Sheep Guarding Llama

Eric and my second day in Washington. We slept in a little after having worked so late and drove into the city. We were really glad that we stayed in Bowie because it is so much closer than driving in from Annapolis. But the hotel is booked for tonight so we don’t get to stay there tonight.

We worked another really long day today, we didn’t even attempt to leave the hospital until 10:00pm. And we had a terrible time finding a hotel room. We ended up just getting a place out in Annapolis. That is a really long drive when you aren’t doing anything recreational while you are there. So we got to the hotel around midnight and just collapsed.

Today is my travel day again. Eric arrived at my house in Ithaca around 9:00 am and we did a little bit of work around here before packing up the car and driving down to East Hill for some Burger King breakfast. We ate at 10:30 and hit the long road down to Washington Hospital Center in DC. We made good time and arrived in the middle of the afternoon. The trip wasn’t bad; I am really glad that I got all that work done on my car two weeks ago. It is running great and no more brake problems.

Not much exciting to tell about the rest of the day. Eric and I spent the rest of the day working at the hospital center until about midnight. We got tons of work done. Then we headed east out of town to Bowie, MD where we grabbed a room at the Comfort Inn there. We also hit Walmart and picked up some cheap movies to occupy our tiny bit of free time this week.

Happy Father’s Day. I moved the May updates out to the archives today. I can always tell when the site needs to have some content archived because my HTML editor starts to slow down dramatically from all of the text that it has to display and move around the screen. This quarter is going to be a shorter read than most of the last year or so. It has just been a really busy couple of months and has kept me from the updates.

Today I started off in Livonia for the last time this week. Every morning Eric wakes me up by having Sonny jump on my head and bite my ears with his razor sharp teeth. My arms are all cut up from the dog playing. He is a really cute puppy though.

Min and I hung out with Eric and Amanda until around noon when they headed out for Father’s Day celebrations in Rochester and I hit the road to go back down to Ithaca. Tomorrow, Eric and I are heading south to DC for the entire week (maybe we will get lucky and get to come back on Thursday.) So I have a bit of work to do this afternoon to get ready for the trip. It is going to be a really long week; we have a lot of work that needs to be done before we can come back.

Dominica is studying hard today for her Real Estate exams. She has to take the first test on Monday (tomorrow) and the State exam on Tuesday. So Min is planning on returning to Ithaca on Tuesday night and then going back to work at Advion on Wednesday. I am sure that she is really looking forward to being able to spend some time at home.

Nate, Bob and I decided to head up to Cortland for some dinner from Garcia’s. We have really started liking that place. That is about our third time there in the past two weeks. They did mess up my order and gave me a Taco Salad with chicken instead of extra beans. So that was kind of gross (I made them get me another salad… many of the people there really don’t speak English very well so it can be pretty hard to place orders correctly.)

Andy got home at 10:30 tonight. This is about our first time seeing each other all week. So we have tons of catching up to do.

Today I actually have off. I drove out to Rochester yesterday and Min and I are staying at Eric and Amanda’s new house. Dominica had to get up early and go to Rochester for her last day of real estate class. So I had much of the day to myself. I watched Spirited Away from Ghibli Studios in Japan. It is a really good movie. I am a pretty big fan of anime but this one is really gorgeous.

After spending a few hours at a meeting at the church, Min and I went up to LeRoy to pick up some Chinese food from Lucky House for Father’s Day. Then we headed down to my parent’s house for dinner. We ended up hanging out with my parents until about 1:30am. Then we headed back to Eric and Amanda’s house to get some sleep.

My mom’s new computer arrived this week. She got a new HP Compaq Evo. This is her first new computer since her old HP Pavilion Celeron 366 from years ago. What a huge jump it is going to be as she moves from a Celeron 366 to a Pentium IV 2400.

The market seems to be coming up a little bit. Andy is still working at Carrier up in Syracuse and I am working for Dell today at Wegman’s in Rochester (the corporate offices, not one of the grocery stores.) I had to get up early this morning and drive to Rochester so that I could start work at 8:30. It was supposed to be an easy installation, and for the most part it was, and was supposed to take less than eight hours, most likely six. But, as these things often do, everything went wrong and they were not prepared for me in the least and we ended up having to leave a lot of the work for them to perform because they just weren’t following their own directions or bothering to communicate with anyone. So, the good news is I got a full eight hours of work in which makes me happy. But it sucks to leave a site without everything being completely taken care of and wrapped up. It is nice to have that sense of closure at the end of a contract. But, we can’t have everything and I am happy to be able to make good money for a day. Plus, because they were running so far behind, I had an almost two hour lunch break with Eric while I waited for some of the backups to take place.

After work, I drove down to Livonia. Dominica is still taking her real estate class so we got out about the same time but she and Tammy were going to go and do some shopping prior to her coming over to Eric and Amanda’s house. Eric, Amanda and I went out to the Geneseo Family Restaurant where Dominica joined us for an early dinner. After dinner we went out to Walmart to do some shopping and picked up four new movies (I have to keep mentioning all of the new movies in here until Andy gets the new, amazing movie database up and running so that everyone can just check for new titles online.) We got, Dances with Wolves: Extended Edition (which I already had on LD but have never watched and will now be selling,) Spirited Away, Real Women Have Curves and Die Another Day, the latest James Bond film. We headed back to Eric and Amanda’s new house and watched the new Bond film. It was ok. I am very disappointed that Walmart is stocking the Full Frame crappy version of it and that is what I got but luckily it was a pretty bad movie and it will never really matter that it isn’t the ful aspect ratio version. A little disappointing but I will get over it. It is one of the weaker Bond films. I know that there have been a lot of really bad ones over the last few years and I won’t get into a debate over just how bad each one was but I will say that this one is weak but at least it isn’t Goldeneye.