November 9, 2008: Visiting in Waverly

12 Days to Baby Day! (38 Weeks and Two Days Pregnant)

Today is the fifth anniversary of my mother’s death.  It’s good to be away from home and busy with family.  We were so busy today that I really couldn’t think about it at all.

Dominica, Oreo and I all slept in a lot this morning.  I got up just before nine which was at least ten hours of sleep and maybe a little more.  Dominica got up a little before ten.

I walked Oreo while she was getting ready to head to breakfast and while walking him I noticed that he was beginning to develop a limp.  He was starting to take his weight off of his rear right leg.  He isn’t wincing but he is not walking heavily upon it.  Our guess is that he pulled it during the night getting on to and off of the bed in the hotel room.  It is much higher and slipperier than he is used to having.

Dominica and I went to the very nice continental breakfast in the Black Diamond Dining Room at the hotel as it was included with our hotel room.  It was very impressive for a “free” included breakfast with full service, eggs and homefries brought to your table plus the usual continental buffet available as well.  It would have been $18 had we not been hotel guests.

After breakfast we drove back to the Birney’s arriving around ten thirty.  By the time that we arrived Oreo was limping pretty badly which, of course, garnered him a lot of sympathy.  He knows how to play the “poor little dog” card quite well.

Today was much more calm than yesterday.  The weather is a bit nicer so that kids were almost exclusively outside.  There were many fewer adults as well as some people were heading out last night and all morning people were heading out to drive or to catch flights out of town.

We had a really nice time just relaxing and visiting with everyone today.  It is so rare that we really get to spend any quality time with the family.

We stayed until five and then really needed to get onto the road to make sure that we would not have any problems getting back to Peekskill tonight.  We timed the drive carefully tonight and it actually takes just a few minutes under three hours to make the trek from Peekskill to Waverly.  Not a bad drive at all.  Much better than we had been expecting.  Google Maps estimates the trip at just over three hours but the Garmen GPS put us just a little under.

It was very nice to get home.  It is so much nicer returning to our own home rather than going to our apartment in Newark.  It is also much closer to most places that we would need to travel.  The house was very cold when we got home, as you can imagine, as the nursery had been wide open for two days.

It was just before eight when we got home and with nothing pressing this evening I decided to finally pop in Assassin’s Creed and to give it a try.  I played for an hour or two and got through all of the tutorial portions of the game.  Overall, I have to say, it isn’t as amazing as I had hoped that it would be.  On the 720p monitor I can really see where the PS3 is being pushed past its limits just trying to pump out that level of detail and the gameplay is extremely simplistic.  I had been hoping that the game itself would be a lot more deep.  We will see, though, as I am just getting started in the game.

We both went to bed pretty early. Oreo had to be carried upstairs because of his leg.  I will be in the office on Wall Street tomorrow.  Dominica will be home nursing the little dog back to health.

November 8, 2008: Papa Doty’s Funeral

13 Days to Baby Day! (38 Weeks and One Day Pregnant)

I didn’t even wake up when the alarm rung this morning.  I was completely exhausted.  Dominica had gone to bed several hours before me last night and wasn’t feeling too bad this morning although she was quite tired too.  She woke me up and we got ready as quickly as we could.  The goal was to be out the door and on the road before six in the morning.

We did pretty well and were in the car around five forty.  We noticed that the front passenger tire was soft so we drove straight to the Exxon-Mobil station on the Peekskill roundabout just north of town at the foot of the mountain by Annsville Creek.  I put air into the tires (while wearing my suit) while Dominica ran inside to Dunkin Donuts and picked up egg and cheese croissants for breakfast that we could eat while we drove.

This morning is actually our first time ever making a trip, other than commuting, from our new home in Peekskill.  The drive that we are taking today, heading west on US 17 through New York’s Southern Tier is one that we are probably going to get to know quite well in the years ahead.

The drive went pretty well. We hit rain that we had to drive through almost the entire way but it was not too heavy.  We realized, once we were far too far away from the house, that we had accidentally left one of the sliding glass doors open so the house was open to the elements while we were gone.  The thermistat was set very low so the heater was unlikely to kick on but we did not want it raining into the nursery while we were away for two whole days.

We arrived in Waverly, New York at just before nine in the morning.   The trip took us just a smidgen over three hours with a breakfast stop and one bathroom stop along the way in the rain.  Not too shabby.

A little known fact about Waverly is that it is the largest producer of cheese for pizzas in the eastern United States.

We managed to arrive early enough that we were able to visit and say hello to everyone at the Birney’s home before we were all to drive into Elmira for the funeral itself.  The funeral mass was at ten at St. Casimir’s on Demarest Parkway in Elmira.  This is actually the first time that I have attended a funeral mass.

After the funeral itself there was a reception held at another church not very far away.  I’m not sure of the name of the other church.  The church ladies there made a very nice meal and we had a really nice time visiting with family.  There were a lot of people that I have not seen in a very long time and quite a few whom I have never met before.  The last really large and all-inclusive family gathering from Dominica’s mother’s side of the family was about eight years ago, just before Dominica and I started dating.  So I was in the somewhat strange position of having been around for seven years but having a lot of people not know who I was or to only know me through long distance correspondance and not in person.

After the reception the entire family moved from Elmira back to Waverly to spend the day at the Birney’s.  Dominica and I decided that we should run to Sayre, Pennsylvania where our hotel is so that we could check in, drop off our stuff and change into casual clothing since we had been all dressed up all morning since leaving Peekskill.

We have a room at the Sayre Best Western Grand Victorian Inn for the weekend.  We were very excited to learn that they accepted pets.  Large ones too which is very nice even though Oreo is just little.  He can go anywhere but people with large pets often have issues traveling with them.  I always appreciate hotels that accept them.  There was only a ten dollar daily charge for Oreo.  Although honestly if people knew how cute and sweet he was we would get a discount for bringing him with us.

The hotel was very nice – not what we were expecting to find in Sayre at all.  I suspect that it is used extensively by Guthrie Health and Medical Center which is very close by.  The hotel used to be called The Guthrie  The room was large and they managed to get us a king room even though they had been unavailable when we had first called.  The bed was nice and the bathroom was one of the nicest that we have seen in a long time.  Oreo loved the room.  He gets all excited when he gets to go to a hotel and he run around and jumps on the bed and rolls around.  He is so funny.

We changed and unpacked and headed back to the Birnie’s for the afternoon.  The crowd there was pretty serious, roughly seventy three people, I believe that I heard someone say.  Luckily the house is very large with several large gathering rooms all connected by circular walkway plus a really big enclosed patio area so seventy-three people was not an impossibility.  It was pretty cold outside, though, so the children were inside a significant portion of the evening and they take up proportionately a lot more space that the more sedintary adults.

We had a really good time getting to visit with everyone.  There are so many people that we get to see so infrequently and there were quite a few that I was just meeting for the first time.  For most everyone this was their first time seeing Dominica pregnant as well and, as you can tell from the baby countdown, she is very, very pregnant.  We were very concerned about the drive this weekend being so close to the due date but we figured out that if her water broke we could hop in the car and head straight for Peekskill and most likely would be there in plenty of time.

We hung out with the family until a bit after nine when the “party” was dwindling and we were completely unable to stay awake any longer.  It has been both a very long and very stressful week and we are both very short on sleep.  It is quite amazing that we made it as long as we did.

We got back to the hotel and were right off to sleep.  We will be heading back to Peekskill sometime tomorrow afternoon.

November 7, 2008: Indian Summer

14 Days to Baby Day! (38 Weeks Pregnant)

Happy belated 50th Anniversary to Strunk and White.  Every middle school graduate should own a copy.  A home library essential for everyone.

It has been so warm this past week.  We are definitely into the Indian Summer of November.  It has been so warm that even a lot of our neighbours have their windows open. We are having a tough time keeping the house cool enough at night to sleep.

I stumbled upon an interesting looking book today on Amazon, “Beatrix Potter: Writing in Code” from the Children’s Literature and Culture Library (Vol. 27).  I’m sure that this would be a very interesting read, however the $94.50 price tag makes me wonder if it could really be all that valuable to me.

I just barely caught the 7:08 train out of Peekskill.  Having a set time to make the train is probably good for me.  It is going to teach me to get moving in the mornings as there is no time to spare.  It would be really nice if I was able to consistently make the 6:42 train.  I suspect that it is less crowded and with just a little effort I think that making it wouldn’t be that big of a deal.  In theory that would get me into the office before 8:30 most days.

Dominica and I are both completely exhausted today.  What a week this has been.

I spoke to RIT today to let them know that I am going to be taking the winter quarter off from school.  I am hoping to be able to return to classes for the spring quarter.  We will have to wait and see.

I paid several of the bills today and noticed that Enterprise has still not returned the wrongfully charged money on the American Express bill.  One more thing that I need to deal with one more time.  It seems like I spend all of my time spinning my wheels trying to follow up with things.

I predict that as society becomes increasinly complex that there will be more and more call for personal valet services which will take the time to deal with these types of hassles for us.  Simple things that everyone needs to do like paying the bills, disputing inappropriate charges, picking up the dry cleaning, maintaining our calendars, taking our cars in for servicing, answering our phones to filter against sales calls (especially those generated through political loopholes), getting our mail, picking up the groceries, fueling the car, putting air in our tired, checking the oil, getting oil changes, washing the car, signing for packages, organizing the maid and food services, etc.  There are so many little, easy tasks that we all have to do so often that it must be a significant drain on our economy just dealing with them all of the time.  They stand between us and productivity.  It would be better, I think, to hire someone to handle them for us.  It would ensure that we are organized and that important tasks are not swept under the rug just because we have gotten busy.

There wasn’t any spare time today so I had to skip both my swimming and my lunch entirely.  I don’t mind skipping lunch too much but skipping my swim time is awful.  I need it for my health, for my stress reduction and just to get a good return on the health club investment.

Things slowed down enough for me this afternoon that I made the decision to just run for home before things got really busy again.  So at about a quarter after two I made a run for the train.  I got stuck waiting for a very long time for the subway which was almost disasterous.  Had it been just one minute later I would have had to have returned to Wall Street and wouldn’t have been able to go home until the middle of the night.  As it was I got to Grand Central Terminal and literally had to run through the terminal to make it to my train.

I got into the Peekskill Station just before four and Dominica picked me up.  We got to the house and I rushed to get logged back in and back to work.  It wasn’t really that busy of a Friday night which was significantly in my favour.  This weekend there is a freeze meaning that almost nothing is going on all weekend and while it doesn’t officially impact tonight it does lessen my workload overall.

The evening was spent in a panic to work on my paper for my class.  I wrapped up almost everything for the office by six.  Dominica ran to the New City Diner to pick up dinner for us as we are both going to be really exhausted by the time that we get a chance to get to bed.

Dominica ate dinner and read the first twenty-seven pages of my paper looks for spelling and grammar errors.  That took a long time.  I continued writing.

The writing went well, I think, and I finally turned in my forty one page, eighteen thousand word paper at eleven at night.  Once I went back and spent some time looking at other people’s papers I began to realize that my scope was completely different from their scope.  The longest paper that I saw was just under eight thousand words with most around five or six and one at just three.  The final was supposed to be a corporate handbook and I took this to mean a publishable book or a regular handbook length and I thought that ~30 pages had been mentioned which I took to mean of content not including the table of contents, bibliography, title page, etc.  I never know if I am doing what the professor wants in any of these classes.

To put my paper in perspective, though, I only wrote the equivalent of less than two weeks of SGL posts.  Two weeks of my daily blogging actually seems like a rather light amount of writing for a graduate paper.  If you’ve been reading SGL for the past two weeks you would have read quite a bit more than I wrote in this paper.

I headed off to bed, shutting down all of the computers in the house, just before midnight.  The alarm is set for five in the morning.  We are hoping to be in Waverly, New York around nine in the morning.

November 6, 2008: Just Writing My Paper

15 Days to Baby Day! (37 Weeks and 6 Days Pregnant)

After our incredibly long day yesterday, Dominica and I decided that I absolutely had to work from home today or else we would both be sick and dysfunctional.  I slept in until nine and then headed downstairs to the office.  Dominica slept in until almost eleven and then cooked breakfast of veggie sausage, eggs and toast.

I got to see the PS3 playing Netflix this morning via PlayOn running on Dominica’s laptop.  It really looks great.  It looks as good as a DVD for older television shows like “Good Neighbours” from the BBC and looks as good as high quality traditional broadcast television or better on newer, cinematic content.  It’s not quite DVD and certainly not BluRay by any stretch but for streaming over the Internet it is absolutely amazing.  I can’t believe how far we have come so quickly.

Today was a really long day.  A totally exhausting day.  I had to spend almost every second of the entire day couped up in the basement either working for the office or writing my final paper for process management at RIT.  I started at nine this morning and my only real break of any size at all came around seven o’clock this evening when Dominica made dinner and I went up to the living room to join her and Oreo while we ate.  I took the time to watch two episodes of Family Guy with her off of Hulu.  That was about a forty five minute break.  Then it was back to the basement to write more of my paper.

I made my 900th Twitter post tonight.

I have written 13,000 words (or 25 pages) in my final paper thus far and am far too tired with writing to be able to provide a good SGL post for today.  It is unlikely that I will have the ability to get back to serious posting until Monday.  Tomorrow I am going in to Wall Street and staying there until work and my paper are completed.  It is going to be a very, very long day.  I hope to be home by midnight but that seems rather unlikely.  The other option is to leave quite early but that seems to be less likely.

On Saturday morning, literally just a few hours after I have to turn in my paper tomorrow night, Dominica and I have to drive to Waverly, Pennsylvania at around five in the morning.  If you think that we are exhausted now just wait until then.  Dominica’s grandfather’s funeral is at ten in the morning out there.  We will be visiting with family, I expect, until we physically cannot stay awake anymore.  Then we are retiring to the local Best Western where we have a room for us and Oreo for the night.

We will visit with family a bit more on Sunday morning and will probably head back to Peekskill early Sunday afternoon.  At least my class will be over and Dominica will not need to go to work on Monday as she is done with work.

We discovered today that our mailbox key does not go into the mailbox and we have no way to retrieve our mail here in Peekskill.  Please, no one mail us anything until we get it fixed.  We are pretty sure that the mailbox is beyond capacity already because we know that a package was delivered yesterday that must take up the entire available space.  Dominica attempted a few times to call the management company today but they just had their phones go to the answering machine, even during their business hours, and did not respond today.  We don’t know if we even have the option of having a locksmith come out and fix it since it is a mailbox that is not owned by us.  We think that it is actually very unlikely that we have the legal right to have the mailbox drilled since it is a community mailbox and we have no means of proving that we own the one that we do (it does not have our address on it anywhere.)

We also discovered today that the neighbour’s gutter has fallen off and that water is pouring down beside the building and is ruining the foundation of our building and damaging the fence between our patios.  We tried to alert the complex management about that issue as well but, as above, they didn’t answer the phone or return any calls today.  They also have no contact information in the home owners manual that they gave to us when we signed the deed.  They do have a mailing address but, of course, they are whom we need to reach to get access to our mail.  Luckily Dominica rerouted our mail from Eleven80 to dad’s house and not to Peekskill so none of our bills are coming here except for the electric, Internet access and the homeowner’s association who will obviously not be getting a penny until they start returning our calls.

It is after twelve thirty at night and I just wanted to get a quick post out before heading off to bed. I have to be up in five hours so that I can catch the train.  I think that I have enough done on my paper that finishing tomorrow should not be a problem but you never know.  There is just so much to do and Fridays are so unpredictable at the office.  It might be slow or I might never get a moment to even look at my paper until after eight at night.

November 5, 2008: Very Long Day

16 Days to Baby Day! (37 Weeks and 5 Days Pregnant)

I got myself up at six this morning on just five and a half hours of sleep.  I am pretty tired today.  I had hoped to maybe make the 6:42 train but that just wasn’t possible so I got the 7:08.  That turned out to be very unfortunate as the 7:08 had a delay and we ended up just sitting north of Tarrytown on the tracks for almost an hour.  It was two hours and forty minutes of travel time from home to the office.  What a long start to the morning.  At least I will get to swim today since I am in the city.  Yay exercise!

Here is an FYI – my favourite thing about Joe Biden is that he is a major supporter of Amtrak and public rail transportation.  Yay Amtrak!  It would be so awesome if Joe was able to advance the rail agenda over the next four years.  The recent fuel crisis may act as a catalyst to make Americans realize that we need to beef up our efficient rail infrastructure.

Yesterday on my train ride home I finished reading Marc Levinson’s “Guide to Financial Markets, 4th Ed.” published by The Economist and Bloomberg.  Today, on my long train ride, I began reading “The Victory of Reason” by Rodney Stark.

I finally got to work but decided that breakfast was needed.  Shreyash and I walked down to Financier and got coffee and I got a croissant with brie for breakfast.  Yummy.

Dan and I took a late lunch and headed to the gym around two this afternoon to go swimming.  This is my fourth week of getting into the pool on a regular basis.  It is starting to feel pretty good although I feel like I am covered in chlorine all of the time.  Taking a shower at the gym doesn’t really get the chlorine off very well.  Today was a good swim, almost an hour.

I looked at SGL’s information on Google Analytics today and it would appear that readership has really increased in the last month or two.  I do not look at the stats on the site very often so it was a nice surprise to find that we have ten to twenty percent more readers now than we did just two months ago!  Awesome.  Keep telling your friends.

I decided that the only way for me to remain productive on my final paper was to stay late in the office and just keep working on it.  I have a very tiny window in which to work on it and if I don’t stay on top of it I will not be able to finish it by Friday.  The work is not hard but there is a massive amount of it to do before Friday night.

Dominica had her next doctor’s appointment today.  Everything went well there and she got home around seven this evening.  Crazy that her doctor’s office is open so late.

While I was stuck working on my process management paper Dominica did some more testing with PlayOn and the PS3 and got NetFlix working now in addition to Hulu which we had working before.  She says that it works just as well as Hulu worked and that the image looks better coming through PlayOn and up to the PS3 and displayed on the big screen than it did on her laptop.  That might be because of the PS3’s playback capabilities, because of the way that the Westinghouse blends the image compared to her precision Samsung monitor or just because the PlayOn server detects us having a faster Internet connection in Peekskill than we were getting in Newark and therefore we might be getting a higher quality video stream.  In any case, its awesome that the system works so well.  It’s like having the best features of television without the crap of commercials and the cost of cable.  It can’t be very long before services like Netflix will be able to deliver high definition video that rivals what cable is delivering today.

I left the office at nine thirty and made the 10:12 train out of Grand Central Terminal.  That meant arriving at Peekskill at 11:06.  What a late day!  I called Dominica from the train and she was already asleep and was not at all happy to have to come down to get me.  This week’s schedule is really rough on both of us.  It is a very good thing that she is done with work and home full time now or we would be in really rough shape.  I would be taking a taxi constantly otherwise.

Got home and finally got some dinner.  Just some stuff from the fridge that Dominica picked up at the grocery store today.  Finally we can have food in the house again and actually get to eat something different and healthy, and fresh breads too.  This is great.

I decided that I just have to work from home tomorrow.  There is no way around it.  I am far too tired to be able to go in early enough to get anything done nor do I have the four hours of commuting to spare at the moment.  Beyond that, there is no way that Dominica can get up in the morning to take me to the train station.

It was around midnight when I finally got to bed.