Sheep Guarding Llama

I worked from midnight to two in the morning today before going to bed. I was up fairly early this morning and had to keep working on the same project. I ended up being so busy that I wasn’t able to go into the office until early afternoon. That gave Dominica and I an opportunity to get lunch together at the Omega Diner.

Work was fairly busy this afternoon but nothing like this morning. Most work seems to be done in the morning. By afternoon I think everyone is sluggish from lunch and just lets things go until the next morning.

Dominica did some apartment hunting today (in order to avoid doing her homework) and found a really promising apartment in Edgewater, New Jersey that she really wanted to go look at. I got out of work a little after seven and drove down to the apartment in North Brunswick to pick up Dominica. Oreo was not happy with that arrangement after not having seen me all day. Dominica had managed to have made contact with the renter and they thought that we could probably go see the place tonight. So we drove on up to the Hudson River Waterfront and found our way up to Edgewater.

It was after nine when we managed to see the place. Dominica really likes it. It is a penthouse floor twelve hundred square foot apartment, very well appointed with a balcony view of the midtown skyline (that’s Manhattan’s midtown.) It is directly on the Hudson and has its own private riverwalk. The really big deal about the place is two included garage spaces! But it is expensive and far to the north for us so commuting to Warren will be tough but commuting to Manhattan would be very, very easy.

We grabbed a late dinner at the Omega and then went home. I had to do a little work before going to bed so it was after one in the morning before I finally got the change to turn in. I was very tired by the time I was finally lying down to go to bed.

We slept in this morning after having stayed up watching movies until very late last night. Oreo and Dexter are so snuggly – each competing to be the snuggliest – that it is hard to get out of bed. I stayed in bed awake for hours. Dominica didn’t wake up until almost noon.

We got ready to leave casually and drove out to Herkimer and had a late lunch with Dominica’s parents at Denny’s before we hit the road. It was 4:05 when we pulled out of Herkimer and we were confident that we would be able to be home before 9:00. Boy were we in for a surprise.

Traffic moved okay until we reached Albany. From the US90 to US87 interchange all the way to the US287 bypass at the New Jersey border we were stuck in crawling traffic. That was roughly 120 miles of backup. And after finally making it all that way it turned out that the traffic jam was caused by the toll boothes!

The instant we were onto US287 we were able to travel quickly again. We drove down to Warren and picked up my car from the office and then headed for hom.

The drive last night went well. We were out of Warren in great time and were on the road so much earlier than we are used to. We took the backroads shortcut straight north out of Warren to get to US 287 as quickly as possible and then took US 287 right up to the New York Thruway. We had great weather and traffic almost the entire way and were able to meet Dominica’s parents and brother in Herkimer for dinner.

It was nice that we were able to get out of New Jersey so early that we actually had time to hang out on Friday evening. Dominica only got Friday night to see Joe before he left for college so that was important.

Friday night was pretty much just relaxing. Oreo and Dexter had a good time getting to play. They miss each other when they are apart even if they spent their whole time together competing for attention.

Dominica’s parents left early in the morning to take Joe out to Albany so Min and I were on our own until the middle of the afternoon. They got home and we all took a ride out to New Hartford in the BMW with the top down even though it was quite chilly and went to Stone Cold Creamery for some ice cream (mmmm… bubble gum with rainbow sprinkles!), the pet store, Barnes and Nobles, Best Buy and then off to dinner at the Castlewood in Utica. I picked up a book at B&N that Andy has been reading recently and said that it was really good “The Pragmatic Programmer’s Guide to Subverion”.

At Best Buy I managed to get a number of good movie deals like the newly released Poseidon that Dominica has really been wanting to see, the American Pie trilogy which really isn’t very good but it is so much a part of the culture for people our age that it just seemed like something that we should own, Major League II which is awesome and came with the really weak Major League III: Back to the Minors but at least it was free, Jackie Chan’s New Police Story and lastly, Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy. New Police Story is actually the fifth movie in the Police Story series. The most popular movies of the series here in the states are PS III and IV which are generally knows as Supercop and First Strike respectively. I have never seen either of the original PS movies nor any of the Michelle Yeoh spin off series (Supercop II, etc.)

After shopping and dinner we returned to the Tocco residence and plunked down to watch Poseidon. I have never seen the original Poseidon Adventure so I have no way to compare this movie to that one but both Dominica and her dad made a big deal about this version’s lack of character development. As it was the movie was entertaining but nothing special. The action was okay, the characters were okay, the plot was okay. As always with these movies I was disappointed that no one cared at all about any sort of accuracy. And, as always, if they don’t care enough to put real effort into a movie that costs this much then why should I care?

Dominica’s dad went to bed her mother having left part way through the movie finding it less than engaging and we went on to watch American Wedding which was even worse than American Pie 2 which was pretty bad. After the movie we still were not tired so we went on and watched Anchorman which was somewhat funny but only barely. Everyone had raved about that movie but it just didn’t cut it.

As always seems to happen when I am scheduled to work the early shift at the office – I woke up at 3:00 in the morning. Today I had some weird pain in my stomach and had to get out of bed. I am fine now but it got me moving quite a bit earlier than I had wanted to. I ended up starting working from home at 3:45 and put it a busy morning up until 5:45. Two hours before even leaving the house. Not too shabby.

I got to the office at 6:30 to officially start my day. I actually like these early mornings. I seem to be able to get a lot done and I feel better about my day. The best part is, of course, that I then get to leave early.

I have managed to get a lot done this week. I forgot to mention the other day that I scrambled to complete a bunch of HP classes that I have been taking this “semester” and this week I completed: “Microsoft Access 2003: Introduction”, ” Security for IT Professionals”, “Design Your Own Business Documents” and “Microsoft Windows Server 2003: Administering.” It was a busy semester. I also finished reading Joel Spolsky’s “The Best Software Writing I”. Now I am attempting to finish the book “Embracing Insanity” which I started a long time ago and never made it all of the way through.

MSNBC reported that Pluto Is No Longer A Planet. In some ways this is sad as now we only have eight planets and all of that stuff that we learned since we were kids is wrong. But Pluto has a wacky orbit compared to the planets and that should have been tipping everyone off. Of course in this article they state the reason why Pluto was demoted using the new criteria for determining what is and isn’t a planet: “A planet1 is a celestial body that (a) is in orbit around the Sun, (b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, and (c) has cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit.” MSNBC then goes on to state that the reason why Pluto was rejected as being a planet for failing to clear the path around its orbit because it crosses orbits with Neptune. Um, did no one read that sentence? Later in the article MSNBC goes into depth about the much more heated debate as astronomers point out that earth, Mars, Jupiter, Neptune, etc. all of uncleared orbits making them not planets either. It turns out that the voting on Pluto’s status was a farce with only a select handful of astronomers (who elected these people anyway) voting and 9,500 astronomers at the conference being shunned. It sounds like the scientific nature of the current astronomic field is being called into question here. If they can’t handle English definitions then how can they practice science? Clearly the astronomers involved in the voting and the subsequent application of the decision do not have the necessary astronomic backgrounds to complete a standard middle school introduction to the Solar system!

My day was very busy up until lunch time. Then things cooled down a lot which I really appreciated. It is nice to have things kind of taper off at the end of the week. I was scheduled to do some work later this evening but someone on my team covered that for me so that I would be able to leave early and get on the road towards Frankfort.

Dominica got onto the road coming from North Brunswick at 1:30 this afternoon. Not too bad. She is picking me up at work. We are leaving my car here at the office. It is awesome having a “gated” office where I can just leave my car if I need to and I managed to park right in front of the entrance so it is extra safe. We are taking the BMW to Frankfort this weekend and then Dominica will take me to work on Monday morning.

We are hoping to be able to arrive in Frankfort by dinner time. Close to 6:30. We will see. We are going to attempt taking the New York State Thruway almost the entire way. Part of the way will be roads that I have never taken before so that should help to make it more interesting.

I am going to go ahead and post today’s daily from the office so that it doesn’t get neglected over the weekend. I will have my laptop but will probably be out of touch most of the weekend. We will be back to New Jersey on Sunday afternoon, though, because I have work that needs my attention starting at midnight.

Today I had my first actual failure of WordPress. I attempted to post today’s update and instead of posting it just logged out and lost my changes. That wasn’t very cool. But fortunately I was able to just go “back” in my browser and everything was still saved in the browser so it was okay.

Today is my work from home day this week. The weather was cooler last night and so we opened the windows and am getting fresh air for one of the first times in a long time. We really hate the air conditioning system here so we are much happier when we get a chance to turn it off. I think that it is actually less humid in the house without the air conditioning running. We do have window fans running. That helps some. During the day it is still pretty warm but it was a little overcast so it didn’t get too hot in the house.

I had a fairly busy day “at work” and Dominica had a lot of homework to work on. She is in her home stretch coming up to the end of the semester. Funny that everyone else is getting ready to start school next week and she is just wrapping up. She has another class starting in two weeks, I believe. Right now she is just taking her Introduction to Programming with Java ni the fall but she might, depending on our schedule, take either Database Systems II or Systems Analysis and Design. We will see. I have been pushing to get my degree wrapped up but that doesn’t appear to be going anywhere. What a pain that is.

No word yet today on the job that Dominica interviewed for on Monday. We are very hopeful that that is still moving along well. And, in reality, if she had heard about the job this week it would have meant either bad new or that she had to start on Monday which was faster than we were ready for so it is probably best that we have not heard anything yet.

For lunch we ordered in Chinese from one of the places that has been hanging their menus on our doorknob. I let Dominica order lunch and she ended up ordering two or three meals worth of food. The food was pretty good but boy was there a lot of it.

I did manage to put in a tiny bit more time on the York Class of ’94 web site today: York94. There isn’t much content yet on the site but I am really happy with the layout and clean theme. I think that people will like it and find it easy to use.

We haven’t had any chance to look at apartments or to even see the Jersey City area so we decided that we would go up there this evening to get a feel for what the area was like. We have looked at tons of apartments and condos online but we have never actually been there (I have been near there in Newark or Weehawken but not in Jersey City, Bayonne or Hoboken themselves to really know what the area is like.)

We left to go look at apartment “areas” as soon as I was done with work which ended up being later than I had anticipated – close to seven o’clock. We drove up to Bayonne, Jersey City and Hoboken and drove around quite a bit in the BMW with Oreo hanging out in the back. He had a good time. We discovered quickly that we do not want to live down in Bayonne. It is okay but too expensive for what it is which is way too similar to North Brunswick. No wonder we were able to find decently priced places there! So JC and Hoboken are the only areas that we are really looking at now. There is some really awesome stuff there. We are very hopeful that that is where we will get to live. We both seem to think that Jersey City is the right balance for us.

On the way back we stopped at the Omega Diner for dinner as we hadn’t had a chance to get any yet. It was way too late by the time that we got back. I didn’t manage to get to bed until after eleven and I have to be in the office by six thirty tomorrow morning! Ugh.