May 9, 2007: Dominica Gets Her CompTIA A+ Certification

I was able to get up nice and early again this morning. I was out of bed by five thirty. Not too shabby. I got right down to the gym and did my morning workout. I am liking this routine. Now if I can just keep it up. I didn’t do a really long workout today – I am just trying to get ready for our trip tomorrow.

I did a little around the house after getting back from my workout while waiting for Dominica to get ready. Once she left I got ready for work and headed out. I got to the office just in time for SUN to come in and give us a technology presentation so that worked out perfectly. I managed to win a t-shirt for Dominica at the show (she loves her technology t-shirts) but the big prize was a copy of Solaris Internals which is going to be autographed by one of the authors, Jim Mauro. So that made for a good morning.

Dominica had her CompTIA A+ exam this afternoon at one thirty.  She called me at almost exactly two thirty to tell me that she had passed it!  What a huge relief.  That is going to make this vacation so much more enjoyable.  Now she doesn’t have to worry about that anymore.  That has been weighing her down for three years!  Boy am I ever happy.

I had a busy afternoon that passed pretty quickly.  I left the office right at half past five and headed back to Newark as quickly as possible.  Dominica and I are meeting Susan for dinner at Food for Life just a little after six this evening.  We haven’t seen Susan in quite a while even though she is the only person that we really know in the area.  Our schedules just never give us any time to see each other.

Dominica and I got home at almost exactly the same time.  We had just enough time to run up to the apartment, drop off Oreo and our belongings and head over to FFL to meet Susan.  We had a nice dinner but couldn’t linger long as Susan had an NJSO concert to get to and I have just a ton of work to do tonight so that we are able to go on our trip tomorrow.  And I need to get to bed early as I am on the early shift tomorrow so that I can get home and get ready to catch the flight.

I was pretty productive this evening.  If I can just keep up the pace tomorrow I will be in pretty decent shape.  Just to make sure that my day wasn’t to good though the fire alarm at 1180 Raymond went off a little after nine thirty at night.  This is after having done a fire drill earlier today (which I went to work to avoid instead of staying home like usual.)  I need to point out that I was correct.  They have completely desensitived the building to the alarms and not one single person, other than me, went into the hallway to see what was going on.  Not one.  And this was a real alarm with the fire department responding and everything.  They even went on to play two additional alarms that we had never heard before.  Unfortunately because we have done so many drills introducing the new alarm was just confusing.  Dominica thought that the sound was coming from outside the building rather than inside.  I only knew what was going on because I was in the hallway trying to figure out if they would ever make their promised PA announcement telling us what was going on.  It took quite some time before they finally announced that it was a false alarm and that people should ignore the alarm.  Not that there was anyone to tell since everyone was just hiding in their apartments trying to stay away from the noise.  In between alarms I could hear dogs barking from other floors.  🙁  Maybe tomorrow I will find out what happened tonight.  These fire alarm issues are just never going to end.  I can’t believe that anyone can make a claim that any of this is for “our safety.”  How obvious does a lie like that have to be before this false under criminal negligence or even malicious conduct?  At some point either the city or the builders or both need to be culpable if someone dies because they had no way to know if an alarm is real or not.

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