August 15, 2008: Spending Friday at the Patisserie

98 Days to Baby Day! (26 Weeks Pregnant)

I discovered some of my Newark pictures being used by Realtor.com today.  Also found some of my pictures over at WorldFlicks.  SongKick used my photo from a recent concert at the Knitting Factory for promotion on their website.  Squidoo, the Internet Who’s Who directory, used some of the pictures from my teenage trip to Prince Edward Island for their page on famed Canadian author L. M. Montgomery.  An Israeli site called Nana10 is using a pick as well but I can’t figure out for what.  A picture of Oreo shows up in a discussion on dog harnesses.  Finanza and Borse uses one too.

I was pretty tired when I got out of bed a little after six thirty this morning.  I am covering the morning shift for someone this morning who is have transportation issues.

It is not nearly as hot in the New York Metro today as it has been recently.  Today is actually a pretty nice day.  Rain was expected but only a drop or two threatened this morning and nothing came down until late in the afternoon.

My iPod died on my on my way into the office so I didn’t get a chance to listen to my book for very long.  I did think to bring a charging cable so that I could charge it back up at the office.

For lunch, Ronak and I walked down to Stone, just south of Hanover Square, and had the Friday specials at the Financier Patisserie.  The crab quiche and the salmon sandwiches are amazing.

Overall it was the expected end of a very slow week.  There was a bit more work today than the other days but not that much.  Definitely slow for a Friday.

At three thirty, Katie and I met back down at Financier for afternoon tea.  We had coffee and gelatto.

Evening was normal.  Worked until about seven in the office.  Then Ronak and I went to the Full Shilling for drinks and fried mac-n-cheese on the way home.

I got home around nine.  We ordered in dinner from Nino’s and watched the first half of Harry and the Hendersons which we just got this week on DVD from Amazon.  I haven’t seen that movie since probably around 1992 at the most recent.

We didnt’ finish the movie and went to bed as soon as we were tired.  My alarm is set for five fifty-five tomorrow morning and I have a long day of work ahead of me so I need some sleep.  This is going to be a very exhausting weekend.

August 14, 2008: House Paperwork

99 Days to Baby Day! (25 Weeks, 6 Days.)

Oreo was very insistent this morning that we sleep in.  He was extremely snuggly and just wouldn’t let me get out of bed until eight.

Work was pretty slow again.  This week has been great for that.

A shipment arrived from Amazon today – the second half of the first season of The Love Boat on DVD, Harry and the Hendersons also on DVD, “Presentation Zen” and “Getting It Right: Business Requirements Analysis Tools and Techniques.”  Also arriving today is the new HP DL145 G3 server.

The big panic today was getting the paperwork ready with which the attorneys need to deal tomorrow.  That took a bit of work as we needed to get the paperwork overnighted and all of the shipping companies have abandoned downtown Newark leaving us with no easy way to send a package which was exacerbated by the fact that we don’t really have a working printer here.  Our lives are practically paperless at this point but sometimes that leaves us in a lurch when you have a company like UPS or FedEx that runs based on paper and we have no way to communicate with them because they simply require a printer for anyone not using one of their stores – which have all left the area.

So Dominica had to run to a UPS location to pick up a shipping envelope then had to do all of the prep work to get the envelope ready including printing out the label from work since I did not have a reliable method to print the shipping label myself.  I had all of the paperwork so she had to rush home with the stuff that she had, we put the paperwork in then I ran out to put it into the drop box.

The UPS drop box at 1160 Raymond Blvd. which is listed as having last pickup at eight o’clock online as well as on the big sticker on the drop box had already been picked up at six o’clock!  Thanks UPS.  Nice customer service.  So then I ran to 744 Broad and there the seven o’clock last pickup box had not quite been picked up yet so we mailed the envelope.

Dominica brought home are regular Thursday evening treat of fish tacos from On the Border.  Having discovered that she can get to On the Border quite easily on her way home when Oreo is home with me has added quite a bit to our food diversity which has gotten pretty important to us here in Newark.  Recently we have been eating later and later in the evenings which has only served to limit our food selections more and more.

We watched a bit of the fifth season of Frasier.  Then around ten o’clock, Dominica went to bed and I took Oreo for his evening walk and listened to some of “The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific” by Maarten Troost.  Then it was time for Oreo to go to bed and for me to head out to the living room office to work until half past midnight on some exam deliverables for the certification exam on which I am working these days.

Tomorrow I will be home in the morning as I am covering the early morning shift until around nine.  Then I will be going into Wall Street.  The weather is supposed to be nice tomorrow.  I am looking forward to it not being so incredibly hot on my walk in to the office.  I enjoy the walk but I get so warm trudging through lower Manhattan with the heat and humidity of the city radiating off of every surface and the sun blazing down but with almost no wind.

August 13, 2008: Getting Back to Normal

I didn’t get much of a chance to get sleep last night.  Went to bed after midnight and had to be up at five thirty this morning.  I was feeling pretty groggy as I pulled myself out of bed.

I am out in Warren, NJ today as usual for a Wednesday.  I was too tired to read a book and just spent the morning’s commute listening to “Shadow of the Silk Road” from Audible on my iPod.  I managed to finish reading that today.

I got out to Warren nice and early and had an incredibly slow day again.  This week must just be really slow.  Just nothing has been happening at work.  (Other than the obvious.)

For lunch, the gang headed out to Bombay for some Indian.  We can’t get Indian cuisine in Newark and any chance to get it is very much appreciated.

My afternoon was pretty slow and someone covered some of my five o’clock deployments so that I was able to run for the shuttle to catch the early ride home.  I caught the shuttle but when I reached the train station the train was getting ready to leave and I reached the door just as it closed.  So I had to wait for the next train and lost a good twenty minutes.

I got to Newark Broad Street Station and started walking towards home.  Dominica’s phone died and she decided to wait on the street to pick me up as I walked by her.  I had no idea that she was waiting for me because she had not told me that she was going to try to do that so I walked through the Rutgers campus and she never saw me.  She called to see where I was and I was already at Eleven80 in the elevator.  She had waited over half an hour for me just sitting in the car and we had missed each other.  That was crappy.

I was not hungry tonight so I just decided to skip dinner.  I ran down to the deli to grab dinner for Dominica at a quarter till nine and got her French toast and scrambled eggs.  She ate dinner and we watched some Frasier.  She has seen nearly twice as much of the shows as I have.  We are now on the fifth season.

Tomorrow I will be home.  In the morning I have to deal with the paperwork for the lawyers in regards to the new house in Peekskill.  We are getting closer.  We are so ready to be out of Newark.  We can’t wait until it is time to move.  The move itself will be awful but that can’t be helped.

August 12, 2008: I Can Has Job!

I had to get up this morning and drive Dominica to work so that I would have the car today.  I need the car because this evening Dominica and I are going suit shopping because we have Nadine and Clarence’s wedding this weekend and I don’t have a suit that fits these days.  I haven’t really needed one in quite some time – I wear my tuxedo regularly but not a suit.

Oreo is happy to be home, of course.  He would prefer if he only went to daycare three days a week at most and never two consecutive days, and he definitely would never voluntarily give up a sunny day at home laying in the living room.  I hope that the new house – assuming that we are still able to get it given all that is going on currently – has some good sunspots for Oreo.

The house is oriented on an angle with the front door facing northwest.  There are not many windows on the front of the house – just the kitchen and the master bedroom on the second floor.  So the second bedroom, the living room with the deck and the basement office area with the patio all face southeast.  In theory, this could mean some good morning sun for Oreo but unlikely any in the afternoon or evening.  The hill behind the house is heavily wooded, though, so that might limit Oreo’s sun expose.  He would be very sad.  I think that the deck gets quite a bit of sunlight.  He might use that extensively.  We might eventually add a second deck off of the second bedroom which would definitely get a lot of sun being so close to the roofline.  That would make Oreo very happy.

Dominica’s morning was incredibly busy at work today while mine was incredibly slow.  The fact that I did a ton of work last night playing catchup to make sure that nothing was left pending for me helped, to be sure.  In general just no requests or new work was coming in this morning.  One of the slowest mornings that I can remember, ever.

So last night I had a dream that there were two very large insects in the apartment running along the east wall above the windows and that I was in the living room watching them.  Then they got bigger and it turned out that one was a large bat and the other was a crow.  The bat tried to fly out the south window but was trapped and the crow flew at me and tried to attack my head with raptor like claws.  Crazy stuff.

I am doing a much better job these days of managing my email – both at the office and my personal email.  I have a tendancy to leave things in email as a sort of “to do” list and the email grows beyond the point where I can easily manage it and pretty soon there is no way to get anything done because of the email being everywhere.

My whole day ended up being relatively slow.  Almost no requests and no one looking for me.  It really felt like a bank holiday.

In the middle of the afternoon it actually happened… I got an email from my consulting firm asking me to call them.  They said that everything was completed, agreed upon and signed.  I have a contract again and am “back to work”.  I’ve been working all along but without knowing what the situation was going to be.  What a relief.

As soon as the stress passed the wave of exhaustion hit.  I haven’t been sleeping much the last few days and it wasn’t really hitting me because of the concern and stress but once those were gone it was a bit overwhelming.  I found myself mostly useless this afternoon.  Luckily there was really very little work to be done so I was actually staying completely on top of everything even being quite run down.

I left home at four thirty to go to Totowa to pick up Dominica.  We spent the evening shopping.  We bought me a new suit from Casual Male for the wedding (on Sunday, not Saturday like I have been saying.)  Then we had dinner at Cheeseburger in Paradise where I have never before been.  Then we bought me a new pair of sneakers as my current ones are beginning to fall apart.

We got home and Dominica watched some Voltron and I did a little wrap up work before we called it a night.  My grandmother called and chatted for half an hour or so.  My cousin is moving to Albequerque, New Mexico very soon, but that was about all of the breaking news from Ohio.

I am posting quickly tonight as I am very exhausted.  More news tomorrow.  We are tired but very happy!

August 11, 2008: We have an answer… probably

Despite all of the stress, I actually managed to sleep in a little this morning which was good.  I needed some extra sleep to be ready to handle today.  We have no idea what is going to happen.

One nice thing about the HP DL145 G3 that I purchased yesterday is that it is going to replace the IBM NetFinity that I have running at dad’s house.  That old IBM is one of the many machines that I purchased from IBM employee sales back when Andy and I worked at IBM in Endicott, New York.  That means that it is one of the machines that I have owned since before I met Dominica.

The IBM NetFinity is a dual Pentium III 667MHz / PC133 server with 1.5GB of memory and a 10,000 RPM SCSI hard drive.  It is definitely nothing special anymore but it was an amazing machine when I picked it up for $150 or so in early 2001.  At the time no one wanted it because it had the much eschewed PIII “Flip Chip” which I thought was great and short thereafter became the industry standard chip form.  So the machine ended up being a most amazing purchase for me.  It was easily a $1,000+ machine at the time that I purchased it.  And it was new as an “open box” item.  I added two high school SCSI drives to it and boosted its memory from 512MB to 1.5GB and had quite a little workhorse for many years.

That IBM has been with me through several locations and changes in purpose.  It spent some time as my email server, did some virtualization and eventually ended up as a Windows 2003 Active Directory machine which is its current role and has been for many years.  The machine is built in the form factor of a desktop workstation and not so much like a server.  I am interested to see how this unit manages to perform as a desktop at Castile Christian Academy.  A Pentium III 667 is generally around our low end cut-off for performance but with dual processors, tons of extra memory and a faster than usual hard drive this might be a very good machine.  Under certain loads it might just outperform the Pentium III 1GHz machines of which we have a fair number these days.

The DL145 also frees up the older DL380 G2 that I have had as the intended replacement for the IBM NetFinity.  The DL380 G2 takes up more space, uses more power and makes more noise than the DL145 while having less computational power and storage (but higher drive I/O.)  So the plan is to send the DL380 G2 down to Castile Christian Academy to be their new file server as its drive performance is amazing.  It is a fully populated unit with dual Pentium IIIs 1.4GHz processors, several gigabytes of memory and six screaming fast SCSI drives.  It will be perfect for them.  Then dad can scale back to just the DL145 G3 and the SunFire V100 that he already has at his house.  Quite a bit smaller than the machines that he has right now.

My day can be summed up in a single word: stress.  I waited all day for news about my job but got absolutely nothing.  It is twenty past four as I write this and we don’t have any direction at all right now.

We officially ended the day with no good news. We don’t have disastrous news but we certainly don’t have good news.  We have made no ground today whatsoever.  There was a lot of talk but no progress.  The only “positive” thing is that the pass-through vendor admitted to not giving any warning about the pay cut but they are acting like that is not their problem.  They are apparently claiming that they have a contract with my consulting firm that allows them to claim anything that they want and bill retroactively for it and change rates retroactively at their whim.

Dominica got home and we talked for a while.  Neither of us is really able to get very much done because we are so worried about our finances and whether or not we will be able to get the house still.  I did speak to the bank today and they are aware of the situation and are holding tight to see what happens.

Around six thirty we got some news that there is a good chance that things are going to be okay.  We don’t really know the details yet and the final word has not come through but it looks like the parties have come to a solution.  We won’t actually know anything tonight but hopefully in the morning.

I ended up working late into the evening.  Dominica sat at her desk knitting and watching Voltron from Netflix.  I ran down to the deli in the building to grab dinner just before they closed at nine o’clock.  I came up and we managed to watch one episode of Frasier together, while we ate dinner, before the phone started ringing.  It was Mary and we talked for half an hour or so until ten.

I went back to “work” around ten.  I have been behind at the office and I wanted to make sure that I was caught up before the morning.  Or at least kind-of caught up so I spent some time doing some paperwork. I answered some emails and got some paperwork together for dad.

Oreo came out to the living room and lay on the recliner on a pillow and a pile of blankets.  He always wants to be with me.

We have been able to have the windows open all day yesterday and all day today.  The fresh air is great.  I do get fresh air walking to work but it isn’t the same.  I am really appreciating having the apartment aired out a bit.  It actually gets far stuffier and mildewy here in summer than in winter because even during a pretty cold winter spell we still tend to open the windows rather a bit – at very least in our bedroom.

Yay, more people following me on Twitter.  I am becoming a Twitter celebrity.  Okay, not quite.  But I do have several people that I have never met following me.  I am finding it to be an interesting addition to my regular blogging.  I really like the fact that I can put on updates throughout the day to let people know the current status of things without them needing to wait until the next day when the SGL dailies post.