Sheep Guarding Llama

I was up at 9:08 this morning. A little late for going into the office but any less sleep and I would have been useless all day. My sinuses are still killing me so it isn’t very likely that this is an allergic reaction. I got ready quickly and got up to the office.

It was really hard to work today. My sinuses are better than yesterday but not good. It is really hard to get much of anything done when you are congested and have a headache and are occassionally crying (my eyes will be dry all day and then suddenly tear out of control.)

While I was at lunch I discovered that my lips were in really bad shape and were starting to peel. It is mild frostbite from Saturday night’s run in with the ice cream. This is going to suck.

Dominica found Ok Go on the Treadmills on YouTube today. This is one of the funniest dance videos that I have ever seen. Everyone will enjoy this little treasure. Ok Go is a British band that I don’t really know but boy are they ever funny. Here is what is apparently their more famous dance routine that they have done a number of places. And if you think that is weird then you can watch the same routine done by two girls with way too much time on their hands.

I came home a little early because I was pretty useless in the office with my horrible cold. I ate leftovers and Dominica made herself a South Beach diet casserole. We watched two episodes of Ballykissangel and decided to call it a night at 9:30. We both have colds now and figured that it would be smart to get some extra sleep in the hopes of fighting them back.

I woke up this morning with the runniest nose that I have ever had in my life. It was awful and it lasted all day. It woke me up long before I should have been getting up. I was awake by 7:45 which was brutal after the long day yesterday and getting to bed after 4:00 this morning. My sinuses were going nuts so I took a shower right away hoping that that might help. It didn’t.

Dominica got up an hour or so later and then dad came over to get breakfast with us at 10:15. We were able to just relax and hang out at breakfast for about two hours. We were, of course, at the Omega Grill.

After breakfast, which was almost lunch, Dominica and I had to head up to Pittsford (on the east side of Rochester) to do some work for TMobile. We are still wrapping up a project that was started in December and this one location is lingering on. It took a few hours but not nearly as long as it might have and we were happy, overall, with how it went today.

We drove down to dad’s house to pick up Oreo and to see the changes on the farm since we have been gone. Dad and Oreo were in the back yard playing frisbee when we pulled in. Oreo just loves getting to go out to the farm. He can just run and run forever. He has such a good time and gets really worn out.

The farm has really changed since the last time I was home. The pool is gone, the whole pool “deck” area is gone, the basketball court if gone, the parking lot is gone, the foundation of the cabana is gone. There isn’t any grass growing in yet so you can still see these different areas almost as if there were still there but you can start to picture the place as nothing but a single, uninterrupted sea of grass.

We all drove over to Denny’s in Geneseo and got some dinner. We were all quite hungry. We ate and then it was time to return to New Jersey. My allergies or cold or whatever it was was acting up all day and I needed to have Dominica drive the first length of the journey for me. She drove until around Corning and then I drove until a little east of Phillipsburg, NJ when she took back over and finished off the drive. By the end I was so tired that I couldn’t stay awake at all.

It was pretty late by the time we rolled into North Brunswick. I was so tired that I can’t really remember getting in very well but it was between 2:30 and 3:00 in the morning. We unpacked the car and Dominica did some work in the kitchen getting things put away. I went right to bed and Oreo came and snuggled. I didn’t even get the light turned off or anything. I was out in no time.

Today is Bob Winans’ bachelour party in Syracuse. Lots of driving for us today. Dominica and I were up at 6:30 this morning to get ready to go. After getting very little sleep last night that wasn’t the best way to go.

We were doing well for time and were going to be able to leave North Brunswick before 8:00 but as we were getting ready to leave I was leaning on the side of the BMW getting Oreo buckled in when a plastic piece that is a part of the top that goes up and down snapped off and fell into the car. With that piece out of place we were unable to move the roof which could be important should it rain or we need to lock the car or anything. So we spent about fourty-five minutes getting that fixed. Finally we got it back in place and everything was better. Or so we thought.

About halfway from North Brunswick to Ithaca we stopped at a rest stop and when we went to get back into the car discovered that the passenger’s door handle from the outside had broken and there was no way to open the door without getting in from the driver’s side and opening the door from the inside. Later in the day we would discover that there was a part loose from this breakage that was in the door and blocking the window from going down safely. What a day.

We ran into a big accident just south of Binghamton and that cost us a bit of time too. It was a tough journey. All of the way from Owego to Danby we were stuck in the slowest, most obnoxious “weekend driver” traffic that we could never get past. Argh.

It was 1:15ish when Dominica and I arrived at Nate and Tammy Parker’s place in T-Burg. We ate some veggie burgers really quickly and then Nate and I drove north with the BMW while Dominica and Tammy went out to Geneseo in the Parker minivan. Nate and I were running a little late but not too bad. We thought that golf tee time was going to be 3:00 and we were indending to meet everyone there. But it turned out that Bob was pretty sick so everyone was just hanging out at his parents’ house in Minoa (get it, Minoa… Syracuse… Ithaca… it’s modeled after Greece – which is a suburb of Rochester) until he started to feel better.

There were seven of us for golf and dinner – Nate, Zach, Tim, Pete (Bob’s brother), Pete (Bob’s father), Me and, of course, Bob. We just played nine holes then it was time to go get dinner. But on the way we were going to go to Bob’s parents’ house to change the cars around. On the way there was an ice cream truck coming past so I offered to jump out and get Bob some ice cream for his party (he was driving the BMW and I was riding – everyone else was in the van.) I grabbed us some popsicles. I took one lick of the bubblegum flavoured popsicle and before I could react, I had frozen to it. And I am not kidding here, this is serious freezing. I was stuck. It bumped my bottom lip and that froze too. I looked to Bob in a panic and in trying to get him to understand what had happened my top lip bumped the popsicles and my mouth sealed shut! Now I was unable to blow warm air across it in the hopes of melting it and I could feel my lips and tongue getting really cold quite quickly. This is, by the, the coldest food item I have ever encountered.

Bob drove us quickly back to his parents’ house and we ran inside and got the hot water running and poured about eight glasses of quite hot water over my lips to get them open again. After all of that time in the August heat, in the sunlight – probably as much as five minutes – it still took eight glasses of hot water to get it cool enough for me to open my mouth! After that Bob tested his popsicle and determined that it was still so cold that he could not safely eat it either. Now this makes for an awesome bachelour party story!

We had dinner at Zebb’s and then it was off to play some Lazer Tag for Nate, Bob, Zach and I. Everyone else headed for home at that point. I have never played real Lazer Tag before although I have really wanted to every since I was a little kid. It was a lot like playing the video game Quake II but with real people. It was awesome. I had a really good time. It was pretty late and we only managed to play two games before the end of the night. In the first game I had a lot of problems figuring out what to do and what the objective was (it is actually a capture the flag style game but we didn’t know that at first.) So I ended up coming in dead last. But then again, I was the old, fat guy so what do you expect. I am the oldest (I believe) of the four of us and all of us were twice the age of the twenty kids that we were playing against. But by the second game I had figured out the layout of the arena, how the equipment worked, how the scoring worked and what the objective was and then it was game time. That’s right, the old guy won. First place, baby! Those teenagers didn’t stand a chance (I learned from Joel Spolsky’s blog that when firing on people you should run at them because you keep getting an easier and easier target and they are forced to take cover so they can’t take the time to shoot at you.) Our team won as well, I believe. We managed to own (or pwn as they say these days) both of the other teams’ flags and protected our own quite well. I made more points defending our base then I earned taking the others. We had a blast. I have to convince Dominica to try this out for some serious excercise. I thought that I was going to keel over from a heart attack after playing two rounds.

We were all old and decide that we couldn’t really stay out late. We stopped at Tully’s and grabbed some soda and then headed for home. Nate drove the BMW back to Perry and then I drove it to Geneseo. It was about four in the morning by the time that I rolled in and went to bed. Boy was I tired.

I had to get up by 4:45 this morning and be on the road by 5:40. My work day started at 6:30 which is a little on the early side for me. Especially since I have been doing the later shift now for the past two months. Almost everyday has been starting with me getting in to the office between 9:00 and 10:00 and staying until quite late. Shifting my day forward by three hours is a bit drastic for only a half day warning but I feel pretty good.

For lunch a bunch of us drove up to Moghul in Morristown to meet with my ex-cubicle neighbour for lunch. He is working near there this week and was able to meet us easily. There was a lot of construction blocking US 287 southbound so we decided to take the local roads instead to get back. This was probably a big mistake as it ended up taking forever to get back going that way.

I was able to leave work on the early side since I was in to work so early and got home ahead of rush hour which was awesome as I was able to spend the evening relaxing at home. For dinner we ran out to the Omega since they have the Crab Cakes on Mac and Cheese that I like so much on Friday nights as the special.

I was totally quoted by Baseline Magazine tonight. Paragraphs three and four are from me. It isn’t much of a quote and it isn’t credited but it is in my favourite rag so that is really awesome. I am quite excited about it.

We had to get to bed on the early side tonight as tomorrow is an early travel day.

Today is my work from home day this week. Because I have been so busy at work I am not sure that working from home makes very much sense, though. My connection to work is really slow and for some reason the remote access client has started saying that I have a cache issue on my Linux box so I am using my Windows laptop to access work which means that I am dropping from a 1600×1200 screen down to a 1024×768 which really affects my ability to get things done. (For those not wanting to do the math themselves, that means that I was getting only 41% of the screen real estate that I am used to!)

Like the past few days today was slammin’ busy. But at least I didn’t have to commute in to the office. I still had to spend several hours on the phone. I worked all day including through lunch. I didn’t take any breaks at all until 7:00 in the evening!

Dominica went out and did some shopping during the day. She bought a second laptop desk for herself. We were so happy with our first one that we figured having two of them would be a good idea. She ended up buying the very last one that Office Depot had. They are a unit custom built for Office Depot and they have been discontinued which is really sad as it was a great product.

I did manage, here and there, to get in a little work on the asset tracking system that I have been working on. So far the MySQL database has reached 32 tables (an impressive number for those in the know) and I expect it to be much, much higher very soon. I am quite happy with how my little project is coming along. I am getting a lot of the basic functionality out of the way and getting the code pretty tight so that it is really easy for me to work on and expand down the road. This is a pretty large programming project for me. I seldom do any programming and almost never on a scale like this. It is still really small but it has been a lot of fun.

I wanted to get out of the house this evening so Dominica and I went over to the Omega Diner. I just needed a break from sitting in the house all day.

We got home and Dominica worked on knitting and reading her assigned reading for class. She has discovered that she can knit and read at the same time using the new laptop desk so she is much more happy and much more productive. She managed to get a lot of reading done tonight. She was quite productive.

For the past few months, since the weather had been hot and the humidity has been out of control, I have heard a dripping sound coming from the center of the house. From time to time I have looked into the furnace “room” and have found standing water on the floor but was never able to actually located the source of the water. Tonight it got so bad that I decided to be a bit more intrusive in looking for the source of the water.

I had also looked previously for the air filter for the furnace knowing that it would have to be changed (which shouldn’t be something that I have to do in an apartment but no one ever does what they are supposed to do) but there was clearly no filter on the furnace nor was there any place to put one. Dad had mentioned that I needed to change the filter for the air conditioning to work better but I looked several times and there was most assuredly none to be foune. I even made Dominica look tonight and she verified that there was none nor was there a spot for one.

I had always felt that the dripping sound came from the wall with the cold air return that was not quite adjacent to the furnace. I looked at the air intake a little more carefully and discovered that I was able to toolessly pull the panel off. I looked in and saw nothing. It is in an area of the house with very poor lighting so there wasn’t much opportunity to see anything in there but it looked just like an empty duct so I put the cover back on.

We did more searching and found nothing so we decided to get a lamp and to try to intake ductwork again. This time I lay on the floor so that I could get a clear view into the duct and with the help of the lamp was able to identify the air filter slot that was empty and a little but behind it was the remains of the old air filter that was so clogged with dirt and limp from water that it had collapsed and been sucked into the furnace fan. It took a while to identify everything as things were not where they were supposed to be and the fan spindle was sticking through the middle of the filter. The filter wasn’t blue but was the color of dirt so it blended into everything in the darkness. We had to shut down the furnace and use a mop handle to pull the filter out. It was several feet inside of the wall. I have never seen or heard of anything so bizarre before. How anyone could possibly be expected to find this I have no idea.

The furnace fan area was the source of the dripping water. Water was pouring in from somewhere above the fan that I could no identify since they built it into the wall but there was a lot of water coming down and some of it was getting sucked straight into the fan. Hopefully without the filter in place maybe the water will stop collecting and will start to dry up. Dominica will attempt to find a filter tomorrow.

We turned the air conditioning back on and could instantly feel the increased air flow in the house. What a difference this is going to make. During the night the air conditioning only ran occassionally and managed to keep the house quite cool. I can’t believe that we didn’t manage to find this until after the massive heat wave that we had last week.

I had to get to bed early tonight. I am doing the early morning coverage tomorrow at the office which means that I have to be up just after 4:30!