October 2, 2008: The Vice Presendential Debate

50 Days to Baby Day! (32 Weeks and Six Days Pregnant)

20 Work Days Left for Dominica

Oreo got me up to walk him at one in the morning.  We had a nice walk around the block then went back to bed.  I was very glad at that point that I had decided that I wanted to go to bed nice and early last night.

Oreo and I got up around seven thirty.  I was very well rested for a change and feel pretty good today.  The air is cool and breezy but there is a lot of sunlight today.  A perfect day for Oreo to be home with me.  Most of the week didn’t have such a nice day for him to lounge in the living room on his big Star Wars pillow.

I got up and got signed in to the office.  It is a pretty slow day today even with the market stuff going on.  I managed to get the dishes done pretty early on this morning.  I am working hard on getting all of the DVDs that we have here in Newark ready so that they can be shipped to dad’s next weekend so that they are completely out of the way before the move.  The last thing that we want is anything “extra” down in Newark to be moved more than it needs to be.  So far I am making good progress and remain on target.

This morning, on MSN.com, they have three pictures cycling by on the homepage.  Bear Mountain Bridge, literally right next to where we are buying our new house.  That is the bridge that we cross to get over the Hudson River just above Peekskill.  The article on MSN using the picture is “The 19 Autumn Foliage Hot Spots”.  It is a good sign that where we live is the highlighted picture.  Here is the direct link.

I placed an Amazon order this morning as I am running low on reading material here in Newark.  I have to maintain a stock of books that are rather small so that they will fit into my bag that I carry to and from work each day in addition to large format books that I read at home.  So I have five new books coming this next week.

Lunch was leftovers from last night.  A little pizza and a salad.

I started using Stack Overflow yesterday, the new developer’s answer site from Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky.  So far it seems to work pretty well.  I have been listening to the podcast from them as they discuss the building of the web site for a few months now so it is very interesting to see it taking shape.  I already have 211 reputation points on my very first day and six or seven badges.

The afternoon flew by in a blur.  Suddenly it was three o’clock and I had no idea at all.  I didn’t even end up eating my salad until three!

Oreo is home with me so Dominica is able to bring home fish tacos from On the Border.  She has lost her taste for fish tacos in the pregnancy so she gets a salad and I get the fish tacos and she eats the rice and beans that come with the tacos.  It works out well.

Tonight I had someone, a Masters of City Planning Candidate (how does one fail to actually get a masters degree?) from UPenn, call me trying to rope me into a pyramid scheme.  He is a real UPenn student as he can’t afford real email and has to use his student account.  Newark is so crappy that even the Ivy League graduate students are trying to make a buck on a pyramid scam.  It was the same scam that we had to have homeless people removed from the building for previously.  I am so anxious to get out of this town.  I want to live in a place where an ivy league grad would feel embarrassed to be trying to get his neighbours suckered into a pyramid scam.

We ate dinner and watched some Fresh Prince and Magnum P.I. The vice presidential debate is scheduled for nine o’clock tonight and the plan is that Kevin, Pam and I are going to go down to the lounge, if it is available, to watch it.

Dominica and I relaxed until nine when it was time to watch the debate.  Dominica went to bed and I went down to Kevin and Pam’s apartment to watch it.  We had hoped to have been able to have gotten one of the lounges but they were all already in use.

Overall the debate was mostly a stalemate, in my opinion.  Palin did much better than I had expected although her unwillingness to face a lot of questions was pretty blatant and she didn’t really deflect them but just plain ignored them which was not overly skillful.  Already it seems apparent than any mention of energy by her is just another phrase meaning “I’m not sure what you’re talking about.”  But she didn’t get totally destroyed in the debate like we had all expected although it was very clear that Biden was pulling all the punches and just letting her go even when the shots were open for him.

I got back to the apartment and wrapped up my class discussion for the evening.  Then it was time to walk Oreo.  Before heading off to bed I really wanted to wrap up the book that I was reading so I just sat down in the office and read until it was done.  At ten after midnight I finished reading “UML for the IT Business Analyst“.  That makes four books completed in four days!  It has been a very good reading week indeed.

Then it was time to head off to bed.  Tomorrow is looking like it will be a nice day for walking into Manhattan.  A high of sixty-four degrees.  I am so glad that autumn is finally here.

Dominica and I are planning to be home in Newark this weekend.  It is our final weekend “in Newark” deus volente. Next weekend is Joe Howlett’s wedding.  The weekend after that is our proposed “soft move” to Peekskill.  The weekend after that is our hard move to Peekskill.  The weekend following that we no longer have a lease for the apartment so we shant be here at all.

October 1, 2008: Georgian Cuisine in NJ

51 Days to Baby Day! (32 Weeks and Five Days Pregnant)

Got up at five thirty this morning and did a little reading.  I finished reading “Dynamic Software Development” by Timothy Wells.

Dominica dropped me at the train station and I was off to Warren.  I actually made the early train today and remembered to use the off-peak round-trip tickets, too.

This is my first time working out at Warren in almost a month, I think.  It has definitely been a while.  Just one thing or another has been cropping up making the trip rather impractical.

Today was a nice, slow day.  For lunch, a friend and I went to a Georgian restaurant on Route 22.  We’ve been trying to go to this restaurant for weeks and just have not been able to schedule it.  We turned out to be the only people looking to eat there during the entire lunch hour!  It was completely empty when we arrived and not one person came while we ate out entire meal except for one woman, just as we were paying, who was just looking to see a menu.

The food was quite good.  The menu was tiny.  The only main meal that they had from the menu was the chicken kabob and the only appetizer was the eggplant wraps.  I told them that I was a vegetarian so they made me an awesome mushroom and potato stew.  It was very good.  I also got the eggplant wraps as an appetizer, they were really excellent.

We also tried a bottle of Georgian cherry soda – which was really good.  If I had had a car there I would have bought several bottles from them.  I love Georgian soda.  It has far less carbonation as American sodas do and is sweetened with cane sugar not high fructose corn syrup.  The combination means that it has far fewer calories as it does not need as much sugar and that the sugar that it has is better for you.  It’s kind of like a blend between soda and kool-aid.

The afternoon went by pretty quickly.  Nothing exciting at work but there was some additional house excitement.  It seems that after last week asking us to move the closing date forward for them the sellers are now asking that we move it back as far as possible.  It’s not a big issue since they don’t want to move back past October 25th, which is when our paperwork from the bank will expire.  They know that we have that limitation and that delaying past there means that they have no buyers for their house and this is a pretty bad market to be losing buyers in.  Most likely if they did do that we would renegotiate to buy the house in several months at a lower cost but that would be rough.  We can’t be doing anything extra like that with the baby right around the corner.

So the original closing target date was October 15th.  The originally asked, last week that is, to target the 7th to which we agreed to try to accomodate and now they are shooting for the 24th which is the last possible day that the attorneys could schedule (the 25th is actually on the weekend.)  The 7th was going to be awful for us since we are away that weekend and the extra time would cost us money and not give us any benefits since we wouldn’t even be around to spend the weekend in the house or to move anything.  Going past the 17th, though, means that we lose the one weekend that we do have to do casual moving.  The 17th is our perfect date so we are hoping that that is what gets scheduled.  It means two days less escrow, both Dominica and I will have another paycheck before the closing and we still get two weekends in which to move.

We are just waiting for some closing date to get scheduled so that we can hire our movers.  That is our biggest point of stress at the moment – other than the stress of paying for this house – just trying to find movers and get that scheduled and to know that there really is a window in which the moving can be done.

If we get the extra weekend, the 18th and 19th, then we are planning to take the Mazda PR5 (which we are picking up when we go back home for Joe’s wedding next weekend) back and forth two or three times with loads of small items to take to the new house if at all possible.  We are guessing that with just a couple of good loads in the hatchback that we can move just about all of the small stuff from the apartment to the house.  Only the furniture and boxes of books would be left for the movers.  The books are just too heavy and too likely to hurt my back to bother moving.  It will only take about two boxes for all of them since so few are here in Newark with me that it is totally worth having the movers just take them with the furniture.  If we manage to get the Verizon FIOS hooked up before the movers come then we might even move the computers early and have that out of the way.  At least everything but the workstation that I use to work for Citi.  But even that I might be able to reduce to a laptop.

The only really tough piece to coordinate will be the plants and the daily use computer equipment.  None of it is hard to move just hard to get moved when it all needs to go right at the last second.  The plants might be staying in Newark until a week after the movers take the furniture away.

My trip home this evening went great.  I caught the Summit shuttle and did a little listening to IT Conversations on my iPod and then managed to just make it on to the express train to Broad Street without any problems.  They really need to move the shuttle schedule up by like one minute so that we never miss that train.  There are several people on the shuttle running for that train every day.

On the train ride home I manage to finish reading “Getting It Right: Business Requirement Analysis Tools and Techniques” by Kathleen Hass, Don Wessels and Kevin Brennan.  I am on quite the roll reading-wise this week.  Three books in three days completed.

Dominica decided that she was in the mood for salad and a sandwich from Eli’s tonight.  So I ordered in and we had food in around an hour.  I messed up the order, though, and had to run down to the deli downstairs to complete the order.  Oops.  I really hate placing orders by phone, especially when I have nothing written down in front of me and no one listens to make sure that I ordered everything.  I am very had at that.

We watched a little bit of Magnum P.I. and The Fresh Prince of Bel Air and both went to bed very early.  I am trying to make sure that I am not falling behind on sleep this week to give my back as much opportunity as possible to repair itself.  Today was better than yesterday so we continue to move in the right direction.  I am home all day tomorrow with no need to walk around outside except to walk Oreo so I am hopeful for a good day of progress.

September 30, 2008: Found a New Health Club

52 Days to Baby Day! (32 Weeks and Four Days Pregnant)

…had contemporary news editors existed back in the days when books were invented, they would have published big scary articles expounding on the dangers of reading a book while riding a horse or chopping firewood.  – Raymond Chen on the New York Times report that people engaging in an activity that requires their attention have a reduced ability to do other things at the same time which also require their attention.

Geekzine picked up one of my older articles.  Pretty cool, thanks, Geekzine!

I slept in a little this morning after staying up rather late last night working until one in the morning.  My back is about the same today as it was yesterday so apparently the walk into the office is not a problem.

It took a while before I was able to get enough done at home so that I would be able to leave.  I had the same problem yesterday.  Yesterday it was all that I could do to get out of the apartment in time to be able to have a one thirty lunch with Katie.  Today was not that bad but it was after noon by the time that I was in to the office.

Shreyash and I went down to Financier for lunch today.  I am watching what I eat a bit more closely now but I have been excited to try Financier’s ratatouille and goat cheese tart so I got that today.  Very tasty.  Dominica would really like it.  It is her type of food.

The afternoon was pretty busy but not too bad.  The market did a lot of recovery today.  A lot of the panic seems to be subsiding.

I talked to a friend, Dan “Mr. Crayfish”, about health clubs with swimming pools near Wall Street as he uses a local health club regularly and it turns out that he is in the process of shopping for a new health club himself.  So we looked around and found a health club down on Whitehall that has a swimming pool and participates in our company’s employee (or pseudo employee, like me) health club discount program.

The club that we found gives us a one week free trial membership through the company so we are going to take advantage of that next week and will be heading down to Whitehall on Monday to give the place a test swim.  Handily the club is right across the street from Katie’s office, literally facing it across the street, and her company pays part of the cost of her membership so she is thinking about giving it a try as well.  Katie swam varsity for four years in high school.

It was around seven thirty when I left the office with Shreyash and Suraj to walk to the World Trade Center.  My back is continuing to improve slowly.  The pain seems to have moved to more muscular and less disc related.

Dominica cooked dinner at home tonight.  She has made tamale pie from a box several times and we decided that making it from scratch had to be cheaper and better.  The box contains almost no beans and the whole thing is mostly cornbread with bean sauce on the bottom.  So tonight from scratch she made it with real vegetarian corn break (no lard, eww!) and lots of beans and corn on the bottom.  It was very good.

We watched a little Fresh Prince and Magnum P.I. and called it an early night.  I am up early tomorrow for my trip to Warren – which I have missed for the last several weeks.

September 29, 2008: Record Market Crash

53 Days to Baby Day! (32 Weeks and Three Days Pregnant)

I didn’t wake up this morning until seven thirty.  My back feels a bit better today and I am going to make an attempt at walking into the office on Wall Street.  This will be quite the challenge.

The walk into the office actually went pretty well.  It was a bit warmer out today that I had anticipated.  It actuall climbed into the seventies here today.

I was listening to Stack Overflow Episode 22 (I listen to them somewhat out of order sometimes) in which Joel was talking about the new offices of Fog Creek Software.  I knew that they were moving to new offices but had no idea that they were moving into my neck of the woods down at 55 Broadway.  I was practically walking past the front of the office when he said it on the podcast!

Even stranger is that I was talking to Katie today and learned that she has an office at 55 Broadway that she is going to this afternoon.  So she and Joel Spolsky actually work in the same building.  What a weird day of coincidences.  I am hoping to be able to go to Fog Creek’s open house once they get completely moved into the new building.

Today was, obviously, an absolutely crazy day on the market.  The biggest Dow Industrial one day point drop in history.  Now that’s something.  It is neat working on Wall Street for things like this.  It was unfortunate that I wasn’t on the trading floor when it happened because that would have been even more interesting.

For lunch today, Katie and I went over to Adrienne’s Pizzabar on Stone.  They have the most amazing pizza there.

We couldn’t decide on dinner this evening so I just went to the deli at Eleven80 and got tuna salad sandwiches for Dominica and I and we ate while watching a little bit of The Fresh Prince of Bel Air. Dominica cooked for Oreo this evening but was really exhausted so she went to bed really early around eight thirty or so.

I stayed up for a while and got some work done including some of my class work for RIT.  I am a bit ahead of schedule for a change with my class this week.  That feels good.

I will be on Wall Street again tomorrow.  My walk in and out went pretty well today.  My back still hurts but it is getting better.  I am still taking two to three ibuprofens throughout the day.

September 28, 2008: Another Long Homework Day

54 Days to Baby Day! (32 Weeks and Two Days Pregnant)

Time is flying.  The house should close, in theory, in under two weeks.  That doesn’t seem even remotely possible with how little communications we have had about it thus far.  It almost doesn’t even seem real given how little we have been hearing.  But the target date from the sellers is in nine days and the target date from us is in sixteen days and it is likely to be somewhere in between the two dates which is very, very soon.

We all slept in very late this morning.  I need more time sleeping to give my back a chance to heal.  It does feel much, much better today so I am hopeful for a quick recovery.  I am still on ibuprofen just to be safe.  No reason to push it.

Today was one of the most humid days that I have ever seen.  When we woke up there was water on everything.  The windows were all steamed up, our glasses were steamed up, the glass on the shelving unit in our bedroom was steamed up – even the television was covered in fog!

More homework for me today.  No escaping homework on Sundays.  Just can’t happen – not with online discussion groups that only have discussions on Sundays.

This afternoon I finished reading “Professionalizing Business Analysis: Breaking the Cycle of Challenged Projects”.  I’ve had a couple of books all being read at the same time recently which has slowed me down a bit, so I am glad to have one of them out of the way.  I am in one of me indecisive reading moods recently.

Today was a rather uneventful day.  Dominica watched a lot of Jericho on Hulu and I spent the morning working on scripts for the school in Castile and the afternoon and evening working on homework.

We were lazy and ordered in dinner from Nino’s and watched some of Magnum P.I. on the AppleTV.  Dominica watched for a few hours after I went back out to the living room office to keep working on homework.

Manhattan looks amazing tonight.  The Empire State Building is obscured behind the clouds and mist but its spire is visible and the bright shine of the cloud just above it that is completely lit by its lights.  Enchanting.