March 30, 2007: Exhausted

I was on the road leaving Newark by a quarter after five last night and found myself immediately in rush hour traffic. I lost an hour right off the bat as I fought my way through pointlessly slow New York City rush hour. I was in stop and go traffic all the way into Pennsylvania. That put a huge damper onto my trip. It really set me back a lot. It took me over an hour just to get to the point that I would have been had I left from the office instead of from home!

It ended up taking me a full six hours or a little more to get from Newark to Pittsburgh. It would have taken much less had I just beaten rush hour. Lesson learned on that one. What a sinking feeling that gave me knowing that I had pretty much lost my window for having any level of convenience whatsoever.

It wasn’t long before midnight when I arrived in Oakland. The work ended up taking about two hours due to one of the computers had some major issues even just starting up. I think that we might have lost an entire hour just waiting for the one computer to fully start up! That was another huge waste of time. Had that computer been working normally at all the entire “fix” time would have been way under an hour. Maybe under forty-five minutes.

It was a quarter till two in the morning when I got onto the road in Pittsburgh to return to New Jersey. The first part of the drive wasn’t bad at all. I wasn’t really all that tired until around four in the morning. Then it caught up with me and I was really, really tired. It was a major struggle to get myself back to New Jersey.

To make matters worse when I got around Allentown, PA I was, once again, stuck in rush hour traffic. I managed to hit rush hour both coming and going. Rush hour on Rt. 78 ended up costing me another hour (about three and a half total hours lost during the trip!) So I ended up driving straight to the office instead of going home. Attempting to get an hour of sleep this morning seems to be pointless so being at work is more useful. So that is where I headed.

I arrived at the office in Warren at a quarter until six in the morning. I had a duffel bag with me prepped with a change of clothes just in case I needed them this morning. It is a good thing that I brought them – the clothes than I had been wearing smell like the autoclave dock! I discovered that my badge has been deactivated at the office because today is my one year anniversary.

It is really hard to believe that I have been on a single contract for an entire year! That is just crazy. This has to be the longest contract that I have ever worked. I have hardly ever worked anywhere for a whole year!

I am super wrinkly guy today. I got stuck wearing my emergency backup clothes that I had in the car with me last night. I hadn’t been planning on actually wearing them and it is a little embarrassing. I need to have a travel bag that is packed and ready to go at all times for emergencies like this.

Everything is soar today after being in the car for twelve hours and seven hundred and twenty miles. I can’t wait to go home and crash into bed. I am going to sleep for a really long time.

The house was supposed to close today but we haven’t heard anything yet so it isn’t looking very good. Not a good sign. We haven’t heard anything at all even after calling our attorney to get a status update. It would appear that they have not been able to get a response from the buyer. 🙁 I just wish that this would be over and done with. I definitely don’t want it to drag out for any amount of time. The house is all cleaned out and taken care of. No reason to hold onto it at all anymore. And now we need to deal with another month of mortgage and homeowner’s fees that we had hoped to have finished with in March.

Time actually flew by this morning at work. It was well after ten before I even knew. Almost four hours into my day already! That is my favourite thing about coming in so early – the morning just whizzes right by and I don’t even notice. When I come in later the day seems to crawl along.

Dominica and I had hoped to be able to go to Ithaca this weekend to see the Ithaca High School production of Beauty and the Beast but with last night’s emergency and with us not going to Rochester this weekend we aren’t able to go. Tomorrow Dominica and I have a housewarming with the guys from the office. Other than that I plan to sleep a lot this weekend. I have a lot of catching up to do and I do not want to drive up to Ithaca – that would be six more hours of driving or more. I can’t even think about that now. Ugh.

There is more news on the Pet Food front: Federal Officials are claiming to have found fertilizer in the wheat gluten in Menu Foods’ dog and cat food. This is in opposition to New York’s finding that the product was rat poison. What are the chances that there are different contaminates in different regions? The FDA has reported over 8,000 complaints so far about the pet food.

Even as tired as I was today I managed to get online and to keep up with my class at RIT. It isn’t too much work as long as I don’t let myself fall behind. I just have to make sure to do a little every day and it works out pretty well.

Dad went over to Geneseo today to oversee the carpet cleaning process. This is the final step in getting the house ready. Now if someone will just buy it we will be all set. 🙁

The morning flew by but the afternoon started to drag on pretty dramatically. I got my third wind but it didn’t help much. I nursed a Rock*Star Energy drink all day (after having had a Venti Starbucks coffee and a Rock*Star while driving) to try to keep the caffeine at an even keel.

During my drive last night I managed to listen to several more hours of the book “Brave New World” which is not exactly riveting stuff but it is an important book and I am enjoying getting a chance to read it. BNW is a socio-political commentary on the potential horrors of a Utopian society of the future through the eyes of 1932 United Kingdom. The title is taken from The Tempest in a speech by Miranda which is quoted by one of the key characters in the book:

“O wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beautious mankind is!
O brave new world
That has such people in’t!”
After they finished steam cleaning the carpets in Geneseo dad took some pictures that I posted up on Flickr so that we will be able to remember a little more what the house looked like. It is really hard to believe that our house isn’t going to be our house anymore. It was such a great house. We loved that house. And now it is so clean!
Having been so tired I forgot to eat today. I forgot about breakfast (technically I had a cheese danish as half past two this morning when I stopped at StarBucks for some coffee) and missed lunch. I might end up being too tired to eat dinner. We will see. Maybe I will get a burst of vitality when I get home just because I am home. Sometimes that happens. But most likely I will just fall asleep and be out for the night.
 
By a little after three I was just about dead in my cubicle.  That is when it really hit me.  I was SO tired.  It was all that I could do just to keep my eyes open at work.
 
I escaped the office around half past four and wasn’t feeling too bad when I left.  I will have to work from home for a little while this evening before I can get any rest, though.  🙁 

March 29, 2007: Pittsburgh

There is no rest for the weary. At least last night I managed to pull off a real, full night’s sleep. It is a good thing because this morning I discovered that I really am needed in Pittsburgh and that I have to run out there tonight! I don’t have any spare time and since I am working from home today I need to be in the office tomorrow. That means that I have to drive to Pittsburgh tonight (in rush hour, no less) which Google Maps says is six hours away. Three hundred and sixty miles. And I have to do it round trip in a single night while stopping in the middle to work after having put in a full day and then go to the office in the morning. At least it is Friday. That is the equivalent drive of going to somewhere between Columbia, South Carolina and Augusta, Georgia! Seven hundred and twenty miles round trip (from here to Columbia is just seven hundred!)

Oreo spent the morning, and the early afternoon, lounging in the sunlight pouring through the windows. I worked from home and managed to catch up on my RIT homework as well.  I am glad that I was able to get caught up on my homework.  I would hardly want to have that hanging over my head while I am traveling tonight.

I was able to escape Newark around five this evening.  It is going to be a REALLY long night.  I hope to be able to go to bed at some point but it seems unlikely at this point.

SGL Vlog: Leaving Geneseo

Download the SGL Video Blog from March 25, 2007 – Leaving Geneseo in 640×480 Xvid (Recommended for Computer Viewing)
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This is my “farewell” video blog post from Geneseo, New York. This was Dominica and my first home that we purchased in July, 2003 and this past weekend we completed the packing process and the house is ready for the movers to take everything away. It is sad selling our very first home and we wanted to have a little video to remember it by. I didn’t have much time to shoot the video so this was taken after the packing was done and we were about to walk out the door, most likely for the last time. Unfortunately because of when I had to shoot the video and the fact that the lights in the house had been packed the basement is almost entirely unlit and is almost impossible to see and the entire house is completely full of boxes so the impression is quite different than how the house was while we were still living in it.

This house was very special to us. It was the first home that either of us ever bought. It was the house that we bought to move to when we got married having bought the house just a few months before the wedding. It was the only house that my mother and my paternal grandmother would ever see of mine. It was the only house that Mr. Humphries would ever live in. It was house where we got Oreo. It was where we spent the first almost four years of our married life together. It was the house that we bought with the intention of building the ultimate theatre room in the basement which we never got a chance to finish. A house can be a very nostalgic thing. I can see why people can be so reluctant to leave a house that they have lived in for a long time. This house was the home that I have lived in more than any other since leaving my parents’ home.

The structure is an end-unit ranch style townhouse right on the end of the village of Geneseo. We start in the driveway where you can see Dominica’s 2002 Mazda Protege 5 waiting to take us back to Newark. The garage is painted in a wine colour that Dominica was very excited about. We never quite finished doing the trim in the garage. We only just put working locks on the house after many years of using defective ones that had come with the house. We should have just left them. There is a lot that we had planned to do but never got around to doing. When we bought the house we were one of only two structures in the complex. We were the fifth unit to be filled and the last of the original buildings. No one new moved in after us for quite some time as an entirely new building had to be built. As the camera swings around you can see the finished development with many new homes almost all occupied. The landscaping and other niceties were never quite finished and I seriously doubt if they ever will be.

When we first moved to Geneseo there was just beginning to be speculation that a Super Walmart might be built somewhere close to us to replace the aging Walmart that was located over in the plaza near Wegmans. At the time the project sounded absurd and highly unlikely. But it wasn’t long after moving in that construction began and for some time now there has been a Super Walmart just behind the house which is just barely visible in a shot looking over the deck. The Tim Hortons was built next to the Walmart and for a while we went there on a regular basis.

In the basement you can just barely make out the baker’s rack located in the “server alcove”. That alcove was a major selling point of the house for us and it served as the location for several servers and related networking and power equipment that ran for almost every moment that we lived in the house. The hum of those servers was a part of our lives.

The theatre is the saddest part of the house. We had had such dreams of making that into an amazing theatre and listening room. We never even got to the point that we put down carpeting. The walls are painted black but were to be carpetted as well. The screen area was painted with a carefully formuated Benjamin Moore paint very carefully to make an excellent movie viewing surface. With the projector mounted near the back wall it was able to fill every inch of that screen area. As the camera turns around you can just make out the mounts where the stereo and theatre equipment had been mounted to the ceiling behind the seating area to make it accessible without interfering with sound or image. The amplifiers had been mounted into the ceiling to get them completely out of the way.

The last room in the basement was my office for the more than the first two years that we were in the house. That room was originally filled with bookshelves and desks. It was also the hub of the old Age of Empires II Friday nights games. But after Andy moved out I moved my office to the second bedroom and the basement mostly sat undisturbed.

I hope that you enjoy this short video of my first home. I didn’t want this important memory to be lost and so I recorded it here. There is no talking in the video – it is just a chance to share in a significant moment of our lives. We are excited about moving on to new opportunities and adventures. The house has been all but empty for a long time. We use it on a regular basis and dad has been there almost every other day. But it doesn’t feel like home anymore.

March 28, 2007: Another Allergy Day

I had to get up a little earlier than usual this morning and go down with Dominica and Oreo and help Min get a urine sample from Oreo for her to take to his vet at the Rutherford Animal Hospital so that we can find out how he is coming along. So that cut another half an hour off my already short night. This has been the week of no sleep for both dad and I. Me with work and him with working on our house in Geneseo.

The tentative closing date on the house remains this Friday but it is looking unlikely that they will be ready to close by that time. I found out this morning that I will not need to be at the closing in person and that I can take care of all of the paperwork from my end via parcel post which will make my weekend a world easier. I had no idea how I was going to manage getting up to Rochester this weekend in addition to everything else that needs to be done. I really just want to get some sleep at this point. I am going to need a vacation very soon.

I had a big scare this morning and spent most of the day being pretty sure that I had to leave from the office to drive out to Pittsburgh, work all night (or at least a couple of hours) and then drive back to New Jersey so that I could work all day without any sleep at all if I even managed to make the drive. But they called this afternoon and it looks as though I don’t have to go down there today. Oh boy do I hope that I don’t have to drive there today.

Today was actually quite slow at work. Almost nothing happened and I spent a lot of my time waiting on other people for resources that I needed. I took advantage of the opportunity to work on SSL-Explorer and managed to get a fair amount of stuff working with it. The biggest wins are that I now have instant messenger access back to home, SSH access and a remote desktop. I don’t have NX working which would be the best and I don’t have HTTP Forwarding yet but one thing at a time. Today qualifies as a pretty major victory.

Today is another one of my weird and as yet unexplained “allergy days”. These new allergies are completely baffling me. I have heard from many sources here that New Jersey is the land of allergies and that almost everyone who moves here has never had them before and gets them after a few months of living here. Mine started around August or September, if I remember correctly. They are strange. They come upon be quite suddenly. I can’t find any correlation between fresh air or stale air, warm weather or cold, open windows or air conditioning or heat, etc. I can’t even find a correlation between being in New York or New Jersey. Generally I wake up in the morning with it and it last for two to three days. And it is nothing more than an insanely runny nose. I don’t understand it at all. Having lived my entire life without any allergies at all and then getting hit with these so quickly seems unlikely. And they manifested themselves for the very first time during a trip back home to Geneseo but since then have almost always been in New Jersey.

YouTube (Google) announced the first YouTube Awards which are probably well worth checking out.

I was able to escape the office at a reasonable time and was home just a little after six.  Dominica did some shopping after work and she and Oreo weren’t home until long after seven.  We spent the evening just relaxing and enjoying having an evening when we didn’t have to frantically try to get tons of work done.  It was a good change.  It was off to bed early.  Tomorrow is looking like it will get to be a doggie – daddy day for Oreo and I.  He is very much looking forward to it.