Sheep Guarding Llama

I am back to work in New Jersey today.  I was in to work at my usual seven in the morning.  Today is my first day actually working from my “new office” in the building up on the hill.  My desk wasn’t really set up yet and I don’t know the layout of the office building yet so a lot of the day was dedicated to just getting myself into a position where I was able to work.

For once I was actually able to leave work at a reasonable time and get home to relax for a little bit.  I relaxed, watching Full House for a couple of hours and did some little things around the apartment, before going down to the media center in the basement to meet up with Ramona and Winnie to watch a movie.

We watched The Labyrinth of the Faun (aka Pan’s Labyrinth in the USA even though there is no faun named Pan in the movie) which is a very sad story about the Spanish civil war in 1944.  It was extremely heavy but very well done.

I can’t believe that we have moved into the second half of the year already. Time really does move faster and faster as you get older.

I was pretty sleepy when I woke up this morning and did not want to get out of bed but it is a busy day and I have no choice. Today is my last day working from dad’s house and I have to work a full day and then drive the five to six hour trip back down to Newark before going straight to bed and then getting up early and driving into the office tomorrow 🙁 But it has been nice to get away from Newark for a few days and I am especially glad to not have been just sitting down there all by my lonesome for the past four days. I am not a stay at home alone kind of guy.

I worked all day and wore myself out. Dad and I had Davis’ Pizza for lunch from down in Pavilion. I had been hoping that we would be able to get Davis’ at some point. You just can’t get good Western New York pizza down in New Jersey. No one does it like home. Jersey only does NYC style pizza.

I did a really good job of getting everything wrapped up by the end of the day and was able to hit the road back to Newark at five thirty! I was very happy with myself for being able to get out so early.

The drive went well. I did my usual stop at the Pilot Truck Stop in Kanona and picked up my Rockstar beverages to keep me “truckin'” on down to Newark. I made really good time until I was halfway across NJ on I80 when I hit a lot of construction which cost me maybe an entire hour. So it was around eleven thirty when I pulled up to 1180.

I was quite tired when I pulled myself out of bed this morning. I got almost eight hours of sleep but was exhausted when I finally got up to start work.

Today was rather uneventful. I worked on my computer and dad worked on his. It was a quiet day. For lunch dad drove down to Cook’s in Greigsville and picked up subs and brought them back so that I could keep working at the house. Getting subs in Newark or anywhere away from “back home” seems to be nearly impossible as nobody makes real subs like the Rochester area does, I guess. I never knew that until I had moved away to several different places and now realize that it is impossible to get a decent sub anywhere. No wonder places like Subway and those other big sub chains do so well while tasting so bland and being nothing like subs back home – the whole country apparently eats sub differently than we do here.

I spent the afternoon working and then at a quarter to six dad and I drove over to Geneseo to meet up with the Richardson clan including Jeremy and Rachel but not Sara for dinner at the Shanghai Buffet in the old Ames Plaza (which will shortly become known as the old Central Tractor Plaza as Ames has been gone for so long that Central Tractor moving to the old Walmart Plaza is the only thing in many peoples’ memories!)

After dinner dad and I came back to Peoria and I immediately got in the Mazda and drove up to Henrietta to meet Andy at the Tim Horton’s on the corner of Jefferson and Marketplace. I don’t believe that I have seen Andy since last September at Bob and Lisa’s wedding! Although I talk to him all of the time so it doesn’t really seem like it has been that long. It was a quarter after eight when I pulled into the Tim Horton’s parking lot.

Andy headed for home around eleven or so and I headed over to Brighton as well to see my cousin Sara’s new apartment. Funny enough Andy is moving into the same complex as Sara in just a week or so. But Sara has a studio and Andy is moving into a townhouse. I hung out with Sara and Toast for about an hour and then drove back down to dad’s so that I could go to bed at a quarter till one in the morning and get six hours of sleep before starting work tomorrow.

Tomorrow I will be working a normal day starting at seven in the morning and then at five when my day wraps up I will be hitting the road as quickly as possible to get back down to Newark so that I can get some sleep before having to drive into the office in the morning.

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.