Sheep Guarding Llama

I was pretty tired this morning pulling myself out of bed. Must be all of that crazy bowling exercise that I got last night (eight frames!!)

This morning I did a little research on the Nikon 5005 Single Lens Reflex 35mm camera that I used extensively from the mid-1990s until switching to digital with my Nikon D50 not too long ago. I was extremely surprised to find that currently Wikipedia does not have any entry for this camera and performing a Google search on it produced a link to MY photographs on the very first page!

Aunt Sharon was doing some digging today and came across some postcards sent to my grandparents, Mahlon and Euphemia Miller, back when they lived in New Jersey. The postcards were originally sent to them at Marlboro State Hospital in Marlboro, NJ. I did some research online and almost immediately found an article talking about the Mennonite Conscientious Observers who worked at Marlboro State Hospital during World War II which is why my grandfather was there.

Under the category of big coincidences: In the past Dominica and I have discussed the question of what is the actual name of Disney-MGM Studios. It is clear that it’s name is Disney-MGM Studios but I was sure that I had seen it changed to The Disney Studios and was convinced that it must have been changed and some point and then changed back. So after months of wondering but never bothering to look it up today I did and discovered that the name has always been Disney-MGM Studios but that Disney does not have the complete rights to that name and so cannot refer to the studio by name in some contexts forcing them to use the pseudonym The Disney Studios in order to refer to it. To make matters more complicated (and here comes the big coincidence) just this morning Disney president Meg Crofton announced that in January, 2008 the name will be changing to Disney’s Hollywood Studios.

Tonight is packing night. All I have enough time for is packing and getting ready to go.  I had plenty to do tonight like shaving my head (I was getting pretty ragged,) getting my laptop and portable devices together, packing, etc.  I talked to Andy for about an hour making plans for meeting at the airport and whatnot.  It is supposed to be raining in Newark tomorrow which could be awful as Newark is the most delayed airport in the country.  They close and bright, clear days because of the weather.  With rain, anything could happen.

Tomorrow is the final weigh in for the weight loss contest at the office.  My last food was yesterday evening and I am pretty hungry tonight.  But as of tomorrow I can eat again. I just have to remember that.

Weight Lost So Far: 32 lbs

I had no idea that it would be raining when I woke up this morning but it sure was. Thunder, lightning and torrential rain. This seems to be the thing here in Newark. Maybe this is just a very rainy year but I have never lived anyplace that rains like this. And it doesn’t even rain for that long just tons of water in short bursts.

It took me almost two hours just to find a way to leave Newark. I tried going south, my usual way out of the city, and that was useless. Cars were underwater that had tried to make a run for it earlier. Traffic was insane all over the city because the city was doing nothing to inform people what routes were closed so thousands of vehicles were lined up trying to get out of the city through all the main routes – each one blocked by flowing water.

It was after eight when I finally got into the office. What a long drive that was. I drove all over Newark and its suburbs trying to find a way out. This experience really shows me just how easily Newark could become a death trap should any disaster were ever to occur there. There is not an adequate means of leaving the city at all.

Dominica’s trip into the office in Nutley was better but only barely. She had to get Oreo to daycare which went okay but then working her way to her office was much worse and while on her way there she blew a tire – the same tire that had blown several weeks ago when the Ralstons were down visiting us. Luckily it was very close to work and she was able to make it there.

BMW Roadside Assistance was out very quickly and got the donut on the car for her. This has been one crazy first week of work for her. First her tooth emergency on Monday. Now this. Forty percent of the week still to go! Who knows what is going to go wrong yet this week.

Having not had Internet access from home for the past five days has really put me on edge. It’s a feeling of extreme impotence. At least it is back on now. I was discussing with someone today how that is a form of technostress resulting from a lack of infrastructure stability.

I got my flight booked for this weekend trip to Georgia and South Carolina. I am flying out of Newark – Liberty at 7:43 pm on AirTran Flight 579 which will get me into Atlanta at 10:20pm which is just twenty-five minutes after Andy is due to arrive there which is just about perfect timing. Although his flight is more likely to be piloted by Mad Dog and might arrive ahead of schedule. We are going to rent a car down there as it is pretty much a necessity to get around at all. I am looking forward to the grits in Anderson! It’s been quite a while since I have been down there.

My weight loss competition is wrapping up (for me) on Friday morning which is going to be perfect. I can have fun and enjoy South Carolina! What is there to do there but eat anyway? Grits. Breakfast all day. Yeah, baby.

I have eight hours between the time that my flight arrives from Atlanta until I have to be back on a plane for Toronto on Monday morning. I am going to have to play it by ear to see what the travel time is on the airtrain to see whether or not I get to take a nap or not before flying out in the morning. But I will probably get to sleep in the airport in Atlanta and on the plane so I should be in pretty good shape overall.

I got home around five. I am beginning to realize that I get home but am just lonely waiting for Dominica to get home. I checked all my mail and everything else. I hopped onto Choice Hotels and made reservations for Anderson. I can never get over how cheap it is to stay down there. I always go “expensive” and stay at the very nice Comfort Suites and still it’s like $86 or less! And for two of us in a suite that is really cheap. The only thing that I need to deal with yet is a rental car. But that is easy.

Min and Oreo got home at a quarter after six. Today is Dominica’s first time coming home from the office without going shopping first so this is our gauge of how long it takes her to get home.

I wanted to eat on the early side as my weight loss contest is done on Friday morning so I am trying to gauge my eating for it now. We were both pretty hungry but Min wasn’t prepared to walk to Food for Life because her feet were covered in blisters from having to do so much walking at work today. So we ordered in some Chinese from Golden City and put in Buck Rogers.

I talked to Eric tonight. He and Amanda just bought a Nikon D40 DSLR camera which is almost identical to my D50. He has always been interested in photography and went with me on the picture taking hike into the Allegheny National Forest in 1994.

Andy and I talked for a little while tonight. He had called me to talk to me about something but we never got around to that as there is so much going on in my life right now. But whatever it is I’m sure that we will have plenty of time to discuss it on the drive from Atlanta to Anderson. Unless, of course, it was something about getting to Atlanta in which case we probably needed to have talked about it tonight. Hmm…

Some friends (and neighbours) called us around eight to see if we wanted to hang out for a little while tonight down in the bowling alley. We almost never get out so it was a fun excursion. The only downside was that Min’s feet are really bad from the blisters that she got today at work so she had to just sit and watch while we bowled. I can’t really bowl because of my carpal tunnel syndrome so I did the “between the legs” bowling method which actually worked as well or better than my regular bowling used to be. We only managed to bowl eight frames because the 1180 bowling alley can almost never function for an entire set of ten frames without breaking. Several of the lanes don’t work at all and those that do only work sporadically. It is sad when a lightly used, private, brand new bowling alley can’t be made to work at all.

So we had a good evening and went back to the apartment around ten thirty and headed for bed. We both have to be up early tomorrow.

Weight Lost So Far: 32 lbs

Recently I was asked to join the Kodak Disc Photo Pool on Flickr because of my images taken using a classic Kodak Disc film camera in the 1980s. I am the most prolific photographer in the pool. It is neat to see pictures taken by other people using that silly camera.

I actually have several pictures that were originally taken on disc film when I was quite young of which I am very proud. There is a certain quality to the pictures. Disc pictures have a tendency to look much older than they actually are because of the under-exposure and extreme graininess. But many of the images turned out very well. In fact the overall results were surprisingly good.

This particular image is of a NASA commissioned Northrop M2-F3 that hangs in the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.

I barely got any sleep last night. We went to bed on the early side but Oreo was very restless and kept waking me up throughout the night. So at no point did I get a chance to get a full sleep cycle in.

I am on the early shift this week so I was awake at five thirty and into the office just after six thirty. At least the drive in was uneventful other than needing to fill up on petrol. The car needs to go into the shop though. It topped one hundred thousand miles this past week and is showing its age. The gas tank appears to be beginning to leak and that has to be dealt with right away. And one of the headlights is out – again. This must be the tenth of so new headlight that we will be putting into this particular vehicle! And the car is starting to start pretty hard on hot and humid days.

I accidentally left my cell phone at the apartment today which is awful as today just is not a day when I can live without it. So my plan is to run back to the apartment over lunch and to pick it up then. Not exactly what I needed today but it will prove to give me a break from the office as I don’t normally take a lunch and since I am tired and have an interview this afternoon it might be good for me even though it is a tremendous pain.

Dominica starts her new job today. Officially she started yesterday but, as you know, that didn’t happen so today is her first day into the office and I am sure that they are extremely glad to see that she has arrived and will be able to talk on the phone just fine. Yesterday there was some fear that she would have some problems talking or would be heavily medicated and useless for troubleshooting. But, as it is, she is just on heavy ibuprofen and is fully functional.

This morning proved to be exceptionally slow at the office. My phone only range once on the entire early shift and I only received a single email! It feels like the Monday that I didn’t get to have yesterday. I needed that.

Dominica was finally able to email me to let me know that she was in the office and had gotten access to her email around ten in the morning. I am sure that it is going to be a very busy day for her.

I ran home during my lunch “break” and cleaned the apartment and got my cell phone just so that I would be able to answer it when Cablevision called about coming to fix my Internet access.  I shouldn’t need it at all because the concierge will orchestrate everything and have a porter let the technician into the apartment but just in case I figured that I should have it.  At least while I was home I was able to whip myself up a protein shake to get me through the day.

I got back to work just in time to spend the rest of my day filling out McDonaldsesque application paperwork for an internal interview.  It was embarassing to say the least (I was embarassed for them for being a fast-food-esque HR manager.)  The interview ended up going very badly and I am far less interested in the position than I was going in.  My real concern is with the company’s lack of perceived value in human assets.  They don’t seem to think very highly of their employees.  Like they are a low value commodity that they can just replace whenever they need – much like McDonald’s does.  Not the kind of environment to foster and happy career.

So I am feeling glum.  I was hopeful going in that this would be really positive but now I am concerned about the viability of the entire idea.  Originally the idea was that I would take the position if the offer was good enough but now I don’t feel that that decision is necessarily a smart one. I forgot what it is like to be an “employee” and how awful that can be.  How depressing to have your own performance not be a factor in your success or compensation.  To just be a commodity expected to be grateful for the opportunity to work.  😛

I got home just in time to deal with the Cablevision Internet access repair.  I could whine about all of the problems that I had with that as Cablevision had voluntarily turned off our Internet last week as a prank, I am told, internally to cause a tech to have to come out to our building but I just don’t have the energy.  So Cablevision is just getting a 😛 as well.  At least my Internet access is back on.

Dominica did some grocery shopping on her way home.  She was not super impressed with her first day of work today so she wasn’t all chipper either.  We were both feeling blue so we decided to just order in a pizza and eat some instant pudding.  We watched some Buck Rogers and decided to just call it a night.

Dominica and I did not get to sleep in this morning as we had to be up and moving to get her to her dentist appointment first thing in the morning. She was scheduled to be the first appointment at the office so we had to be moving very early.

I needed to get some work done online before we could leave because I wanted to have some stuff downloaded to my laptop for while I was stuck in the waiting room at the dentist’s office. So I went down to the lobby and set up my laptop at the desk and did some quick online work. It is a good thing that I have a wireless laptop!

Luckily it wasn’t too hot out this morning and it was overcast and expected to rain so we were able to pack up Oreo and bring him with us. That saved us a bit of time and made him a lot happier.

We were able to get right in just after nine o’clock. I went next door to the little cafe there and got myself some coffee while Oreo hung out in the car. It was a good area of Kearny with plenty of parking which made the whole trip much easier.

I had managed to have gotten the stuff that I needed downloaded and I was totally productive while I was waiting at the dentist’s office. I really had needed to have gotten that work done so I was very relived when it was completed.

Min’s appointment went very quickly and she was done in under forty-five minutes. I didn’t even have a chance to finish drinking my coffee! But it was just the preliminary appointment. She needs to have a root canal done and they can’t schedule her until two this afternoon and she figured that that would be better than just sitting in the office for four hours hoping to be squeezed in since we live so close – just fifteen minutes away.

So at ten we drove back to 1180 and dropped off Oreo. Then we walked over to Food for Life just as it was beginning to rain to get ourselves some breakfast. I am supposed to be on an all liquid diet this week but too much has been going on and I need the break. Dominica got pancakes as they are soft and easy to chew and I got the AM Burrito. The rain really came down while we were eating but it was over before returned to the apartment.

Dominica watched Bones and I went down to the 1180 lounge (aka “The Living Room”) so that I could hop onto the Spot On Wireless network there and get some work done. I managed to work for around two hours from the lounge and not be totally useless today. It was perfect timing as I was able to work during the time period when most of my office takes their lunch so I was able to help cover the time when there weren’t very many people in the office making me actually useful.

At one thirty it was time to back up Dominica and Oreo and to get back to Kearny for Min’s root canal. The whole thing ended up going extremely quickly and took only forty-five minutes from the time that we arrived until the procedure was completed. While Min was having the work done I took Oreo on a half hour walk through Kearny where we both got very overheated and we were sitting in the car with the air conditioning blasting when Min surprised us by calling to say that she was all done!

Dominica said that the root canal went very well and quickly and that she had almost no pain at all. She has several more appointments that she is going to have to go back for but this was the big one and everything else is very simple and she won’t need me to be there for them which is good as I am going to be out of town for almost a week coming up here at the end of this week and it would be a real problem if I needed to take her back.

So it was just after three when we got back to 1180 for what we hoped would be the final trip of the day. Dominica settled back into the living room recliner to watch more Bones and I headed down to the second floor conference room to set up and really get some work done. It is really handy having an office and conference room down there with no one ever interested in using them.

It was hours before I saw anyone at all down there and even then it was some people who were working in the building and not residents looking to use the space! I am amazed at how little usage so many of the amenities get in a place like this.

By the time that the end of the day was rolling around I was very near exhausted. In addition to everything else that was going on today I have a throat / neck problem that seems to be gland related – most likely an allergic reaction to something that I ate today but I can’t be sure. It really affects me when I swallow anything.

Tomorrow morning I am on the early shift for real. I was supposed to be on it today but called one of my teammates yesterday to have him cover for me today. It is going to be a long week. And after going in early tomorrow I am only hoping that there will working Internet access when I return to Newark as Cablevision is scheduled to be there sometime after two or so in the afternoon although when I go to my account online it says that no maintenance is scheduled. Argh!

So, to say the least, today turned out to be an extremely interesting first day on the job for Dominica.  For those of you who do not follow along closely: today was the first day of Min’s new job up in Nutley.  Her last position wrapped up a week ago, she took a week off in between the two jobs to vacation with her family on Topsail Island, North Carolina and today she was expected to be starting at her new position!  The big upside to all of this is that her new job, which started today remember, has dental insurance!  We don’t know how that will work yet but that could be a big time money saver for us.

I worked down in the conference room until seven and decided to call it a night.  I can’t get online from the apartment so I am going to post early.  Hopefully being back in the office tomorrow I will have a chance to post more regularly.  Tomorrow is going to be crazy between doing the early shift, having a very critical two-thirty meeting just before I leave for the day and then coming home to deal with the Internet access again.

Weight Lost So Far: 31 pounds

Today turned out to be toothache day for Dominica. And yet another day without any Internet access for us. We are really beginning to appreciate the Treo with web access from Verizon because at least we can continue to check email and get online for really basic things when we really need to. Andy and I were even able to do a little bit of work today over it – but not very much.

Dominica’s tooth is feeling much worse today and she is in some considerable pain. She discovered that the only thing that really keeps the pain at bay is keeping cold water directly on the tooth but to keep this up she is consuming water at a rate of approximately one ounce per minute which is 60 fluid ounces or about 1.75 litres per hour! That means that she is not that much shy of a gallon every two hours which is faster than your body can maintain essential electrolyte levels if sustained. So we were forced to find another solution.

I ran out to Walmart and bought some topical tooth ache gel and got some regular medicine as recommended by Dominica’s brother Joe the pharmacist. We tried that but quickly found that it did little or not good and that the water was the only thing that was making any difference. While I was at Walmart I did find the complete Buck Rogers in the Twenty Fifth Century and the first part of the first season of The Fall Guy on DVD. Good, classic stuff.

Eventually we decided that the pain had gotten so bad that there was nothing to do but to attempt to get her in to see a weekend dentist. We tried finding one in Newark but had no luck on our own. So we eventually called 1-800-DENTIST which found us a dentist in Kearny, New Jersey. The dentist in Kearny was out of town and unable to see us today but prescribed some medicine for Min to deal with the pain and some anti-bacterial medication just in case there was an infection.

So I drove out to Walgreen’s in the Ironbound and picked up Dominica’s medications from the very nice twenty-four hour pharmacy there. I also got us more water as Min had depleted our supplies very quickly, some ice cream, bread and other basics.

We spent the evening watching either Buck Rogers which both of us used to watch when we were very young and brings back so many memories or Bones which Dominica had purchased while on vacation.

Dominica is scheduled to see her dentist at nine tomorrow morning.  We will know more then as to what is going on.  Hopefully with the medications that she has now she will be able to sleep some tonight.  That alone will help a lot.