Sheep Guarding Llama

Finally, after a week away from home, Eric and I are heading home today. What a long and busy week it has been.

Next week, on Friday, Dominica and I are heading out to Houston, TX to visit her sister. This will be my first time to the Texas region. I am hoping to have a chance to meet a friend of mine who lives in Mexico as well while I am there. We are going for five days. I hope that they get a cold spell while we are there. I am not designed well for this hot weather. It should be fun, though. I expect that we will be going to the zoo (I LOVE the zoo) and I am able to bring my laptop with me – so I can continue to work as usual. Plus, it will give me some time to start preparing for the classes that I am planning on taking this semester. I am hoping to be able to schedule a full time work load this summer at Empire State (www.esc.edu.)

I forget to mention previously that Nate has his new 2001 Black Ford Explorer Sport, now. He got it this week while I have been away. Hopefully, this one won’t burn up on him. He might be driving it home to show to his family today. I might be picking him up there. I don’t really know what is going on.

Dominica threw her back out yesterday, so she is laid up again for the time being. And of all times, she had to through it out on her very last day of work at her old job. She is having an MRI done on Monday.

Eric got completely trashed last night, it was really hilarious. You can thank Rob and JJ at Island Jim’s for setting him up all night. This was Eric’s first trip to Island Jim’s to see where we all hang out here in DC. Now he is officially one of the crew. On the way home we stopped by Borders and picked up some books. I got a new book on Java programming and Eric got one on HTML and XHTML. Can you believe that Eric actually bought a book – and a computer book at that. Isn’t this world a crazy place?

Right now, Eric is playing video games on John’s amazing video game machine (Athlon XP 1900+, Soyo Dragon+, GeFroce3 Ti 500.) John has a full 3D setup like Loopy’s so Eric is playing games like Deus Ex in that. Eric managed to pick up a copy of Deus Ex this weekend for only $4.00. Quite the deal. I am such a bad influence. Eric also played Giants: Citizen Kubota (or whatever it is called) and Castle Wolfenstein. Giants was in full 3D and Eric thought that it was pretty good. Good enough that he might even buy himself a copy. That is pretty surprising since we had expected it to be so bad. I am mentioning this now because I want to tell Loopy and I expect that I will forget. Eric also thought that Castle Wolfenstein was really awesome.

John is in the process of closing on a house here in the Chesapeake Bay region. We will see what happens there. We have all been trying to get houses and I know how hard it is. I am planning on talking to the bank this week about getting a mortgage so that I can get a house. But I may end up staying right where I am. Boy, would it be nice to know what is happening. (And before it is too late at that.) Maybe I will be moving down here in the autumn. Just another factor in the never ending quest for “Where are we going to live next year?”

Can you believe that there are three days of updates left to go this month? This is the first time that we ever had to archive the previous month halfway through the current month. We almost need to archive part of this month now! I am awaiting a new update from Anne before posting. The one that I got was blank. So, Anne, if you are reading this – have your dad send me a new copy.

Eric and I are now sitting in the airport. We have fifty minutes until the flight takes off. We have already gone through the check in and terminal security process. We are waiting at our gate now. We will have to go through the personal search yet before we get on the plane. How do I know this? Because we always get searched. Once, when I was flying to San Diego, I did not have to get searched. That is the only time that I have not been searched. Considering how much I fly, that is pretty bad. Eric gets searched every time too. So did Josh and Loopy when they flew. It is pretty consistent.

Congratulations to JJ in DC who is graduating from Catholic University of America in two weeks. Also, congratulations to Miranda who graduated from her college in the last few days. It is very depressing to have everyone graduating a few weeks before I start back at school.

Our flight just got delayed. Only by a little bit, they expect. The plane is not here yet and we are expected to leave shortly.

Well, Eric and I finally managed to get a good night’s sleep last night at the Red Roof. We were very thankful that we stopped there since we are much better rested now than we would have been otherwise. Much less driving this way. I am writing the site update as we drive into DC. Eric is driving and I have the computer in my lap (that is why they call it a laptop, I guess.)

Eric and I have tickets to fly back to Rochester tomorrow (Saturday) afternoon on AirTran again. We will be arriving there at 5:00pm. It is actually cheaper to fly AirTran than it is to rent a car and pay for the gas! I am looking forward to heading home and to getting to listen to the end of Harry Potter: The Chamber of Secrets. Maybe I will pick up the next Harry Potter book soon so that I can find out what happens next. It is a long drive home back to Ithaca.

Eric and I are working at Washington Hospital Center today. Fun, fun, fun. We haven’t decided what we are doing about our rental car yet. We will probably keep it this late in the day and just take it to the airport tomorrow when we go to fly home. We will leave the condo around 1:00 pm, for anyone who really cares.

Okay, enough new info from me for today. This month has to be the longest ever in SGL history. So many updates. I haven’t had the opportunity to post all week so there is quite a load of new updates going up today. And more tomorrow, I am sure. Look for me to be home late tomorrow enjoying the snow (it was snowing there this morning. – It has been beautiful summer weather in the south all week.)

Today is work in Anderson day. All of the things that need to be done here are getting done today. We ran around the hospital all day and took the Joes to lunch. Joe and Joe run our Anderson facility. We managed to spend the day getting all kinds of things done at the hospital. Very productive, all together.

After a long and busy day at the hospital in South Carolina, Eric and I managed to hit the road around 4:30 in the afternoon and head towards DC. The drive from Anderson to DC is not a short one. About nine hours worth of car time. We made good time and stopped in some little town in North Carolina to pick up some Taco Bell and a power inverter so that we could use the computer in the car without killing the battery. The battery on this laptop doesn’t last any time at all.

We managed to get a little bit more work done while we were on the road. Eric managed to work on the laptop for an hour or so while we were driving. This laptop is working out pretty well. After Eric couldn’t stand working anymore, I starting teaching him a little bit about HTML while we were driving.

We stopped and stayed at a Red Roof about 80 miles south of DC on i95. We were just too tired to drive all of the way into DC and then on to Annapolis tonight.

Miranda made it to the SGL house in Ithaca this afternoon. Dominica called me and let me know that she had arrived. I am sure that Loopy is very excited. Miranda is staying with us for the week. So, I will get a chance to see her eventually once I get back home.

Wednesday morning. We had to get up early this morning so that we could head into Atlanta and tour Capital Internet’s Colo-Atlanta facility. We are looking at locating SGL there. The tour went well. We had a good time. The facility is small and was having a lot of construction done so it was a pretty silly tour. It really felt like touring someone’s basement with a lot of computers in it. (Remind you of anyone?)

After the tour, we head to, you guessed it, Waffle House. More grits. Then it was back on the road heading to Anderson, SC. We managed to get to Anderson early enough that we were able to work at the hospital for most of the afternoon. We were actually able to be very productive, even after all of that driving.

Being in Anderson was nice because we knew where the food was and how to get around. We stayed at our usual, the Comfort Suites. They know us by site there. Tonight is the first night that we had a little time to relax. We watched Run Lola, Run – a really interesting German film and then we walked down to the hotel bar and got a few drinks and ordered in a pizza. Then we headed back to the room and watched some of Apocolypse Now Redux. We managed to make it through about forty minutes before we just needed to get to bed. It was nice to have not to travel after having to drive anywhere after work. It wasn’t much time off but it was something. We needed to relax a little.

Boy where we glad to wake up this morning and be in Mississippi. The weather is great today. A little overcast and that perfect warmth. The company that we came down to meet with decided to push off our meeting until the afternoon so we had some time to relax this morning. Breakfast started at Waffle House with Eric getting grits. He is addicted to them now.

I think that this month may be the longest month on Sheep Guarding Llama yet. With all of the people reading the site and with the updates coming from Anne on a regular basis, this may be our busiest month for traffic to the site as well.

Speaking of Anne, I have her update number sixteen but I will not be able to post that update until I am back in New York.

After our meeting in Hattiesburg, MS (which was very positive,) Eric and I headed back to Waffle House for some lunch and then hit the road to head out to Atlanta. The drive to Atlanta went pretty quickly and was relatively uneventful. It was only about six hours to Atlanta total. We had to drive across Alabama and that was the bulk of the drive. The weather was good for driving.

We arrived in Atlanta at 10:30 at night and checked into the Sleep Inn in Douglassville just to the west of the city. We headed on over to the Walmart that was in the same parking lot as the hotel. Eric looked at Game Boy Advances and I picked up three DVDs, Drunken Master, Apocolypse Now Redux and Lola Rennt (Run Lola, Run.) We ran out and got some Taco Bell and headed back to the hotel. Luckily, I have this new laptop that has a built in DVD player so we watched Drunken Master (Jackie Chan.) Eric fell asleep about halfway through the movie. I managed to finish it but was pretty sleepy by the time it was over.