Sheep Guarding Llama

Late last night, Nate, Bob and I went out to the driving range and each hit a bucket of balls. I haven’t been to a driving range in so long. I think it has probably been five years since I hit a golf ball and eleven years since I played a round of golf. I am up early this morning hoping that we will be able to head down to the city course and play nine holes but they ended up not being open yet. So, at least I am up early.

The RX-7 is STILL not out of the shop. It has now spent over an entire month in the shop in the six weeks that we have owned the car. Believe me, this is getting to be a little bit frustrating. After spending an entire month in the shop, we will have had new mufflers and a new intake manifold gasket put on and a new headlamp on one side and battery terminal connectors. That is it. I could have done the last two items myself in 30 minutes or less. We might have the radio antenna fixed but this waits to be seen. Mufflers can be done in under an hour at many places. It really makes you wonder.

Wow, it is August already. Today is the day that we were supposed to be moving into our new house but obviously that hasn’t happened yet. Now they are telling us that we should be in by August 18th but that isn’t looking so likely either since there is no kitchen yet, the walls aren’t painted, no carpeting, etc. The house is largely unfinished so we are thinking that mid-September is the earliest that it will be done. How frustrating.

Today is a big car day. Nate and I have to drive to Canandaigua and get the Mazda out of the shop and then we also have to drive to Horseheads and pick up Nate’s new ’92 Buick LeSabre that he is buying. So there might be a little bit of driving around going on today. I finally saw Bob yesterday for the first time in three weeks! He drove down to Ithaca with his new Mazda Protégé ES 2.0 and I finally got to ride in it. Very nice. It is very similar to the car that I am planning on getting.

Last night was Llama Karaoke at the Bear Lodge in Collegetown. We sang from 9pm – 11pm. Our friend Anthony showed up and sang a bit too.

So Loopy went out and got this new video game called ” Black and White ” and we decided to try it out. The idea of the game was really interesting and we started to get into it. But the interface for the game is so frustrating that both of us gave up on it. I didn’t even make it through the incredibly long tutorial (hours long) before I decided that attempting to play the game was way too much work to be fun over any length of time. Everything in the game is an effort. It is too bad, it had a lot of potential but they really blew it.

So after an entire week of not missing a single day of updates, I missed one day. At least we set a new Llama record for continuous updates. This is my first real week of working from home and it is a little bit weird. I get so many phone calls during the day. My office here is really turning into an office.

Josh headed back to Rochester yesterday afternoon after an exhausting weekend here. We all went to Margaritaville on Saturday night and that wore everybody out pretty bad. I managed to get almost everyone to sing some karaoke. Josh, Loopy, Dominica and I sang “Summer Lovin'” from Grease as well as a number of other songs. Loopy even got up and did his own renditions of “Like a Virgin” and “I Touch Myself. ” He was the hit of the evening.

Tomorrow I have to work in Rochester again. I have not seen Bob in at least two weeks and I have not seen Nate for one. I will probably pass Nate as he heads towards Ithaca and I head towards Rochester. The Mazda should be out of the shop tomorrow. We will see if that really happens.

I am moving everything older than July over to the archive files to help speed up the time it takes to download this main page. That should cut about 40% off of the download time.

[Ed.  Margaritaville was a special “Mexican” night at the Crooked Board Tavern on the east side of Ithaca out in the country.  Andy’s drunken renditions of “Like a Virgin” by Madonna and “I Touch Myself” by the DeVinyls have turned into legends within our social group.  December, 2007.]

Not much to report today. Yesterday I worked in Rochester almost all day so it was fairly uneventful. Josh came down last night and is spending the weekend helping Bob and Heather move. I was going to help move but I have a broken toe and have to work this morning (yes, even on a Saturday.) Lunch today is from Oswego Subs – one of our favorite places in town. It should be here any minute, I am very hungry. Our new friend Sara has been over the last couple days and has been named the house wrestling champion after whuppin’ Josh and I pretty bad. Originally we had a tag team competition until Josh injured Dominica.

Nate and Bob are out of town for another couple days so Loopy and I are running the house. How dangerous. Tonight is Margaritaville in Slayterville. So everyone be sure to come out to the Crooked Board and join us for some margaritas and karaoke.

Wow, what a day the site had yesterday. I think that this may be the single busiest twenty four hour period ever on the site. Not only have we been having high traffic levels (everyone under the sun has been contacting me about the site) but also we have a lot of new content added and problems resolved. We managed to fix that stupid Javascript error, found some spelling errors, added to the list of What?!? movies, added new poetry and funnies and added the new Links section. And on top of all of that, we are having our sixth straight day of updates to the site, doubling our previous record. I know that you are all impressed. Not only are there updates coming on a regular basis, but the updates are big ones too! Still no new “Letter to the Editor” since Christmas, I suggest that everyone bug Tim about getting some new material in.

Dominica cooked for us again last night. Nate and I were expecting to be out of town but we ended up staying so we got to eat here. It has become quite the dining experience here. Dominica has announced her intentions of competing with Josh as the head Pseudo Llama. So Josh is coming here tomorrow so that they can battle it out (or something like that.) Anyway, we had a combo dinner of Italian Sausage, Polish Sausage and Boca Fake Veggie Sausage. It was interesting.

I am beginning to think of writing the dailies for this site as kind of like being a morning radio talk show guy. I write things that people read during the day and I can’t hear anyone but I am writing all alone and can’t see anyone reading them. It is kind of weird. I only have things going on in my life to write about so it is kind of boring but on the other hand, I am sure that that makes it kind of morbidly interesting. It is official, I have called you all morbid. But don’t get me wrong, I love having people come and read the site. I can’t believe how popular we are becoming. I just hope that we didn’t lose our large Elmira Heights contingency during our downtime and name change. I am sure that a lot of people thought that we had gone down for good.

Today we are instigating a new thing. The Nate quote. The quote today is “That couch is as close to black as you can get… …while still being blue.” We thought that that was pretty weird. I would also like to quote him as saying “Clashed Out Loud.” I don’t even know what that means!