harrisburg and got some lunch at a diner.

We arrived in Annapolis around 5:00 and went to the hotel where we are staying, the Comfort Inn Bay Dale, and checked in. Then we headed on over to John and Michelle’s house to see the baby (and the cats.) The baby is only awake for fifteen minutes at a time so we didn’t get to spend much time with her. Min did hold her for a while though. We hung out at the house this eveing. John and I just had to run out down the street to check on the thermostat for our friends Rob and Trish. Rob and Trish just moved to Jacksonville, Fl. They both found new jobs down there and are very excited. They are also expecting! Seems like everyone is expecting these days. Must be something in the water.

We got pizza for dinner and we watched 28 Days Later… and 2 Fast 2 Furious. 28 Days Later… was much better than I expected. I actually really enjoyed it. It is a horror flick but it really focuses on the suspense and action and not on the gore. 2 Fast 2 Furious was positively dreadful. Luckily it was just on television so it didn’t cost anything. I recommend really avoiding that movie. It might even be worse than Paul Walker’s last huge flop, Meet the Deedles.

Min and I had breakfast at our local hangout, the Omega Grill, and then we did some shopping at Walmart. Min wanted to get some new decorations for the tree and I did some hunting for bargain films. Walmart has added new bargain selections for the holidays so there is a lot to go check out. We found a ton of really good stuff including Dave, Last of the Red Hot Lovers, Wuthering Heights, Lost in Space and National Lampoon’s European Vacation. We made out like bandits. Cheap movies rule.

Min and I were originally planning on driving to Annapolis this afternoon but with the weather being bad we decided to wait until the morning. So tomorrow morning, first thing, Min and I will be road-tripping south to Maryland (where they have a ton more snow than we do here.) It will be nice because neither of us has been down there in quite a while. This may be the longest stretch of me not being there since I started living there in the summer of 2000. Min really wants to see John and Michelle’s new baby Francis Nicole. So we will be down south until Wednesday evening.

We watched some movies this afternoon. With so much new good stuff beckoning us, how could we resist. I don’t think I have ever seen all of European Vacation before so we watched that. What a great film. I am not sure that it is as good as the original but it is awfully good. It is funny how much I love the Vacation movies but I am not really a fan of anything else that National Lampoon has done (especially Class Reunion, that was the worst.) After that, we watched Dave with Kevin Klein and Sigourney Weaver which is an incredible movie. I haven’t seen it since it was in theatres in 1993 and Min really likes it too so we watched that.

Dad came over after evening church and we drove up to Avon to get some food at Tom Wahl’s.