It is Sunday. We slept in until what seemed late this morning but I was up before eight and Dominica was up not that long after me. Oreo wanted to sleep longer but he needed to be taken for a walk in the park first thing this morning so we were up and moving pretty quickly. Dominica took Oreo to the park while I ran down to the McDonald’s on Broad Street to pick up some breakfast. We had been hoping to have gotten breakfast from the breakfast truck that parks at the park but he was not there this morning and Subway is closed on Sunday mornings.
Shortly after breakfast one of the guys that works in our building stopped by with his two kids and their computer so that we could take a look at it and see if we could get the sound card working. As always, the drivers for the sound card were not installed at all so the system didn’t even know that there was a sound card. It is amazing how often this happens to people. No one thinks of their sound card as being a “cool” part of their computer system so they just ignore it and then it doesn’t function and they don’t know why. They were also missing video drivers so the hardware acceleration was completely disabled. Apparently the shop that built this computer for them never did any installation on it at all. It took about twenty minutes to get the computer all set up and to diagnose it and get drivers downloaded for it. But just before I was able to wrap up with it he was paged and had to leave to deal with something in the building.
We ended up hanging out with the kids and watching The Gummi Bears for about three hours. We were supposed to meet Zach and Susan over in Harrison between eleven thirty and noon but instead we were trying to figure out how to get out of the apartment a bit after noon! It was not the morning that we had been expecting. Fortunately they were really polite kids and were “happy” to just hang on the futon with Oreo and watch cartoons that were clearly very old to them and quite weird. (The Gummi Bears ran from 1985 – 1987 on the Saturday morning cartoons.)
We got to Harrison around a quarter to one and picked up Zach and Susan and told them of our morning adventures. Then we drove to “downtown” Harrison and ate at Five Grain Rice Chinese restaurant that opened there recently. We had a nice time hanging out. The restaurant is new, open for about two or three months, and is an interesting blend of restaurant styles. Dominica and I enjoyed our food and will probably eat there again. The crabmeat and cheese Rangoons were awesome. Zach and Susan were less impressed with their meals. The restaurant hails itself as Asian fusion (doesn’t everyone these days) but was really just a Cantonese restaurant which is what I thought that it was when we went in there so I think that had a lot to do with why I was so happy with the food. Different expectations. I got the fish and tofu casserole and it was quite good. The fried fish was excellent.
After lunch we all walked over to the Italian bakery right on the corner there and got some baked goods for dessert. Dominica and said as we drove to pick Zach and Susan up that she had wanted to try out that bakery and it was Susan who decided that she wanted to go there after lunch so we thought that it was funny that they both wanted to go to the same place without talking to each other about it.
Zach’s car was broken into in Brooklyn on Friday night. He had been staying with a friend there and when he came out in the morning he discovered that his passenger windows had been smashed in and some stuff had been stolen out of his car. Financially the loss wasn’t too high but the real tragedy was that Zach’s school bag was taken from the car which has no value to anyone except for him so it ended up being a really big loss for his but very little gain for the person who broke into the car. Zach had to spend this morning constructing a cardboard window cover to keep the frigid air from freezing him as he drives back to Baltimore this afternoon.
I had more work to do this afternoon but not too much. I put in about two hours and called it a day although I had to keep on top of my email and whatnot to make sure that I was not needed. Hopefully this will die down in another week or so. Dominica and I know that we can’t travel back to Geneseo this coming weekend because I will be working overtime over that weekend as well. But maybe the weekend after that. It is harder to get back home than you would think!
Dominica cooked an egg scramble for dinner and at around seven we settled down and just watched a movie. I finally got to see Pirates of the Caribbean 2: Dead Man’s Chest which has been one of my “must see” movies now for well over half a year and I just have not managed to get to see it. It was good. Not as good as the first movie and clearly a “middle movie” that has all of the set up and plot building with the climaxes that we expect to see in the third movie. But it was very entertaining.
The movie was long and after it was done it was time for bed. I have to be up at five tomorrow morning to start the early shift which I am working all week. I ordered my car for six before going to bed so that I would not have to worry about ordering it in the morning.