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.

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!