Sheep Guarding Llama

Saturday, the universe’s accepted day off. Min, Oreo and I slept in nice and late today. I needed a break. It has been a decently busy week. Today I had to get Min’s old Shuttle XPC computer ready for Bob who is picking it up today.

Andy decided that he hadn’t given MUD style gaming a fair chance eigth years ago when I had last introduced it to him so he downloaded CircleMUD today (the same game that I played extensively in college in 1994-1995 and had set up in the house in Greece running on a 486 Caldera OpenLinux box in 1997 or 1998) and got it up and running in the house. He, Art and I had had a long discussion about the MUDs last night when Art, Danielle and Michael were over and he peaked his interest.

Andy spent most of the day at his parent’s house visiting with Dana and her new baby. Min and I went up to Henrietta around 4:30 and met Bob and Lisa at the Olive Garden. We were supposed to meet them earlier but I was having problems getting Bob’s new computer ready for him and I needed all of the time that we could come up with to keep working on it. I did finally get it ready and got it to him.

We only got to see Bob and Lisa for about twenty minutes because they were in a hurry to get up to Frontier Field as they were going to see Nate’s dad throw out the first pitch at the Red Wings game on Rotary Night. Min didn’t want to sit through a baseball game so we didn’t go. After dinner, we went over to PetSmart and got some puppy supplies including a dog tag for Oreo. On the way home we swung into Woody’s II in Avon and got some ice cream.

We came home and decided to relax for the afternoon. It was decently late by that point anyway, almost 8:00. The day seemed to have flown by. I got Min’s new desktop set up and working in our bedroom today so that it doesn’t have to be brought out into the living room to be able to be used anymore. We are using Andy’s USB wireless adapter so that we can be on the wireless from the bedroom. That makes things much easier. And we are using the power line system in the living room to get the Mac Mini online. Speaking of Min’s new desktop, her new GeForce 6600 PCIE graphics card is due on Tuesday or Wednesday, she is pretty excited.

We spent most of the evening watching The Family Guy which Andy owns. That show is hilarious. We haven’t seen it in at least a year so we are watching it again. While watching the show I did some work on backup systems for one of our clients while casually playing the MUD with Andy. Every so many years I really feel the need to play it again. I wish that I had the resources to have a nice MUD server up and running all of the time. I think that that would be cool. But it is probably too much effort to be worth it. Maybe someday. If anyone is interested in that project, let me know. I would love to have a MUD game that runs all of the time and is publicly available and has a decent community using it. But the MUDs that are popular now, if there are any that qualify for that status, are quite different from what we used to play. It just isn’t the same.

I had to pull myself out of bed this morning and get to work in Perry because I had a morning meeting. Turned out that I only had to go to the meeting because Verizon’s help desk was incompetent and told one of clients a fib instead of admitting that they had no service in the area. So I went in to treat the problem like it was a software error. Yup, just no service. I held the laptop up to a window and voila, problem solved. Scott saves the day again.

I thought that I was having a get together with Craig and Vonary (I am sure that that is not spelled correctly) but they were busy buying a new car today so they weren’t able to get together with us for lunch.

Dad came over this afternoon to get dinner at the Omega Grill like we usually do on Friday evenings. We did a really early dinner or more appropriately, a really late lunch. He brought Oreo over for the weekend when he came over. We love it when Oreo is here – he is so much fun to have around. And so snuggly.

Andy and I went and took eight (yes, EIGHT) large kitchen garbage bags of clothes to donate over to the St. Timothy’s Lutheran Church clothing donation thing in Geneseo this afternoon. That really helped to clean up the living room. Suddenly there is plenty of space in the house again. That was such a huge percentage of the living space of the house just taken up by that. On the way back we swung by Walmart because I wanted to pick up a cheap set of tumblers because we don’t own any and I am always wanting to use one. So I splurged and spent $6 on some. Min ended up really liking them so it worked out pretty well. While we were at Walmart, Andy and I ran into the Ralstons who were shopping there and were buying the Trivial Pursuit 90’s Edition to try playing later this evening.

The Ralstons came over this evening to hang out. Danielle made a tilapia dinner and brought it over. We all had dinner together and then gathered around the dinner table and played Trivial Pursuit. Min won, of course, as she always does. The 90’s edition was really bad with the answers being ridiculously repetitive, the subject matter being boring and an unbelievable number of the questions actually being wrong (with the worst case event of two consecutive cards that contradicted each other!) It really appeared that this edition of TP was made completely by the interns and the editors weren’t even allowed to get involved.

The Ralstons hung out until around 1:30 am before heading home. Min and I had to make our bed before getting into it since she had been doing laundry today. But we were quickly off to sleep.

I don’t have any free days this week. Which is good, I guess, it means that I am getting more busy than I have been recently. That is good. I can’t complain. Even though business has been picking up extremely slowly, it has been picking up. Speaking of businesses, I will be working in Ithaca next week for one night and probably staying there that day.

This morning I had a meeting up in East Rochester about doing some web site design work. I do so many different things, it definitely helps keep life interesting. I really enjoy that I have so many different things that I can do every day. I am so glad that things seldom get old.

My meeting was at 1:00 and I was on the road home around 3:30.

The Buffalo fun is almost over for this week. This afternoon, Andy wanted to go up to Rochester to go to Rowe’s to see if there was any new stereo equipment that he wanted to buy. They are having a two day sale there and he was thinking about getting some stereo components because he doesn’t really own anything now and he is planning on moving out relatively soon. Min slept most of the day and is on the South Beach diet so we really can’t eat together anyway so I decided to go up to the city with Andy. We made a pitstop at my bank and then went to Rowe to see what they had.

I wasn’t too impressed with Rowe’s selection or prices. They didn’t have anything there that I would want to own except for Anthem which is way out of my price range. So I convinced Andy to go over to SoundWorks in Pittsford so that he could see what the competition was.

I am working in Buffalo steady all this week. Next week is Ithaca, Syracuse and Auburn. Nice to change things up.