Sheep Guarding Llama

Oreo was very happy to be home with me today.  He had four straight days at daycare this week so he is very worn out.

Today was a a long work day.  I was busy from morning until night.  I was scheduled for a very long day today so it was unexpected.  I did a little bit of cleaning around the house where I could in between other things but I did not have very much spare time to work with.  Fridays are always busy but in addition to my normal Friday workload tonight we have a disaster recovery / continuity of business test that will go until ten o’clock.

The weather is gorgeous today.  Bright and really warm.  We have had the windows open for days now and are really enjoying all of the fresh air.  Even with the windows all open it is a little too warm in the apartment but not bad.  The plants are doing great.

Oreo almost had a really bad accident today.  He was sleeping on the Ottoman when we got an itch.  So he sat up and was itching and suddenly slipped and fell over backwards.  We have hardwood on concrete floors so for him to land on his back could be very, very bad.  It is enough of a fall for him to break his back on such an unforgiving surface and he has caused himself to limp from many much more minor falls in the past.  Fortunately I was ready and shot out and caught him in mid-air.  He wasn’t very happy but he was safe.  The world is a dangerous place when you are a little dog.

For lunch I hit Blimpie subs again on the corner.  It is fast, tasty and cheap.  I grabbed my sub and ran back to the apartment so that I could eat while working.  No time to relax today.  While I was Blimpie my bartender from the Key Club was there and I got in trouble for not having gone there in a while.  But, in my defense, I went there several times and several times bringing people with me and they have consistently been closed during peak hours and I really thought that they had closed.  Once I went for a few months thinking that they were closed they completely lost any mindshare that they used to have and now it barely even occurs to me as an option to go there even though I really like it.

Dominica got home with some groceries but didn’t really get to see me at all this evening because I was on a conference call until quite late. So it was a lonely night.

After working I finally got around to working on my homework.  This is a light homework week but it needs to be done regardless.  So I put an hour or so into that.  Only so much could be done tonight as it is a collaborative assignment and requires feedback.  So I did what I could and will try to do some more tomorrow night.

Tomorrow morning I start work at eight in the morning.  Then, at seven after eleven, dad is arriving at Newark-Liberty International to visit for the weekend.  So we are picking him up and probably going to the diner in Elizabeth for lunch.  He is staying until Monday evening.

It is another beautiful day here in the New York Metro area. The sun is shining and it is quite warm out. Today is a different work day which is fun to have for a change of pace. Helps to keep things interesting. Today several people are coming into the Manhattan office where I work from our New Jersey, Toronto and Long Island offices so I am giving tours of the Wall Street office and going up to Tribeca later on in the day as well.

Flat Stanley got a chance to visit Munich, Germany today. This is Flat Stan’s first time to a place that I have not been to yet.

Dominica and I are talking about take another weekend trip to Disney World late this spring. She and I both have some vacation time stored up, not a lot but a little, and we want to get away. So we are thinking about doing four days at the Wilderness Lodge which neither of us has stayed at before and we would really like to stay there. The Wilderness Lodge is near the Contemporary Resort in the Magic Kingdom area and is generally considered to be the most romantic resort in the Disney complex. We really liked the Animal Kingdom Lodge so we want to try out more of the real “resort” locations.

Try out this “moving jigsaw puzzle.” Not hard at all but what a cool idea.

I spent a lot of the morning giving a tour of the building that I work in. I am the only person from my team that has access to some of the floors. So we did that in the morning and then the team that came out all went to Pizzeria Uno at the Southside Seaport for lunch. It was my first time ever really going to the seaport. I have been to it before but have never sat down and had a meal there. It was very nice. What a great location in Manhattan. Maybe I will get a chance to take Flat Stanley up there for some pictures. I had him with me today but didn’t bring my camera as I knew that it was going to be a busy day and that I wouldn’t have an opportunity to take any pics.

In the afternoon we went up to the Tribeca office. This was actually the first time that I ever got to tour our datacenter there which is one of the primary datacenters that I support. Datacenters are, by definition, not very interesting. Just power systems, cooling and servers in cabinets. Mostly locked cabinets where you can barely make out what machine is where. So there really isn’t anything to look at. I have been to many datacenters over the years and none are very exciting. If you have seen one then you have seen them all. But it is handy to be able to visualize what people are looking at when you send them to the datacenter to do something for you.

For dinner Dominica and I finally tried out the new Blimpie subs on the corner of Commerce and Mulberry right next door to the apartment. There was a Blimpie there before but it was in horrible disrepair and no one would ever go in there. But a very nice woman bought it recently and has done a lot of work to clean the place up both inside and out. She had new awning put up which really helped to fix up that corner which looked like a war zone before. And she has a man dressed as a bear standing in front of the place now getting people to come in. Maybe the biggest change is that Blimpie is now open reasonable hours and not just for a little while during lunch only for the business crowd. Now Blimpie is catering to the neighbours as well. The food was actually very good. Andy and I was got Blimpie in Rochester and it was awful. So I was gun shy about trying another one. Boy am I glad that we did. Blimpie was very good and very cost effective. This will be another food choice for us in the evenings as well as for my lunches.

I am working from home tomorrow. It is going to be a really long day. Oreo is exhausted after four straight days of daycare. He is really looking forward to having a long weekend. He will definitely be ready for a trip to the park by Sunday.

Just a normal day in the office today. I found out today that a number of people are coming into the city tomorrow to visit the Manhattan offices so I am changing my schedule for the week so that I am in the office on Thursday and will be staying home on Friday. This works out well as I am scheduled to work until ten o’clock on Friday night and then to start again at eight in the morning on Saturday. So going into the office on Friday would have been a problem anyway.

Katie and I wanted to do lunch today so that we could take more Flat Stanley pictures. She got caught in meetings though and we didn’t get to go at one thirty like we had planned and ended up going to Burritovillie at a little after three. It was a short afternoon since we both got back to the office after four.

I came home to discover that a water line on the fourth floor of Eleven80 had burst just minutes before I got home and everyone was in quite the panic.  Water was already beginning to run through the ceiling into the lobby on the first floor.  You could hear the sounds of water rushing on the second floor above us and it sounded like a river up there.  I managed to catch a ride up to the apartment in the elevator before there was time to shut it off.

Dominica and I arranged dinner with Ryan over at Sculley’s Publick House and shortly we headed down to the lobby to meet.  We immediately discovered that we had no elevator so we tried the stairs.  At the fourth floor we went out onto the floor to investigate and even there there was still water running out of the ceiling and the whole middle of the floor was under water.  The water was rushing down the elevator shaft like a waterfall.

So we continued on down to the third floor and checked things out there.  The third floor had almost as much water on the floor as the fourth floor had had.  From there we weren’t able to head down the stairway any farther as the ceiling in the stairwell had started to collapse and water was pouring down into the stairways so heavily that we could not pass.  We had to try the other stairwell.  Luckily the other stairwell was not so much underwater that we couldn’t get down.  It was really a surprising amount of water.

We had dinner with Ryan at Sculley’s.  The food and service has improved significantly over the last few months.  The meal was really good.  When we got back to Eleven80 they had one elevator up and running to get us back up to the apartment.  It’s amazing how quickly they got the place functional again – although there is a lot of work that is going to take a very long time.  I can only imagine that the damage is just unreal on those three floors.

Well, it’s that day. Taxes are due. I turned mine into the accountants several days ago but didn’t hear anything until this morning and it wasn’t good news this morning. Dominica and I were sure that we were going to be getting several thousand dollars back when we filed and were looking forward to being able to invest that money. No such luck. We actually owe quite a bit this year and there is a lot of complication caused by our dual-state status that is causing issues as well. So I spent a good chunk of the day on the phone dealing with tax issues. Not exactly a fun day.

At least today was a bright and sunny day – just gorgeous here in the New York City Metro area. Warm and breezy and no chill at all. I got lunch at Airlie Cafe across the street.

The dishes were a bit out of control today but I managed to get a load of them done. The floor has been getting really dusty because our vacuum cleaner has been broken ever since it sucked the threading right out of our living room carpet destroying both itself and the carpeting. Dominica fixed it the other day and I tried doing some floor cleaning today. However, the crappy plastic nozzle broke yet again (this thing is made of the most brittle plastic ever) and the belt drive is still not functioning. So I had a tough time even doing some basic floor vacuuming and a new nozzle is an absolute necessity at this point.

I forgot to mention that on Friday I finished reading “Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great”.

I was pretty burnt by the end of the day today but a lot of important work got completed and I can only complain so much.  After work wrapped up I did a bit of cleaning as we decided yesterday that we are going to attempt to have a D&D game at our place tonight.  We didn’t decide until today whether it was going to be Feder’s Known World campaign or my Forgotten Realms game but the last minute role call left us with me being the dungeon master for the evening.

We are all pretty excited about getting to play tonight as it has been over a month since we have been able to get together and the last session really left everyone hanging as the stalwart adventures were barricaded into a small room at the end of a long tunnel and there were goblins attempting to break down the doors.  Cliffhangers are always a good way to leave the game resting.  🙂

Dominica got home and made herself dinner on the early side and relaxed for a little while with Oreo and started watching Doris Day and David Niven in Please Don’t Eat the Daisies.  I got the game ready, as much as I could, and then at a quarter to eight went down to Food for Life to meet Ramona who was picking up dinner there.

We started the game just after eight and played until ten thirty.  Dominica thought that she was going to be really tired but actually did really well and was “with it” all night and wasn’t really ready to stop playing even at ten thirty.

We were not really all that tired even after the game so Min and I watched two episodes of the fifth season of The Family Guy before going to bed.