Sheep Guarding Llama

Monday morning. Back to the grind in DC! I had some problems getting online yesterday so I had to wait until today to post all of the updates from the last few days. I needed a DSL filter for the phone line and I didn’t have one handy. So look back over the last few days to find all of the updates that have been waiting for me to get online again.

Dominica and I have really gotten addicted to the Game Boy Advance adventure game Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templars. We both have been playing a ton for the last two weeks. We are most of the way through the game now – only a couple more days of play before we should be done. The game is really great and will definitely be the top pick for an adventure game on a hand held platform for you hard core King’s Quest and Monkey Islanders out there. Dominica is not able to play starting today because the GBA is mine and is down here in Annapolis with me so she has to wait until a week from today when I come back to New York to be able to play it again. Her birthday is next Wednesday and she is going to ask for a GBA for her birthday from her parents so that she can play it too. I have four games total for the GBA right now but will probably get a couple more right away if Min gets a GBA as well. Loopy has a backlit one on order from Hong Kong and is waiting patiently for that to arrive since he broke his regular one a few months ago. I am hoping to get the Nancy Drew game as soon as I finish playing Broken Sword since it should be relatively similar and that is my favorite type of one player game. I wish that they would make a port of Age or Empires for the GBA, that would be really cool. But I am sure that the platform can’t handle something that massive of anything close to it.

Phil, our director of operations down here in DC, has been on vacation as well for the last week and he returns to work this morning too. So today will be a big day for getting things done in DC. We still haven’t moved the office here since the hospital failed to be ready before Phil and I went on vacation. It had better get done this week or it is going to be really hard to schedule it. We are all getting tired of sitting around waiting for the new office anyway. The hospital had been holding us up for six weeks at least now.

I spent some time writing the new Audiophile section of SGL that will hopefully be put up soon. It is getting pretty long already but there is a lot of information that I wanted to get in there so I am being lengthy. Eventually I would like to refine it into a really good beginner’s resource for getting into High End Audio. I know that there are lots of people who have questions about how things work and need someplace to get basic answers to things.

Dominica arrived home just before 10pm last night. She will be awfully tired today as she heads back to work as well. She has been listening to the Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in the car and is probably just about done with it. She had already made it through two of the five CDs before she left Annapolis yesterday.

I can’t believe that we managed to make it for an entire week without there being a major catastrophe at one of the offices. I didn’t get a single call all week about work except for one from Eric panicing about a scale not working but then he called back and said that it was ok before I even had gotten the first message. So, at least I didn’t have that to worry about.

Nila has figured the cat door out, I am pretty sure. She made it back into the house all by herself. Mickey isn’t getting the hang of it and refuses to go near the thing. I guess he will just be crossing his legs and dancing around until he gets over how stubborn he is and just pushes on the door. It is so nice to finally be in the house here instead of the condo. After being in the condo for over a year, this is a real change. The AC is able to keep the place cold now. In fact it is very cold. Extremely cold. There is a lot of space here. But no TV. I think that this is the first place that I have ever lived in that didn’t have a television except for when Loopy and I lived in Pittsburgh in the Winter and Spring of 2000. We had much less then. Here at least there is radio if you need to hear the news and you can get online. The condo never had high speed Internet access so that is a huge jump. Many times more important than a television. And two bathrooms, that makes a difference too! But the space is the big thing. There is just so much space. Especially right now since there isn’t any furniture anywhere. I have a nice big bed spread out on the floor plus plenty of room for all of the books and DVDs and stuff to sit around. I even have a hamper now. That makes life a lot easier. Of course, the lack of furniture means that I am using the kitchen island to put the laptop on to type today’s update:) Dominica did buy one of those new folding chairs from Target the other day and I have moved that into my bedroom so that I have some sort of furniture in it. It is all the decor that I have. I actually put it there so that it wouldn’t walk off of the back porch. We had a fern storlen off of the front porch already two weeks ago.

Dominica headed back to Ithaca this afternoon. We didn’t do much today either. We did some more shopping getting things that we need for the house down here. John has been working on putting a new roof on the garage and I am working on putting up some new blinds in my bedroom and catching up on homework. We installed a new cat door in the back of the house but the cats are having a hard time figureing out how to use it. Mickey is back in now but I had to bring him in. Nila is still MIA.

More news tomorrow. We have AOL Dial Up AND Verizon ADSL now at the house in Annapolis. Tomorrow I hope to be able to get and install the wireless ethernet system for the house so that this will be really useful. I will try to have a big update tomorrow. It is so nice to finally have high speed access available here. I will now be able to get so much work done and there should be more and bigger updates coming soon. SGL will be my only means of keeping everyone up to date on my goings on now that I am going to be away so much of the time.

Today was our day to recover from vacation. Dominica and I drove to Annapolis from Topsail Island last night to keep from having to drive during the heat of the day with all of the vacationer’s traffic. The trip took less than six hours on mostly deserted roads.

Our project today was to sleep late and make a table top water fountain because I have always wanted one. So we spent a large amount of the day driving around to stores everywhere trying to find the parts that we needed to make a small fountain. It ended up taking an astronomic amount of time and effort but we finally had everything that we needed to build a basic starter fountain. Now we know where we are able to get the parts that we need so the next one will be a lot easier to do, I am sure. It was fun, though, and it works. It is right next to my computer now.

Dominica brought my little Aiwa stereo down here so that we would have something to listen to in this house. Until now there has been nothing at all. We don’t have many CD’s here. Mostly what is here is my Ken Burns Jazz Collection that I have just started building so there are only about three discs. Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday and Louis Armstrong. I think the neighbors think that we are pretty weird.

Day Six, our last day on Topsail Island. Dominica and I had to run up to Wilmington this morning to Western Union some rent money to Loopy. When we got back, we managed to head out to the beach for the first time since we made it down here. Between the two of us being sick and needing to run errands and going to see the USS North Carolina, we haven’t been able to get out there at all. It was cooler the last two days so the beach was nicer today as well. Everyone went out for dinner tonight for our last night on the island. Everyone else is getting up at 3am or so and heading out in the morning. It sure will be nice to be home at the same time that everyone else is pulling themselves out of bed!

By the time it was all said and done, everyone got the disentary except for Dominica who was on antibiotics that probably saved her. Rob is the only one who is still sick. Even the dog, Dexter, got it a little bit at the end.

Min and I did discover a nice, quaint North Carolina wine while we were down. Duplin Vineyards just north of Topsail Island. The wine is very sweet and is good for beginners but it wasn’t bad and we had two bottles during the vacation. We were hoping that we would have the opportunity to tour the winery before we left but we would have had to stay on Saturday for an extra half a day after everyone else had left to be able to do it so we decided to head back early rather than late since we wouldn’t have had any place to park the car or stay until we were ready to leave.

Day Five on Topsail Island. Neither Dominica or I are really sick today. Dominica still has a bit of her hives left but she isn’t so bad. This morning we headed out to Wilmington to tour the USS North Carolina. It is the 1941 battleship that saw itself engaged in every battle of the Pacific Theatre in World War II. The tour was really interesting. I have toured destroyers, missile cruisers and subs before but I think that this was my first time on a full scale battleship.

After touring the ship today, we went out to Gilligan’s just off the island and did some karaoke. No one sang but me but at least I had fun:) We didn’t stay real late but I managed to sing about five songs. I did one that I did for the first time a week ago at the Elk’s Club of Broadneck and I did a few new ones that I have never tried before.