It is amazing to me that when looking online neither Google nor Yahoo seach returns any blogs, but this one of course, ever mentioning ol’ Pavilion Baptist School.  Technorati doesn’t even bother to list SGL but I suppose that PBS is only ever mentioned in passing.  It is sad to see such a major part of so many of our lives reduced to a few lines on the Internet.  No history, no contacts, no nothing.  A seach of the name turns up many automated school search engines listing the school as if it still existed but no real information.  I don’t even know how to definitively discover when the school actually closed.  It just vanished while none of us were watching.

Sadly, even an image search for the school name turns up only picture of or by me.  It’s almost as if the school never existed.

One of my goals, but not a high priority one, is to create the Pavilion Baptist School web site.  We need to have a central repository of news and contact information.  Being from PBS really encourages a lot of people to not be very tech savvy and in this day and age that is the difference between finding lost friends and not.  Those of us who have reconnected have done so almost exclusively through FaceBook – which is extra difficult as FaceBook won’t recognize PBS as a school so we aren’t allowed to have a school group through them.  Although now that we have official email addresses it might help a little.  A few people have found me through my personal web page too but not very many.

I was up bright and early again today.  This is a really long week.  Oreo was so tired last night that he completely forgot about his dinner and just went to bed without it.  We don’t offer him dinner unless he asks as we don’t think that he needs any “extra” food.  His weight is under control but he is very sensitive to weight gain and if he isn’t hungry enough to ask for his dinner then he certainly doesn’t need it.  He knows how to ask for food when he is hungry and isn’t shy about doing so.

Lots of stuff to do today.  Tomorrow is too busy with work and I will be in the office on Wall St. tomorrow so I can’t do the “little things” that need catching up with around here.  This weekend we are taking the nieces camping in Watkins Glen so we need to be ready.  Today is extra laundry, some light shopping and Oreo needs his flea and tick preventative treatment so that he is ready to face the wilds of Upstate New York.

It turns out that Josh is coming down to Clifton, NJ this weekend with the Empire Statesmen but, obviously, we won’t see him as we will be out of town.

I got a call from Craig today.  Craig, who has been missing in action for months now.  Turns out that they are expecting in December!  We have so many people that we know having babies within several weeks of us.  It is really crazy.

Anyway, Craig had some info on a rent controlled apartment up in Inwood (the northern most bit of the island of Manhattan) becoming available so we called and are going over there this evening to take a look at the area and the apartment.  We have only ever driven through Inwood on the highway and don’t really have a good idea of what the area is like.  It had never occurred to us that getting a rent controlled apartment would even be possible as they are rare and highly coveted.  So we are rushing out to see what the deal is.  We already know that Oreo won’t be a problem and that there is a grocery store very nearby as well as a train.

We would love to live up in Westchester but we are nervous about house prices right now.  They are lower than before but it seems like there is quite a bit of a possibility of the prices falling still before they hit bottom and investing in property in the New York area is not an easy prospect.  We definitely don’t want to get trapped having bought something that loses value immediately and then find that we need to move!  We would be in rough shape.  Renting, even if just temporarily, would be very good for us to give us time to get to know the market and the area better.

Inwood would still be closer to our families but only by about half an hour or so and driving into the city isn’t very easy.  The car situation would not be ideal.  But commuting for me would be great.  Almost as good as it is now and almost as cheap.  It would mean that I would have a lot more time at home with the baby – especially if I end up being unable to be at home as much as I am now.

Moving into Manhattan would only make sense for us if the cost was really low which is a possibility.  We will see more tonight when we look at the apartment.  Neither of us has ever looked at a New York City apartment before, let alone a Manhattan apartment.  We don’t know very much about rent control either.  This might be a great opportunity or nothing that we are interested in at all.

Dominica got home a little before six and we pretty much just got ready to go and left around twenty after.  It took about an hour and a half to get from Newark to Inwood.  We took the PATH from Newark’s Penn Station to 33rd Street near NY Penn Station.  There is probably some trick to the train to train transfer but we just popped up in midtown and walked from the PATH to Penn Station to catch the A Train (Express) up to Inwood (200th and Broadway.)

We looked at two apartments that are coming available up there, a one bedroom and a three bedroom.  The three bedroom was a little interesting but, unfortunately, the style of the whole place was totally not our scene.  The prices were amazing and the deal really is quite good.  For people looking to really live in Manhattan it is hard to beat.  For us, though, we would be much happier, we feel, being out in Westchester.  The difference in commute time really isn’t that much different.

We decided to save the effort of taking the PATH and to just catch NJ Transit back between New York and New Jersey.  NJ Transit is more comfortable and we have now figured out how to get the better trains and it barely costs any more.  Plus there is only two stops totally to get us back home so that is pretty easy.

We tried to get a bite to eat at Penn Station in Manhattan on the way home but like everything else down here, it was all closed by the time that we got there.  Upstate New Yorkers have such an incredibly skewed view of the world.  We are used to so many things being open twenty-four hours a day and we are always told how we are from the “sleepy north” and that Manhattan is the city that never sleeps.  Ha!  We are so spoiled in Rochester, Buffalo, Syracuse, Elmira, Ithaca, etc.  Everything downstate closes early.  New Yorkers are so trapped in their own little universe that they don’t even realize that they have no more late night services than any random city.  Nowhere near what a small, “sleepy” town like Geneseo has to offer.

There was one restaurant still open in Newark’s Penn Station so we ate there.  Now it is a seriously sad statement that we were able to get food in Newark and not in New York.  Our biggest complaint (well, maybe not the biggest) about Newark is how we aren’t able to get any food in the evenings!

There was laundry, email and a few other things that we needed to do before we were able to get to bed.  We were up far later than either of us wanted to be.  We were both totally exhausted coming back from New York.

I am on Wall Street tomorrow.  Dominica has a baby shower for her friend Elaine at the office so she has some work to do for that to do.  After work we are heading north to Frankfort and then taking our nieces camping over the weekend.

I am really going to miss the constant presence of Manhattan being just outside the window when we move away from here. Even if we don’t get to spend all that much time actually in the city it is just so amazing having it sitting right there. I love all of the twinkling lights and the passing cars on the bridges leading in and out of the city. I have always liked cities at night. So many people yet so quiet and still. I need to get some pictures of Manhattan at night from our view here before we leave. It is rather unlikely that I will ever have a view quite like this again. This is very much a once in a lifetime kind of opportunity, I’m sure. Nevertheless, we have had it for a year and a half and it will be over two years when we actually leave and I have worked from home a lot during that time and my work area has always had this view so very few people anywhere have had the chance to take advantage of such a view as much as I have.

We turned down our lease renewal. The apartment building offered a deal to those who would renew in March. Personally I think that it was a foolish move asking us to renew so far in advance. We didn’t have enough time to really think about or make any plans to stay or go. So, since we couldn’t guarantee that we needed to stay we effectively guaranteed that we weren’t. Had they extended the offer to a point where we were really able to make a commitment then we might easily have decided that staying in Newark for one more year was going to make sense. But, now we know that the financials just aren’t going to make sense for us next year and this apartment isn’t really an option. The handy thing for us is that now we have seven months to make plans for moving knowing exactly when we are moving. I have never had so much warning on a move before. Our last day in Newark, or at least at Eleven80, is October 31st. Now we just need to figure out exactly to where we are moving come November.

Oreo was very, very happy to be home today. He was so exhausted. Dominica tells me that he played a lot more than usual at daycare yesterday because Lana, the little puppy that he loves to play with, was in playing with another dog and Oreo just couldn’t resist and he played all day. He was all worked up and being crazy last night when he got home. Today he is making up for it. Just sleeping and sleeping. Even on his walk when he saw other dogs he could do no more than take a quick sniff to acknowledge their existence and drag himself along until he was able to do his business and then get back home to go to bed.

At one point late this morning our silly dog was sitting on the loveseat in the living room and was itching the middle of his back with his head turned all the way around. He was in the sunlight and apparently quite comfortable as he just fell asleep right in the middle of itching himself. It was the craziest thing to see. I look over and there he is all passed out in what appeared to be the most uncomfortable position imaginable. He was so sleepy that I was able to take several pictures of him and walk about without him stirring at all.

Dominica came home and we watched the final two episodes of the 2006 season of Doctor Who.  These were some seriously good but sad episodes.  We are definitely looking forward to the next season as well as to checking out Torchwood the Doctor Who spinoff series.  (For those in the know, “Torchwood” used to be a code name for “Doctor Who” used at the study.  You will notice that the letters from Doctor Who can be used to form the word Torchwood.)

After dinner and the show it was time for bed.  We “popped in” some What I Like About You that we watched while we cleaned in the bedroom.  Dominica assembled her new shoe rack and got it put into the closet which cleared up a ton of space and now the closet doors can close.  It also freed up some plastic bins that I need to organize other stuff around the house that has been sitting around waiting for a box into which to go.

I stayed up for a while after Dominica went to bed and did some web site work and Handbrake conversions.  Nothing heavy just some light stuff that needed my attention and that I wanted to get out of the way.  By a quarter after eleven, Oreo was getting quite insistent that I come to bed.  He doesn’t like it when one of us goes to bed early and one stays up.  It makes him nervous or something.

Dad is finally doing a rebuild of his Windows XP workstation today.  It has been been rebuilt in many years – even possibly never although that seems to be a stretch.  I generally recommend complete rebuilds every six to eighteen months with once a year being a pretty happy medium.  I rebuild my Linux box every six months but that is because I want to use the very latest OpenSUSE release.  My Windows machine probably sees a fresh install every nine months or so.  Being in the habit of constantly rebuilding means that you are always keeping things cleaned and you are always prepared to start fresh at any moment.

This coming weekend is going to be busy with homework.  Dominica is almost caught up in her class but still has a little bit that she needs to do plus the steady stream of new work.  This is one of my busy homework weekends just in general.  I am not behind at all but that doesn’t make it any easier.

I came to Ithaca several times from 1994 until 2000 without having lived here.  Nathan Parker moved here in the fall of 1994 to attend school at Ithaca College.  I was able to visit fairly often during those first few years because our school schedules were so drastically different.  I had talked about moving to Ithaca for some time but hadn’t had a strategy to do so until this new project started and I no longer had to live in any particular location when not working on site at the client facility.  So Ithaca it was and a momentous decision it was in many ways.

Today we tried to get the apartment into some sort of order although there was little to be done.  In addition to all of my furniture I also had a giant Compaq Proliant 5000 quad Pentium server which took up all kinds of space and would move from apartment to apartment with me until many years later it was taken off of my hands by John Stephens (the Surfing IT Wizard.)  It was the prize piece of my collection at the time though.  In 2000, owning a real enterprise class Compaq Proliant was no small thing and it was quite an impressive line item on my youthful resume.  Even though I had started my IT career in June, 1994 – six years before – and had been the Director of Information Services for Nicklin Associates now since June, 1999 I was still building up my resume and laying the groundwork for my career and every little bit helped.

Additionally I had several desktop machines that I kept as “learning” machines – mostly running Caldera OpenLinux or Windows NT 4.  This list included by 1995 Digital Starion Pentium 75 computer that I bought to take with me to my second year at GMI (now Kettering University), a PentiumPro 200 Compaq DeskPro that we loving called “Oscar” and ran Windows NT 4 Server, three old Intel 486 machines (all Compaq DeskPros) that all ran Linux and a Gateway 2000 Intel 386 desktop that attempted to run Linux but did so very poorly.  I also, of course, had my Compaq Presario Pentium II 350 128MB which was my primary desktop that ran Windows 98.  I had received that computer and my main colour inkjet printer from Paul Binderman for whom I had done some consulting and he paid me by giving me the computer.  It was a fair deal at the time.  We were both very happy.

So there were many computers in the apartment and no Internet connection other than our AltaVista dial-up connection that was “free” dial-up Internet access that displayed ads to pay for itself.  I had my two paprika coloured leather Natuzzi couches which by this time had already become a bit famous amongst all of our friends. Nate had the big “Emily” couch so named because it came from Emily’s house in Perry.  We had my stereo which, at the time, consisted of a Rotel pre-amp and processor, two Marantz MA-500 monoblock amplifiers, an Adcom line controller and a pair of massive Paradigm Studio Reference 80 speakers.  Nate also had his own stereo system which included a pair of B&W 250 mini-shelf speakers and an Adcom integrated amplifier.  We both had laserdisc players as well.  My laserdisc collection took up no small amount of space either with about 350 titles amassed by this time.  (The collection was roughly at its peak here.)

Nate put his old television/VCR combo unit into his “master” bedroom and we put my Sony Trinitron into the living room.  The apartment had a nice deck too that we stored some stuff on.  We had NO space at all.

I remember very clearly how awful the shower was there.  It had some sort of “high efficiency” shower head that totally atomized the water and created a very dry feeling mist that shot out at you when you attempted to shower.  The mist had so much forced that it swirled as it came out but no actual water ever hit you.  It was very annoying.  I have never seen its like again.

The apartment, I also remember,  was an absolute cleanliness disaster.  Nate’s cousin Mandy had moved out from it some weeks or months before (his cousin Becky had lived there before Mandy did) but food that she had cooked (pasta) was still sitting on the rangetop and the fridge still had her old food in it.  We ate what we could and over several weeks the place improved slightly.

The main pastime was watching the extensive laserdisc collection.  Nate owned a few of his own but having my 350 titles there was a big deal.  People came over all of the time to watch them.