Sheep Guarding Llama

I was awake at twenty after five this morning but stayed in bed for about half an hour before getting up. I checked email and did a few things before heading off to the gym to work out before going to work. I was quite happy to be able to make it to the gym early this morning. My plan is to make my gym time really early in the morning because it helps to keep me going all day and it is one of the few times that I can really squeeze it in. I wore my new New Balance sneakers today too to break them in so that I can use them without getting blisters in Walt Disney World.

Getting up extra early doesn’t really help me get into work early in any significant way. I get back from the gym but still have to wait until almost eight before I get start getting ready because I have to wait until Dominica is ready and leaves for the office. But it gives me more time to do other things around the house.

It was a busy day at the office but time passed quickly and I could barely tell where the day went. The original plan for this week was that Oreo and I would stay home tomorrow as my work from home day and then I would go into the office on Thursday and work the early shift so that I could be back in Newark with plenty of time to get out to the airport. But without any reasonible notice we have another fire drill at 1180 tomorrow which means that neither Oreo nor I should be home as having an hour long alarm at an unknown time in the middle of the day is just crippling for us causing him to panic and me to spend the entire day waiting for the alarm to happen. So he is stuck going to daycare every day this week and I am stuck going to work four full days this week. This is probably the worst possible week for them to pull this without any warning because Oreo can’t stay home on Thursday because of our flight and then he is being boarded all weekend. So he will be at daycare from Monday of this week straight until Thursday of next! He and I could have stayed home today had they given us any warning at all about the alarm but they didn’t even tell me until this morning about an hour or two after Oreo had already gone to daycare with Dominica. Had they told us earlier this morning we could have done something probably and if they had told us yesterday I could definitely have arranged it. Things like this make it extremely expensive and uncomfortable living in 1180. This is costing us between $50 and $100 just this week not to mention the distress of having to go to work an extra day, missing a day with my dog and having him go to daycare far too much. The quality of life factor is not doing so well here in Newark at the moment. We were told repeatedly that there were only two floors left needing to be tested (there have been five or six tests so far since they told us that there were only two more) but this morning we were informed that there is testing needed when each of the retail spaces gets filled on the first floor which adds a tremendous amount of additional fire alarm testing. Even the city told us that there were only two more floors to test! This is far beyond ridiculous.

I got home and ran over to Subway for a quick dinner as Dominica is really stressed out between work and her big A+ exam that she is taking tomorrow afternoon.  She didn’t want to leave the house.  We watched one episode, the pilot, of Arrested Development which we had never seen before and then spent the evening doing nothing but studying.  We studied until Dominica was completely burnt out and then watched one more episode of the show before heading off to bed.  She will need plenty of sleep tonight so that she is ready for tomorrow.

Today begins my short week at the office. Dominica found out on Friday that she is being given Friday as a “holiday” the same as I am. That is awesome. That will help a lot to offset the cost of our mini-vacation. So she doesn’t have to go crazy working through her lunches and staying late every night trying to make up time. It is especially helpful since she is taking some time off on Wednesday afternoon, at least an hour, to go to take her CompTIA A+ exam. So we both have four day work weeks. I am hoping to be able to work from home on Wednesday so that I will get a day with Oreo before he spends the long weekend at day care without seeing us. He will really miss us and he will be really exhausted after all that so we want to make sure that he gets his usual sleep-in-the-sun day. So I will probably only be going into the office three days this week and Thursday is going to be a really early day for me so that I can leave the office by three thirty.

We are already packed for the trip. Dominica did that while studying over the weekend. So we are almost ready to walk out the door as it is. We just have to get dressed after work, get a ride to the airport and off we go. Dominica is exceptionally excited about this trip. She gets really worked up about trips to Walt Disney World. Min did a little looking and discovered that there is a new way to do Mission: Space that does not include the motion-sickness inducing centrifuge which means that we can now do the ride which is one of EPCOT’s biggest attractions. We are really excited about that because it provides a completely new and highly anticipated experience in EPCOT. Mission: Space replaced by former favourite EPCOT attraction – Horizons presented by General Electric. My parents and I rode Horizons three times when we went there in 1987. This is very exciting as on our last trip we really felt that we had exhausted the “attraction” portion of WDW and were very tired of the rides. Having something big and new to go to will really help.

So our new EPCOT stuff to experience include: The Seas (re-opened since our 2005 trip), Spaceship Earth (modified so that I can ride it without becoming ill), The Land (same ride but the human narrator has been replaced with pre-recorded audio) and the Gran Fiesta Tour in Mexico (replaces the aged El Rio del Tiempo.) Outside of EPCOT there is the new Laugh Floor Comedy Club in the Magic Kingdom and a Narnia museum exhibit in Disney Studios. Both are very unlikely to justify trips to those parks though.

We have checked the weather and it is going to be extremely hot while we are in WDW. It will be in the low 90s each day that we are there. That is not what we had been hoping for. We are not well prepared to be spending a weekend in that kind of heat. That is going to add a layer of complication to the weekend. At least we are arriving in the middle of the night so it shouldn’t be too bad at that point.

Today is pretty slow as it is a bank holiday in the UK. So I have very little to do. A nice day to relax and get caught up with some stuff. I actually did get a bit of “catch up” work done and got a chance to get a little breather. Dominica had a really busy day, though, which is not what she needs leading up to her big exam.

Before leaving home this morning I finished reading “DV Filmaking” from O’Reilly Publishing that I started a few weeks ago. I also wrapped up my textbook “A Gift of Fire” by Sara Baase. I skipped most of the book as it didn’t really apply that much to my class. Really it was just an expensive assignment sheet for us. The book was pretty good considering the subject matter but nothing that I feel the need to pour over or keep. I will probably sell it used in the hopes that someone will need it for another class.

I left work at a quarter till six.  Tonight will be nothing but studying for Dominica and I.

Today Dominica was actually up earlier than me. She must have gotten up sometime around seven thirty or maybe a little earlier. Oreo and I were up before eight. For a change I cooked breakfast this morning. I made Dominica’s almost famous scrambled eggs and soyrizo (soy chorizo) dish. It was very good. Sauteed onions and green peppers, some rosemary, olive oil, seven eggs and a whole package of soyrizo. Mmmm. I think that it needs eight eggs though to balance out correctly.

Today is the big homework and study day for the two of us. We both have assignments due today and today is the last weekend day before Dominica has her A+ exam on Wednesday.

Congratulations to Joe Howlett whose daughter was born on Friday.

In ongoing issues with the US Army: Four US Army Soldier are arrested for looting in a Kansas town destroyed by a tornado.

We spent the day working on homework and then Dominica’s A+ stuff. We both had a lot of homework to do today so that took us well into the afternoon. At six thirty I left to run into Manhattan. My friend Helen Highfield from back in Ithaca is starring in The Bride of Olneyville Square and tonight is the only performance that I can make it to at all. Dominica wanted to go and had originally planned on it but with the homework and studying that she has to do there just isn’t any way that she can squeeze it in. So I am stuck going alone.

I had to take NJ Transit into Manhattan instead of the Path because I was heading uptown rather than downtown.  The theatre is up at 340 East 54th Street.  I almost never go up there.  It is a part of town that I don’t know very well.  NJ Transit ended up taking forever.  I got to the train station and watched two Path trains leave while I was waiting.  It took me almost half an hour to catch the train.  That didn’t work out very well.  Then once I got into NY’s Penn Station it took ten or fifteen minutes before I was able to catch the metro up to 53rd and Lexington so I was running really late by the time that I even got off of the trains.  🙁  I came out of the subway and discovered that I was in the station in CitiGroup center which I have barely ever seen in person.

The show, The Bride of Olneyville Square by Edward Allan Baker was quite good.  I really enjoyed the performance which was excellent.  Helen had a very major role and did an amazing job.  I am glad that I went although I did not manage to see Helen after the show – I didn’t have any time to wait around as the show ran until after ten.  With the late night train schedules it was closing in on midnight by the time that I got back to 1180 in Newark.  Dominica was already in bed and I went to bed very quickly.

I thought that I slept in quite a bit this morning but later realized that I had gotten up just after seven! Dominica thought that she had slept in a really long time because I was up for so long before she and Oreo got up but she was up just after eight. Normally on Saturdays we get up and have just enough time to get ready and to run to Food for Life to make it for breakfast. Today we were up, showered and ready to go several hours before they even open for breakfast so we had some time to kill.

After breakfast Dominica spent the day working on her A+ exam.  She did some practice tests off of her practice CDs and then we spent some time with me asking her questions and going through the answers with her.  We broke up the studying with episodes of Good Eats with Alton Brown from the Food Network.

For dinner we just ran over to Food for Life and ate there.  We took along some study material and I kept asking Dominica more questions while we waited for our dinner.

Not much of a Cinco de Mayo party for us.