Sheep Guarding Llama

It is a good thing that I decided to go to bed so early last night because the phone rang just after five this morning and it was time for me to get back to work. This week has been exhausting and so far I am just beginning my third day.

Once I was up I figured that I might as well get to work and just start my day early. I am so glad that I am able to do that.

Like the rest of the week today ended up being completely crazy. I thought that by starting so early in the morning that it would take a bit of a load off but it didn’t work out that way at all. Today was so crazy that I don’t even have time to write about it.

Susan and I tried to do lunch together today and it took half of the day just to manage to coordinate it. We ended up not getting to eat until almost two in the afternoon and then had to cut it short as we didn’t have any time to chat.

Oreo needed me to walk him twice during the day today. I don’t mind walking him but there just isn’t enough time for me to be away from the computer for so long.

Dominica got home and we just ordered some pizza to get us through dinner as quickly and as painlessly as possible.  She studied her A+ materials and finished the first book that she was reading and started on a second while I continued to work.

I ended up putting in a sixteen plus hour day today!  What a long day it was.  From five in the morning until well after nine in the evening.  The moment I was done working it was time for bed.  Hopefully I can get some good sleep tonight or I will be really sorry tomorrow.

I got to sleep in a little this morning. I felt much better. Oreo was still completely exhausted from his one day at daycare at it was all that Dominica could do to get him dressed and off to school (err, I mean to get his harness on and get him to daycare.) While she was putting her shoes on he ran away and went back to bed in the hopes that she would forget him.

The office was completely crazy today. It is quite the change from that awesome month of doing almost nothing that we had going on in December and the first week of January. Now we are paying for all of that relaxing that we got to do.

If you love pigs then today is the perfect day to throw all of your personal favourite pigs and spend some time snoodling them. Apparently, and I am getting this from my word of the day calendar that I got from Joe and I am using it to fill my blog like thousands of other lazy bloggers are doing today, snoodling (or “to snoodle”) means to feed, scratch, rub and attend assiduously to pigs. Not animals in general. Just pigs, hogs, swine, etc. And today is the Feast of Saint Anthony who is the patron saint of pigs. Not of swineherders. Of pigs. I guess they traditionally must serve his feast in a trough.

The weather turned cold yesterday evening and winter has finally set in to New Jersey. Now I have to learn to deal with the cold again.

For people who have given up checking in on the site, The Jedi Council Blog is back up and running now that Bob has a working computer again.

Last night Rochester had yet another train issue as CSX derails in East Rochester. No wonder Amtrak takes so long to get from Manhattan to Buffalo!

Dominica found a great page at Slate listing the top questions asked of Slate in 2006.

I didn’t manage to leave work until seven and boy was I ready to go home.  I got to Newark and picked up Dominica in front of the apartment building and we immediately went out to get dinner as tonight is Dosa and Chat Night at the Udipi Cafe.  Dinner was good and it was half past nine by the time we got back to the apartment.

It was so late that I just checked my email and went to bed.  A very short night indeed.  There is a fair chance that I will have to work during the overnight shift tonight and I want to have some sleep in case that happens.

After being away for five days it is hard to believe that I am back in the office again. That was almost like having an entire week off. Technically it was only four days off, Friday through Monday, and I got stuck working an hour on Saturday and a few hours on Monday, but still, in theory, it was a lot of time off.

Oreo didn’t get to walk as much as he had wanted to last night apparently and he got me out of bed in a panic to get outside just after four in the morning. I jumped out of bed and got dressed as quickly as possible and we ran like mad out to Military Park for his walk. Fortunately there is no traffic that early in the morning and we were able to sprint from the from door of the building all the way into the park without ever missing a beat. We got back to the apartment and he went back to bed with Dominica but I figured that I was all ready up so I might as well stay up. Going back to bed wouldn’t help very much that late.

I decided that since I was up that I would get my butt into the office nice and early. I got in before eight in the morning which is quite early for me when I am not covering the early shift.

As some of you know, Dominica and I have been considering my taking of a position in Belfast, Northern Ireland. There was an offer of a position a few months ago but that fell through. Recently there has been some talk of another position. Today I got the details and we now know enough about the situation in Belfast that we know that going there with the company that I am currently working for will not be a consideration. The pay rate options in the UK are just so much lower than here in the US that we just can’t take that much of a cut even if it means getting to live over there for several years. It would be career suicide. 🙁 Not to mention the fact that petrol is over $7 per gallon.

Today ended up being a very busy day. It has been a while since I have really been able to say that about work but I really got run ragged today. I barely had time to do anything and I was so busy that I ended up giving myself a headache. I did get a chance to run down to the cafeteria and to get myself an egg salad wrap.

My afternoon was busy too. Not as busy as my morning but still quite busy. By the end of the day I was quite tired.  I ended up working a little overtime today – an eleven hour day.  I had overtime on Saturday as well.  It is going to be busy all week I am guessing.

I got home around seven in the evening and had to run over to FexEx-Kinkos to send out an overnight package for Art and Danielle.  Dominica met me in the lobby of Eleven80 and we drove up the hill to IHOP to get some dinner.  Neither of us was in a mood for anything but breakfast.

After dinner we came home and made a short night of it going to bed before ten!

I got up this morning and logged into the office, even though it is Martin Luther King, Jr. day, and did a bit of work before getting to, more or less, take the day off. Dad came over and we did breakfast at the Omega like always. In many ways the Omega is more my home in Geneseo than my house in Geneseo is. Maybe I won’t end up missing my home in Geneseo as long as I visit the Omega often enough. It will continue to feel as if I have never left.

We had an ice storm last night and everything is coated in an even layer of ice that indicates that it was deposited by fog and not by rain. But then everything as the telltale drips that are caused by rain so we can determine that it was foggy and then it rained. There are few things as beautiful as the world after an ice storm. As long as you have no need to go out into the icy world this is about as good as it gets.

A lot of people in the region are without power today as ice storms tend to bring down trees and power lines (God’s way of telling the power company that he didn’t design the world to look nice with power lines up in the air everywhere.) In Geneseo I lost power for just a minute this morning. This was the first time that I have lost power while sleeping in over two years! I know this because this was the first time that the power went off while I was using my CPAP. Let me tell you, that is quite the surprising way to wake up. One moment you have an air compressor forcing air into you and keeping your throat inflated and the next minute you have the equivalent of some invisible foe pinching your nose shut while you sleep.

After breakfast dad returned home and I went back to packing. I managed to get a fair amount done today and I don’t feel too bad about the progress that we made this weekend. We didn’t make as much as we had been hoping but we still have a lot of time left and we have reduced the total volume of stuff to be moved considerably. I talked to Nate this afternoon and he is going to take a number of the old instruments like my marching trombone and three of my guitars.  That is a bunch of space that I won’t have to worry about now.

I didn’t have as much packing time today as I would have liked as I have to pack the car for the return journey to Newark and get on the road before the going gets tough.  (Therefore, I must get going – see the poetic logic of the situation?)  I loaded the second DL380 G2 into the car (one less thing to deal with in Geneseo – one less BIG thing) and a plastic storage bin full of books, mail and miscellany that is returning to Newark with me, my clothing bag, CPAP, laptop bag and, at the very last minute, a laser printer (HP LaserJet 6L) to deliver to Johnson City.

Right at the last minute I got stuck and wasn’t able to leave the house when I wanted to because of support issues in Sao Paulo.  (Sao Paulo is, of course, the Portuguese equivalent of Minnesota’s Saint Paul.)  Some interesting facts about Sao Paulo are: it is the second largest metro area in the world after Tokyo (using the common system of disregarding the New York City Megaplex), it is one of the largest Italian cities in the world with five million Italians living in the city while having only three million Portuguese and two million Spaniards.  It has the largest number of US or German companies headquartered outside of their respective homelands.  It is the largest Lebanese population in the world outside of Lebanon.  It is the largest Japanese population in the world outside of Japan.  A very dynamic place indeed.

I got out of town just in time to avoid the ice again.  It was above freezing this afternoon and the roads weren’t too bad but it was getting cold again and the roads would be treacherous if I stayed around for very long.  I got down to Dansville and grabbed some McDonald’s to eat on the road.

While driving I finished listening to Garrison Keillor’s “WLT: A Radio Romance” that he wrote in 1992. It was pretty good and is definitely one of the books that mark Garrison’s attempt to change the style in which he writes.  This was a book that showed him transitioning to the new Garrison who wrote “Lake Wobegon Summer 1956” nine years later or “Lake Wobegon Boy” in 1998.  After finished Garrison’s book about life in Minnesota during the waning days of radio I began listening to “In the Wake of Madness” the story of the Whaling Ship Sharon that set sail from New England in 1841 and went on to become one of the most important news events upon her return with her captain murdered and much of her crew escaped onto Ascension Island.  For years the events surrounding the mutiny were covered up but with recent uncovering of journals and news reports the story has been put back together for the contemporary audience.

The trip went quickly.  I stopped in Johnson City and left there at nine.  It took just under two and a half hours to go from Johnson City, NY to Newark, NJ.  Not bad time at all.  I got in before half past eleven and was in bed just a little after midnight.  Oreo was very glad to be home and he really missed his mommy.

The alarm went off at six this morning and boy was I tired. It took me a minute before I could figure out why I had an alarm clock going off so early in the morning in Geneseo. I was up quickly and almost immediately out the door and into the car. It was very cold out and the car was covered in ice so I had to sit for a little while to let it warm up.

I drove up to the city and was ahead of Eric so I swung over to Andy’s apartment and picked him up no the way to the hospital. That saved some time. We all got there at about the same time. The roads were pretty bad this morning with black ice. The bridges on US 390 were all frozen and made the driving pretty treacherous. There were a lot of accidents early in the morning out on the highway.

Eric worked with Andy and I until a quarter after nine when he had to leave to get to church. Andy and I stayed at the hospital for another hour or so working on getting the new system up and running. For the most part things went well but everything is not complete at this point and there isn’t much chance of getting things actually running until mid-week at the earliest.

After we gave up at the hospital Andy and I went over to Jay’s Diner and got some breakfast.  Well, Andy got some breakfast and I got some coffee as I was still full from the big dinner last night.

I got home just in time to shower and get ready to go out to lunch with my family.  Dad, Aunt Sharon and Uncle Leo, Dominica and I all went out to the Omega for lunch at half past twelve.  Dominica wanted to get out of town before the weather got too bad so she left early from lunch and headed straight out.

After lunch I went home and continued packing.  There is so much packing to be done!  This afternoon I finished going through the books.  The final count from just the books that are still in the house is approximately 190 books are being thrown out.  One hundred and ninety technical books.  It is a very rare person to ever own so many books dedicated to technical education.  Andy has one of the largest libraries of anyone that I have ever known and he owns only about eighty books.

After the books were finally sorted and catalogued it was time to start working on the rest of the basement.  Most of the basement work involved sorting and deciding what to keep and what to throw away or donate or whatever.  The actual packing and moving is only so hard.  I am attempting to make THIS time moving the time when I really start thinning everything out significantly.  But then again, I say that every time, don’t I?

Dad was planning on coming over for dinner but the weather turned kind of nasty after lunch and we decided that it would be smartest to just wait until breakfast rather than attempting bad weather travel just for food.  Dominica made it out before the weather got to bad and managed to stay ahead of it.  She actually made quite good time and was down in Newark before seven o’clock.

I worked until one in the morning or so on the basement.  I went through years worth of paperwork and disposed of almost everything.  Giant garbage bags of papers filled to capacity were dragged from the basement tonight. If I can keep on the roll that I am currently on moving next time won’t be nearly so bad and dad won’t have so much stuff to store.  But that is probably a long shot.  I also went through some boxes of “memories” that I keep and reduced the stuff in there.  Posterity doesn’t need to be able to piece together every single event of my life.  It is really tough parting with stuff though.  As I go through all of this old stuff it definitely makes me realize how old I am.