Sheep Guarding Llama – Page 832 – Scott Alan Miller

July 18, 2008: Wow, is it ever hot!

This entire week has been really, really hot and today it is much hotter than it has been. Dominica and I were hoping to have started our mortgage process today to get things lined up as quickly as possible so that we could make an offer on the townhouse in which we are most interested, but our loan origination person is out of the office today and we can’t do anything until Monday.

Oreo went to daycare today. It is a good thing. Who knows how crazy he would be if he didn’t get to go in and burn off some of his extra energy. He has been couped up far too much this week. He needs some time playing with his doggy friends.

My walk into the Wall Street office today was really awful. Walking through Newark wasn’t bad at all. Hot, but it was fine. I did decide to play it safe and to walk through the Gateway Center, though, which is air conditioned so most of my walk was “inside”. Normally I just walk outside along Raymond Boulevard.

Once I was into Manhattan the real heat hit. In Manhattan everything is warmer because of all the people, buildings, vehicles, etc. plus there is seldom any air flow. The difference in effective temperatures from Newark to Manhattan is staggering. I was quite uncomfortable by the time I got down to the end of Wall Street. I did grab an ice cream cone from Mr. Softee to cool me off a little.

If you are a Starbucks Coffee Fanatic (for the record, I am definitely not) then you have probably been waiting on pins and needles to know if your Starbucks is one of the six hundred that are being closed this summer as Starbucks shuts down five percent of its operations. Well, I found the list and now you know: The Starbucks Doomed 600. If you are from my hometown, and too lazy to look through the list yourself, Geneseo Starbucks is on the doomed list as are many in Upstate New York – where people have never even begun associated good coffee with the Starbucks brand like they do downstate. The Starbucks in Geneseo opened right as Dominica and I moved there in 2003 and we said to ourselves that that was a crazy location that couldn’t possibly make money. I went in there once and there was no one there. Just a few weeks ago we said “It can’t possibly still be open, can it? The place is always empty.” We were right. Now it is closing. So now Geneseo will have yet another vacant building. Although the old “Del Taco” building, now Starbucks, has been an empty building for such a large percentage of its life span that it just seems natural to have that spot be an empty – strangely architected building.

Starbucks in Geneseo was really hurt by the fact that it is on the “wrong” side of the road. It is in a spot that has so long been ignored that you don’t even realize that there is a business there now that there is one. Then, just after they went in, Tim Horton’s (with better coffee and more food options) came in in a far more visible location, had a brand new building and was open twenty-four by seven. So Starbucks just completely lost any mindshare that it might have had. In Upstate NY, people just don’t “think” about Starbucks. It doesn’t occur to most people that it is even a coffee option. Heck, I lived within an easy walk of it for several years and I bet I never went there even once. Now that I live in Newark I am literally next door to a Starbucks and have only been there two or three times at most. Being an upstater, it just isn’t something that you do. Back in Rochester, Eric and I used to make coffee runs to Bruegers, right next door to the Starbucks, and never once even though about going to Starbucks instead.

Now that I have mentioned it… I am seriously missing living right next to the all night Tim Hortons. Argh.

For those who don’t speak fluent Spanish, “Del Taco” is Spanish for “of the taco”. Clearly it was intended to be “Mexican food for middle-America where multiculturalism is a foreign concept.” Ha ha.

While doing a search for something unrelated, I came across a great image of Fall Brook Waterfall in Geneseo on Flickr. I’ve been to the waterfall a time or two but it has been a really long time. Never saw it when the foliage was so lush.

By four thirty the humidity had dropped enough that even though it was even warmer than this morning it was actually quite nice outside. At least it was pretty nice just sitting outside. Hard walking, like I have to do to get to the World Trade Center to catch the train, is still way too hot.

My day was not overly busy but this lulled me into a false sense of “going home security.” I thought that I was going to be done really close to five. All of my work was scheduled to complete right at five. I was fooled. The call for the release at four forty-five ended up lasting until almost six thirty! Argh.

Dominica is feeling very under the weather. She has a headcold or something similar that is affecting her sinuses. It might just be allergies. So her plan is to get home and to get to bed right away in the hopes of getting enough sleep to start getting better. So I am tasked with getting dinner on my way home which will be from Metro Cafe if I make it in time and from McDonalds if I don’t.

I am exhausted and don’t have the energy to write more tonight and don’t want to leave y’all (to practice my Texan) without an update so I am posting before leaving the office. I will probably just watch some Third Rock from the Sun with Dominica and Oreo and get to bed early. I have some unscheduled work to do tomorrow morning whenever I wake up and then, in the early afternoon, we are driving to Frankfort for Garrett’s batism on Sunday.

July 17, 2008: End of House Hunting?

I had to be up before six thirty this morning as I am covering the early morning shift and boy am I ever tired. I am glad to be home today especially because it is extremely hot here in the New York Metro area today and walking into the office would be awful. I am not looking forward to tomorrow when it is supposed to approach one hundred degrees in Newark. Ugh.

Oreo really didn’t need to be home today. He had tons of energy all day and really wanted to play. He was so adamant about getting my attention that he actually barked at me several times! He has only done this two or three times in the three years that he has lived with us. So he was really worked up today. He is so cute when he gets so excited that he barks at you to make you play with him. He actually took a run at me, jump up and bounced off of me while I was in my office chair and barked in my face and then stood over his binky ready to play!

Dominica had a doctor’s appointment today, but not an ultrasound, to check up on the baby. Everything is good. She has another appointment in four weeks.

After her doctor’s appointment, Dominica came home and picked me up and I took her to work and then came home so that I would have the car in the afternoon. We have to drive up to Peekskill this evening and I have to have the car as Dominica’s work is on the way and it would take an hour or more longer for her to pick me up and then go all of the way back past Totowa.

I left Oreo at home as it is so hot outside and I drove up to pick up Dominica at four thirty. From Totowa, New Jersey we drove on up the Palisades Parkway and over the Bear Mountain Bridge on the Hudson River to Peekskill, New York. Today we are looking at one townhome that we had looked at previously and liked as well as four additional townhomes in a different development that we had not looked at before today.

It was way too warm for looking at houses. Half of the houses had no air conditioning and being in then when they have been shut up and are all musty and hot and humid with no air movement at all is a bit much. It was quite uncomfortable.

We really liked the new complex that we looked at. It was gorgeous. We did not like the homes themselves as much. The prices were all over the place. There is one home in that complex that we would consider, but we are pretty sure that we are actually most interested in the one that we looked at for the second time today. Our plan is to make an offer on that house as soon as possible. If that doesn’t work out as we hope then we have a perfectly viable option in the other complex. We are definitely glad that we took the time to look in the other complex as we got a better price comparison and more of an idea of what is available in the area and how long things are typically sitting on the market. There are several townhomes that have been on for over a year!

On the way home we stopped off on the Garden State Parkway and ate at Burger King. That is really handy and we seem to always do that on the way from Peekskill back to Newark.

After we got home, Dominica went straight to bed and I did a little work and then was in bed around eleven thirty. I would have been asleep long before but Oreo decided that he wanted a late night walk before turning in for the night.

July 16, 2008: Getting More Tired

Something happened and I got stuck writing yesterday’s post twice. I must somehow have never saved it or something, which is strange as the system saves automatically. Or maybe I did something weird causing the post to get overwritten. Either way, I thought that I had Tuesday’s updates already posted and discovered that they were missing and wrote them again.

In the rewriting I forgot to mention that Socks, the little baby Boston Terrier who lives down the hall from us, came by after his vet appointment this evening to meet us. He is so adorable. Just three months old. A tiny little Oreo. He and Oreo played for a little while. Oreo loves puppies and is so gentle with them. It is incredibly cute watching Oreo play with the little, tiny Boston puppy. It is so sad that we never knew Oreo at that age. He must have been the most wonderful puppy ever.

I had to be up early this morning so that I could catch the train out to Warren. I was completely exhausted. We tried to go to bed early last night but I wasn’t able to fall asleep as early as I had hoped. So I am short on sleep again.

Today was another busy day for me. I was hopping all day from one thing to another. That was good because it kept me awake. Otherwise I would have been fighting not to fall asleep at the office.

I took the five o’clock shuttle for home and made it to Summit Train Station just in time to step right on to the Hoboken Express with no stops from Summit to Newark Broad Street Station. I was home in no time – well okay, about an hour. But much faster than usual. And I made it just in time for Dominica to pick me up on the side of the road about halfway to the apartment so I didn’t have to walk as far as usual.

Dominica went to bed early and I stayed up late talking to Andy on the phone. We started talking around nine thirty and ended up on the phone until after two in the morning! I am going to be even more exhausted in the morning. Tomorrow I am working the early morning shift so my day starts very early and then in the evening Dominica and I are going up to Peekskill to look at four more houses and one that we have seen before.

July 15, 2008: Recovery Day

Dominica and I were seriously hurting this morning when we woke up. Camping this weekend really put the hurt on us – we are too old for this sort of thing. Min got up and immediately knew that she could not go in to work this morning. So she called in and took a half day off sick. Then she and Oreo slept in until around noon.

I had to get right up and get to work. No sleeping in for me. Boy was I sore this morning.

Because Min didn’t go in to work until late today Oreo was able to spend the day at home sleeping. He liked that.

This week is really hot here in New Jersey. It is not going to be pleasant.

I had a pretty busy day. I spent the whole morning just catching up on the literally four thousand emails that had come in from the time that I left the office on Friday evening until this morning. This amount of email really makes the whole email system completely useless. People really need to learn when email is appropriate and when other forms of communication are appropriate, and a good percentage of the time the right choice would be neither and to just keep it to themselves. The bulk of the email has nothing to do with me which makes it extra frustrating.

This evening was a purely relaxing one. We just watched Third Rock from the Sun and ordered in Chinese for dinner. Then it was off to an early bed time. Dominica had actually fallen asleep immediatley after getting home and we didn’t have dinner until eight when she woke up again.

July 14, 2008: Returning from Watkins Glen

Thankfully it did not rain last night or if it did it was extremely little. We actually got pretty decent sleep once we were all able to fall asleep. We didn’t get up until after eight.

We were delighted to discover that the sun was out and that the dew was rapidly burning off of the grass. This was a Godsend as we desperately needed to lay out just about everything that we had brought with us in order to dry it out before we could pack it to go back with us. If we didn’t get everything dry this morning then we had to unpack everything at Dominica’s parents’ house, set the tent and everything back up, let it dry and then have her family pack it back up when it was all done. That would have taken hours out of our afternoon which we did not have any of which to spare.

There wasn’t really any time to spare this morning and we spent every moment that we had available to us drying and packing the camping gear. We let Madeline and Emily sleep as long as they could but for Emily that wasn’t long at all and for Madeline it was only until around nine. The girls really had nothing to do this morning and we very, very bored. We felt really bad but there was nothing that we could do to entertain them as we had to spend all of our time getting the camp packed. They did spend a little time taking turns playing Cooking Mama on Dominica’s Nintendo DS, but that only killed so much time.

Somehow the car-top carrier actually got dry and we were able to pack everything into the car. It was amazing that Dominica was able to figure out how to get everything back into the car. I could never have packed the car like that. Not having Oreo with us did make things quite a bit easier as we were able to use the space in the back seat that he had been using on the way down.

It was a quarter till one when we were finally able to check out and pull out of the campground. Almost five hours of packing! But we can’t complain as everything was dry (except for the towels) and everything was put away and packed into the car. What a relief it was to have that all done.

After checking out we played a round of miniature golf for the girls as they had been so patient all morning with nothing to do. Dominica was only able to play a couple of holes, though, as she started getting light headed from bending over so much trying to play so she had to stop. Being pregnant is tough.

After the girls finished their game we drove on down to the town of Watkins Glen and stopped a the Burger King there to get a quick lunch. We got to try out their new apple fries which are apples cut into the shape of french fries that come with a caramel sauce for dipping. It is a great idea. Far healthier than French fries and quite tasty. I never liked Burger King’s French fries anyway so this is a great alternative for me that makes me far more likely to want to eat at Burger King.

After lunch we crossed the parking lot and we all got ice cream (or gellato for Dominica) from the ice cream shop that was located right there. Then it was time to really get on the road. So around two in the afternoon we finally set off for Frankfort.

This time the drive went well and we made good time through Ithaca, Cortland and Syracuse and up to Utica and Frankfort. We arrived in Frankfort just in time for dinner so we hung around for just a little while and had the picnic at the Tocco’s that had originally been planned for yesterday before the rain made that pretty much impossible.

While we were there with the BMW 330Ci parked in the police station / municipal parking lot directly next to Dominica’s parents’ house another completely identical BMW pulled in and parked nose to nose with Dominica’s car. We have never seen another BMW in Frankfort let alone a completely identical model with the same year, color, model and options and then to have them parked nose to nose on a Monday evening! I ran out and took some pictures just to prove that it happened and ended up being outside at just the right time to see the other owner and to get to talk to him for a little bit about the car. He does not live in Frankfort, as you can imagine.

We got the Chrysler 300M unpacked and packed up the BMW and were back on the road between six and seven in the evening. The drive back down to Newark went well and we arrived at the apartment at Eleven80 before midnight. We were completely exhausted by the time that we got home but still had to unload the car and walk Oreo. Then Dominica went straight to bed but I was so wired from driving and walking the dog that I didn’t fall asleep until two in the morning.