Sheep Guarding Llama

Walked to work again today.  It is getting pretty cold down here in Texas.  We were not expecting it to be quite so freezing cold and we do not have warm jackets or anything so I am walking to work with just my fleece.  Not very much for blowing winds and temperatures dipping below twenty.  I was a mite chilly when I got to the office today but not too bad.  It is supposed to be very cold tomorrow though.

For lunch, two of us from the office decided to walk up to Blu Ginger, where Dominica, Liesl and I ate last night, and have lunch there.  We offered for several people from the office to join us but no one else was keen on walking around outside I guess.

We walked all the way to the restaurant when Dominica called to say that Oreo really needed me to run back and take him out.  So we made a pitstop back at the apartment to deal with Oreo.  Then on to lunch.

I discovered that not only does Blu Ginger have an awesome lunch but it is only $8 per person including a spring roll, soup and an entree!  Now that is cheap. Try doing that in New York.  I can’t believe how much less it costs to do things here.  We were expecting housing to be cheaper but the cost of food is really amazing.

We got food to go for Dominica too.  We delivered that back to the apartment and then walked back to the office.

Once we got to the office we discovered that there was no manager on site at that time to sign me back in and even though I had a pass for the day security was not going to let me back in to the building.  Um, good planning there.  They didn’t require this yesterday and don’t do this on Wall Street or in Tribeca, not sure why they do it here.

So, with nothing else to do, I walked back home again and spent the afternoon working from home.  Didn’t really end up being all that bad.

Tomorrow my priority is definitely getting my badge activated.  I am not going to go in until that is ready to be dealt with.  I can’t be walking around in the cold getting locked out as it starts getting colder here over the next few days.

This morning was my very first time going in to the new Irving office.  It is awesome being able to walk into the office.  I have never really been able to do that before.  At least not since Pittsburgh.

The walk in only took a few minutes.  A very easy walk.  It is crazy how close we are living to work.

I had a good morning in the office.  For lunch I walked back to the apartment and had sandwiches there with Dominica, Liesl and Oreo.  I was able to spend my lunch break with Liesl and walk Oreo for Dominica so that she would not have to deal with walking Oreo with Liesl being left in the apartment.

I finally managed to deal with my immunizations for college today!  What a pain that has been.  After getting threats from health services, threats from the dean’s office, calling people and explaining the situation over and over again and then everyone acting like I am not responding to the notices even though I keep calling and calling.  It isn’t like I closed over Christmas break, they did!

After working and working to track down my records for the past few weeks and especially yesterday it finally turns out, today, that RIT decided to admit that since I was a completely distance student (like I have always been for the last three years) that obviously I don’t need to have immunization records on file.  Of course, I had asked if students who lived in countries that didn’t have those immunizations and were online students had to meet this insane requirement and had previously been told that it was a NY State requirement and of course they did.  So, obviously, that was a total lie to try to force me to provide records I cannot reasonably possess.

So after much paperwork and hustle I am not being kicked out of college for something that was not my fault and not a requirement of me at all.  RIT had been threatening to keep all of my tuition as well – a nice little scam that they have running.  Only students with enough wherewithal to really fight this process don’t lose tens of thousands of dollars to their little game.  I am really disgusted by how that entire process was handled.  I had called the health center with this information a month ago – the minute that they opened on the day that they notified me of the fake requirement – and had explained this all then and they have been giving me a runaround for a month!

I also managed to get my scholarship straightened out.  There was some serious miscommunication there and while I did lose about $1,000 I did not lose my complete scholarship.  One more thing ironed out and out of the way.  We are slowly chipping away at these things.

Weird note: The word “miscommunication” does not appear in my browser’s dictionary.  How can this be?  Isn’t this a very, very standard word?  I looked it up at Mirriam-Webster (okay, I hate all Websters dictionaries on principle but it was quick) and believe it or not, they claim that miscommunication has only been a part of the English lexicon since 1964?  Is that possible?  Anyone have an OED to verify that?

Tonight we decided to get Thai for dinner.  We walked over to the restaurant with Liesl.  It is so close it is barely a walk!  This is going to be great.  And it is warm enough that we only need to wear fleeces!  In January!  At night!

Dinner was awesome.  We went all out and had two entrees, two appetizers, Thai ice teams and even some Thai wine – which was very good.  Liesl had a great time throwing food all over the floor.  Argh.  If this had been Peekskill the bill would easily have been $120.  We got the bill and it was only $50!  I can’t believe how cheap Texas is.  This food was really excellent too.

Today is it, the last day of us being in the Houston / Galveston area before we head up to Dallas.  There is a lot of packing to be done today.  Not something that we are looking forward to at all.  It has gotten a lot colder here today and it is not fun being outside.

The really big job of the day was mounting the Thule car top carrier on to the X3 and then packing it full of as much as we can get up there to haul up to Irving.  We know that now everything is going to fit in this load so we have to be selective about what we are going to need in the next two weeks versus the months to come.  We will be back down in League City in two weeks so we can get another load of stuff at that time.  We were completely full on the drive down to here from New York and there have been a lot of additional Christmas items added that don’t fit.  So we have to pick and choose what we take.

Dominica got the car top carrier mounted to the car pretty quickly but then came the long job of attempting to pack it.  That is not fun at all.  It is bad enough when the weather is good but when it is cold and windy it is really unpleasant.  It took a while to get everything jammed into the car top.  What a pain that is.  I hope that we do not have to use it very often.

Packing the trunk of the BMW took no time at all.  We have several large items that fill that right up without any problem.

We went over to the Grices’ this evening to hang out for a little while.  We did not stay for long as everyone there has school and work tomorrow and we have to make an early start.  Our plan is to be up around four thirty and on the road as quickly as we can.  A lot of driving and other things to do tomorrow!

It is our final weekend here in the Houston / Galveston area.  Today, Dominica and I got to watch Joe play Assassin’s Creed II which is awesome!  We did pretty much nothing else all day.  I did some work on my laptop, played with Liesl, etc.  But watching Assassin’s Creed II is actually better than watching television.  The story is really engaging and well done.  Much better, I think, that the original game which I have and have played a bit but am far from completing.  I need to go back and play that again now that I see how awesome the sequel is.

Assassin’s Creed II is set in renaissance Florence which is really cool.  The recreation of the center of the city is amazing.  It really gives you the feeling of being there.

For breakfast today, Dominica, Liesl and I went out to the IHOP in Le Marque which is just a little closer to Houston than we are in Bayou Vista.  We were excited because they had some Christmas pancake specials like gingerbread and eggnog pancakes.  We tried to order the specials and to substitute toast instead of the meat that comes with them.  We did this regularly in Newark and never experienced a problem doing so.  Being vegetarian is always a challenge and we expect to pay meat prices for toast but it is not so bad.

Our waitress informed us that because it was a special that no substitutions were allowed.  We were rather surprised as we know that this was not an IHOP corporate policy since we did it all of the time but we did know that the IHOP on Jefferson Road in Rochester would not allow vegetarians to substitute lower cost toast for high cost meat even though they would have made more money per serving (vegetarians are often surprised when they offer to pay the same and get less and are told that the restaurants would rather not have their business than to make extra money on them!)

So we ended up eating something else.  When we got the bill there was a customer service website on it with a “how did we do?”  So I decided that I should at least voice my opinion to the franchisee to inform them that their restaurant had turned down higher profits and made us unwilling to eat there again if we felt that we would be unable to order anything except for the very, very few non-meat items on the menu.  I understand that it is their right to not supply vegetarian options.  Of course it is.  But I couldn’t believe that they would choose to turn away their highest (or higher, at least) profit margin customers just because they were determined to serve meat with their meals!

It only took about an hour, on a Saturday morning, before the senior vice president of operations for the IHOP franchisee (who handles pretty much all of Texas) called me, personally, at home!  He assured me that substituting toast for meat was always allowed and that accommodating vegetarians was very important for them.  He was not sure exactly how we could possibly have been told that any substitution was not allowed, especially one like this.  He dispatched the regional manager to go see what was going on at the restaurant right then and there, as I understood it.

He said that as soon as we are settled in Irving to send him our address and he is going to ship some free dining certificates to us to encourage us to come back out and try their IHOP franchise again.  There is an IHOP just down the street from our new apartment in Las Colinas so it will be very easy for us to visit them.

I am very impressed with how quickly and decisively ACG Texas, the IHOP franchise, reacted to the issue and resolved it.  Even on a Saturday morning!  We had not even thought to ask for the manager at the store because it is so common for vegetarians to not be allowed substitutions (Burger King made this corporate policy at one point and individual stores could get in trouble for selling you sandwiches without meat! This was later rescinded but the damage was done.  It also cost them the legal right to say “you’re way” in their ads!) that you don’t automatically ask for a manager to complain or clarify.  You just get something else and never eat there again.  It’s not about rocking the boat.  It’s about giving business to companies who aren’t ridiculous.  Vote with your wallet.

So we will definitely try IHOP in Texas again once we are in Irving.  Customer service kudos to ACG.  Every company makes mistakes.  It is how they resolve them that determines good customer service.

After breakfast we came back and watched more of Joe playing Assassin’s Creed II.  We got to see one of the funniest video game moments ever when one of the characters in renaissance Italy suddenly says “Don’t you recognize me, its a me, Mario!” in his best Nintendo Super Mario Bros. imitation.  Hilarious!

I got a chance to watch Run, Fatboy Run with Simon Pegg and Hank Azaria on BD today.  Pretty good movie.  Can’t go wrong with Peff and Azaria.

Dominica watched a LOT of HGTV today.  She is addicted to television shows about people buying houses in foreign countries.  At least this show gets her excited about house hunted overseas which is what I want to do.  So she is picking up buying tips for foreign markets.

One more day down here before we drive up to Irving.  We were supposed to have started packing the car today but we were lazy and did not even start looking into putting things into the car top carrier at all yet.  That is all being saved for tomorrow.  We leave really early on Monday so nothing can be packed on Monday itself.  It all has to be done today.  Luckily this is a very slow weekend for work so there is some time to relax before we drive up there and deal with the apartment.