Sheep Guarding Llama

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

ComputerWorld has a good article this morning on the top ten dead or dying computer skills.

Today I get to work from home but because yet another fire drill was scheduled for today at the very last minute we did not have time to change our schedules and so Oreo has to go to daycare and I have to work at home alone without my dog. It turned out to be very good that we sent him to daycare because we had heard that the alarms would only be tested for about half an hour which means that I could have taken Oreo for a long walk while they did the testing but it turned out that the testing was for more like two hours and it would have been a major issue. As it was I worked through twenty minutes or so of alarms because I had no choice but it was extremely painful. So then I went to Food for Life and got lunch and then went to StarBucks and read “Questioning Extreme Programming” for a while. Earlier this week I wrapped up reading “Pragmatic Project Automation” which is the third and final title in the Pragmatic Programming Starter Kit.

I learned that yesterday was the day when the earth’s population officially (whatever that means) shifted from being primarily rural to being primarily urban for the first time in recorded history. The United States made this particular demographic shift sometime between 1910 and 1919.

Today is furniture day. Our new loveseat is schedule to be delivered this afternoon. I put in a lot of time cleaning today and moving furniture so that everything is ready for it to be delivered. We are taking the one leather seat that we have back up to dad’s so that the loveseat and the futon will both fit in the apartment. We don’t have spare space anywhere.

The furniture arrived late around the time that Dominica had left from work. We got it moved up to the apartment pretty quickly and nothing got destroyed. The first thing that I discovered is that the loveseat is much smaller than we had thought that it would be and is, in fact, a large recliner and not a true loveseat. Time will tell how well this is going to meet our needs but at least it was not expensive.

Dominica came home and we finished watching the final season of Arrested Development and then went off to bed.  We watched the show while squeezed onto our new recliner.  We fit but it is tight.  Oreo cannot possibly sit on it with us.  The recliner is called the “Cuddler” for a reason.

Weight Lost So Far: 12lbs