January 8, 2008: No Title Today, Meh

Oreo was a very restless dog last night. I tried to go to bed around eleven but the moment that I was all set to fall asleep Oreo decided that he needed me to take him out for a walk. So that took a while. And then when we returned he had way too much energy and didn’t want to go to bed. He tried for a little bit but got up and asked me to let him out of the bedroom and into the house around midnight. I gave up on getting any sleep so I went to the living room and sat with him.

Urinate IN the toilet, not ON the toilet.

From midnight until one in the morning Oreo lay on his pillow in the living room not sleeping and I practiced my guitar. I wasn’t happy about being up so late but at least I got some practice time in. I went to bed around one and Oreo came to bed sometime between one and two. Must be nice to be Dominica and get to sleep through the dog asking to do things but it keeps me awake. Just him walking around the room wakes me up.

My alarm went off at five thirty this morning but I was not about to get up and start working as tired as I was with just three and a half hours of sleep or so. I plugged in my office BlackBerry and checked my mail. No one needing me just yet. I slept a little while longer, but not long, and kept checking my mail every ten minutes or so until I was asked to deal with some issues for another team.

So by seven I was up and working. I wasn’t expecting to have an issue this morning (who does) so I ended up getting stuck working from home for the day as one issue piled up against another and I never had a chance to leave. But I got a lot of work done today so that worked out well.

I was busy enough that I decided to skip lunch and just eat something from the kitchen. There isn’t much in the way of food in the house so it was yoghurt and Smart Start cereal with vanilla soy milk for me. Cheap and healthy though.

Dominica ran out to Target over her lunch break and did some shopping. Just staples and some television on DVD. She realized today that it is 2008 and that later this year she will be turning thirty! But, of course, Danielle is turning thirty-two tomorrow. And luckily for all of us, she will always be older. But not as old as Francesca.

There was a lot of work to do around the house today. We have been falling behind since Christmas. I did two loads of dishes today and took no less than six loads of trash out to the trash and recycling room. I managed to make a good dent in the house though and it is looking much better.

Dominica got home and we had order in pizza from Tony’s. We watched What I Like About You – the 2002 television show with Amanda Bynes and Jennie Garth. I have never seen the show before but we are both big Amanda Bynes fans so we were confident that it would be a good show.

We ended up watching half of the first season, which wasn’t long, by the end of the night. We stopped watching at nine thirty and I went back to the living room to get back to work. Things have just been too busy at work for me not to be putting in lots of extra time right now.

Dominica went to bed when I went back out to work. I am hoping to be to bed around ten. After last night I am really exhausted.

I did manage to sneak in thirty to sixty minutes of playing classical guitar throughout the day. I am sounding much better.

January 7, 2008: The Thaw

Thanks to dad for this link to Bill Gates’ Last Day at Microsoft.

No Clearance On Side of Train

I guess this sign explains why it is important to pay for a train ticket. Clinging to the side of trains is not a safe way to travel no matter how economical it seems.

I discovered today that the Medina Railroad Museum has the largest single floor HO model railroad (apparently in the world but they don’t specify exactly on their website – it is 14′ x 204′.) Medina is located less than an hour west of Rochester between Rochester and Buffalo. There is so much stuff to do back home that I never realized was there when I lived there.

To those of you who are from “back home” it might be interesting to know that Arcade, New York in Wyoming County was once the sole production location for the soy product Cremora. Cremora originated in Arcade and was once exclusively shipped out on the Attica & Arcade Railroad which has been operating the line in Wyoming County since 1917.

Today is the first day “post financial industry freeze” and the real work begins anew. I had some stuff going on this morning so I was up at five thirty making sure that the early morning deployments were going smoothly. There was quite a bit going on so I ended up doing quite a bit of work before getting a chance to escape from the apartment.

The weather was awesome today. In the fifties. It was so warm that I didn’t even bother to take a jacket or a fleece or anything while walking to the office. And it was perfectly comfortable. Rumor is that we are going to be in the mid-sixties tomorrow. Now that is just crazy for mid-January.

I worked until after six and then walked to the train. Today I am listening to “I’m a Stranger Here Myself” by Bill Bryson. “I’m a Stranger Here Myself” is a book written from a series of newspaper articles that Bill – I can call him Bill as I am a familiar American – wrote upon returning to live in America after two decades of living in the Yorkshire Dales of Northern England.

On my way home from Manhattan I stopped by at Newark Penn Station’s McDonald’s and picked up dinner. Dominica and Oreo were home long before me and that makes the evening easier. Min was watching Heroes season two when I got home so I didn’t expect to see or hear from her for the rest of the evening.

I had more work to do for the office so I read the technology trades while eating dinner and then went back to work. Can’t complain about having too much work these days. There is a lot of expectation at the office that large workforce cuts may be coming down the pike in the next several weeks. This is the most concern that I have seen from my coworkers about layoffs since I started there about two years ago. But I figure that it is mostly just huff and that the layoffs, if there are layoffs, will hit us rather lightly.

Dominica watched all of the Heroes episodes that were available to her.  I worked until around ten thirty.  At that point I decided that I needed some of the evening to myself before needing to get off to bed so that I can go back to the office tomorrow.  I did get some good, important work done though so I am happy that I put in the time.

I did take about half an hour and practiced some classical guitar.  It has been quite some time since I have played that much.  I really need to get back to practicing on a regular basis.

I updated Dominica’s personal web site for her so that it is more of a resume site rather than her old attempt at a blog from 2002.  She managed to do just one entry before she gave up on that project but the one post has been lingering on her site for six years now.

We didn’t stay up too late tonight.  Got to get back into this work groove.

January 6, 2008: Lazy Sunday

Dominica got up sometime this morning. Maybe around tenish if I was to guess. I slept until around one. Which wasn’t really very much sleep since I didn’t even head off to bed until not that long before eight. Oreo took the cake for sleeping today though. He didn’t even think of getting up to eat or drink or walk until around seven this evening! He is really sore and exhausted from his long walk through the city yesterday. He is limping quite a bit today.

Lunch was leftovers from Mi Pequeño Mexico last night. Their food is really good the day after. They deliver to Eleven80 so we are planning on getting more food from them tonight.

While we ate lunch we watched the remainder of the final season of Full House on DVD. Strangely I had never seen most of the seventh and eighth seasons of the show previously but as we approached the last few episodes of the final season they ended up all being ones that I have seen. I can only imagine that I caught them on cable in hotel rooms over the last few years while working out of town. I saw a lot of Full House in the hotels when I was working for Wegmans in 2004 – 2005. I can’t believe that working for Wegmans was almost four years ago now. This year is my fourteenth year in Information Technology! And we have been in New Jersey for almost two full years now.

We tried watching a BBC show that we got from dad called Hamish MacBeth. Not our type of show though. The hero of the show is a cop and a junkie which makes for a “hard to identify with” lead and it is quite difficult to get into the show for us. The characters in the show were very endearing to us.

Dominica spent a bit of the evening watching the second season of Heroes on NBC online.

For dinner we called in an order to  Mi Pequeño Mexico and had burritos delivered.  It took hardly any time at all and was a very affordable large dinner.  We are vey excited to have a new restaurant that delivers something different to us.  And they are cheaper, faster, easier and healthier than many other choices too.  Yay!

Sleeping in so much made for a really short day today. I had some work that I needed to do for the office before we hit tomorrow morning which is going to be a really busy day so I spent a few hours doing that before heading off to bed. Nothing stressful, just last minute stuff that I wanted to have completed (ducks in a row and all that) as we head into the busy week.

I did some shopping for great Amazon MP3 downloads for my Apple iPod tonight too.  It is awesome that they carry some of my favourite artists like Allison Kraus & Union Station!  There is so much great music to get from there.  One thing that is really awesome is that one of the best songs that we have ever played on the SGL Podcast (Episode 48 – Half of My Mistakes by Radney Foster) was just recently covered by Gary Allan who is one of my all time favourite singers.  So I picked up his version of the song as well because it is just one of my favourite songs too.

We were up until around one in the morning before turning in for the night.

January 5, 2008: Staying Up Way Too Late

World’s Scariest Model Train Wrecks.

Last night Dominica, Kevin, Ryan and I went out to the Kilkenny Alehouse near where we live in downtown Newark and hung out there for the evening. It was about one in the morning when we got back to Eleven80. Kevin was fooling around in the elevator and managed to drop his keys and have them fall down the elevator shaft! We were told that they fell past the subbasement into open sewage. Eww.

We weren’t sleeping and Min and I didn’t end up getting to bed until four in the morning.

Dominica and I are pretty much just taking this weekend off. We have no work and no homework this weekend for either of us. And we don’t have to travel anywhere either. So we are just spending the weekend relaxing at home for a change.

We did a simple lunch from Market City Deli downstairs in Eleven80.  We watched some more of Full House today.  We are almost done with the series.

For dinner, Ryan, Dominica, Oreo and I took a walk down to Ferry Street in the Ironbound section of Newark to Mi Pequeño Mexico. It was a really long walk for little Oreo. He was cold and shivering most of the way.  He enjoyed the walk but it was definitely quite a bit too far for him.

The food from  Mi Pequeño Mexico was really good.  Dominica got the spinach burrito and I went for the burrito loco.  There was a ton of food and none of us could finish it.

Later on, Kevin came up to hang out and everyone sat around and visited for the evening.  Ryan stayed till a little after one.  Kevin and I ended up staying awake until seven thirty in the morning!  Oops.  A bit later than we had meant to stay up.

We actually pulled out the classical guitar tonight and played just a little.  I think that I am going to make an attempt at practicing on a regular basis even if just a little bit.  It doesn’t take much to make a big difference these days.  I have been playing guitar for twenty-four years now!

January 4, 2008: What Does This Sign Mean?

Well the first day of US election mania has come to a close. The Iowa results are in and, as far as I can tell, awfully depressing. Obama leads the serious Democratic race with Edwards in second and Clinton in third which seems impossible to my thinking. I guess that we will have to wait until after New Hampshire to have an idea of what the race is really going to look like. I find Obama to be a very unlikely candidate while Hillary seems an obvious choice for the Democratic party. Clearly she is the most likely to appeal to Republics and the most able to take away votes from a Republican candidate in an actual election. But I suppose that Republicans are probably just a lot more willing to have a woman president than the Democrats are. But we will see.

Sign of Unknown Meaning in the Faroe Islands

On the Republican front we have Huckabee winning in Iowa which seems even more improbable than Obama. I have had a hard time even thinking of Huckabee as a serious candidate let alone a front-runner. At least Guiliani made almost no showing at all. He and McCane have fallen to the bottom of my Republican pile. Ron Paul is the most interesting of the Republican candidates and he did okay in Iowa but “okay in Iowa” is a long way from the real race. There is a long road between now and then.

The weather is quite a bit warmer today. It is still cold but nothing like yesterday’s incredible chill. My walk in this morning was completely comfortable and I should not have brought along my hat, gloves and scarf as I was too warm by the time that I had reached Wall Street.

Today was slow, as expected, but it did pass by quite quickly. I left for home just minutes after five since there was nothing going on. I need to enjoy it while it lasts as we will be very busy come Monday morning. I already have an early deployment scheduled for first thing in the morning.

Dominica made arrangements for “the gang” to go out to Food for Life for dinner tonight. We are planning on dinner at a quarter after seven.

It is too early to be really certain but we believe that we have sold the Mazda PR5. Hopefully we will have plans for getting rid of it finalized over the weekend. Dad will be extremely happy to have all of that space back in the barn. Now we will only be storing one car instead of two. And just the smallest one. Dominica will also be happy to be driving the BMW full time.

Here is a great animation of: Animation vs. Animator. Very well done flash video.

Dominica and I are actually going to be spending the weekend at home for a change. Too much traveling recently. Time to just stay in and relax a little bit.

I met someone who just moved into our building here in Newark today who said that when they were looking for apartments that they had come across my video tour of my apartment at Eleven80. I am in the video and he recognized me in the lobby today. I need to do a new tour of the building using the new camera, better editing and cover more of the building like the lounge and the bowling alley.

I am posting early tonight so that I can get a nice relaxing evening in.