And the word of the day is…. tired. I am really, really tired. After a week of not being able to get enough sleep, I am now working through the night again and I don’t know when I will be able to go to bed yet. Maybe sometime this afternoon if I am lucky. Last evening, Min, Andy and I went down to the State St. Diner to get some dinner before I had to head out of town. This is probably our last dinner together in Ithaca before we move out. I may not even get a chance to sleep in my own bed in Ithaca again which is sad since it has been a week since I got to sleep in it last as it is. I hit the road south around 8:30 pm. I managed to actually get out of Ithaca around 9:00 pm and decided to take the alternate route south starting with NY34 out of Ithaca heading down into Spencer, Waverly, Sayre, Athens and on to PA199 and PA220 which took me down to US180 east of Williamsport. I went down to Harrisburg and stayed on 15S to Gettysburg and took that route out to US270 and US495 into Washington. It was really nice to have a change of scenery. The first long bit of the trip was all new to me and the 15S stretch hasn’t seen me for probably two years or so. Not since John and I were living in Alexandia, VA and I was working for Oil Navigator in the city. Boy does that bring back memories.
I arrived at the hospital around 3:30 am. I was so tired as I came into Maryland that I had to stop at a rest stop and take a short nap before I was able to continue driving. I listened to some more of “The Map That Changed the World” on the way down and am about halfway through it now. I also managed to listen to almost all of Tony Hillerman’s “Sinister Pig.” I haven’t made up my mind about “Pig” though. It is pretty good but not yet really riveting like something by Grafton or Evanovich. But we will see how I like it when I managed to finish it. Just before I left Ithaca, Emily called to warn me that “Map” was really bad and that I should return it if I hadn’t already opened it. No such luck, though, Min and I had been listening to it the night before. Min has been liking it, though. I don’t think that it is nearly as good as Simon Winchester’s later book “Krakatoa” but it has been entertaining so far. However, it does lack something in Winchester’s obvious dependency on academics and his lacking of some personal reasoning. Too many of his topics are taken as fact when they are actually speculation. His science leaves something to be desired but his history is astounding.
When I got to the office, my root beer (Barqs) from last Friday afternoon was still sitting on my desk waiting for me. Just a painful reminder that I was the last one out of the office last week and I am the first one in this week.
On the way back from Pavilion yesterday, Min made me stop by Target in Ithaca and we picked up the newly released Shanghai Knights with Jackie Chan and Owen Wilson which should prove to be a really funny movie. We have been looking forward to seeing it for some time now. Shanghai Noon was such a good movie and Jackie Chan has been doing a lot of really good stuff recently so we are very hopeful. Unfortunately, Min only has her computer in her closet to watch it on and Andy only has his computer in his room. And I am out of town. So everyone has to watch it on their own to be able to see it.
I moved the last of the spring ’03 updates over to the archives. Even with all of the slacking that I did, Quarter 2, 2003, made the third biggest season of writing yet for SGL. Maybe I can get even more this quarter. I will try.
I got back to the hotel at 11:00 am. This hotel is starting to feel like home, much like many other hotels I have spent a large portion of time in. This one is smaller than most but adequate. There is practically no television stations here but that is ok because I use the DVD player on the laptop and that is a million times better anyway. But who has time to watch anything these days. I am starting to know the sounds of the voices of all of the people who work at the front desk now. I managed to get to sleep around noon but got a number of phone calls from noon ’till 1:00pm so I was awfully groggy for quite a while. I only had one additional call right in the middle of the 1:00 – 5:00 stretch and then got up right at the end of the workday to call into the hospital center to see what was going on. So, it seemed like a good time to give my nap a break (I seem to be having problems sleeping from the exhaustion) and order me some Domino’s dots for dinner. Boy am I glad that I am used to being in hotels or this would be awful. And it is a really good thing that I have a laptop of I would never get anything done.
I got my ordered for Domino’s placed and went back to finish Lawrence of Arabia that I didn’t manage to finish the last time that I was down here alone.
Dominica told me that Andy got dressed up in a suit and drove out to Buffalo to go see about a job that hasn’t been calling him back promptly. He really wants this job so is being awful ambitious about it. We will have to see how well this tactic works.
After eating dinner, I finished watching Lawrence of Arabia which was pretty good but only pretty good. T. E. Lawrence himself was mostly a bastard and not someone you would really want to connect with in a movie but the history of the Ottoman front in the first World War is really interesting from a historical perspective. After watching the movie, I shaved my head and took a shower. My hair has been getting out of control so I decided to take care of it myself. I have just been too busy to deal with it for the last several weeks and it has quickly become quite unruly. It is nice having a hair style where I can safely cut it myself, though, that makes life a whole lot easier sometimes. I also started watching Star Trek X: Nemesis which I had previously seen in the theatre. At 9:00 pm I drove over to the Sunoco next door to the hotel and filled up and planned on heading into the hospital. I have a couple of nagging issues that I would like to be able to deal with sooner than later. I called John to talk to him before going into the office and I ended up stopping by the house during Sydney’s birthday party. So we partied for a little while and then John and I got some time to talk about operations here in DC. We decided that I was wasting my time down here right now with everything being so busy. So we are pushing off the work that we had been planning to do over the last three weeks and instead, I am heading back to Ithaca tomorrow morning so that I can work from home and spend some time packing and cleaning. So, I returned to the hotel in Annapolis at 1:00 am.
Dominica did manage to reschedule the moving truck so that we are getting it on Thursday and Friday now. That is much better. So, we are inspecting the house on Wednesday evening in Geneseo and probably delivering a carload out to my parent’s house when we do so. Then we will return to Ithaca on Wednesday night to pack as much as possible. Thursday morning we will be picking up the truck and loading it in Ithaca. After loading it, we will be cleaning the house. We will drive the truck out to Pavilion and park it at my parent’s house late Thursday night. I expect that Min, Andy and I will all spend the night there since we won’t be able to stay in Ithaca. Then at 10:00 am on Friday, I will be going up to Rochester to close on the house at ESL on King’s Highway. Then I will come back down, grab the truck and head over to Geneseo to begin unloading everything. So anyone who needs Andy or I on Friday will have to go over to the house in Geneseo to find us. If we are really lucky, the new SDSL line will have been run in already and turned on before Friday but we aren’t likely to be so lucky. Min will be going out to Utica (Vernon) on Friday to be in her friend Laura’s wedding. Min and Laura were best friends from high school. I am just too busy with the house to be able to go to the wedding with her. It sucks that she is in the wedding and I can’t even go but it isn’t quite so bad because Laura and I haven’t met and I wouldn’t know anyone there so maybe it is best since Min will be busy being in the wedding. Then Min is flying straight from the wedding to Savannah, GA. I will be driving down to meet her later in the week after we get Children’s National Medical Center up and running smoothly (ha!)
Today’s update will likely be the longest one ever, since I am still awake and it feels like an entirely different day now. It is like two updates in one. So that was my day. I am now sitting in my hotel room writing on my laptop on the hotel desk. I have had such a messed up schedule that I am starting to have problems falling asleep at the right times even when I am really tired. I need to get back to a fairly regular schedule – I have gotten too old for this kind of stuff. Ok, time to upload.