Sheep Guarding Llama

By dry I don’t mean alcohol free (it was that too) but water free.  Dominica and I woke up this morning and discovered that we had no water.  None.  Nada.  Thank goodness today is a holiday and neither of us are scheduled to be anywhere all day today.

I got up and went down to the front desk to make sure that they were aware that we had no water.  1180 Raymond Blvd. is pretty good about knowing that there are issues but if you don’t let people know things and they never get fixed you really have no one to blame but yourself.  So I went down to find out the skinny on the situation.  It turns out that there was a pump issue that caused a bunch of safeties to go so the water system has shut down.  This explains the degraded water performance last night and the resulting outage this morning.

I walked over to Subway, the one on Broad Street that is right next door to us, to get some breakfast.  I was the only person there.  Newark, apparently, really shuts down on the Fourth of July.  Even Dunkin Donuts was closed according to my neighbour who went out searching for food.  McDonald’s and Subway were the only local restaurants reported to be open this morning.  Fortunately Subway has the egg and cheese subs which are quite delicious.

My goal for today is to play lots and lots of Dragon Quest VIII.  Dominica has a bit of homework left to do so she is working on that today.  Her class ends on Friday so today is her last chance to get everything done.  Unfortunately she discovered today that one portion of her class is unavailable to her today because it only unlocks once other people have submitted their work so that they can collaborate.  This is an important part of the class.  But, as of tonight, Dominica is the only person to have worked on the final section of the class leaving her with only two worknights left until the course is over with no way to complete her work.  Of course, this means that no one else is even close to completing their work but they can complete at any moment as her work has unlocked that section for them.  So it is actually easier for other people to finish the class than it is for Dominica because she did the work and attempted to complete the class first!  Now she has to squeeze in time to watch for other people’s submittals to see if she has any chance of completing at all.  Online classes, supposedly designed to allow for schedule flexibility for working professionals, with ridiculous time scenarios like this cause real problems.  If she worked an evening job there is every possibility that the class would wrap up while she was working her final shift and even though she was the first to “complete” she could be left as the only person not having submitted all of the work.

Our water came back on this morning but the hot water has iron or something in it and it is really disgusting.  We were supposed to run the water for fifteen or twenty minutes to get the sediment out and then it was supposed to be okay.  No such luck.  Whatever got into the tank really got into the tank.  We ended up running the water in the bath all day – that is about twelve hours!  And after all that time the water never cleared up.  It got better but it never got clear.  Nor did it ever get warm.  By late evening it was tepid but never warm.  So no one in 1180 got to take showers last night or today.  Ewww.

Min finished her homework and then finished watching the first season of <em>Veronica Mars</em>.  Oreo slept all day like he has never slept before.  He was totally exhausted.  There was a birthday party at daycare yesterday and he got so worked up that he had to be put in time out.  He gets so excited about these parties that he just loses control. Today he migrated back and forth between the futon where he could watch Dominica working and the loveseat where he was snuggling with me.  It was a good day for little dogs.

For dinner we ate leftover Chinese food (General Tso’s Bean Curd) that we had ordered in last night.  Boy is that stuff good.

A nurse serving aboard an air-ambulance was partially sucked out of a window when the window blew out at 20,000 feet!

Hetty Green was born on this date, 1834. Hetty was known as the “Witch of Wall Street” and is famous for being one of the cheapest people to ever walk this earth while being one of the richest. So enamored of her money she refused to pay for her son’s broken leg and chose that it be amputated rather than to have it be seen by a doctor unless it was free.

I got up at seven and fed Oreo and got him ready to get off to school so that he can play with the other dogs. We are pretty sure that with Dominica’s contract wrapping up in a month (to the day) that Oreo will not be able to continue going to Doggie Paradise that he loves so much and we will have to find him another daycare provider as it is extremely unlikely for Min to find work in the area near where she works now.

My bronchitis doesn’t feel too bad today but my voice is totally gone. I had to do a conference call this morning at nine thirty and it was the first time that I had attempted talking all morning. It was quite funny. I was just barely audible on the phone.

I was pretty much under the weather today. I think that that sums it up pretty well. I can’t tell if they cut off the air conditioning in the office today or if I am just running a fever now or something.

I was reading about Bahrain today on Wikipedia and found it to be pretty funny that they compare its size as being slightly larger than the Isle of Man but slightly smaller than the nearby King Fahd International Airport.

I ended up getting stuck at work quite late tonight. Not the best day for that. Although I seem to be getting healthier as the day goes on I am very tired and would like to get started on my holiday. Tonight is supposed to be a night to relax.

I got home and we discovered that we have pretty much no water tonight.  Something is wrong but we are able to flush and brush our teeth so the world isn’t coming to an end.  Just one more issue at 1180 Raymond.  Thing go wrong so often here that you really don’t stop and think about it so much anymore.  Never before have I lived in an apartment where there are “day to day” disasters, changes and problems.  Normally you can go for months without having any need to interact with the management other than paying rent.  Sure things break but normally it is a long time in between things.  Here, building issues are a daily occurrence and everything requires the residents to manage the process very thoroughly.   Things are never “dealt with” automatically like they should be in a luxury apartment.

Dominica spent the evening watching <em>Veronica Mars</em> and I played some Dragon Quest VIII and went to bed early.  Tomorrow we both have the day off and are really looking forward to having a chance to really relax a little bit.

Weight Lost So Far: 26.5 lbs

I just had to set Oreo Yawning as my new desktop wallpaper at work. I wish that the focus has been better on this one but you still can’t deny that he is just so cute!!

I slept in until almost eight this morning but I feel much better and I think that my cold has mostly subsided at this point. It is still lingering some to be sure but I am on top of it now and I doubt that I will have any more virus in me by tomorrow. I tend to get over things like this pretty quickly in general. And I drink lots of fluids naturally so that makes it that much easier to stay healthy.

I was still hacking, coughing, wheezing and sneezing all day but I do think that I am improving slightly. I definitely feel better today even if I sound worse. I am worried that this might be acute bronchitis. Dominica thinks that she has bronchitis (again – second time since moving to smogland) so there is a definite likelihood that I do since my chest congestion is a bit worse than hers.

Scott Adams in The Dilbert Blog had a really great post today about Empathizing with Horror Movies that is exactly how I have always seen horror movie fans. I don’t know which is scarier – people who are watching horror movies thinking how cool it would be to (a. die horribly or b. kill people in such a manner) or how much I think like Scott Adams. Creepy.

Of notable interest today, the alien theories at Roswell got some backing as Army Lt. Haut’s deathbed affidavit has been opened to reveal that he asserts to having seen not only the alien “spacecraft” but the aliens themselves in New Mexico. Haut was the military relations officer responsible for first telling the public about the incident and then, shortly thereafter, changing the official story and claiming that it was a weather balloon experiment. The official story has changed very little until now, for the first time, there is official certification that the weather balloon release was a lie right from the mouth of the person who spun the tale.

For all of you sub-rock dwellers, the Apple iPhone (not to be confused with the true iPhone) released this weekend. I got to see one that my neighbour got first thing this morning. It is nice looking I guess. But the reports of more than one third of the iPhones being nothing but worthless chunks of plastic is not encouraging.

I got home and spent the evening playing Dragon Quest VIII. I finally got past Empyrea and am back into actually playing the game again. Dominica was supposed to be doing more homework tonight but pretty much just spent her time watching more <em>Veronica Mars</em>.

We tried to go to bed on the early side but Abdul came by to see me pretty late and we didn’t actually get to bed until almost eleven. Because of the holiday in the middle of the week tomorrow is going to be a lot like a Friday. Both Min and I have Wednesday off although she will be spending the day doing homework. And I work from home on Thursday – which I expect to be an extremely slow day with almost nothing going on at all since everyone will be taking the end of the week off as vacation. And although I go to work on Friday – how busy can it really end up being? And then it is the weekend again! Almost like work doesn’t exist this week at all.

I managed to win two Playstation 2 games on eBay today: Dark Cloud 2 (aka Dark Chronicle) and Rogue Galaxy. These games were at the top of my list of titles to get for the PS2. Rogue Galaxy and Dark Cloud 2 are made by the same team, Level 5, that made DQ8 which is what made me choose them.

Weight Lost So Far: 26lbs

Well we are into the second half of the year. That is hard to believe but we can say that every year and it starts to get old so I will let it go 😉

Today was Dominica and my recovery day mostly. We both still have really bad colds and we need another day to rest and fight off the virus. Dominica still had a ton of homework to do and spent most of the day working on that. I took the day as a chance to really relax and spent quite a bit of time playing Dragon Quest VIII. Throughout the day I got about three or four hours in on the game. But I didn’t make much progress in the game.

I am stuck in the “World of Darkness” in DQ8 and have to fight the bird Empyrea but I have tried at least three times and the bird can kick the crap out of me so I am stuck attempting to make my characters stronger in an extremely boring part of the game so that I am able to advance from this section. So far each of my characters has leveled twice and I am barely any closer to being able to defeat this stupid bird. I have read about how other people have managed to do this same thing in online walkthroughs but the techniques that they mention don’t seem to work when I tried them. This bit of the game is proving to be quite challenging.

Dominica starting watching the show <em>Veronica Mars</em> today. We have had it on DVD for a while but have not gotten around to watching it yet. She really likes the show and I can see why but I don’t really like it all that much because it is a really depressing show and I don’t appreciate “entertainment” that doesn’t make me feel good. There is more than enough real stuff in this life to be upset about there is little reason to intentionally subject yourself to something fictional and depressing just for the fun of it.

We ordered in from Papa John’s again and went to bed early.

Weight Lost So Far: 25.5 lbs