Sheep Guarding Llama

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.

Today is cleaning day. The worst part of moving, except maybe the moving, is the prepping of the old apartment for turn over. It is so final. It isn’t like normal cleaning and packing where there is always something left for later of if you miss something you can always do it later. But when you do the final check out everything has to be perfect.

We slept in just a little but sleeping in these days isn’t very late. Oreo was a lot more calm today now that all of our stuff is moved into the new place. He loves getting taken outside for his walks here as there are so many smells and so many other dogs have obviously been through there.

We ordered the car and I took Oreo out for his morning walk and Dominica went over to Subway to get some breakfast sandwiches. Then we ate in the car as we drove down to North Brunswick.

Cleaning didn’t take nearly as long as we had thought. Hard wood floors do have the advantage of being easy to clean once the apartment is empty. It took several hours but we were done early on in the afternoon. Oreo spent the day laying in the middle of the living room on his Star Wars pillow looking sad. But he was quite happy when we loaded him into the car and returned to Newark.

Tonight is our first real chance to actively get the house into working order. Dominica spent the evening continuing to work on laundry and there isn’t very much left. She worked hard getting the bedroom and bathroom into order (she did a ton of the kitchen yesterday although there is still plenty to do there.) I worked on the living room and managed to get the desks and computers in place. I got our firewall hooked back up and our Internet connection is really working and our wireless is back up.

I ended up having to work for a few hours this afternoon. Nothing major.

We ordered dinner in from Steakhouse 1 which came highly recommended by the concierge tonight. The food took forever. Almost two hours. We had to call several times to make sure that they were on their way. The concierge said that they are always really busy and that it does take quite some time.

When the food finally arrived we found out why there was such a wait. The subs that we ordered were amazing. I had taken Oreo out for a walk right as the food had arrived and by the time he and I made it up to the apartment Dominica had all ready finished her dinner! My sub was awesome too. Really messy but so tasty. That was one of the best subs I have ever had. If Wegmans could make bread that good ad soft then I wouldn’t need them to toast their rolls either.

After dinner it was bed time. The apartment is coming together nicely. The bedroom feels like a bedroom and the bathroom is done. The kitchen is well under way and the living room is pretty much set on the one side. There are still several bins to be addressed and there are a number of computers that need to be shipped elsewhere because we don’t have anywhere to put them at all but other than that we are doing pretty well. Tomorrow we will probably have the place completed as much as we can for the moment.

We need to get three or four bar stools for the kitchen bar. That is our “dining room table”. And we have to figure out what we want to do about other furniture. We might bring some down from New York. We haven’t decided yet. Soon we want to get some of our good desks from Geneseo. Maybe we will coordinate that with needing to move all of the big stuff out of there. There is quite a bit left to get.

Today is the big day. We are moving to Newark. It has been a long time since we were so excited about moving. Maybe never this much. The apartment in North Brunswick was so icky and the new place is so nice that the contrast might be the most extreme ever for us.

I was up a bit before Dominica this morning but because we had loaded the big two person stuff into the truck last night I was able to get busy loading the bins and other items into the truck and had a lot of the apartment done before she even got up. We were almost done loading before we would even have gotten the truck home had we picked it up this morning because the rental place only opened at nine in the morning. We were done loading by ten. We figure we might have been able to have gotten the truck home by a quarter to ten at the latest.

We left to head to Newark at a little before eleven. Dominica drove Oreo in the fully loaded PR5 ahead of me in the hopes of warning me to any traffic issues and hopefully to be able to coordinate where to put the truck once we arrived in Newark. Unfortunately she didn’t manage to stay much in front of me and was only three blocks or so in front of me as we drove through the city. I hate driving trucks and doing it in the city is really tough.

We got to the apartment and Dominica parked out front by the valets and I parked in the back by the service entrance. The port staff came out and two porters and the doorman worked like crazy helping us move. It took only fourty five minutes to move us from the truck to having everything into the apartment on the sixteenth floor! I can’t believe how easy that was and how helpful everyone was. Our first impression of really living here is that this is going to be awesome. It isn’t just a great apartment but the people involved are great too and everyone really seems to love working here and being a part of this place.

It was almost one in the afternoon when we got everything moved in and then we quickly took the truck out west to the Penske rental place in Newark to drop it off. We wanted to get that done as quickly as possible since there was no good place to put the truck at the new apartment. I got directions from an employee that I had blocked in and who was stuck waiting in his car for me to come out. He was really great and actually drove in front of me and waved me in the right direction so that I easily made it to the rental place. That was a huge help. I am not sure how I would have found it otherwise.

The people at the Penske drop off were really nice and polite. I was worried that Dominica was going to be lost because she left after me and the trip was very confusing and they even let me make a long distance call on their phone (because I didn’t have my cell on me because I hadn’t been planning on moving the truck when I did but the guy was blocked in). But Min arrived just minutes later. I was very proud that she was able to navigate the city on her own so well.

We went back to the apartment and the evening was spent getting the apartment together. Boy is there a lot to do. CableVision was schedule in the window of two until four. We made it back from dropping off the truck before they came out so we didn’t have to worry about missing them. That worked out perfectly.

We did unpacking and tried to get stuff together as much as possible while we were waiting for Cablevision. The tech came by around half past three and worked for about two hours and realized that the wiring in the building was so complex and he had so little information about the way that it was set up that he needed someone who had worked in the building before to come help him. So he left to get dinner while he waited for someone to come to help him. We got another hour to work on getting the apartment together.

Dominica went crazy doing laundry to get everything caught up. She is really happy to have a washer and dryer in the apartment now. We really missed that since having left Geneseo. Doing laundry in North Brunswick has been brutal.

We needed a few basic supplies so I ran out to the corner store to get some chips and soda, a shower curtain, etc. Dominica couldn’t believe that I was able to go out to the store and back in just five minutes. Living in downtown is so incredibly handy. I have only ever lived in the city proper in Flint and Pittsburgh. In Flint I lived in a slum so nothing was handy except the scary corner store. And in Pittsburgh we lived so far from the city center in a heavily residental area that the closest real things to us were a half hour walk away and even there there wasn’t all that much. So this convenience is really something for me and Dominica has never seen anything like it. Not only is it convenient but everything is really inexpensive too.

We discovered that the dryer was not working properly. We called the concierge and they had maintenance looking at it in minutes. They spent probably twenty minutes determining that the dryer was actually defective (they have three hundred new ones in the building, some will be bad) and they quickly swapped it out for a brand new one. At six o’clock on a Saturday evening we had a new dryer installed in our apartment. Now how is that for service? Let me tell you, we are ever so impressed with this place. Everyone has been giving one hundred and twenty percent to make this whole experience just awesome.

Cablevision came back and got us up and running around eight tonight. I was really impressed that they stuck with it and got us running this evening. We are very relieved to have Internet access again. I plugged in my laptop and checked email but didn’t bother to set up the real computers tonight. I need something to keep me busy tomorrow.

We ordered take out from a local pizza and sub shop. The food was quick and was pretty tasty. Dominica and I split a cheese sub and each got an order of French Fries with cheese on them. It was all very good.

We did a little more organizing and unpacking and then headed off to bed. Tomorrow we have to go back down to North Brunswick to wrap everything up, clean the place and turn in the keys.