Sheep Guarding Llama

How can it be April already?  That’s crazy.  March just flew right by.

I was really tired this morning and decided not to go in early like I usually try to do.  I like going in to the office early but once in a while I just need some time to sleep in like a normal person so that I can function all day long.

When I got to the office I discovered that I was locked out – which was to be expected as this is my first time back to the office since my two year anniversary rolled over over the weekend.  So I had to deal with that although it wasn’t too bad.  Now that I have done this before the process is much easier the second time around.  I also got myself access to the floors where a lot of my clients sit so I am not able to go meet people that I work for and near but have never actually seen.

Today was miraculously a slow day which I really needed after yesterday and the whole weekend.  After getting afternoon coffee I took advantage of my new found access card and checked out the big floor with my clients and spent a few hours just moving from team to team saying hello to people that I hadn’t seen in a while and meeting people that I have worked with for years but have never met.

Since I was out of the office for a while I got a little backed up.  Not too bad as the afternoon was slow, but there were some things that needed to be done and I ended up getting stuck in the office until after seven in the evening.  It was after eight by the time that I arrived home by way of the train.  Quite a long day and I was really tired.

Dominica was watching Family Guy when I got home.  I watched one episode and relaxed for twenty some minutes and then went to the living room and got started on my homework for the evening.  I have a bit to do this week and it is due on Friday night which means that there really isn’t any free time for me to get it done between now and then which will be, obviously, quite problematic.

I had the weirdest dream last night that Eric was offered one million dollars to be the spokesperson for Harry Anderson‘s political campaign.  I don’t remember if Eric took him up on the offer or not.  He ended up being offered a million dollar house to be on the campaign trail (for what I have no idea) and then one hundred thousand a year to be a political advisor.

Oreo and I went to bed pretty late but we didn’t really sleep in this morning. It was around nine when Oreo got up and told me that there was sunlight to be had in the living room and that he wanted to partake of it. So I got up and he moved out into a nice, warm sun patch on a chair in the living room.

I was just starting to get settled in to actually do some more homework when I got paged from the office. Lot’s of issues this morning and tons of people are stuck working today because of it. I put in a couple of hours on a conference call. Things were busy enough that my cell phone kept ringing too. Not what I was expecting this morning. But, again, with Dominica not here I might as well be getting paged out rather than just sitting around doing nothing (although getting my homework caught up would be a nice change too.)

I did a tiny bit of cleaning early this afternoon and managed to get some laundry going. Normally Dominica does the laundry over the weekend but with her not here it could be a problem. I don’t like having her do the laundry but she gets mad if I try to do it because “I do it wrong” although I think that she is overcautious about colours and under-cautious about temperatures and over-drying. She thinks that I am colour-unsafe and wrinkle happy. So I only did my own laundry today so that she can only get so upset. Although she doesn’t like me doing even that.

I did do some other cleaning after Min called to say that she was on her way home from Philadelphia. She left around two in the afternoon. She had originally planned to come home earlier but Jenn and Angelo just had an offer accepted on a house and Jenn’s parents were down to see the house this morning so Dominica went with all of them so that they could all see it together.

I talked to dad today and right now the plan is for him to come down to Newark on April 19th and to stay until the 21st. We can’t do anything before then because of Dominica and my class schedules. My class, Object Technologies, at RIT is going to keep me very busy up until that weekend. I am hopeful that that weekend will be a “recovery” weekend after lots of other stuff comes due just days before. This is a rather busy semester for both of us.

It was nearly four when Dominica got back home. Oreo was so excited! We took a little break and got dinner from the deli downstairs and watched a few shoes on the AppleTV before returning to the living room to get back to work on our homework. 🙁

We both worked on homework all evening.  Then Dominica headed off to bed.  I didn’t wrap up homework until just after eleven at night!

Ryan, Kevin and I walked out to City Cafe and had a few drinks before we all turned in for the night.  We have all been so busy recently that none of us have seen each other at all.  We were only out for about an hour.  We were happy to discover that City Cafe stays open extremely late and even has their kitchen open at Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights until two in the morning!

I got up a little before eight this morning and Oreo followed me right out to the living room where there is some extremely bright sunlight today. Perfect for lazy dogs and growing plants. The rose bush has really been coming along thanks to being watered three times a day, being turned constantly in the window for even lighting and bi-daily mildew treatments and regular trimming and pruning. It is as full as it ever was and, as of yesterday, I have noticed a new rose flower beginning to form. We will have some pink in amongst the green in a few days. All of the plants seem to be healthy at this point. The mandarin is the hardest to read. It was really abused at the store but seems to be doing just fine since moving here.

Dominica got up around nine and started getting ready to go to Jenn’s place in Pennsylvania. She has been really tired recently and taking two classes at once from Empire State is really a problem so we decided that she is going to drop her Computer Operations and Security class that she just started (since today is the last day to actually drop it) and that she will try to take it again maybe in the fall. It is overlapping with her GPS and the New Geography class which isn’t too hard but involves a bit of time-consuming work and we were hoping that she would take HTML for Web Design right after the GPS class. Both would overlap with COS and taking overlapping classes is far more than twice the work of just taking one class. Just the task-switching alone between the two classes is the effort of at least half of another class. It is no wonder that full time college students get so little out of college – the system is completely not designed around the way that the human brain processes information efficiently.

We walked Oreo and picked up breakfast from Airlie Cafe. Then Dominica hit the road. First she drove me down to the Newark downtown post office so that I could mail her drop/add form to the university and be postmarked today and then she was off for Philadelphia. Oreo was very unhappy when I came back to the apartment without Dominica. He really enjoys his weekends when both of us are here.

Min made it safely out to Jenn’s apartment at a quarter after two.  My afternoon was all work and homework.  I was quite busy all day.  Not the way that I wanted to spend the weekend but at least it was a good use of the time while Dominica was out.  I got a lot done that needed my attention.  I also got a lot of time on Dominica’s laptop, our fastest workstation, with Handbrake getting stuff prepped for the ATV.

Oreo is very sad today without Dominica around.  He doesn’t like going very long without her.  Even on a normal weekday at home with me he starts getting anxious for her to come home around four in the afternoon.  So today he is very anxiously looking for her.

I wrapped up my work around midnight.  Hard to believe that there can be so much to do, I know.  I didn’t even manage to do any real work around the apartment today which is too bad as it really needs it.  I hate that this place is so small that we have no means of keeping it clean even for a few days.  At least my AppleTV conversion project will clear one whole shelf of space up which will help with some books and stuff.

At midnight I cracked open a bottle of Finger Lakes Cabernet Frank but, as you would guess, it had turned to vinegar.  Not only did we get an entire case of wine from Marketview Liquor in Henrietta in which half the bottles were bad but we have managed to have every other bottle that we try be bad.  Exactly every other bottle.  It has alternated through the entire case now, good, bad, good, bad.  It is unbelievable that even having six good and six bad bottles that we would open them in such an exacting order.  The second bottle that I opened, a 70/30 blend of Cabernet Frank and Lemberger from Anthony Road was good and so I enjoyed that while Oreo and I watched Doris Day in Glass Bottom Boat.

This week has really gone by in a blur.  Work has kept me really busy and when I haven’t been busy with that there has been homework today.  Today is the last day of my official early morning coverage week so on Monday I will be back to my normal schedule – whatever that is.  Because of the conference call that I got onto last night I didn’t get to bed until almost midnight.  So this morning I slept in until the last possible minute and then worked from home.  I was going to go into the office once there was redundant coverage but things got busy and I never had time.  Not that that is so surprising.  Things have been very busy all week.  Today is also the final day of my first two years at my current company!  I started on March 29th, 2006.

I didn’t get a chance to have breakfast this morning but I did get an early-ish lunch from Food for Life that I brought back and ate at my desk while working.  I had a really busy day of doing real, solid SA work with tons of troubleshooting and performance tuning stuff.  Much more interesting than my usual day.  I even got to work with an engineer from Red Hat today which I never get to do.

I did manage to squeeze in time to do the dishes today and to get the kitchen cleaned up, more or less.  It is looking a lot better than before, at least.  I forgot to mention yesterday that a friend in maintenance stopped by and hung two plant hangers for us yesterday.  We have a very healthy ivy plant that we have been looking forward to hanging on one of them and are hoping to have another ivy or possibly a spider plant to hang on the other.  They are swinging hangers that come out about nine inches from the wall.  We have them hanging on either side of the kitchen “window” coming out into the living room.  It may sound as if they would be in the way and taking up space in our tiny living area but they are mounted about nine feet up on the wall and are far above our heads.  It is quite nice and really adds something to the room.

I learned how to do queued encoding with Handbrake today which is making my video transfer process immensely easier than before.  Now I can just set half a day’s worth of video encodes up on Dominica’s dual-core Turion X2 laptop and let it chunk away without my intervention.  It is really going to be handy for getting the computers to work through the night.  Previously we could only set up a single encode job and it would finish one or two hours after we went to bed then the computer would be on but idle all night.  Now I can queue up enough work so that it is still working when I get up in the morning.

Dominica got home and we actually remembered to unload the groceries from her car today.  So once again there is some amount of food in the apartment to eat.  It won’t last long but at least there is something.  This way I probably won’t need to go out hunting for food this weekend while I am home alone.  Dominica has Jenn’s bachelorette party in Philly tomorrow night and I will be home with Oreo until Sunday afternoon when Min gets back home.  But I have plenty of homework to do along with plenty of work for the office to keep me more than busy all weekend.

For dinner we just ate some of the food that Dominica had picked up.  She had leftovers and I had Fiber One cereal (tastes better than it sounds.)  We watched some Family Guy that I have transferred to the AppleTV.  It was an early night for us as we have to be up relatively early tomorrow.  Dominica is going to drive to Philly even though the train is possible.  The train isn’t exactly cheap overall (about $50 to Philly and then another train for an unknown amount out to Ambler and then even more on Sunday to get home so $150 – $200 altogether) but it would be cheap enough to justify not driving if the schedule was good enough to make it not a rush on both ends.  The trip from Newark to Ambler would be pretty easy and runs every two hours all day long but the trip back isn’t scheduled nearly as well and would make Sunday quite difficult.  So Min is just going to drive since she now has the GPS and it will be quite easy.  The drive will be almost an hour shorter than going by train anyway (because of the transfer.)