March 19, 2006

Oreo and I got out of bed before nine this morning. A bit of snow fell overnight and Upstate New York is white once again. We managed to go all winter without hardly having any snow at all and half of the time not even needing to wear coats and now that we are just a week away from spring we are bitter cold and covered in snow! What a place this is.

Dominica slept in and I put in some serious work on the email server that was having problems the other night and got caught up on the SGL dailies. I know that while I am in New Jersey the dailies are going to be just about everyone’s sole means of communicating with me so I have been trying to be really diligent about keeping them up to date and full of actual information.

I got Andy and my reservations all set for our trip to South Carolina this week. We are flying out of Rochester on Wednesday afternoon at 5:00 and arriving in Atlanta, Georgia just after 7:00. We will rent a car and drive east out to Anderson, South Carolina and be checked in to the Comfort Suites out on US85 by 10:00 at the latest. That will give us plenty of time to get some rest in before spending all of Thursday at the hospitals. Then we are returning to Atlanta on Friday at 9:00 and flying back to Rochester and should arrive just after 11:00. I should be able to get home just an hour or an hour and a half after Dominica.

Dominica’s Saturday schedule has changed and she is now working an hour earlier than she used to. That is going to make her Saturdays that much more exhausting. She barely has enough time to get home, sleep and get back to work. In theory her weekend will start an hour earlier but she will be even more tired going into it. I am not sure that it is worth it.

Dominica got out of bed just in time to shower and be ready when dad came over after church so that we could go get some lunch at the Omega. I am all ready starting to miss the Omega Grill and I have not even moved away yet. How sad is that?

After lunch we spent the afternoon studying, me for the Security+ exam and Dominica for the A+. I think that I am ready to take the Security+ after all of this time. I can’t believe how long I have put this test off. I will be very happy to have this out of the way. While I am working in New Jersey my plan is to focus on the Red Hat certifications since they will directly apply to exactly what I am doing down there. I shouldn’t waste the opportunity. And I am certain that my manager will be happy to let me flex my hours in order to take tests directly related to my work. They will probably let me take any tests I want regardless of its relevance but I am not so sure about that. We will have to see. It would be really nice if I was able to test all of the time down there because I could get a lot of stuff out of the way while I am stuck down there all by myself. Studying at night is a good way to pass the time. That is how I did most of my early certifications – I would study in a hotel room by myself when there was nothing else to do. It made me be really productive.

Dominica went to Walmart and did some shopping. She found some new clothes for me. I need new clothes since I am starting the new job in New Jersey and don’t have enough “office” clothes to be anyplace full time unless they want me in jeans and polos all of the time. On her way home she went to Pizza Paul’s and got us some dinner. A cheese pizza and one of their giant brownies. Min really likes their pizza and I really like their brownies. I still prefer my pizza from Mia’s but these are the sacrifices that one must make for one’s marriage. 🙂

On her way back to the house Dominica got pulled over by a village cop in training because her headlight was out. We are planning on taking the car in tomorrow to deal with that. Dominica only discovered that the light was out yesterday and told me while she was at work. I called but the shop was closed for the weekend so tomorrow is the first chance that we will have to get it fixed. She didn’t get a ticket but she was pretty annoyed.

We spent the evening watching a few episodes of Remington Steele Season One. Only one episode left to go after tonight. Min picked up Season Two while she was at Walmart and Season Three is due out in just a few weeks. We did some additional studying and then it was time for bed.

Leave a comment