June 29, 2008: Us, Camping?

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Dominica and I both slept in a bit this morning before getting up and doing a bunch of apartment cleaning that was very much over due.  No one has been visiting us recently and we have been letting the apartment go quite a bit as our schedules have been pretty busy and I have not been working from home as much as usual which always leads to a lack of time for housework.

We found out last night that a new and as yet unnamed Boston Terrier puppy, just nine weeks old, has moved onto our floor at Eleven80.  We haven’t met the new puppy yet but expect to do so soon.  There are now three full time Boston Terrier residents in the building but Oreo is the only mature one.

Around noon Ramona and Winni came by to visit with the intent of playing a small Dungeons and Dragons game.  We haven’t seen either of them in at least two months.  Winni is living in New Hampshire now, but is moving to Frederick, Maryland in a few weeks, and Ramona recently moved from the Ironbound, here in Newark, to Flushing in Queens.

The idea today was to play a quick, little D&D Fourth Edition adventure which Winni had put together just so that we could test out the fourth edition rules, but we didn’t have a lot of time in which to play as they needed to get over to Ramona’s old apartment to deal with some final packing and stuff and none of us had seen in each other in quite a while so we just spent the afternoon visiting.

We ordered in lunch from Nino’s as pretty much everyone was in the mood for some Italian.  We ate and opened a bottle of Miles Wine Cellars 2005 Cabernet Frank which everyone really enjoyed.

Winni and Ramona left around six and I went to work on a few things.  Almost right away while attempting to get my dual monitors working on my new OpenSUSE 11 workstation I did something that caused the root directory to just vanish.  So there was little that I could do but to install again.  So I kicked off another install.  Crappy.

Dominica and I have our nieces coming to visit us sometime in the next couple weeks and we are attempting to figure out what we are going to do.  The original plan was to go see “The Little Mermaid” on Broadway but the cost was going to be astronomic – like close to $600 or more – and we have heard that the show isn’t very good.  We thought about doing the Bronx Zoo and the science center but Dominica doesn’t think that she could spend a day walking at the Bronx Zoo.  We considered spending the weekend at a resort in the Poconos but that was really expensive as well.

Our final idea was to take the girls camping.  Dominica has never been camping (not actual camping) and I have not gone since going t Allegheny National Forest near Warren, Pennsylvania in June, 1994.  I have never owned a tent of my own and things have improved a lot since Eric and I went all of those years ago.  We thought that camping would be pretty expensive but we compared it to the price of going to see a show on Broadway or to a night or two in the Poconos and it turns out that buying all new, top end camping gear would be significantly cheaper – plus it is all reusable.

We hunted around and the best Coleman tent is only $175 from Amazon ($250 MSRP) and the types of sleeping bags that we would need are very cheap.  Some nice LED lights and tent fans (to keep cool) all came up to being very inexpensive.  After looking at the cool gadgets to get Dominica got really excited about camping and has been going crazy shopping for cool camping stuff for the last two days.

We were hoping to be able to camp at a New York State state park but have not been able to find any camp sites that will work for us.  We absolutely need electrical hookup (cheesy for real camping, I know) because I cannot sleep without my CPAP so there is no way around that requirement.  We almost didn’t think of that and might have booked a camp site without power which would have been disastrous, but since we know now that we have to have it it means that we know ahead of time that we can take the laptop and watch movies at night and charge our phones and stuff.  It’s not exactly “roughing it” camping but that really isn’t an option at this point in our lives anymore and that wasn’t quite what Dominica wanted to do anyway.  It does mean, though, that we can never camp at Handsome Lake again which I would have liked to have been able to have done again.

So since the state parks aren’t available to us in July when we need to go we decided to look at KOA (Kampgrounds of America) and many of them come with power and wireless Internet access which is extremely cool.  That means that we can keep in full contact with the outside world and that I don’t even have to go off of being “on call” for the weekend.  I will be able to work as usual while camping giving us a lot more flexibility to do this more often.  Plus, I think, that camping with this level of amenities makes camping a lot more attractive to us in general.  We just don’t live lives that allow for us to completely break contact with the outside world.  We won’t have the camera problems that I have had in the past either since we will always have the car near by in which to store valuables where they can be locked up safe.

So the plan is that sometime in the next two to three weeks that the four of us will head out into the “wilderness” to go camping.  Dominica is even excited about camping recipes and cooking over an open fire!

Tomorrow morning we have a doctor’s appointment in the morning.  I will be working from home before the appointment and Dominica will be off until after lunch.  So she just has a half day.  I will just be “out” for about two hours.

June 28, 2008: House Hunting, Day 2

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My morning started nice and early.  I was online and working starting at a quarter until eight and had to keep working for the office until one thirty in the afternoon.  Almost six hours of work first thing in the morning.  Not the way that I pictured that I would be spending my Saturday mornings when I was a child – I probably thought that I would be busy watching cartoons and eating cereal – but it does help to pay the bills and with the house payments coming up soon it all helps.

At one thirty I quickly jumped into the shower and got ready to go.  Dominica and I were out the door at ten till two.  We met out real estate agent in Peekskill, New York at three.  We had several townhouses which Dominica had picked out to look at today.

The first townhouse wasn’t in the best part of town and had no basement.  For us the basement is very important because we need the storage space, the utility space and a place for me to have computer equipment that isn’t sitting in the “middle of the house.”  While we could make due in a house without a basement it is extremely unlikely that we will find a house that is cost effective for us without one.  Basements are cheap compared to a lot of other types of space, like extra bedrooms, and serve our purposes just as well or better, in many cases.  This first place was nothing special and the current owner hadn’t vacated like he was supposed to have done so we had a really awkward situation of being shown around by both the real estate agent and the owner and not being able to discuss anything.  There were even someone sleeping in one of the rooms that we were there to see.  Luckily we weren’t impressed with the place at all so it wasn’t like that swayed us in any way.  It just wasn’t the right place for us.  Not a bad place, just not a good fit for us.

Our next stop was to a townhouse down in Croton-on-Hudson.  That was its address but in reality it was more like Cortlandt – which might be even better.  This place, a three bedroom with a great deck and a tiny basement, was very nice and we were quite impressed.  The area was gorgeous and the neighbourhood seemed really nice too.  We were impressed with everything.  The price is a little higher than we were hoping for but technically within our range.  It even had a garage.  This one is the first definite consideration that we have seen thus far in all of our house hunting.  Our selection process has definitely improved.

Next we saw two, nearly identical, townhouses in Peekskill on the east side of town.  The first was amazing but expensive and really set up for adults without children.  Lots of living space but very little bedroom / bathroom space.  It would be great if we weren’t planning on having kids but it isn’t what we need now.

The next place was much better.  More modern than the townhouse in Croton-on-Hudson and with more space (1850 sq. ft. vs 1800 sq. ft.) in a more sensible design.  It is only a two bedroom but with three and a half baths, which is awesome.  It had a giant basement.  The yard, street and neighbourhood weren’t as nice as in Croton but the structure is much nicer.  It is also slightly cheaper although the Croton townhouse is a better market value making it a safer investment, but we are thrilled to have two places that we are really interested in on just our second day.

We looked at one final place in a different complex. It wasn’t a great place but the price was really good and we wouldn’t be unhappy if it was all that we could get.  Not a top contender but a decent fall back option.  Now that we know what we are looking for almost everything that we are seeing is a consideration and we know even more for next time.  This last place was smaller and not as nice.  The lack of space would be tough but workable.  If possible we will shoot for at least 1800 square feet.

It was almost seven when we got back home to Newark.  Oreo did pretty well with us being gone.  We would have taken him with us today but it was horribly hot – well over ninety degrees with a heat index several degrees warmer.  He would have been cooking in the car the whole time.  It was really uncomfortable being in the houses that we were looking at because almost none of them were air conditioned in any way, which didn’t seem like a good sales tactic to me.   I realize that keeping them cool would be expensive when no one was living there but it seems to me that making potential buyers feel more comfortable in the house would trigger a happier memory of it as well as make them less likely to want to leave as quickly as possible.  It definitely shortened the amount of time that we spent in almost all of the houses.

I ended up doing a bit more work this evening.  Another two hours throughout the night.  In between bits of work Dominica and I watched some more Third Rock from the Sun. Then she went to bed a bit after eleven and I worked for a while until almost one in the morning.

Today is my first day really working with OpenSUSE 11.0 which I finally got installed on my HP dx5150 desktop (AMD Athlon64 3200+ 64Bit processor with 2.5GB of memory) late last night.  I have it installed at home now and at the office in Microsoft VirtualPC 2007 SP1.  The install went pretty well and so far I am liking what I see.  It is not a major upgrade over OpenSUSE 10.3 which I have been using for the past six months but all of the packages are slightly updated and now FireFox 3.0 is included which is a very big deal.  The big, new “toy” in the system is KDE 4.0.4 which I am excited to try.

June 27, 2008: Hellbender and Mr. Bean’s Holiday

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I worked from home with Oreo today since I went into the office yesterday.  He was totally exhausted after along week of birthday parties at daycare – including his own.  And being eight years old, we think, he is starting to slow down and can’t handle as many parties as he used to be able to even though he still oves having them so much.  He is really enjoy his new stuffed present which was given to him in his birthday bag of goodies.  He has a stuffed present at daycare that comes out only at birthday parties and it is one of his favourite toys there so they got him one of his own to take home.  He loves it.

Nothing remarkable about today.  It was a very busy work day and I put in about thirteen hours which isn’t unusual on a Friday.  I had to work until fairly late.

Mr. Bean’s Holiday came via NetFlix today.  Dominica has been forgetting that she needs to manage the NetFlix queue on a constant basis so we keep getting movies for both of us to see instead of movies just for her since I don’t have enough time to watch as much as she does.  So once I was finally done with work we ordered in a baked ziti pizza from Eli’s Pizza and watched the movie.

We had hopes that Mr. Bean’s Holiday would be better than the ill-fated Bean but it was not to be.  Having the movie set in France added a flair of exoticism, I suppose, but that is about all that the movie had going for it.  The movie was weak and boring, but nothing that we hadn’t expected.  The Mr. Bean vignette style does not lend itself to full length movies very well.

Dominica wasn’t tired so we stayed up until around midnight watching Third Rock from the Sun.  I cracked a bottle of Red Newt’s Hellbender wine which was amazing.  It is one of my new favourite wines from the Finger Lakes.  Unfortunately it is nearly impossible to get anymore.  I don’t believe that they make it any longer.

June 26, 2008: Pound and Pence

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I forgot to mention yesterday that Oreo celebrated his belated birthday at Doggie Paradise yesterday. He loves parties at daycare in general but when it is his own birthday party he is just so incredibly happy. He loves being the special dog of the day and he really knows when it is his party. He wears his hat and sits so cute in the birthday dog chair. It doesn’t take much prompting for him to dive into the specially baked doggy birthday cake. We already have the new photo-collage from his party up in the kitchen. We have had the collage from his party last year up all of this time. As soon as I get the digital pictures from daycare I will post them up on Flickr for everyone to enjoy.

We had to delay Oreo’s birthday party this year – we normally celebrate his birthday in May since we don’t know his actual birthday but he came to live with us in May – because we were busy and traveling a lot during the time when we would normally do it and we were never sure when he would be at daycare. Oreo is most likley eight years old now. He doesn’t act eight at all but he is definitely slowing down and his fur is starting to take on quite a bit of grey. We were told that he was five when we got him in 2005. That would put him at eight now if he had just turned five right as we got him.

I worked from home for a little while this morning. Then I met Katie in Manhattan for lunch at a really cool British Pub at 55 Liberty in Manhattan – The Pount and Pence Pub. The food was good and the beer was great. They serve London Pride which is awesome. It is draught and not manual pull but you can only ask for so much in New York. We got seated upstairs, which is where you are recommended to sit when you look online, and we ate lunch in big, comfy leather seats. It was very cool.

I spent the afternoon working on Wall Street. Then a little after six I headed back home after putting in an eleven hour day since I started at seven in the morning. It is not all that warm out today but the humidity is really high. Not an incredibly comfortable day for long walks in the city.

I got home around seven.  It was a relaxing evening.  Not too much going on around here.

June 25, 2008: Keep Voting for OrbTrak

Support Andy and vote for OrbTrak.  Voting ends on July 2.  That is sooner than you think.  Get out and vote now.  Andy is already in the top two contenders!

I had to be up nice and early this morning so that I could catch the train from Broad Street Station to Warren.  It was a pretty busy day in the office.  I spent quite a bit of time meeting with people today and doing troubleshooting.  Lunch was at a pasta express place just north of the office.

Mostly an uneventful day.  I managed to wrangle up a huge number of votes for Andy as we come into the home stretch of the Dice Tech Challenge.

Dominica got home  a bit before me.  Once I was home we walked over to Blimpie and got ourselves some subs for dinner.  Then we watched some Third Rock from the Sun. Min was asleep by nine which is becoming more and more common for her these days.

Andy and I spent the evening talking on the phone.  We ended up talking for almost four hours!  It was one in the morning when I finally headed off to bed.

Dominica and I are scheduled to go house hunting again this Saturday in the early afternoon up in Peekskill.  Hopefully we all have a better idea of what we are looking for this time around and will have a better lineup of houses.  We found out today that there is a massive pay-cut coming down the pike at my office.  It is already decided and in motion but has not yet taken effect.  We don’t know exactly how the rate cut will trickle down to me.  There is some remote possibility that it won’t come down at all and that the cuts will be absorbed by the system but that seems like a bit of a wild hope.

We were kind of hoping that we could get an LCD television (probably the Westinghouse 1080p LCD Monitor) to put into the living room so that Dominica and I could spend more time together.  We really like having our television in our bedroom but having that be the only television that we have of any sort is quite a problem, and since the DVD player and other devices all have to be mounted on top of a bookshelf it makes using the television for anything but AppleTV very difficult.  We actually keep a ladder unfolded in our bedroom in order to change DVDs!  At this point it looks like we will be waiting on the television.