January 3, 2008: Snyrting

Congratulations to Jeff and Danielle Simpson who, on December 26th, welcomed the newest member of their family: Justin Reid Simpson. Everyone is home and doing fine.

Snyrting in Iceland

While I am busy cleaning out my email, here is Tony West’s New Blog.

Oreo stayed in bed for a solid twelve hours. Just as he was leaving daycare yesterday he played with Lana, the little Jack Russell Terrier puppy there and she really wears him out. He isn’t young anymore. So whenever that happens he sleeps extra but this was a whole new level of sleeping even for him. He was definitely ready for breakfast when Dominica called him in to the kitchen this morning.

For the second day in a row they forgot to get Dominica her car. It was so cold today that she and Oreo returned to the apartment to get him more bundling to keep him warm. It is 16° F today with high winds bring the wind chill a bit below 0°. This is how I think of winter in the northeast.

My walk to the train station was bitter cold. I grabbed a hot sandwich at Airlie on the way in and that kept me warm a little. When I got to the PATH station I discovered that the trains were having a track issue down in Jersey City and that they were not running at this time. The PATH platform was completely packed with people who had apparently been waiting quite some time for the train. There were so many people that people were waiting on the outside of the turnstiles to await the train.

It took me an extra hour to get into the office. The train was packed with people like sardines. It was awful. And we kept getting stuck at different stations. It was not a pleasant ride into work today.

I have decided that the best names for pet cats are American Civil War Battlefields. Some examples of great names for pet cats include: Shiloh, Harper, Vicksburg, Antietam, Appomattox, Boydton, Hampton, Front Royal, Hanover, Hatcher, Manassas, McDowell, Piedmont, Rappahannock, Staunton, Ware Bottom, Totopotomy, Trevilian, Wilson, Winchester, Kessler, Smithfield, Galveston, Murfrees, Chattanooga, Brentwood, Franklin, Memphis, Chusto, Chustenahlah, Buffington, Albemarle, Averas, Hatteras, Roanoke, Valverde, Belmont, Girardeau, Carthage, Marmiton, Meridian, Okolona, Tupelo and Monocacy. Now that you have my list you can each choose one and will forever have a cat with a great, conversation starting name. These names don’t necessarily work well for dogs. It is specifically cats who needs Civil War names.

I came across a great site for the history of the Genesee and Wyoming Railroad which operates between Retsof and Caledonia, New York. In the past few years they have branched out and now serve as far south as Hampton Corners, NY where the new salt mine shafts are located.

For my readers who are from “back home” in Western, New York there has been a lot of interest over the last several years wondering what would become of the giant Foster-Wheeler facility in Dansville, NY. FW was the major employer in the region and the plant takes up a significant amount of the village land area. There has been much concern over the plant closing and what it would mean for the region. Today I stumbled upon American Motive Power who purchased the plant, renovated it and now uses it for rebuilding railroad locomotives. That is the perfect business for that area. I am really happy to see the facility being put to good use.

I discovered today that the Rochester area has the New York Museum of Transportation. I had no idea that this was in Rochester. I would have gone at some point had I known that. The area also has the Rochester & Genesee Valley Railroad Museum. You only find these things after you move away. I also found a good article with good pictures of the abandoned Rochester Subway of the 1950s.

I stumbled across an amazing picture of a lake in the Faroe Islands that is 30 meters above sea level. This image is really stunning.

I went home and Dominica was cooking for Oreo when I got there. He hasn’t had home cooked food in a few weeks. During the holidays he went onto canned food as he was traveling so much. We are thinking that he is tired of his canned food as he skipped his dinner again tonight. Although it also could be that the cans of food are providing him with more food at breakfast and he just isn’t getting hungry at night like he does when we giving him the smaller, home-cooked portions.

I went down to the deli in the first floor of our building for dinner – grilled cheese and French fries.  We ate our dinners while watching some more of the eighth season of Full House.  Not much more of that show left.

Ryan stopped by for a little while to snag a piece of apple pie from the pie that Dominica baked yesterday.  Dominica thought that Ryan would be appalled by my idea of mounted a 52″ x 20″ Z Scale model railroad diorama on the wall by our bookshelf in the living room but Ryan agreed that it was a good idea and would be cool.  So Dominica lost out on that one 🙂

Early to bed and one more day then the weekend!

January 2, 2008: Turning Cold in Newark

Today’s Music: B. J. Thomas

Happy Birthday to Mary Johnston! After several months of not being able to reach Mary I have finally heard from her this past week. She is still living in Warsaw, New York and is now working in Perry at what used to be the Archway Cookie factory. I do not know what they make there now, though. Probably still cookies.

Oreo seemed to be looking forward to getting back to daycare today. He has been restless. He got me up at three this morning because he just wanted to go out and hang out in the living room for a little while. I was just thankful that I didn’t have to take him outside in the cold for a walk.

Things were extremely quiet out on Wall Street today. You could barely tell that anyone at all was even in the office.

Dominica’s day was really crappy. It was really busy at her office and her team was short staffed with people out and they were stuck training a new person while short staffed making them even shorter staffed.

I accidentally allowed my supply of caffeine at the office to run out. Oops. That isn’t good. The mid-afternoon drowsies will be looking for me now. Although it is probably best as I have been suffering from the post-holiday ate-too-much-sugar acid reflux disorder these days and I shouldn’t do too much to aggravate my stomach until that has been addressed a little more thoroughly.

I decided to skip lunch today. I had grabbed a rather hearty breakfast on the way in to the office from Airlie Cafe on Commerce and ate that on the walk in to the office and bought an extra muffin to eat at the office which I did a little before lunch time. So I wasn’t starving but didn’t get a lot of protein either.

I did get a chance to play a little Xplorers on AsoBrain today although I didn’t fare very well. I didn’t see Art or Danielle online though.

I finished “reading” Bill Bryson’s “Neither Here Nor There” between the commute in and the office today. That was a really good book. Next up is “I’m a Stranger Here Myself” which is his account of returning to the United States (he grew up in Iowa) after living for about twenty years in England.

Dominica ran out and did some shopping over her lunch break. She is planning on baking an apple pie tonight.

For dinner I am stopping at McDonald’s in Newark’s Penn Station and just picking up something simple. It saves a lot of time.

At Borders I picked up Ed Greenwood’s “Spellfire” which is the very first of the Forgotten Realms novels. I also picked up the 2008 Great Model Railroads “magazine” which has pictures from eleven of the year’s hottest model railroad layouts. And I got a “Level One” adventure for Dungeons and Dragons that looked like it would be perfect for our group to kick off with.

The walk home was bitter cold. I had no idea that the temperature had dropped so dramatically during the day. The temperature was only so bad but the biting wind really made the walk bad. I have to spend a lot of time outside on my feet and high winds make it very tough. The wind was so bad that I actually had to stop walking at one point!

I beat Dominica home by almost twenty minutes. We unloaded her groceries once she arrived and then ate dinner and watched the beginning of the eighth season of Full House. We are well into the shows that I have never seen at all which is weird considering how well I know the show in general.

Dominica baked an apple pie tonight which we ate a bit of later on in the evening.  It was a lazy night at home.  Oreo had a great time snuggled up in the bed.  He was so snuggly, in fact, that he decided to completely skip dinner and just lay in bed all night.

January 1, 2008: A New Year Begins

Today begins the eighth year of Sheep Guarding Llama. Hard to believe.

Oreo got me out of bed at twenty past seven this morning which was way too early to be getting up. We went for a walk and then returned to the apartment and went right back to bed. We didn’t really get up until well after nine which was much more reasonable. It was after four when Dominica and I had gotten to sleep last night and we were all very tired this morning.

Dominica slept in until half past noon and then dragged her tired butt out into the living room to join the land of the living. We decided that we would see who was awake and interested in joining us for “lunch” so we emailed people to see what the status of everyone was. While we were waiting for some responses I hopped into the shower and then Dominica took hers.

We were hungry but there aren’t many food options in a city like Newark, New Jersey on a holiday like New Year’s Day. At two thirty Ryan was just getting up and decided that he would like to join us for some delivered Domino’s Pizza which was probably the easiest food choice of the day.

We learned an important trick today – when ordering our meal online Domino’s was going to charge us $35 but when we called it in they only charged us $24. $11 on a meal that cheap is a really huge percentage (closing in on 50%!) So we will be taking the extra effort to call in all of our orders from now on instead of using the simpler online ordering method. It is strange that they choose to go that route since ordering online costs them less than it does to have a person manning the telephones.

It was probably around three when Ryan came up to the apartment and the food was there about twenty minutes later. We never did hear back from Kevin and Pam.

Ryan hung out until almost seven. The new furniture that we now have in our living room is really paying off. People are coming over more and more often now and probably a lot of it has to do with the fact that we have places to sit.

I played a few games of AsoBrain Xplorers today. The online version (compared to Mayfair Games’ Settlers of Catan boardgame) is quirky and takes some getting used to but works pretty well for the most part. Art Ralston jumped in and played a couple of games against me throughout the day. He is, apparently, quite addicted to the game.

Dominica did some work for one of her classes at Empire State College today. She is hoping that she is just a few classes from being able to qualify for a two year Associates of Science in Computer Information Systems degree that she can take now and then, after having achieved that “waypoint”, move on towards the remainder of the BS of CIS requirements. Unfortunately her advisor, along with the rest of the ESC staff, is off for the January “reading period” so she can’t get any feedback until after it is too late for any decision making for this semester.

So for the January semester she is signing up for the “Operating Systems” class which focuses on the internal workings of UNIX and Linux. This will be a good class for her to have since her goal is to move into Linux System Administration. Unfortunately Empire’s computer system doesn’t communicate well with itself and in some places the class is listed as open with three seats left available but when she actually attempts to register it is listed as being full.

So the quest to find an available class that will actually be useful for her on the road to getting her degree began. After an hour or so of running through the options we finally decided that she should take “GPS and the New Geography” this semester. It is an “Intro” level class but sounded interesting. We are thinking that it will be fun.

From some speculative planning, we think that Dominica most likely needs to take three four-credit courses yet this year to qualify for her AS degree. So the current plan is – assuming that her mentor agrees – that she take GPS now, a course in System Administration in May and the Operating Systems course online in September. We hope that those three classes will be enough to wrap up her AS waypoint and then plans for her BS degree can be evaluated after that point.

It was half past eleven when we were finally ready to head off to bed. Dominica has been reading “The Crystal Shard” and is just about caught up with me.

Both of us have to go back to work tomorrow. The winter holiday vacations are finally over. Although for her the normal work begins again tomorrow but my office doesn’t return to “normal” until Monday when the financial industry freeze is lifted. My winter recess from RIT is over on Monday as well and class work will begin again.

December 31, 2007: Fondue Party

2007 is over. It has been a busy but largely uneventful year. This has been a big year for getting caught up in the “machinations of life.” We have set new records for not getting to see people this year. Many of our friends we haven’t been able to see for over a year now! And even our families have barely seen us.  And here is the final posting of 2007.

We both slept in a bit this morning. I slept in until nine and Dominica until between noon and one! I had to get up at four in the morning to walk Oreo though. His long car riding finally caught up with him in the middle of the night and we had to make an emergency walk down to the corner of Mulberry.

I had to work today but with tomorrow being a holiday there was very little going on in the office.

There was a lot of cleaning to be done around the apartment. Lots of stuff to be put away and a lot of new things that need places to be found for them to go. We have the new humidifier that we brought back from dad’s that was our main humidifier at the house in Geneseo. I hooked that up in the entrance hallway and fired it up to compliment the smaller unit that we have running in the kitchen.

We reassembled the lamp / side table and set it up in the living room by the side of the love seat. It works really well with the rest of our furniture. We are glad to have it with us again and we will really appreciate having the extra light in our rather dark living room.

Art and Danielle turned me on to AsoBrain Games which have popular European board games that you can play online. They have their own online version of Settlers of Catan which is much faster than the board game and just about identical. You can play against real people or just against the computer. I like it. I was playing my very first game on the site this afternoon and Art and Danielle managed to find me and to jump into the game that I was trying out.

At more or less the last minute we managed to make New Year’s Eve party plans with Kevin and Pam and we reserved the Eleven80 Lounge area for our own personal party.  How no one else reserved this I have no idea.  So we scheduled to get it at nine thirty and stay more or less until midnight.  Kevin and Pam went out and got snacks, soft drinks and cheese fondue for the party and we are providing the chocolate fondue fountain, a few bottles of wine and 99 Blackberries.  (Remember my one signature mixed cocktail: Mt. Dew and 99 Blackberries = Dewberry Juice.)

I am posting early, before the party, just so everyone knows where we are.  We should be home around midnight.  This won’t be a late party.  We only have the lounge until midnight anyway.  And Oreo is staying home alone which he doesn’t like.

Dominica and I both have tomorrow off from work so we will be home relaxing all day.  We have no plans to go anywhere at all.  So if you need us you know where to find us.

It is funny that we are doing fondue twice in one week.  Normally we goes years between fondue events.

As we wrap up the year here on SGL we can look back at one of the busiest years ever on the site.  We might have made it the entire year without missing a single day of updates.  While many of the dailies this year were not record setting in length we managed to maintain consistent and regular postings and had almost no “sparse” postings just to fill in a day when nothing really happened.  2007 could easily be our busiest year ever even with hardly any podcast or video podcast postings.  And we have several new regular readers as well!

Happy New Year Everyone!