Sheep Guarding Llama

I have really been looking forward to today – my first day to work from home in the new apartment. A whole day to just hang out with Oreo and enjoy Newark. Oreo is really looking forward to today too as he doesn’t get left alone today and won’t for a long time since Doggie Paradise reopens on Monday and we will be home with him all weekend. I am also looking forward to getting to eat breakfast in Newark. My plan is to get over to Food for Life if at all possible to get breakfast. I want to try their fish based breakfast meats.

The day started off quite abruptly. At about twenty after five this morning the fire alarm went off. Yes, this is the fourth time that the fire alarm has gone off in fourty eight hours. Dominica and I were the lucky ones. Min normally gets up at a quarter to six so while this was early for her it wasn’t that early and she didn’t need to go back to bed. I am awake at that time normally so it isn’t a big deal for me. Being on the sixteenth floor can have its disadvantages though. They shut down the elevators and most everyone on our floor, in their pajamas, headed down to the street. They were not happy. Especially when they learned that this was the fourth time in two days. We stayed in our apartment and we were definitely the ones who made out on that deal. That early in the morning is awful for just about anyone because almost no one has left for work yet but almost everyone is either sleeping and it disrupts them or is in the process of getting ready for work and this makes them late. And manually going up and down thirty eight sets of stairs like the people on the nineteenth floor had to do could easily end up eating half an hour or more of your morning and that is just for the stairs portion. The elevator was shut down for at least half an hour.

Dominica emailed me from work to let me know that when she left the building around seven the elevators were still not turned back on. Now this could be a bit of a problem. I can only imagine all of the really pissed off people walking out this morning after descending all of that way. Most people need to go in and out once or twice during the morning. Those of us with dogs have to do it a bit. Good thing that Oreo was walked last night and likes to sleep in late or I would be very unhappy going up and down the stairs all morning with the little boy. That is way too much climbing for either of us.

My life would appear to have turned into nothing more than a series of phone conferences. Only two yesterday but well over four hours total between them. Probably closer to five and that is just the conference time. That doesn’t include the hours of regular telephone time that I have each day. I must have come close to six or seven hours on the phone yesterday. That is crazy. Today I have at least three phone conferences lines up before the day even started. I can just sense a long day coming on.

Well I was right about it being a long day. I worked about fourteen hours in total and didn’t have a chance to get breakfast or lunch until two in the afternoon. Oreo had to cross his legs until then before he got a chance to take a walk in the park. He normally doesn’t volunteer to be taken out until around eleven or so but it was still a bit of a wait for him. I was on the phone constantly from half past eight until almost one on back to back conference calls. That made the day very busy while being almost totally unproductive.

Lunch came from Food for Life right next door. They are fast and easy when I am in a hurry since they are so close and all ready know me by name. Boy is that food good. I am really glad that I made it over there to get lunch (Nautical BLT, mac and cheese and some cole slaw) because it turned out to be my only meal of the day. I ran back to the apartment and ate at my desk. What a day.

Oreo was at least happy to have me home with him all day even if it didn’t mean that we got to play very much. He was a very good boy all day and spent the majority of the day sleeping on the futon behind me. Occassionaly he would get up and play with his ball or ask me to through one of his little stuffed squirrels around. But mostly he was very calm.

Dominica got home a little late due to traffic. She rolled in around six. I was on a conference call when she got home and didn’t get to stop work until a while after seven. I had been so busy all day that I had only had one quick meal and hadn’t had a chance to shower yet. So I took a shower while she looked at some menus and tried to decide where she wanted to go for dinner.

By the time that I got out of the shower Dominica and Oreo had gone to bed and were asleep. I came out to the livingroom and discovered that there was a new crisis at the office and worked again for another two hours or more and didn’t get a chance to turn in until close to eleven. What a day. And the plan is that we will be working for a bit of the weekend as well.

I talked to Josh today and his plans have changed. He is coming down here on Wednesday. That is this Wednesday in just five days or so and will be crashing here until Friday. Then he will be flying out on Friday and we will be driving out to head back home once Dominica gets out of work on Friday evening.

Today is Oreo’s final day alone in the apartment. He is getting used to me leaving him at this point but he still doesn’t like it. He knows about when I talk him for his morning walk in the park and he gets very anxious. He has gotten very used to the procedure for getting into the elevator. He walks directly to the back of the elevator and sits down and waits until the doors open again and he knows that he is not allowed to walk around in the elevator. What a good boy he is.

I found an interesting web site that provides an “enhancement” to the VMWare technology for what they call LivePC’s. These are virtual machines that run on your desktop but instead of downloading a complete image this is a heavy compression and streaming technology that allows you start up machines quickly that you have not downloaded previously and also handles automatic updating and caching. I haven’t had a chance to try it yet but it definitely sounds very interesting. You can check out LivePC at the Moka5 website.

Dominica discovered an awesome video on Google Video yesteray: The Evolution of Dance. This is one of the best videos ever and well worth the time to watch. This is especially hilarious to those of us who grew up during the eras of these dances.

Dominica was on a role finding good videos today apparently and also found this great footage of a Texas anchorman being attacked by a lizard. Short but quite funny.

Good news for web developers and anyone working extensively with image formats – as of October 1, 2006 the GIF image format is finally going to be completely patent free and available for unlimited use.

I have been meaning to put this into the dailies for a week or two but haven’t gotten to it. My grandma Miller’s neighbour from when she used to live in Ohio many, many years ago was recently doing some cleaning and discovered an old letter from my grandmother thanking her neighbours for helping her to move. The letter wasn’t dated but we can estimate when it is from because she talks about me graduating from nursery school. “My little Scott graduated from Nursery School. He had a cap, gown and diploma. It was really nice. They even served punch and cake to parents and grandmas!!”

I posted last night before our dinner had actually arrived. It took an hour and a half for our food to get to us but we were expecting that. Unfortunately they didn’t get my sub right – piling it with onions and slathering it in Italian dressing instead of just lettuce and tomatoes with mayo like I like it. I ate it but it just isn’t the same. Once you wait for ninety minutes you hope that the food is amazing. And the bread wasn’t fresh today like it was the other day. The effect was the difference between possibly the best non-toasted sub that I have ever had and a sub I wouldn’t bother to get even if it was delivered quickly. Since we have only ordered from them twice and they messed up the order half the time it isn’t encouraging for us to try them again. The other problem is that Italian dressing is like a self-destruct mechanism built into the sub making it soggy and gross so that it isn’t any good as left-overs. Now every time we go to order subs I will be unlikely to choose Steakhouse 1. They take so long to deliver that you really can’t do anything about it when they mess up the order. So we will see how they do going forward.

I worked a little late tonight not leaving until about seven. But tomorrow I will work from home so it isn’t too bad. Dominica made herself dinner tonight and I ate the leftovers from last night that were not as bad as I thought that they were likely to be.

Oreo finally decided that the hedgehog had to die so he set to tearing it apart tonight pulling every last but of stuffing out of it. What fun he has with that. Now the livingroom is full of hedgehog stuffing. Dominica worked on her Java class homework and I worked on getting more of the bins emptied and put away. We are down to the nitty gritty and it takes a while as I have to find a suitable location for each little thing. We are hoping to be able to go shopping for a small corner shelf thing to put in our entryway this weekend so that we have a place to put the random daily stuff like keys and the dog’s leash. Right now they are going on the counter in the kitchen and that doesn’t help make the place look nice and organized. I did manage to get an entire bin put away. That helps. Pretty much everything left that needs to go somewhere is in a bin and there are just four bins left in total. We figure that one bin will have to remain as the “wires and stuff” bin like we have had for a year now. One bin is returning to New York. That only leaves two bins yet to actually get put away and both of those are primarily books that are waiting for a bigger bookshelf to arrive and then they will be all set. So we are in good shape.

As I write this there is a strip of pink sky beginning to be illuminated behind the Manhattan skyline with the twinkling lights of the city in front of it. Awesome.

Last night I got home and Dominica was hard at work attempting to assemble her new office chair. We ordered take away from Food for Life next door and I walked over to pick it up. We decided that we needed a lot more food tonight because it was so good last night that we were left wanting more when we were done. But we got BLTs again tonight. I tried the mac and cheese which was really good and Dominica experimented with carrot fries which were pretty good as well.

I got back home and Dominica was just finishing up her chair so that she could sit in it to eat her dinner since we have no seating at the “breakfast bar” yet. One thing at a time. We will have that figured out soon enough. I hope.

It was another short night. Min put in almost an hour working on the stuff for her Java class. Now that she has a comfy chair she was able to read at her computer for a little while. I spent the hour paying bills. Oh the joy. I took Oreo for a walk in the park and then it was off to bed.

Oreo pretty much completely pushed me out of bed last night. I ended up right on the edge of the bed unable to move. I stayed that way as long as I could stand so as not to wake up the dog who needs all the consideration we can muster this week but by a quarter after five I had to get up. Oreo is very much the bed hog. And a cover hog. I had almost no covers all night.

I did a little more unpacking this morning. We are getting down to the harder stuff as we run out of spaces for things and wonder what to do with what we have now. Space is really limited here and we don’t want things just stacked up and sitting around. But finding nooks and crannies to jam everything into is going to be a challenge. Once we get a larger bookshelf (we have one of those tiny three shelf deals where two of the shelves are so short that only novels would fit on them and only the paperbacks at that) as we have tons of books that have no home at the moment. So they are stuck in bins that don’t fit anywhere.

Min got up around a quarter to six. The early shift is killing her this week. She has no spare time to do anything. Just putting that chair together last night ate up most of her evening. But next week she should be back to a normal fourty hour week and will get a chance to actually enjoy the shorter commute which she hasn’t gotten to take advantage of once yet. Although in actuality the commute is saving her two hours and the overtime is just one hour so she is still better off than before. But she is running home during her lunch to walk Oreo so she isn’t getting a relaxing lunch like she normally would although she does get to see the apartment a bit more than me during the day. That, again, is only for this week. Oreo will be back playing with his friends at Doggie Paradise on Monday. He is really looking forward to that. We think that he thinks that he doesn’t get to go there anymore because we moved. He will be very happy when he finds himself there again and we will be a lot happier as it will eliminate, probably, half of the times that we have to take him out for walks in the park which take a big toll on our free time and we feel that riding elevators and crossing big city streets are dangerous for little dogs.

Oreo was quite delited to have me staying home later than usual today. He hopped up onto the futon where his pillow is and napped near my computer. I am scheduled to work the early shifts at the office for the next two weeks (starting on Monday.) That will be a nice change of pace. Now that Min gets up early every day and Oreo goes off to daycare and my commute is so much shorter going in for the early shift is a breeze. I wake up on my own in plenty of time to make it in as it is now but I just bum around the house trying not to wake people up right now.

The guys that I was supposed to be meeting this morning in Newark had train problems and decided to take a different way into the office. That ended up good as my morning conference call was also cancelled. But I still had plenty to do.

I ended up having to deal with three fire drills (or fire alarm tests as we weren’t requred to line up single file behind our teacher and slowly march through the firey mayhem while contemplating our demise.) The first one sent me into a panic since I have never heard the fire alarm in this building before. And I had no idea that they would be doing a test. The alarm is so loud that I almost got sick and I couldn’t think straight so it took much longer than it should have to get Oreo out of the apartment. Boy was he scared. Poor little boy. He has no way to cover his ears.

We rushed down to the front desk but by the time that we got there the alarm had stopped and they said that everything was okay. Apparently I was about the only person actually hanging out in the building during the day. So we went back up to the apartment and got back to work.

It wasn’t long before a second fire alarm went off. I was much faster this time and got out of the apartment with scared Oreo in about half the time. My ears were still ringing from the first alarm. Boy is that loud in a tiny apartment with hard wood floors and very little furniture! I got down to the desk and had a discussion with them about the torture that they are putting the dogs that are trapped in the rooms through and that people need to be notified before false alarms are set off. Testing is fine but we are being trained to ignore the alarms and worse yet the animals are being hurt. (I truly believe that un-notified fire drills are a well known cause of fire disasters. It is obvious to anyone familiar with “The Boy Who Cried Wolf”. I mean seriously, does anyone know a person who actually takes a fire alarm seriously anymore? I wonder how many people burn to death each year because of schools and other institutions performing fake and/or prank fire alarms. Honestly, what is the difference between a test alarm and a prank? If a prank fire alarm is dangerous then obviously so is a drill! Just like either it is unsafe for cops to talk on cell phones while driving or it is safe for everyone.) So the concierge said that I would be notified should the alarms be tested again but that there were no more scheduled alarms.

I was probably not in the apartment for more than thirty minutes before the phone rang from the front desk letting me know that they were going to do a third alarm and that they would wait for me to exit the building with Oreo. So I gathered up the boy and we ran out to Military Park for a short walk. He loves his walks. He was much happier running around in the park than sitting through another fire alarm. So, it turns out, it was a good thing that I had had the discussion at the desk about needing to know before a fire alarm test was done so Oreo was saved from the agony. He gets scared enough during the day. He sure doesnt’ need to go through that pain. The pain is enough to make me ill I can only imagine what it does to him.

My morning turned out to be really busy and I didn’t get a chance to head into the office until about eleven. I ran over to the Commerce Market right across the street and grabbed and egg and cheese on hardroll and jumped in the car and headed for Warren. Luckily at this time of day there is no traffic at all and the trip is really fast. The Commerce Market looks like it is going to be good. It is a deli that does breakfast and lunch and has a lunch buffet thing with a lot of miscellaneous stuff and a bit of Chinese food. It is cheap and really handy but I think that they might just be open during the week which means that we won’t get the chance to actually use them very often.

The drive in was fast. My day turned out to be mostly meeting and time spent on the phone. Much like my morning was. Dominica decided to skip going home over lunch today as Oreo was walked at eleven just before I left Newark. He will not be happy having to skip his lunch and not getting to get his early afternoon walk but Dominica will appreciate the reduced driving and getting some time to just relax at work.

Dominica found an awesome David Hasslehoff video on Google today: Jump In My Car. I thought that this would be good to brighten up everyone’s day.

It was pretty late before I had the chance to head for home. A quarter after seven. That is a bit later than usual. But the commute was fast so it made up for it a bit. We had been toying with the idea of going out tonight but it was so late and Oreo had been alone so much today that we decided just to order in. So around seven thirty Dominica ordered subs from Steakhouse 1 which we had on Sunday night. It took two horus for them to deliver on Sunday night so we figured that it would be important to order as early as possible. But their subs are so good that they are often worth the wait.

Josh called tonight and made plans to come down to Newark to visit. He is coming down on Sunday the eighth – I believe that that is right. And staying on Monday at least long enough to get lunch. I will work from home that day. So Josh managed to be the only non-family member to come down and see our North Brunswick apartment and will be the first family or otherwise to come down and see the new place in Newark. No family members are current scheduled to come down although we think that Dominica’s parents might be planning on coming down fairly soon. Min, Oreo and I are planning on going to Geneseo on the Friday before Josh comes to visit so that we can drop off a load of stuff that we have no room at all for and then we are heading to Frankfort to celebrate Dominica’s dad’s birthday before returning to Newark on Sunday afternoon. But that is not this weekend but next. This weekend we will simply be staying home and spending the time putting away the apartment and discovering Newark.

Something new to us here in Newark is bean pies. They are a popular food around here and are quite good.

Oreo did really well today. He had a really tough day being alone

Last night when I got home Dominica and Oreo came down and met me at the front door and we went out to Military Park and went for a walk. From the north side of Military Park there is an awesome view of the downtown skyscrapers including 1180. I hope to get a picture taken from down there sometime soon. I have been pretty busy and haven’t been able to get pictures of the place yet.

After our walk we decided to go out for dinner so we headed right next door to the east and ate at Food for Life. It is really easy for us to get to, it is only seconds away. Dominica had found this place by going downstairs and looking through the menus that they have in a book for us. How handy that is. Unfortunately they are only open from ten in the morning until eight at night which is a pretty tight schedule for us to get there. We can’t use them for breakfast and if we get dinner there we have to get there pretty early. We were late enough that we were not able to sit down and eat but had to get our food to go. But that was fine since we are just down one door. Everyone there was really polite and nice and very professional. The restaurant is really cool. Neat decor and all of the paintings that they have in there are done by local middle and high school students. That is a cool idea.

We got back to the apartment and ate out dinner. Boy were we in for a surprise. The food from Food for Life was absolutely amazing. They are a vegetarian friendly restaurant so the menu available to us is pretty large. They have a tone of fish (so technically targetted towards veg-aquarians like us which is awesome) and they have a little chicken but not much. One of their specialties is “nautical bacon” which is a fish based smoken bacon style food that is so incredibly delicious. Both Dominica and I got their BLTs which are made with smoked salmon and a special mayo sauce. Those must have been the best sandwiches of that style that I have ever had. We were totally blown away by the quality of the food. We are going to be eating at Food for Life a lot in the future. We are really hoping that with 1180 becoming populated that it will shift the market in the area away from everything being really targetted towards the business crowd and maybe places like Food for Life will start opening earlier to support the breakfast crowd and staying open at least half an hour later so that they can get the dinner crowd.

Our evening was pretty short. We had our walk and got our dinner and came home and ate. At that point the evening was almost over. I was hoping to have been able to have gotten more of the living room put away tonight but that didn’t end up happening. Mostly we just decided to go to bed and read for a little bit. I played with Oreo a little but mostly he just wanted to spend time with us after his long, lonely day. He is really looking forward to being able to go to Doggie Paradise again.

The valet issues seemed to be resolved this morning and we were able to get our cars right on time. Dominica is going into work an hour early all week because one of her coworkers had a baby and needs some time at home with his wife and new child. So she is working five hours of overtime this week. So she left very early this morning – about the same time that she would have to have left if we were still living in North Brunswick. Not awful and a whole week of overtime will be helpful with the move and everything happening recently.

I was up early and had enough time to take Oreo on a nice half hour walk through Military Park. He had a great time running all over the place and smelling everything and peeing on as much stuff as he could. He is stuck at home so much on his own that it is important to walk him as much as possible.

My car was waiting for me at half past eight. When it works that is the most convenient thing ever.

ABC News again makes the list of media greats with the news that the human heart produces urine! Nothing like quality reporting and investigation. And even a novice editor should have caught that mistake. Can you believe how many teachers trust disreputable sources in print over reputable sources on the web because they believe that paper is inherently more trustworthy than any other medium?

By the end of the day I was ready to head for home. Having the new apartment makes going home so much more fun. I have never been so happy with a residence before – not even the house that I own (still own) even though it was a great house.

Dominica has a lot of homework to do tonight for her Introduction to Object Oriented Programming using Java class that she is taking. So she is thinking about stopping off on the way home to pick up a new office chair since hers is uncomfortable (it wasn’t great to begin with but she locked the bottom and pushed hard against it and the metal support for the back is bent and twisted now so it is really bad – mine which is identical is still fine) and without a good chair it is really difficult for her to read and she has a lot of ready to do. We don’t have much furniture in the house so the office chair is a major bit of our seating.

She went to Staples and found a Lane chair that she really liked. That is good, maybe she will be able to be more productive now. Since coming down to New Jersey she has had to lay in the bed to read and she falls right to sleep when she does that.

Our plan is to get dinner from Food for Life again. I would lean towards doing a bit more culinary exploration before heading back to the same place again but the food was so amazing that I can’t really say no. I must have more nautical bacon! So the plan is that I will go and pick up our order and bring it back to the apartment and Dominica will work on her homework and spend time with the boy. He will be very lonely after two days alone in the apartment.

Tomorrow morning I am going to be at home a little later than usual (Oreo will be happy) because some of the guys that I work with from Long Island are coming in to Newark to car pool with me so I might still be in Newark as late as ten thirty or so.

I was planning on working from home on Thursday but that isn’t working out this week. Instead I am working from home on Friday again, like last week, which is okay. I prefer to break up the week but having a three day weekend (more or less) is pretty cool too. I have to be in the office on Thursday so I can’t take that day off.

Okay, I am posting and heading for home.

Dominica had her car brought around early this morning because she didn’t know how long it was going to take her to get to work from the new apartment. It is a good thing that she did because the valet took a really long time getting her car for her even though it was scheduled last night so she was just barely able to make it on time even though it took her only fifteen minutes to get there. But fifteen minutes! That is great. What an incredible lifestyle change that is going to make. She will only need to be in the car for thirty to fourty minutes a day instead of one hundred and fifty! That is going to save a fortune as well.

I attempted to get my car at a quarter after eight but we have to expect a half hour wait for cars during “rush hour” in the morning so I ordered it for a quarter to nine and I took Oreo out for his morning walk. We walked down the east side of Military Park and discovered the location of some cool places like the Robert Treat Hotel which is supposed to be the best hotel in the city. It is great that it is right next to us almost. The Robert Treat Hotel has the restaurant Maize which was advertised in our move-in packet and looked really good. We are really looking forward to trying that place out. (Note for people looking to stay near us: The Robert Treat’s room rates are just barely over half of the cost of staying at the Hilton, are closer and the walk from the RTH to us is along the park and better lit at night than the walk from the Hilton although the Hilton is connected to Penn Station.)

The sun coming up behind the Manhattan skyline this morning was amazing. What a great view that is going to be every morning. The livingroom is so completely full of light. What a wonderful change from the dungeon that we have been living in for the last six months. Even in contrast with the house in Geneseo which was on the dark side. This place is made of light.

My car didn’t come by a quarter to nine as it was supposed to. At twenty after nine I finally gave up because I had a phone conference to call in to and I didn’t want to do that from the car so I had them wait on bringing up the car and scheduled it for ten thirty. Then I went back up to the apartment and hung out with Oreo for an hour and just worked from home. That worked out well so that Oreo wasn’t alone nearly as long as he would have been otherwise. Doggie Paradise has been closed since Friday for renovations so Oreo has been stuck at home. Today is going to be really tough for him since he is home alone in the new apartment. The weekend was decently traumatic for him and he had some shaking spells but overall he did really well and we are really proud of him. Dominica is coming home today at lunch time to spend half an hour with him. We figure that if we break up the day enough it might not be so bad.

At ten thirty they had forgotten to get my car but they ran and got it tutte suite (I have no idea how to spell that) and I was on the road very shortly. To my great surprise the commute did not take the fifty minutes that everyone said that it was going to but actually took only twenty six minutes! Now that was fast. It is going to be awesome only needing to drive for a little under an hour a day. What a wonderful change. I will be getting a bonus half an hour or more per day. Maybe closer to an hour.

Okay, here is funny news. Filming for the movie Battle in Seatle has begun (never see a movie with a rhyming title) and is being filmed… in Vancouver. Yup.

More exploding laptop fun today. Officially there is no link yet between this explosion and previous fires and explosions but it seems unlikely to be an isolated incident given the number of revent issues and the continued finding of the number of places that have the Sony batteries deployed. But that is just speculation. It really does illustrate why working with desktops still makes a lot of sense even with today’s powerful desktops.

Today was a busy day but not a crazy day at work. By the end of the day I felt mostly unproductive even though stuff had been accomplished. Very blah.

I left work at six thirty but didn’t feel like writing tonight and the last few days have been pretty lengthy so I am posting early. I know that there are a lot of people wanting to know about the move so I will give them as much as possible to read right away.