Sheep Guarding Llama

The alarm went off at a quarter after five this morning and since I am not officially assigned to the early morning shift I laid in bed contemplating the option of going back to sleep and getting up after Dominica was leaving for work. But I was fairly wide awake so I decided that I should bite the bullet and just get on up out of bed.

Before leaving for work this morning I finished reading the “No Fluff, Just Stuff Anthology 2006” and sorted through a stack of back mail that needed to be dealt with. Then it was off to the office.

It was a busy morning considering that it is a Monday. I was quite busy all morning dealing with emails, phone calls, etc. I did some additional bill paying and got some important mail ready that needed to go out today as well. Answered emails, got caught up from the weekend.

At six minutes after ten this morning the torrential rainfall hit where I was in Warren, New Jersey. It was surprising how quickly we went from moderate overcast skies to the roar of pounding rain that was very obvious even within the large industrial structure that I work in.

I have to include a link to Dominica’s coworker’s dog Dudley’s website.

I was very sad to learn that one of my all time favourite authors, Madeleine L’Engle, has died at age 88.  When I was younger I read almost all of her novels including the “Time Quintet”, “O’Keeffe” and the “Austin” series.

We had dinner with a friend who was recently a neighbour but has now moved into the cooler Ironbound section of town.  She just happened to be at the front desk when Dominica and I were heading out for dinner at Food for Life.  (If you want to eat with us apparently this is the process for that – just wait around the front desk until you see us come by.)

I completed by first weeks’ Java homework for my class at RIT.  It feels good to have homework done several days early.  I plan on submitting the homework tomorrow.

Dominica and I watched an episode of Heroes together.  Then I talked to Andy for a while while Dominica watched another episode.  Then she read some for her classes at Empire State.  Then we were off to bed.  It was an early night for us.

I actually got some sleep last night. We made Dexter sleep with Dominica’s parents so that we could get some actually sleep down in the living room with Oreo. That worked much better and we both got solid night’s sleeps which we desperately needed before driving back down to Newark today.

Dominica watched the rest of Man of the Year this morning which I thought was incredibly weak and silly. Not bad like you should turn it off if you have already started but I wouldn’t intentionally spend time watching it. The core plot device of the entire movie wasn’t even double checked by a continuity expert and it doesn’t make any sense in the story line unless you are casually watching the movie and not paying any attention. (The movie revolves around a faulty electronic voting system that is shown in the movie to not fail in the way that it is verbally described making the resulting “bad election results” not make sense to someone who is actually watching the movie and not just running it in the background.)

We packed up and showered and got ready to go.  I spent an hour or so standing in the rain talking on the phone to Andy while Dominica watched the MTV movie Aeon Flux which, from the little bit that I saw, didn’t look to be too engrossing.

Around four Dominica and I and her parents went out to the Denny’s in Herkimer to have dinner before we hit the road home.  Like most days when I am driving, it is raining today.  It had been raining most of the night and all day so far.  At least the continuous rain has brought a break to the heat wave that we had been dealing with the last few days.

It was getting close to five thirty when we finally left Herkimer.  On the drive east on i90 the rain got harder and harder until we were creeping along at 25 mph and scores of cars were pulled over just sitting on the side of the highway waiting for the torrent to subside.  We pressed onward but I was very tired and needed some coffee so we called Joe (who lives in Albany) and got directions to the Crossgates Mall where we hit the Borders there around six thirty.  We did some quick shopping and bought a couple of books (“Java Phrasebook” and “Manage It!“) and some Garrison Keillor books on Audio CD to help keep us awake in the car.  We both got Seattle’s Best Maple White Mocha coffees from the Seattle’s Best shop inside of Borders.  We left just as they were closing hitting the road at seven.

Our trip south was both rain free and very smooth.  It took just ninety minutes to go from Crossgates mall (which is one exit to the north of the i90 / i87 interchange) to the NYC Thruway toll booths which is just amazing.  In another half an hour we were starting to look for i280 outside of Newark.  We have never made such good time going home before.  We were home around nine thirty!

We just relaxed for the little bit of time that we had before it was time to go to bed.  Back to work tomorrow.  We were in bed around eleven.

Dominica and I got just about no sleep last night. It was after one when we finally got a chance to lay down and attempt some sleep so that was working against us from the beginning but additionally Dexter spent the entire night either licking our feet, whining, whimpering, jumping on us or chasing Oreo around so that we never managed to get any real rest. In all we had to take the two dogs out at least four times during the night which only lasted about six hours in total anyway. By seven in the morning it wasn’t even worth attempting trying to get back to sleep.

Dominica and I were both really exhausted and it was a slow morning trying to get moving. We visited and for lunch got a pizza from Sulley’s (now known as Big Willey’s) which is one of my favourite “Western New York” style pizzas anywhere. I really look forward to it whenever we come to Frankfort.

For most of the afternoon we watched some TLC – mostly home selling / buying shows that I have never seen before and some shows about fixing up houses and what not to wear and stuff like that. We only really see television when we are in Frankfort or in hotels.

For dinner we all went out to the Kitlas in Utica. The Kitlas has some of the best food around and we always look forward to getting to eat there and Dominica’s parents like to have us around as an excuse to get to go again as they go pretty often as it is.

We went out to Dave’s to get ice cream as it was very warm still today and the perfect weather for going out for ice cream.

When we returned to the house we got Hot Fuzz on demand from Time Warner in HD (although Time Warner HD doesn’t look nearly as good as a normal DVD so I don’t know how they get away with calling it HD.)  That is a really funny movie from the team (and the set) of Shaun of the Dead which was also and excellent film.  Hot Fuzz is an excellent blend of hilarity and action.

After Hot Fuzz we watched Ghost Rider that Dominica has been wanting to see.  We had some popcorn made in the Tocco’s “new” commercial popcorn popper.  That was some good popcorn.

Tomorrow we will be heading back down to Newark.  Probably around noonish if possible.

The other day at dinner we were talking about Centralia, Pennsylvania which, 1962, accidentally lit its underground coal deposits on fire. The fire has been burning there for forty-five years now and there is no sign of it stopping. In fact, the neighbouring town of Ashland is being threatened by the fire now. You can learn more about the town’s early history on Wikipedia. For example, this is the town that Bill Bryson spoke about in his book “A Walk in the Woods” – which both Dominica and I have read and neither of us recalled this story when it was mentioned – and it is the town on which the Dan Aykroyd classic Nothing But Trouble is based upon.

Other relevant sites about Centralia, PA and its ongoing fire include CentraliaPA.com, Damn Interesting, Roadside America, PA Highways, Washington Posts’s Article “Zip Code 00000″, Odd Things I’ve Seen, Gribble Nation, Fogonazos, Abandoned but Not Forgotten, RV With Us, BlogCritics, Encyclopedia of Earth, and many more. In addition to traditional articles and blog posts there is some nice media to check out such as Centralia: A Modern Day Ghost Town and Footage from the Real Silent Hill on YouTube. A quick search on Flickr turns up a wealth of images as well.

Today is my last day of my early week. I am pretty tired today – it adds up over the course of the week. But the weather is nice today. Back home dad says that it hit 94F in Rochester yesterday and it might be as hot today! Nothing like that here.

Fridays are almost always slow in the office until the late afternoon rolls around. I am happy to have RSSOwl installed now as it has given me a chance to get caught back up on my favourite feeds like the Dilbert Blog, Wil Wheaton in Exhile and Little Yellow Different.

Oreo, our little Boston Terrier, got used (his likeness) on DCist’s birthday page! And one of my honeymoon pictures from Halifax got used on a blog post about a cruise ship coming to Halifax.

I also missed when Oreo was featured for a second time on The Bostonist. They originally used his photo in an article about the Menu Foods pet food recall. They ran a second article about him a little later. They had asked permission to do an article on him but I was unaware that they had. But today I found it.

I ate lunch in the office today and, as often happens, was racked by horrible mid-afternoon drowsiness. I just can’t handle eating a lunch without feeling awful all afternoon. It is all that I can do to keep myself awake.

I decided that I needed to leave work on the early side because my evening work was beginning to pile up and it would be best to get the commute home out of the way prior to all of that work or else the evening would drag on forever. And it is a perfect use of my useless mid-afternoon drowsy period to get my driving over and done with for the day (for some reason the drowsiness keeps me from functioning in a technical role but doesn’t seem to affect my driving even though it used to be the opposite about ten years ago.)

So around three thirty I drove back to Newark and hopped back onto my desktop as soon as I arrived. It is a good thing that I did drive home early as my evening work, which was supposed to be done before six, ended up stretching out until eight o’clock! What a long day.

Dominica got home from work at six and spent her time packing so that we would be ready to leave as soon as my office work was completed. We left as quickly as we could and saved dinner for the Patterson, New York Thruway rest stop which has a Nathan’s Original because Dominica is totally in love with their crinkle cut French fries. I think that their fish sandwich is pretty good so we have started eating there now when we are traveling up i87 to Albany.

We made really good time on our drive, thankfully. We drove the Mazda PR5 as we are trying to put miles onto it as quickly as possible as our concern is that the vehicle will most likely rust before it has significant powertrain issues. That and we would like to sell it as soon as possible so the more we drive it before we sell it then the less we can ask for it and the easier it will be to sell. I am going to be working out of Manhattan starting quite soon and once I am working there we will no longer have a need for the PR5 and we would like to save the insurance and parking costs which are roughly $2,500 a year. When we need it, we have the 1988 Mazda RX7 convertible that we can break out of storage and put onto the road should it become necessary.

It was just before midnight when we pulled into Frankfort. We were quite tired but stayed up for about an hour visiting before setting up the futon mattress on the living room floor and attempting to get some sleep. Our first night here is always tough because Dexter is always so excited that we are there that he really doesn’t let us sleep at all.