TODAY IS DOMINICA AND MY FIRST WEDDING ANNIVERSARY!!!
It is true, can you believe it? One whole year ago today Dominica and I tied the knot in Wyoming, New York at the Hillside Inn. It is hard to believe that an entire year has passed by already. Time goes by so quickly. It was nice to have Lori and Perry’s wedding on Saturday because they were at our wedding and we were able to get together with so many people from our own wedding so close to our anniversary and to get us into the anniversary mood. That is two weddings in the last few weeks and three since our own. The past 13 months have been the busiest wedding season ever, everyone we know has gotten married this year. And we have two more weddings on the schedule for the next 54 weeks! Every one of these weddings being for people that were at our own wedding and just about exactly half of the people were actually in the wedding party (coincidence, I think not.) I was really hoping that the Hillside Inn would be open for dinner this evening because that would be perfect to go back there on our anniversary but they are only open for dinner on Friday and Saturday nights these days so we have to do something else. Mondays are a rough day for going out for a nice dinner.
This is going to be a busy week so don’t be surprised if no one is able to find me all week. Today will be busy because it is my anniversary, obviously. Tomorrow morning I have to be up and moving extremely early to get down to Ithaca for the Microsoft event down there where Niagara has a table to promote our services to small businesses in the Ithaca area. Wednesday is a breather day. Then Thursday is the matching Microsoft event in Rochester which we will be at but sans table. Friday, I am sure, I will be going nuts trying to catch up on homework, as usual, and on Saturday morning we are expecting Joe to be coming out although he might come out on Friday evening. Somewhere, in all of that, we need to spend at least a little time painting in the garage to get the primer coat finished and I need to give a final coat to the theatre screen to make sure that everything is even. Still no work on working in Rochester or Albany, don’t hold your collective breath out there in SGLand, I am not holding it here.
Unfortunately there is no practical way for Min and I to really get to spend the day together. She is coming off of a sixteen hour shift with sixteen hours off before returning to do an eight hour shift. And I have to leave Geneseo no later that 6:00 tomorrow morning to make it out to the Microsoft show, so I have a different schedule as well. But, it is kind of good because that means that Min will be sleeping which will give me some time to get more homework done.
Today is Andy’s first day of work at Wegman’s. He has been out of work since leaving BOC Edwards early in the year, sometime around April, I think.
I got up very early this morning, well early for me at least, at 6:30 and ran out to Wegmans to do some last minute anniversary shopping. I got flowers and chocolates for Dominica. Then I ran over to Dunkin Donuts and got breakfast for us. I timed it perfectly to be home just five minutes before Min would get home from work so that breakfast would be hot. I had flowers and chocolate and a card waiting for Min when she got home. Then I put another card and the good flowers in our bedroom and I got into bed and hid the breakfast food and plates next to the dresser.
Well, it turned out that Min stayed late at work and I ended up calling there an hour later to see if she was okay. So she didn’t get home until almost 8:30 and breakfast was very cold. But she nuked it and we ate breakfast in bed anyway. She was very tired after working for seventeen hours so she went right to bed and I slept for a little longer too since I only got three hours of sleep last night.
I worked around the house this afternoon while Min slept. Then she got up and went down to check out the theatre now that it is somewhat operational. I did some more adjusting down there and managed to get the screen a little larger than it was yesterday. It looks like we are pretty much going to be able to operate with the project situated all the way at the back of the room. That will be a bit of a pain from a wiring standpoint but it sure makes for a huge image on the screen. Min was very impressed.
My aunt and uncle stopped by to drop off some new Niagara polo shirts and the table display for the Microsoft show that we are advertising at in Ithaca tomorrow. They worked on this stuff for us over the weekend. We will see how it goes over at the show tomorrow. While they were at the house they went down to check out the theatre too. Everyone is really excited to come over and check it out. They watched a chapter of The Bourne Identity and were pretty excited. We are all really looking forward to getting enough done to really get the sound into place along with the image. Right now we are really lacking in the audio department.
Andy got home from work and told us all about his new job. He is expected to be working for Wegman’s corporate offices up on Brooks Avenue in Rochester for the next six months. They actually got him a computer and a network login and a security badge and everything on his first day. That never seems to happen with contracts. They even got some preliminaries of his work started, that NEVER happens on contracts. They did do one thing that everyone does to Andy, though. They advertised his position as a Visual Basic .NET Application developer and switched it to ASP.NET when he showed up to work. Luckily he knows ASP.NET but it isn’t the job that he had wanted or had agreed to. They are really lucky that he is able to do the job because he could easily not. He has been struggling against this “bait and switch” mentality of contract hiring for years. They always promise him the work that he is looking for and then either switch at an interview or at a testing time or the first day of work. Sometimes it is the contracting companies trying to get him to get to an interview and figure that he will stay once he is that far and sometimes it is companies hoping that he will stay once he has started work. But mostly it is probably retarded HR workers who are completely unqualified to write job descriptions who do the hiring and just make whatever sounds good up. It is a real problem. Can you believe that he made it through all of the interviews and tests to start work and no one EVER mentioned the technology that he would be working on in the job? Imagine if you were hired to be a pilot and they expected you to be an air traffic controller when you showed up, ready to fly. It is a very similar situation. Imagine if it kept happening over and over again after every job. Eventually you forget how to fly and what an airplane looks like even though you have been hired as a jumbo jet pilot in every job that you have taken!
Min and I went out to the Valley Inn in Warsaw for our anniversary dinner. We were there once before some time ago, maybe almost a year ago. Well, tonight was just as good. The food was completely amazing and I hold to my story that the Valley Inn is the best food in Western NY west of Ithaca. And dare I say it, maybe even including Ithaca. No place in Ithaca dramatically tops the Valley Inn, that is for sure. I had spear fish and Min had pumpkin stuffed ravioli. Boy was dinner good. For anyone who is going to try the Valley Inn, be sure to get the “New York New York” salad, it is truly amazing, every bit as good as Banfi’s New York salad at the Statler Hotel in Ithaca. We both got their pumpkin creme brulee for dessert. They served it in little tiny pumpkins that they hollowed out. It was really cute. The Valley Inn really goes out of their way to make their presentation amazing. It is one of the only restaurants in all of western New York that really gets that fancy. It is funny, you would think that there would be more restaurants like that in a region with three million inhabitants but there really aren’t very many and what few there are are all located in Buffalo, Rochester and Ithaca. The Valley Inn in Warsaw really doesn’t advertise very much either but they seem to stay relatively busy. I think they rely on word of mouth to keep them going but it seems to be working for them. If you are going to be in the area, you really need to try them out. They are open Monday through Saturday for lunch and dinner but only until 8:00. You really should make reservations. They do have three guest rooms in case you want to crash in Warsaw (this is a really good time of year with the leaves changing!)
After dinner we went over to dad’s house to pick up some supplies that I needed for tomorrow for the Microsoft show. We didn’t hang around there for more than a few minutes. Then we headed home so that Min could get to work. We made a few phone calls once we got home and then Min headed off to work in Henrietta. I went and wrote up the day’s updates and am now heading off to bed. I have to be up by 5:00 am tomorrow so even though I am not ready for bed, I have to try to get some sleep.