It is my birthday. I am thirty. Thirty years old. Old old old.
I got up at 8:00 this morning because it is Saturday and old people don’t sleep in on Saturdays like they do when they were young, say, in their twenties. I got up and I read Baseline Magazine. I read an article on Bearing Point the financial consulting group and their failure to comply with Sarbanes-Oxley which is a cruel twist of fate for them since they are a SarbOx consultancy. Sounds like light reading for someone so OLD… doesn’t it?
Dominica left for work at 9:00. It is just Oreo and I for my birthday. Dad and I are going to do lunch later on. Min’s parents are coming down tomorrow and we are going to have cheesecake then. So I have house cleaning to do today. The house isn’t bad now but there is always more work to be done.
Dad and I did lunch over at the Omega at 11:30. For my birthday he got me a remote controlled lighting “system” for the basement theatre. Strangely enough he happened to pick out the exact same unit that I had looked at just a few weeks ago at an electrical supply store in Buffalo so I knew the unit instantly. Not the kind of technology that I am usually associated with. Hopefully we will be doing some work in the theatre in the near future. It would be really nice to get that moving forward.
Oreo is feeling sick again today. He is not has bad as he was a week ago but he is not nearly as good as he has been for the last several days. Maybe the change in the weather today is affecting him. He seems to be in some pain. He is restless and walking around the house. He doesn’t want to play. Hopefully this is just a bad day and not a relapse.
One of my larger current projects is an updated email system. I have completely built, from “scratch” if you will (from a system engineering standpoint not from a developer’s standpoint) the last two email systems that we have used and I have become a little bit of an expert when it comes to flexible email. It is unbelievable how much work goes into having a stable email environment with all of the necessary features. The time has come to begin looking into options for a new system. So I am in the process of building a demo server to test out some options. It is a tremendously daunting task but email is such a critical piece of our operations and really of any company’s operations that it really is worth all of the work that it entails. So today saw me putting many hours of work into getting the demo up and running.
I put in a bit of time working on getting updates into the movie database system. Eventually I couldn’t handle starring at the monitor anymore so I decided to switch monitors and watch a movie in the living room with Oreo. So I popped in Foul Play with Goldie Hawn and Chevy Chase from 1978. I was expecting this to be a really bad movie but it wasn’t bad at all. It was actually quite enjoyable. It was cute with a tiny bit of action. Maybe a little too drawn out but it was an early film for both actors and they both did a good job. In fact I think that it might be one of my all time favourite roles for Chevy Chase.
Dominica was going to bring home dinner tonight but the weather has gotten really bad so she is going to come straight home instead. I ordered pizza from Mama Mia’s which we haven’t had in a while. She let me have my favourite pizza because it is my birthday. Normally we have to get Walmart or Pizza Pauls because she doesn’t like Mia’s style.
Oreo finally killed his green moon binky tonight. He has had that binky since the summer. It has far outlasted any of his other toys. It just kept going and going. It was really expensive compared to his regular binkies but it proved to be well worth the investment. Normally they only last him a month or so. Once he manages to tear into one he decides that the stuffing must come out so he proceeded to rip the moon apart and make a mess in the dining room.
We ate pizza while watching Growing Pains upstairs. After eating we moved down to the theatre and watched the final episodes of Firefly. It is very sad that we don’t have any more Firefly to watch. That really was a great show. Thanks to Wil Wheaton for recommending it and John Stephens, the Surfing IT Wizard, for bringing up his copy and getting us hooked on it. While we watched the show Dominica made me cookies for my birthday as well.
Oreo ended the day feeling pretty well. I think we managed to get by with him only have the one brief bad spell in the middle of the day. It is bound to happen from time to time. Hopefully not very often. He appeared to recover pretty quickly today.
Overall it was a rather uneventful birthday. I didn’t even leave the house to go any farther than the diner around the corner. I guess this is what happens when you get older. Home seems more and more appealing. I wonder if fifteen year olds would feel the same way about staying home if they owned their own homes? It is overwhelmingly the case that I like just being home far more now that I own a house than ever before. Having an apartment had the same effect but not to the same level. I guess when you own the home there is a sense of permanense and anything that you do that improves the house whether it is adding on, changing, improving, cleaning or decorating takes on a different meaning than that same activity did when it was a place that wasn’t your own. A house seems like something that you will always have even if it is pretty unlikely to be the case.
It is weird, in some ways, to think of this house as anything more than just an apartment. Having never lived in anything but apartments before the idea of owning a place where you can live is a little foreign to me. But in other ways the idea of ever leaving this house seems even more strange. It kind of seems as if buying a house is a commitment not easily walked away from. Unlike an apartment with rent the house doesn’t have an annual renewal or a landlord or anything. Any of the objects or events that create constant reminders of the temporal nature of apartments are lacking when you live in a house that you own. It really is quite different.
Well, I can’t stay up late tonight. It is two o’clock in the morning as I write this and everyone knows that once you are in your thirties you can’t be staying up past midnight anymore. We have to be to Sunday School in the morning and I will be needing a full night’s sleep so that my body can repair itself from a full day of being awake. Church is at 10:00. We should be home just after 11:00. Then it is a little panic cleaning and then Dominica’s parents are due to arrive a little after noon. Dominica said something about having cake in the middle of the afternoon but I don’t know if she has talked to anyone about that or not. With the snow coming down the way it is right now, though, we aren’t totally sure whether or not anyone is going to be travelling tomorrow. It has been windy and snowy here pretty much all day.