Sheep Guarding Llama

Day Two in Washington, DC. I got out of the office at 2:00am last night (i.e. this morning) and drove out to Annapolis to stay at the Comfort Inn at Bay Dale. So, in case anyone needs me, that is where I am most likely staying. I got a restless night of sleep and then drove into the office around 10:30 this morning. On the way out to Annapolis last night, I finished listening to “Krakatoa” on CD. It was a bit drawn out (twelve hours) but there was a ton of really interesting things in there. Simon Winchester really covered all of his bases on the subject. I am very eager to “read” some of his other books. At the end of the CDs there was an excerpt from Winchester’s first big book, “The Professor and the Madman” and that sounds like it might be a really good listen as well. Winchester really knows how to pick some rare and obscure topics but makes them really interesting. Now I am back to listening to Douglas Adams’ “The Restaurant at the End of the Universe” or Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy 2. I will have that finished up, most likely, before I start driving back to New York.

It is really hot and humid in DC today. Weather.com says that it is 83 but feels like 84 here in DC and 84 feels like 85 in Annapolis but I think that that is low. There is no air moving today and it feels really hot.

Ok, so the other day I was looking for some information on the web and stumbled across this page all about Groundhogs. It is a really funny site and it even has videos to watch.

In addition to having fallen behind recently with LoTMs, I also forgot to update the LoTM page itself with the last couple of entries. This has now been taken care of. I knew that I was going to have a lot of time sitting at my desk this week to write the updates.

I looked up a couple of entries in Mirriam-Webster today. And the two big finding are that AUNT is pronounced correctly linke ANT and NOTHER is an actual word, as in “a whole nother way of looking at it.” I always that that NOTHER was some word that I had made up because it sounded like people said that.

I am very tired today. I hope to get a chance to relax some after the main part of the day is past. I might even get to watch a movie in the office. That would be a nice change.

I had to do some work on my resume today. I haven’t been selling myself for technical work outside of NTI for a few months now and I decided that I wanted to streamline my resume a little bit. For some time now, my resume has been four full pages, which is a bit much to wade through. So I worked it down to three pages. It is still a pain to look through but there is a lot of stuff that I have to convey and it really doesn’t seem to be reasonable to try to get it any smaller at this point. I think that it is a bit more readable now. It is rough when you are a contractor because you do tons of jobs that are only one or two days long or maybe a week at most. Once you do a large number of those, you end up with a really long resume if you list them all. And if you don’t list them all, then you are leaving off valuable and current work experience.

I am having a terrible time trying to get the laptop working on the truck down here. None of the peripherals that attach to it are able to keep working. We are using a printer that breaks down all of the time, a wireless system that for some reason looses the ability to communicate and a signature pad that used to work fine but does nothing at all now. I put in a call to the sig pad manufacturer and they agreed that it sounded like the pad itself was no longer working so the are rushing a replacement pad out to us right away. That is good. I am glad that it wasn’t some software problem that we were having.

I worked in the office until around 10:00pm then I drove back out to the hotel. I would have stayed later but we had a small fire on the truck and it wasn’t going to be running again for a while so I decided that some sleep would be the best thing for me.

I got back to the hotel and finished watching Jackie Chan’s Project A 2 that Eric and I had started watching last week but hadn’t made it very far through. It was ok. One of the earlier “middle period” Chan films. Maggie Cheung is always good. Then I started watching the very long movie Patton that is an all time classic that I have somehow managed to never see. I only made it about half an hour into the three hour film, though, before I needed to go to bed.

Well, I am going to try my best to stay on top of the updates while I am down here in DC. I am going to be down here for a whole week so it is extra important for me not to get behind. Not to mention the fact that so few of you will have the chance to talk to me directly now so there are even more people reading the site everyday to see what is going on in Scott World.

I slept in a little this morning, I was still pretty tired from the weekend. I was hoping to be up early enough to be able to finish watching Castle in the Clouds but no such luck. I had to do some work around the house, do some packing and make sure that a computer that was shipped recently was working before I left. So I had a pretty busy morning. Then I had to type a proposal for one of my clients. At noon, I drove down to Taco Bell and met Min for a quick lunch. Before lunch, she went to Target to see if there were any copies of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (HP5) left there since Walmart in Cortland had sold out. There weren’t but they did have a few on CD but they were $67.50 which is a bit much for a book on CD. So, after lunch we made a quick stop over at Barnes and Noble and they had both the book and the book on CD at 50% off with my Reader’s Advantage card! So she picked up the book and I got the CDs. $37.50 is a much more reasonable price to pay for a book on CD. It is 27 hours long so it is pretty cheap by the hour compared to many other books on CD (although I am not impressed by Jim Dale who reads the books.) So I am very excited about that but we are trying to save the CDs for our really long drive down to Georgia in a month.

After lunch, I stopped by my client and dropped off those papers that I had been working on and then I hit the road to Washington. It was probably about 1:30pm by the time I actually hit the road out of Ithaca. A little later than I had hoped for but not too bad overall. I am mostly working on the “B” shift and into the night so it isn’t big deal to be down here later than usual. I will most likely be stuck riding the truck tonight and potentially throughout much of the week. So, I brought a couple of books to read while I am out with the truck. Nothing exciting, but things that I need to get read anyway. I expect that it will be a long week one way or another. I also brought three movies along with me, Jackie Chan’s Project A 2, Patton and Grave of the Fireflies. We will see if I actually manage to get to watch any of them. Last week, being down here with Eric, I watched about forty minutes of the Jackie Chan flick and that was about the end of it.

I arrived at Washington Hospital Center just after 7:30 and set up shop in the dark, cold office to wait for the truck to return to the hospital center and for the dock guys to get it unloaded.

On the trip down, I managed to listen to almost all of the remaining CDs of “Krakatoa.” I have about 45 minutes left which I should be able to listen on my way out to Annapolis later tonight.

Tonight I will be staying at a hotel. I was hoping to get to stay in Bowie, MD but that hotel is full again, so I will be staying at the Comfort Inn in Annapolis on Old Mill Bottom Rd. It just makes working these long and odd hours a little bit easier. I am about to head out on the truck so I am wrapping up the update for the night.

Another incredibly busy week. I seem to be getting into the habit of updating about once a week. But, this coming week I will probably be good with the updates because I will be spending an incredible amount of time sitting in the Washington office alone for really long hours. I am leaving for DC tomorrow and will be there for at least the week. I might be there for a while longer.

I have been listening to hours of “Krakatoa” by Simon Winchester, it is a really good book. There are twelve hours of CDs to listen to so I will be listening to it all of the way down to DC tomorrow.

Today is Dominica’s brother Joe’s graduation party at the Knight Spot in Frankfort. So I spent most of the morning playing with the kids and then Min and I walked over to the party around 2:00. We had a good time and got to see a lot of family. We headed back for home around 5:00.

On our way back to Ithaca, Min stopped at Walmart in Cortland and picked up Castle in the Sky which we have both been really wanting to see for a while. It is the other movie in the series from Ghibli Studios and released through Disney and Miramax including Spirited Away, Kiki’s Delivery Service and Princess Mononoke. We started watching it and made it most of the way through but Min got tired so we decided to save the rest of it for later. So far, though, it looks like it is going to be really good. We have been very happy with all of the other Ghibli films.

Lots of travel for me today. This morning I drove out to my parent’s house in Pavilion for my mother’s birthday (which was actually yesterday but I couldn’t go out there yesterday.) So I got to spend most of the day visiting with my parents and my mother’s parents who had come out to visit from Ohio.

On my way out to Pavilion, I stopped by Barnes and Noble in Big Flats and picked up some new audio books. I finally found the next two installments of “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” by Douglas Adams which I am very excited about. “The Restaurant at the End of the Universe” and “Life, the Universe and Everything” are books two and three in the six book series. They are the two that have been almost impossible to find. I am also very excited about having found “Krakatoa” by Simon Winchester on CD (twelve hours of natural history for you science buffs out there!) I saw this book in hardback at the bookstore not long ago and had really wanted to purchase it because it looked really interesting. But I have learned my lesson and I know that I simply do not have any time to spend reading books that do not directly pertain to my job. So, when I found this new title on Audio CD, I snapped it right up.

Today is my day off and I really need it. I have plenty of running around to do today because this is my last weekday at home for potentially a very long time.