All three of us slept in quite significantly today. I was the first up around nine thirty or maybe a little later. Dominica got up just before eleven thirty and Oreo was only minutes ahead of her. We were up way too late last night for sure.
I was on the phone working with Andy when Dominica got up but as soon as I was off of the phone we called in a breakfast order to Food for Life before they stopped serving breakfast. We ordered the occidental pockets and hurried to take Oreo out for a walk in the park while they were making our food. The timing was perfect. By the time he had walked and returned to the apartment and we got over to FFL the food was ready and just the right temperature for us. By this time it was well after noon and they stop serving breakfast on Saturdays at noon. We wanted pancakes but breakfast was long over. We made sad faces and they made us pancakes even though they weren’t supposed to. It is good to be well loved (and probably the most regular customers that they have.)
After lunch it was time to come back to the apartment and finish watching the final season five epidose and the one holiday special episode of Monarch of the Glen. While we were watching that I started doing the big weekend project that I have for the office. That ended up taking me all afternoon. I had a ton of work to do today. While I was waiting for stuff to happen at the office I also worked on building a CentOS based BugZilla server. Andy and I talked this morning and he was so unimpressed with my experiences in installing FogBugz that he does not feel confident in the long term stability of the company or the resiliency of the software. So we made the decision to return that software and to explore other avenues. My plan is to write an essay on my two day experience of attempting to install FogBugz and start a new “Essays” category on SGL so that my long diatribes can be relegated to an easily avoided section while becoming more searchable.
At six we had to rush to get ready for our dinner this evening. I jumped into the shower and then took Oreo out for his evening walk while Dominica was in the shower getting ready. I got Oreo back to the apartment just in time to walk out the door with Dominica and over to pick up Jeffrey whom we are having dinner with tonight. By “picking him up” I mean on foot as he lives just one block away from us and the restaurant that we are going to tonight, The Savoy Grill, lies between our homes. The Savoy is actually closer to us than our car is and I am pretty sure that Jeffrey is closer than the car as well!
We ended up staying at the Savoy for three and a half hours and we had a really good time. We also got a chance to talk to the general manager a little bit whom we met two nights ago at Food for Life during the party at 1180 Raymond. The Savoy Grill is located on the first floor of the NorCrown Bank Building. In the Savoy there is an old picture on the wall between the restrooms that was apparently taken in the early 1930s of the NorCrown Bank Building from a towering neighbour building looking down on it and showing the empty Military Park with the lonely Trinity Church located in it. It only took a second of looking at the picture before I figured out that the picture was taken from 1180 Raymond shortly after the building was finished when it was one of the few high rises in the area. It was eery to see Military Park so desolate. It is very strange to think of this building that I am sitting in right now as I write today’s post to have been built as this gigantic testiment to human engineering and efficient use of space while the area around it was empty and low lying buildings could easily have been built instead.
While doing some online searches today I found two great pictures of downtown Newark taken across the Passaic River: Resurgence City Daylight Downtown Newark and Resurgence City Night Downtown Newark. In both images you can see the new skyscrapers of Newark but right in the center, on its own, is 1180 Raymond Boulevard reminding viewers of the Newark’s heyday.