Sheep Guarding Llama

I am really liking the site a lot more now that I am putting in little pictures from the SGL Flickr archives (and a few other random sources so don’t just totally assume that every random pic is necessarily from my collection – they are normally linked so you can follow them if you need to find out more.)

It’s Friday so I got to sleep in a little. Fridays are my days for working late so I don’t bother getting up as early or getting to the office as quickly. I appreciate the break between Thursday night and Friday morning. It gets me ready for Friday’s long haul 🙂

Dominica looks pretty serious (or hopped up on Nyquil) as she rocks out to Guitar Hero II in the 1180 Media Room.

Today wasn’t too busy and I got a chance to get caught back up with the SGL dailies as I haven’t had a chance to post since Tuesday night when I was stuck in the office all night.

Next week is going to be really long for me as I am going to be alone in Newark all week. Dominica is leaving a week from today to go to Topsail Island in North Carolina for the week with her family on their summer vacation and I am staying behind in Newark so that I can work. It will give me, I hope, a chance to get caught up with a lot of the little work here and there that needs to be done that is so hard to get done normally. Dominica is taking Oreo with her to Topsail so I will be very lonely! It is going to be a very long week for me indeed.

In order to prepare for Dominica’s trip to North Carolina which is quite the long drive we have to get the BMW 330 into a New York Inspection Station which is going to be a bit of a pain but I was finally able to make an appointment today and on Wednesday morning I will be taking it up to Spring Valley BMW just over the New York border north of Newark to get that completed. What a pain that is going to be. I have to be there at eight fifteen in the morning!

Most of my day was pretty slow. Things were very slow until I was going through the SGL logs, as I often do, and discovered people doing employment searches on Eric and finding really silly pictures on SGL. That was hilarious. I had to call Eric at work to see what was going on. We were dying when we realized what they were finding when they were searching on him. I knew that the SGL logs were entertaining but this is exceptionally funny.

There is always enjoyment in Pug Bowling. But nothing is as cute as a baby piglet.

I got home a little after seven tonight. Min had gone grocery shopping and had gotten home just minutes before me. We unloaded the groceries and headed straight over to Food for Life to ourselves some dinner. We haven’t eaten there in a while before they closed down for a week and it got us out of the habit of going over there. And the weather has been very hot and they don’t really air condition that place so it is always significantly warmer inside than it is out. Sometimes by twenty degrees or more. Today was one of those days. Almost chilly outside and extremely warm inside even with the doors open.

After dinner we came home but Jeffrey called us and then stopped by after his cell phone minutes ran out and so we ended up spending most of the evening talking to him out in front of the building on Raymond. We are meeting him and his girlfriend for a late lunch tomorrow around three. It was ten o’clock by the time that we got back to the apartment and we were both ready to just go to bed. Oreo was already in bed and very snuggle.

Weight Lost So Far: 31.5 lbs

I am still quite tired today as it has been a long and stressful week already. I slept in just a tiny bit this morning and that helped some.

I have managed to get several dozen more images posted onto the SGL Flickr site. It is truly amazing how many pictures I have.  This is a pic of Mary Johnston from Art and Danielle Ralston’s wedding in February, 1994.  The wedding party (there was a reception for the immediate family following the wedding but the “friends” party was later) was held at Eric Millen’s house in Warsaw, New York.  You can see Eric sort of in the background here.

This morning I weighed in and for the first time I now weigh less than I did in June, 2001 when I first met Dominica at Phil and Kate’s wedding in Norwich, New York!  That is pretty exciting.

This morning at work was pretty hectic and stressful.  Lots of unknowns continuing.  Around eleven this morning there was finally an opportunity for the players to get together and figure out what is going on.  We didn’t exactly figure out what the final story is but at least we have a clearer picture and a path forward.  For the moment not much is changing but we will start to see some changes in about two weeks.  Stay tuned!  (Don’t actually bother to stay tuned as it isn’t very exciting. Ha ha.) 

We had to take Dominica’s car into the shop today as it has been having problems with it’s Service Engine Soon light.  We were unable to get it inspected last weekend because of the light which is supposed to only be an indicator for the gas cap (it is not the Check Engine light which is located directly next to it.)  So the 330 spent the day at Essex BMW in Newark.  They discovered a bad oxygen sensor which should fix the light and should also fix the power issues that the engine has been having at very specific speeds and loads.

Weight Loss So Far: 30.5 lbs

Humdog the Pencil Freak on Native Pencils.

I was really exhausted this morning. It was after two thirty when I finally got to sleep last night and I had to be up and right back in this morning to the office. Ugh. I was dragging pretty badly.

Today was busy and a blur. All kinds of stuff going on. It was an extremely busy day both from a work and from a “what’s going on with our lives” kind of day. Unfortunately I can’t talk about everything here but we have a lot of questions right now including where we will be living after October. If we are staying in the New York Metro area then the plan is to remain at 1180 Raymond because even though we have had our problems there it has been good enough overall that we would like to remain and most everything has improved significantly so that it isn’t so bad at this point. But we don’t know if we are going to be staying in the metro area so there is a lot to figure out.

Tonight was mostly phone calls and emails and planning (as much as possible.) We won’t know anything much until tomorrow at the earliest. Me being totally exhausted is not helping things though.

Weight Lost So Far: 28.5 lbs

Today is another start early day for me. I woke up on my own at five this morning after going to bed at eleven but stayed in bed until a little after five thirty. What can I say, Oreo is snuggly.

A few weeks ago Dominica sent me a video of the cutest pig ever and I didn’t get a chance to watch it until today. This is babe the pig from Australia. It is hard for me to see pigs because it makes me so sad like knowing that lots of people eat them when they are so intelligent and friendly. Just like knowing that people eat dogs and cats.

Dad sent me a link to this YouTube video of Kodak’s Building 23 being imploded. This is the office building that my dad used to work in. I have seen this building many times as I used to go up to Building 28 “Theater on the Ridge” because that is where the Kodak Camera Club (KCC) used to be located down in the basement.

Dominica tells me that Drew ToothPaste is really funny but I haven’t been able to watch it yet so watch at your own risk – like eating black bean cake.

I was in to the office just a little before a quarter after seven. It was extremely warm in the office and I definitely can’t arrive any earlier than that during the summer or I have to spend the entire time figuring out how not to sweat.

Apple’s iPhone has been caught at Duke University performing MAC level denial of service attacks on the university’s wireless network. How is that for a reason not to buy an iPhone? Now that it has been publicized a wireless network owner can reasonably sue an iPhone user who brings down their network as a hacker and prosecute them under some pretty harrowing US laws (or lack thereof) that include long term imprisonment without trial. That is a pretty serious level of danger that Apple has placed, quite literally, into the hands of its generally extremely technically unsavy user base. While it is unlikely that such a situation would occur – now that everyone knows this is a great tool for causing some serious damage to companies and universities or your neighbour and just claim that you are a mindless Apple drone.

There is a new review of 1180 Raymond Blvd. today online and they mention the endless fire alarms and no, it wasn’t me! At first I was the only person upset by the fire alarms but now I have heard about it from a lot of people so I don’t feel so bad anymore.

I was expecting it but today turned out to be another very long day for me as well. It is going to be a very long week. My work from home day on Thursday has been canceled too. 🙁 Oreo will be very tired by this weekend. As, apparently, will I.

I ended up staying at work extremely late working on a major project that is not going well. It went from staying a little late into staying practically forever. It put me right back in DC working at Washington Hospital Center in the little Nicklin Associates office there. I would often get stuck working late into the night in that warm office with no one around just waiting to see data come in from the workstation in the autoclave area.

It has been a long time since I worked through the night all alone in “the office” whether it be here in Warren on down in DC or wherever. It has happened but it has become increasingly rare these past few years. It feels rather strange to be doing it now and yet so familiar. Late nights in the office, all alone, have been such a significant part of my adult life that if feels completely natural no matter how long it has been since the last time that I did it.

Since I had so much time sitting in the office just waiting for stuff I put in some time updating and adding labels, categories, tags and titles to my Flickr feed. My Flickr pics have been viewed well over four thousand times so far not counting me.

I ended up working until well after one in the morning!  It has been a long time since I pulled a double and this definitely qualifies.  It was an eighteen hours day!

Today is my first day of being on the regular early morning shift. Nothing like starting the early morning on the first day after having driven twelve hours after a day of all family activities after a day of working twelve hours before driving for six. I was understandably a little tired when I work up at five this morning.

I was in the office at a quarter after seven which is, I think, a pretty good time to get started on the day.  It is early enough that I am able to avoid most of the traffic which speeds my commute significantly and normally I will be able to leave at a reasonable time to get home.  The office is still pretty quiet at that time and it is easy to get caught up on a lot of stuff that otherwise you can’t get to once everyone gets busy.  I am looking forward to the new schedule for the most part.

My day today ended up being really crazy and totally exhausting.  I didn’t get a minute for lunch or a snack or a break or anything.  Ugh.  Not only was my day busy but it was quite long too.  I ended up getting stuck at work until close to seven in the evening!  So much for getting to take off early.

I called Dominica from work and we decided that we needed to just order a pizza for dinner so that things would be quick and easy.  So she called Papa John’s to order us a spinach alfredo pizza (yum!) before I left the office.  The spinach alfredo definitely is not up to par with DiSalvo’s pizza but it will have to do.

I have decided that I will be exhausted tonight and am not going to spend time working on SGL once I get home so I am going to go ahead and post and call it a day.