Today the baby is considered to be full term!  That means that if the baby comes today we are no longer considered to be premature but just simply “on the early side”.  It also means that the possibility of the baby arriving any day is much, much higher than it has been.  We are into the common, healthy labor zone in which we will remain either until little baby Miller arrives or we hit two weeks after the due date (in 35 days time.)  It is not likely that the doctor and midwife would allow us to go for a whole two weeks after due date.  Most likely labor would be induced at one week after the due date.

Dominica and I were really exhausted when the alarm rang at five thirty this morning.  We had, at best three and a half hours of restless sleep.  It was a rough night in a completely bare apartment.  It was a bit strange sleeping in the apartment when there was nothing but one lamp sitting on the window sill, the air mattress on the floor and some garbage bags with our clothes.

I got up and showered and then Dominica got up.  We were hurting pretty badly and Oreo was completely exhausted.  He slept in his car seat which was pulled up next to the air mattress so that he could be close to us since there was not enough room on the mattress itself for him to be with us.

Loading the car took two trips with the valet cart this morning and the car was parked way down the street so that took us extra long as I had to walk quite far with the cart twice.  Today is the last day for the Central Parking Valet Service at Eleven80 as well.  The valets were all given jobs at other locations, I have been told, so that is good.  I am sure that they do not really appreciate having to learn the ropes at a new location and get to know new coworkers, though.

Dominica got off to work a little on the late side.  I went back to the building and got Ramone, the resident manager, to come up around seven fifty to do the move-out inspection.  That only took a minute and went really well.  We were concerned that we would be charge for wall damage from where the television was mounted in our bedroom and where the plants were hung in the living room but we were not.  He said that that stuff was fine and that they expected to be fixing those things.  The only thing for which we may be charged is some carpet stains if they don’t come up with the steam cleaning.  We expect that they will so no big deal.

I headed out from Eleven80 just after eight twenty.  Nadine was working the desk which was very cool that we got to see her as we left this morning.  Leaving was very emotional.  We have been at Eleven80 for a very long time.  We have gotten to really know the place and feel like this is home.  Even though Newark was never really a place where we fit in we have been there for so long that it seems quite strange to be leaving.

For my blog readers from Eleven80 – if you want to find me via email or to get my phone number just go see Nadine.  She has that information for you.

Before heading to the PATH I walked over to Airlie Cafe and picked up breakfast.  It was my last morning to see them as well.  I got my “usual” breakfast sandwich, egg, cheese, black pepper and homefries on a hard roll as well as a cheese danish.  I said my goodbyes and walked to Newark Penn Station to get onto the commuter train to World Trade Center.  It feels very weird doing this for the last time.

Today was an absolutely gorgeous morning.  Crisp and clean air (the views of Manhattan from 1180 Raymond before I left were great – boy am I ever going to miss that) while being bright and sunny.  It is mornings like this that make autumn in the northeastern US so popular.  I had a nice walk to the train station and then from World Trade Center down to the bottom of Wall Street.

I had a large box of Lindt Swiss Chocolates brought to me desk today as a thank you.  Good stuff. Lindt is my favourite chocolate maker.

Today I finally brought my little fan into the office.   I originally bought this fan when I worked out in Warren before they began the crackdown on anyone trying to make themselves productive by being at a comfortable temperature. Then I took it home to keep it from being confiscated as it is a nice little fan that I bought from Walmart and of which many people were jealous.  Since fans are allowed and prevalent on Wall Street I have been meaning to bring my little fan in with me but there is never a time when it is convenient to carry a fan into the office with you.  Today it just needed to be done so that the fan would not be shipped to Peekskill where it would really not do me any good.  So I stuck it into my bag and carried it into the office today.  Now it is set up on my desk and helping to keep me cool while I work.

I decided that I really needed a command line Twitter client today so I whipped one up in Ruby.  I used it extensively today and I much prefer it to other Twitter clients that I have used.  It is also much easier to automate over methods.  Now I can start doing neat, automated Twitter messages without too much effort.  I am even considering making a little service that will read Twitter or Identi.ca and auto-publish to the opposite service.  In that way I could switch to an Identi.ca account but have everything that I do automatically appear in Twitter.  Then people who use either system would keep getting updates.  Even cooler would be if I set up my own Laconi.ca server (which is my long-term plan) and then have a service pull that feed and update Twitter, Identi.ca and maybe some others as well.  A microblogging-blaster.  Maybe this will be a project for next week.  I am talking myself into it as I write about it.  Seems like a neat idea.

I skipped lunch today and at around three in the afternoon Dan and I walked down to NYHRC on Whitehall and did our workout.  He played basketball for a bit while I swam.  I got a pretty good workout today and felt really good about it.  My swimming is definitely improving.  I was really glad to get in to the pool today as I have been missing quite a bit this past week and I don’t want to slack off nor do I want to waste the money that I put into the gym membership.  In theory, Katie is going to be able to start swimming with us soon too.

Dominica left work and went over to Doggie Paradise to pick up Oreo and then to visit some friends who just had a baby a week or two ago before she drives up to Peekskill.

We are so excited about tonight – our first night living full time in our new home.  That is going to be awesome.  I have a pretty light weekend from work too.  I originally had deployments scheduled for tomorrow morning but they were postponed until next weekend.  I will be doing a lot of homework this weekend and a lot of unpacking.

Dad and aunt Sharon are spending the night tonight and hanging out tomorrow morning since we have gotten very little time to actually visit even though they have been here for almost an entire week.  The commute time from Manhattan to Peekskill is pretty grueling and by the time that we would get to Peekskill it was always very late and everyone was so tired.  They are heading back home probably around lunch time at which point I will be getting to work on the homework situation from my new office in the basement.

Beyond the painting, which has been a tremendously huge project we are really hoping that dad will be able to get the Westinghouse 32″ LCD screen that we have mounted in the living room.  Until we have that mounted on the wall above the fireplace we really don’t have any way to watch anything or to try out the Wii Fit or the PlayStation 3.  Our first Amazon shipment, with a PS3 game and our first BluRay content, is supposed to have arrived today as well.  I checked the website and have not seen it listed as “out for delivery” or “delivered” yet so that is not a good sign.  The site still claims that it will arrive today.

Dominica took care of forwarding our mail to the new house today as well as setting up Netflix to go to the new house.  She also added BluRay as an option on our Netflix account.  Now we can really start getting use out of the PS3.

I managed to get in some class time for my RIT class.  There is almost no class discussion going on at this point.  I guess that people are winding down as they prepare for the final.  Unfortunately we have not yet gotten any feedback on the second draft of a final project so we really have almost no direction coming into our last week of the quarter.  This is really rough.  We have had almost no feedback at all for the entire course.  I have no idea whatsoever how I am doing or if I am even on the right track for this very large final project.  This is going to be a rough weekend attempting to do a project completely abstractly while being concerned that I am not even tackling the right problem.

Work at the office wrapped up at a decent time tonight.  I had some paperwork that needed my attention so I took care of that and then decided to just take the opportunity to deal with some work that is scheduled for this weekend.  The more that I am able to get out of the way tonight is less that I have to worry about tomorrow or on Sunday.

Dominica filled up the Mazda today while she was in Wallington, New Jersey.  She paid just $2.19 per gallon!  That is crazy.  We were at almost $4.00 just a few months ago.  This is so cheap.  I am pretty sure that gas is now cheaper than it was when we moved out of Geneseo well over two and a half years ago.  Gas is a big cost of living item and with it being half of what it was recently and lower than it was almost three years ago it does a lot to buffer against inflation.  We have not yet even begun to see what impacts the lower fuel costs may have on the transportation of food and manufactured good either.  There is a real possibility for big cost reductions although a lot of businesses raised prices based on the excuse of high fuel and are likely to be reluctant to bring the prices back down now that people have adjusted.

I called dad at a quarter after seven.  He and aunt Sharon were sitting in the dark hiding from trick or treaters because they didn’t have candy to hand out.  They reported that a package arrived today which is almost certainly from Amazon which should be Heroes Season 2 on BluRay for Dominica and Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion – Game of the Year Edition for me for the PS3.

My Friday night work went really well.  I burned through a ton of stuff very quickly.  I was quite productive.  I was very happy with the work that I was able to complete tonight.

I wrapped up at the office on Wall Street at eight in the evening.  Late but not all that late.  I am posting before I leave the office as I will not be back online until tomorrow.  I am hoping to be home before ten.

It was almost eight by the time that the maid wrapped up and we were in the process of loading the car.  When we went down to the lobby to get the car loaded we ran into a ton of people on their way to the halloween party and everyone kept asking us to go.  We finally caved in and decided to put in an appearance.

We love the Eleven80 Halloween Party, it is awesome.  It is Eleven80’s biggest event of the year.  A lot of people were really disappointed that they didn’t get to see Oreo compete in the dog costume contest this year.  He won last year and has a really cool pirate (salty dog?) costume this year that Dominica’s mom made for him.  He is the only dog that always has a custom made costume.  He looks so adorable in it.  He was far and away the favourite to win this year but with him being in Peekskill there was no way for us to get him down to Newark in time for the judging.

We stayed at the party for maybe half an hour.  It wasn’t very long.  We did not venture in very far and only made it to the ramp of the bowling alley.  We got to see several people just before leaving so that was good.  It is really starting to hit us tonight that we are leaving and really have been here for a really long time and know a lot of people now.  This is our third Eleven80 Halloween Party.  We were invited back for next year’s party and we will definitely make an effort to come visit.  Oreo would love to be back for an evening and show off his costume.

We hit the road around nine thirty with a very loaded car full of plants and food from the apartment.  It was almost eleven when we arrived in Peekskill!  We had not been planning on having been out this late.  What a long day.  We are not sorry that we delayed and stopped by the party, though, as it was really good to get to say some goodbyes.

Dad and aunt Sharon were still awake when we got to the house although they sure were not going to be awake for much longer.  Oreo had really been missing us all day and spent the day following dad around like, well, like a lost puppy.  We unloaded the car and visited for twenty minutes or so and got to get a first look at how the painting has been coming along.  The upstairs looks awesome.  The nursery is all but done and the master bathroom is done and bits of the master bedroom are done (there is just a master bedroom and the nursery as far as bedrooms go.)  They are hoping to complete the master bedroom tomorrow.

Dominica, Oreo and I arrived back at Eleven80 in Newark at one thirty in the morning.  Wow were we tired.  We pumped up the air mattress and did some quick, last minute packing to be sure that we were ready for tomorrow morning and got to bed sometime around a quarter till two!  The alarm was set for five thirty so this is a very short night.

No sooner than we dropped off to sleep on the not very comfortable air mattress than the phone rang, it was ten after two in the morning, from the valet saying that our car was double parked and blocking the street and that they needed our keys.  We had dropped off the keys so we were pretty confused.  I got out of bed and searched around the completely empty apartment for a few minutes before Kamil, the concierge, found where they had fallen behind a computer monitor on the desk and had disappeared.  So our short, less than four hour night was now a much less than four hour night with an interruption in the middle of it.  Tomorrow morning is going to be rough.

There is very little for us to do in the morning.  We are both going to shower, pack up the few clothes that we have here, deflate the bed, load the car, get Oreo ready for his daycare halloween party and get Dominica off to her final day at work.  (Her finaly official day.  We’ve decided that if she feels well enough come Monday that she is going to work Monday and Tuesday of next week.  Those are the two busiest days for her office when they will miss her the most.  Then she will take her three bereavement days and that will round out the week.  It will be a full five days later before she could work again and there is no way that she will be able to do so that close to the baby day.)  Then, as soon as Dominica leaves for work I am orchestrating the check-out of the apartment.  That is just a brief walkthrough to determine any damage, stains, missing parts, etc. in the apartment for which we will be charged.  Very quick and easy.  Then I will take the PATH from Newark to the WTC for the last time.

After work tomorrow we all just head to Peekskill and shift completely to our new home!

12 Work Days Left for Dominica; House closing scheduled in 6 days.

Everything is getting so close.  We are really starting to feel the pressure as we need to have everything done very, very soon.  Dominica brought home the boxes last night and the hallway is full of boxes that we need to assemble and fill with stuff.  We had no time to start the packing process last night so we are expecting to be able to start today.  Just a few boxes each day is the plan starting with the books.  Lots of books.

My brain got plenty of sleep but my body definitely feels the two days of swimming.  I do real laps and don’t play around in the pool so I have gotten a bit of exercise the last two days and I feel it.  We have been going to the New York Health and Racquet Club on Whitehall.  They are the only gym that we can find in the area that has a pool and a pool is what I need.  I can keep myself going to a pool day after day but using weight machines or whatever always falls apart eventually.  The pool is also much easier on your body – very unlikely to do any real damage from swimming.

Dominica discovered that HP’s 2133 mini laptop (a.k.a. NetBook) machines have dropped dramatically in price recently.  The HP2133 is extra cool because online all of the other NetBooks that I have seen, this one ships with SUSE Linux installed rather than some form of Fedora.

BluRay Players are finally becoming affordable.  The Samsung BD-P1500 is just a little over two hundred dollars now from Amazon.  Not too bad considering it was well over four hundred for most of the year for an older model.  They are getting into the range where it makes a lot of sense to get one.  If we weren’t in the process of closing on the house I would have ordered this today.  Dominica is very anxious to get a BluRay player and we have been thinking that we were going to hold off until we could just get a Sony PS3 instead but now the BluRay players are so inexpensive that getting one of those and an XBOX 360 is about the same price as the PS3 alone.

Today began another round of layoffs at the office.  I think that this is my fourth or fifth round of layoffs since starting here.  I am not concerned for myself, but I do know people who are affected again this round.  Constant layoffs are no fun.  Everyone always wonders if it will be their department next.  It happens so often that people just keep the idea of the layoffs in the back of their minds all of the time.  It is not good for moral or productivity.

Much like Eastman Kodak through the nineties.  I remember that the layoffs just came and came in waves.  It became a constant culture of layoffs with no end in sight.  It was just business as usual at Kodak after a while and that is what is happening here.  Layoff announcements don’t even invoke a response anymore as everyone forgets when they start and stop.

Oreo is feeling so much better each day.  The steroids are really doing the trick.  Of course, we don’t want to keep him on steroids all of the time as it is not healthy for him, but for the moment it is really helping him get over his horrible allergies.  It is so rough watching his life deteriorate down to nothing but scratching and scratching.  He spends all of his time doing it, and he is very unhappy.

For lunch today, three of us drove out to Pooja to get Indian buffet.  I was starving before going to lunch having skipped breakfast.  Then, of course, I ate too much at the buffet and felt like crap all afternoon.  Dumb, dumb, dumb.

I caught the express train home and Dominica managed to pick me up as I walked along Broad heading towards Eleven80.  Today was a very easy commuting day.

I was not very hungry after my big lunch and so decided to skip dinner this evening.  Dominica was so tired that she really did not want to have dinner either.  So she just had some oatmeal and vegetables.  We watched a little Fresh Prince of Bel Air and were off to bed by nine thirty!  Crazy, I know.

Tomorrow I am home with Oreo and tonight is my chance to really catch up on some sleep.  Tomorrow Dominica is working an extra hour to cover for someone at the office and so really needs her sleep tonight as working really wears her out.  Luckily it was on a Thursday that they needed her to work extra so that she didn’t have to drive Oreo to and from daycare like she normally has to do.  So in reality her day tomorrow is only marginally longer than normal.  It might actually be shorter.

We found out tonight that the Eleven80 Halloween Party has been scheduled for October 30th which is our very last night staying at Eleven80 before we move completely to Peekskill and give up the apartment.  So we might go now that we know that it is possible.  We had a really good time last year.  Oreo loves getting all dressed up for parties.

Speaking of changes at Eleven80.  We also found out that starting November 1st, there is no more valet parking at Eleven80.  Instead of using valets to park the cars under Military Park the building has worked out an agreement to allow residents to park at 1160 Raymond Blvd. in the garage directly next door to Eleven80 where they can get to and from their own cars anytime that they want.

It may not sound as nice as valet parking but I am positive that this will do wonders for the building.  Having nothing but valet service and having no space in which to operate it really does not work well.  It works better in Manhattan where you need your car only seldom but in Newark you need it far too often to always have to deal with having it taken away and brought around for you.  The new parking does cost 25% more than the old parking but personally I think that it is probably going to be well worth it.

The thing that is awful, in a way, is that the new parking scheme takes effect the instant that our lease is up.  We end at midnight, October 31st and that is when the new parking begins.  I am curious as to the logistics of moving all of those cars from Military Park’s garage which is valet access only to 1160 which requires the residents to drive from one to the other.  I wonder if anyone has thought about that yet.  That is going to be a mess!  I am SO glad that Dominica and I are not coming “home” to Eleven80 that night but driving straight to Peekskill after work.

It is just sad, though, because we were some of the most vocal opponents of the valet scheme.  It just didn’t work and caused problems no end.  The street has been a mess with cars double and triple parked, using side streets, being blocked in, getting left out all night, etc.  The valets were just starting to get into the groove, though, after two years and it has not been so bad for a while.  But the constant parking tickets and other hassles have only gotten worse.  Too bad that we will never get to park in the new garage.  That would have made living at Eleven80 much nicer.

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.

Lunch was leftovers from Mi Pequeño Mexico last night. Their food is really good the day after. They deliver to Eleven80 so we are planning on getting more food from them tonight.

While we ate lunch we watched the remainder of the final season of Full House on DVD. Strangely I had never seen most of the seventh and eighth seasons of the show previously but as we approached the last few episodes of the final season they ended up all being ones that I have seen. I can only imagine that I caught them on cable in hotel rooms over the last few years while working out of town. I saw a lot of Full House in the hotels when I was working for Wegmans in 2004 – 2005. I can’t believe that working for Wegmans was almost four years ago now. This year is my fourteenth year in Information Technology! And we have been in New Jersey for almost two full years now.

We tried watching a BBC show that we got from dad called Hamish MacBeth. Not our type of show though. The hero of the show is a cop and a junkie which makes for a “hard to identify with” lead and it is quite difficult to get into the show for us. The characters in the show were very endearing to us.

Dominica spent a bit of the evening watching the second season of Heroes on NBC online.

For dinner we called in an order to  Mi Pequeño Mexico and had burritos delivered.  It took hardly any time at all and was a very affordable large dinner.  We are vey excited to have a new restaurant that delivers something different to us.  And they are cheaper, faster, easier and healthier than many other choices too.  Yay!

Sleeping in so much made for a really short day today. I had some work that I needed to do for the office before we hit tomorrow morning which is going to be a really busy day so I spent a few hours doing that before heading off to bed. Nothing stressful, just last minute stuff that I wanted to have completed (ducks in a row and all that) as we head into the busy week.

I did some shopping for great Amazon MP3 downloads for my Apple iPod tonight too.  It is awesome that they carry some of my favourite artists like Allison Kraus & Union Station!  There is so much great music to get from there.  One thing that is really awesome is that one of the best songs that we have ever played on the SGL Podcast (Episode 48 – Half of My Mistakes by Radney Foster) was just recently covered by Gary Allan who is one of my all time favourite singers.  So I picked up his version of the song as well because it is just one of my favourite songs too.

We were up until around one in the morning before turning in for the night.

We both slept in a bit this morning. I slept in until nine and Dominica until between noon and one! I had to get up at four in the morning to walk Oreo though. His long car riding finally caught up with him in the middle of the night and we had to make an emergency walk down to the corner of Mulberry.

I had to work today but with tomorrow being a holiday there was very little going on in the office.

There was a lot of cleaning to be done around the apartment. Lots of stuff to be put away and a lot of new things that need places to be found for them to go. We have the new humidifier that we brought back from dad’s that was our main humidifier at the house in Geneseo. I hooked that up in the entrance hallway and fired it up to compliment the smaller unit that we have running in the kitchen.

We reassembled the lamp / side table and set it up in the living room by the side of the love seat. It works really well with the rest of our furniture. We are glad to have it with us again and we will really appreciate having the extra light in our rather dark living room.

Art and Danielle turned me on to AsoBrain Games which have popular European board games that you can play online. They have their own online version of Settlers of Catan which is much faster than the board game and just about identical. You can play against real people or just against the computer. I like it. I was playing my very first game on the site this afternoon and Art and Danielle managed to find me and to jump into the game that I was trying out.

At more or less the last minute we managed to make New Year’s Eve party plans with Kevin and Pam and we reserved the Eleven80 Lounge area for our own personal party.  How no one else reserved this I have no idea.  So we scheduled to get it at nine thirty and stay more or less until midnight.  Kevin and Pam went out and got snacks, soft drinks and cheese fondue for the party and we are providing the chocolate fondue fountain, a few bottles of wine and 99 Blackberries.  (Remember my one signature mixed cocktail: Mt. Dew and 99 Blackberries = Dewberry Juice.)

I am posting early, before the party, just so everyone knows where we are.  We should be home around midnight.  This won’t be a late party.  We only have the lounge until midnight anyway.  And Oreo is staying home alone which he doesn’t like.

Dominica and I both have tomorrow off from work so we will be home relaxing all day.  We have no plans to go anywhere at all.  So if you need us you know where to find us.

It is funny that we are doing fondue twice in one week.  Normally we goes years between fondue events.

As we wrap up the year here on SGL we can look back at one of the busiest years ever on the site.  We might have made it the entire year without missing a single day of updates.  While many of the dailies this year were not record setting in length we managed to maintain consistent and regular postings and had almost no “sparse” postings just to fill in a day when nothing really happened.  2007 could easily be our busiest year ever even with hardly any podcast or video podcast postings.  And we have several new regular readers as well!

Happy New Year Everyone!

When I took Oreo out for his morning walk we got to see our building, Eleven80, with the scaffolding all taken away. Boy does that make a difference with the appearance of the building and the entire street. We have had all three exposed sides of Eleven80 covered in scaffolding along with our facing side of Catholic Health Services since we first moved in making Raymond, Commerce and the little side Commerce streets all very dark and gloomy. Now, suddenly, there is wide open space around our building and light and a view! It’s like Commerce street is all new again.

The side street, the “other” Commerce, on the east side of Eleven80 still has construction stuff filling the one lane and the big fencing all around it but they are cleaning today as if that is going to be removed in a day or two. It will be great to have the use of that street for the first time and it should, in theory, help to eliminate the traffic congestion on our street which is horrific. Standing on Commerce is a very different experience than it was just four months ago. It is becoming an attractive street. Once the other Commerce is open I will get some pictures of the “new” Eleven80.

Despite some missteps and some backtracking Newark does appear to be making progress. The new stadium really is bringing in the crowds and there are several downtown areas that are showing some serious improvements over the past year. Dominica and I will be in Newark for at least one more year. It will be interesting to see what happens as we move forward.

Still missing from downtown is any sort of good, mid-market eateries. We have fast food and we have deli type restaurants galore (on our block alone are two existing brick and mortar restaurants with identical deli menus and an existing “truck” restaurant with the same men and one more located in our building about to open with nothing on its menu to differentiate it from the restaurants that it faces on the same street!) as well as Subways, fried chicken and pizza. And we have some nice restaurants like the Theater Square Grill, Maize and 27Mix. But we lack normal, everyday type eateries that most people want to go to for dinner most days. We need normal places to eat in addition to what we have. The fringe is well taken care of. It is time to fill in the gaps so that people who actually live here have places to go.

Today involved a lot of cleaning and household chores for me. First and foremost was kitchen cleaning. This week has been busy and the dishes just scaled out of control before we knew what hit us. The kitchen was all but unusable for the last few days and so it is up to me to reclaim it from the clutches of dirty dishes.

Work was fairly busy today and I did not get a chance to run out to grab myself some lunch until well after two in the afternoon. I didn’t have much time so I just called over an order to Food for Life and walked over to pick it up so that I could eat at my desk.

Oreo was very playful today which is good because it means that he is healthy. We played and played in addition to taking a couple of walks. It was nice out today – perfect for walking with Oreo. It was very cold early this morning but as the day progressed the sun was out and warmed this up considerably. It was still a little chilly so Oreo had to wear his little sweater but he likes wearing it because he gets lots of people to stop on the street and tell him how adorable he is.

Dominica got home around six but I was still working.  Busy day.  We got ready as quickly as we could met Ramona around six thirty to go out for dinner.  Traffic was horrible – the curse of the new, thriving downtown Newark social scene – so it took her a while to make it the two miles from the Ironbound to downtown to meet us.  We went over to Halsey to 27Mix.  It was a happening place tonight.  Wall to wall people.  Dinner was very good but unfortunately the music was so loud that we really couldn’t talk at all. Not the best to go for socializing.  The place is mostly inhabited by the college students from Rutgers and NJIT which are very nearby.

Min and I got home at eight thirty and were tired.  Boy are we ever getting old.  But Oreo enjoys the extra snuggle time.  So it was time to pop in Buck Rogers in the Twenty Fifth Century and head off to dreamland.  I will be on Wall St. tomorrow.  Just the usual.  No big weekend plans other than last minute preparations for the trip to the UK.  My Java class is theoretically having its final on Saturday morning which would be awesome.  That would give me an entire week to relax before the trip.