December 7, 2006: A Day in Geneseo

I got to bed around four last night and had to be up at eight this morning so I was pretty tired. But I did managed to get roughly one sleep cycle in so I am not that bad but definitely tired. I checked this morning and the server is still running which is a major relief. Losing it at any moment is a real possibility at this point.

I checked in with the office and did some real quick tasks and called dad so that we could do breakfast. He came over about half an hour later and we headed over to the Omega. It is funny how much eating at the Omega is like being home. It is just a part of being in Geneseo.

I was not prepared for how cold it was going to be in Geneseo. I have gotten used to New Jersey all ready. It was bitter cold and it snowed almost the entire time that I was home. Dominica was taunting me with the knowledge that it was fifty degrees back in Newark and under twenty here!

It was more or less a normal “office day” for me working from home. Oreo just slept just about all day. Normal for him on Thursdays. I wasn’t too busy and got a little time to do a few tasks around the house but not too much. I did do some searching for some things that I really needed but did not succeed in finding much of anything. But I did get a tiny bit of cleaning done. The house in Geneseo is so weird. It is sterile much like a hotel. Very weird.

Dad came back over a little before five and we did a quick dinner at the Omega. We couldn’t linger long because I had to get back and wrap up my evening work so that I could get onto the road. It was eight or so by the time that I was able to leave Geneseo. That makes for a long night but not that bad. It took about five hours to get back to Newark so I arrived just after one in the morning. I felt pretty good. I wasn’t that tired even after a long drive in the terrible wind.

On the ride down I managed to finished listening to “Mayflower” which is a really long book. I found it very interesting though. There is so little that most people know about seventeenth century New England history. The famous dark century of America. Like it says at the end of the book, American school children are taught that the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock (no one actually knows for sure if they did – one old guy on his death bed claims that that is where they landed and hence the legend was born) and that they had Thanksgiving (which was made up by President Lincoln during the Civil War) and then that we fought for our freedom from the British (more than one hundred and fifty years later!) There is a lot of missing history between those two events. So much history, in fact, that the whole things makes little sense to children studying it. How does a small colony barely able to feed itself suddenly fend off the world’s biggest super-power? It was between the foundations of the Massachusetts, New Netherlands and Virginia colonies and 1770 that the building of our current country actually took place and there is a lot of important history in there including several wars such as King Philip’s War with the highest casualty rate of any war ever fought (that we know of) in America!

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