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.

We took Oreo out right away for his morning walk and went to Market City right in our building for “breakfast”.  They said that the Sunday crowd is really good there being the only business in the entire downtown area that bothers to be open for all of the people living where we do.  It is  the only place that we can walk to quickly that we are aware of that has food for us on Sundays (or late evenings.)

Dominica spent most of the day playing Paper Mario on the Wii Virtual Console.  I did a bit of just “fun” reading today.  I read the rest of “Homeland” by R. A. Salvatore.  It was really good and I am looking forward to getting to read “Exile” – the next book in the series.  One of the advantages to waiting almost two decades before starting to read a popular book series is that almost all, if not all, of the sequels have been written and prequels and corrections and all that and I get to just start at the beginning and read them as fast as I want without having to wait for another book in the series to release.

Speaking of books that we have been waiting for for a long time, Sue Grafton’s “T is for Trespass” is finally out this month, less than a week ago in fact.  Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone mystery series is our favourite series of mystery books.  We really enjoy them and have the entire collection on Audio CD.  We have been listening to them for years now and eagerly await each new installment.

Through a somewhat bizarre turn of events Dominica and I now own a copy of Super Mario Galaxy that we will get to pick up at Christmas making it, more or less, a Christmas present to ourselves.  So we now own the 3D Mario collection of Super Mario 64, Super Mario Sunshine and Super Mario Galaxy.

Oreo is having a great weekend.  Three straight days of never being away from us at all.  He has been sleeping and smiling all weekend long.  He is one happy dog.

Today was very quiet overall.  Eventually we decided to get another meal from Market City and settled in to watch the final two episodes of The Vicar of Dibley from 2006.  We just got the last two episodes on DVD the other day.  The ending of the series was good but definitely not its highlight.  It is sad that the show is finally completely over.  For years it kept lingering on with the hope of another show being squeezed in at some point.  While watching the show this time I realized that the opening shot (an aerial going down the M40 in Oxfordshire) was shot very near where Dominica and I traveled through.  I did some research and we were indeed no more than eight miles from that particular spot and most likely far less.  From my best map estimates it looks as though we were approximately three miles from it running roughly parallel while we were on the train following the route of the A4010.  The shot is taken near Stokenchurch.