Sheep Guarding Llama

Dad managed to ship off my new CPAP equipment today so I know that in less than a week I will have it and I won’t have to worry about my old equipment falling apart on me. My CPAP headgear and tubing has most definitely seen better days. The facemask and headset sets are really only designed to last for about three to six months and mine is on eighteen months and it is starting to get pretty ratty. The velcro is ready to die and the one gel pad that braces the thing against my forehead has burst and the gel is oozing out and is as sticky as glue which is a real pain. I have had to coat it with cornstarch so that I can keep wearing it. I am really looking forward to having a new one and my CPAP is really looking forward to having new air filters installed in it.

Nothing unusual at work today. Work is work. I talked to Josh today and his marching show with the Empire Statesmen is at the Wildwood Convention Center in Wildwood, New Jersey on Saturday at 6:00 pm. Dominica and I looked around and she managed to find a hotel in Atlantic City that allows pets so we got a room there so that we can take Oreo with us when we go and then we will be able to spend the night instead of needing to rush right back to get back to him. We are hoping to get a chance to see a little of Atlantic City and Wildwood during the day and then see Josh’s show in the evening. We need to come right back to North Brunswick on Sunday morning because I have some work that I need to do very early on Sunday afternoon, and Dominica needs to drive to Frankfort as soon as we get back as well. She will be in Frankfort until Wednesday or Thursday of next week. Josh will be coming up this way and spending the evening nearby. He will be the first person from back home other than Dominica’s family to see our apartment or the area in which we live. He is working in Jersey City on Monday morning so we are going to grab breakfast before he and I head off to work. I am trying to convince Bob to come down since he is marching band guy and it is his first Monday off from teaching.

Hewlett-Packard is currently offering some good sounding classes so I decided to just sign up for a few of them and give them a spin. I really enjoy taking classes so I didn’t want to miss any that really seemed to apply. So I added, in addition to the “Introduction to Network Attached Storage” class that I was all ready in but started this morning, “Project Management” and “Advanced Network Administration Best Practices” which I think will be beneficial for me. They will definitely keep me a bit busier.

Dominica came up to Warren and met me for a late lunch at the Thai House. It is funny that we have only been here for a few weeks and all ready people at all of “our” restaurants are beginning to recognize us. They most definitely know us at Tanjore, The Thai House and The Omega Diner and Cafe and I wouldn’t be surprised if the sushi place that I go to isn’t beginning to recognize me.

I got home and was surprisingly hungry (I had skipped breakfast but had a late lunch) so we went out to the Omega. Dominica has been working hard on her database class all day and she had a lot of questions for me so she brought her books and notes along with her to dinner and we spent a long time going over database design principles and I helped her with her homework. She learned a lot tonight and she was excited about all that she was learning and was impatient to get home and fire up her Access 2003 to try out some of the things that she had learned.

We spent the evening working on our respective computers. Nothing exciting happened but we were both productive and got a lot done.

Today I am back at work in the office. It has seemed like I have been on vacation for the last two and a half weeks. Between leaving work early to go to Ohio, being gone for a few days, having the Monday holiday off, having the week off for a training class, working from home for a week, having visitors over the weekend and then working from home for two more days I barely feel like I have been at the same job that I was at a month ago.

I got into the office this morning and was planning on making a joke about how long I had been out and that I expected that they would have given away my desk but the joke was on me because I got to my desk and found someone that I didn’t know working at my computer! He introduced himself as the new guy in our department (in reality he gave me his name and didn’t just refer to himself as “the new guy” just in case you thought that he was insane or something) and went off to see if someone could find him another desk to use. Everyone was quite surprised to see me.

It isn’t everyday as a blogger that you get good quotes from your friends but today I had to quote Bob from The Jedi Council Speaks: “…being half awake, turned on the water and went to step into the shower and slipped. I fell out of the shower forwards, tore down the shower curtain and rod and hit my head on the toilet seat.”

The rain was back in force today. I mean really, really heavy rain all afternoon into the night. It rained so hard that the commute took me an hour and a half. Every road was at a crawl. There was almost no visibility and there were a few inches of flowing water on the roads in places. My regular route home was a total disaster so I took my old route home on the big highways because they were at least moving a little.

I called Dominica and she and Oreo left the apartment and met me at Tanjore. It is a lot faster for them to meet me rather than have me come home and pick them up and then go to the restaurant. My evenings are too short as it is and I really don’t want to spend all of my free time dealing with logistics. When we sat down to dinner the owner, or at least I presume that he is the owner of the restuarant, told us that we were the lucky preferred customer the other day and that our meal had been on the house. We were really surprised that they would just surprise us with a free meal when it was a meal that we had all ready had and it had been $50 for the two of us! They are just so nice there. I have started ordering my food there really spicy because I have come to realize that those of us from the Buffalo area really do like our food a lot spicier than most Americans and Indians often think that Americans can’t handle spicy food but some of us know better.

It was late by the time that we got back to the house so we did very little other than to just go to bed. My body is still all thrown off from my shifting schedule.

Today is the big day, Dominica and my first trip into Manhattan to see a Broadway musical while living in or near the city. It has been a couple of years since either of us has seen a real Broadway show. The last show that we saw together was “Into the Woods” with Vanessa Williams that Dominica got me for my birthday. We are really excited about getting to go into “town” to see a show and with HCJ no less.

I woke up on my own from my “nap” at 11:53 and came out to the living room to get to work for the night. Working overnights for over a week will really throw off your body’s internal clock. It is only midnight and my body really feels like it is morning. I half expect people I know to be getting up and going to work soon but they won’t be doing that for a long time yet and most everyone I know hasn’t even gone to bed yet. That is the weirdest part. Getting up before everyone else goes to bed is just strange. The upside of doing the overnight is that it gives me lots of time to myself to work on the SGL Dailies!

It is going to be a little on the warm side as Dominica and I go into the city this afternoon. The Weather Channel is calling for low eighties and ten to twenty percent chance of rain. Not too bad but a little warmer than I would have hoped for going into the city all dressed up.

One of the advantages of being in and around New York City is that you get to be a part of the news. While we were in Manhattan with Dominica’s family on Saturday we got to see a number of DRM (Digital Rights Management) protestors marching past the Apple Store on Fifth Avenue (believe it or not I only figured out that the Apple Store was there because of the protestors because Apple has done such a bad job and making the store visible.) Today Newsforge carried the article about Saturday’s national protest against Digital Rights Management being carried out by the Free Software Foundation’s Defective By Design campaign. I read these articles all of the time but I actually got to see something happening for once. That is pretty cool. Unfortunately the event didn’t go as well as planned and far too few Americans are aware of the evils of Digital Rights Management and are willing to buy products that rely on it. Considering how little Americans bother to learn today about things that drastically affect them it is amazing that once upon a time we were ever able to educate people enough to get them to bother fighting to have our own country!

It is definitely handy working the overnight as it gives me plenty of opportunity to do backups and other simple maintenance tasks. It is surprising how much stuff like that needs to be done on a regular basis.

A little before two in the morning Oreo decided that he missed me and he came out into the living room and plopped down onto his pillow beside my chair. It is so awesome to have a dog that works so hard to spend time with me. I have never had a dog before that chooses to spend time with me over other people.

I have plenty of work to keep me busy on the overnight tonight. Mostly a load of paperwork that has to be attended to. That makes for a long night but at least it keeps me busy.

Today I started using an awesome new feature of Firefox from Google. It is the Google Firefox Sync Tool. Now this little add on to Firefox might be just the thing to convince all of you Internet Explorer people to switch for good – at least those of you who use more than one computer. This new tool from Google is a simple add on to Firefox 1.5 that allows you to syncronize your browser settings including (at your discretion) cookies, history, passwords, favourites, tabs, etc. More or less your entire browser environment. You just download the free add on, install it (it takes like five seconds) and you enter your Google account information and select a new PIN for the sync process and away it goes. You do this on each machine where you will be using Firefox and Google takes care of the rest. Now whenever you are using your awesome Firefox web browser you can have all of the same settings that you hav everywhere else. Sounds simple but it is a pretty big deal and I am really amazed that no one has tried this before now. Google is doing it for free but this easily could have been a fee based service from someone. For people who do a lot of surfing at home and at work this is truly awesome. For people like me who use a Linux desktop, a Windows desktop, a Mac desktop, a laptop plus my computer at work this can really help tie all of those machines together. Now if Google would just make an open source Firefox Sync Server for enterprises to use within their intranets then we would really have something. Companies all over the place would roll that feature out in no time.

Dominica has been studying databases for her Database Development class (as one would expect) and she has a new book that she got a few weeks ago from SAMS Publishing “Teach Yourself Access 2003 in 24 Hours” and since I have never really worked with Microsoft Access before, and since I own it as well, I thought that I might as well read the book too and see what there is to learn about it. I am not much of an Access fan but I can see a few places where it could come in handy. One thing that I am learning is that Access can be used as a frontend tool and not as an actual database which makes it a lot more useful than I was aware that it could be. Access as a rapid database development tool isn’t nearly so bad. So often companies use Access as a stand alone database product that maybe it gets a bad rap. It really is not designed to be used in a business all by itself except in really rare circumstances. Often it is a crutch that bad managers use to get around doing things the right away and it ends up costing them a fortune in the end but the costs are hidden in ongoing support and in client application purchases that they can often hide their ineptitude. I have Access 2003 on my laptop and Dominica has it on her desktop but my desktop that I use for the overnight login to the office has the beta of Access 2007 on it so I am taking a look at that tonight while I wait for package installs to finish at the office. The 2007 interface is a lot different than what people are used to from 2003 and older and I wonder how much people are going to like it. Microsoft Office products linger around for so long that it will make for a steep learning curve and it will be tough for people who routinely move back and forth between modern and legacy versions of the suite. I can’t tell you how many people I talk to still use Office 97! Office 97 was replaced by 2000 which was replaced by XP which was replaced by 2003 and is now in the process of being replaced by 2007! And that list only includes the Windows versions of the tools and not the Macintosh versions which often fall inbetween then (Office 98, 2002, etc.)

The new interface is really attractive and I think that it seems, at first glance, to be pretty intuitive but it will take some getting used to. I am really happy with what looks like amazing integration with Microsoft SharePoint Services which I think is a really strong product from Microsoft. From my first look here it would appear that Access 2007 really focuses on working with SharePoint transparently and that will be a huge selling point for this product when the new 2007 version of SharePoint releases. It also appears that Microsoft has made Access 2007 work a little more obviously with SQL Server and other enterprise class database management systems.

I also took a look at InfoPath 2007. The old version of InfoPath wasn’t very interesting. I thought that they had some good ideas but there wasn’t much to make it a real value proposition for a business. But with 2007 I think they are heading down the right path (the right InfoPath, if you will.) In 2007 they have released an InfoPath Server product that should function to tie the InfoPath product into the enterprise. The real question, I think, will be pricing. InfoPath traditionally was so expesive that it really wasn’t useful for most businesses. Its purpose is to allow non-technical staff to do form design but if the product is anywhere near the price of having paid the IT guys (or gals) to do the same work then that would have gotten you a lot more mileage and companies are generally happier when their staves are busy rather than when they are idle and buying expensive software that requires expensive license management. So I am cautiously optimistic about InfoPath in this latest incarnation.

One thing that I find to be odd about the new Microsoft Office suite is that some of the applications, mostly the core applications, use the new “2007” interface while some of the less common applications like Publisher and InfoPath still use the “2003” interface. I imagine that these decisions were made simply based on time and how much revenue each product brings to the table but it seems weird to me that Microsoft would want to package two competing interfaces into a single shipping product. It seems almost as if they couldn’t decide whether or not they liked the new interface so they didn’t completely commit to it.

I fired up Outlook 2007 and took a look at it as well. There isn’t much noticable variation from Outlook 2003 but there seem to be some improvement here and there. It seems to act a little better. I have always found Outlook to be a really good tool if you are working with Microsoft Exchange on the backend but not very useful if you are not and I am not sure if this latest version changes my opinion of it very much. Outlook has some serious competition from Thunderbird as far as I am concerned. And my experiences with how flaky Outlook is at my new position really do not encourage me to recommend it.

Since I had tried out every other component of the new Microsoft Office suite I decided that I couldn’t neglect Groove 2007 which is an all new application added to the suite in this edition. (I didn’t leave out SharePoint Designer but I had looked at it previously and it is just a new focus and name for FrontPage.) Groove is a bit more enigmatic than most of the applications in the MS Office suite. Groove is a collaboration tool for teams. It is a little hard for me to audition it as collaboration tools are a bit boring when you don’t have a team working with you on it. But it looks to be interesting and I look forward to having a chance to work with it. I should mention that if you purchase Groove 2007 that it will handle the syncronizing of Internet Explorer favourites across computers just like the Google sync does for Firefox (only the Google version does tons more and is free.)

Six o’clock rolled around and I was starting to get pretty sleepy. You can only keep yourself awake for so long before you start to just feel like crap. I took a couple loads of trash out to the dumpster and that helped to wake me up a little bit. The sun was starting to come out and it is a beautiful morning. I just wish that I wasn’t so tired so that I could enjoy it a little more. I opened the shades in the kitchen and the drapes in the living room to get some sunlight into the house.

By seven o’clock I was really tired and working hard to keep my eyes open and pointed at the computer monitor. By body was beginning to ache from trying to keep it awake long after it needed to go to sleep. Just after seven thirty my terminal services crashed and I lost some work that I had been in the middle of. Argh. It is bad enough to lose work when you are awake but it is much worse to lose it when you have been struggling so hard to keep doing it. At least it was nothing critical.

Dad emailed me this morning to correct me for saying that there are not ice cream trucks in Geneseo. He said that he saw one in Geneseo just yesterday. Apparently they just don’t go out to the edge of town where we were.

When eight o’clock came around I was totally ready to sign off and hit the hay. I had brushed my teeth and taken my mobile phone and BlackBerry in and put them by the bed ahead of time so that I wouldn’t have to think about them when I was ready for bed. I cranked up the air conditioning so that it would be nice and cold while I slept too. I sleep much better when it is cold and when I am pushing myself like this it become much more important than usual. I normally turn the air conditioning down when I am working at night because I don’t need it as cold and it is annoying to have it run all night and because it is so inefficient it does even at very reasonable temperatures which is depressing. I hope that it doesn’t get too hot this summer or the air conditioning will never manage to keep up with it.

I slept very solidly until 2:30. I didn’t want to sleep that long but I was really tired and I needed it. I got up and Dominica and I needed to get moving right away to be able to make it to our show at 7:00. It seems crazy to think that you need to get moving that early but when you consider that I was just waking up and that there is a bit to traveling to do it isn’t that surprising.

We got ready to leave and made it out the door a little after 4:00. We were in a rush to make the 4:30 train out of New Brunswick. Dominica ran and got our train tickets while I parked the car in the garage across the street from the station. That worked well as we were both ready at almost exactly the same time.

The train ride takes about an hour during the day but at least during commuting hours they have the nicer cars on the tracks with the nice seats. At night they switch to the “drunk crowd” cars with vinyl seats that are much older and much less comfortable. We got into Penn Station and hopped the 123 subway to 42nd Street / Times Square. We made it up there just before 6:00 so we were doing well. Originally we had hoped that we would be able to do a nice dinner but we had figured out several hours earlier that that was not going to be possible at all with me sleeping in as late as I did.

We walked down 42nd and grabbed a quick bite of vegetarian wraps at Pax Food. We had both seen the restaurant when we were in the city on Saturday but didn’t get to eat there. The food was good and we figure that we will be going back there again. It is a really convenient place to eat quickly if you are a vegetarian on Times Square. We only had a small meal and we were both saving room for ice cream from Cold Stone Creamery where we had ice cream on Saturday which is also on 42nd on the same block which made everything really easy. Their ice cream is just amazing.

After our ice cream it was time to get to the theatre. Our tickets were waiting at Will Call and everything was very easy to deal with at the American Airlines Theater. Our seats were in the stage right box – 3 and 5. They were partial view seats but they weren’t bad at all. We were quite happy although seat 5 was a bit nicer than 3 and we switched halfway through the show so that neither of us would get stuck with the worse seat. We wish that we had gotten 5 and 7. We will know that for next time in that theatre.

So how was “The Pajama Game“? It was simply incredible! One of the best shows that I have ever seen. The entire cast was just phenominal. We are so glad that we decided to switch my schedule at work and get last minute tickets. We decided that we would have been happy even if we would have spent $700 for better seats (we tried but they were sold out – we got the best seats that we could get under $2,000.) Neither of us had ever seen “The Pajama Game” before so it was great to get to see a classic for the first time but it was also awesome to see it with such an amazing cast. This has to have been the best cast to have ever done the show. You can see some clips of the show from Opening Night on Broadway dot com. I really hope that they make a DVD of this show because I will definitely be buying that.

Harry Connick, Jr. was outstanding in the role of Sid. This was his first role on Broadway but I doubt that it will be his last. He has a great stage presence and we were really happy to be sitting so close because we could clearly see all of his great facial expressions which really added to the performance. And his singing was, as expected, just unbelievable. I have seen him in concert twice before (once in Michigan near Detroit and once at Darien Lake just outside of Buffalo) and he was every bit as amazing in this show. They even modified the show so that Harry could play piano in it and do some improvisation which was, of course, amazing. (Harry was a piano player before he was a singer. Check out his album “Eleven“.) If you are a real Harry Connick, Jr. fan then you should find a way to get to Manhattan before Saturday and get into one of the final shows – you will not be disappointed.

I shouldn’t focus just on HCJ either, the rest of the cast totally lived up to his performance. Kelli O’Hara playing Babe Williams was equally amazing. Her voice is really something. She was perfect as Sid’s love interest and there was a lot of chemistry between the two of them. Michael McKean, one of my favourite Hollywood actors that you will know from films like Clue, This is Spinal Tap and for his role as Lenny on the television show Laverne and Shirley, playes Hines and was really awesome. I have never really heard him sing and he really can. He was hilarious. Everyone did a really good; this was really an all star cast.

At the end of the show Harry Connick, Jr. came out and thanked everyong for coming to the special benefit and hosted the auctioning of his watch that he wore during the show. Sotheby’s had a representative there who did the auctioning. The watch ended up going for $20,000. They are auctioning one of these special, limited edition watches each night of the show.

After the show we caught the subway back and rode the late train back to New Brunswick. Neither of us was tired when we got back to the apartment but I had to get to bed because tomorrow I have to go back into the office for the first time in two weeks. It has been like a vacation. Dominica stayed up for a little while before coming to bed.

My first shift of the week began at midnight, first thing this morning. I still don’t know what the schedule is going to be like for the rest of the week. I am still guessing that I will be working days for the rest of the week but it is only a guess. I will only be doing that if someone volunteers to work the night shift instead of me. It is weird. I have only been at this job since the last few days in March and for several weeks all I did was sit in my cubicle and wait for access to things. Then I managed to get about three weeks of real, solid work in. Then the guy that I work with that trains me on everything was out for a few weeks, I was out of the office at a week long class, we had a couple of holiday days and for the past week I have been working from home doing the overnight shift which I am doing again today. So it is weird that I have only had three or four weeks of normal “work” since I started. I have been at the job long enough that it is starting to feel natural for me to be there but I haven’t been there long enough that I have all of my “tools” working yet and access to everything yet and the past three weeks I have been pretty much completely out which is extra weird since that is such a huge percentage of my total time at the job. And I am being scheduled for another class sometime soon that will disrupt the normal flow of things yet again.

Mary’s Internet access is back on. They had thought that it had been shut off but they found out yesterday or the day before that their cable modem had been hit by lightning and that it was fried. So they are happy and back online now.

Dominica was really tired this evening and went to bed just as I was about to start my shift. She had been attempting to study her database development texts on the futon but I found her passed out sleeping on her book and sent her to bed.

Since I am working the Sunday overnight I decided that it was a good time to run a full, manual system backup of the email and instant messaging system so there was some disruption of that in the middle of the night – just in case anyone noticed. Sunday nights are about the only decently safe time to take the system offline for a backup so that is when I try to squeeze them in. It takes over an hour to run the backup once the system has been brought down and then it has to be manually brought back online so it isn’t a fast and easy process.

I finally managed to get Dominica computer working again. For the most part it had been working but there were some issues with its My Documents folder not functioning correctly and, of course, Microsoft doesn’t make it something that is easily modifiable and there isn’t any good documentation for it so that is just a huge pain. It took quite a bit of work and it turned out to be several overlapping issues that were all causing the same thing to keep happening. We wouldn’t have been worrying about it but she needs Access 2003 to work on it and that is one of the things that was not working. Funny how often it is the Microsoft products that fail when you are doing something too complex on a Microsoft operating system. OpenOffice, of course, worked just fine. But her class uses Access so that is what she needs to use. I wish that the State University of New York would get with the times a little bit and modernize their teaching tools and work with things that are more accessible to more students and not use proprietary software just because their aren’t familiar enough with the industry to not be swayed by whatever product is sitting on the shelf at CompUSA. It is really sad.

Since I am pulling the overnight tonight and have the entire day free tomorrow Dominica and I are toying with the idea of running into the city and trying to catch a Broadway musical. We figure that we have been here for too long not to have seen one yet and we have all ready managed to miss the people that we really wanted to see doing “Spamalot” and are really sad about that. Harry Connick Jr. is in “The Pajama Game” and we want to catch that while he is still in it. There are a number of shows on Broadway right now that we really want to see. Actually there are more Broadway shows on right now that look really good than we have seen of movies that look good expected out yet this year. Right now the only movie that we want to see is Prairie Home Companion but we will most likely just wait for that to come out on DVD. It isn’t the type of movie that really demands that we run to the theatre to see it. We didn’t even know when it was coming out until we looked today to see what was playing.

Well, one in the morning rolled around and all was quiet. It has been such a busy, busteling weekend that I really can’t believe that it is Monday all ready. It seems like it was Friday yesterday and I haven’t had any time off from the overnights yet.

Working overnight makes you accutely aware of the very loud air conditioning coming on and off in the apartment. I am pretty sure that the air conditioning runs about two thirds or more of the time. Maybe a lot more than that. I can’t believe how often it has to run to keep the apartment at a decent temperature at night when it isn’t that warm outside. This must be the world’s least efficient air conditioning system. That is a problem with apartments – they install really inefficient appliances because they know that it is your problem to pay for the energy. If the government would put stricter requirements on appliances like refridgerators and air conditioners it would save a lot of power in this country. There are so many people who are stuck living in situations where they have no choice but to use very inefficient appliances. It would cause housing costs to go up but nominally and it would pay for itself in the energy costs. Overall it would be good for everyone.

We had mandatory security training that had to be done at work this week so I took the wasted time on my night shift to get it out of the way. That ended up taking me two hours to complete. What a waste of time. Not that I have tons of work that needs my immediate attention in the middle of the night but still. No way that I am going to manage to stay awake all night doing stuff like that. I am pretty tired as it is and I have a long way to go. Only three o’clock by the time I did that annoying “training”. Five hours still ahead of me. Email and instant messaging was backed up and back online around a quarter till three and I doubt that anyone noticed.

By four o’clock I was pretty sleepy. My entire body ached from all of the walking on Saturday and it wanted an opportunity to rest and heal itself.

I spent the rest of the morning being kind of delirious. Around six I decided to lay down and watch my BlackBerry to see if anything was going on. I would snooze for five minutes at a time and watch the email to make sure that everything was under control. That helped a little. Oreo moved into the bedroom and got into his car seat that we moved beside the bed and I managed to get a little bit of rest. I had to get up and come out to the living room to work every twenty or thirty minutes or so but normally just for five or ten minutes. By seven forty I was up for good. I am so glad that I am able to rest like that and not just fall asleep and be worthless. Being able to sleep this way really adds to my overall quality of life considering the type of work that I do and have done for many years.

By eight thirty I was wrapping up with my shift and I was ready to get to bed for real and not worry about checking in with the mail every so often. I collapsed into bed and was asleep immediately. Dominica got up just as I was going to bed and she made a run to Panera and Dunkin Donuts to get breakfast for us. She was home around nine and we ate and I went right back to bed. Oreo came in and slept all day right beside me. He loves his daddy.

I got up at three. Six hours, not too shabby. Dad watched the Tony Awards last night and found out that “The Pajama Game” with Harry Connick, Jr. is closing on Saturday (less than a week away!) Dominica and I were really hoping to get to see “The Pajama Game” and we were really disappointed that it was closing because we had thought that we might get to see it today but it is closed on Mondays. I talked to my boss and he changed my schedule so that I am working the overnight again tonight. “The Pajama Game” is running in an extended week as a benefit to a number of charities. So the tickets are outrageously expensive and there are almost none left. As soon as I found out that my schedule was clear we called the box office and managed to get just about the last tickets. They were $110 a piece for a partially obstructed view and we have to sit one in front of the other but at least we get to see the show. We had thought that we were going to have to spend $250-$350 per ticket but those had all sold out and we were not about to spend $2,500 which is what was left without an obstructed view. Ouch. So the tickets didn’t end up being cheap but they are a lot cheaper than they might have been and we get to see Harry’s Broadway deput show before it closes which is really cool. We are really excited. It is our first Broadway show since moving down here and only the second that we have seen together (we saw “Into the Woods” a few years ago.) Even with bad, expensive seats this is going to be awesome. This will really help us feel a lot more like we live “in the city.”

Dominica was so excited about getting to go to a benefit show in the city that she ran out to do some shopping for new clothes for it. While she was out the ice cream truck came by so I went out and got myself a strawberry shortcake ice cream bar. I love living in a populated area. No ice cream trucks in Geneseo.

Min got back from her little shopping trip and then we went out to Tanjore for dinner. The food there is just amazing. I think that only three people work there and that makes it really hard for them. We got enough food to stuff ourselves and still have plenty for lunch tomorrow. We ran out to Sears real quickly and returned a blazer that Dominica had bought for me that was too small and then came home. I was still tired after the long weekend and doing the overnight so we decided that a nap was in order. Dominica fed Oreo and then we went to bed hoping to get a little rest in before I start my shift at midnight. Tomorrow will be a busy day and I don’t want to be too tired for it.

I was allowed to sleep in until after eight this morning which means that I actually got an entire night’s sleep last night which was very much needed. I was totally exhausted last night from the week of working overnights and never getting a full night’s sleep and from spending the entire day yesterday traveling and walking and doing stuff in Manhattan. I really needed a chance to do some catching up.

I was the last one awake this morning and boy did I appreciate it. Oreo even decided to sleep right beside me even with everyone packing and getting ready to leave in the living room. I don’t think that he wants to be apart from me after his long, lonely day yesterday. It was a little after nine when the Tocco clan was packed up into Francesca’s car and they were all ready to leave. Min took her own car and I took Oreo in mine and the nine of us drove over to the Omega Diner for some breakfast.

We were quite the crows for breakfast at the diner. We had so many people that they shuffled us off to the back room that Min and I have never seen before. It took a while for everyone to order and eat. It was probaby 10:30 when we finally left the restaurant. I said goodbye to everyone and took Oreo back to the apartment. He needs some time to relax but not to be left alone. Everyone else packed into either Francesca’s truck or Min’s Mazda and they all headed for a tour of the Crayola factory in Easton, Pennsylvania. I have always wanted to tour the factory ever since they did a short documentary on it on the kids’ show “3-2-1 Contact” when I was young. But I have some work that I have to do at a specific time in the middle of the afternoon today and I can’t be away. It is probably best, though, because I can spend the day with Oreo. He would be very upset if he was left home alone again today. He is a very social dog.

It is a beautiful, sunny day today and I took Oreo on a short walk exploring the back side of the apartment complex. There is a tree and grass buffer against the houses to the back and it is the perfect place to take Oreo on a walk. He had a really good time. I didn’t need to do any extra walking today though. I got my fill of it yesterday.

I had some work to do this afternoon so I had to start working at 1:30. I didn’t have a lot of work to do but I had some and that was enough to keep be from being able to go out to the Crayola factory today. Dominica got home from the factory around 4:00. She had a good time but was disappointed that it was much less of a factory tour and more of a hands-on Crayola learning center for kids. They had a really good time, she was just hoping for a real factory tour. She said that it wouldn’t be a good place to go unless you are bringing kids but that it was really good for kids. She brought be back some projects that she had done and also some souvenirs from the factory. Her parents bought me heat sensitive silly putty which is pretty cool. And I got an orange Crayola golf ball and a carabineer and Dominica drew me a bunch of pictures too.

We were both starving by the time that Min got back from the factory so we went out to get some dinner. We had planned on getting Indian but they were closed. So we tried the noodle place. They were closed. So we got Italian from Bertucci’s in the same plaza. The food was really good. Dominica has never eaten at a Bertucci’s before.

It was 6:00 by the time that we got back to the apartment. We were both stuffed from our huge dinners and we were really tired so we decided to take a nap. Oreo liked that idea and came right in and lay between us being super snuggly boy.

We didn’t get up until 10:00. Then we came out to the living room to do some work. Dominica started working on her database class which has her using Microsoft Access to learn how to work with databases and I set to work on some miscellaneous tasks. Oreo set to work sucking on his new hedgehog. That must be his favourite toy ever. Good thing because it was $13.00!

My schedule was kind of in flux over the weekend as we waited to find out what I was going to be working this week. So far we still don’t know but we do know that I am working the overnight again tonight from midnight to eight in the morning. I don’t think that I am going to be doing any additional overnights during the week but that is just a guess. I could easily end up working overnights all week.

This coming weekend Dominica and I are planning on going down to Wildwood, New Jersey which is supposedly one of those super, massively touristy locations that is completely yuppy to go to in the summer. It is a little village of 5,400 people (smaller than Geneseo and just a smidgen bigger than Dansville) that sweels to over a quarter million tourists during the summer (similar to Disney World!) That is just crazy. And, as far as I can tell, there isn’t anything to do there. Just a beach, a boardwalk (that should be neat but only so neat) and cheesy carnival rides like you get in Mt. Morris or Nunda during the summer that no one really wants to ride on but when you like in Mt. Morris or Nunda you take what you can get. We have no idea what our travel plans are going to be like right now. It is about two and a half hours to Wilwood from North Brunswick if we don’t have to contend with vacation traffic. I don’t know when the roads will be bad so it is really hard to guess what the driving will be like. And we aren’t sure exactly when we will be there so we are waiting to find out the nitty gritty details from Josh. Josh’s marching and field band the Empire Statesmen from Rochester are in a show down there and we are going to see them.