Sheep Guarding Llama

I know, I know, it has been two weeks since I did the last Llama update. I have a good excuse, though. Nate and I headed for a business convention in Tampa last week and it has been quite a hectic time since then. Wednesday (the 11th), Nate headed out to Perry and stayed there with the Mazda for a couple of day. Friday night (the 13th) we drove from Ithaca to Rochester to Ithaca and then on to Washington, DC where we did some work at Washington Hospital Center and stayed at the condo in Annapolis. On Saturday (the 14th) we drove down to Tampa but decided that we needed to stop at Pedro’s South of the Border in South Carolina along the way. Let me tell you … it is quite the interesting place. Anyway, we arrived in Tampa around 3:00 am and that was about the last time that we needed a hotel mix-up but it didn’t take too long to get that straightened out. We got to stay at the Marriott West Shore in Tampa. It was very nice. The weather was WAY too hot, though. I just can’t take it. Sunday (the 15th) I went into the Tampa convention center to work on the display that we were going to have up at the ASHE (American Society of Hospital Engineers) convention. Sunday night was mostly relaxing. Monday morning (the 16th) we started the convention. Monday night, Nate and I drove out to Orlando to test out a 1988 Porsche 944 from the Nort Northam collection. After that we headed out to Downtown Disney for a bite to eat at Captain Jacks in the Marketplace. I just love Disney World. We also picked up some cool new toys at the Lego Super Store there. Tuesday (the 17th) was the conference again but we got to pack the car and jet as soon as the show was over that day. Tuesday night we headed up to St. Augustine, FL (the US’s oldest city) where we managed to track down some truly awesome hot sauces. [St. Augustine is the only city in the world where the elusive Datil pepper grows. The Datil pepper is the Scott and Nate’s pick for the greatest pepper ever.] We bought every Datil product we where able to find in town. From St. Augustine we headed up north to Jacksonville where we crashed with our Southern Llamas Megan and Carlos. Wednesday (the 18th) we drove back to Washington where we had to work at Washington Hospital Center again but not until after stopping in to see JJ and the gang at Island Jim’s. That night we crashed out at the condo again. Thursday (the 19th) we drove back home to Ithaca in time to meet Dominica out at the Brooked Board for some wings and burgers.

Friday (the 20th), Nate got to stay home while I jumped into the Mazda RX-7 (the Florida trip was made in my mother’s ’98 Buick Regal) and headed for Rochester. Eric and I spent the day working at the University of Rochester Medical Center at Strong Hospital. While I am thinking of it, the Llamas would all like to congratulate Eric on taking over as the Nicklin Associates Account Manager at Strong Hospital. After working at the Hospital, Josh, Phil, Kate and I went out and checked out Final Fantasy. What a cool movie. The movie really isn’t very interesting but the effects and just out of this world. I was very happy with the movie. That night I crashed at Josh’s (the old Llama place in Rochester.) Early Saturday (the 21st) I jumped back in the RX-7 and drove out to Canton, Ohio to see the family at the family reunion. I drove back to Ithaca today and am now quite exhausted. All in all, I have done about 4000 miles in the past week and a half and I am quite tired of driving. I will be driving nowhere at all tomorrow. I am also very sunburnt from driving for ten hours the past two days with the top down on the Mazda. Boy am I feeling it now.

I think this may be a record setting Llama update. It is not very often that I get the chance to add so much. I hope that somebody out there is reading this because this is taking an awfully long time to write down you know:) Hopefully we didn’t lose too many faithful readers when we went through our name change. One of these days I will get around to reading our logs and seeing what kind of hits we are getting. Right now I am just too lazy to think about doing anything of the sort.

For anyone wondering about technical data on our web site, we are currently running on one of Niagara Telecom’s Managed Compaq Proliant 800 servers running Windows NT 4.0 SP 6a and Internet Information Server 4 on a high speed RAID 5 array out of their Washington, DC facilities. Most of the editing done for this site is automated with FrontPage 2000 although some of it is hand coded XHTML.

A cool note from my workplace … we have recently begun installing a web based video monitoring system at some of ourfacilities and it is just the coolest thing. We have live, full motion video available to us all over the world. I will post a picture from it so that you can see how cool it is.

I should also mention that Bob has gone and bought himself a new car. He has had it for about a week and I have not even had a chance to see it myself. I hear that we has a really sweet 2001 Mazda Protégé ES 2.0 in Silver with a five speed. We are becoming quite the Mazda household. I am looking at getting a 2002 Mazda Protoge5 in Yellow. But, yellow is very hard to get and it might not even be possible. So, I will have to see what I can do. I was originally looking to get a new Buick Regal GS to replace my old one but the Mazda is pretty spiffy and would save me some big bucks.

Well, at least now no one can complain that I never update anymore.

Can you believe it, this is the third daily update in a row. I know that you are all very impressed. So, some of the latest news is that Nate and I have purchased a really cool 1988 Mazda RX-7 Convertible in red. We found the car and fell in love with it. The RX-7 is such a fun car and it is so nice to have a convertible. It has spent most of the time in the shop (it has been there for the last five days now and this is already its second trip in to the shop in the last two weeks) but we expect to have it out again tomorrow and we are looking forward to driving it again. We even got a vanity plate so the llamas around town can spot us, it is “MLUVNIT”. We had to get that license because of an incident with an identical car fourteen years ago. So honk if you see us around Ithaca.

The llamas are moving to a new house in just a few weeks. We have grown weary of our old pen and have decided that we need a bigger place to roam. Tim is moving in with us when we move because we are moving up from a four bedroom to a five bedroom house. We are also moving from 2.5 baths up to 5.5 and from a single width “Jacuzzi” to a double. We are very happy. The house is currently being built and is expected to be completed shortly. We are very excited.

Well, a lot of work has been done to the site today so I hope that everyone gets the chance to check it out. This weekend we managed to find a cool new place in Ithaca to hang out, the Odyssey. Tonight we will be heading back there so see if you can find us there.

Ok, ok. I know that the postings have stopped for some time and this is a really long break to have taken in updating the site but we wanted to get the site switched over to its new home and everything before a lot more work went into it. So here it is. Hopefully a lot of work will be going into the site in the near future so you can see all of the dramatic changes happening to it. Please email me and tell me what you think. We will be looking at a lot of new color schemes trying to come up with what everyone thinks is appropriate. We are looking for a brighter, happier look than we have had in the past.

In addition to all of the changes going on to the site, we would also like to welcome our newest close house friend, Dominica, to the fold. We met her at our friends Phil and Kate’s Wedding and now she has become part of the gang. So we just wanted to wish her a big Llama welcome to the gang. More news on her will be soon to follow.