Sheep Guarding Llama

Not a terribly exciting day today. I have to be up very early this morning, half four in fact, so that I could hop onto an early morning UK conference call. But I managed to get up on my own without an alarm. This whole week is looking like it is going to be really early for me.

I discovered a really cool classic Commodore computer web site today. Commodore 16 Online is a site dedicated to the later, less expensive Commodore computers especially the C=16 and the Plus/4 which were brought out after the Commodore 64 and 128 but were not nearly as well known. The thing that makes this site so cool is that they have a C=16 emulator called Minus/4 (instead of Plus/4) that runs in a Java applet and allows you to play many original C=16 and Plus/4 games right on the web site. What a great idea. There is a huge library of really great Commodore, Apple, TI, Atari and other early computer games out there and these old machines can easily be emulated in Java and being able to play them from a web page is a really cool way of accessing them. I am able to get to the site from work but Dominica can’t which is too bad because she would totally play these games from work all of the time.

Dominica and I decided that we are going to go see Spamalot this week. We have had so much going on that we have not had a chance to go do anything on Broadway in a few months and we don’t want to miss our chances to do that so we decided that we are just going regardless of the scheduling. So we bought tickets to see the show on Thursday evening. One of the best parts of being so local is that we can go to the “off night” shows with the less expensive tickets. If we are really fortunate then I will be able to work from home on Thursday which will make getting to the show a lot easier.

I got to head for home before half four today. That is the great part about going in early. A nice long evening at home. It was a heavy rain day. It just poured and poured all day. It was very dark. Min wanted some ice cream and made me run out to the Dollar Bazar (yes, we are aware that Bazar is not a word but that is its name) to get her ice cream. Apparently there is a Bazar publishing company in Norway, though.

Min got home and we just hung out at home for the evening. She watched more of The Gilmore Girls last night and then read a little in her Java book.

It is only the second day of doggie daycare but Oreo is totally exhausted. He is going to have a hard time making it through the whole week.

There is no question that today is definitely a Monday. I woke up just fine. Actually I woke up on my own without an alarm at ten after five. Not too shabby. Less than five hours of sleep and I still felt just fine getting up. But when I tried to turn off my morning alarm apparently that didn’t work as it went off later and woke up Min.

I got downstairs to get my car that I had ordered last night and discovered that they had brought around Min’s car instead of mine. That would have been okay except she had things in her car that she needed and the totally blocked it in so I couldn’t just take it anyway. So I decided that it was probably better to just have them go ahead and get my car instead of trying to jostle cars around at the last minute while running up and down in the elevator trying to get everything that Min needed to her.

So instead of leaving Newark at six like I had planned I didn’t manage to leave until six thirty. That extra half an hour meant that instead of driving in during the really slow early morning traffic I was in the beginnings of rush hour. I drove like mad and managed to get to work before seven which was a little late but not bad. The car issue is getting bad though. It is very tough because I have to have the car brought around so early that I have to always leave it just sitting around or else I have to go down “on time” and just hope that the car is really there. It is pretty risky either way.

At daycare today one of the dogs, Bullwinkle – a chocolate lab, celebrated her first birthday today and all of the dogs had a birthday party. Oreo was one of the few dogs who wore his birthday hat almost all day. What a cutie he is. All of the dogs got little treat bags to take home that had a photo of the birthday girl on them.

When Dominica got home tonight we had to fill out paperwork because her car had a small accident in the parking garage. Her car was dropped off on Friday night and we didn’t use it until this morning so we don’t know exactly when it occured but when the car was brought around early this morning I didn’t notice the damage and I think that I would have from where the car was placed and which part of it was visible to me. It looks as though the car was backed into a pole inside of the garage. It turns out that this has happened several times all ready to other people’s cars in that garage. So the upside is that there won’t be any hassle with the parking garage company covering the repair. It is a decently serious “scratch” that left a damage area of almost six inches by six inches and slightly ruptured the bumper. It does not appear that the bumper compressed or that any metal was damaged – just plastic. So the repair should be too bad but it will mean that the car has to go into a shop for a while. What a pain. So we spent almost an hour dealing with that.

Dominica started studying her Head Rush Java book from O’Reilly. So far it looks like the new book is really going to help her figure out what is going on in her Java programming class. So far in her class they haven’t had them write a single actual program yet, not even a “Hello World”, so everyone in the class who has never programmed before is really learning everything so incredibly abstractly that it is not useful. This is the fifth week of the course so it is really pushing things that they haven’t written a stand along program yet. They have written some code but only totally abstract classes and stuff that are run through some other program. It really hides everything that is going on and makes learning extremely difficult.

Today actually turned out to be a day for relaxing. Yesterday wasn’t too bad but the shopping took its toll on me and working on that Sun Blade and getting nowhere didn’t make me feel any better.

I started the day walking over to Subway and getting Dominica and I breakfast sandwiches. Unfortunately they don’t open until ten so I had to wait around for a while and discovered that there was a parade/walk going on in downtown Newark and that all of the streets around us were going to be closed for hours so there would be no driving to or from our apartment! How obnoxious is that? They shut down the whole city for a group of people to walk around. They closed our parking garage since they were marching right on top of it and they shut down the city buses that service our area of the city so the only thing going anywhere was the subway!

I got breakfast and went back up to the apartment. Dominica had laundry started and humming along. We enjoyed our breakfast and then fell to just relaxing around the house. Min did a bit of cleaning today and the place is starting to come together. Her first real chore this morning was getting the towel rack for the bathroom put together. That took close to an hour but once it was together we were able to get it into the bathroom and now we have something functioning as our linen closet since we don’t have an actual linen closet. That is going to increase our space by a bit and it helps to make the bathroom look a little less sterile. The really high ceilings make the white walls a bit much for that room.

I had several servers that I attempted to work on today. I have three in the apartment on the docket. Two got completed today and will be shipped out as soon as possible. The third has a fan issue and I had to do some eBay shopping to get a replacement. Actually that will be a replacement for the replacement as the original was totally destroyed and this one that isn’t working now is the replacement for that one. So that will stall that for several week, I am sure. But I was happy to get two of them completely done and ready to go.

Dominica watched a good chuck of the sixth season of Gilmore Girls today. That is like her favourite show these days. She got in many hours of it today. She had to take a while off from it to pound on her Java homework. She had thought that she was going to get a reprive from he homework this weekend because the SUNY Learning Network’s servers were located in Buffalo and had been down but by tonight they were back online so she had homework that needed to be done and if she goes past tonight she will be stuck doing her homework during the busy week which is no fun. So that took an hour or two. But at least she managed to get it all taken care of.

I put in several hours of working on the asset tracking system. I wasn’t exactly ultra-productive but I think that I got some good work done and managed to relax a bit. Toward the end of the evening I got paged out and had to work a little and then I got asked to come in early and do the early shift tomorrow starting at half six in the morning.

We wanted to get to bed early but neither of us were tired and we ended up staying up until a bit after midnight. That is going to make getting up in the morning a pain.

I slept in this morning for a total of nearly eleven hours of sleep! I guess that I was seriously tired. And I don’t feel as if I slept too much either. I actually needed all of that sleep. Wow.

After I got up Dominica and I took Oreo out to the park for his morning walk. He was so sleepy we weren’t sure if he was going to be able to make it out to the park. He wasn’t running like normal and we didn’t stay in the park for long. We brought him home and then walked over to Food for Life for some breakfast. We discovered today that they do delivery here in downtown Newark so people in our building could be getting food delivered by them.

Dominica and Oreo took a midday nap and then at three we went down to Elizabeth to attempt to do some shopping. We were trying to find Bed, Bath and Beyond and ended up at the New Jersey Garden Center Outlet Mall. Had we known that it was a tacky outlet mall we would never have gone there – especially not in New Jersey. There is no place worse to go than huge shopping centers in New Jersey. Jersey is the “mob” state where everyone just follows the car in front of them, parks in huge parking lots and all shop at the same store and eat at the same restaurants. The land of bland chain restaurants and huge retail stores. And outlet malls are far more popular than in other places because they offer less variety so that everyone in New Jersey can buy the same clothes, furnishings, toys, gadgets, jewelry, etc. as everyone else in New Jersey. This is the cookie cutter state. Needless to say, shopping in the outlet mall is horrible.

Our first challenge was finding the “mall” as it was way out in the middle of nowhere. Completely not where you would have thought that retail shopping centers would have been located. Once we finally found the place we realized that it was an outlet mall and spent probably half an hour just trying to figure out if BB&B was even there. We eventually got a parking spot and hiked into the mall. We attempted to shop at the Borders there but all that had were a million copies each of ten different books – it was closer to being in the book section of Sam’s Club. So we left there right away and got some pretzels. Then we tried EB Games to see if there was anything for the NDSL that we wanted. I couldn’t stand being in the store. There were some kids playing video games blocking half the stuff that you might want to see. Old people just loitering blocking the rest and little kids running around like proverbial chickens crashing into everything and everyone so that it wasn’t even a real option just to stand there waiting for rude people to move. Dominica finally took the initiative to go in there herself and quickly discovered that they had just about nothing to even look at. It was a total waste. I decided to try looking at the shelves from outside of the store because I was able to get closer from there.

Our final stop was BB&B where we fought our way through the store that was clearly laid out with the express intention of causing you to crash into displays, have to carefully negotiate around people shopping as there is no room to pass people in the aisles and overall just feel uncomfortable and want to lease as soon as possible. (This feeling of cramped, closterphobic discomfort is the precise shopping experience that I have observed to be desired by most New Jersians so this layout on the part of BB&B was probably intential although insane.) We did manage to find what we were looking for (even though we had to stand around waiting for people loitering in front of the boxes to actually be able to get one) and were able to escape from the horrid outlet mall never to return again. Even Dominica who, I feel, loves shopping under really uncomfortable conditions said that it was awful and that she would never return to any store there.

We headed across the street to Ikea which Dominica was really excited about as she has never been to one before. I have never been to one either but I just can’t get excited about shopping for furniture no matter how nice it is or how inexpensive. Needless to say, Ikea’s furniture is quite impressive. They have higher quality furniture than most furniture stores in Upstate New York at prices often lower than Walmart! Ikea is a major reason why people are able to afford to live in expensive cities. It really cuts the cost of furnishing a dwelling by 75% and is extremely fashionable. Shopping in the Ikea store is a completely different story though. I thought that it was much better than the outlet mall but Dominica actually started to panic that there were too many people and there was no clear way to exit the structure. It took a good fifteen minutes to get out of there once we attempted to just leave but before we did we did find some stuff that we really liked and will definitely be getting. But it was so uncomfortable to shop there that even though we were right there we wouldn’t buy anything. It is much better to buy online and have it shipped to us. There was even a really cool little Swedish grocery on the way out with tons of items that we wanted to get but the crowd buying foodstuffs was so crazy that we weren’t even willing to face that.

We returned to Newark after several hours having done nothing but frustrate ourselves and having bought a towel rack for the bathroom. That took almost four hours! The biggest problem is not the stores themselves but the people. It seems like the only passtime in New Jersey is shopping but not actually shopping – just standing around like a herd of cattle chewing cud. Everywhere you go, any item that you want to look at or buy there is someone standing there not shopping at all nor paying attention to the people waiting for them to move along just standing looking at the ceiling or the carpeting or the inside of their glasses. I have no idea what these people are doing. Apparently standing in stores is cheaper than buying coffee and sounds more exciting than watching television. Maybe their homelives are so awful that they would rather just hide in the dark recesses of a furniture display rather than have to face the realities of their own homes. All I know is I would rather drive to Rochester to shop than have to do it in New Jersey.

We still needed supplies so to escape the insanity we drove up to Nutley and shopped at Target Greatland. For some reason people in Nutley aren’t like people around most of New Jersey and, for the most part, shop like normal, same human beings. Who knows how Nutley escaped the brain fungus that seems to have infected everyone else down here but thank goodness. It took no more than half an hour at Target to do ten to twenty hours worth of Elizabeth shopping and it took less time to get there even though, I believe, it is farther away in mileage. We got some food and bottled water, candy (for halloween), etc. I found some really good looking Christmas CDs including a new one from Bette Midler. We also got three DVDs: A Prairie Home Companion, Click and Season Six of The Gilmore Girls. We haven’t bought any DVDs for at least a month. Our DVD buying has massively subsided now that we are in Newark. It had slowed down considerably once we were in New Jersey but this is even more dramatic.

We got back home and ordered in from Steakhouse 1. They actually didn’t take all that long this time and they didn’t mess up our order but the sub that I got just wasn’t up to the quality of the one that I got the first time that we ordered from there. It was still a good sub but not the same at all. That first one was just so perfect.

We watched Click with Adam Sandler which turned out to be a really good light drama that we both really enjoyed. We weren’t in the mood to go to bed yet so we also watched A Prairie Home Companion which I had had really high hopes about but turned out to pretty much just be a dud. It was mildly entertaining but mostly it was just weird and quirky but without any real plot or story and it definitely didn’t draw you in at all. It seemed mostly like an experiment in just being weird and seeing if anyone would notice that they really didn’t make a movie. We were really disappointed since we had been looking forward to this one for so long.

I spent a good chunk of the night working on getting my “new” SUN Blade 100 up and running. After several hours of work the answer is “no”. I am not much closer to getting it to work than I was when I started. I am not sure if the issue is that the CD-ROM simply doesn’t work or what. But that appears to be the case. But the fact that I am using a regular keyboard instead of a Sun keyboard isn’t helping as I am missing important keys. So I am trying to get this figured out. The CD-ROM drive wasn’t even connected when the first opened up the box so I am suspicious that that must be the issue. I will need to find another CD-ROM drive.

Today is one of those days when it is a joyous thing to have moved away from Upstate New York: Dad called me on my way into the office this morning to let me know that he, like almost a quarter of a million other western New Yorkers, was without power and might not get it restored until next week. Last night instead of getting the expected four inches of snow the region had gotten as much as two feet of the fluffy stuff bringing the region to a standstill. It turns out that this is the third worst snow storm in Buffalo’s history and Detroit’s eariest ever recorded snowfall! And here in New Jersey? A brisk autumn day of about fifty degrees. And in Papua New Guinea? Seventy three in Port Moresby.

Dad was apparently one of the lucky ones and had his power restored later in the day. But he almost had a really long, cold, dark weekend.

Dominica got her first full paycheck from her new job today. It is awesome to be on dual incomes again. That will make a big different around here.

Today was very slow at the office. What a great week this has been. I have really needed this break. After this weekend I plan to really be re-energized.

I came home and picked up Dominica and we went right out to Tops Diner to get some dinner. The food was really not up to par at all with what we were hoping for. The service was good and the place was clean although really, really packed with people. It was so packed that it was quite uncomfortable. The food was bad enough that I am really not looking forward to returning to Top and expect that it will be a long time before we choose this over another venue. After the quality of the Omega Diner in North Brunswick I think that we will be looking for a different diner experience down here. And everyone wants to call Tops the “standard” for New Jersey diners I think that I will be a lot more apprehensive about eating at diners in New Jersey. Our not very good diner there cost us $50 for just the two of us. There are a lot of good places that we could have eaten for prices like that!

We came home and went to bed early. That seems to be becoming a theme around here. But we have just been so exhausted.