October 13, 2007: Wedding on Long Island

Today was an insanely busy day for Dominica and I. We woke up and pretty much went right over to the Airlie Cafe for some breakfast. Dominica hasn’t had a chance to go there yet so it was nice that she was able to try it out. During the week they are pretty much closed at any time that she would consider going there. That is the big problem with all of the businesses in the area – they only cater to the commuters who come in during the day and they don’t offer services to those of us who live on their street even though we are a very large population. For a coffee shop that makes its money during the lunch rush it seems like staffing it just enough to hit the dinner and evening coffee crowd would be very cost effective as all of the overhead except for the labor is covered earlier in the day.

This is another pictures from the conference room down the hall from my office.  This is looking south from Gouvernors Lane in lower Manhattan at South Street.  This is southern Brooklyn to the left and Governor’s Island to the right.  In the middle is Upper New York Bay.  In the distance you can see the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge connecting Brooklyn to Staten Island.

After breakfast we came back to Eleven80 and I prepared for my midterm exam in my Master’s Java programming class that I am taking. I did some reading and went through class notes provided by the professor. Once I was ready I took my two hour long midterm exam. It was open book and open notes but the only thing that we were allowed to use online were the JavaDocs provided by Sun. I used the whole two hours and feel pretty good about the job that I did. It was a really tough test and was quite demanding. But it is a graduate level programming class so I guess that it should be. This is the first collegiate exam that I have taken since I took a class at TC3 in 2000 or maybe 2001. All of my Empire State College classes and my last RIT class were essay based and didn’t use legacy tests for grading.

After my midterm was over it was past time for us to get ready to go to a friend’s wedding out on Long Island. We got ready as quickly as we could. My friend had lead us to believe that the travel time out to Mount Sinai on Long Island was only about an hour and a quarter for us. Ha ha. I also used his directions to get there instead of Google’s directions. Not a good idea. It ended up taking us almost three hours to get there from Newark.

This was the very first time that either Dominica or I had ever set foot onto Long Island. We got the chance to take the Long Island Expressway over halfway across the island. We crossed into Manhattan through the Lincoln Tunnel, crossed Manhattan on 34th Street and then went into Queens via the Midtown Tunnel which turns right into the LIE. Then we drove all the way across Queens and out to Exit 63 of the LIE and then took NY83 north up to Mount Sinai. It was a very long trip with a lot of traffic and an accident in Flushings.

Because of leaving late and the bad traffic we ended up missing the ceremony itself which really couldn’t have been helped with my midterm being today but we wished that we could have been there. The ceremony was scheduled to begin at six in the evening and we arrived just after the ceremony. It was the perfect time to arrive for just the reception and we were really glad that we were able to make it for that. A few of my coworkers who work in Melville, New York were there and we were able to hang out. We had a really good time.

It was just after midnight when we decided that we needed to leave the wedding and make the drive back to Newark. It was getting late and any later would have been a really tough drive. Oreo was just hanging out in the car being a good boy. He didn’t mind at all although he was visibly bored.

The drive back went well and we were home not long after two. Neither of us were that tired so we watched an episode of The Cosby Show before going to bed.