Sheep Guarding Llama

Today was a very serious driving day for us. Dad, Dominica and I were all up around eight and we were ready to head out not long after nine. Not quite as early as we had hoped but not too much later.

We started by heading west from Warsaw on NY 20A and traveling through Wyoming County and entering the Buffalo region through East Aurora. 20A continues on from East Aurora to Orchard Park and then into Hamburg.

Dominica really like Orchard Park and East Aurora. My dad hadn’t been through that area in a long time and was always driving so he had never really looked at the homes before and was surprised by what a really nice area that is.

From there we continued on to Route 5 and Lakeshore Drive along Lake Erie starting from about Angola on the Lake and heading up to the city itself. We had no idea that that lake shore zone was so beautiful! I have been a fan of Lake Erie ever since I worked for that one week in Erie, Pennsylvania where I got a chance to really see the lake. The eastern shore is awesome because it has such wonderful views at sunset. And this area has the most amazing views of the city of Buffalo, Fort Erie in Ontario, etc. It is really something to see. We were amazed. This is definitely the place to be in the Buffalo area.

We drove through downtown on the skyway and up to Amherst. We drove around Amherst and Williamsville a bit before grabbing a quick bite at Burger King and then heading back towards home. We had left dad’s place just a little after nine and we were back to his place some time after two so it was about a five to six hour trip pretty much driving the entire time. It was a lot of fun though but quite exhausting.

We packed up the car and we all drove down to Sharon and Leo’s house in Leicester but everyone had left because we were running so late. They all had to get back to Ohio.  It worked out for the best though because it was getting late and we really needed to get on the road to Newark.  It had been a long day of driving and we hadn’t even started our real driving yet.

The trip home was largely uneventful.  We were tired by the time that we got back but we were doing okay.  We were really glad to get out of the car after twelve hours of driving just today and six hours on Friday though!

Dominica, Dad and I were all completely exhausted this morning. Dominica got to bed a little after three and dad and I were both awake until around four. We had to be up at a little before eight this morning so that we could take the BMW over to Geneseo for its inspection appointment.

We drove over to Geneseo and discovered that the garage was closed today even though we had an appointment. Oops. That doesn’t work. We would have been upset as this was a bit of an emergency BUT the “service engine soon” light which BMW says in their manual is NOT an engine light but a light dedicated to the gas tank cap has been going on and off and is on at the moment and New York State has worked out some deal where cars cannot be inspected with that light on even though it has nothing to do with the working of the car or not. So we are screwed either way and have no idea how we are going to deal with this now.

Since we were in Geneseo bright and early we went to the Omega for breakfast. We were pretty tired but we managed to get a bit of coffee into us to get us going.

It was a decently leisurely morning since the car didn’t go to the shop and the party didn’t start until four in the afternoon. Dad had to be down there by three and we figured that we would get there a bit before four.

We did pretty well for ourselves getting down to the party at three thirty. Jeremy took Rachel and one of her friends out in the 330 with the top down. Rachel says that BMWs are her favourite car but maybe she is just being nice.

I took my Nikon D50 with me and took some pictures but unfortunately I used the old Nikkor 50mm lens that I had just gotten from dad’s house and it would appear that the D50 doesn’t work all that well with that lens and it doesn’t focus as well as one would hope so many of the pictures turned out fuzzy. 🙁 At least I managed to get a few decent pictures out even if they aren’t rock solid.

It was an overcast and somewhat rainy afternoon. It rained at Sara’s graduation party last year too! The rain this year was weird as it would rain for just a few minutes and then stop completely for an hour and then do it again… over and over again.

The cake was really good. And here is Sara demonstrating how exciting it was.

Dominica and I hung out until around nine or maybe a little later.  Officially the party ran until ten but we were so tired that there was no way that we were going to be hanging around for that long.

We left and drove down to Warsaw to see Mary who started working at DiSalvo’s Pizza about a week or two ago.  We haven’t seen Mary in forever so we swung through down there and grabbed some slices and some fried mushrooms.  We have not eaten at DiSalvo’s since our wedding night!  That is where Min and I, the Nicklins, Mary and Jocelyn all went after everyone left the Cannonball Run Pub in Wyoming after our wedding reception almost four years ago.  The pizza there is really good.  It is a true “Western NY” style pizza as I call it.  Definitely not a downstate thin crust and not a pan pizza.  We didn’t stay for long.  Just enough time to eat and run.  Mary was working so it wasn’t like she could hang out anyway.

We got back to dad’s a little before eleven and it was off to bed for us.  Tomorrow our goal is to drive up to Buffalo to look at neighbourhoods to see what Buffalo has to offer.

I got twenty or more pictures scanned in and uploaded to Flickr last night. Good stuff in there. Lots of old stuff from long ago and the first batch of my sports photography stuff. I am quite proud of the work that I was able to do in high school taking sports pictures using my Nikon 5005 film rig. I did most of my black and white sports work using Eastman Kodak’s high performance 3200 ISO film and did my own darkroom work. I am scanning everything, good and bad, which is tough because generally photographers only show one percent or less of the pictures that they take but I want the collection online so only the totally worthless stuff isn’t going in. So don’t expect every picture to be great. This is raw stuff and many years old and scanned on a cheap scanner.

Today ended up being a completely crazy at work. I was going nuts all day. I came into work early at six thirty planning on being able to leave quite early and to be able to get on the road the moment that Dominica got home. No such luck. I ended up having to work late so that I put in a twelve hour day. Not what I was hoping for at all. I was totally exhausted by the time that I got back to Newark so that we could start packing up the car.

It was about twenty after seven when Dominica and I finally managed to get onto the road.  We are taking the BMW up because it needs to go into the shop tomorrow for its New York State Inspection.  Luckily we were able to get an appointment for it.

Our drive felt like it took forever.  We stopped at Burger King on the road and grabbed a quick dinner while we traveled.  Not in the diet, I know, but it is very difficult to eat quickly while driving.

We were totally exhausted by the time that we got to dad’s house and Dominica had to drive for the last hour or so.  There was a lot of construction on i390 and they made us drive north on the southbound side – but not with two way traffic, just converted to northbound traffic with the signs facing the wrong way.  We didn’t see a single vehicle traveling with us all the way from Dansville to Sonyea and it was very disconcerting.  We thought that we had gotten onto the wrong road or something.  But it turned out to just be weird and labeled poorly.

Today is a beautifully clear sunny day after yesterday evening’s torrential downpour. Everyone back home in Upstate New York has been complaining about how they are getting no rain at all this year and we keep getting slammed by huge amounts of rain and flooding here.

Like most Thursdays today was a chance for me to work from home and for Oreo to sleep. He isn’t the youngster that he was two years ago when we first brought him home to live with us from Houston and he needs a lot more sleep these days than he did back then. Daycare is tough work for him and although it keeps him in shape and healthy it also really wears him out. He has been going there for well over half a year now and when he started he would never, ever lay down and nap while at daycare but now he takes regular, long naps in the sunlight when it is available to him. And he used to only sleep “most” of the day on Thursdays but now he is out of the count all day long – which does make life easier for me when I am working but it also means that I almost never get to play with Oreo which I miss.

I took some spare time this morning in between requests at the office – which were pouring in steadily all day keeping me tied to my desk all day long – and created a handful of “video game listing” pages on SGL so that I have an easy way to keep track of the video games that I own and have owned over the years. This is both nice from a memory and nostalgia standpoint as I tend to start forgetting about these things as I get older even though I appreciate their memories more and more but also, for my more recent systems, to keep track of what games I already own! This gets worse as many games are in series and have similar names. I begin to lose track. It gets worse because sometimes I buy games from systems that I don’t own (I own Shenmue II for the XBox and Enchanted Arms for the XBox 360, for example, neither of which system do I own.)

I am starting on a new schedule at the office starting on Monday. As of Monday I am doing the “early” shift starting around seven in the morning Monday through Wednesday and then working my normal hours on Fridays and still working from home on Thursdays. I think that this will make life in the apartment better because I won’t be waiting for Dominica to head off to work so that I can start to get ready. And there is always a backlog of work created during the time that I am getting ready and driving in and, of course, traffic is almost non-existant when you head in for seven but is horrible the rest of the day. So this way my day automatically becomes thirty to sixty minutes shorter just because of the difference in the traffic situation.

I am working the early shift tomorrow but that has nothing to do with my schedule change starting next week. It is just a coincidence. The great thing is that my working early coincides with Dominica and I making the trip up to Pavilion for the weekend. It is looking like we will have a really good chance of getting out of Newark on the early side and actually making some good time if all goes well. It would be great to get to leave early rather than late for a change. We are driving the BMW up this time because it has to go into the shop in Geneseo on Saturday for its inspection. Otherwise we would drive the most cost-effective Mazda PR5 which is just about to turn one hundred thousand miles.

Things finally started to slow down at the office as we approached the close of the day. I managed to sit down just before Domincia got home and work through one small section of Suikoden III getting maybe thirty minutes of actual game play in. I did manage to clean the kitchen and get all of the dishes done and to do a little light cleaning throughout the house done.

I managed to find the power supply for our image scanner today so I hooked it up and scanned some prints that I have in our huge stash waiting to be scanned. Immediately we noticed that the quality of the scans wasn’t very good so we decided that we are going to go buy a new scanner because most of the pictures that we want to scan are our wedding photos so we don’t want the old scanner making the pictures not turn out well. So I did some scanning of some low quality old black and white prints that won’t be noticeably affected by the scanner’s issues.

I spent a while on the phone with Craig who is venturing out on his own and is going to be working in the New York area very soon.

It was off to bed around nine thirty.

Weight Lost So Far: 28 lbs