Sheep Guarding Llama

I was pretty sleepy this morning but managed to get up and start working – from bed with my BlackBerry – at half past five in the morning. Dominica was just getting up to get ready for work and poor Oreo was still exhausted. Going to daycare every day really takes a toll on him as he spends the entire day running around and playing with the other dogs. He is not used to getting this kind of excercise.

I was actually in the office before nine this morning, quite early for me. Today was supposed to be the big system administrator town hall meeting day but I was so busy that I couldn’t even consider going to it. Today is just as busy as the last two days have been. Maybe even busier. I am going to be awfully exhausted by the end of the week.

My work didn’t let up all day but I didn’t have to stay late. In fact, I managed to be out the door a little before six. Not much before but a little.

Tonight we both decided that rest was the top priority. So we ordered in from Papa John’s and watched the recent remake of The Flight of the Phoenix. Not an awesome movie but a decent movie. There wasn’t really much plot twist in the movie. Plane crashes in desert. (I won’t tell you which desert so that MAYBE it will be a surprise but there are only two deserts that I am aware of with big sand dunes so you have a fifty percent chance of guessing anyway since they show the sand dunes everywhere.) People are stuck in desert because plane doesn’t fly. People make plane fly. People leave. Um, that’s it. Sure they argue and fight in the desert whilst making their new plane. But everything is just standard, but decently done, cinema fodder. Nothing special but perfectly fine for an evening of rest and relaxation. A good movie when you don’t have time to pay really close attention.

We went to bed before ten. Nothing like getting old. Tomorrow I am working from home so Oreo is not going to Doggie Paradise for the day and that shaves at least half an hour off of Dominica’s commute time. She will appreciate that. On Saturday morning we have an appointment to look at an apartment building in Newark. Everyone has been telling us to stay away from Newark because of the crime but we are really hopeful about this apartment. It looks really good and because of its reputation, Newark is incredible affordable for what you get. And it is hard, for us, to get more convenient than Newark. Dominica works in Nutley which is only about eight miles from Newark and I am about half an hour from there. It is in between where we work. And Newark has unbelievably easy access to Manhattan, Hoboken, Jersey City, etc. by NJ and Path transit systems. And Newark has a major Amtrak station as well. Not to mention a major airport. So travel from Newark is great. So we will see.

I woke up, of my own accord, at a quart to five this morning. I was wide awake so I decided to get up and to get to work. There has been so much work to do at the office that getting up and getting right to work was well worth it. I just worked around the house for the first few hours. I was working an hour before Dominica even got out of bed.

Min got up and she and Oreo headed off for Nutley. Oreo is getting used to going to daycare and is very tired in the morning but quite excited to get to play with his new doggie friends. He made a new friend yesterday. A little girl corgie (I have no idea how to spell that) that has been there at least ten times and has never found anyone to play with made friends with him yesterday and they are having a great time together.

I didn’t actually go into the office itself until around nine. But I was well into my workday by the time that I got there. I had the pleasure of finding out first thing this morning (if you can call four hours into the day first thing) that my contract which was due to be up in a few weeks has been extended for another year – that is twice as long again as how much I have worked all ready.

I got home quite late. Dominica was running late too as she had done some shopping on her way home. So we met up at the Omega Diner and had some dinner. I had the salmon cakes with horseradish sauce. Yum.

We came home just in time for me to have me credit by evaluation interview for Empire State College. That took about an hour or so. Boy is it ever a relief to have that over. I wasn’t really concerned about it but it was just that one last bit of “process” that was hanging over my head for the past six months. It has been really difficult to get that scheduled. Now it is done and the results should be in to the college around the end of the week. As long as it went well, and I am sure that it did, then everything is set for my college work to be presented to the regents. The only part that I am involved in from here on out is making sure that other people do their parts. My contributions to my college degree are now over barring any additional requirements imposed by the regents themselves which, as I understand it, is fairly rare. My program was approved by my direct mentor, then by the regional college branch and now just has to be double checked by the regents themselves. Wouldn’t it be nice to actually graduate?

After my interview it was off to bed. I had to send off an email and had some issues so it was close to eleven when I finally got to bed and that was a bit later than I had been hoping for since I need to be working pretty early in the morning. But nevermind since I no longer have that college stuff hanging over my head.

It has been five years today since the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks. Hard to believe. Manhattan is starting to look normal without the towers now. I have now seen it more often without than with. Very strange that just yesterday Dominica and I were right across from “ground zero” at one of the closest point in New Jersey. The view from there must have been something.

Oreo was super, ultra snuggle boy last night. He slept most of the night right up against my side with his head on my shoulder. Apparently he was cold. He doesn’t like having to get up in the morning to commute in to Doggie Paradise with Dominica.

I ended up working from home a little this morning and didn’t manage to make it into the office until almost eleven. What a busy day. I was going nuts all day trying to keep up with everything. Days like this wear you out but they also make you feel good. It wasn’t like I was spinning my wheels all day. I was, in fact, quite productive and worked very well. It is nice to end the day knowing that you got tons and tons done.

But it was a long day and I was quite tired by the time that I got home. I got to North Brunswick and Dominica and I ran right out to Tanjore to get some dinner. We both needed a break. Dominica’s second week of work is going well and Oreo had a really good time at doggie daycare.

We got home and it was right off to bed. Yes, at half past nine we were both ready for bed. How old are we?

Today is desperate apartment hunting day. We all slept in a little bit this morning but I was still up decently early. We are getting down to the wire for finding an apartment before our current lease runs out on October 1st so we need to do something right away.

We left North Brunswick at ten in the morning and drove straight out to Jersey City. We got a little lost as we drove through the city itself but we made okay time and made our first stop to look at an apartment in the Atlantic Building which is a part of the Newport properties (the world’s largest and most successful mixed use project of its kind.) The apartment was totally amazing. It might have the best view of Manhattan that I have ever seen and I have been to the top of the World Trade Center and the Empire State Building and neither compare to this. This was just amazing. A total, head on, huge, unobstructed view of downtown Manhattan, the village, the Hudson river and the harbour! It was totally unbelievable. You could peer down and see the “beach” just below the tower and see Brooklyn off in the distance and see the lower Jersey City Coast off to the side. Both the living room and the bedroom and the same amazing view. I mean this was really something. And the apartment itself was nice too. But, we decided, the price was just too high. But boy were we disappointed to not be able to take it. What a dream apartment!

We attempted to look at several more apartments but we did not have very good luck at it. We went to Avalon Cove and waiting there for twenty minutes just to have the person doing rentals come in and announce that they had no one or two bedroom units available. So that was a huge waste. Then we went down to Portside Towers (or something like that) and Hudson Point which were both owned by the same company. Their rental people just blew the day off and didn’t come to work. I called their national rental center to let them know that we were standing there and that their leasing agents at both properties hadn’t shown up to work that day and that the coneirge at the towers had been AWOL for quite some time so we didn’t even have anyone to ask about the leasing agent. They offerred to help us through the office in Arizone but we didn’t think that they had managed to make a good enough impression for us to want to spend our money there.

We tried one place in the Palisades that was far less expensive. But we quickly discovered why. The place was really scary and nasty and in a dangerous neighbourhood. So we quickly took our leave and tried to look at some places in Hoboken.

The first place that we tried in Hoboken didn’t even exist. That is a constant battle down here. Lots of places advertise buildings that aren’t even build yet. In this case there wasn’t even a marked plot for it yet. So it would be several years before an actual building would appear if they even decide to actually build it. So that scratched that off of our list pretty quickly. We did find one place in Hoboken that actually had their agent show up to work and actually existed and was actually helpful. Of course, all she could tell us was that they had no vacancies and didn’t really anticipate any. But at least she was nice and helpful.

We grabbed lunch at a cafe in Hoboken since we had a parking spot. Lunch was good and expensive. Another reason not to live in the area. I really don’t like Hoboken. Jersey City is like an extension of Manhattan and feels like part of “the city” and I think that people who live there are just Manhattanites looking for a better view, cleaner air and lower prices. In Hoboken I feel like you get the real “New Jersians” with the accents, attitudes and lack of taste. It is really disappointing. The difference is that in Jersey City people go into Manhattan for their entertainment. But in Hoboken, Manhattan is just a place to work and the people there “hang out” in Hoboken because they like it better. Ugh.

So we decided that we were not going to have any luck finding anything that we liked on the Hudson and we gave up the search and returned home.

I managed to win some D&D books on eBay that I needed. I got them new and managed to save almost 30% over having bought them in the store. That was awesome. D&D books really are not all that cheap so I was quite happy to discover that there is a number of items available on eBay. If you are into the older D&D stuff and don’t feel the need to play the very latest edition, which is 3.5, you can really get some bargains. Players of the classic AD&D 2nd Edition stuff will find that they can get almost everything dirt cheap. For new players that might be a really good way to go.

We got back and Dominica needed to do some more shopping for work clothes for her new job where they actually expect them to dress nicely. So she spent an hour and a half shopping at some place called Avenue down in East Brunswick. I went back to the apartment and spent the time with Oreo. It was a good thing that I did. He was feeling quite neglected and needed me to play with him the entire time. Then he and I drove down and picked Dominica up. We came home and she went over to the laundromat to take care of the laundry and I spent two hours playing with Oreo again. Boy was he in need of attention today. Between sleeping for the past several days and getting left alone this morning he had a lot of “play with me” stored up.

Dominica came back home and we had some simple dinner at home. I continued working on the assett tracking system from yesterday. I am making good headway on it.

Tonight is another “get to bed early” day. We actually went to bed before ten!

I was awake, on my own, at five in the morning. Way too early to be awake but what are you going to do. I tried laying in bed for about half an hour but that didn’t get me anywhere so I decided that I would just be happier if I got myself out of bed and did something productive. Normally Oreo would have gotten up with me but he is still attempting to recover from his first day at daycare two days ago. He has been pretty much sleeping continuously since having gone. That is the one big upside to using daycare for him – instead of spending all of his time at home needing excercise which we don’t have time to give him enough of he will get that at daycare and can spend his time at home just hanging out with us.

Dominica surprised me by getting up at half past seven herself. I figured that she would sleep in quite a bit today. Oreo was glad to get up to and played a lot all morning. I did a little light work here and there and spent most of the morning reading. I finished reading Frederick Brooks’ “The Mythical Man-Month” today – the Anniversary Edition with the four extra chapters making for an almost thirty percent longer book in total. It is a good read and it is nice to see parrallels between software engineering today and the projects of the 1960’s. It was also cool to discover that Frederick Brooks had worked at IBM Endicott (he was a system architect) since I worked there in the same job role some fourty years later. In fact, it is completely possible that I was the last person to have performed that job function at IBM Endicott before the facility was closed.

Today is mostly a lazy day and a well deserved one at that. Dominica managed to drag me out of the house after our lunch of leftovers to go shoe shopping. My current casual dress shoes, which at this point are several years old and have been well worn, are completely destroyed and are likely to fall off of my feet in the very near future. I have been putting off going shoe shopping because I have a massive dislike for trying on shoes in stores. But it had to be done and Dominica promised that we would do it as quick and as painlessly as possible. We ended up just going to Sears up the street where the sales tax is just 3.5% and there was a sale on as well. I managed to find four pairs of shoes. Four pairs! That might be as many shoes as I have ever bought for myself as an adult (and I don’t mean at any one time I mean total!) It probably isn’t quite that dramatic but it is definitely a significant percentage of my adult shoe buying. Hopefully this shopping trip will last me for quite some time.

I only managed to read a single book all week. That gives you an idea of just how tired I have been. Today I moved on and began reading “Practices of an Agile Developer” by Venkat Subramaniam and Andy Hunt. I am familiar with Venkat’s writing as he is a popular Java developer and writer who appears frequently in the Java Developer’s Journal which I subscribe to and read with some regularity.

I put in some time this afternoon while Dominica was napping to work on the assett tracking system that I had been working on several weeks ago. It is a rather large system and takes a lot to do anything with it right now so I am trying to work on it a little at a time as I have the opportunities. I need to work on the movie database project as well but that isn’t as high of a priority. Really the thing that I need to do with that is to get the system populated with all of the data. Other than that it is quite usable as it stands. But the assett system still needs a lot of work.

I also worked on the server that is now located in Scranton. It is such a pleasure working on a machine located in such a fast and easy to use data center. Not only is the system itself a bit higher end than we are used to working with and not only is the connection that we have in Scranton a significant upgrade for us but also we have higher end switching, routing and VPN aggregation and all of this together is really noticeable.

Dominica napped for several hours and didn’t get up until almost seven in the evening. When she finally got moving we went out to Tanjore for Indian and then hit the ice cream parlour next door for some dessert. We have been so busy the last few weeks that we haven’t been able to get to Tanjore as often as we would like.

We didn’t look at apartments today as neither of us had any energy for that level of undertaking but we really cannot avoid it any longer. We have an appointment to look at a small one bedroom apartment in Jersey City tomorrow morning at eleven. It is small but it is in the perfect location for commuting and it has a great view of Manhattan which is very important to me.

I spent the remaining evening working on the assett tracking system that I have been working on. (Now if that isn’t a redundant sentance I don’t know what is.) I got a lot of good work done tonight and I am really happy with how it is coming along. I am learning a lot while working on it. It is a good experience for me.

Dominica spent the evening looking up apartments that we are interested in looking at tomorrow in Jersey City and Hoboken. She has managed to come up with several so we are going to have a really busy day tomorrow.

We went to bed on the early side. We are getting old and both of us have to be up early all week long so shifting our schedules for the weekend doesn’t make much sense. Poor Oreo, he misses sleeping in late. He really misses when Min and I used to sleep in shifts – he pretty much never had to get out of bed.