Sheep Guarding Llama

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.

THE NOVEMBER LLAMA OF THE MONTH IS DOMINICA ANNE MILLER!!

Dominica wins the Llama of the Month competition because she was smart enough to marry me. I figured that that was reason enough. I can’t believe that the month of October has gone by already. It seems only yesterday that we were running around trying to get things ready for the wedding. And now the month has passed right by.

Min and I went over to my parent’s house this afternoon. We are trying to take a big stack of boxes with us every time that we go over there because dad is planning on having a big bonfire for something and so he is going to use all of the boxes that we don’t need. And boy do we have plenty of boxes. I keep filling up the car with them. I feel like they will just go on forever. We visited for about two hours. Then Art came up so that we could scrounge through some of the wood that dad has in the barn because we are doing some work on the basement at my house and we needed wood. Better to take it out of the barn then to drive to the city to buy some. We found what we needed and headed back to my place. Danielle and Michael met us over there.

Art and I spent the evening getting the electrical moving along while the girls entertained Michael as best they could. The girls also went out and picked up some Chinese for dinner. Art managed to get one additional outlet hooked up tonight. But it is enough to really help. Now there isn’t the big tangles mess of electrical sitting behind me while I work and tripping me as I go to and from my desk. Art and I moved some of the desks around and we managed to get the place looking and working tons better than it was before. There is now a “laptop station” where visitors to my office can sit down their laptops and work with either a wired or a wireless connection. My main desk has been cleared off and moved slightly. And the seven foot long peninsula extension to my desk has been relocated into the second cublicle area so that there will be a fully functional workstation there for people who need to use it. That will be much better for people who want to play Age of Empires and Empire Earth as well as people who need to get work done. It is a nice setup.

Danielle and I went out to Warsaw to do sales this morning. It was a most beautiful day for it. The weather was perfect for walking up and down small town main streets. I don’t really like doing sales but the nice weather and the small town settings makes it nice.

I wrote a ton of update yesterday but didn’t get a chance to post all of it. So if you are reading this before Thursday or so, be sure to go back and read October 19th later because it will be much longer. I sat in the living room all day yesterday with Min after she hurt her back and all of the updates that I wrote are on my laptop and I don’t have the energy today to transfer them over to post them. I am going to start carrying around the latest copy of the site on a USB memory stick so that it is easier for me to work on wherever I may be at the time.

Dominica’s back is still really bad this morning. She is in a lot of pain and very upset. We made an appointment to see the doctor today. We weren’t able to schedule her in until this afternoon so she will have to deal with the pain for a bit of the day before we can go. She is going to use my doctor in Batavia since she doesn’t have one out here yet.

Tomorrow is the Microsoft Office 2003 Launch Event. Should be very exciting. We don’t think that Min is going to be able to go, though, because of her back. It is really too bad because she was really looking forward to going. It is an extra shame because they are giving out Microsoft Office Professional 2003 to everyone who goes to the show so she is really going to miss out.

ChoiceOne finally came this morning and installed our SDSL line that we have been waiting for all of this time. It turns out that the line is really ADSL that acts like SDSL but that is ok, it isn’t really a big deal. The important thing is that the line is finally in place. I was so busy today that I wasn’t even able to try the line at all. Maybe I will be able to get to it tomorrow if I am lucky. I have a ton of things to do and I have been having a terrible time trying to catch up. There has just been so much going on recently that I am just falling farther and farther behind. I didn’t even get a chance to really eat today before I had to take Min out to Batavia to see the doctor.

Min laid in the back seat of the car on the way to Batavia. She can’t sit up at all from the pain in her back. We finally got out to the doctor’s office and I left Min in the car so that I could go check her in since they don’t have anywhere for you to lie down in the waiting room and she can’t stand or sit. The doctor said that if she couldn’t sit in the waiting room then she needed to go straight to the emergency room at United Memorial Hospital. Luckily, the hospital is in the same parking lot as the doctor’s office so that wasn’t too hard to do. We drove over and I got her into the emergency room. The staff there were plain mean. They wouldn’t do anything to help us. There was no where for Min to go because all they had were seats that she couldn’t sit in. They ignored us as much as they could and told us that beds were only for people who had hurt their backs falling and all other back injuries had to walk. When we told them she couldn’t walk or sit they brought a wheel chair out and laughed at us. The whole waiting room was furious and talking about how mean the nurses where there. Min kneeled against one of the chairs and leaned her head on the wall while I got her all checked in. Then they made her stand to check her vitals while she cried from the pain. The nurse was really mean about it. Then they made her just stand in the middle of the waiting area for about fifteen minutes while they did whatever it is they do. No one knows what they do in the emergency room that takes more than ten seconds. It seems like you could just walk in and be treated. But, of course, non of them or computer literate (or likely literate at all) so that probably plays a big role in it. That is probably also why they can never figure out which patients are which. Finally a nurse came out to take Min back somewhere and I made sure that they would have a bed for her when we got there before I let them take her. When we finally got there they made me leave (I can only assume so that there is no one there to see what is really done – patients in pain are much more apt to just let the doctors and nurses do whatever they want if there is no one there to support them.) So I went back out and waited in the waiting room for a few hours.

Eventually a nurse decided that I could go back to see Min. They hadn’t really done anything. But at least she was on a bed so it wasn’t so bad. But some jerk had come along and raised her head up so her back hurt again and just took off and no nurses would stop by to check on her and they didn’t give them any way to call her. She couldn’t call out for a nurse because the ER nurses had made her sit and stand for so long that she was so weak that she couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t get a nurse easily either so I put the bed down myself and she was a bit better after that. They gave her some pain killer in her butt but that was about all that they did for her while we were there. The doctor gave her a prescription for an anti-biotic for something that we hadn’t come to the emergency room for and totally ignored her back and just left. But they had drugged her up so we couldn’t do anything more at that point and all we wanted to do was to get out of that place. So all of that pain and torture and they managed to not even look at her, basically. It was a total waste of time and the pain hadn’t been such a big deal until we went to the hospital. I was, and am, furious. This is the same hospital that refused to admit me in 1998 when I had appendicitis and then my appendix burst. That is United Memorial Hospital in Batavia, NY (formally Genesee Hospital) for anyone who is ever considering going there. I know that lots of hospitals treat their patients horribly and that it has become status quo to do so but this hospital has really stood out as a really terrible place to go. Everyone we dealt with was rude, ignorant and incompetent. I hope that the insurance company has a talk with them about charging for services that we didn’t even go in there for and doing nothing for the reason that we were there and only succeeding at making it much worse. Everyone in the waiting room was complaining about how mean and uncaring they were both to us and to everyone in general. No one was very happy.

I was pretty hungry by the time we left the hospital and not in a very good mood. I am glad that I at least have my soapbox here to get these things out of my system or I would be really raging. To have been burned by the same hospital twice like that is really embarrassing. I got Min home and she needed to just lie down and relax. I went over to the Wegman’s Pharmacy to have her prescription filled. While I was waiting for that I grabbed a cheese sub from the new sub shop. I also ran into Chris Briffa, Josh will get a laugh out of that, who has been working there for eight years. Some of you will remember him from high school. He didn’t know my name but recognized me immediately as being someone from York. I can’t believe that he remembered me at all. He is four years younger than most of us. His sister is now the Assisstant DA in Olean. I got the medicine and headed back to the house. I talked to my dad on the phone for a while and ranted about the hospital.

Min watched movies while I retreated to my office to catch up on some soarly lacking work. I worked on Arti’s file server and got that all set. Danielle will be able to take it home with her tomorrow. That is a relief to have one more thing done and out of the way. And another that the new Internet line is in. One thing at a time but I am knocking them down. I might even be caught up soon, ha ha.

Okay, I have to be up early tomorrow and I am already exhausted. I didn’t really get any chance to play with my hamster today. He is going to feel neglected. John Stephens (the Surfing IT Wizard) is going to be coming up on Friday night to hang at the Llama house. He has never been up to stay with us. It is too bad that Andy won’t be around. I hope that everyone has been diligently reading the site recently because I have really been putting an effort into keeping it up to date all of the time again and trying to really get a lot more content into it. I think that as I work on the site day to day and year to year, I am getting a lot more used to having a digital diary and I find it much easier to talk to everyone in this format. It is also a whole lot easier to tell everyone what is going on like this instead of having to email or call everyone individually to let them know the latest news.

Oh, I almost forgot. I totally went off on MBNA American Credit today. They have called me five times on my cell phone out of the last six business days. Everytime it has been incredibly inconvenient and each time I explain to them that this is my cell phone and I a) don’t do any business like this over the phone and b) don’t appreciate getting calls on my cell phone. I ripped into the guy asking why they felt that it was okay to call me day after day. Even if I was buying the stuff that they were selling it wouldn’t be okay to call me that often. Even on a land line. But on a cell phone after many requests to be taken off of they call list is just ridiculous. Plus, it is illegal to make sales calls to cell phones anyway. (That is not totally true, you cannot call cell phones with auto-dialers, but hand dialing is allowed.) But I am sure they are not hand dialing. I really ripped into the poor sales guy. I told him to get his managed and explain to his managed the legal consequences of calling me again. I was in rare form. 🙂 The bottom line is, don’t get an MBNA credit card because they are just bastards.

Min’s back hurt this morning, we assume from trying to move furniture last night. So she ended up just lying on the floor in the living room sleeping for a lot of the day. We don’t think that her back is too bad but it is really sore.

A quick technology udpate: New Mozilla software is available from Mozilla.org, both the web browser Firebird and the email reader Thunderbird have been updated with new versions.

Min and I watched The Pink Panther and The Return of the Pink Panther which is actually the fourth movie in the series. The third one, A Shot in the Dark is available but I haven’t gotten it yet and the fourth one is totally rare and no one knows it and heaven only knows how one would go about getting it. I hear it isn’t any good and it has a different inspector, not Peter Sellers. Few people really consider it a part of the series even though it is officially.

I cooked lunch today – a very dangerous undertaking – while Min was stuck lying on the floor. I just did eggs, toast and fake bacon. I think that it might be my first time cooking in the new house. My parents let me borrow some folding chairs yesterday so that we will actually have four places to sit when we eat until our real chairs arrive in a month or two.

Andy called from Puerto Rico today. He has moved into his new apartment yesterday. It is a studio on the beach. It isn’t in San Juan, it is a lot closer to where his job is. He said that the place isn’t very nice. Everything is dirty and not very well taken care of. It is a tiny studio with everyting in one room, including his laundry. There is powerful air conditioning but it blows in a straight line through the middle of the apartment so you can either stand in that air stream and be cold and stand outside of it and be warm. Either way, it isn’t very good. He has no phone reception there so he has to drive to Walmart to be able to make a call. It’s hard to believe that there could be any place on such a tiny, overcrowded island without cell reception. But they only got him a Sprint phone so maybe that is why. He has no Internet access yet. They are supposed to be installing that tomorrow. His choices for high speed broadband down there were 64kb/s or 256kb/s (in New York, it is hard to find any service offering less that 256kb/s.) So he won’t have a really fast connection no matter what he does. The apartment is furnished but with really crappy stuff. He is considering buying himself a microwave so that he can cook and just leaving it there when he leaves. He has a television but one have the television is one colour and the other half is another colour. He is thinking about buying a cheap television to use while he is there and just leaving that there when he is done too. Luckily, he did take his integrated DVD/Monitor unit along with him so that he is able to watch DVDs down there. Otherwise, he would really have to do without anything. He works so much, though, that it doesn’t make too much of a difference. He does have two golf courses and tenis right there at his apartment. That is nice. But he doesn’t like golf so it isn’t all that good for him. He was at Walmart getting groceries and then he was shopping for a digital camera. It will be nice if he gets one because he will be able to send us pictures of his new place and where he works and stuff.

After watching the Pink Panther movies, Min fell asleep so I went down to the basement and played some Age of Empires 2. I played in the basement for four hours or so while she napped.

When I came back upstairs, Min had just woken up. Her back is much worse than I thought. She wasn’t able to get up herself. She was in a lot of pain. So we decided to order dinner in since it was best not to have me cook again and she sure couldn’t do it. We got pizza and french fries. They forgot the bleu cheese again. That is like the fourth time. If only we had Andy here to rough them up a bit. He knows how to take care of a restaurant that doesn’t deliver bleu cheese. But now he is in Puerto Rico where they probably don’t even know what bleu cheese is. Luckily, Min bought some bleu cheese at the grocery store so I could still have some on my pizza. For those of you who know good bleu cheese, we recently discovered that Marie’s was bought by Morningstar. That is why they have new packaging.

So, we started watching the BBC’s Chronicles of Narnia: The Silver Chair. The Silver Chair is one of my favorite, if not my favorite, of all of the Chronicles of Narnia. Warwick Davis – the actor made famous by his staring role in George Lucas’ Willow in 1988 – is in both of the later Narnia movies. In one he plays the mouse and in the next we plays the owl. Min and I both heard his voice and knew who he was immediately. We were interested to know what other roles he had been in that we weren’t aware of so I did a little research. He has done a lot of movies but the ones that really stand out are his first role as Wicket in Return of the Jedi and his subsequent recurring roles as Wicket in the Ewok movies. He appeared in some famous films like Labryinth, Star Wars: The Phantom Menace and Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone.

The laserdisc player that we won on eBay is expected to be arriving tomorrow. We are excited to be able to watch the LD collection again. There are tons of movies that we haven’t seen in a long time and lots that Min has never seen at all. There are five boxes of discs just sitting in the cellar waiting to be watched again.

Art went to the city to see how much it is going to cost to get the wiring done in our basement. We are very anxious to get the electric run in the basement so that we can get my office cleaned up, get the theatre set up and get the server room in order. Everything is coming together in the basement now. The new projector will be along soon, the new subwoofer is here, the SDSL should be in and running any day. Things are good.

After watching The Silver Chair, we decided that it was time to move onto The Pink Panther Striker Again. I just love the Pink Panther movies. Peter Sellers is just a genius. It is hard to believe that Blake Edwards directed the Pink Panther movies and movies like Breakfast at Tiffany’s. For those who are wondering when the infamous “Pool of Jello” scene appears, it is in the beginning of the seventh film, Trail of the Pink Panther, 1982. That is the first film made after Sellers died in 1980. The film was made using unused clips of Sellers from the first, second, fourth, fifth and sixth Pink Panther films (Sellers character was played by Alan Arkin for the third movie.)

Our Internet connection is flaky again tonight. Frontier is very unreliable. It has already been down for over 24 hours in the past week. And not just their high speed ADSL service but their dial-up as well. The problem that we have is weird, though. We loose the ability to look at web pages but we do not loose our actual connection. We are able to look up DNS names and email keeps working. But if we restart the “DSL Modem”, then we are just out of luck because the DHCP server will not get us a new address. Of course, as I am writing this, we have lost all connectivity and cannot even send email anymore. Great, probably another day of not having any way of communicating with the outside world. Who knows how long it will be before I am able to post today’s update. Luckily, I updated this morning so we are not behind at all at this point. I am very happy that this October looks like it is going to be our busiest updating month ever. I guess there is just a lot going on here this month.

Next, we were on to The Mummy Returns. I saw part of it before but I have never managed to see the whole thing. As you can tell, I am writing the update while we watch the movies. It’s days like today, when Min’s back hurts and we can’t possible go anywhere, that I am really thankful that we have a movie library right here at our dispossal. If we didn’t have it, there wouldn’t be anything for her to do. She would like to play video games but she has tried that before and she can’t do that while her back hurts this bad. She can’t really read either. I am very glad that she got this new recliner for her back, though, because it lets me sit in comfort while we watch all these movies. Since she is stuck on the floor, it works out well. The Hamster is really enjoying us being around in the living room. He is very active running around his cage tonight.

While I am sitting around writing what could easily be the longest update in SGL’s long history, I should probably also point out that this autumn means that we have completed our THIRD year of updates. Three whole years of Sheep Guarding Llama. Can you believe it? SGL started by announcing the Llama New Years Millenium Party for Dec. 31, 2000. Since then we have come a long way. The site has changed a lot. I moved first from the 8-1 Sanctuary Dr. house to 13 Observatory Circle and now we are living in Geneseo. Roomates have moved in and out. Jobs have changed, many, many times. There is a new hamster. We have met new friends. Even discovered a few who were missing. A number of us have gotten married. The economy has fallen and now begun to return. The political world has even changed around us. It has been an exciting three years. We look forward to another exciting three years. I hope that all of you can join us for the adventure.

Well, that is more than enough update for one day. We have no Internet access so I am going to shut down for now and hope that we can do an update tomorrow. Min will still be stuck in bed for at least one more day. The telephones will be going to my cell phone since the main line is down. I expect to be working from the house tomorrow, especially since I can’t really leave Min here alone. Hopefully she will be able to go to the Microsoft show on Tuesday, that will be a really good time. Only two more days. Okay, everyone have a good night – Scott out.