Sheep Guarding Llama

Finally a day off. More or less. It is a bank holiday so I am not expected to report to the office and I am only covering important stuff. All of the less critical items just wait until tomorrow. So it is basically a day off but not quite. I put in about an hour or two of work today which is as close to a day off as I am likely to get for some time although I am hopeful about this coming weekend. Dominica is not so lucky and had to get up early this morning and drive into the office. She does appreciate my days off, however, as she does not have to get up nearly so early because she does not have to take Oreo to daycare and she gets home faster because she doesn’t have to pick him up. Oreo appreciated his day to lay in the sun and catch up on his rest. He has had a four day weekend but traveling all weekend makes him nervous and he doesn’t get good rest when he has to do that.

I had a number of projects that I had wanted to have worked on today but that just didn’t happen. I decided to just crash and do just about nothing today. I put in a lot of time working on setting up my new Linksys WIP300 VoIP wireless phone. That unit is really cool. It took several hours for me to get it figured out but finally it is working and I was able to place a call from it and was able to place calls to it. I am looking forward to getting to use that.

I talked to the Ralstons today. They have decided that they are going into the mission field and are almost totally sure that they are going to Papua New Guinea. (For those unaware, Papua New Guinea or PNG is a nation located on the east half of the island of New Guinea which is the world’s second largest island after Greenland and is located just north of the northeastern tip of the Autralian continent. PNG has a population of almost six million in a space just larger than California. PNG is a member of the Commonwealth and is a subject nation of the crown (i.e. they are subjects of Queen Elizabeth.) PNG is a relatively poor nation and was the last large population in the world to be totally isolated when it was discovered by a European pilot flying over the region in 1938. The interior is almost competely physically isolated from the coast and although Europeans had been living on the coast for some four hundred years no one knew that million of people lived in the interior until seeing them by plane. One city in the interior had a population of over fifty thousand making it much larger than Ithaca, NY. The western half of the island is a part of the Indonesian nation and is a semi-autonomous region simply known as Papua. Unlike the rest of Indonesia which is primarily Islamic, Papua is primarily Christian with large Muslim population.) They don’t know how long it will be before they are going to go down there but they are hoping to be able to leave in about six to nine months. They have a lot of preparation to do such as selling their house in York (anyone looking for a house in York very near to the school and to my dad’s house?), selling the bakery that Art just finished building, selling vehicles, etc. I know that that stuff can be quite difficult. At least they will be able to sell stuff prior to actually moving to PNG. Unlike us who moved to New Jersey and then decided to sell things once we weren’t there anymore.

I managed to somehow forget to eat today and it was so late before I was going to go out for food that I decided to just wait for Dominica to return. She got home and we immediately went over to Food for Life to get dinner. I tried my new phone over there but, of course, as soon as I take the phone with me they decide to shut off the wireless for the day because too many people were using it from outside of the restaurant. So I will have to try it another day.

Dominica had to work on homework tonight for her Java class that she didn’t manage to do over the weekend. I went through mail that we brought back from dad’s and the big news is that all of my credits have been finally approved at Empire State College so twenty-one advanced standing credits were just added to my total and now everything is finished for the final submittal to go to Saratoga Springs in the hopes that I will actually graduate. We are really hopeful that I can finish this year and not have this go into 2007.

I am so used to getting up early in the mornings that even after staying up late watching cooking shows I was still up at half past seven this morning. I really wish that I could have slept some more. It is nice having two dogs to snuggle with but they really compete for space. Dexter loves it when we visit and always sleeps with us.

It was a short morning today. We had some work to do at the Toccos’ before we could leave. The big thing was getting Dominica’s father set up with his birthday present which was a new Creative MuVo digital audio player and a subscription to Audible.com. We got the player working and the account set up and his first book downloaded and moved over to the player.

For lunch before leaving Utica we went to Babe’s Macaroni Grill. Babe’s is a local chain from Utica that feels similar to a TGI Fridays or Applebee’s but the menu isn’t as broad and is more Italian based. The food was okay but nothing special. Definitely not up to par with the Kitlas but they are closed on Sundays.

Dominica and her dad went out to Walmart and did a little shopping today. We wanted new video games for the Nintendo DSs so she picked up Mario Basketball 3on3 and Nicktoons Unite. We tried playing Mario Basketball but have discovered, we believe, that my NDSL has a bad touchscreen and games the need it don’t work. So that is something that we are going to have to deal with. The screen appears to always think that it is being touched and anything reading the screen all of the time just doesn’t function. What a pain. Just another “thing” that needs to be dealt with. Nothing is ever simple.

I did have to work for an hour this afternoon but that was all. Nothing much. Nothing like what I have been working for the past month.

Back at the house we had birthday cake and packed up the car. Time to travel back down to Newark. After our last experience of attempting to take the New York Thruway down to New Jersey we decided that it was better to drive the much longer way through Pennsylvania. It is hard to believe that New York hasn’t figured out what a critical highway route 87 is and widen it to accommodate more traffic. It is the only real north/south road in the whole region! That is a gigantic population that has only that one highway to travel down – it services NYC, Long Island, Albany, the Hudson Valley and all the way north almost to Montreal!

The drive back went fairly quickly. It wasn’t too late when we arrived in Newark. Maybe ten or so. We unpacked the car and got everything moved into the apartment and then it was time for bed. Tomorrow is a work day for Dominica but I have it off, more or less. It is Columbus Day (apparently the celebration of genocide) and banks are closed.

I really didn’t want to get out of bed this morning when the alarm on my Blackberry went off. It was half past seven and I probably didn’t get to sleep until after five. Two hours of decent sleep. Ugh. And after having driving all night.

I was quite happy when my morning phone conference was pushed back by half an hour. I was way too “still asleep” to be on a call at eight.

Dad came over around half past nine and the three of us went over to the Omega Grill for breakfast. It is cool going back there as they still have Dominica and my pictures up on the milk refridgerator! We ate breakfast and hung out there as long as we could until I had to get back to the house because I had another conference call.

Once my call was over around one in the afternoon we packed up the PR5 and drove over to dad’s to drop off stuff that was slated to go into storage at his place. Oreo was happy to get to go to the farm and just run all around. He does get wide open space very often and he has so much fun just running and running.

We were at the farm for probably an hour before returning to Geneseo and packing the car with as much stuff as we could fit and did manage to get most of the things that we had meant to pack to take back down to New Jersey. Our apartment in Newark has been pretty bare and this will help a little. The load of stuff that we took north really help to clean up the apartment.

We left Geneseo and drove to Avon where we dropped off a load of stuff for Tony. He got a laptop, laser printer, wireless VoIP phone and some books. A pretty good haul in general.

Min and I arrived in Utica around six and met her parents and her brother Joe at the Kitlas restaurant on the east side of town. That is an awesome restaurant nestled into the weirdest little corner by router 5s. Very strange. The place was apparently first a residence and then later a roadhouse or some sort of bar. Then it was outfitted on the inside to look roughly like a normal family restaurant but then the chef decided that he wanted an all out fancy restaurant so the menu is out of control at family restaurant prices. Very strange but a really great place and we will be eating there much more often now that we have had a chance to try it.

We spent the evening just hanging out in Frankfort. Min and I needed a chance to just stop moving for a few minutes. Joe just got an XBOX 360 so he played that some while we were there and we got to see it. Definitely was enough to convince us not to get one. It was nice but not impressive for the price at all. Nothing compared to a computer of the same price and there are no games out at all that we are interested in. Literally not a single one.

I don’t normally look forward to Friday like I was looking forward to it this week. I couldn’t wait to get out of work. The past several weeks have been so busy that I really need a break and even though I am on call all weekend I am not expecting that there will be very much work.

Josh and I got to hang around a little this morning but not for long. He had to get out to the airport to drop off his rental car and then had to hop from train to train all day to get to all of the places that he needed to go. I worked from home today. My week has been so busy that I really needed a planned day at home. That gave Oreo a chance to spend the day with me and to recover from his very busy week of playing at Doggie Paradise.

My day ended up going quite late and I worked until around nine in the evening. That was really late considering that we have a lot of driving to do yet tonight. We pulled out of Newark as early as we could which was almost half nine as we needed to completely load the PR5 before leaving. We put everything that we could into the car as this is our first trip back home in quite some time.

The drive went fine and we discovered that living in Newark put us a bit closer to home than we had been in North Brunswick. Maybe half an hour closer or more. We are now north of Rt. 78 instead of very south of it. And we are able to almost immediately hop onto US 280 that takes us north west up to US 80 which takes us quite quickly across northern New Jersey and meets up with US 380 in Pennsylvania quite conveniently. So our new route gets us to the highway in minutes instead of in fourty five minutes. It gets us to a more northern highway that moves faster and goes shorter and completely eliminates the whole 78 to 33 to 80 to 380 mess that is often where the bad traffic is. So we are very happy about all of that.

We got a very late dinner at the Waffle House in Clark’s Summit. We haven’t been there in quite a while. It is funny to have a restaurant that we frequent so much so far from anyplace that we have ever lived. Clark Summit is one of those “familiar” areas that I have been to so many times that it feels almost like a place that I have lived in. A lot like the Twin Pines area much farther south on US 81. That whole Binghamton to Scranton stretch must be the single most traveled highway in my life. And in such a bizarre location. I can almost do the whole thing with my eyes closed.

We pulled into Geneseo at three in the morning. Boy were we worn out. It has become very strange to have a house waiting for us in Geneseo. In some way almost like we had never left and in other ways very, very foreign and strange. The house was never quite like this when we lived here and it feel weird to be here. But boy is it handy having a house to return to that is back home.

Dominica and I ended up staying up for an hour or two talking. We have had so little interest in our Geneseo house that we have decided that we are just going to deal with the fact that we have a house there and are going to hang on to it for the time being. That doesn’t mean that we won’t be willing to sell it if someone comes along and is interested in it but we are not going to be keeping it on the market. We figure that with the housing market the way that it is right now that we will probably loose little, if anything, by holding on to the house for a few more years. The original plan from six months ago was not to sell the house but to keep it because we love the house and the area and it isn’t that expensive. And we do use it several days a month ourselves in addition to using it as a garage and for storage.

We are going to be really tired by tomorrow.

I am pretty sure that this is the farthest behind that SGL has fallen in at least a year. I have not been able to update the site in six days as you will notice from the posting date on the dailies.

Today was a totally insane work day. I ended up putting in a really long day and not managing to make it home until around ten in the evening. That really sucked as we had been hoping to have been able to go to Mompou in the Ironbound tonight so that Josh could experience that Portuguese side of Newark. I was still up for going out after my really long day but both Josh and Dominica had to go to work in the morning so they just ordered Chinese and decided to stay in.

It was a short evening. I was only home for about an hour before going to bed and almost all of that time was spent eating dinner.