Sheep Guarding Llama – Page 817 – Scott Alan Miller

Boulder Golf

This past week my father has been hard at work turning his ten acre lawn into a boulder golf course (or, as I like to call it “permutation golf”.) The idea behind boulder golf is very simple. Instead of using holes in which the golf ball will drop you use large rocks and you just have to hit the rock. The game requires a greater degree of honesty as there is no hole to hold the golf ball and prove whether or not you successfully made the shot. For really good players able to hit the hole from some distance this could be a problem. It is not for us.

I prefer the term “permutation golf” as the real innovation is dad’s use of triple fairways from each “hole”. His ten acre course, two and a half miles in “length”, is created using only six boulders and flags. Each fairway begins at one of the boulders and ends at one of three possible ending boulders. Through a series of permutations you end up criss-crossing the course several times as you work through the mesh of starting point / target boulder combinations.

At this point dad is working almost exclusively with open grass which is all “rough”. The fairways themselves have not been made and he is not planning on working on that aspect of the course until next year after he is able to bring in a heavy-duty steam roller to smooth out the course. One of the holes has a little bit of a green created so far.

We look forward to being able to play permutation golf when at dad’s house in the future. If you play straight from hole to hole and do not hook or splice too badly, it requires approximately two and a half miles of walking to complete the course. There are no sandtraps yet, though.

September 1, 2008: Labor Day

81 Days to Baby Day! (28 Weeks and 3 Days Pregnant)

I got up early this morning – before eight! I was pretty upset from finding out that HP had mislead me pertty severly and that I had a lot of work that I had to do today before we could leave dad’s house. So I got right up and got to work.

Once Dominica got up we all drove over to Geneseo to go to the Omega Grill for another breakfast. As we often do when we are there, we ran into Becky who used to work with me at Pizza Hut in Geneseo circa 1995, right after I had dropped out of GMI and hadn’t started at MCC yet. She had her baby and little boy with her. Everyone has kids these days.

After breakfast we drove over to Lakeville to see if the Benjamin Moore store was open. It was not. So we went to Walmart and picked up some paint samples and bought some velcro so that we can finally attach our EZPass to the windscreen of the BMW. I can’t believe how long we have failed to do that.

Then it was back to dad’s house where I spent the entire afternoon working on getting that server to work sans Xen. We ended up getting pizza from Davis’ for dinner. I really miss their pizza when I am away for a while. It is so delicious and a completely different flavour and style than you can get down here in the New York Metro.

I worked for a few more hours after we ate. It was pretty late when we finally left. Maybe almost seven in the evening although I am not really sure of the exact time.

We stopped in Kanona, New York for energy drinks and snacks for the ride in the car. Other than that we zipped right along towards Newark. There was no real traffic. It was surprisingly light for a holiday weekend.

It was around one thirty in the morning when we pulled into Newark. We unloaded the car and I walked Oreo. Dominica went to bed at two in the morning and was really exhausted. I could not quite sleep yet, having driven for the past six hours and having drunk an energy drink, so I stayed up till after two thirty and finished reading Garr Reynolds’ “Presentation Zen.”

August 31, 2008: Labor Day Picnic

82 Days to Baby Day! (28 Weeks and 2 Days Pregnant)

Dominica, Oreo and I slept in a bit this morning. Driving all day really wears you out.

We headed up to the Omega Grill for a late breakfast. Having breakfast at the Omega is like the official declaration of being “home” for the weekend.

We talked to dad about the idea of him coming down to stay in Peekskill for a little while to help with the move and preparations for the baby. The plan is that he will come down shortly after the closing on the house and have the place, more or less, to himself for the first two weeks while we are still living out of Newark so that Dominica can go to work. During that time he will oversee the installation of our Internet access, some minor house repairs including having a plumber come in, some painting, etc.

Then, once October 31st comes and we are no longer able to stay in Newark, Dominica and I will move up to Peekskill and dad will “hang out” so that we have someone around to help with the baby logistics. With me working in Manhattan it will take almost two hours for me to get home once Dominica realizes that she is going into labor. That is a long time with no one that we know in the entire county. So dad will be there to help get her to the hospital if it happens while I am at work and then to deal with Oreo while I am at the hospital with Dominica.

After breakfast we returned to dad’s house. I did some computer work and dad set up for the afternoon’s picnic. Dominica took a nap for a few hours with Oreo.

The family arrived around two thirty and we hung out in the side yard for a while until around four. Then we started our labor day weekend picnic. Dad grilled cedar plank salmon and we had amazing corn on the cob (boy have I missed good New York produce), potatoes, fruit and dip, etc.

After the party wound down, dad and Dominica hung out in the basement as she went through some of the stuff that we have packed at dad’s house. She managed to eliminate more than a bin of stuff that will now go to the church rummage sale. That was a pretty good reduction of the “bin stuff” that we had. My cousin Sara is taking the plastic ficas trees that I used to have in my basement office in Geneseo. We are also giving away the four “moon chairs” that we bought from Walmart while we were living in Geneseo. We have no space for them at the Peekskill house. It is a good size load from the garage that we managed to designate as “going away” rather than moving to Westchester with us.

I spent the evening working on getting Xen really working on the HP DL145 G3 that I bought just for that. I spent the entire afternoon and evening working on it not finding out that HP did not document that they had crippled the processors to block this very thing until around two in the morning! I can’t believe that they published a roadmap touting these features even after they had shipped this machine without mentioning that they had stripped those features out! The capability is right there in the box but they are blocking its use! 🙁 I am extremely unhappy.

August 30, 2008: Driving During the Day!

83 Days to Baby Day! (28 Weeks and 1 Day Pregnant)

Dominica and I got up at eight this morning in the hopes of getting right onto the road to get the day’s driving out of the way. It is never so easy. Just going from “getting out of bed” to “being on the road” takes about two hours.

We only have one bathroom so we have to get showered and ready sequentially. That slows us down considerably. Then we have the mandatory last minute power-down of all unneeded electronics in the house and the last minute watering of the plants. Then we have to pack the car which can not be done ahead of time at all because the car is kept in a public garage and often just left on the street. So it has to always be empty.

It was a little after ten when we finally got onto the road. The trip went pretty well. We stopped at Cracker Barrel for a late breakfast just before noon. That was really good.

We arrived at dad’s around five in the evening. It is quite a long drive and it takes the whole day pretty much no matter what you do.

We unloaded the car and dropped off Oreo. Then we pretty much turned right around, got back in the car and drove up to Henrietta to meet Andy and Miranda at The King and I for dinner. Dominica hasn’t seen either of them since Bob and Lisa’s wedding in 2006. I saw Andy one time last year – we met at Tim Horton’s for coffee. It is amazing how isolated we are out here in New Jersey.

After dinner we went to Tim Horton’s on Jefferson Road and had some real coffee for a change. It was around midnight when we returned to dad’s house and got to bed.

August 29, 2008: Running Late Today

84 Days to Baby Day! (28 Weeks Pregnant)

It was really late when I finally managed to go to bed last night. About two in the morning. I was very, very tired when trying to get up today and ended up sleeping in a bit late. I didn’t want to log in to the office from home or else I knew that I would be stuck for hours working from home. So I just got ready quickly and raced onto Wall Street.

I only worked for an hour or two before three of us headed out for lunch at Financier on Stone. Their Friday specials, smoked salmon sandwich and crab quiche, are just awesome. We discussed new media, AppleTV, NetFlix, Amazon UnBox, etc.

My afternoon got to be pretty busy. Katie and I had wanted to do gelato and afternoon coffee but I ended up on a conference call that blotted out my entire afternoon and that was not to be. Even though it was busy I was still able to leave at a very reasonable time. It is the end of the month and lots of work gets put on hold because of that so we wrapped up on the early side tonight.

I got home at a reasonable hour, but Dominica and I decided that we needed to rest and relax tonight and do our driving in the morning rather than getting all worn out trying to drive tonight. This has been a really exhausting week.

I spent the available time this evening doing my first ever installation of Xen on Red Hat Enterprise Linux / CentOS. That went really well and I learned a lot. Then it was off to bed. Leaving for “back home” first thing in the morning.