I poked my head out of the door around 7:30 this morning and let me tell you, it is looking like it is going to be a beautiful day. The Weather Channel says that it is only 36 degrees right now and that it is only supposed to hit 44 as a high today but I think that they must be mistaken. Tomorrow is due to be near 60, though. I am looking forward to that.
Min just got home, it is 8:00, and even though it is so gorgeous out here, she said that the thruway is closed to the west due to extreme blizzard conditions. There are people trapped in cars south of Buffalo that can only be reached by snowmobile at this point. And Rochester didn’t get touched. She had a ton of people cancel their reservations last night because they either got stuck in their cars or they decided not to leave Pennsylvania. It is weird to have such radically different weather so close in proximity to us. I guess New York is really like that.
Dad picked us up for breakfast at 8:15 and we headed over to the Omega Grill. We hung out there until about 9:30 then Min and I headed home to get some sleep. We were both totally exhausted.
I was up and moving by 2:30 this afternoon. I can’t believe that I managed to just wake up after that little sleep and being awake for so long before hand. But my stomach was bothering me a little and sleep wasn’t helping it so that was a contributing factor.
I managed to get a hold of Craig today, he is actually still alive but had a really busy weekend. We are doing coffee tomorrow morning. We say tomorrow morning, but it will probably go into the afternoon significantly.
Today was tax day for me. I got all of the paperwork together for my taxes last night and Min got them together this morning. This afternoon I had to go through all of my electric bills and figure out what my power consumption was this year. Power is really expensive. I know that everyone things that I spend a fortune on my utilities but I want to know how people are getting away much more cheaply than I am. We average $205 per month, that is electric and gas together. The gas is between 25% and 30% of the total utility bill, on average. The house is totally lighted by florescent lights except for a few stray lights here and there that are still incadescent – but I am still working on getting rid of those too. The bedrooms each have one incadescent bulb and the basement has one in my office – but not my main light. Speaking of which, we have at least one spare halogen lamp and maybe two, if anyone would like one. We aren’t using them and they are just in the way here. Plus I use a low power Mac and a laptop for all of my computing which are both like a quarter of the power consumption of regular computers and we have all LCD monitors in the house which are just a fraction compared to CRTs as well. Plus my computers and Min’s are off at night. Min’s is off almost all of the time. She only has it on maybe three or four times in a week.
I had one last test to take this afternoon to qualify for the big Brainbench Certified .NET Programmer, the Web Services Application Engineering exam. So I took that while Min was cooking dinner. I thought that I was going to do really poorly (okay, I know that everyone is getting sick of hearing that one) but I pulled off a really half decent score. Enough that I am quite happy with it.
As soon as Min went to leave for work, I can down to the basement and discovered the mouse that had been lured into the mouse cube. With any luck, that will be the only one that is in the house. I am sure that that is not the case, but at least we caught the one. So, of course, that meant that I had to take a walk to take our little friend far, far away from the house. Mice seem to be really good and finding their way back to the house so we can’t let that happen. He was very cute and looked very sad to have been caught and yet quite thrilled with all of the peanut butter that he got to eat.
Well, I went walking for about half an hour. It was good that I caught the mouse so that I had to get out and get a little exercise. I got back and updated What Scott Ate Today and SGL2 but, of course, Blogger lost my post to SGL2. They lose about 50% of what I upload to them. They are really having serious issues there and they are going to be losing customers quickly if they don’t do something about it. I did end up getting the info posted. So you can go read my short tidbit over there. I have noticed that almost none of you out there in the blogosphere have been writing anything for me to read. Tony is about the only person who has been writing anything at all. Min and Jeremy have been silent for a week and Danielle for two or more. C’mon people, I need stuff to read too, you know!
After I got back from my walk I took one last test. I took the C++ Programming test. I skimmed by. Just barely passing but hey, good enough for us non-programmers. That got me not just my BCP in C++ but also my Job Role Cert as a C++ Programmer. I am now heavily certified on every major programming language group (C++, Java and .NET) so I could compete for jobs just about anywhere. Not that I am looking to do that. But it is nice to have options these days.
I am not really tired and would really like to stay up late tonight but I am meeting Craig for coffee tomorrow morning downtown so I have to get some sleep tonight. Hopefully by tomorrow I will have something to talk about other than my test taking. Sorry to be doing that so much but I can hardly change my lifestyle just to make my blog more interesting to read.