Sheep Guarding Llama

That’s right folks. Today’s post is the two thousandth post on SGL!

Jeremy is apparently shocked that SGL made it this far. This picture was taken in December of 1993 on the same day that my family made Christmas cookies for the holiday season. You can’t see it but Jeremy is sitting on a plastic 6×6 toy ATV that I used to have when I was little. This is taken in my parents’ living room on the farm. Behind him, if you look closely, you can see that the living room wall had photographs of our vacations in Maine mounted on it. This was the “in between” decorations between the original “Torero and Bull” painting and then later the Thomas Kinkade print.

I have to work today even though I am out of town at dad’s house so I was up around five this morning to check in with the office and to make sure that they didn’t need me for anything. They didn’t and I didn’t have to really work until seven as usual. So hopefully I will be back to my usual schedule, more or less, this week.

Emily emailed me last night to let me know that she is in town too. That is one of the really handy things about SGL – as long as I manage to keep it up to date people can find me when they need to. So we made plans to get some lunch today. I haven’t seen Emily in almost two years I think!

I worked until lunch time when Emily called and said that she couldn’t do lunch but could do dinner. So dad and I went over to Geneseo for lunch at the Omega Grill. Going through Geneseo is always a little weird because Dominica and I lived there for several years but it never quite felt like home. Nothing really does anymore.

After lunch we hit Wegmans for some quick supplies and then we went back to the house as I needed to get back to work. I managed to get a number of additional photos tagged and one uploaded today. I actually put the one that I uploaded today as the main picture for yesterday’s post (they really come out one day behind.) Within the first hour about nine people had looked at that photo!

I worked until around six thirty. Dad and I moved my old childhood dresser out of my old childhood bedroom and down to the barn so that the fireman can take it away for the fireman’s auction in Pavilion. That dresser has been in this bedroom since the house was built in 1982 and was with me in the old farm house as long as I can remember. In kindergarten I had gone on a field trip with my class from Pavilion Baptist School to the Buffalo Zoo and I can still remember buying a poster in the gift shop there. The poster was a picture of a tiger having bitten through a soccer ball and was captioned “I Don’t Like Losing”. I had attached that posted to the side of the dresser as it has fit perfectly into the recessed space on the side of it and dad finally removed that poster yesterday before we took it down to the barn. For twenty-six years that poster has hung there.

I took the Nikon D50 out and walked around the farm. I wanted to both test the old 50mm F1.8 lens that I have from the Nikon 5005 to see if it really wasn’t working like it should with the new camera and the decision was that it isn’t and I am not going to be keeping it. It doesn’t focus correctly and just isn’t useful to me even though it is a great piece of glass. The D50 just cannot reliably focus the 50mm lens. I then switched over to my modern Nikkor digital lens and took more pictures. Now that I have mapping and geotagging capabilities on Flickr it makes making reference photos of the farm very useful.

Emily called around eight and I drove down to Perry and picked her up at her parents’ house and we drove down to Warsaw and went to DiSalvo’s for some pizza.  Well, I got pizza and she got some French fries.  We had been hoping that we would have run into Mary at work but we were informed that Mary has Mondays and Tuesdays off.  So we drove out and tried Mary’s house but no one was home and she didn’t answer her phone.  So we gave up looking for Mary and just went over to the “new” Tim Horton’s in Warsaw and had coffee and hot chocolate and hung out there.  The Tim Horton’s actually opened in January of 2006 in Warsaw but it is new to us.

It was great to get some time to visit.  Emily and I haven’t seen each other since the summer of 2005 or so.  We would have to look up on SGL exactly when it was that we managed to see each other last but it has been some time.  She and Craig moved to Birmingham a year before Min and I moved to New Jersey and the combination of moves just kept us from ever seeing each other (or anyone else for the most part.)  Now she and Craig are in the process of moving out to Pensacola, Florida.

It was around eleven thirty when I got back to dad’s and went to bed.  Have to be working at seven tomorrow morning.

Even after going to bed so late last night I was still up at ten this morning. It’s a good thing too as my timesheet at work has to be signed by noon and I put it off until today and I could easily have slept through it. (Normally it is signed on Mondays but it is month end so that causes havoc.) I got up and took care of that straight away and then started getting ready to head north to dad’s house.

Dad sent me this picture of Dominica and I standing by my 2003 Mazda 6 Sport back from July 12, 2003 that I just got uploaded to Flickr today.  I am sad not to have that car anymore.  It was a great car.

It was about ten after one when I pulled out of Newark to hit the road home. I stopped at the Travel America at Exit 4 on Route 80 west to grab some burritos at Taco Bell and to fuel up. I grabbed a few cans of Rockstar energy drink and was on my way. I emailed dad to let him know where I was – having email on my Treo is really handy.

There was some rain today while I was driving. Of course there was. No matter when I drive back home it always rains while I am driving.

I made really good time and arrived at dad’s house around a quarter after six. Just five hours after having left even with having gotten gas and lunch on the road. Dad was just wrapping up The Wedding Singer which he had never seen before. After he was done with the movie we drove over to Geneseo to get some dinner at Denny’s and then we went to the cinema to watch Disney – Pixar’s highly acclaimed new film Ratatouille.

Ratatouille did in fact turn out to be a really good film. Very enjoyable and good for kids and adults. Very well done.

We were both pretty tired after the movie was over. I need to get some sleep as I am back to work as normal tomorrow so I need to be up fairly early.

Finally, it’s the weekend! Now begins my lonely week alone. Dominica and Oreo are gone so I am alone in the apartment. I don’t know if I have spent a single night alone since I lived alone in North Brunswick over a year ago. I don’t think that I have ever been alone here in Newark. I would be home alone all week but my plan is to drive up to dad’s tomorrow and to work out of his house Monday through Wednesday and only be in Newark by myself on Thursday and Friday. Dominica should be home on Saturday.

After having gone to bed so late last night I slept until noon today. My schedule is all messed up after this week and it is going to take some work to get it back towards something normal. I think, although I am not sure, that I lost of day of sleep in there somewhere although I seem to think that I have still gone to bed each night and gotten up each morning – but it doesn’t quite feel that way.

One of my goals today is to not even leave the apartment – at all.  I spent the afternoon watching Full House Season Four and I ordered in Chinese from Golden City although their last delivery of bean curd was spoiled and they have none so I just ordered sauteed snow peas which isn’t exactly the same when you are hoping for serious protein but what could I do?

Andy called and we ended up talking for five hours.  They killed the late afternoon and evening hours.  After we were off of the phone it was about time for me to move on to “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows”.  I was up to around page four hundred last night when I finished reading so that puts me just over halfway through the book at this point.  My goal is to finish the book tonight so that Dominica and I can talk about it tomorrow as I don’t think that anyone down in North Carolina will have finished reading it until tomorrow or the day after.

I ended up reading until five in the morning but I did finally finish the book.  At four in the morning I was emailing back and forth with the Surfing IT Wizard – he finished HP7 yesterday.  In between everything else I manage to geotag hundreds more images on Flickr.  What a huge job that is.  I am way over one thousand geotagged images now.

I got to bed at just before six in the morning.  I am hoping to be awake around ten so that I can pack and get on the road up to Peoria to see dad.

I had to be up at three again this morning. I am starting to be rather tired and getting up is tough but people really needed me to work this morning so there wasn’t any extra napping for me even though it is a Friday.

This mornnig Sheep Guarding Llama’s datacenter in Scranton had electrical maintenance done and the site was unavailable from 7:30 until about 11:20.

I worked all morning and babysat Oreo. I was home with him until around eleven and then I drove into the office. My office is being relocated today and I wanted to be in the office during the move to make sure that things went smoothly.

I managed to get in just before noon with just ten minutes to go before my workstation had to be powered down and packed up. It was quite a rush as I needed to log in and do some work and pack a few things before the last moment arrived.

Once the packing was done there really wasn’t anything to do. There was some “hotel” space so that a little work could be done but all of that was in use for emergencies so I just used my BlackBerry and Treo to keep up with what was going on and relaxed for a little bit waiting for lunch. Luckily having my Treo meant that I could surf the web, check my email and log into the admin server in Scranton to check up on the progress of the electric so I knew that things were coming back online.

Everyone at work was quite busy so I took the opportunity of having nothing at all to do and ran down to Beach Camera on Route 22 and bought myself a Nikon SpeedLight SB600 flash for my Nikon D50 dSLR. I have never owned a really nice flash before so I am really looking forward to trying it out. This is a really awesome flash unit and Beach had it for a really great price so I am extra happy. It was a big purchase but I have been working really hard this week and feel that I earned it.

I got back to the office just in time to be caught in a fire drill. (Everyone says that it was a real fire but the “drill” people were there making sure that people didn’t leave and they wouldn’t have been there all set up for a drill had it been a real fire.) It was very hot out today so I started sweating as I stood outside in the muggy heat. Since there was so much going on at the office (so much being a relative term as the real issue was lack of workstations) we decided to order in and eat at work. Lunch arrived during the drill so we had to walk across campus to another building (now I am really warm) and ate there.

Once lunch was done we walked back and got our cars and drove over to the new office building to check out the progress as it had now been a few hours and our workstations were expected to be back on any minute. I arrived just in time to be approaching the office door when that office had a fire drill! So more standing outside sweating.

We finally got up to our offices but apparently the moving crew had gotten caught by both fire drills and nothing was even close to being ready for us.  I was totally exhausted by this point between the long days, the early mornings and the hours outside in the heat.  I was ready to drop.  There wasn’t going to be a workstation set up for me until after the end of the day so I left for home around three thirty – which was over twelve hours into my day as it was.

I got home to my lonely apartment.  Dominica and Oreo had left around three and it was now four thirty.  Min won’t be back for over a week!  I was tired but not ready for bed yet.  I watched a little Full House and made myself some pistachio pudding.  I have discovered that now that I am an adult I actually like pudding (yes plain old Jello instant pudding) more now than I did as a kid.

I had to run out to meet Jeffrey tonight to help out with something.  On the way back I decided to stop at Food for Life and grab a sandwich (Tuna BLT Wrap.)  Before I could make it the fifty feet from the door of FFL to my front door TWO people managed to grab me and it took me a good thirty to forty minutes to finally make it home.  This is one thing that I hate about living in Newark – there are just so many people looking to talk to me or need me to do something that are always waiting just outside the doors of the apartment that I can never walk anywhere.  I literally order in food half of the time just because I don’t want to put up with the hassle of stepping outside.  People really don’t think about the fact that I have other things in my life that I have to do – like work, sleep or see my family.

I finally got back home and got to eat my now soggy wrap.  After eating I went back to reading “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.”  I read until after two in the morning and made it over five hundred pages through the book.  I hope to finish it tomorrow so that I can discuss the book with Dominica.  She has been waiting for someone to finish reading it as she is just dying to talk about it.

My alarm went off this morning at 2:45 am. This is going to take some getting used to for sure. Luckily no one was already looking for me today so I was up in plenty of time. In fact, I even got a chance to do some napping throughout the morning. I have mastered the art of the ten to fifteen minute nap. Somehow I am able to consistently do that and wake myself back up to work when I need to.

Today was not nearly as busy as yesterday was. That was awesome because I was pretty tired today. I can only get up this early for so long before it starts to take its toll on me and apparenlty my limit is about two days.

I got a chance throughout the day to get tons more images geotagged, cleaned up and scanned in to Flickr. I can’t believe how many photographs I keep discovering that have not been scanned in previously. I had thought that everything was in there until recently. Dominica and I also discovered hundreds of our wedding photos which were not developed until late December, 2003 which have never been digitized!

Today is Dominica’s last full day of work at her current job. Tomorrow she will be working a partial day and then leaving, with Oreo, for North Carolina’s Topsail Island. When she gets back in a week she will be starting at a new position with a new firm but still on the same corporate campus. So she is probably pretty excited today. Tomorrow Oreo will be staying home with me until I got to the office partway through the day and then Min will be picking him up early in the afternoon. She will be driving down to Virginia tomorrow night and then driving with her dad from there to Topsail on Saturday.

I worked another very long day today and did manage to squeeze in just a little housework. We watched some Full House and ordered in some Chinese from Golden City. It was a lazy night but I never really got to move away from my workstation.

At ten I went to bed and ready the latest Harry Potter while I waited for Dominica to finish packing so that we could turn off the lights and get a few winks. It was well after eleven before she was ready for bed. So much for getting four hours of sleep!

Mood: Exhausted

Weight Lost So Far: 30 lbs