June 30, 2006: Halfway Through the Year

Today marks the halway point of 2006.

Having been an avid cyclist in my youth I always take an interest when governments attempt to cripple the hobby/health and environmentally conscious form of transportation/means for the poor to still get to work in a world without good public transportation and you can check out this awesome website showing the UK Government mocking and attempting to hinder safe bycycling. There is some seriously funny stuff on there but be sure to remember that for cyclists this is a very serious matter. I am very glad that in the US cyclists are legal vehicles and have all the right of way of motorized vehicles. And for those of you who are unsure – it is illegal and a ticketable offense to ride a bicycle on the left side of the road and in most villages the sidewalks are off limits to bicycles. Bicycles are governed by regular DOT vehicle code and ride in the traffic lane just like a motorcycle does. If you have kids never, ever let them ride on the wrong side. It just causes a really high speed, head on collision. Oh and yes, you can get a speeding ticket on a bicycle. I tried once but the cop wasn’t paying enough attention – he was speeding so fast that he pulled away from me.

I got the call this morning that the BMW 330 that we had been interested in had arrived at the lot. We are not able to go look at it today so we are scheduled to go in and look at it on Monday afternoon. Our salesman said that there is also a second 2004 330 that came in in a different colour with just five thousand additional miles that is also available. So we will have two to look at on Monday. Very exciting.

Today is a big day for the city of Montreal. Yes, Wil Wheaton was just there but that is not what I mean. The Montreal Olympic Stadium that they built in 1976 (yes, the year that I was born a full thirty years ago) was paid off today and the city now owns the stadium.

Today is definitely a Friday before a long holiday weekend. I expect that just about everyone is taking Monday off because Tuesday is Independance Day so with one vacation day people get a four day weekend. So this place is super slow today as nothing is going on going into the weekend and lots of people are all ready out for the weekend. I am sure that everyone is going to be attempting to escape as quickly as possible this afternoon.

Our plan this afternoon is to have Dominica drive up to Crystal Mazda on route 22 and drop off her PR5 around 5:30 and I will pick her up there. She is having a minor brake issue that needs to be addressed. Then from there we will head for Geneseo. We expect, if traffic is okay, to get to Geneseo between eleven and midnight.

With everything being so slow today I got a chance to catch up on the news, catch up on Bob Crissman’s Jedi Council blog and to catch up on all of my HP classes. I also signed up for two new classes starting in late July: Making Business Documents and Designing a Tape Backup Strategy. Neither are very tough topics but they both sounded valuable and were the best options for the month. HP seems to run their classes on a four to six week schedule or something like that. I decided to add the Introduction to Access 2003 class too since Dominica has been doing a lot of work with Access 2003 recently. I figured that it was a good time to get familiar with it. While I was loading my plate I decided to throw on Windows 2003 Administration just for fun.

It was such a slow day that I decided to additionally pick up a class from HP on Firewall Basics that was all ready underway. It was one of the longer classes but I have a really good background in the technologies involved so it was really just to see if there was anything additional to learn from the class and to get credit for having taken it. I learned long ago that by covering similar material over and over again in different ways you can learn a lot whether it is from getting material that no one else covered or by having the same material presented in a different way or by seeing things in the light of additional knowledge and experience.

I wanted to leave work before five but there was some “after hours” work that had to be done so I was stuck there until about a quarter after. Not bad by any stretch but still later than I had been hoping for. The traffic going down to Green Brook where Min was dropping off her car wasn’t bad and I made good time getting down to pick up her and Oreo. From there we hit the road as quickly as possibly heading for home.

Traffic was pretty awful. They were anticipating the holiday traffic and the New Jersey / Pennsylvania Bridge Authority or whoever administers the tolls on the Delaware Water Gap bridges had closed the tolls and had all of the toll operators standing out there waving people through as quickly as possible to prevent backups in New Jersey. It worked pretty well for the most part but the backups came pretty quickly once we were into Pennsylvania. We ended up losing an hour or more just in the 33 to 80 are which is pretty short the way we go. We just sat there never topping five miles per hour for about an hour or so. That was awful. All in all it took us more than seven hours to get back to Geneseo, although we did stop for some Waffle House as we went through Clarke Summit like we always do. There was a really bad accident on 390 between Cohocton and Wayland and we had to be rerouted onto the side roads between those exits.

It was after midnight when we finally arrived in Geneseo. It was nice to be back to our house even if it isn’t going to be our house for very much longer. We are both really torn with the idea of selling it. We love that house so much and we like the location and we have some really important memories there. It was really the perfect physical house for us. Just the right amount of space both in living space and in basement space. It was easy to take care of, the dog loves it, the deck is the perfect size, etc. We are really sad to have to get rid of it. But we spent a lot of the drive up reminding each other of all of the reasons why we don’t want to keep it no matter how much we like the house itself.

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