We dropped off the car and then went over to the Omega Grill for a long breakfast.  I was on the BlackBerry all morning working from that.  I was able to do almost all of my work through email so it worked out really well.

As we were leaving breakfast we ran into Karin

After breakfast we went across the street to Tim Horton’s where we bought $40 of coffee beans to take back to Peekskill with us.  We do not have any convenient access to Tim Horton’s at all so this is our only way to really get the coffee.  The nearest Tim Horton’s to us is in Elmira, New York which is just over four hours away.

Then it was over to Walmart for some quick shopping for baby supplies.  Were only there for fifteen minutes at most.  I made a quick pass through the store to see if Mary was working but she was nowhere to be found.  As always seems to happen whenever we are in Walmart in Geneseo, we ran into the Ralstons on the way through the checkout.  They are planning on coming over to visit this evening.

We swung through the auto shop to see if the car was done having its tires changed yet but it had not.  By this time, between eating a light breakfast, staying way too long drinking coffee, running errands and needing to wait for the car we decided to just swing back into the Omega and get lunch there as well.

After lunch the car was still not ready so we went back to dad’s house and I worked for the afternoon from there.  They called about the car.  It turns out that we had let our NYS inspection expire on the car without realizing it.  So they were going to take care of that when the found that the real brakes were in bad shape.

So the car has to stay in the shop until tomorrow morning and we have to have $800 of work done on it rather than just getting the tires changed.  Older cars are never cheap.  We only have about 115K miles on the PR5 at this point.  It is a 2002 so it is getting old but isn’t that old.  It still drives quite well.

After work was over, more or less, we ordered pizza from Davis Farm Market in Pavilion.  It just wouldn’t be a trip home without pizza from there.  I took the convertible down to pick up the pizza.  This is the first trip in it this season.

As I was pulling out of Davis’, the Ralsons pulled up behind me at the light on Route 63.  What timing.  I run into them more than anyone else that I know.

The Ralstons hung out until almost eleven.  They are getting ready to move to the Republic of the Congo in the very near future.  Maybe in as little as six weeks!

After the Ralsonts headed back home Dad, Dominica and Liesl all went to bed.  I hit the road to drive over to Geneseo to meet Tony at Tim Horton’s for coffee at eleven.

Tony and I ended up talking about software development until three thirty in the morning when he headed for home to do his homework and I went back to dad’s house.  Once I got back I worked online for almost another hour before turning in for the night.

Dominica, Oreo and I slept in a bit this morning.  Driving all day really wears you out.

We headed up to the Omega Grill for a late breakfast.  Having breakfast at the Omega is like the official declaration of being “home” for the weekend.

We talked to dad about the idea of him coming down to stay in Peekskill for a little while to help with the move and preparations for the baby.  The plan is that he will come down shortly after the closing on the house and have the place, more or less, to himself for the first two weeks while we are still living out of Newark so that Dominica can go to work.  During that time he will oversee the installation of our Internet access, some minor house repairs including having a plumber come in, some painting, etc.

Then, once October 31st comes and we are no longer able to stay in Newark, Dominica and I will move up to Peekskill and dad will “hang out” so that we have someone around to help with the baby logistics.  With me working in Manhattan it will take almost two hours for me to get home once Dominica realizes that she is going into labor.  That is a long time with no one that we know in the entire county.  So dad will be there to help get her to the hospital if it happens while I am at work and then to deal with Oreo while I am at the hospital with Dominica.

After breakfast we returned to dad’s house.  I did some computer work and dad set up for the afternoon’s picnic.  Dominica took a nap for a few hours with Oreo.

The family arrived around two thirty and we hung out in the side yard for a while until around four.  Then we started our labor day weekend picnic.  Dad grilled cedar plank salmon and we had amazing corn on the cob (boy have I missed good New York produce), potatoes, fruit and dip, etc.

After the party wound down, dad and Dominica hung out in the basement as she went through some of the stuff that we have packed at dad’s house.  She managed to eliminate more than a bin of stuff that will now go to the church rummage sale.  That was a pretty good reduction of the “bin stuff” that we had.  My cousin Sara is taking the plastic ficas trees that I used to have in my basement office in Geneseo.  We are also giving away the four “moon chairs” that we bought from Walmart while we were living in Geneseo.  We have no space for them at the Peekskill house.  It is a good size load from the garage that we managed to designate as “going away” rather than moving to Westchester with us.

I spent the evening working on getting Xen really working on the HP DL145 G3 that I bought just for that.  I spent the entire afternoon and evening working on it not finding out that HP did not document that they had crippled the processors to block this very thing until around two in the morning!  I can’t believe that they published a roadmap touting these features even after they had shipped this machine without mentioning that they had stripped those features out!  The capability is right there in the box but they are blocking its use!    I am extremely unhappy.

Oreo went to daycare today.  It is a good thing.  Who knows how crazy he would be if he didn’t get to go in and burn off some of his extra energy.  He has been couped up far too much this week.  He needs some time playing with his doggy friends.

My walk into the Wall Street office today was really awful.  Walking through Newark wasn’t bad at all.  Hot, but it was fine.  I did decide to play it safe and to walk through the Gateway Center, though, which is air conditioned so most of my walk was “inside”.  Normally I just walk outside along Raymond Boulevard.

Once I was into Manhattan the real heat hit.  In Manhattan everything is warmer because of all the people, buildings, vehicles, etc. plus there is seldom any air flow.  The difference in effective temperatures from Newark to Manhattan is staggering.  I was quite uncomfortable by the time I got down to the end of Wall Street.  I did grab an ice cream cone from Mr. Softee to cool me off a little.

If you are a Starbucks Coffee Fanatic (for the record, I am definitely not) then you have probably been waiting on pins and needles to know if your Starbucks is one of the six hundred that are being closed this summer as Starbucks shuts down five percent of its operations.  Well, I found the list and now you know: The Starbucks Doomed 600.  If you are from my hometown, and too lazy to look through the list yourself, Geneseo Starbucks is on the doomed list as are many in Upstate New York – where people have never even begun associated good coffee with the Starbucks brand like they do downstate.  The Starbucks in Geneseo opened right as Dominica and I moved there in 2003 and we said to ourselves that that was a crazy location that couldn’t possibly make money.  I went in there once and there was no one there.  Just a few weeks ago we said “It can’t possibly still be open, can it?  The place is always empty.”  We were right.  Now it is closing.  So now Geneseo will have yet another vacant building.  Although the old “Del Taco” building, now Starbucks, has been an empty building for such a large percentage of its life span that it just seems natural to have that spot be an empty – strangely architected building.

Starbucks in Geneseo was really hurt by the fact that it is on the “wrong” side of the road.  It is in a spot that has so long been ignored that you don’t even realize that there is a business there now that there is one.  Then, just after they went in, Tim Horton’s (with better coffee and more food options) came in in a far more visible location, had a brand new building and was open twenty-four by seven.  So Starbucks just completely lost any mindshare that it might have had.  In Upstate NY, people just don’t “think” about Starbucks.  It doesn’t occur to most people that it is even a coffee option.  Heck, I lived within an easy walk of it for several years and I bet I never went there even once.  Now that I live in Newark I am literally next door to a Starbucks and have only been there two or three times at most.  Being an upstater, it just isn’t something that you do.  Back in Rochester, Eric and I used to make coffee runs to Bruegers, right next door to the Starbucks, and never once even though about going to Starbucks instead.

Now that I have mentioned it… I am seriously missing living right next to the all night Tim Hortons.  Argh.

For those who don’t speak fluent Spanish, “Del Taco” is Spanish for “of the taco”.  Clearly it was intended to be “Mexican food for middle-America where multiculturalism is a foreign concept.”  Ha ha.

While doing a search for something unrelated, I came across a great image of Fall Brook Waterfall in Geneseo on Flickr.  I’ve been to the waterfall a time or two but it has been a really long time.  Never saw it when the foliage was so lush.

By four thirty the humidity had dropped enough that even though it was even warmer than this morning it was actually quite nice outside.  At least it was pretty nice just sitting outside.  Hard walking, like I have to do to get to the World Trade Center to catch the train, is still way too hot.

My day was not overly busy but this lulled me into a false sense of “going home security.”  I thought that I was going to be done really close to five.  All of my work was scheduled to complete right at five.  I was fooled.  The call for the release at four forty-five ended up lasting until almost six thirty!  Argh.

Dominica is feeling very under the weather.  She has a headcold or something similar that is affecting her sinuses.  It might just be allergies.  So her plan is to get home and to get to bed right away in the hopes of getting enough sleep to start getting better.  So I am tasked with getting dinner on my way home which will be from Metro Cafe if I make it in time and from McDonalds if I don’t.

I am exhausted and don’t have the energy to write more tonight and don’t want to leave y’all (to practice my Texan) without an update so I am posting before leaving the office.  I will probably just watch some Third Rock from the Sun with Dominica and Oreo and get to bed early.  I have some unscheduled work to do tomorrow morning whenever I wake up and then, in the early afternoon, we are driving to Frankfort for Garrett’s batism on Sunday.

So, Josh had worked at Pizza Hut in Geneseo for a while and had recently moved on to a store up in Rochester and he put in a good word for me – hopefully that isn’t why I got the job. So I took a job at Pizza Hut in Geneseo as a pizza maker. Not very exciting nor did it pay very well but it fit my schedule and allowed me to go to college while I worked.

Over time I would become the team lead, one of only three dough masters, one of the top two pizza makers and even try my hand at waiting tables while at Pizza Hut which I left for a while, came back to for a short time and then finally left completely in 1997.

The last job that I would do there before leaving was to play classical guitar in the restaurant for tips but the waitresses complained to the manager that I was making far more money than them and I was told that making the customers happy just wasn’t appreciated. It was neat while it lasted and I was making over $20 an hour in tips which was great compared to normal Pizza Hut pay.

Overall the PH experience was valuable only in learning how awful jobs can be. Most jobs at this level are. I had my first real experience with a sexist boss and experienced the glass ceiling first hand. Sexual discrimination against the male staff was so drastic that they didn’t even attempt to hide it. We were told by Wendy, the store manager, that only women could be waitresses and only waitresses could become managers since no one could be a manager without having done all the different jobs. So barred men from waiting tables as a means to barring them from any and all promotions. I only made team lead because the area manager over Wendy promoted me when Wendy wasn’t around.

It was neat working in the busiest Pizza Hut in upstate New York for a while. It was a good experience, but the best part was getting to leave when I finally did.