Sheep Guarding Llama

I hate when I start getting so far behind on SGL. Things always snowball. First I get busy, then I go out of town, then I don’t feel like posting because I know how far behind I am and it feels daunting – so I avoid it. Well, here I am trying to catch up again.

Min and I had to get up earlier than usual this morning so that we could go over to dad’s and take Oreo out so that he wouldn’t be left alone for too long while we were at church. He is pretty good being on his own but he isn’t able to handle long periods of time without being able to go outside. So we try to minimize it as much as possible. So we went over there around 10:00 this morning and played with him for about half an hour. As always, he was very glad to see us.

Church at 11:00 as usual at LaGrange. We were surpised to see Garrett and Beth there today (Garrett is the associate pastor of Eric and Amanda’s church in Avon.) We didn’t realize that Beth’s grandmother was Ruth Stockin who goes to LaGrange and was my Sunday School teacher ages ago when I was little.

After church we managed to get over to Perry to have lunch at the Silver Lake Family Restaurant. We haven’t been there in a long time. We were all missing our regular Sunday lunch. After lunch, Min really wanted to spend time with Oreo so we went back over to dad’s and played with the dog some more. No one had a lot of energy so we just popped in a DVD and watched that while snuggling with Oreo. He was pretty tired so it worked out reasonably well. We watched Bicentennial Man with Robin Williams which I have never seen. It was one of dad’s movies. It was good. I have heard a lot of people complain about it but I thought that it was very well done.

Min didn’t want to stop spending time with Oreo so we took him with us to dinner at Tom Wahl’s in Avon and ate outside with him. He was very happy to have the chance to go with us. After Wahl’s, we got ice cream at Woody’s II on Genesee St. They have the best ice cream there. Then Min drove me home to drop me off so that I could be productive while she went back to dad’s to stay with Oreo until dad got home from visiting with grandma.

Andy was out when we got in so Min stayed for a while. Art and Danielle stopped by because they were in town and ended up staying until around midnight hanging out. The new living room setup is much more conducive to people hanging out there and it really shows. And it is really handy having a computer in the living room because it now allows us to look things up without leaving the room. We find that we are always looking things up and that I always have to go somewhere to look things up for people and that doesn’t work very well when you are trying to be social. So Min never got a chance to take Oreo home so he is staying the night with us. Yay!

Mary stopped by after work just to say that Jocelyn was sick so they weren’t going to be hanging out tonight like they had planned.

Min has to work tomorrow afternoon. I have the day off for the holiday. I will be going up to Craig’s in the afternoon/evening for the wedding reception. Tuesday morning I leave for New Jersey. I will be there until Thursday. John Nicklin is supposed to be in town this week – we will see if I even manage to see him at all.

Min has often told me about her family’s old computer that they used to use. Andy and I are not familiar with the machine and Min always claimed that it was a rare IBM PC clone. So I finally looked it up and am providing a link here to it so that if we ever need to find out more about it, it will be accessible right here. It was the 1988 Commodore Colt which sported a hot Intel 8088 8/16 bit processor, 640K of memory, a 5 1/4″ floppy drive and, this is the big bonus, a 20 MB hard drive. Not a very impressive machine for 1988. This machine was severly underpowered for its era.

I was planning on doing all kinds of work today but that didn’t end up happening at all. Min slept in late after partying last night. As always after a party, I was up pretty early. Not sure how that works but it seems to always work out that way. I was up by 9:30 (yeah, that is four hours of sleep) and I didn’t use an alarm or anything. I was just wide awake and got up.

Dad called at 11:00 to make lunch plans and came over to pick up Min and I at 11:30. Mary and Jocelyn moved from sleeping on the futon to sleeping in Min and my bedroom so that they could avoid the crowds around the house. Mary has to work at 3:00 so she needs to get her sleep in now.

We had lunch at the Omega and then dad came over and hung up Min and my wedding quilt which has been waiting to be mounted on the wall since our wedding! Yeah, that is a LONG time for the quilt to be waiting. There is only one wall in the entire house that is able to fit the quilt but luckily it just fit. It looks really awesome hanging on the living room wall. Hopefully I will be able to get a picture of it for everyone soon. It is good timing getting it hung because we just got the living room totally reorganized as well so it is almost like having an entirely new house.

Mary and Jocelyn finally got up around 1:30 and had some breakfast before Mary had to go to work. Dad left around the same time.

After everyone left, Min decided that she really, really needed to go shopping up in the city. She has just received a $50 gift card to Michael’s craft store and wants to go look at yarn. So she finally convinced me to go with her (ugh) and we headed up to the city. I dropped Min off at Michael’s and I went on to Office Depot to look at desk options for our bedroom. Now that our bedroom computer desk/armoir has been moved to the living room we need something in our bedroom. We use computers in almost every room of the house all of the time so we really need to just realize that we do this and set the house up to work as well with that going on as possible. So far so good.

I managed to find a small metal and glass computer cart that I thought would be a good fit for our bedroom. We need something really small. The old desk was just huge and it caused a lot of problems. So we are looking for something that will take up a lot less space and be less of a focal point in the room. I didn’t feel comfortable deciding on the desk all by myself so I went back over to Michael’s and got Min and brought her back to look at it.

Min wasn’t totally thrilled with the desk but finally admitted that it was a very practicable style and that the cost really was a big deal since it was considerably less than anything else that we had looked at anywhere. So we decided to go with it. Then I drove her back to Michael’s and I went to Borders to kill some time since there is nothing for me to look at at Michael’s at all.

We got home from shopping around 7:00. It took us several hours to get nothing but a small computer cart and some clearance knitting needles. Andy came home with Tony just a few minutes after we got in. They all decided that they wanted to play a little AoE2 so I agreed. I shouldn’t have. We have been playing too much recently and it is wearing on me. I am starting to lose my ability to be interested in the game or to concentrate on it at all. We have just played so much. I think that I might be pretty close to calling it quits on that game. Time to retire it and move onto something a little bit newer and, hopefully, more involved. It is sad but this has been a mainstay game for all of us for several years now so we can’t say that we haven’t gotten tons of use out of it. I just hope that something comes along soon that has the same kind of excitement and longetivity for us. So far only Quake II, Quake III and Age of Empires II have lasted at all. Call of Duty is good but has never gotten the game play of the others. And Quake III hasn’t had nearly the game play of Quake II. Really Q2 and AoE2 are in categories of their own.

Speaking of video games, I suggest that everyone on a Windows machine that can remember the days of Spy Hunter on the Apple ][ go and download Highway Pursuit which is a really rocking remake of the game using 3D acceleration. It isn’t the most amazing game ever but it is super addicting for a free game. And, maybe you didn’t catch this, it is free. For people who are really into free games, don’t forget that the Anonymous Game Developers are still hard at work making Sierra classic remakes that blow away the originals. There are still only two remakes completed but the third one promises to be very good and I am really looking forward to it releasing. I have mentioned them on here before but it has been a long time. So if you haven’t tried out their games yet, go download King’s Quest I and II. You will be glad that you did. The originals of these games were some of my favourite games ever. But keep in mind that they were made on 16-bit early PC’s (anyone remember the IBM PC Jr.? My dad almost bought that computer for my family before deciding on the much cooler Commodore Amiga 1000.

Today was enjoy the deck day. Min got the umbrella set up on the deck earlier this week and got the screen attached to it so we have a semi-enclosure out on the deck to hang out in now. This afternoon I went out and help Min get the screen bottom filled with water to hold it down. Once we did that it started working better and we were actually able to start using it.

I took the laptop out onto the deck and did what work I could from out there. The weather was very pleasent so it worked really well being outside for most of the day. Andy came out and hung out for quite a while too. He and Min decided that they wanted to party tonight so they called Mary and Jocelyn and convinced them to come over to party and then they went out to get party supplies at Wegmans.

Oreo is with us today so he got to hang out with us on the deck all day. He really enjoyed that. He is such a good dog. He just gets up onto a deck chair beside the one that I am on and sleeps beside me. It is very sweet.

The party got started after Jocelyn brought Mary over after work. That was about 11:45. So we got started pretty late. Min, Jocelyn and Andy were all asleep around 3:30 but Mary and I kept on going until around 5:30. We were all sitting around the living room watching first Season One of Coupling and then moving on to Season Three!

The year is half over. How time does fly. I really don’t think that there is any good reason to write about how time flies in a diary site like this but I do it so deal with it. 😛

Min had me help her to disassemble her computer desk/armoir today which was no small task. Just unloading all of the junk from it was a major undertaking. Then, once the contents of the desk were strewn across the bedroom, Min got to have the fun task of actually taking the unit apart. It is a large, heavy unit that can’t be moved as a single piece. So that was a major project in and of itself as well. All in all, it took several hours to get the unit moved from the bedroom to the living room just about ten feet away. Then it had to be reassembled and then we had to get it hooked up with a computer and filled with books and this and that.

We were rushing to get the living room back into reasonable order before Eric and Amanda came over to hang out. They were coming over to visit after going to Rachel’s soccer practice. They arrived around 8:15 and we ordered a pizza from Pizza Hut. Food from there is SO expensive. It must literally cost double what it costs to get pizza from anywhere else in town. It is ridiculous. Their pizza is good but it is only my third or fourth favourite just in Geneseo alone and not worth the price at all. (News from the rumor mill – Geneseo is getting an Applebys, Home Depot AND an Olive Garden this year. Yay!)

PH doesn’t deliver so Eric and I had to run out and pick up the pizza. What a pain. Just another reason why I stick with Mia’s when it is up to me. He and Amanda needed some Julia supplies so we went over to Wegmans before getting the pizza.

We got home with the pizza and we all sat out on the porch eating. That didn’t last long, though, because the insect were absolutely out of control and not everyone fit comfortably inside of the screening. So Eric and I ended up heading inside.

One of the great new features of the layout of the living room is that the comuter that goes onto the computer desk can act as a television for the living room. That was part of our plan from the beginning. So Eric and I popped in some Red Dward Season Five and watched a couple of episodes while the girls hung out on the deck.

I slept in LATE today. Boy was I tired last night. I woke up around noon but didn’t get out of bed because Oreo was being so snuggly. He is starting to get comfortable with us and we think that he has finally realized that we are his permanent family now. He seems to be much more happy. We spent a lot of the afternoon playing with him. He loves staying with us because we spend so much time with him.

We decided that we wanted to go to the drive-in this evening so we called the Ralstons to see if they wanted to go with us. They are often bored on Saturday afternoons. So they decided that that sounded like a good idea. Min called and the drive-in allows dogs so we are taking Oreo with us. He loves going anywhere in the car and is very comfortable sleeping in the car so he will be very happy to be going with us. Pizza and ice cream for dinner sounded awfully good to me so I am pretty excited. We are going to see Herbie: Fully Loaded which is, I believe, the sixth Herbie movie (No. 1: The Love Bug, No. 2: Herbie Goes Bananas, No. 3: Herbie Rides Again, No. 4: Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo and No. 5: The Bruce Campbell Remake Herbie).

So I am posting early today before we go to the movies. Have a good weekend everyone. Min and I are going to church with Eric and Amanda tomorrow morning for Julie and Rachel’s dedication. Then we are zipping off to Frankfort for Min’s cousin Glen’s High School Graduation Party. We will be home around 7:00, we think. I am working in Philadelphia on Monday, if I have my schedule right, and will be around the rest of the week.