Sheep Guarding Llama

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

I didn’t have too bad of a time getting up when my alarm went off at three o’clock this morning but it sure did feel early. Today begins both my extreme early shifts as well as my working from home. The plan is that I am now working from home indefinitely. Originally it was going to start on Monday but since I am doing these extreme early mornings we moved it forward so that I could actually handle getting up so early.

I worked until just after seven when I had to take the BMW up to Spring Valley in New York to get it inspected. The drive took just about an hour even in heavy traffic which wasn’t so bad. I got up to the dealer and waited there while they took a look at the car. The inspection went fine but they noticed that the front bumper had pulled away from the frame (bumper cover – the safety portion of the bumper is just fine this is an aesthetic thing) and a few of the clips are broken. I didn’t have time to have that taken care of today as I am waiting for the car and have to get back down to Newark so that I can work again but it will need to be taken care of soon.

The car took about ninety minutes as there were lots of people waiting for their cars as well. I took the chance to take a look at the large selection of Ferraris and Maseratis that they have on their lot. Very impressive indeed. I tried to talk dad into a used 1999 Ferrari two seat targa instead of a convertible but he felt that even with the heavy used car discount that it was a little too much for a two seater. Personally, I thought that it was a bargain at $107,000 😉

I got back to the apartment at 1180 and spent the rest of the day working. It was a pretty busy day. When I could, in between normal tasks or while I was “thinking” I continued to work on geotagging my Flickr images and cleaning up the regular tags, dates, descriptions, etc. It is amazing how much work it takes to manage that many images effectively. But they are going to be extremely useful for many years to come because of this work so I don’t mind.

I managed to more or less wrap up with the office around four in the afternoon at which point I remained online but started doing housework. I cleaned the kitchen including the mountain of dishes that accumulated last week with me not working from home at all. I cleaned the hall table which was a disaster. I cleaned in the living room. I cleaned in the bathroom. I cleaned in the bedroom. I made pudding so that it would be ready later when Dominica and I want some after dinner. Maybe I need to rethink this working from home situation…

Dominica got home and we watch some Full House and ordered in from Papa John’s (Spinach Alfredo pizza) and did our best to relax.  I kept working on my pictures and stayed connected to the office.  Dominica managed to finished reading “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” this afternoon at work so tonight I got to start reading it.  I will not be reading it at the same break-neck pace that Min did (she only bought it yesterday afternoon meaning that she completed it in just under twenty-four hours) but I will see what I can do.  We ordered the book on CD but Amazon has not yet shipped it to us even though we could get it for the same price sitting on the Target shelves 🙁  We have no idea what is going on there.  We have had it pre-ordered for some time but apparently Amazon isn’t giving in to the “getting it there the day of release” craze and is just going to ship it when they get around to it.

I wanted to go to bed early but my body just isn’t ready to switch schedules yet so I ended up going to bed just before eleven this evening.  I have to be up tomorrow at a quarter till three in the morning.