Sheep Guarding Llama

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.

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.