Sheep Guarding Llama

The weather cleared for the most part and driving wasn’t bad at all today. I had to get up and get moving right away as I had to return my rental Toyota and pick up the PR5 from the shop. We got the pleasant surprise last night that the repairs on the car were going to be nowhere near as expensive as they had thought that they were going to be and we were able to save almost a thousand dollars on the repairs.

My review of the Toyota Corolla S was that it is very weak, just like Andy had said after having rented one too. No power at all. And I feel like I am sitting very high off of the road for such a small car. It felt very unstable and it was hard to hold the road. Overall the car was okay but nothing special and definitely not competitive with Kia or Hyundai. It definitely convinced me not to buy a Toyota. Just not the level of craftsmanship that I expect in a car these days.

Congratulations to Steve Romano who bought his own auto shop today in Wamego, Kansas. He won’t be taking over the shop for about a month as everything just went through today. Wamega is “famous” for its Oz Museum with one of the largest collections of Wizard of Oz memorabilia, the Schonhoff Dutch Mill which is the only working stone windmill in the state of Kansas, Historic Prairie Town taking visitors back to the early days of Wamego and most prominently as the birthplace of Walter Chrysler the founder of the former American car maker once famous as one of the big three Detroit auto manufacturers. Wamego has a population of about 4,000 making it just slightly smaller than Perry but it is located very close to Topeka which, in turn, is just outside of Kansas City.

Since we didn’t get to go out to dinner last night we decided on IHOP tonight.  I had good food at work today too going out for the Thai House for lunch and then having some Indian food in the office after I got back.

Tonight we are hoping for a slow and relaxing night.  Nothing much scheduled.  Dominica is planning on going out to Frankfort this weekend to be with her mother.  We don’t know much beyond that for plans at this point.  We don’t have a car with snow tires on it right now so if there is any snow then it is not safe for us to be driving any distance which is why we have kept avoiding going back to Geneseo to get the rest of our stuff moved out of there.  So with that in mind the most likely scenario is that she will take the Amtrak train from Manhattan up to Utica and have her father pick her up there.  That means that I will be staying in Newark with Oreo as Oreo is not allowed to ride the train – which is our top complaint about Amtrak service and I am sure a major loss of business to them in general.  Dominica was able to get Monday off from work as it is a holiday as I have it off as well so if we both drive up then we can be there for three days or if she goes alone then I am still in Newark on Monday to watch after Oreo.

I worked very late last night and didn’t go to bed until after two in the morning. I went down to the lobby and checked out the weather before going to bed. From the looks of things early this morning it didn’t look as though the storm would be all that bad.

Dominica attempted to leave for work but came back to the apartment with Oreo and told me that I had to stay home with him today because she couldn’t do the extra miles to get him to daycare and that I should be driving all of the way out on 78. So today became an impromptu Doggie-Daddy Day. Snow days are always fun. Even if I do still have to work.

The weather was so bad that Oreo couldn’t handle even walking outside. The poor little boy is not a dog built for winter conditions. I decided that it wasn’t even worth walking to Food for Life to get lunch so I just cooked myself some vegetable rice in the apartment instead.

Dominica made it to work just fine and was glad to be driving the rear-wheel drive BMW. As serious snow drivers know – read-wheel drive is the actual safer option in snow. It gets stuck far easier than any other drive but it maintains the greatest control and is the least likely to cause a high speed accident. This is Dominica’s first winter driving a rear-wheel drive car as they are pretty rare these days but she is already feeling its advantages. Scott Rear-Wheel Drive Rule of Thumb: If the weather conditions are so bad that your rear-wheel drive car won’t allow you to move – then the conditions are too dangerous to be driving in a front-wheel drive or all-wheel drive car and you should be thankful for not having to make the decision yourself. Basically, BMWs force you to drive more responsibly but allow you to be safer when you are being responsible.

Dominica’s mother fell down the stairs at her home in Frankfort, NY this morning carrying a load of laundry and shattered her left wrist – breaking every bone in it. They faced closed roads and horrible driving conditions to get her to the hospital in Utica just to discover that the hospital there doesn’t have the facilities to handle a break of this magnitude and now she has to wait at home with an unset multiple break until Friday when they can get her into surgery at a hospital in Syracuse – which we are assuming will be University Hospital although we don’t know that for sure.

For the most part Oreo and I had a really good day just relaxing in the apartment knowing that we had no way to travel anywhere today. I even managed to squeeze in maybe an hour more of Dragon Quest VIII between things that I had to do at the office. But I didn’t get very much time in.

Dominica’s office decided to close early and she was the last one out at half past two this afternoon. It took her almost an hour to get from the office door back to 1180 in Newark and she was very glad to be back home. It worked out nicely for us as it is Valentine’s Day and we were able to spend a long evening together even though I had to work for a lot of the evening and we were not able to go out to dinner like we had hoped that we would be able to. Dominica made some vegetarian spaghetti for dinner and we relaxed while watching more of the second season of The Facts of Life. This is the season where they fired most of the girls (apparently the budget was too high the first season) and replaced the dorm full of girls (including Molly Ringwald) with Nancy McKeon as Joe.

I forgot to mention yesterday that our check for the damage to the BMW finally arrived last night. Several months late but it did arrive and we are much relieved. Speaking of cars – the Mazda PR5 is heading to the shop this morning. That car is no longer saving us any money but with all of the money that we are putting into it it seems like it would be foolish to get rid of it anytime soon! Argh.

I worked from home for two hours or so this morning before rushing into the office to get the PR5 into the shop. I dropped the car off and got a loaner – a new Toyota Corolla S. This works out well as I have been wondering whether or not I would like a Corolla S. It is a small, sporty looking economy car. And my rental is even a colour that I like for this car. So it is like an extended test drive – not that we are looking for another car at this point. We really need to sell three cars as it is. Let me know if you are interested in one of them.

The PR5 is going to end up costing around $1,500! Both front bearings are toast and very dangerous and so they and their hubs have to be replaced which, in turn, requires a front end alignment and, while it is there, it is getting an oil change as well. It is things like this that make me REALLY want to get transferred up to Jersey City so that I don’t have to drive any more and we can go down to a single car. That would be awesome.

Work wasn’t too bad today. A lot of “recovering” still from yesterday’s emergency and a few incidences for today as well but not bad. A good day, I would say.

We are expecting some real snow tonight. Our first real snow of the year with driving problems and everything. But it isn’t expected to hit until this evening so the morning commute is the first that we will really see any driving issues. Everyone at the office is making contingency plans to deal with a lot of people needing to work remotely. Oreo would be very happy if I didn’t have to leave the house tomorrow. As it is he is planning on losing this week’s “Doggie / Daddy Day” and he will be SO exhausted come the weekend. At least it is a long, three day weekend so he will have a lot of time to rest up and recover from five solid days of daycare.

Barry Leiba from IBM expanding on Raymond Chen of Microsoft’s email subject etiquette article and I thought that I should copy it here: Guide to Email Subjects. It is a good read for everyone. I know you all are like me and poor at choosing useful email subjects. In the article he talks about how some people may only get a few emails a day but some of us get dozens or even hundreds but I want you to know that, not including SPAM, I am getting several thousand a day and can top ten thousand on rare occasion and I know that there are a lot of people like me out there and for us it is VERY important to have meaningful email subjects. It isn’t a long read and it would be good for us all – so go read it.

I had to leave the office a little early this evening because I have night work that has to be done, well, late.  So I had to get home early enough to have time to get the work done.

Today is the first day of our valet service working from Commerce instead of Raymond so now we are getting our cars on the south side of the building instead of the north side like we have been.  In the long run we think that this will probably be the better solution as Raymond just wasn’t working but with all of the parking and construction that go on on Commerce and the total disaster that that road is every evening I have no idea how this is going to work.  It is all that we can do to drive down Commerce in the evenings let along actually get in and out of our cars there!

I was up nice and early this morning and had to immediately get to work on an office emergency. I was planning on going into the office today but that didn’t end up happening. I was so busy all day that I ended up being stuck working from home all day. It turned into a really long day and I didn’t actually quit working until one in the morning!

It wasn’t an absolutely solid day of work like it sounds but I never really got any time off. I had to babysit a recovery process and only quit when I did because Optimum online went down and didn’t come back soon enough so I just went to bed so that I could get up and continue tomorrow.

I did get a chance to play a little Dragon Quest VIII today. Not a lot but a little and that was enough to keep me happy. I am a little over twenty hours into the game now and supposedly it should have about ninety hours of gameplay. My game clock was at twenty-five hours by the end of the day but a lot of that time was caused by me playing and having to leave the game running during conference calls and emergencies and other things that keep happening while I am playing. Several hours have been run up on the clock without me actually playing so I am estimating that I can’t be over twenty percent through the game thus far.

Dominica went out and picked up fish tacos from Chevy’s for dinner on her way home which worked out really well. We ate dinner and watched several episodes of The Facts of Life Season One from 1979. TFOL is a spin off of the really bad show Diff’rent Strokes but was far better than its parent show and actually lasted a bit longer as well do mostly to the acting talents of Lisa Welchel who had more acting talent than the entire Diff’rent Strokes cast combined. I think that the producers figured out that DS just didn’t have the acting depth to be able to last and even though they attempted to build TFOL using the same formula they looked for someone to lead the cast who could actually portray emotion on the screen and balance out Charlotte Rea’s completely insane performance that threatened to drag everything around it into the mire.

We are continuing to enjoy the new living room layout and are looking forward to putting in the real television stand with front door that will hide the PS2 and the DVD player.

Oreo got me up as he does every Sunday just after eight in the morning. He acts as though he needs to be taken outside to make sure that I get up right away but then he just runs out to the living room and lays in the sun. He has learned to time it so that he gets me out of bed just minutes before the sun is in a position for him to be all toasty so that he doesn’t miss any sun time.

Today is Dragon Quest VIII day. Dominica is still tired of Kingdom Hearts II after they put in that silly, long and very frustrating “Tron” section so she retired to the futon with Oreo and spent most of the day watching me play DQ8.

Today is our first day trying out the new furniture arrangement in the living room and the verdict is that we really like it. Dominica found a television stand from Walmart online that she really liked and ordered it. So we should be moving away from the tacky wire-frame printer stand and to a simulation wood television stand in a week or two.

The Mazda is not in good driving condition as its bearings are beginning to go so we are attempting to avoid driving it as much as possible until we can get it into the shop to get the bearings fixed. So today is “staying in” day which is great for me as I have possession of the PS2 for most of the day. I put in pretty much a full day of video gaming. It is amazing how much less expensive a good video game can be than a movie or something else similar. DQ8 was only about twenty dollars but will provide a lot of entertainment value. This game is very cinematic and really gives a good feel as if you are interacting with a movie. The cell shading is absolutely gorgeous and the game really feels like you are living in an anime film.

Dragon Quest IX has been announced in the last several weeks but is not coming to one of the new consoles but is instead going to be targeted at the Nintendo DS. The DS is awesome and I love it but I don’t know how excited I am about a cell shaded Dragon Quest sequel going to it when the cinematic qualities of the last one are so phenomenal. What I really want to see is DQ9 going to the PS3 or, even better, to the PC with full 1080p output and everything so that we can see just how amazing this stuff can look.