Sheep Guarding Llama

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.

Here is one that I was late picking up on: Radio Shack fired four hundred employees via email a few months back. How ridiculous is that? I guess they wanted to send a clear message to any potential employees. Message sent and received.

Nothing worth mentioning from my day today. Everything was pretty mundain. I got home later than I had hoped. Originally I was going to meet someone from work for tapas over in the Ironbound but both he and I ended up getting busy towards the end of the day and had to reschedule for next week. So Dominica just ordered a pizza that arrived right as I got home.

After dinner I decided that I really wanted a milkshake. We walked over to Food for Life and got a milkshake to split and some very delicious squash pie.

The night was pretty quiet. Nothing exciting. What a boring update.

My alarm was scheduled to go off at ten till five this morning but I ended up getting pages at half past four so my day started much earlier than I had anticipated. But at least that means that I get to wrap up the day earlier than I would get to otherwise and often that is better than working in the middle of the day.

Today is my first day attempting to work my way through the mountiain of magazines that were shipped down in the car from dad’s house. We had a huge box of them although most of them are just garbage. I can’t believe how willing advertisers are to pay for ads in magazines that no one anywhere has ever read. Someone is getting fooled pretty well there, I think.

I got half a day of work in before driving into the office. I ran over to Food for Life right as they opened and got myself a late breakfast to hold me through the day at the office. The cook knew less about the meny than I did today and made my sandwich incorrectly. Apparently he had been doing that all morning but I noticed. I guess we have found our new “Omega”!

I drove into the office for my half day. Boy was that nice. I got to leave and head for home by half past three. I got home and just relaxed for the evening. That did a lot to recharge me and get me ready to finish off the week.

While I was home early I took the opportunity to have the building maintenance crew work on the apartment. The door to our washer and dryer closet had fallen off and they came up and put that back on. The air conditioner had been broken last night but it turned out to be a building wide issue and they got that fixed before I asked about it. The smoke detector in the hallway was acting up and they replaced that as well. The only outstanding issue that we aren’t sure when it is going to be dealt with is the closet door in the main hallway that does not close properly. I am told that that issue has to wait for the contractors to have a significant number of doors and they will be dealing with all of them at once.

Dominica got home in the pouring rain and brought Oreo up to the apartment and then immediately she and I went out and drove over to East Newark to try out the fabled Tops Diner. Getting there wasn’t bad although the downpour made the driving tough as we couldn’t see the road at all. The decor of the place was impressive. Everything dark wood and red plush. The food was good and we will be going there again. They have a wide menu that will keep us interested for a while.

After dinner we came home and decided that we were sleepy. So we read and played video games in bed and then off to sleep for us. We have been going to bed earlier and earlier recently but overall I have been pretty tired and have needed it.

My “four day weekend” is over and it is back to the office this morning. That was a really nice break. I appreciated that.

I had a fairly “normal” day today, if there is such a thing. Dominica took Oreo to daycare and I went into work at a normal time. I worked overtime today but not very much. I worked late enough that we decided just to order in some pizza this evening. Min ordered it before I left the office and it arrived just before I got home. That was very convenient.

Short night. I know that I have to work early in the morning tomorrow so I am going to bed early tonight.

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.