Sheep Guarding Llama

Monday. This morning, dad, Dominica and I went to Perry to deal with the funeral arrangements. I was supposed to be working in Perry this morning but they ended up not needing me until Wednesday so the timing was perfect. It was good that I was able to be there to be a part of the arrangements. I think that it helped. I know that there are a lot of you that are hoping to be able to attend. The details are as follows:

Services at Eaton-Watson Funeral Home, Perry, NY

Calling Hours for Karen Lee Miller:
Thursday, Nov. 13 7:00-9:00pm
Friday, Nov. 14 1:00-3:00pm

Funeral Service
Friday, Nov. 14 3:00pm

Food at LaGrange Baptist Church following services.

After making all of the arrangement, we had errands to run around Perry. We had banking to do, mail to post and food to pick up since everyone is eating at my dad’s house this week. My grandparents are and have been staying there so it is pretty much grand central. There are a million people stoppingin there everyday. I am going to take my laptop with me tomorrow so that I can do some work on SGL while I am there and maybe get a little bit caught up. I figure that at least that will give me something to do. The Lord really watched over us because Min and I have this entire week and next off from work because we had been planning on being on our honeymoon during this time. Otherwise, we would have been so busy that we wouldn’t have been able to easily deal with everything.

This afternoon, I came back over to my house and Eric came down from Rochester and we played a little AoE2. I needed the break from everything. AoE2 is so intense that it really forces you to pay attention to it. After the game, Min, dad, all of my grandparents, my aunt and my uncle all came up to Geneseo and we went to the Omega Grill for dinner. Min and I haven’t really gone out to eat for so long that it feels weird. We had a really nice dinner on Saturday night but that was a special occasion, not just dinner out. After dinner, Min was really tired and she just watched a little “Are You Being Served?” and went to bed really early. I ended up staying up late into the night watching DVDs and playing with the hamster. Mr. Humphries really likes getting a ton of attention and will spend the entire night making you get him out of his cage if you let him. He loves to be held now and he especially like it when we take him out of his cage (using a Betty Crocker’s Cookbook) and carry him over to the futon. Then he runs all around on the futon exploring. He is so hyper. He just runs and runs and runs. He will stay up all night playing if you let him.

Speaking of rodents, I caught another mouse this morning. That is, I believe, our twelfth mouse caught to date and removed from the house. I can’t believe how many there are. They are so cute though. Continue reading “November 10, 2003”

Sunday. Today has been the hardest day of my life. This morning at 8:28 am, my mother lost her long and hard battle with lung cancer. I haven’t felt that I was to talk about this fight on SGL over the past several years but now I find that this is probably the best way to let everyone know what is going on in my life. This past week has been so hard for all of us. After the wedding, five weeks ago yesterday, mom began deteriorating very quickly. It was obvious to all of us that she worked very hard to be able to make it to the wedding; it really meant a lot to her and to us to have her there. This final week she has been very scared of suffication and has had to have been on medication to keep her from panicing.

We were all very glad that Min and I had made the decision to postpone our honeymoon, we would have been on the plane just about landing in Florida when mom passed away. We wouldn’t have spent the entire day flying without even getting to leave the airport and we wouldn’t have been able to spend the day with the family. It was important that we were there to be with dad and everyone. We are hoping to take our honeymoon either in December or in February. We haven’t decided what we are going to try to do yet. We will know soon, I think. There are no funeral arrangements yet, that will be decided tomorrow morning so I will let everyone know then what is going on. A lot of my family is planning on coming in from Ohio so it will probably be late in the week.

I just want to let everyone know how much their support has meant to me and to Min over the past few years as we have gone through this. You all mean so much to us.

Saturday. Min and I got up very late today. I stayed up very late last night playing AoE2 with Arti so that I would be able to sleep with Dominica part of the night. She worked overnight at the hotel. So we didn’t get up until around 2:00. I did some work around the house and then drove over to see my mom for a little while. She opened her good eye twice when I first got there and I am pretty sure that she knew that I was there. She is in a lot of pain and things are getting really hard for her. She is no longer able to swallow or to get enough air to breathe, even with all of the O2 being pumped into the air. She is hoping to be able to go home soon.

Min and I went out to a late anniversary dinner at the Valley Inn in Warsaw. Eric told me about this place and I have been dying to try it out. The food was amazing. This is actually an all our fancy Ithaca style restaurant right in Warsaw! Of all places. We couldn’t believe that this great little place was hidden there in the valley right on Route 20A. I have gone past this restaurant a million times and never even known that it was there. We were very impressed. I am sure that we will be eating there plenty in the future.

After dinner, we drove over to Perry and hung out with Nate and Tammy for a little while at Tammy’s house. We haven’t had a chance to see them since the wedding so it was nice to visit.

Friday. I had a really stressful day today. I was supposed to work at Basil’s in Perry this morning but I wasn’t able to get everything that I was supposed to be delivering there ready to go and so we had to put off the work until Monday. I am supposed to be installing a new computer and a KVM switch there and the switch isn’t working for me so I am kind of out of luck. It is a Linksys KVM2KIT unit and it appears to be a total piece of crap. It completely doesn’t work. There is no support from Linksys either. The supposedly offer 24×7 support with extra special service for VARs (like me) but I called their supposed 24×7 support line and all there is is an answering machine. And I have read other people reviews of this unit online and they say that they have had similar problems and Linksys refused to get back to them about it as well. It appears that Linksys tried to make a super cheap KVM unit and failed and is trying not to acknowledge it. This will cost them in the long run, though, since they are a division of Cisco and we now have to tell all of our customers that Cisco is not honoring its product support agreements and that they are selling total crap hoping to sucker customers trying to save a buck or two. Cisco sells really expensive stuff and I have a hard time believing that they really thought that it would be a good idea to risk their reputation on such a stupid item.

My day got even longer when I needed to get two proposals printed out this morning and we ended up with no printers that had any ink in them. We had a document written using MS Office 2003 so no one could open it and no one who could print it had a working printer. After much effort, we finally ended up having Eric print the stupid things in Rochester and then driving down to York to hand them to me so that I could turn them in. After all that, Eric came over to the house and we played a round of AoE2 to relax as it was a very long and hectic day. After our game, Min and I dropped Eric off at Arti and Danielle’s house and we went up to visit mom.

We didn’t know it at the time but this will be the last time that I am able to communicate with my mom. She was barely able to talk tonight. It was all that she could do to be awake while we were there. She said about six words all night and with great effort. She has given up now and is just waiting for it to all be over. It is really hard seeing her because she is in so much pain. We can barely even recognize her now. We stayed until she fell asleep.

Min went to work tonight and Arti came over to play some AoE2. I like to play late on Friday nights because it means that I can sleep in in the morning with Min. Arti and I played three games (I played one earlier with Eric and Arti played earlier with Eric once and with Carl once) and I crushed him all three games. In fact, I improved significantly with each game. I think Arti was getting exhausted by the end. Arti managed to beat Eric quite well earlier today as well.

Sunday. Sorry everyone, I know that I have been not keeping up with the updates these last two weeks. There has been a lot going on here. I have been working very hard trying to catch up on all of the work that I need to be getting done. And for those of you who know what else is going on, that isn’t going well either. Dominica and I have cancelled our honeymoon that we were supposed to be leaving for this coming weekend. It is just a terrible time to try to go so we decided that it wasn’t the right thing to do and we will probably try to go again in February.

I will do what I can to catch up on the past news. There hasn’t been a lot of it so don’t worry that you have all been missing out on all of the excitement. Min’s back is quite a bit better but she is still moving around very slowly and carefully. She is spending most of her time sitting in the new recliner chair that she has in the living room and watching DVDs on the new projector. We are getting a lot of use out of our DVD collection over the past few weeks. More than we ever thought possible.

Min’s back hurt this morning so we weren’t able to go to church. She just isn’t able to sit in the pews. I woke up to a call from Andy in Puerto Rico. He is really hating it down there. Both companies that he is involved with are really going out of their respective ways to screw him over. He is pretty much ready to come home. He is supposed to get Sundays off and every other Saturday. But he has been working every day since he has been down there. He went into the office at 7:30 this morning. And just in case he didn’t go into the office, they sent someone to his appartment to drag him to work. When he found out about that, he left. They aren’t even allowed to have him work on Sundays. And they won’t give him a phone so that they can call him at home. They gave him a Sprint cell phone that only works when he is sitting in the parking lot at Walmart. And he doesn’t live right by a Walmart like he does here in Geneseo so it is really a pain for him to call anyone. The worst part of the whole thing is that they go to so much trouble to make sure that he doesn’t get a day off but neither company will have a single person there for him to work with so even though he is there there isn’t anything for him to do. So they are doing it just to be mean to him. And they know way ahead of time that no one is going to be there but they don’t schedule anyone. And they are constantly waiting to give him any work during the day until after the people he needs to work with have gone home for the day. So he spends his entire day with nothing to do and then is rushed in the evenings when there is no way for him to produce any results.

Min and I went over to my parent’s house around 3:00. The pastor came over to give communion at the house. It is nice since so many of us have been unable to make it to church recently. Min and I hung out there for much of the afternoon. We stayed about five hours and had dinner there.

Min and I came home and watched the first six episode of Season Two of Coupling (the real Coupling, not the cheesy NBC knockoff.) I think that Season One was better but Two is still really good. There are three episodes left that we need to go through.