June 23, 2006: Last Day at Home Alone

Fortunately Friday nights are very slow. After a long week of work it is very nice to know that Friday nights have almost nothing going on. It was extra slow tonight and I got to spend almost the entire night relaxing. I needed that. I was really tired, mentally not physically, after a long week. Everyone who does the night shift says that by the fifth night you start to lose the ability to do to much.

I found a centipede in the “dining room” area. Will they never end? I managed to kill it pretty quickly. I am getting better at this. I have to do it so often.

I also got a ton more done on the web site. All of 2002 and a lot of 2003 have been moved over as well as some of the podcasts although that will take a bit longer to get them all moved. That requires coordination with OurMedia. I did managed to record the first SGL Podcast in quite some time. That felt good to finally get moving again. It has been over two months since the last episode! It was tough to record because of the incredibly loud air conditioning. Boy am I getting tired of that. I can’t wait to move to a nicer place where the air conditioning actually keeps the place cold, there aren’t centipedes crawling everywhere and there is nice stuff that I can walk to.

Around three in the morning I discovered yet another centipede. This is really awful. This one I didn’t manage to kill. It made a run for it in the dark and made it into the furnace “room”. I hate that that small “room” or “hallway thing” has no light or its own nor does it have a power plug to allow me to add one. So there was nothing that I could do and I just had to wait him out.

Throughout the night I kept coming back and looking for the centipede but had no luck. I doubted that he would go to far but you can never tell with these things. They are big creatures and really travel. I kept watching the area for hours in the hopes of seeing it again. At seven or so I went to use the bathroom which is right next to that area and, as luck would have it, the centipede decided to take the opportunity to make its appearance. What a pain. He started by running out of the linen closet, the farthest point in the room from me, and making a dart to go under the sink, the nearest point of the room. The sink wasn’t installed very well and there was a good 1/8″ to 1/4″ space under the cabinet for him to be able to roam around in. Just great. I thought that the old adage “he is as scared of me as I am of him” must be true and trusted that he would stay under there. Nope. He decided to make a run at me! This thing is aggressive. He knows that I am after him. I managed to get him with a magazine but before I could step on it he was gone around running around the back of the toilet and making a loop back for the sink. Argh. He went back under and hid this time. I got a glass of water and tried to “swoosh” him out. That didn’t work but he did poke his head out to look at me! I think that I might have seen him give me the finger. But I can’t be sure. It took another couple of hours before he showed himself again. I caught him in the “hallway” making a run for his furnace room hiding place. This time I was ready with the mop and managed to get him – sort of. He started climbing up the mop! But he did make the mistake of getting caught between the top of the sponge and the pressing plate and I managed to get him in there. I doubt that any amount of pressure in that manny would actually kill him so I took the mop into the bathrub and drowned him. Finally. The good news is that even with all of these centipedes – we have yet to have found a single one that we didn’t manage to kill eventually. It is also encouraging that we have not had any that once we have found them have not remained very obvious so we are pretty certain that we are currently aware of any current guests and that we find them shortly after they decide to move in.

I watched a couple of movies this morning like Not Another Teen Movie and Road Trip. Stuff that I have seen before but haven’t seen in a while.

For some reason I wasn’t all that tired when the end of my shift came so I decided to stay up for a while. I got an email from dad early this morning saying that his Buick’s engine had seized up on him and the car was dead. Totalled, in fact. So he is quickly shopping for a new car. My aunt is helping him to get a rental today to hold him over until he finds something. He has been looking at the Saturn Sky but didn’t think that there would be any way to get one. So this morning I walked over to the Saturn dealer that is right next to where I live and sat in one to see how it was. They have two on the lot there and one of them would work for dad. I called him but he doesn’t want a black one. So I called all over New Jersey and found a dealer with a perfect silver one that could be traded to the local dealer. So dad had to run up to Rochester to find a Sky to test drive so that he can decide whether or not he wants one.

Dad got a Nissan Altima for a rental. That is a pretty nice rental. He is really liking it. He would never have looked twice at a Nissan before but now he is driving one we will see how this affects him.

I went over to the Omega Diner at 3:00 to get some dinner. It is Friday and they have their crab cakes with mac and cheese on Fridays and it is really awesome. I didn’t want to miss that like I did last week. So I ate alone and then came right back to the apartment. It is very sad. The upside to the crab cake/mac and cheese meal is that it is huge and I have plenty of left overs from it. So that should make for another meal for me later. Hopefully I will get a chance to eat it before I leave.

Once I got home and had some food on my stomach I decided that it was time to actually go to bed. I suppose that I should get some sleep before I have to go to Frankfort for the weekend. I basically have ended up skipping an entire night’s sleep at somepoint. Weird how that happens. I am starting to miss my bed. It feels kind of weird going to bed now.

Dad called at 4:30 to let me know that he had looked at the car and that it was too small and low for him to be able to use all of the time so he is going to pass up his dream of owning a Saturn Sky. He also looked at the Ford Mustang convertible but decided that it, too, was too low for him to use. So he was going to look at cars at a dealer in Batavia that he likes. He is looking at a Mazda 6 that they have there.

I slept until about ten o’clock this evening. I was very well rested and decided that it was time to get up. It is a bit earlier than I had hoped for since I am going to have to be awake until I arrive in Utica at two tomorrow afternoon and then I have lots to do all day. So I am going to be up for quite a while at this point. Ugh. But I feel good so we will see.

I watched some more Magnum P.I. Season Two and continued working on the SGL Dailies from 2003. I am about halfway through the year now.

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