Sheep Guarding Llama

I got up this morning and went down to the health club to get back into the swing of things after having a rough exercise weekend. Dominica and I cheated quite a bit on our diets and skipped exercising yesterday so we are quite behind. I was looking forward to getting back into it this morning and working off the extra weekend food but I was only in the gym for a little over five minutes before Dominica popped in to let me know that her car’s battery was dead again and that she needed to take my car and that I needed to deal with the dead battery. So much for my morning workout.

I was back in the apartment for about ten minutes before Dominica called to let me know that the valet manager had charged Min’s battery using her own car and that Min had managed to head off to work in the BMW. The battery was dead, as we had expected, because the car’s roof and not been closed completely when it was parked on Friday. This happens because Min has been letting the valets drive the car with the top down and just having them put it up with they are done but a couple of times now it has happened over a weekend that the roof is left only most of the way up and the car just sets off all kinds of lights and alarms to get them to close it but they leave it and the alarms drain the battery. So we can’t do that anymore. But at least it really wasn’t a hassle this morning any more than me missing my workout.

I am told that we are having another fire drill tomorrow – amazingly not on a day when either Oreo or I are intending to be in the apartment for once. But the big news is that this is supposed to be the final fire drill. After this one they will be sending out an official notice saying that the fire alarm testing is complete. So we will see what happens but it is a huge relief that we are moving into the next phase of the fire alarm situation.

Dominica discovered that we can order our office furniture online and that it has free shipping from Office Max! We are very excited about that. We need at least one more piece than we currently own so we will definitely be placing an order soon – hopefully today. We also discovered that the nice stuff that we buy from Bush is currently on sale for 20% off which is really cool as this stuff isn’t cheap! Free shipping on big furniture items is a really big deal and 20% off is huge. We think that we will probably buy a new office piece instead of shipping the big corner piece from dad’s house because it will cost more in gas and wear & tear on the car to bring up the existing piece than it would cost to buy a new piece and have it delivered for free (and guess which one is better for the economy and the environment and provides us with an extra piece of office furniture!) And that way I still have a nice full desk set up at dad’s – where I already have a full workstation in place with my older HP D325 desktop running Windows XP Pro. That is the small form factor machine that used to be Jeremy’s that I bought from him about a year ago to have as a spare Windows workstation. That ended up working out pretty well.

China has discovered that their head of the Food and Drug Safety department has been taking bribes to allow dangerous foods and drugs to enter the Chinese and foreign marketplaces. Apparently his crimes were pretty significant resulting or being related to tens of thousands of Chinese deaths, hundreds of thousands if not millions of animals deaths and strained trade relations between China and many trading partners primarily in North and Central America. China has found the former head of their equivalent of the FDA to be guilty and that his crimes are so serious that he has been sentenced to death. It is very good to see China taking this situation as seriously as they are as this is a very critical situation globally. It is encouraging to see China being willing to be so definitive about the situation. Oreo is glad to see justice being delivered after his own life hung so precariously in the balance.

Today passed by pretty quickly. Before I even knew it it was after four in the afternoon. Not a lot of work going on but enough to keep me working. Tonight Dominica and I get to put together the desk that we just brought down from Pavilion which is going to make such a difference in our little apartment. I am going to be able to actually use my computer effectively again. It has been painful working on a tiny glass and metal desk that wobbles and doesn’t work at all with my optical mouse (LEDs don’t reflect well off of glass.) Next time that we return to Pavilion we will be bringing one or two of our small desks back for dad to sell or give away. The one is already spoken for by Jeremy. Maybe Sara will want the other now that she has her own apartment and needs stuff to fill it with.

The end of the day slowed down significantly so I decided to head for Newark a little before five thirty.

Weight Lost So Far: 11lbs

We had to get up a little earlier than we had planned this morning because Dominica accidentally slept with part of her leg on a wood support post and it cut off one of her nerves and she was completely unable to move her right leg this morning. She was in a lot of pain and needed my help to be able to walk or to get up the stairs.

Microsoft’s use of Roman numerals (humorous and short.) Also check out the Zompist Phrasebook.

In cool Internet news: the Mozilla Firefox web browser has captured 25% of the global browsing market!

If anyone is interested in trying out Audible which I have been talking about for the past couple of years then you should give them a try now as they have a thirty day free trial now available: Audible Invite.

We had a short morning as we prepared for the Memorial Day picnic this afternoon. Everyone came over a little before noon and we sat out in the back yard. It has been months since Dominica and I had a chance to see everyone. We have been really out of touch with the universe but now that the house, car and sofa set are sold we are hoping that that will change.

Dominica and I had cedar plank grilled salmon for lunch.  After lunch dad took the family out on a hay-wagon ride except we no longer have any hay (although all of the fields are being used for hay this year and they were just cut down this morning so there is a lot of hay out there) and so I had the idea of taking grandma’s old couch that has recently been moved to dad’s barn from our basement in Geneseo and putting that onto the hay-wagon instead.  So Jeremy and I loaded it up and everyone took a ride on the couch wagon.  That was a lot of fun and really comfortable.  We did a second ride and even Oreo took a spin on the couch.  He thought that it was great.  We were afraid that he might jump off so we attached his seatbelt device to my belt to protect him.  But he was fine.

It was a bit after six by the time that Dominica and I finally got a chance to leave the farm.  We did manage to load up one of my good desks though which we are very excited about.  We have been living for the past year in New Jersey with no good work surfaces and it has been brutal.  This is the first desk to come down and if all goes well there will be two more leaving dad’s house to come down and one new one being purchased down here.

We made decent time getting back to Newark.  We stopped in Wilawana and got “dinner” at the Dandy mini-mart there.  We were in Newark by half past midnight and then it was time for bed.

Weight Lost So Far: Unknown Until Tomorrow

I got up around eight this morning. This is the first night that I have ever slept in my parents’ guest bedroom. That is a little weird. I got to see dad for almost an hour before he left to go to Sunday School down in Leicester.

I went through our mail this morning and then took Oreo outside for a walk around the farm and then did some exploring through our stuff in the barn. Boy is that ever going to be a challenge. I managed to find one box of books and decided to through out almost every single thing in the box! I wasn’t sure where to find other stuff that I need to go through so I am going to wait for dad to help with that so I did the SGL update for yesterday and began the process of uploading the Close Up 1993 pictures to Flickr. It took well more than an hour just to upload all of the pictures. No small project. I am glad to have them done so that I can give the originals and the CD of the digital copies back to Nate tonight if he makes it to the drive in.

It is weird going through the Close Up pictures so many years later and trying to remember who everyone was. It has been fourteen years since the trip. One of the best pictures though is this picture of the gang that includes Nathan Parker and myself, Gretchen Randall who I hung out with after Close Up a little (we went and saw The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Disney up in Canandaigua) and Colleen Moyer whom I dated for a few months in high school and was my date to my junior prom! Gretchen was from Naples, New York and Colleen was from Wayland and attended the newly integrated Wayland-Cohocton school that was located there. Seth Webster went to that same school but we wouldn’t know each other until we went to MCC together many years later.

I spent a while this afternoon going through the barn sorting through the stuff that Dominica and I have in storage. There is so much stuff that it is very difficult to know where to begin. I managed to eliminate one or two plastic bins worth of stuff and found some things that we had been looking for. And a lot of miscellaneous stuff is able to be thrown out now. That is a good start. Better than nothing.

A little after six this evening we drove down to Perry to go to the Silver Lake Drive-In with the Ralstons. The weather was a little rainy so even though this is the opening weekend (I believe) for Pirates of the Caribbean 3: At World’s End there wasn’t that big of a crowd. Art, Danielle and Michael got to the drive-in about twenty minutes after us. They were running late because they had run up to Penfield and had bought a new motorcycle this afternoon and just randomly ended up buying it from Ginamarie Romano’s boyfriend. Ginamarie went to York with us and is Steve “Cheese” Romano’s little sister. Ginamarie and I worked together at Tops in Avon for a while as well.

We had pizza for dinner and then some ice cream. Nate Parker came over to hang out for a little while while we were having our pizza. He had just gotten in from Boston a few hours before.

Pirates of the Caribbean III was nowhere near as good as the first two films. It was mildly enjoyable just because there was a lot of action and it had some good characters in it and it was interesting to see how they wrapped up the storyline from the second film. But the reality was that everything in this movie was very poor in comparison to the first two. The storyline was absolutely pathetic and it was clear that nothing had been planned even when they were working on the second movie and they were stuck with a very difficult plot ending to fix and had to slap the whole thing together. It felt like it was written by a high school class trying to learn how to do bland Hollywood script fixing. One of the most poorly written movies of the genre I have ever seen. Even with the cliff-hanger ending of Pirates of the Caribbean 2: Dead Man’s Chest it is barely worth watching the third installment since it really is not tied to the second movie in any way. Just horrible. And the effects were not up to the standards of the first two films and the actors were definitely getting tired of the camp.

I was definitely bored watching the movie which did not happen with the first two. The first Pirates films is one of my all time favourite movies. But this is just crap and it shows how little Disney is able to keep any level of quality alive these days. Even with such a phenomenally successful and easy to work with franchise they couldn’t come up with anything decent at all. And they played so loose and wild with the “world” that they had to completely change the flavour of the characters and the world in general so it will be unreasonable to make another movie in the series.  They introduced an entire pirate’s ethos and a bizarre and meaningless pirate political structure.  It was as if they forgot that they were making a pirate movie altogether.  In fact, it was very much like they had the script on hand for a bad mariner movie that got turned down because it was so stupid but when they didn’t have a third installment for Pirates they just grabbed some unrelated script off the shelf and stuck the Pirates characters into it (like Super Mario Bros. 2 – even the most casual gamer can just “feel” that it isn’t really a part of the series and it was just a cheap way out.)  We were thoroughly disappointed.

To add insult to injury we then watched Wild Hogs.  Pirates of the Caribbean 3 was boring and pathetic but the budget was so big and there was so much momentum behind it that we were able to enjoy it regardless.  But Wild Hogs was horrible.  Just horrible.  Don’t rent this movie.  Don’t even watch it if someone gives it to you.  It isn’t worth the ninety minutes of your life.  The acting was horrible.  There was no plot at all.  It isn’t funny.  It isn’t anything.  It would be a bad episode of a bland television show but they made it into a movie!  Just sad that Hollywood is still able to make money making stuff like this.  It is movies like this that completely make me want to stop going to the movies.  And they have pretty much succeeded – this was the first trip to the movies this year and we only made one last year!  We have almost completely phased out the movies from our lives.  I don’t even think about them anymore.

It looks like this year is going to be the summer of horrible movies.  Everyone has been saying that Spiderman III is a huge disappointment as well.  It worries me because I have been hopeful about The Transformers but the trend isn’t looking good.  And Harry Potter V is due out later this summer too.

Weight Lost So Far: Unknown – No Scale Until Tuesday

Dominica and I did not manage to get to bed last night nearly as early as we had wanted to and so I didn’t wake up this morning until eight! I got right up and went on down to the gym for my morning workout. I did forty-five minutes and then came back up to the apartment for my shower and to get ready to leave. Dominica had showered while I was in the gym and packed while I was in the shower.

By the time that we did all that, got the car packed and were ready to leave it was getting close to eleven in the morning! Our idea of “first thing in the morning” isn’t very early. Although we have no way to pack the car early and part of the reason to stay back another day was to give me a chance to hit the gym two more times and Dominica once which we did. Missing the gym at this phase would be very bad for me. Dad has a treadmill but it will be harder to work out there and I don’t know how much I can do on a treadmill yet.

We left Newark and almost immediately discovered that traffic was horrible. We lost more than an hour just between Newark and Scranton! It was stop and go traffic almost the entire way. Then the road cleared until about twenty miles south of Binghamton where we hit completely stopped traffic and lost almost another hour! It was awful.

Because of the bad traffic we ended up needing to run straight to the Millens’ to meet them for dinner instead of going to dad’s house first and then going over to Livonia. We ended up making it right for five o’clock. We stayed at the Millens’ until around eleven at night. I haven’t seen them for over a year! Not since February or March of 2006 I am sure. That is crazy. Being in New Jersey has really cut me off from everyone except Josh who comes down and visits on a regular basis. The Millens’ even have a new baby since the last time that I saw them. I missed seeing Amanda through her entire pregnancy even!

We got to dad’s around eleven thirty and hung out for about an hour before going to bed. Tomorrow Dominica will be spending the day working on her Systems Analysis and Design homework for Empire State College and I will be going through stuff that dad has stored in the barn so that we can cut down on the amount of stuff that he is storing – we hope. Dad said that the leather couch and loveseat have officially sold and just haven’t been picked up yet. So that is a bit of storage going away. This is the first that we have seen his garage completely full of our stuff. Boy do we have a lot of stuff.

Dad managed to get all of Nathan Parker’s pictures from our trip to Washington, DC in 1993 for Close Up scanned and ready for me to upload to Flickr. I am excited about that. All of my pictures from Close Up were lost when my Olympus rangefinder 35mm camera was accidentally left behind in the hotel room when we returned to New York. It was very sad. So Nate recently lent me his pictures from the trip so that we could add them to the Flickr site so that that wouldn’t get lost.

Tomorrow night Dominica and I are going to the Silver Lake Drive-In with the Ralstons and the Parkers.

Weight Lost So Far: 12lbs

I found out from Michelle Nicklin today that Phil Kreibel – aka Dr. Redbag – passed away on Tuesday night. Phil was the Director of Operations at Nicklin Associates during part of my tenure there. We spent a lot of time working together in Washington. Eric worked with him quite a bit too as Eric reported to him for a while. I haven’t gotten any details yet about what happened. Phil and I got together last summer after I had moved down to New Jersey and we had drinks out on the Long Island Sound in the Bronx. It was the only time that I had ever been to the Bronx. We were planning on getting together again sometime soon. It has only been several weeks since we last spoke.

It is a hot day in New Jersey today. Yesterday evening began to get quite warm and dad said that it was in the low nineties yesterday in Pavilion, NY. It is not supposed to hit the nineties today here but it is supposed to get close.

Did you know that in 1939 Adolf Hitler was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize even as World War II was well under way?

Today was a slow day at the office. With the long weekend coming up there is very little going on. Everyone is leaving early to get started on the holiday weekend.

Dominica and I decided that we are not going to drive up to Pavilion tonight and are instead going to use tonight to do laundry and cleaning and things that need to be done around the apartment and we will head for Pavilion as soon as I am done working out in the morning. This is good as it keeps me from missing two cycles of working out which would not be good for me at this point.

Our plans this weekend include hanging out with the Millens on Saturday night and then going to the Silver Lake Drive-In with the Ralstons and Parkers on Sunday night. Monday afternoon is a picnic at dad’s house. The rest of the weekend will be spent going through all of the stuff that dad is storing for us as we attempt to thin it out and throw out as much as possible.

Total Weight Lost So Far: 12.5lbs