Dominica decided that she was going to take the train up to Utica this weekend to visit her family before her sister, the girls and Garrett head back for Houston, but when she went to buy the tickets the train was sold out.

Today was my day at home with Oreo.  I just scrounged around the kitchen for food here today.  It’s cheaper and easier than going out I suppose.  Healthier, that’s for sure.

I was decently busy today.  Dominica’s day was actually a little slow it seems.  She needed that.  Her week has been pretty crazy.  Her job now is doing email / ticket support primarily rather than being tied to a phone.  This changed a few months ago.  She likes this as the work is a little less “real time” and there isn’t a phone ringing for her to “jump on” every few seconds.  But because she can work at her own pace and doesn’t have to wait for the work to trickle in she actually works much harder and, when the emails or tickets get caught up or the phone people call behind, she jumps back to the phones to help out.  So she can get exhausted easily.

Dominica brought home fish tacos from On the Border for dinner.  It is a common Thursday night treat for us since she works very near to an On the Border restaurant.  Her drive home was terrible, though, because of traffic from Bruce Springsteen whom I guess is playing at the Meadowlands tonight and American Idol is filming or something in Newark’s Prudential Center right next door.  So traffic is a mess everywhere and Newark is, of course, gridlock.

Once Dominica got home, we watched some of the second season of Frasier and relaxed for most of the evening.  I didn’t get to see much more than half of the first season, but I have just been far too busy to spend time watching that so Dominica has been watching it without me.

After Dominica went to bed around nine I stayed up working until almost midnight.  We are trying to get things moving at the school so that we have computers updated and ready for the kids when they return in late August.  More importantly, really, is getting computers ready for the teachers and staff.  Getting everyone else onto and using the computers regularly is actually more important because it forms a critical support structure for the kids to have computers at their disposal.

I played around with Twitter again tonight.  Haven’t tried it in over a year.  Microblogging is kind of interesting and I see it taking root within Facebook now as well.  I will see how Twitter works out.  Now there are badges so that I can add my Twitter feed to SGL.  Maybe I can do that this weekend.  That might make it more worthwhile for me to try.  I already blog so much I don’t want to be sending people elsewhere to see my microblog updates.

I can’t believe that July is already over.  This year is flying by.  The house move in October and the baby in November are going to be here before I know it.

I was not ready to get up when the alarm went off this morning. Oreo was very snuggly and I was still quite sleepy. Five thirty is too early for me this week.

I got up and started the shower – it can take up to thirty minutes for warm water to reach us when I get up this early in the morning. Then I hit the living room and uploaded the podcast and finished yesterday’s post. I didn’t want to leave them as it might be a whole day before they would get posted.

It was raining this morning which is a nice change from the haze.

I got to the office and discovered that IBM was giving a class on PowerHA (high availability clustering for IBM Power servers running AIX or Linux) which was not completely full so I was able to get in on it. It was a good session – lasting for four hours – and it covered a lot of AIX and IBM Power stuff that I was not very familiar with so it was worthwhile.

The weather was really crazy today. Tornado warning for much of Northern New Jersey – especially Middlesex County where Dominica and I used to live just two years ago. Very heavy rains hit the whole area on and off throughout the day. There was so much rain that it caused a low voltage issue to some of the New Jersey Transit lines making the commute rather rough for a lot of people.

I left the office in Warren at five in the afternoon to catch the shuttle to Summit in the hopes of meeting Dominica on her way home from picking up Oreo at daycare. I got to Summit just fine but the trains there were running very slowly and one was just sitting at the station. They announced that all New York bound trains were being rerouted to Hoboken because of the power issues. Luckily the Hoboken line is perfect for me so I was able to get to Newark Broad Street Station without any real problem. The train took quite a bit longer than usual but it wasn’t bad.

Dominica got to Newark a bit before I did but she parked by Washington Park for a few minutes to wait for me. It worked out pretty well. The rain stopped for the little bit that I had to walk over to the par, and then she was able to drive me back home to Eleven80.

Tonight was Dominica’s cooking for Oreo night. He has been on canned food since the weekend as she just hasn’t had the energy to cook for him.

We got dinner from the deli downstairs and watched a little of the first season of Frasier which I do not believe that I have ever seen. I have seen a lot of the show but the very early and late shows I am not familiar with very much.

By around nine o’clock this evening the storm really got heated up and it was just constant lightning all evening. Really heavy rain with just amazing levels of lightning. I spent a bit of time just watching out of the windows. The lighting, the heavy rain, the thunder. I love rain in the city. Watching the water pour down on the lighted streets. Cars plowing through the puddles. From our vantage in Eleven80 we are just close enough to the ground to be able to make out the fall of the rain but high enough to see the waves and changes from block to block.

We are really, really hoping that Oreo doesn’t decide that tonight is one of his late-night go for a walk nights. We will all be really sorry if he does.

I stumbled across an article about the Coco Bidet. I totally want one of these. Somehow the thought of how toilet paper works (or doesn’t work) is just kind of gross. Of course, if you want to be cheap you can always just get a water gun for your butt.

Katie was in Atlanta this week and shared her breakfast at Waffle House with us. Here is her chef.

I spent a bit of the evening working on getting my dual head monitor setup working on OpenSUSE Linux 11 on my HP dx5150 desktop.  I installed OpenSUSE 11 probably a month or more ago and never got the dual monitors working correctly so tonight I dedicated my time to fixing the issue once and for all.  It is working great now and I am very happy.  Having all of my monitors working makes getting work done so much easier.  It is amazing how quickly you become completely addicted to having all of that screen real estate at your disposal.

I also did some work on getting Red Hat Fedora 9 installed on to VirtualPC but I did not have nearly as much luck with that.

Tomorrow Oreo and I will be staying home as it is Thursday.  It is good that Dominica does not need to take Oreo to daycare as there is likely to be some serious flooding as northern New Jersey does not have good flood control and all of the streets are underwater whenever there is a good rain.  I am so thankful to not be commuting by car anymore.  Not having Oreo means that Dominica can leave earlier for work and only has to do about half as many total miles.