Sheep Guarding Llama

I was up at eight this morning. I showered, dressed and packed before Dominica got up. She got up just after nine when I headed down car to pack up as much as I could. Dad was already in the lobby when I got down there with my luggage and we ran into my Aunt Gayle as we were heading out to the BMW to pack it up. I transfered the SunFire V100 over to dad and he gave me a pile of my mail to sort through. By the time that we got all of that done it was perfect timing for them to run over to Bob Evan’s and get in line for a seat while I went up to help Dominica and Oreo get out of the hotel and finish loading up the car.

Min and I got to Bob Evan’s just as dad and Aunt Gayle had been seated. Min has never eaten at a Bob Evan’s before which I found surprising but since we have been vegetarians (technically ovo-lacto-vegaquarian) their selection of food for us has declined sharply and since their specialty is sausage the draw isn’t that strong. They had a good selection of stuff for us today, though, and I wonder if their menu hasn’t changed a bit over the last few years to serve vegetarians better – especially the ovo-lacto-vegetarians who tend to be so fond of breakfast foods.

We had a really nice breakfast although it did take forever and a mix up with Dominica’s food meant that she didn’t get to eat with the rest of us. It was eleven thirty when Dominica and I piled into the BMW again and began the long journey back again across Pennsylvania on Interstate 80. It is depressing to have to drive about one hour through Ohio, the entire width (the long way) of Pennsylvania and the entire width (the short way) of New Jersey ending just a few miles short of New York! More than two states pass beneath our tires on the road home.

The weather was perfect for driving today. We had to stop for fuel twice and made a few “pit stops” once giving Oreo a nice long walk to stretch his legs. We then stopped again at the Panera Bread on PA 33 and got our dinner meal there (we skipped lunch.) We had to backtrack down PA33 and across on Interstate 78 across New Jersey because my Mazda PR5 was still parked at the office in Warren, NJ and we had to pick that up so that I would have it to drive to work tomorrow.

We got to Warren and went to pick up the PR5 and discovered that the front passenger tire was all but flat. Maybe 5 psi at best. 🙁 This is the same tire that was a little soft after we had returned from Montreal a couple week previous. Dominica followed me as I crept the car up the street to the gas station that I know has an air compressor and we filled up the tire there. The tire had so little pressure that it wouldn’t register on the gauge! We got it filled and drove it back to Newark with Dominica following me the whole way but the pressure appears to have held. I am going to need to get some flat tire goop to put into it. That will probably stop whatever slow leak is going on. I hope.

It was seven when we pulled into Eleven 80 in Newark. We were tired of driving but we weren’t “tired”. It is surprising that we were able to do fourteen hours of driving this weekend without having the horrible long trip “drowsies” that are normally such a problem but everything went very smoothly. Traveling during the normal day hours and getting earlier starts that usual helped a lot. This trip was long enough that we were planning ahead and being much more proactive than normal and taking more breaks to keep the blood flowing.

Dominica had to spend the remaining evening working on homework for her classes as Empire State. She is doing two two credit classes this semester and this is the first that she has had things to turn in. I worked on getting the second SunFire V100 prepped with its new hard drives so that I can get to work on it straight away. My hope (I always say this so take it with a grain of salt) is to have it built soon and maybe ready to take out to Scranton this week. Getting machines out of my house is a top priority – the house is filling up with them.

Dominica was very excited to learn that one of her classmates works on the KC-135R for the New York National Guard. Refueling airplanes is very cool. Another class mate works on the Hercules C-130 (my favourite propeller driven aircraft – if one can have a favourite of that sort of thing as a casual pedestrian – but, you know, if I was to win any prop driven aircraft of my choice in a lotto drawing this is the one that I would choose) and is living in Antarctica – right now while doing the class! That is pretty cool.

I spent most of the evening getting caught up on SGL. Believe it or not it really does take a while to write all of this stuff. Doing one entry per day isn’t bad but catching up for an entire weekend including Friday is a lot of work. But it has to be done. My public is waiting!

Tomorrow morning at eight thirty I have to return to Newark’s traffic court at 31 Green Street in room 108. This is my second trip to the court which didn’t need to happen had I been aware of the process last week. New York does things differently and it hadn’t occurred to me that New Jersey would have been willing to have wrapped up the entire thing on my first appearance. Oh well. At least now I know how it works and I know exactly what to do tomorrow and it is very low key. Last week was a little stressful just because there were a lot of unknowns. But tomorrow will be nothin’.

Next weekend Dominica and I are planning on staying put here in New Jersey. We have a baby shower to attend locally down near Edison, NJ on Friday night and will just be staying in Newark over the weekend (with a slight chance that I might need to leave for Toronto on Sunday but I doubt it as that has not been scheduled yet officially.)

I got paged out at ten thirty tonight.  I didn’t have to work for too long but it kept me up a little later than I had hoped.

Dominica and I were pretty sleepy this morning. I got up around nine thirty and had a pretty good lead on Dominica and Oreo who weren’t even thinking about waking up yet. I showered and dressed and went over to visit with dad for a while until Dominica was up and ready to get breakfast. It was about eleven when she and Oreo came out and we all went down the street to Luna’s in Alliance for breakfast. We originally tried to go to Bob Evan’s but the line was way too long and once we were there Dominica and I both remembered eating at Luna’s the last time that we were out in Ohio so we went down the street in search of it.

After breakfast we went over to my grandparents’ house in East Canton, OH. It was a little after one in the afternoon when we got over there. We just hung out there, the five of us, until four thirty when it was time to drive out to Hartville to meet the rest of the family for dinner. My oldest cousin, Gwen, is living upstairs with my grandparents these days. She and her boyfriend, Mike, stopped by momentarily to say hi but had to run out and run some errands before dinner. So it was a quiet afternoon.

At four thirty we bundled into two cars – Dominica and I always need to drive separately to make sure that Oreo has a comfortable car to sleep in where he won’t panic – and drove out to Hartville to eat at the Hartville Kitchen. For the past several years dad has been raving about the Hartville Kitchen but Dominica and I have not yet had a chance to eat there. Just last night Dominica had expressed that she really wanted to eat there and was hoping that we would get to today after I had discovered a brochure for the restaurant in the lobby of the Comfort Inn in Alliance.

Today we are celebrating, a bit belated, my grandparents’ sixtieth wedding anniversary.  They were married, July 4, 1947!  This weekend was the first opportunity for everyone to get together.  Dominica and my schedules, my dad’s schedule and my grandfather’s health have been major factors determining when we would be able to get together to celebrate but fortunately we were able to find something that worked for everyone without having to wait too long.

It didn’t take long for the rest of the family to arrive. Everyone made it from our immediate Myers family except for my youngest cousin Monica. Monica is the only one of my cousins (on either side) still in high school. I only have five cousins in total, two from the Miller side that both grew up and live in New York and three from the Myers side that all grew up and live in Ohio. All four of the other cousins are in college currently which technically, since I am doing my Master’s degree currently includes me and Dominica as well as the only spouse among the cousins who is currently working on her second Bachelor’s degree.  Monica just moved into her first apartment in the last two days or so.  Now all of the girls of my generation have moved out from home and all of the boys except for me are still living at home.  So she is busy dealing with her new home.

Dinner at the Hartville Kitchen was very good.  The Hartville Kitchen is a Mennonite restaurant specializing in “comfort foods” of the upper midwest.  Dominica had the broiled fish which she really loved and dad and I both got the “fish and shrimp” which is fried cod and shrimp.  You get a choice of three hearty sides with your meal making the “normal sized” main meal portions inconsequential as the side dishes generally equal far more volume than the meal proper.  The sides were excellent as was the shrimp.  The friend fish was fine but I would avoid it personally and go for the all shrimp meal next time myself.  The “Kitchen” doesn’t really have much for true vegetarians but for ovo-lacto–vegaquarians like Dominica and myself there was plenty for us to eat.

The Hartville Kitchen is also renowned for their dessert selection with twenty home made pies and more but we were having dessert at my aunt and uncle’s house later in the evening so we decided to skip the dessert for now although I am sure that Dominica and I will be back to sample it at another time.  After dinner Dominica wanted to explore the Vera Bradley collection at the “Kitchen’s” shops.  They had the largest Vera Bradley collection that Dominica has ever seen.  It is funny to find such a large collection in such an out of the way place here in a small agri-community nestled between Canton and Akron, Ohio.  While Dominica was shopping Gwen, Mike and I explored the candy shop and discovered that they had the freshest Jelly Belly Jelly Beans that we had ever tasted so we bought several pounds of them between us.

After we were finished at the Hartville Kitchen we all drove over to my Aunt Marlene and Uncle Don’s house in Louisville to visit for the evening.   Monica managed to join us there.  Gwen brought a game called Mad Gab which Min and I had never heard of before.  Mad Gabs is based on mondegreens which are mishearings of words or phrases as a homophone.  We managed to come up with two teams of four – the young team of Gwen, Mike, Molly and Brett versus the old team of Dominica, my Aunt Cheryl, my Aunt Gayle and me.  The old team won the first round, lost the second and game back to win the tie breaking third round.  Dominica and I quickly discovered the secret to the game – having just one team member read the mondegreen and have the others listen as most of the challenge of the game is created by the psychological impact of visually seeing the mondegreen.  Playing the game without having this visual stumbling block makes it much easier.  The game is a lot of fun.

We had dessert – cake, cheesecake, blueberry pie and, of course, elderberry pie.  Elderberry pie is a family specialty and one of my dad and my personal favourties.  My grandmother knows that I love elderberry and that I can only get it when she bakes it for me in Ohio.  Elderberries are not generally very popular in American culture although many people have contact with them as they are one of the main flavourings of the anise drink: Sambuca.  Here is a tip – elderberries should not be eaten raw as they contain cyanide.

Oreo had a great time at the party.  He ran all over the house playing with one person or another.  He was a little nervous being in a new place but for the most party he had a lot of fun and got a lot of exercise.

It was really great to get to see the family.  It is very seldom that we are all able to be together and my grandmother was really happy that all of her children, all of their children, all of the spouses and all of the significant others all made it for the anniversary party.

Dominica and I were tired and went back to the hotel a little after eleven.  We just can’t keep up with these party animals anymore.

It’s Friday! I get to sleep in on Fridays (sleep in until seven in the morning!) I had to get up right at seven so that I could pack up the SunFire V100 and load it along with all of our luggage and my CPAP into the BMW so that Dominica and Oreo can leave from work in Nutley and come straight out to Warren to pick me up after work tonight. We are driving to Alliance, Ohio immediately from work tonight. To save time, perhaps hours, Dominica and Oreo are meeting me at my office in Warren and we are leaving the Mazda here over the weekend. Leaving the moment that I wrap up with work here saves all of the time of my drive back to Newark, packing the car after I arrive and all of the time pretty much driving right back past the office again. We might shave as much as two hours off of the trip compared to not meeting me at the office!

I got the car all packed and saw Min off to work. Then I had to get ready for work myself and do a little cleaning around the apartment like making sure that the trash was all taken out before leaving the house for a few days.

Dad called from Ohio to let us know that he had arrived in Alliance and had checked into the hotel there.  He got room 409 (sixties surf music plays in my head) and set us up to have the room across the hall.

Work was slow as it often is on Fridays.  Dominica left work at five and did her best to get out to Warren as quickly as she could.  No travel from Nutley to Warren can be done quickly during rush hour on a Friday evening, however, and it took her about an hour and a half to make it to Warren.  That time includes picking Oreo up from daycare, of course.

I was actually done with work a bit before Dominica arrived to meet me at work and I was walking from the office to the road to make things quicker when she drove up the office driveway to get me.  It was about a quarter to seven in the evening when we headed out from Warren towards Alliance, Ohio.

Dominica drove the first stretch starting from Nutley to Wallington to Warren and then west on interstate 78 out to PA33.  We took PA33 the one mile north to the first exit at Freemansburg Avenue where we got off and stopped at the Panera Bread to get some dinner.  Dinner was delicious.  We really wish that we could have a Panera Bread near us in Newark.  They have great coffee, interesting food, vegetarian selections and free WiFi.  We used to have one across the highway from us when we lived in North Brunswick, New Jersey and we did use it occasionally but being on the other side of Route 1 from us made it too difficult to get to to use casually like we would have liked.

We switched drivers and continued on our way after about forty-five minutes at Panera Bread.  So far we have managed to make good time and our only real delays occurred prior to Dominica picking me up from work.  Traffic is light and moving briskly.

The trip westward on Interstate 80 went very quickly considering just how long and boring it really is.  Traffic moved very quickly.  At one point we had to deal with a severly drunk driver who attempted to push us and probably a dozen other vehicles off of the road.  We called him in to the state troopers and did our best to get information for them and to watch him as long as we could.  He caught on and started driving extremely slowly to make sure that we would have to pass him and leave him far behind.  Hopefully he didn’t kill anyone but the chances are quite good that someone was hurt by him.  I tried searching the news for Pennsylvania but it is difficult to discover something like that when it could have happened over an area that is quite large.

It was two in the morning when Dominica and I rolled into Alliance, Ohio and checked in to the Comfort Inn there in the Carnation Mall.  It took us probably half an hour or more before we were all moved in to the hotel room and were settling in to get some sleep.  We have stayed at this Comfort Inn before and we like it a lot.  This time we are staying for free on my preferred customer points.  The Alliance Comfort Inn takes pets so Oreo is able to stay with us.  We got room 408 – right across the hall from where dad is staying.

I keep feeling the need to write the word canceled as “cancelled” and I keep seeing other people do it too. So I decided to do some research. It caught me by surprise because my automatic spell checked keeps telling me that it is “canceled” even though my finger instinctively spell it with the double L. So I looked it up and it turns out that both are correct. The single L is the correct British and Canadian spelling while the double L is the correct American spelling. Now you know and knowing is half the battle.

I was tired this morning and didn’t wake up on my own when my phone’s battery died and my alarm didn’t go off. No big deal but it kept me from getting into the office as early as I would have hoped. Really, the biggest issue was hitting rush hour instead of sneaking in before there was any traffic to deal with.

Uneventful day at the office. I did some more classes from the HP Learning Center. Because I didn’t make it in early this morning I worked a normal day today instead of getting to leave early. It was around five thirty when I headed out for home.

I got to Newark just in time to walk in the door to the phone ringing from Andy. He and I talked for about fifteen minutes and then my cell phone rang with the office needing some work to be completed. Dominica and I were already running late for meeting Susan for dinner so I had to rush.

We weren’t too late when we finally rushed out the door. We walked briskly over to Halsey Street and up to 27 Mix where we were meeting Susan. Neither Dominica nor I have been to 27 Mix yet even though it is widely known as one of the hottest eateries in downtown Newark. How we have avoided it all this time we have no idea.

27 Mix was awesome.  Not too expensive and the food was really amazing.  We sat outside on the back patio where a live jazz ensemble played most of the evening.  We haven’t seen Susan in months – maybe even six months – so it was nice to get a chance to do some catching up.

Some of the gang from Eleven 80 stalked followed “showed up” at 27 Mix and grabbed a table diagonal from us.  Several more people from Eleven 80 also ended up sitting at a table roughly between us so we had a total of ten people at 27 Mix all from Eleven 80 to one degree or another.

Dinner was excellent and we walked back home around nine in the evening.  Susan has a new office now in a much nicer building on Military Park which has moved her about two-thirds of the distance from her old office to Eleven 80.  She is now working just one building away from us.  Only the PSE&G fountain separates her office door from our apartment door!

We got back to the apartment and Dominica had a bunch of laundry and packing work to do before she could go to bed.  So she set straight away to working on that.  I had a surprise earlier in the day when I came home discovering that NewEgg had delivered my new hard drives overnight (I ordered them yesterday, did not expedite shipping and did the low cost three day UPS Ground shipping and they arrived in about twenty hours!)  Since the new hard drives were here it only made sense for me to stay up late and get one of the SunFire V100 servers built tonight so that it could be packed and shipped out to Ohio with us tomorrow so that dad can drive it back home with him since it is his house that it is going to.

I set right off installing the new Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 160GB 8MB UltraATA 100 drives into the V100.  These are the first generation of drives using Seagate’s perpendicular drive technology.  I got them installed and fortunately after having worked on these V100s so much over the past two weeks I was very familiar with everything that was needed to get the installation kicked right off.  I had to download the latest image of Solaris 10 from SUN (version 8/7) but that only took about five minutes.

The entire build process went surprisingly smoothly.  Once the operating system was installed (I just went for the “Core” system which is extremely small and then went for the “locked down” networking option which installed just about nothing) I had to figure out how to get SSH installed so that I could actually use the server.  That took a little while and getting the new Solaris 10 services set up and working took a little bit but it wasn’t too bad.

By the time that everything was said and done it was about one o’clock in the morning.  Pretty late considering I need to be up for work in the morning but I am very happy as to the state of the server and I am relatively confident that it can be taken to dad’s house, plugged in and powered on and that it will be accessible right away.  Hopefully.  Fingers crossed.