Sheep Guarding Llama

Only one more day left until we leave for England. We have been hard at work trying to finalize our plans. We are not going to make any attempt to go to France or to the continent in general but we do believe that we will be managing to see a little bit of England, Wales, Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland and Scotland during the trip.

This morning Dominica packed up my little Oreo and shipped him away from me 🙁 I am very sad. I won’t see Oreo for two weeks now almost. After work tonight Dominica will be driving him up to Frankfort. Then she will spend the night there to help keep Oreo relaxed and then she will drive back down to Newark in the morning to get the very last of the packing done so that we can leave. It is amazing how much planning and coordination it takes for a trip like this.

I’m sure that it was a long day for Dominica. She hasn’t had a vacation in a while. Not since her time between jobs during the first half of last year when she came down from from New York to New Jersey.  She must be looking forward to the time off as much as she is to the trip to the UK.  Although, as I mention it I guess that she got to go to the beach this summer in North Carolina.  Actually, she gets lots of vacation time.  It’s me who never gets any.

It was an extremely busy day at the office with most of the day being spent writing reports.  I didn’t manage to even get to lunch until almost three in the afternoon.

I decided that since Dominica and Oreo were gone that there was no reason to head home early or even at the normal time so I stayed at the office in Manhattan until around seven getting extra work done before we leave.

I came home and did some prep work around the apartment.  I did dishes and some cleaning to get things ready.  We can’t leave a mess or it will be a disaster by the time that we get back.  So I cleaned and I ran down some electronic gadgets that we are taking with us so that they can be fully charged before we go.  We are taking both of the small Kodak cameras (Min’s 10MP pink one and my 5MP black one), the Canon camcorder, the two BlackBerries, two iPods, the Creative Zen Vision M, Min’s new laptop and more.  It is a crazy amount of stuff.  We have a 2GB SD card and a 1GB SD card for the cameras so we should be able to shoot quite a lot of pics.  I will post them as quickly as I can.  It will be tough.

I just ate some food that was left in the apartment.  There isn’t much here but what is here is mostly going to go bad by the time that we return in ten days so leaving it here isn’t a good idea.  So I did what I could to clean up.  Yogurt is the biggest problem.  Dominica bought several boxes of yogurt that all expire the day before we return.  I think that she must have forgotten the dates. We then have half a thing of yogurt that expires the day after we return.

I managed to sneak in a quick episode of the SGL Podcast tonight that will be posting tomorrow morning.  Now if we can just do some shows from the UK.

Just in time for us to make travel decisions, the public transportation workers in Paris went out on strike today which means that if we arrived there we would have no means of getting around in the city and might even be trapped at the train station where we arrived. Not a good situation. As our first trip to Europe we can’t be taking a risk like that when we have such a tiny window to be in France anyway. This does mean, of course, that it could be a long time before we ever go to France. We were just going to go because it was so convenient and the timing was just perfect. So we are back to our original, low-key, low-stress plan of spending the weekend chilling in Stratford-upon-Avon. I am sad that we won’t see France or even the continent but I feel better about just relaxing in Stratford. Less effort, plans are already all made, less cost and less opportunity for things to go horribly wrong.

There was a major earthquake on the coast in Chile this morning. Right now it is isolated but the time is ripe for a major fault correction along the Pacific Plate. What that means is that San Francisco’s and Anchorage’s “hundred year” earthquakes – which are overdue – could be coming any time now. Chile tends to see that activity first as it moves it’s way up the fault.

I am home today with Oreo. My schedule is all messed up this week with the trip this weekend interrupting everything. Oreo is getting his “home” day a day early so that tomorrow Dominica can grab him from daycare as soon as she gets out of work and then run him up to Frankfort where he will be staying for the next two weeks with his uncle Dexter. I will be back on Wall Street tomorrow and Friday.

Today was about normal as far as work was concerned.  Oreo was quite happy to be home with me all day.  He will be very unhappy tomorrow when he goes away and won’t see his family for almost two weeks.

I talked to Andy today.  He just bought a new 40″ Samsung 1080p HDTV LCD display.  He also got a Samsung Blu-Ray player.  So he is now officially the first person that I know that has a BD Player.  We are still using old, legacy DVD here.  It’s like the dark ages.

I gave Oreo his “going to stay with his grandparents for the week” bath this evening.  Now he smells all clean and fresh.  It has been a while since his last bath and he was definitely starting to smell a bit “doggie”.  He is so good about his baths.  I actually give him a shower, not a bath.  I turn on the warm water and he stands in it which gets him much cleaner than a bath would.  He almost seems to enjoy it now that I have made it so that he is warm the entire time.  But after a little while he starts to get antsy because he knows that when we are done that he gets a cookie.  But other than that, he is such a good little boy – even when I wash his face and hold him up to the shower to get him nice and clean.

Dominica ordered in Italian from Nino’s and I spent an hour or so on the phone with Verizon getting the last of my Blackberry stuff ready for our trip.  Now the BlackBerry is my main phone which rings when you call me.  And my European phone service is now turned on and activated.  And my European data service so that I can surf the web and get email is turned on.  So we are all set to be contactable while we are out of the country.

The evening was spent getting the BlackBerry as ready for the trip as possible including running it down so that it can take a full charge over night.  Dominica did additional packing and made more lists.  Effectively we are leaving for the trip tomorrow morning since Dominica and Oreo are leaving the apartment at seven in the morning and Min will only be returning just in time to do the final bit of packing and to get onto the plane on Friday evening.

We have changed our plans slight, again, and are now planning to go not directly to Belfast but first to Dublin and then north through Ireland on Thanksgiving so that we will have a chance to see Ireland proper.  We are able to do this without using any additional time simply by planning our train and ferry travel more effectively.  We are excited to get to see the Republic of Ireland in addition to the UK.  We will also, because of the detour to Ireland, be passing through much of Wales which is a great bonus to the trip too.  We are hoping to be able to take lots of pictures and videos to share with everyone.

We watched some Buck Rogers in the Twenty Fifth Century while preparing for the trip and then it was off to bed.

Dominica and I made an attempt at going to the Chinese restaurant on Commerce Street here in Newark that is directly across the street from us as we have not even tried to eat there yet all of the time that we have lived here. It is impossible to tell when this restaurant is open because they have no open or closed signs and there is always activity there. So we went in but it was very uncomfortable as if they were closed but didn’t want to tell us. Not one person in the restaurant would even look at us and it really looked like we had walked into a business meeting or some seedy underground thing like you see in a movie. So we turned around and left and won’t be trying that again. It definitely gave that feeling of just being a front for some underworld crime ring. So we are just going to avoid that place.

We did a quick and simple dinner at Subway next to Eleven80. Eating there is relatively healthy, quite cheap and very quick and easy.

I was doing some searching for pictures of Eleven80 on Flickr and found this great picture of Farty G – Ikea’s box of stinky pajamas. Seriously, how does marketing fail this horribly for such a giant company?

I felt a little better when I got up this morning. Yesterday I was quite under the weather with a minor sinus infection. Normally I get them these days because of the CPAP. It makes me extra sensitive to them and to weather changes.

Today I worked out in Warren. So I got up, stopped at Airlie Cafe for breakfast and walked up to the Broad Street Station of NJ Transit here in Newark. Going this way costs a lot more in walking time getting to the train station. I think that the walk probably takes me at least twenty minutes if not a little more. That station is quite some distance from the apartment at Eleven80. At least it is good exercise. It was raining a bit this morning but rather warm. Incredibly warm when you consider that it is just about December!

As always happens in Warren by day was very busy – mostly with meetings and talking to people that I never get to see. Today Dominica and I realized that we are spending so much time traveling from London to Stratford-upon-Avon that we could actually get out to Paris in far less time on the train.  And somehow, going to Paris for the weekend just sounds like a better plan than going to Stratford-upon-Avon for the weekend.  Stratford would be cool and we would like to go someday but as this is our first trip ever to Europe it would be awfully nice to at least get to set foot upon the continent even if just for the weekend.

I took the shuttle/train home from work and arrived to find my new Blackberry had arrived.  I got it unpacked and fired up and activated and all that jazz.  It works but there is another step to getting it set up that we can’t do until tomorrow evening.  So it is only half setup right now and there is a lot of stuff that I can’t test.  So my review of the unit is pretty minimal today.  So far so good.  It looks nice and the interface is pretty decent.  But that is about all that I have for the moment.

I found out from RIT that my next semester does not begin until December 4th so I am free and clear until then.