Sheep Guarding Llama

My life has involved an insane amount of driving since somewhere around 1999 and even before then I was doing quite a bit.  Whether it was back and forth to Michigan every several weeks, surprise trips to Chicago or Maine or whatever, I have always been up for a road trip.  But the last seven years seem to have really turned my life into a non-stop trip north and south along the US’ Eastern Seaboard that never seems to end.

I got to work today and was feeling quite a bit better than I have been but I am having really sharp paines in my stomach.  Just what I need.  At least today is a super, unbelievably slow day at the office.  At lunch time ten of us ended up going out to an Italian place around the corner from work that I have never been to before and had a four bottles of wine lunch.  We had a really good time.

The afternoon went by really quickly and by four o’clock there was almost no one left in the office.  I waited until almost five and I was out of there.  I hadn’t expected to have been able to have gotten onto the road so early and I ended up making great time up to Frankfort.  It was barely after nine when I arrived!  Not bad at all.  The trip went really easily.  I finished listening to the book “Can You Keep a Secret” by Sophie Kinsella that Dominica had left in my car some time ago.  It was a good book.  Quite enjoyable and it worked well to make the time pass on my drive down and back up this week.

I arrived in Frankfort and Oreo was so happy to see me.  Almost immediatley Dominica and I ran out and I grabbed some quick pizza at Sulley’s (which has the best cheese pizza around) and then ran to Walmart for some quick supplies before coming back to the house and watching Cars with the family.  That was a much better movie than I had been anticipating.  I thought that it was going to be pretty silly but it was actually very good.  I was very happy with it.

Wired News decided to celebrate the coming new year with the 2006 Foot in Mouth awards. Well worth reading. And definitely worth the opening quote when our nation’s leader shows off his complete and utter lack of literacy. And if that isn’t bad enough, keep reading. The chair of the senate committee attempting to regulate the Internet shows, quite clearly, a total lack of understanding for the very technology he is tasked with regulating. If this is the caliber of US politicians, no wonder we are losing the intellectual arms race. Neither of these two would be able to make it out of a New York state high school with their levels of education. Luckily for them they came from backwater states and attended, obviously, the “my daddy is rich and bought be a degree” colleges – the Ivy League has become well known as the haven for the illiterate rich to buy their way out of doing any actual learning.

I didn’t go into the office until almost eleven this morning. I slept in late but felt quite a bit better after spending the entire day yesterday recovering from food poisoning. Today, though, I have a migraine that I expect is brought on through a combination of dehydration and a lack of protein. I have been drinking tons but I have a lot to make up for from the last two days.

Work was slow today which was good as I was pretty much unable to get anything done. My head hurt pretty bad for most of the day.

Dominica and I found out today that someone is very seriously looking at our house in Geneseo. It is going to be a tough decision for us as to whether to stay or not. We love our “apartment” in Geneseo. Going there always feels like going home. Giving up a home is a really tough thing to do. But we can’t hold on to the house in Geneseo forever just because we don’t want to give it up. That isn’t practical in the long run. Geneseo has become a rather impractical location to keep a house. It was perfect when we bought it but now, even though we believe that we do need to maintain a “base of operations” for ourselves, it is in a very cumbersome location far from the train and airport and not close to any potential work opportunities. If we sell the house in Geneseo we could turn right around in this good buyer’s market and attempt to get a nice, new condo in Buffalo which is likely to be vastly more valuable to us in the long run. We need property that we can rent right now. Not property that sits empty all of the time. And a townhouse is not very practical for us. A condo would be much better.

I was totally useless at work today and left on the early side so I could get home and get some rest.  Nothing much to report.  I watched some Different Strokes and did pretty much nothing all evening.  I ordered in some pizza from Dominos and hung out with the front desk for a little while.  Then it was off to sleep again.

I slept as much as I could last night being so sick which wasn’t much and I spent the entire day today either laying on the futon in the dining room and sitting on the couch in the living room.  I slowly recovered throughout the day but was in pretty bad shape all day long.  I didn’t see any real improvement until in the middle of the afternoon Oreo came out and laid next to me on the futon and we both fell asleep for two hours or so and that really helped.  Boston Terriers make everything better.

I have to be in the office tomorrow and I am not about to call in sick so I have to drive to Newark this evening.  That is not something that I am looking forward to.

I left Frankfort around six in the evening and got to Newark a little after ten.  Not too bad of a drive although I was pretty worried the whole time.  I was able to grab a small meal from McDonald’s on the way and was able to eat it which was good.  I must be improving a lot.  This was the first meal that I have kept down since a tiny breakfast yesterday.  My last realy meal of any size was Christmas dinner two days ago in the middle of the afternoon!

Today is Boxing Day – the celebration of “Good King Wenceslas”. The day when people recover from the exhaustion of the Christmas holiday.

Our first order of the day, once people were awake and moving, was to get everyone ready and out the door to go see Night at the Museum. We were over prepared for big crowds and arrived at the theatre right at noon for a one o’clock showing. Because so much of Dominica’s family was going with us we had to be ready and waiting at the door since a quarter after eleven. So we were ready and waiting for the movie to start for close to two hours! The movie theatre never ended up filling up although it was fairly busy. Personally I think that home theatres are completely killing the movie theatre business. They do so much to make going out to the movies uncomfortable and expensive and in so many ways inferior to the home experience that it just isn’t worth it. They are artificially giving the theatres an advantage by allowing movies to release their first and only then going to DVD, HD-DVD and Blu-Ray but that can only last for so long.

Night at the Museum was really good and had a surprise cast that I was not expecting. It was a lot of fun and it was very family friendly which you don’t get too much of these days. I am really glad that we went to see it. Everyone really enjoyed it.

After the movie we went back to the house and I worked on setting up the Grices’ new computer.  That, of course, takes forever.  As I was setting it up we realized that this was one of the first machines that I have ever set up of Windows XP that was not going onto a Windows Domain which normally takes care of a lot of the setup process for me.  It has been years since I did a clean install of a personal use machine.  It was amazing how hard it was to set up and how much stuff you simply “had to know” to be able to get it to work.  It was a simply unreal amount of set up and it was very obvious that if you don’t have someone knowlegable about Microsoft Windows there is no way to get it really working well or safely.  I have gotten so used to Linux (SUSE, Fedora, Ubuntu or the BSDs like PC-BSD) with their super simple install process (much easier than Windows) and far easier post-install setup that I have totally forgotten how terrible Windows is to work with like that and how completely impossible it is for a casual user to use.  The average Linux installation is so much easier I can’t believe that everyone hasn’t switched all ready.

While we were setting up the computer Francesca decided that there were some additional computer parts that she would like so we all decided to go out to dinner and then shopping.  Everyone headed out to Denny’s for dinner and then we went to Best Buy to get some computer supplies.  We were unable to find a single thing that she needed at Best Buy.  I knew that Best Buy wouldn’t handle everything that she wanted but never imagined that they wouldn’t carry basic hardware like a DVD burner!  (They had legacy DVD Burners for people with old PATA equipment but modern SATA machines like the Grices’ new HP require modern equipment that Best Buy hasn’t even told their staff about yet apparently!!  It is unreal that people shop there!)  So that was a complete waste of time.  But at least she didn’t buy a bunch of stuff at double its normal prices.  Amazon and New Egg are totally the places to get this stuff.  We did fine the complete Dungeons and Dragons cartoon series at Best Buy and had to get that along with Mel Brook’s History of the World Part I which is an awesome movie, maybe the best Mel Brooks movie ever, but amazingly he never made a sequel which would have been awesome.
By the time we were heading for home I was feeling really sick.  It really started before we went to eat but it wasn’t very bad and I really didn’t take any notice of it.  By the time that we had dinner I was just starting to realize that something was wrong and by the time that we left Best Buy I was in pretty rough shape.

I spent the rest of the evening fighting with what appears to be food poisoning.  Francesca got a little sick too but nothing like what I did.  I was so sick that I did not manage to even really go to bed until almost four in the morning.  It was a really rough night.

Christmas 2006 has arrived.  Dominica and I were understandably quite tired when this morning rolled around.  As every year, we were all up at nine and the race to open presents was on.  Actually today the present opening was not nearly as crazy as it has been on many occasions.  We ended up only taking about four and a half hours instead of the usual five to six hours.

Dominica and my big presents include money towards a Nintendo Wii and bar stools for our living room, Superman Returns on DVD, Charmed Season One on DVD (for Dominica, not for me,) lots of work clothes, a gym bag for when I work out at the apartment, Final Fantasy III for the Nintendo DS, Final Fantasy V for the GBA and lots of other stuff.
After the present opening it was time to go to Dominica’s grandfather’s home for the evening Christmas festivities.  I have learned the routine and know pretty much what to expect from Christmas in Frankfort these days.

Merry Christmas everyone from everyone at Sheep Guarding Llama and SGL Media!