Sheep Guarding Llama

Boy was I glad to get to sleep in this morning after having worked until after midnight last night. I needed the chance to catch up. This week has been overwhelming.

The day was mostly relaxing for us. I got up late, around nine, and Dominica got up about an hour after me. Oreo is still beat from his long week at doggie daycare too. We did some light packing this morning, very light, and I continued working on some projects for the office. Not too much today, trying to take it easy.

Dominica went over to the laundromat for the final time of having to do laundry outside of our own apartment. She is really looking forward to having a washer and dryer right in the apartment. We got spoiled in Geneseo.

I finished reading “Practices of an Agile Developer” today. I have been working through it all week. Normally it wouldn’t have taken very long to have read a book like that but I have barely had any downtime all week and it really shows in my reading schedule. Bit at least I managed to read something this week.

I put in a four hour day (half day) of work today. What a week. By six this evening I was too tired to do anything more with the office. I opened a bottle of reisling (we have three bottles of wine in the house and we don’t want to have to move them to the new apartment so they have to go by Friday night) and just relaxed. I did do some cleaning and continued doing some light packing. It seems like we can put off the packing but after today there is only five very busy work nights left before we move and Saturday morning will be busy because we have to pick up the truck (a twelve foot Penske) and get it loaded.

Dominica needed a break and watched Center Stage which we had picked up yesterday. It is a pretty good movie that Nate and I rented or something many years ago.

By seven I had been paged out again. No rest for me I guess.

I did some work on a new computer that I have been trying to put together for the school in Castile but, of course, there were all kinds of issues. It looks like the memory is bad that I received but that is always hard to tell on a new motherboard with a new processor. There are just too many variables that can cause memory to fail tests. So I am going to have to spend several hours this week diagnosing that problem so that I can determine exactly which piece of the puzzle is broken and needs to be sent back. Ugh. Definitely not what I needed to be dealing with this week. I all ready have two sticks of memory from Andy that have to be returned and a router that died.

Dominica and I watched half or a little more of Out to Sea witch Jack Lemmon and Walter Mathau. Not one of their classics but a decent movie because they were such good actors. Then it was off to bed before ten. We have a very busy week ahead of us and we are going to need our rest.

As we were going to bed Dominica discovered TWO centipedes in our bedroom. One small one on the wall which she killed and as she was killing it she discovered a large one on the ceiling directly over our bed. That one I had to kill. Let me tell you, we are very, very excited about being able to get out of this place!

Apartment hunting day. Dominica and I slept in as long as we could both of us being completely exhausted. Oreo had his first full week of day care and he was pretty worn out as well. He isn’t used to this busy, strenuous lifestyle.

We had to leave North Brunswick at ten in the morning to make it to our appointment in Newark to look at the apartment that we were interested in. It is a fairly long drive from here to there. But not as far as Dominica has to commute every day. But that should end soon.

We arrived in Newark on the early side but were glad so that we were calm and just had to find some nearby parking. We managed to get in to see our rental agent twenty minutes early and she started by “walking” us through the neighbourhood so that we would have an idea of where we were and what we would have access to. Then she told us about all of the amenities that would come with the apartment or would, at least, be available to us. Some things like the health club are not included in the rent but are quite reasonable if we should decide to take advantage of them. There are cool “pay for” services available like maid service, dog walking and grocery delivery.

The rental office was acros the street from the actual apartment building. We starting by looking at a studio apartment. We liked it but it was too small for us. The layout was fine but it was very confining. It was so small that the living room was, I feel, a complete waste of space. So we ruled that unit out. Then we went to look at the one bedroom options. We looked at two. One was a traditional single bedroom unit with windows facing in a single direction. It was nice but we really loved the other unit that we saw which was a corner unit with windows on half of the walls. That was awesome. The models were on the eighteenth floor and the corner one bedroom had a nice view of Manhattan. You could clearly see midtown and downtown was partially in view. It was awesome. We really liked the apartments and the upper floors were really cool. The building is, in total, thirty five residential floors so this was about the midpoint of the building.

We looked into options and prices. We were sure that there wasn’t going to be any way for us to be high enough in the building to be able to have a view so we had resigned ourselves to getting the nice corner unit but on a low floor below the level of the adjacent buildings so that we would have less light and little view. But the rental agent worked with us and got us a way to get into a better unit higher up so we jumped at it. So we got a corner unit on a floor around the middle of the building and we are very excited. Our lease begins on September 23rd, one week from today. That gives us a week of overlap with the apartment that we have now in which to get moved and to get this place cleaned and turned over to the rental company. Our moving window in Newark is from eleven to two on Saturday the 23rd. That is when the moving elevator is reserved for us. Boy are we ever excited.

We are the first people moving into this apartment and the apartment building is only half finished and less than one third populated. It is the first downtown Newark luxury rental in decades and we are really excited to be part of the rebirth of the city. The whole area around where we are moving is being completely rebuilt and it is going to be quite neat. The location in Newark is totally ideal for both Dominica and I commuting as it is situated between our workplaces and for Dominica is only about six miles from her office and very near where Oreo goes for his daycare. So she will be going from a commute currently of well over an hour to closer to fifteen or twenty minutes. What a difference that will make both for time and for cost. My commute change won’t be so dramatic but we are hoping that it will drop from fifty minutes to closer to thirty.

The apartment building is located just about a block from the big Newark Penn Station which houses the Path (light rail to downtown Manhattan), NJ Transit (heavy rail all over New Jersey) and Amtrak. A five minute walk away. Next door to that is the bus station. And right in front of our door is the subway entrance should we need to travel by light rail. Newark’s main airport is just five minutes away by car and there is a small airport somewhere even closer. We are directly against the city’s largest park – Military Park and our cars will be parked underneath the park itself. All of the car access is by valet. How cool is that?

The apartment isn’t big but we really don’t need very much. The kitchen is small but has granite surfaces and stainless steel appliances. It has a little “breakfast bar” so that we can just pull up stools there and won’t need to have any additional dining surface which is awesome since the place is small and we don’t want to be adding any unnecessary furniture. The view is spectacular and we are really excited about that. It is mostly hardwood floors but the bathroom is real marble and the bedroom is carpeted. Oreo will appreciate that. There is a good amount of closet space.

We get free access to a four lane bowling alley and the apartment comes with complementary bowling shoes. How funny is that? There is a billiards room and a conference room. If we need there is a storage space in the basement. There is also an “entertainment room” that has a big flat panel television with an XBOX 360 and other new video game consoles that we can go use. That is pretty cool. I might find myself buying a game or two since I have free access to a system. That makes the games a pretty good deal. There are a few titles that I might find myself playing to relax from time to time.

I am also quite happy that the building gets its cable from Cablevision who we have currently in North Brunswick and who has been so awesome to deal with. Their prices, service and customer service have been really good since we moved here and I don’t want to move to any other companies after having dealt with them. I am hopeful that Newark will have access to their higher end services that we can’t get out here in the boonies.

The rental agent said that getting into midtown Manhattan would take only about fifteen minutes by train and downtown should be about twenty minutes. That is awesome. In theory that will allow us to go into Manhattan anytime that we want whether it is for food or for a show or to go to a museum. That is exactly what we have been wanting. Dad measured it and the apartment is just under eight and a half miles from the city as the crow flies. Now that is close!

We spent a couple of hours up in Newark dealing with the apartment and getting paperwork filled and out and everything so that we could move as quickly as possible since we want to be moved in in a week’s time. That isn’t very long at all. Nothing like waiting until the last possible moment to find an apartment. But we are really happy that we found this place and that we weren’t able to find anything too tempting in Jersey City or Hoboken since this is so much less expensive and will let us spend a lot more time together and with Oreo.

Dominica did some research and found some light history on the building that we will be living in. You can see the apartment building’s current website to get an idea of what it is like today. The building is a beautiful 1929 Art Deco masterpiece that is being totally gutted, revamped and renovated. It is gorgeous and I believe that it is now on the register of historic places. It is one of the most prominent and recognizable buildings in Newark.

We went to TGI Friday’s to get some late lunch. It was okay. Nothing special. But it was something different and that is what we needed. Although soon we will have all new food choices and we will have to see what our options are once we are up there. We also stopped at the Walmart that we loathe and grabbed a stack of plastic bins with which to pack up our apartment and some bargain movies including Dying Young, Out to Sea, Center Stage, The Sweetest Thing, The Presidio and Anywhere But Here.

At home I spent the afternoon and evening doing work for the office. There is a ton of work left over from yesterday. What a long week it has been and still is. But hey, overtime is good and makes it worth it. It isn’t stressful work, just a lot of it. A lot of it that we were unable to get to during the week and the weekend gives us the chance to get caught up.

Dominica had some homework to get caught up on since her Object Oriented Programming with Java class started a week ago and she hasn’t had a chance to do anything with it yet. Of course, we should have expect this, it appears that this class is also going to be skipping all of the technical learning and avoiding the course description and providing a blow off class for the professor that doesn’t meet any of the requirements of the program that Dominica is in. This is getting to be really frustrating and Dominica is quite upset that we keep paying for classes just to have it turn into a ton of pointless busywork with no actual learning involved. Empire State is really digging itself into a hole here. She wrote a letter to the professor to see what is going on and I wrote to some of my contacts there and tomorrow she is supposed to follow up with the dean to get to the bottom of this. At this point it is really starting to look like SUNY Empire is just trying to make a quick buck and is skipping the entire education process for its online curriculum for which is boasts so much. We will see. So for now she has decided not to waste any additional time on the class as everything that they are doing currently is really juvenile and gives the appearance that the professor doesn’t understand the knowledge domain very well or just doesn’t think very much of Empire’s students.

Dominica headed to bed around half past nine. I had too much work to do to be able to join her. I took the time to do some really serious BASH Shell scripting tonight. This is by far the largest shell scripting project that I think that I have ever done. Not that I am any shell scripting master but I like “doing it right” and not just making something silly that works but is hard to extend. So we have a new deployment tool now at the office. Pretty nifty. I didn’t get to go to bed until almost midnight, however, which was much later than I had been hoping for. Nothing like putting in a five our weekend day when you have been doing overtime all week. Unfortunately there is some work to be done tomorrow as well but not nearly as much as today – I hope.

I started my day by getting paged at half past four in the morning. Five hours of sleep. Oh boy, time for a long day. I got right on the computer and worked for about an hour before hopping into the shower and getting ready to face the day.

I managed to get into the office before six thirty when me “shift” started. I love early mornings on Friday because all of the real work happens in the evenings after hours so the early morning is extremely quiet. Nice and relaxing which I really needed after my long haul yesterday.

Today was just as crazy and busy as the last few days have been. What a week! I almost didn’t get to eat lunch but one of my coworkers grabbed me right at five till two when the cafeteria was going to close and we ran down and grabbed a bite.

I managed to run home around four in the afternoon and worked from home until it was time to go for dinner. A fourteen hour day today to follow my sixteen hour day yesterday. Boy am I tired. I still have plenty of unfinished work and need to work from home over the weekend but at least not days like this. Tomorrow will be really busy though because I need to sleep in so that I am somewhat functional and then we are going to Newark to check out that apartment then I have to work and try to keep Dominica on task with her homework.

For dinner we did our regular Friday night outing to the Omega Diner. Mac and cheese, yay! We came home and off to bed it was for us.

Not very often am I as glad for a work from home day as I am today. This week has been brutal and not having to go in to the office today is a big relief. And knowing that Oreo has been away all week and can now spend the day at home resting is nice too. And to top it off, it is a beautiful, rainy day so I can open the windows and the curtains and just enjoy it. We haven’t had a good rain in a long time and I miss it. I get so little natural light and I only really get to open up the curtains when it is raining both because heavy sunlight exhausts me and makes it hard to work at the computer but also because the rain keeps the children in the neighbourhood from standing at our windows looking into the apartment. But only a few more weeks of that, one way or another. We are moving on October 1st, thank goodness. I can’t really say that the apartment has been bad. It has been fine. But we are really glad to be going someplace more upscale and more convenient to our actual lives. This place served its purpose just fine but it is definitely time to be moving on from here. We are really glad that I got my contract extended for another year just now so that we are really confident about getting an apartment in an area that is convenient for getting in to and out of Warren. Otherwise we would just go to Nutley and hope for the best, I suppose.

Because she didn’t have Oreo, Dominica left for work a little later than usual and ended up hitting really bad traffic so her drive in to the office wasn’t very good. She did manage to stop at Dunkin Donuts on her way and get coffee and donuts for her coworkers (and herself, I would guess.) No donuts for me. Just a Slim Fast. Not that that helps.

The rain kept up into the afternoon and Oreo kept on sleeping just as long. He only moved all day to transition from sleeping in Dominica and my bed to his own bed in the living room so that he could sleep next to me as I worked. He didn’t even want to get taken out until afternoon! He has a lot of rest to catch up on apparently.

I just happened to stop by Voip-Supply today and discovered an awesome sale on wireless VoIP phones. It was really cool because I just happen to decide to go there today to check out the prices on a particular model and today just happened to be the second day of a two day sale on just that one model of phone! So, of course, I bought five of them.

Today was a very telephone oriented day for me. I was on the phone for by far the bulk of my day. That goodness that I have a solid VoIP connection to work from. I am so glad that I have that and that I have a nice phone with a speakerphone option. I was able to turn that on and walk arount the house while on some of the calls.

Oreo got up just long enough to stretch and to get a drink at two thirty in the afternoon but then returned right back to his bed. What a lazy boy.

Dominica got home around seven tonight and I was still working. What a long day. Today was so busy that I didn’t have a chance to make myself a meal all day. I just grabbed quick snacks from the kitchen to hold me until Min got home. She ordered take away from Tanjore and ran out and picked it up. It was twenty after eight when we finally sat down to eat. I had to eat sitting at my computer because I was still working.

Dominica watched The Game which is just an awesome movie. She had seen parts of it before but never the whole thing. She ended up liking it.

I worked right up until bed time. A sixteen hour work day. We crashed at just a little before eleven. I found out that I need to cover the early shift tomorrow so I have to be on the road just after five thirty in the morning. So much for a good night’s sleep.

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.