May 24, 2008: Day Off at Dad’s

We all slept in a bit this morning as it was such a late night last night.  Oreo, in constant search of a nice sunspot in which to bathe, was the first one up.  Once everyone was up we headed over to Geneseo to eat at the Omega Grill.

The afternoon was spent just relaxing at dad’s house.  Hard to believe that we haven’t been on the farm in about six months.  This is one of the longest stretches that I have ever gone without being home at all.

One thing that is very strange is that New York’s Route 63 (aka Big Tree Road) is being moved and this trip is the last time that the highway and Peoria Road that I grew up on will be in the same place that they were all throughout my childhood.  The infamous dangerous curve on the highway and the horrible blind intersection that the state refused to fix – even with logical signage, the look of “Peoria” which used to sit on an intersection but will now sit beside one.  This is a major change to the look and feel of the place where I grew up.  Peoria Road is being closed the day after Dominica and I leave to return to New Jersey.  I won’t ever seen it again.

For dinner we went over to Perry to the Lumberyard Restaurant.  They have the best soup and salad there.  And the most amazing croûtons ever.  A funny thing to get excited about, perhaps, but you haven’t had them!

After dinner we went to Pavilion to Davis’ Farm Market and got soft-serve ice cream for all of us and Oreo.  I’m lucky if I can get Davis’ soft-serve once a year so I like to take advantage of the opportunity when it arises.

After dinner we came home and played with Oreo in the back yard for a while.  He just loves running after a Frisbee in the wide open lawn.  He got a ton of exercise today.  It was very good for him although all of the time spent in the grass is already starting to be a problem with his allergies.  He is just so sensitive to grass.  It is very sad.

We watched Rush Hour 3 with Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker which we rented from Netflix.  It really wasn’t very good, though.  It was incredibly weak compared to the other two Rush Hour films and did not maintain character integrity.  The storyline was crappy too.  The only really good bit was George, the French cab driver.  We were rather disappointed.  The first two movies were so good.

May 23, 2008: Warren and Driving Home

Dominica and I had to be up early this morning so that we could pack up the Mazda PR5 for our trip back “home” this evening. That made for a short night and a busy morning. I had to be up just after five so that I could shower and be all ready to go before Dominica got up.

It was an extra short night with a pretty big interruption to walk Oreo in the middle of me trying to sleep.  The one thing that worked out well is that because I was up in the middle of the night with Oreo I was able to get the luggage cart so that it was in the hallway and very easy to load up first thing this morning.

We packed the car as best as we could. We have a decent load of stuff going up to dad’s place this time. This is our first trip back there since Christmas if you can believe that! We packed up all of the CDs and DVDs in the apartment, two humidifiers, the space heater and more. It made a huge dent in our clutter here (and will be barely noticeable in dad’s already packaged garage.)

It’s a pain having to pack the car in a panic in the morning though. It’s times like this that I really wish that I had a garage.  What a difference that would make.

Dominica dropped me off at the Broad Street Train station on her way to take Oreo to daycare. There I caught the train to Summit and the shuttle to Warren like I normally do when working out in New Jersey.

Today is an early market close day so a lot of my usually late night Friday work was able to be done in the middle of the afternoon which was really nice. I was in good shape when Dominica arrived to pick me up a little after six. She had used the GPS to get her from Totowa to Wallington to Warren which worked really well as it routed her around some stuff and took her a different route than she would have taken normally and it saved a bit of time.

It was around six thirty when we left Warren. Traffic wasn’t bad in New Jersey and we only hit a small delay right at the Delaware Water Gap when people were going through the toll booths there.

Normally we avoid the i81 corridor through eastern Pennsylvania as PennDOT has completely destroyed the entire corridor with poor labeling and extended single lane zones around the Scranton Metro which cause massive delays but today it couldn’t be helped. We are delivering two computers up to Apalachin, New York and the i81 corridor is the only easy way from New Jersey to the Binghamton area.

We let the GPS guide us on a faster route through New Jersey. It took us off of i78 and up NJ206 to i80. Not a route that we have taken in a very long time. We stopped along the way to eat at Panera Bread and to pick up some bagels for the morning.

The trip through Scranton ended up adding two to three additional hours to the trip in a construction zone that has been a problem for almost nine months now. It is completely ridiculous. It would have been better to drive back to Newark from Warren then go up to the Hudson Valley and catch NY17 west to Binghamton. Tons of extra miles but it would have saved an hour or more. We will be completely and utterly avoiding eastern Pennsylvania from now on. You just can’t trust PennDOT to do reasonable traffic patterns or warnings. They also don’t provide traffic updates over FM radio for the GPS units so everyone gets stuck in the same traffic jams that could easily have been avoided.

Instead of arriving at a little after nine at John Stephen’s apartment like we had planned it was well after midnight! We were pretty tired and unhappy by the time that we made it through all of that construction traffic. Our long night was turning into a really, really long night.

We only stayed at John’s for a tiny bit. Just enough time to unload the car, load up a computer that he had for me and get a quick tour of his new place. He has only been there for a month or two. We got to meet John’s girlfriend. They are hoping to come down to New Jersey to visit us around mid-July. This is the last summer for folks looking to hang out with us while we live so close to Manhattan.

The rest of the trip from John’s place to dad’s went pretty smoothly and quickly. It was awfully late by the time that we pulled into dad’s driveway. We were quite tired. But at least we were able to deliver the computers tonight and they are not hanging over our heads until Monday evening. That would not be fun. We are going to want to be able to drive right back to Newark on Monday afternoon.

May 22, 2008: Discovering the Financier Patisserie

I slept for approximately twelve hours last night.  Boy did I ever need that!  It wasn’t a straight twelve hours but it was a block of twelve hours of mostly sleep.  I got up several times during the night and a few times I was awake for a fairely long period of time.  At one point I even went out to the living room office and made sure that the computers were still busy doing Handbrake jobs.  But mostly I slept.

It was seven in the morning when I finally pulled myself out of bed.  I took my time getting ready for work taking a nice long shower to get myself back into “awake mode”.  I felt pretty good this morning.  Haven’t felt this good in two weeks.  That’s for sure.

I logged in from home to the office just long enough to get caught up and to make sure that no one needed anything from me that had queued up since I had gone to bed so early last night.  There wasn’t much to do, though, so I was able to head right on into the city.

It was raining as I went in which didn’t make me happy.  I am getting tired of being wet at the office.

Today was a rather slow day which was nice considering that everything else in my life is slowing down today.  At two in the afternoon a few of the guys from the office took a walk down to Stone to check out the Financier Pattiserie that Susan had told me about last week.  Even that late in the afternoon the place was just packed with people.  We got coffee (cafe Americano) and headed back to the office.  I got a “to-go” box full of awesome looking pastry items to take home to Dominica.  So tonight we will see how their food is.  It all looked really amazing.

Since the day was pretty slow and because I had managed to do the big evening deployments around five I took off for home at five thirty.  Winni called to say that he and Ulf couldn’t make it down to hang out this evening.  That is probably best as Dominica and I really need to spend the evening getting ready for traveling tomorrow.

We had vegetarian BLTs and pastries for dinner and watched the final episode of the first volume of the first season of The Love Boat.  Dominica did laundry and packing to get ready for the morning.  We have to be up extra early tomorrow so that we can get the car packed and get onto the road for work.  I am working out of Warren tomorrow so Min will drop me off at the train station on her way to work and will them swing out to Warren to pick me up as we head towards dad’s house in the evening.  We might be making a pit stop in Binghamton to do some computer exchanges as we pass through.  We won’t know that until tomorrow.

We finally got to bed around midnight.  We were pretty tired.  Dominica really did a ton of work tonight.

Oreo made me take him for a walk just before going to bed and then got me up at three in the morning to walk him again.  Tomorrow is going to be a long day after so little sleep.  Hopefully I can do some catchup this weekend.

May 21, 2008: Last Day of Classes

Only three and a half hours of sleep.  It was after three when I got into bed last night and six thirty when I woke up this morning.  These past two weeks are just killing me.

I got up and was working not long after seven.  Oreo is staying home with me today.  I did some bill paying today, some cleaning, wrote the last paper that was due for my class at RIT and more.  It was an extremely busy day.  I submitted the very last work for my class at five forty-five in the evening.  I am so relieved that it is finally done and that I can now relax.  I really, really need to take a break and just slow down for a little bit.  Too many things piled up and hit me all at exactly the same time.

Dominica made vegetarian BLTs for dinner and we watched a little The Love Boat.  I was sleeping by seven, probably.  I was so tired that I just couldn’t function anymore.

I will be on Wall Street tomorrow.  Winni and Ulf are coming over to hang out tomorrow evening.

May 20, 2008: Rainbow Room

Last night was another night of just four hours of sleep.  It has been over two weeks since I had a real night’s sleep and I am really getting tired.  I have a function in the city this evening so I am working from home this morning and going in in the afternoon to the city.

Oreo went to daycare today for the first time in about ten days.  I am sure that he was pretty excited.  He has had quite a lot of energy recently since he doesn’t have any dogs to play with when he stays home.  He starts to get pretty rambunctious.  We don’t realize how much “puppy” he has in him still (he is about eight years old these days) until he hasn’t been getting worn out at daycare all week long.  He wants to play a lot and is always asking to go for long walks.

I started into the city in the middle of the afternoon.  I went to the Tribeca office rather than Wall Street today.  All day the weather wasn’t too bad.  All day, that is, until I walked out the door to head into the city.  The rain started just minutes before I headed out the door.  What bad timing.

I made a quick run for the Gateway Center which is located just a block from my apartment at Eleven80.  I managed to not get too wet in that short distance.  There is tree cover much of the way which helped too.

I arrived at World Trade Center and decided to just take the subway up to Tribeca even though the walk isn’t all that long because the rain was going to be a nuisance.  But I forgot that the subway station at the WTC has been moved and I didn’t know where its entrance was or even if that station was still open.  So I decided that hunting around for a station that I knew nothing about was a bad idea and just walked towards Tribeca going up Greenwich as quickly as I could.

Unfortunately the rain started to get pretty heavy as I was walking and I was caught in a long stretch with a subway or any type of cover.  So by the time that I arrived at the trading floors in northern Tribeca I was completely and utterly drenched.

I spent about two hours on the Tribeca trading floors before heading out onto the road again.  This time I knew where the subway stop was and there was no way for me to walk all of the way to Rockefeller Center.  Still there was a bit of rain and I wasn’t exactly dry by the time that I got to the Rock.

For those who do not know, 30 Rockefeller Center, also known as the GE Building, is one of the most famous buildings in New York – partially because of the famous photograph taken during its construction.  It is a seventy story behemoth structure just north of the Empire State Building.  The observation deck at 30 Rock is known as the “Top of the Rock” and is the second most famous views of the city behind only the legendary Empire State Building itself.  Both, though, are much lower than the former World Trade Center’s commanding views.  The new WTC building rising out of lower Manhattan will have some truly amazing views, though, I am sure, when it is finally completed.  (The work on the new building is really coming along.  I can see significant progress in the last few months since I started working in lower Manhattan and traveling through the WTC every day.)

On the sixty-fifth floor of 30 Rock, and commanding views only nominally less impressive than the observation deck itself, is the landmark Rainbow Room.  The Rainbow Room has been one of the most important restaurant venues in Manhattan since 1934 and is world famous.  I have seen the views of New York City from the WTC Towers (in 1997) and from the Empire State Building (in 1994) but this was my first time going above the NBC Studios in the GE Building.  So I have now seen the three most famous Manhattan views which is pretty cool.

I was very excited about the event at the Rainbow Room tonight.  It isn’t every day that technologist get invited to events of this order.  It happens, of course, but being from Upstate New York we don’t even have venues like this so my experience with it is rather limited.

The view from the Rainbow Room was really amazing.  They had an open bar for us when we first arrived and a nice area which basically functioned as a bar/observation deck to use for socializing and meeting up with people.

From there we went into a nice conference room where some really top people including executives from Hewlett-Packard and Intel spoke as well as Diane Greene, CEO of VMWare and eWeeks’ #20 Most Influential Person in IT for 2008.

After the conference portion we headed out into another large space where an amazing, grazing dinner was provided for us as well as several more open bars.  The food was completely outstanding.  Cipriani, famous Venetian restauranteurs who also operate down on Wall Street, “catered” the event (they run the Rainbow Room restaurant as well) and it is clear why they were chosen for this task.  All of the food, as well as the service, was excellent.  The smoked salmon was especially good.

During dinner we were provided an amazing show by the extremely famous performance artist / painter Jean Francois who was flown in just for us.  Jean Francois has been very well known for his live painting work which is truly amazing.  He did two murals for us while we were there (one of John Lennon and one of The Beatles) and it was really something to watch.  Everyone was really amazed.  I got to shake his hand and talk to him for a minute afterward as well.

After the show it was food and drinks for the rest of the evening, until a bit after ten, with IT people mingling throughout the night.  I met some really cool guys from a financial firm in midtown and we hung out most of the night.

After the party was over, one of the guys and I hit the actual Rainbow Room bar for one last drink before heading out into the cold night.  Overall the party with HP, Intel and VMWare was amazingly impressive and a lot of fun.  Originally several people from my office were going to go but with the bad weather and the venue being in NYC and not in New Jersey everyone who was going to go decided against it leaving me there alone.  But it worked out pretty well and I had fun anyway.

It was just a few minutes after midnight when I stepped out of 30 Rock onto the courtyard of Rockefeller Center.  The subway stop that I had used to come uptown was now closed leaving me to fend for myself to find my way back home.  I wasn’t about to pay for a cab ride so I started walking south hoping to run into a subway station.

I had to walk for several blocks before I found anything.  I stopped at some all night pizza joint and grabbed a very tasty slice on NY style pizza.  I finally found a train around one or maybe a little later.  I didn’t know the train schedules or availability up at Penn Station in midtown so I took the subway all the way back down to the World Trade Center even though it was probably going to take longer to get home just to avoid extra travel risk.  The stop that I needed was, as we already learned, closed so I had to get off a bit north of the WTC and walk a bit farther.

At this time of night the trains run pretty infrequently so I got stuck sitting at the WTC Train Station for quite some time before the PATH train arrived to take us back to Newark.  The train ride itself was extra long too as we had to wait at a few stations for other trains to meet us.

It was well after two thirty in the morning when I finally made it back to Eleven80.  Dominica had woken up and wondered where I was and called my cell phone while I was still in the lobby.  It was about three when I finally got into bed.  No catching up on sleep tonight.  A little more homework to do tomorrow but then my schedule relaxes a bit.

I am working from home tomorrow and going onto Wall Street on Thursday which is the first Thursday in the office in as long as I can remember.  On Friday I am heading out to Warren by train (NJ Transit) and Dominica is picking me up from there so that we can drive directly up to dad’s place to spend the long weekend up there.