Sheep Guarding Llama

As planned, this morning was IKEA shopping morning. We got up a little after seven and drove down to Elizabeth around half past eight. We stopped at Burger King for breakfast and then hit the IKEA store shortly after they opened. Getting there really early did help a lot and we were able to go right in and get the Billy bookshelf and a few assorted sundry items that we needed for decorating around the apartment quite quickly and easily. Far better than our previous experience at the store.

On the way out we also did some shopping in the IKEA Swedish grocery store. We discovered delicious Lant Chips along with several types of northernberry preserves like lingonberry (aka cowberry), cloudberry (aka bakeapple) and gooseberry. Very delicious stuff.

We came home to Newark and set to putting together the shelving unit. It was much better construction that the stuff that we are used to buying and very competitively priced. We are very pleased with the quality of the unit. It is able to hold a lot more books than we are used to and it is a lot more attractive. Once that was completed our job was to clean the apartment and to get as much stuff as possible put away now that there is enough shelf space in the apartment. We moved the old, small shelf that had been in the living room into our bedroom.

One project that I attempted today and am now very sorry for having tried is washing the living room throw rug. We got this rug when we first moved to New Jersey and were living in North Brunswick and it has traveled with us to here and we decided that we wanted to wash it before Susan came to visit this week. The original plan was to have taken the rug to a cleaner but that didn’t end up working out so I decided that I would give it the ol’ college try myself. Bad, bad idea. Of course the only place where I could hope to wash the rug was in the shower but that didn’t work at all. It is a fairly large throw rug and when I first put it into the shower everything was going fine until it dawned on me that as the shower water soaked into the rug that the rug would be getting heavier and heavier and very soon it was too heavy for me to lift. Oops. So that ended up turning into a much larger project than I had anticipated. I spent about an hour cleaning the rug just to discover that things like Oreo’s corn starch bone bits were not about to come out of it one way or another. So I am not sure how valuable the whole cleaning process was anyway. Now we are stuck with a rather large, completely water-logged rug that we have no reasonable way to spread out to dry. We are pretty sure that we are going to be stuck throwing the rug away which, in reality, is only so bad. I never liked that rug anyway.

Dominica did a lot of cleaning around the apartment today while I was struggling with the rug. After several hours of working on the apartment we talked and decided that it was time that we acquired a television or a television like device for the apartment so that we would have something to watch movies on since we have been stuck using Dominica’s 19″ computer monitor in the living room “alcove” which is a very cumbersome place to view movies in. So we drove out to Union, NJ which was a total parking lot the entire way. I guess Christmas shopping comes early in New Jersey. We got to Best Buy and found out that they don’t carry any 1080p monitors, just HDTV (1080p is the step above HDTV and is the standard for high quality home theatre now as it is the common output shared between HD-DVD and BluRay as well as the output from video game devices like the X-BOX 360 and the PS3) at least in reasonable sizes like what we are interested in which is between 32″ and 42″. Dad has the 37″ Westinghouse 1080p that he got from Best Buy and he loves it. We were hoping that they would be carrying that model but they no longer carry it in the store and you can only order it. That would really defeat the purpose of the spur of the moment shopping spree that we were on and would not make the television usable by Susan this week.

We settled on just doing some grocery shopping and then we headed back to Newark. We decided to just watch The Wedding Crashers and then headed off to bed. The movie was pretty good. Nothing classic but entertaining.

In the eleventh hour leading up to the release of Windows Vista Microsoft has decided to back off on its draconian licensing terms in the Vista EULA and now users will be allowed to transfer the Vista license an unlimited number of times if they buy the full, non-OEM copy. This makes the licenses mostly comparable to Windows XP and makes it something that I can once again recommend. Kudos to Microsoft for getting a clue and listening to the bloggers responses to discovering the original EULA terms.

Some of you were aware that Dominica and I were looking at a possible move at work that would have allowed us to move to Northern Ireland. At one point it was an “all clear” and as far as we knew everything was happening but as often happens there were many unknown factors and that has fallen through. As with any opportunity we are kind of bummed just because it would have been a neat change of pace but there were lots of downsides and we are very happy where we are now. So we are staying in Newark for the foreseeable future.

Now we can really put forth some effort furnishing our apartment and getting it to be a place where we are really going to live. It will mean that we get to continue using the house in Geneseo on a semi-regular basis. Our plan, currently for what that is worth, is to keep moving forward with finishing the house in Geneseo.

We finally got our apartment deposit back from our place in North Brunswick today. Boy this stuff takes forever. At least that is one less thing that I need to worry about. I hate having to follow up to make sure that people are giving you your money back.

Last night when I got home from work Dominica wanted to go out shopping in West Orange so I picked her up and we did some driving around trying to find a new way to get our to West Orange. That ended up just getting us lost.

We finally got out to the shopping center and we know how to get there easily now. We grabbed dinner at Desert Moon Cafe which we didn’t realize was a national chain. They now have tofu on their menu and we were really happy with the food there. It was very tasty. We will be going back there now that we know that they are just ten minutes away and that they have new menu items that we really like.

After dinner we hit Macy’s really quickly to get the stuff that Dominica had wanted to go shopping for. That only took a few minutes. Then we hit Stone Cold Creamery for dessert but we were pretty full and couldn’t eat much which was sad because the ice cream sounded so good.

We came home and decided that it needed to be a very early night and we went pretty much right to bed. Boy are we ever getting old! I thought about playing some Lunar Legend before actually falling asleep but before I could actually play it – I was asleep.

I ended up working from home for quite a while this morning. I was planning on escaping Newark on the early side but I got caught doing one thing or another and didn’t actually manage to leave Newark until almost eleven. That works out well though because it ends up making the day seem to fly by.

I am really glad that today is Friday. I am looking forward to a nice “relaxing” weekend at home. We don’t get those often enough. Dominica has a lot of homework and studying to do this weekend so we will just be home doing that most of the weekend. She is coming into the second half of her Java class and so that is getting much harder. And she has only six weeks left to finish her A+ before they introduce a new A+ test and she has to start over again which would be awful.

We had a fire “drill” this afternoon. Apparently it was announced but through a channel where no one was aware of it and I am pretty sure that only a small number of people were told. So I had no jacket and had to stand around outside for a while without one. It was a little chilly.

Here is a story proving that everything that you think about Newark is a Bunch of Bull.

I left work just a little after five and drove in heavy traffic and beat Dominica and Oreo home by quite a bit. When they got home we decided to order from Domino’s and to just spend the evening relaxing at home. We have to be up early in the morning to go bookshelf shopping so we don’t want to stay up too late.

We popped in Date Movie which was one of the many movies that we had picked up while having been down in Maryland this past weekend. In addition to Date Movie we also picked up copies of Benchwarmers, Just Friends, Scorched, Wedding Crashers, The New World, Lord of War and Ladies in Lavender with Judi Dench. It didn’t take long before we realized that Date Movie was completely unwatchable and turned it off and watched Benchwarmers instead.

The Benchwarmers was significantly better and a halfway decent movie on its own. Silly and dumb but it had some good people and was cute. Then it was off to bed to play some video games. Oreo had another surprise birthday party today at daycare and is totally exhausted. This was his first five day daycare week, he had two parties and he had a long weekend of playing with buddy leading into the week so he is the most tired Oreo that there has ever been!

I posted some really cute pics of Oreo in his Yoda costume onto Flickr. He is so adorable in his costume and he loves wearing it.

Joey’s Scribble Blog had a cute Windows vs. Linux article this morning that I found entertaining. So here it is.

Dad sent me a link to this weird drawing game thing called Line Rider.

Last night was a short night. I got home and both Dominica and I had decided that we kind of wanted to eat at IHOP so I picked up Min who was waiting at the door and we were off to IHOP. Dinner was good. We got home and pretty much it was straight to bed for us.

I was up early this morning – before half past five. I got ready for work and left a little bit before Dominica did. It turns out that it was a good morning to be up and moving early. I got to the office and was inundated with work and was completely swamped all morning. I didn’t get a chance to catch my breath until after noon.

I did bring a stack of magazines and newspapers to work today to get caught up. Whenever I see dad he always has a huge stack of mail for me that always includes a huge number of magazines that I need to get through. Over the past two days I have made it through four or five issues each of InfoWorld and eWeek, CIOInsight, Optimize, Baseline, among others. I really do get backed up.

I have recently discovered that due to something beyond my control that Rocketboom now works from my office. How did this happen? I have no idea. But, yay! So today I decided to do what I could to get caught up on old Rocketboom episodes.

My after lunch slash early afternoon period got pretty slow and I got to search around for new and exciting Internet television programs. Amanda Congdon made famous by being the original host of Rocketboom is now wrapping up a cool show that she did called Amanda Across America which you should definitely check out.

I am also excited to report that Homestar Runner is no longer only available in the annoying flash format but is now available as a downloadable Internet television show. That is so much better than the way that it used to be. Andy will definitely appreciate that.

Dad said that the work on his barn roof is done today and just in time. Minutes after completing the roof it began to snow and they got two inches of snow this afternoon. That is really amazing to us here where it is Indian Summer and really warm the past couple of days. Dominica and I have been running the air conditioning at night because it has been so warm!

Epson is expected to have a 1080p projector available in Japan in December. We can only imagine that this will be being made available to the rest of the world shortly thereafter. That is very exciting. Finally a way to watch 1080p BluRay Discs at a full 1080p at full size. I can’t wait to have THAT in the theatre!

Dominica ordered our new hall table yesterday and we hope to have that soon. Our plan is to go to IKEA on Saturday morning to pick up the new bookshelf that we want. They have a really nice, large bookshelf that is available with additional extensions that go on top allowing you to make it really tall and able to hold a ton of books which we really need. Since we have little floor space but eleven foot ceilings that should be perfect for us. It will probably quadruple our total shelf space in the apartment.

Susan is coming to visit us next week. She and Zach just moved to Baltimore a couple of months back but she has just found out that she has a position with the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra! She called a few weeks ago to find out where we were living and if we were anywhere in the vicinity of where the orchestra plays. As luck would have it, we are living right across the park from their home at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center. When we walk Oreo in Military Park we go right past NJPAC. We can see it from our building. We is less than a five minute walk from our building to the performing arts center. We were planning on getting season tickets to attend the symphony which works out even better. So Susan is coming up next week to stay with us for a few days. Now, with the exception of our families, only Josh and Susan will have ever come to New Jersey to visit us.

Dominica wanted to go to Macy’s tonight to do some shopping and then we are going to get some dinner. I wrapped up around six this evening so it wasn’t too late. Only one more day and no traveling this weekend. Just some shopping.