In the middle of the night Oreo got up and decided that he wanted to go out into the living room and sleep on his pillow. It was very strange. We had the air conditioning on in the bedroom so the doors was closed. So I got up and walked him out to his pillow where he was very happy to lay down for about half an hour. He came in to check on us once but saw that we were in bed and ran back to the living room to his pillow. We could hear the clicking of his toenails on the hardwood as he ran the whole way. Eventually he gave up on that idea and returned to bed. That kept me up for about an hour between two and three in the morning with him going in and out and opening and closing doors for him.

This morning I had to get up with Dominica so that we could go down to Ryan’s apartment and feed his fish. Ryan is in Florida and we are looking after the sealife for him. I have not taken care of his fish before so I didn’t know what to do. So my night was rather short after going to bed after midnight, being up for an hour and getting up at seven.

At least today is my day at home with Oreo. It is yet another bright and beautiful day here in Newark.

Today I discovered that our ivy plant that I like so much has a spider mite infestation. Because the plant hangs so high I didn’t notice it until it was pretty heavily infested. So now I have to figure out how to take care of spider mites. I am hoping that regular washing will do the trick but they are all over the leaves. I need dad to send me some of his spare ladybugs from back home.

Tonight we are going to see Riverdance at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center. This is the third in our series of tickets for the NJPAC this season. It works out well that the tickets are for Thursdays as that means that we always leave Oreo home alone after he has had an entire day with me already. He is much more relaxed about being left in that case.

Dominica got home and wasn’t in the mood for anything except McDonald’s.  So I walked down Broad and got dinner from the McDonald’s just two blocks away.  We watched a few episodes of Average Betty while we ate.

After dinner I had to get ready to go as quickly as possible.  Then it was time to walk down to NJPAC to see the show.

Riverdance was really good.  I have seen Lord of the Dance in Toronto, I think, long ago and have seen Riverdance on television or DVD or something at some point over the years but have never seen it in person.  It was very good.  Dominica coworder Al and his wife joined us at the show and had tickets for the row right behind us.  All of the seats by them were empty so we moved back by them after intermission.

After we got home from Riverdance it was time for Min to get to bed.  I did a little work, a little over an hour, and then was ready to head off to bed myself.

I worked for a little over an hour and then took time to go shower and get ready to face the day. I did the dishes to get the kitchen cleaned up, went over to Airlie Cafe to get breakfast for Dominica and I and made coffee. Dominica was up around ten thirty or so and spent the morning reading R. A. Salvatore’s Path of Darkness series (part of the Drizzt Cycle.)

I learned today that Amazon is in the process of buying Audible. This is interesting as we know a few of the Audible folks who are our neighbours. Audible itself is located at One Washington Square right here in downtown Newark just a few minutes walk out of our front doors. So we will be watching this closely to see how it plays out and what affect it has locally and to our favourite audio book service which we live and die by around here. Audible is a major component of my lifestyle.

Speaking of Audible, I have been waiting a long time for Scott Adams’ two classics, The Dilbert Principle and The Dilbert Future to be available from Audible. I have box on cassette from many years ago but as I have no cassette player anymore that does me very little good. So I am very happy to see them on Audible so that I can listen to them again. (These books are so good that I own them in print as well.) Scott Adams’ new book, Stick To Drawing Comics, Monkey Brain! is available as well. I bought all of these today along with Louisa May Alcott’s “Jo’s Boys” which is her only major work that I have never read. I also got her lesser known book “Good Wives” which is also a part of the March Sisters Series along with “Little Women” and “Little Men” both of which I read as a child.

Dad installed the new 512MB into the SunFire V100 that only had 128MB before. That should help a lot. The memory install went fine and as soon as it was back online I kicked off a large rsync operation to see how the new memory would affect performance. It made a huge difference and my files were backed up from one location to another in no time at all. Very nice.

Our reimbursement check for Dominica’s dental work came today which was quite a bit of money. She also received her second Netflix movie, Dreamgirls.

Dominica and Oreo spent the afternoon napping in the living room. Dominica didn’t effectively get up today until around four thirty.

Many of my Brainbench certifications have expired over the past several months and I have been lax about dealing with them. So today I started “re-upping” my certifications to get them current again. When you have as many expiring certifications as I do this can be a rather significant process. It is far more certifications than I keep on my resume too since many of the certs which have expired are not IT certifications but are soft skills that are used to build up to larger cumulative certifications. I started today with renewing by Linux Administration (Red Hat) and Linux Administration (Red Hat 9). Both tests are out of date. The first one is so out of date that I have no means of even estimating the era in which is was relevant but it was definitely quite some time ago. Perhaps the popular RH 7.3 was the basis for this test which was before I did any work with Red Hat and instead used OpenLinux and SuSE. The second test was much better but still several years old – it wasn’t that new when I took it the last time more than three years ago. This time, on my first attempt, I scored a Masters and ranked number two in the United States even on a platform version that I have never worked on.

For dinner I just ran over to Food for Life and picked up dinner as take out so that we could eat at home and relax. I finished reading Johanna Rothman’s “Manage It!” while I waited for them to finish up with the food. Once I got back home we watched more of the fifth season of The Cosby Show while we ate. Oreo has decided that his new favourite thing to do while we watch television is to climb into my lap and go to sleep which makes it impossible to get up again. We we ended up watching about two hours before Dominica decided that she really wanted to watch Dreamgirls so, at that point, I was easily able to decide to go back to the living room.

I did some light work in the living room and did some reading but mostly just took time to play with and hang out with Oreo who was being very needy.  After Dominica’s movie was over we watched some more The Cosby Show and went off to bed.