Sheep Guarding Llama

Min and Danielle went up to the city this morning to pick up Danielle’s new glasses. Min got home around noon and went out to apply for substitute teaching positions with dad. They were gone for most of the afternoon. Eric arrived at the house just as Min and dad were leaving. Eric worked out of my office today. We went over to the Omega Grill to get some lunch. Min and dad went down to the diner in Nunda for lunch. Danielle and I ate there a few months ago and it was really good.

I spent most of the day in the office today working on getting out new SuSE Linux 9.0 super server up and running. It takes a ton of setup time and I am nowhere near getting it done. I finally got frustrated enough with it that I decided to take a break and start work on installing our new Windows Small Business Server 2003 machine instead. SBS 2003 just released as a packaged product this week so I am anxious to get it up and running. It is a lot easier to install than the Linux machine! But it is still a pain. No sooner than I got the new version installed over the demo version and the ethernet card couldn’t be recognized anymore. So I had to install another NIC just so that I could finish the install process. What a pain that is.

Phil stopped by unexpectedly this evening. He had to make a delivery in Geneseo (twice because he couldn’t find where he was going the first time) and decided to drop by and say hi. He couldn’t hang out long because he had to get back to work.

Min watched A Fish Called Wanda for her first time in forever. She thought that it was okay. I have never thought of it as a great movie. Min and I then watched Silverado, which she had never seen before. Then we watched The Untouchables which she has never seen and I haven’t seen in a very long time. What a great movie that is. Tonight was kind of a Kevin Kline, Kevin Costner and John Cleese evening (each of them was in two of the movies that we watched tonight.) That knocked another “never been watched” off of the list.

Winter has definitely arrived. There is snow all over today. Andy should be happy to be back in PR because the roads were bad around here today. It was really nice to walk out the front door this morning and find that the walk had been shoveled and the driveway had been plowed. I love living in a townhouse.

I worked around the house all day. Min meant to go out applying for jobs but the roads were bad so she is saving that for tomorrow. This evening, my dad, aunt, uncle and cousins came over for “movie night”. I ran out to Walmart and picked up Disney’s Pirates of the Carribean. It just released today. All of us had seen it in the theatre but it was nice to see it again and it is a ton better on DVD. It is a nice disc with ten hours of special features, two discs and a DTS soundtrack. We had a good time watching it.

The first day of December and the snow and wind is already terrible. I drove Andy out to the Buffalo airport this morning and it was an awful drive. We went through Batavia and most of the way we were an the verge of white-outs. But right as we got to the airport, it suddenly cleared up and their was bright sun. Andy’s plane made it out roughly on time and he called us from Philadelphia to say that all was going well. He will be back in Puerto Rico sometime this evening.

Tomorrow night, my dad and my aunt and uncle’s family are coming over for the first of our new weekly “Movie Nights.” We haven’t decided what movie we are going to watch yet but there is a bit of a selection. We haven’t figured out where everyone is going to sit yet but we will figure that out when the time arrives. Soon we should be able to do it in the basement. That is the next piece of the electrical for Art to work on.

Dominica whipped up a full dinner for us tonight. She made angel hair pasta with a tomato-alfredo sauce and Quorn chicken. We even had rolls!

Andy called from Puerto Rico to say that he had arrived safely. But, once again, his luggage has been lost. This seems to be a recurring theme in his travels. He doesn’t have to go to work tomorrow… he is getting out of it, or at least some of it, so that he can go shopping to come up with some clothes to wear. Min and I watched season two of As Time Goes By and then started working on season three.

The last day of November already. I can’t believe how fast this month has flown by. Min and I actually got up early enough this morning to get to church on time for once. I don’t think that anyone knew who we were getting there so early. After church, we went to lunch with dad at the Silver Lake Family Restaurant in Perry. We ran into Ellie there. I haven’t seen her in years. She has been reading the site, though, so she knows all the comings and goings of my universe.

Min and I went up to the city so that she could check out a new yarn shop that she wanted to see. We didn’t stay very long but she got some yarn that she needed to finish a sweater that she has been working on. We got back home but Andy is at his parent’s house this afternoon and evening. He is heading back down to the Carribbean tomorrow. I am taking him to the airport around noon so anyone who wants to catch him had better do so pretty early in the morning. Min and I watched some more As Time Goes By and then The American President. It is a pretty good movie. The DVD is a crappy transfer with tons of noise in the image and it isn’t anamorphic so you have lower image quality to begin with. On the projector, the older DVDs done at drastically lower qualities are really noticeable. Luckily, almost everyone makes anaphoric (enhanced for 16×9 televisions) DVDs these days so you don’t get too many of these older ones.

Leanne stopped by this evening to drop off some pictures from the wedding that she just gotted developed today. There are some really good ones. Maybe Andy will allow us to borrow the scanner for a while while he is gone and then we can put up all of the pics on the web site.

Andy needed to reinstall his operating system on his laptop this evening so while he was working on that, we decided to watch the Harry Potter movies. Andy has never seen them so it was a treat for him. He was surprisingly in the mood to give the movies a try and then after the first one he wanted to watch the second one as well. And since the second one is so much better than the first one, that worked out pretty well. Min fell asleep about two-thirds the way through the first movie and ended up sleeping away on the futon in the living room. While we were watching the movies, we started noticing more and more actors that we know from other things. For those of you who watch a lot of British television like we do, you will know who a lot of these characters are. The coolest one is Dawn French (of French and Saunders fame as well as playing the Vicar in The Vicar of Dibley) who is going to be appearing in Harry Potter III that is set to release this coming June, 2004. But of course, the actor who plays Harry’s uncle is also from The Vicar of Dibley, he plays the Bishop friend of David Horton in Series III. In Harry Potter II, the guest of Harry’s uncle at the beginning of the movie is Bishop Brennan from Father Ted! Mr. Weasley (Ron’s dad) in Harry II is also famous for his portrayal of Olaf Peterson in Red Dwarf (he appeared in many episodes but you can always find him in the pilot episode when his character was still alive.) I am sure that there are tons of other actors that I haven’t identified but as we were watching we noticed those and thought that the other Brit-Com fans would appreciate being able to find their favorite characters in the Harry Potter movies. In addition to television stars that you should all know, Kenneth Branagh played Gilderoy Lockhart who is much more famous for his staring roles in Henry V, Much Ado About Nothing and Love’s Labour Lost.

Well, I am doing my best to get back on the ball with the updates. I have a lot of catching up to do. Last season had so many updates that it will be hard to keep this season up to par with all that has been going on.

Today was a relaxed day. Min decided not to sleep in very late and Andy had to get up early to run around and do his banking before his bank closed. They aren’t very considerate of people who need to work or have normal lives. But what else is new with banks.

Andy, Min and I managed to coordinate lunch out at the Omega Grill. After lunch, Min watched The Man in the Moon and Andy tried his hand against me at Age of Empires II. We played a pretty good couple of hour game with very little conflict. I have learned a few new tactics from me recent readings of the Mongol invasions of Europe and tried a few of them out against Andy and they were quite effective. I think I might write a page about some of my AoE2 strategies and see how many people read the page. That would be interesting to know. After the game, Eric and Amanda said that they would come up from Eric’s parent’s house in Warsaw and go to the Omega Grill with us for some coffee while we had some dinner. While we were waiting for E&A to get over to Geneseo Andy and I decided to play another round of AoE2. I told Andy that I would try to beat him before The Millens made it over but he didn’t believe me. The game ended up lasting less than twenty minutes and we managed to finish up and discuss the game before Eric and Amanda got here. (Oh, by the way, do a Google search on “Eric Millen” and you will notice Waste Watcher, Sheep Guarding Llama and Niagara Telcom’s web sites all come up on the very first page.) It was a very lucky feudal rush.

Eric and Amanda arrived around 8:30 and then we all headed over to the Omega Grill again. Twice in one day. Andy is really happy to have American food again. (Once again, try a Google search on, “Omega Grill” Geneseo, and you should notice us at the bottom of the second page.) We had a nice dinner but the Millens couldn’t come over for a movie later so we all just went home seperately from there.

Andy, Dominica and I stayed in the rest of the evening and we watched the remaining episodes of “Coupling” Series Two. We finished off the last six episodes. Andy was laughing hysterically. Since we have stopped buying so many discs recently, we have been really knocking off our unwatched movies. We have reduced to only about 35 totaly unwatched movies (Emily will be proud) and less than 30 DVDs since the laserdiscs shouldn’t count against us since none of the LD players still work. Actually, dad had a lightning strike recently and it killed his LD player too. So we have REALLY been out of luck recently. But the cost per view has fallen to $5.09. Whoo-hoo!

I wrote part of today’s update and then got sidetracked looking at Lonely Planet to see what cool places in Central Asia there are to visit. There are a number of interesting places but I think that Armenia and the Ukraine are the most interesting. I would really like to visit one of them. Armenia is the oldest Christian country in the world. But they have a very bleak history as they were over-run by every major empire for thousands of years.