In 2001, archival footage of a school pageant that took place in Ashdown Forest in 1929 was discovered.  Footage from the area was very rare as most had been destroyed over the years.  This is the only known footage of the region from the era.  After close examination, it was discovered that Christopher Robin Milne was, in fact, one of the children in the school pageant!  This is now the only visual record of Christopher Robin actually in the Hundred Acre Wood.  Christopher Robin would have been eight or nine years old in the film.  He died five years before the films discovery.

While Christopher Robin spent his life in the UK, Winnie-the-Pooh, Eeyore, Kanga and Tigger were donated by A. A. Milne to the publisher E. F. Dutton (who published the hardcover editions that Dominica and I just bought yesterday) in the 1940s.  Dutton then, in 1988, donated the stuffed animals to the New York Public Library’s Donnell Library Center branch in midtown Manhattan where they remain today behind bullet-proof glass.

One of these days I want to make a trek to the Donnell Library Center to see Winnie and friends.  It is a pretty interesting piece of literary history and to have it so close at hand would make it a shame to not take advantage of the opportunity.

Oreo had to go to daycare today.  He has a vet appointment this afternoon to look at his grass allergy and skin condition.  He really has to go because he needs more medicine for his itchy belly before we take him camping this weekend in Watkins Glen.  Besides it is about time for a normal checkup anyway.

My morning was extremely slow.  I am on the early shift all week and typically the mornings are pretty slow but today was far slower than usual.  There was barely a single thing happening from six thirty until the “normal day” began at nine.

Later on in the day, though, things went from slow to really crazy.  It got so busy, in fact, that I was unable to even get any lunch.  I got stuck in the office until almost seven thirty!  It was nuts.

Dominica and I were both going to be getting home quite late today so we decided to just eat on our own.  She got Burger King on the way home and I just grabbed pizza at the plaza near the World Trade Center with the statue of the financier in on the marble bench.

Oreo’s vet appointment went well.  He is in good health and everyone at the vet’s office loves him.  He makes friends so easily.  He has a growth or something on his tail which is why he had this visit, in addition to needing more antihystamine medication.  They took a sample of the growth but the vet does not think that it is anything to worry about.  He had tail issue before he came to live with us which is why, according to some of his records, he has no tail of which to speak.  It was removed when he was young because of some growth.  So we want to make sure that everything is alright.

We watched about two episodes of Third Rock from the Sun but that was about all that we could get through.  I got called to do some additional work at the office around ten thirty which kept me busy long enough that Dominica was pretty much asleep when I was done.  This week is really wearing us out.

Oreo was still really tired today and very itchy still from his weekend in the grass.  We decided to have him stay home again today because he needs time to sleep and for his skin to hear.  Going to daycare would just take more energy out of him that he needs for his body to repair itself.  He was pretty excited when he figured out that he was spending the day with his daddy.

Dominica started the Hewlett-Packard Linux 101 class today.  The class doesn’t officially begun until next week but she is trying to get a jump start on it and had me download Red Hat’s Fedora 9 so that she could do an install with it as the HP Linux classes are based on Fedora.

Today we got our very first items for the forthcoming baby.  We got the Winnie-the-Pooh collection by A. A. Milne in hardcover.  All four books, When We Were Young, Winnie the Pooh, The House on Pooh Corner and Now We Are Six. Normally we would have waited to buy baby stuff but we are up to the stage where we are supposed to be reading to the baby so we wanted something to get started with that is nice stuff that will be long lasting and something that our child will always want to own.  So our child already owns four books!

Also arriving today is the first Business Analyst book on my reading list: Writing Effective Use Cases.  As I am suddenly very responsible for BA education I am taking it upon myself to read, and to some degree define, the ultimate Busness Analyst Reading List.  Everyone seems to agree that this and the BA’s UML book top the list so I am starting with those.  You can’t go wrong with Alistair Cockburn and I am looking forward to this book.

My day at the office ended up being so busy that I didn’t even manage to have lunch.  I started trying to get lunch around one thirty and it was five before I even knew what happened.  I was on a conference call solid from around one thirty until five which really ate away the day.

Dominica decided that tonight she would be cooking so it is vegetarian corn dogs, corn on the cob and macaroni salad for us.  I was really tired after my incredibly long afternoon of supporting a single issue for hours – hours past my “end of day” since I am on the early shift this week.  That will wear you out pretty quickly.

We watched some of the fifth season of Third Rock from the Sun and relaxed for the most part.  At one point, probably around ten in the evening, I took Oreo out for his usual walk around the block.  When we went outside we noticed that all of the streets were blocked off around our building and that the sidewalks were covered in electrical and lighting equipment.  A large tour bus sat on the street.  It was all very strange.

As Oreo and I walk across the street to Airlee we noticed that the half of the building not used by Airlee for their cafe had all of its signage replaced with “Mars Cometh – One Night Only”, a velvet rope was set up and a red carpet was down and a security guard was sitting on a stool in front of the building.  This caught me by surprise as this building has been empty for the entire time that we have lived in Newark and no work has been being done on it.

I asked around and learned that Commerce, behind our building, is being used for the filming of the upcoming movie The Perfect Age of Rock and Roll.  So Oreo and I got to walk through the set just as filming was about to begin.  Working on Wall Street means that I see television and film shoots all of the time but this was pretty neat as the filming is literally happening just a few feet outside of our living room windows and part of the movie is in a building that I eat in several times a week.

Long ago I walked through the filming of Blues Brothers 2000 while I was in Toronto with Kelley’s Heroes for the Santa Clause Parade.  That was either 1996 or 1997.