Sheep Guarding Llama

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.

Today is Dominica and my 3rd anniversary!

After working until midnight last night I was called out of bed at six this morning and had to start my day quite a bit earlier than I had hoped.

Somewhere it had to exist. Check out the Lego gallows.

I was really tired all day today although I felt reasonably productive. I worked from home for a few hours this morning before making the drive in in between phone conferences. I have discovered a massive flaw in the design of Exchange and Outlook recently. I have never really used them before so their are relatively new to me. I have never been a fan of them as they are push based email systems and that encourages their use as real-time delivery IM replacements instead of acting as pull based traditional email. They are often faster but it makes people rely on them in ways that they shouldn’t. That and they crash constantly. I have never used any application so unstable. Anyway, the problem that I discovered is that the calendaring system is not centrally managed and only appears to be. The calendar is actually managed, as far as I can tell, by Outlook and not by Exchange and Exchange just syncronizes copies of it or something. So I constantly have meetings scheduled on my calendar that were cancelled but the system doesn’t alert me because there actually isn’t a “calendar server” but instead just emails containing things to attach to your calendar. So if someone emails you an appointment and forgets to email you a cancellation it stays on your calendar with no way of coordinating with a central scheduling service that says that the event was cancelled. Pretty poor. It has major effects where I work where tons of people lose half an hour or more a day to Outlook ghost events. I schedule my whole day around those events and it really messes up my commuting. And then everyone spends a ton of time confirming everything on their calendars or just skipping stuff because thay can’t verify if it is real or not. Very, very poor. And this is the “big selling point” of Exchange!

Josh managed to get to the apartment in the middle of the afternoon. I didn’t get home until around six and, of course, work called just as I was getting home so I had to walk right in and work for half an hour instead of hanging out with Josh. Dominica and Oreo got home minutes after I got off of a conference call.

We were all pretty tired. We walked over to the Savoy which is really close to use and had dinner over there. The food was good but not spectacular. What we have heard is that the price is too high for the quality of the food and they are right. Everything was great. The atmosphere is really good and the service was great but none of it justified quite the price. But we had a good time.

Back at home we were so tired that we all went to bed pretty early. Josh and I used the NDSLs over the wireless to be able to race each other in Mario Kart from across the house. What a great feature that is.

Dad informed me that it was just announced that Rochester is now the second worst city in the entire country for job opportunities passing only New Orleans! Now that is rough. People never believe me when I say that there is no work at all in Rochester. But there really isn’t. I can’t believe how many people stay there through all of this. I also can’t believe how no one that we know is actually out of work and can still change jobs in the nation’s worst non-natural disaster economy. It really shows just how good the economy is here and how many jobs there are everywhere else!