Sheep Guarding Llama

I slept in quite a bit this morning with Oreo. Dominica was up early and went out to hang out with people before eight in the morning which is very strange for her. Oreo and I were exhausted and enjoyed the chance to just snuggle and sleep for a while.

I am working today from Francesca’s house so I immediately set up shop and got to work. There wasn’t a lot of work to do today but there was some and it needed to be seen to.

The Wii was in use almost the entire day by one person or another. In fact, I believe that the Grices’ new Wii may have already seen more use just today than our Wii has seen in total use in the several months that we have owned it with the exception of its use as an emulated Nintendo 64 for Paper Mario!

I discovered from Chris today that Assassin’s Creed is expected to release for the PC platform in one or two months. This caused Dominica and I to decide to reevaluate our decision to get an XBOX 360. The only game that was really driving us to get the 360 at this time was Assassin’s Creed. The other games for the platform that I want are Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and Call of Duty 4 both of which are also available for the PC with better graphics and game play. So getting the 360 suddenly doesn’t seem like it is the best idea. So we are pretty sure that we are going to re-gear our plans and get a nice, new Windows Vista desktop to hook up in the living room dedicated to entertainment. We will probably get a 360 sometime but we can wait for the prices to fall farther and not have a large, hot, ugly device in our bedroom that we can’t figure out where to put.

So the new plan is to have the PC, Dreamcast and the Nintendo Wii in the living room and the PS2 in our bedroom. This is probably a better arrangement and has less overlap of systems. We have been without a serious PC gaming platform for a long time. Dominica’s desktop was used as a gaming system for a while but it was horribly outdated when we finally took it apart and moved her to just using a laptop. So now we have nothing at all. So in the end we will have the PS2 for night-time gaming and our back catalogue of classic Console RPGs that we really like, the Wii in the living room for “party” games and the PC for serious, hard core gaming as well as for casual web surfing and for movies.

Most of the day was spent with people playing either Wii or PS3.  None of the games were even slightly interesting to me though.  Either first person shooters on the PS3 or Carnival games on the Wii.  Not my cup of tea.

Tomorrow my plan is to go into the office at Williams Tower in Houston.  Probably best to escape the mayhem here.

I “turned in” on the early side and spent some time reading “The Crystal Shard” by R. A. Salvatore – the third book in the Drizzt Cycle.  Dominica is still working on “Sojourn”.  Several people are attempting to escape by reading around here.

It sure felt early when the alarms went off at three this morning.  It was all that we could do to pull ourselves out of bed and get ready to leave.  We did a good job though and were able to get onto the road at three thirty to head off to the airport in Rochester.

As soon as we pulled out onto Peoria Road the road slid and we were worried that we would have really bad driving conditions all of the way to the airport but it turned out to be fine.  We got to the airport right around four thirty and there was plenty of time for us to get through security and to get breakfast at McDonald’s before going to the gate to wait to board our plane to Atlanta.

Our first flight made it off without any problems at all and we were in Atlanta, GA right on time.  We ended up having to wait a little while before boarding our connecting flight to Houston because one of the planes connecting to ours was delayed from wherever it was coming from so we left Atlanta about twenty minutes late.  But AirTran managed to make up the time and we landed at Houston-Hobby in Texas ahead of our original schedule.

Francesca and Emily picked us up and zipped us over to the Grice’s so that we could celebrate Christmas.  Oreo was so glad to see us when we came through the door.  He had no idea that we were coming.

The weather was actually nice in Houston.  Much cooler than we had been anticipating.

Christmas present opening took forever as usual.  We opened presents from around eleven until after three in the afternoon.  Big items included a really awesome Garmin GPS unit for Dominica and I and another matching one for the Grices.  We are excited as this unit will also function as a hands free mobile phone kit, as an MP3 player for the car and as an Audible book reader!  Joe got a PlayStation 3.  Grices got a Nintendo Wii.

Not long after opening presents I turned in with Oreo and took a nap for a while.  We were both really exhausted.  We probably slept for three hours.

While we were sleeping there was a lot of Wii playing going on in the living room.  When we got up we all watched Spiderman 3 which was a really weak movie with a horrible plot.  I hope that that is the end of that flailing series.

After that it was pretty much time for bed.

For once Dominica was up long before me. She was up around eight but I slept in for a while as I was exhausted.

I got up and got right to work.  There wasn’t much to be done today but there was still some work to do and I don’t have the day off so I set up shop in the kitchen and worked from there.

For lunch today we drove over to the Omega Grill and ate there before they closed and then ran over to the Walmart in Geneseo to pick up some pizzas to cook for dinner tonight.  Dad secretly went to the automotive department and picked up a cover for the BMW for us for Christmas.  We ran to the electronics department and grabbed a 1080p upconverting DVD player for dad so that his DVDs will look better on his big 1080p LCD.  His old DVD player isn’t does not even have progressive scan which left him watching 480i output scaled up to 1080p by the television.

After lunch I worked for a little while and we relaxed around dad’s house.  We opened presents on the early side so that we could hook up and use the DVD player to watch our Christmas movies this evening.  My big present from Dominica was a new Timex watch that I had asked for.  I haven’t had a good watch in many years and I really wanted a nice, attractive watch that I can wear every day.  Min is also getting me Assassin’s Creed for the XBOX 360 which we don’t have yet but we are getting in a week or so unless we get it for Christmas so we both ended up getting 360 stuff for each other in anticipation.

Dad got the DVD player and as a “sort of” Christmas gift he got our 5MP Kodak digicam which is still pretty new.  It is a nice upgrade from his old 1.3MP Olympus that he has had for six years or so.  We decided that we really wanted the new 12MP Kodak camera with 720p video recording capability so it worked out well.

The big gift for Dominica was a Rotary Swiss Havana Watch in pink but it is coming from the UK and needed special paperwork in order to be able to order it so it won’t be coming for a few weeks yet.  I also got her MySims for the Nintendo Wii and a pink XBox 360 controller.

After opening presents we hooked up the new DVD player and then moved on to watching White Christmas which Dominica and I watch every year for Christmas but dad hasn’t seen in many years.  That is one of my favourite movies ever.

After White Christmas we started cooking the pizzas and then watched Holiday Inn which isn’t really all that much of a Christmas movie but it is the first time that anyone ever heard the song White Christmas as it was written for that movie.

After the movies it was time for bed.  We need to be up at three in the morning to be able to get to the airport on time so we are hoping to at least get a few hours of sleep.

At ten, just as we were heading to bed, I was paged out six times from the office!  I ended up spending a couple of hours dealing with the issues (the issues were paging issues and not actual support issues which didn’t make me very happy.)  This has been going on for a week now and it is driving me crazy.

It was after midnight when I finally got to go to bed!

It is warmer today and the would-be white Christmas is quickly fading away. When we arrived in Peoria on Friday night there was a surprising amount of snow. It was several inches deep and the driveway and been ploughed to allow for cars to pass through. But this morning the snow is all but gone as the world turns into the greyish sky and brownish landscape of a warm western New York winter’s day.

I was up at seven forty-five but Dominica slept in until a quarter after ten. Dad was up and off to Sunday School (for adults) at nine thirty. I set up Min’s laptop in the kitchen and got to work catching up on the SGL Dailies as well as working on the OLPC XO’s wireless setting in the hope of making it work dad’s WPA2 wireless security. The really cool features of the XO are in its abilities online and I am anxious to see how well it works.

I found some directions online from the OLPC projects on setting WPA Settings Manually for advanced Linux users. So I gave those a whirl. It took a couple of tries but I finally got it working and now the OLPC is online and working great.

For lunch we decided to go to Geneseo again to the Omega Grill but when we got up to Geneseo we found that almost the entire village was without power and there was no way to get food there. So, since Dominica needed to hit the big Jefferson Road Post Office anyway, we went up to Henrietta for lunch at Red Lobster at noon. We had been making a trip to Red Lobster anyway.

After lunch we hit Marketview Liquors to do some wine shopping as we need to stock up on good New York wines whenever we have the chance since we can’t get this stuff down in New Jersey anywhere. Although we were excited to learn that our favourite winery (well my favourite) – Lakeshore Winery – is now able to ship to most of the US so we can probably get that now.

We hit the post office and Dominica finished her Christmas shipping. And then it was time to return home.

Once we got back to Peoria we spent an hour or more working on moving cars around. The BMW is going into storage and the Mazda is heading to Newark. The RX7 had to be run for a little while just to keep it healthy so we let it run for twenty minutes and I even took it out for a couple of spins around the driveway. Other than a small idling issue the car seems to be running great and is very drivable. I am looking forward to having a chance to really drive it again this summer now that it is ready to be inspected and registered again.

After dealing with the cars we started a fire in the living room fireplace and relaxed.  After a little while dad and I ran down to Greigsville to grab some subs from the gas station on the corner.  But they have mostly closed up their food operations there, it seems, and have a far more limited menu than they have for the past fifteen years and they had already closed by the time that we got there.  That is very sad as they were incredibly handy and had very tasty subs.  But one of the patrons at the gas station saw that we wanted food and suggested that we try the new sub shop in York.

So we drove down to York which is just two miles or so down the road.  The new York Deli is in the old York Landings building on the “downtown” corner of York, NY.  They have been the York Deli since August.  We went in and were surprised both that they were open and that they had a pretty good selection of food.  We ordered three subs and then drove home with them.  The food was excellent and we will definitely be getting food from there quite a bit in the future.  That is, until they close too.

We just relaxed most of the evening and went to bed early.  I have to work tomorrow and we have more work to do around the farm as we attempt to clean up our stuff that is there a little at a time whenever we are around.  I did have a bit of homework to do so I spent an hour or so working on that tonight too.  My school holiday does not begin until tomorrow.

Dominica finished reading “Exile” before going to bed.

We were pretty tired when we got up this morning around nine.  I was ready to head out of the house by ten which was about the time that Dominica was getting up.

At eleven thirty we met the Richardson clan sans Sara (the birthday girl) at the Omega Grill in Geneseo.  We had lunch there and hung out for an little more than an hour.  Jeremy and his girlfriend Rachel were able to make it along.

After lunch we went over to the Super Walmart in Geneseo.  It is so nice to have nice, clean, safe places to shop for a change.  It is a different world down in New Jersey.  Dominica did some Christmas shopping and also picked up the first season of Dexter and the eighth season of Full House on DVD.  I picked up two Nintendo Wii video games: Ace Combat and Madden NFL 2008.  We got those as we felt that they might be better family fun games than a lot of the stuff that we currently have.

We went back to dad’s house and the Richardsons all ended up coming over just minutes after we arrived.  We hooked up the Wii to dad’s 37″ LCD display in the basement and everyone played Wii Play and Ace Combat.  This was our first test of the Wii as an entertainment device for when people are gathering together.  So far, it has worked pretty well.

Dominica and I tried a game of Madden NFL 2008 but she quickly became frustrated and is not very enthusiastic about playing that any more.

Around five the Richardsons left and at five thirty the Ralstons, Art and Danielle but not Michael, came over to visit for the evening.  We ordered pizza from Davis’ Farm Market in Pavilion which Min and I try to get at least once on every trip home.  The Omega Grill and Davis’ are like my “tastes from home” these days.

We had a nice time visiting until about eleven, I think.  I lost track of time.  After they left Dominica stayed up for a while readying The Dark Elf Trilogy – she is still on “Exile”.  And I read some of “Beginning Java Game Programming 2nd Ed.” which just arrived from Amazon in today’s mail.

We tried doing some wireless work with the OLPC XO today but discovered that since dad’s wireless uses WPA2 security that the XO was unable to connect to it.  A little online research and we learned that the WPA security family is not yet supported by the XO’s software but is expected to be supported very soon.  For the time being we will have to make other arrangements.  Hopefully tomorrow we will get something figured out.