Jeff Billimek’s Journal

Jen was wide awake this morning when the alarm went off. She was poking me and acting silly. This woke me up. I love being woken up this way. I was running slow this morning and didn't make it out of the house until about 7:30am and arrived at work by 8am.

Like most days now I had lunch by myself today. I went outside and across the park to the good deli place and had a BLT while I read the newspaper. I miss having lunch with my co-workers.

One of the things I like it going outside during lunch time, especially around the park (Centennial Olympic Park) because there are always a lot of families and other happy people spread out enjoying the day. One of the downsides of this new job is that my cubicle is located in an area in which there is no easy access to a window. I never get to see what it is like outside unless I leave the suite and go into the atrium and then it is only a small glimpse through the skylights above.

I was pretty busy and worked hard all day long. Jeff H. came by around 1:30pm and said that I could leave at 2pm if I wanted - he was releasing everyone early in light of the holiday weekend and because traffic will be bad. So I left around 2pm.

Jen and I made plans for her to come to this part of town around 5:30pm so that we could go to the aquarium for the party tonight. She wasn't too excited about this idea and would rather that I drove.

So when I got home early she was pretty happy. I took a short nap and also called up Larry's house. Larry told me about him switching jobs and I wanted to get some more info. He wasn't online the past two or three days which indicated that he either wasn't at work or had already quit. When I called their house, Larry wasn't home but Amy was.

I spoke with Amy for about thirty minutes and got some more details about their plans to relocate to Houston.

Jen and I left the house around 5pm and drove back to where my office is in downtown. We parked at the Georgia Aquarium and went inside. Jen's company is throwing a going-away party for everyone at the Aquarium since they are ceasing operations very soon. We had free parking, admission, and a catered dinner tonight.

The Aquarium was very crowded when we got there at about 5:30pm. It was closing at 6pm so we had about thirty minutes of time with everyone else until it closed.

With the crowds I didn't care for the aquarium at all. It was simply too stifling with all of the people packed everywhere and kids running around and angry parents running into people with their fleet of strollers.

Eventually everyone left except for us and some of Jen's co-workers. We had special orange wristbands which allowed us to stick around after everyone else left.

Now that we had the place to ourselves, Jen and I had a much better time experiencing it. I think I was expecting it to be a little larger than it actually was.

The whales and large fish were fun to look at. My favorite was a type of sea-horse type fish that had what looked to be leaves all over them. This natural camouflage allowed them to blend in quite well.

(jen took this photo of me)

Around 7pm we gained entrance to an exhibit that was closed earlier. It was the 'Ocean Voyager' exhibit with the large fish of all types. This was a pretty impressive exhibit - especially the part where you can walk through a tube with water all around and over you inside the glass tube.

There was a bar setup (we were given four drink tickets). Jen had some wine and I had a whiskey & coke. We mingled and talked with Jen's co-workers.

Eventually it was time to eat and a buffet-style line was setup where we could all fill our plates with good food.

Tables were a bit scarce so we had to go eat on high-top tables inside the glass tube. This was pretty cool because we could eat while watching all of the different fish (over 100,000) swim around overhead. I liked it. It was a bit rough not having any chairs though - we had to stand and eat. I would have preferred if we could sit.

The food was good - especially the sweet cornbread and one of the pastas that they had. Eventually we were all asked to go into another room for coffee and desert.

This room looked really cool. There was a huge viewing area into the same large tank that the tube goes under. We saw the same fish as earlier but it was cool seeing them from a larger area.

What followed was the company presentation about thanking everyone, etc. They ended with the video that Jen had worked on so much. She put in so many hours creating this special DVD montage of pictures of people and around the office. For the final product, someone else made some modifications to what she worked on but for the most part it was all her work. It was a little disappointing that Jen didn't get any recognition for putting so much work into the DVD.

We were pretty tired and went home around 10:30pm. It was nice meeting all of Jen's co-workers and putting some faces to people Jen's talked about a lot.

I woke up this morning after Jen did. When I went downstairs, there was an easter basket out for me. Jen smiled and said that the easter bunny came by and left this for me.

Inside were some brand-new workout clothes as well as some candy. It was pretty exciting and I was happy to get all of these cool things. Jen's really good to me.

After breakfast, Jen watched one of her Netflix movies: 'Pride and Prejudice'. After the movie, we showered, dressed, and headed out to her parent's house.

When we arrived, Katie, Chris, Jen's Mom, and and Jen's Grandmother were already there. Jen's Dad wasn't home because he was working. We had a really nice Easter-Day dinner. We had salad, ham, potatoes, deviled eggs, and couscous that Jen brought. It was was all very good - especially the deviled eggs and potato casserole.

For desert, Katie made a hot peach cobbler with ice cream on top. It was also quite good.

We left around 5pm and went home. After getting home, I did some work on my company laptop using the desktop computer downstairs. I logged into the laptop with remote desktop and it worked quite well.

This mode of using my company laptop works perfectly for me. I can log into it from either the desktop or my personal laptop. The company laptop has a very small screen which isn't conducive to doing work in Visual Studio. If Jennifer needs to use the desktop, I can simple detach from the remote desktop session and re-attach from my personal laptop. Speed isn't really an issue since it is either on the gigabit LAN or the WiFi network.

I finally went to bed around 11:30pm.

Shortly after I got home today, after a very long & stressful week, Jen and I decided to go out for dinner.

We thought a nice relaxing evening at Houston's would be a great way to end the week. We drove over to Houston's, valet-parked my car, and were seated right away.

Jen and I both had the veggie burger, but I had bacon added to mine - I love bacon! Along with dinner, we ordered a bottle of red wine. It was nice to relax, have a nice meal, and enjoy wine.

Jen was out of the house most of the day doing some things with her mother and sister.

I took the opportunity to play around with the Xbox and upgrade the XBMC software to the latest version. I used to simply get the latest source code from CVS and compile using an automated tool that someone wrote. Unfortunately, however, sourceforge has been having major CVS issues for quite a while now so I haven't been able to get the latest source code.

Instead, I broke down and just downloaded a recent build of XBMC (the PIMPED edition build). That seemed to work well.

After I did this, I watched 'Invasion USA'. I remember it being much more entertaining when it first came out in 1985 (I was also 8 or 9 years old at the time too). Now, it wasn't that entertaining. Instead, it was very dark (not like a dark mood, but the technical quality of the film was dark and dingy).

I also called Dad to catch up with him and see how things are going.

I love sleeping in, so it was nice to sleep in today. After waking up I made plans with Jen to go to Costco today since we are hosting a dinner party tonight. We had some lunch and then shortly after that Scott and his girlfriend Kristina came over.

All four of us left to go play some disc golf at Oregon Park in West Cobb. It was somewhat overcast outside when we arrived and as a result the course was fairly empty. As the day progressed, it got sunny and nice out.

We met Brad there and he informed me that my two discs were both putters, so he let me borrow one of his drivers. Brad knows about these things because he is pretty good at disc golf. In all, we had a great time playing and it was also a chance for Jen and I to get to know Kristina better as well.

After playing nine holes we decided to quit and stopped by Starbucks nearby for some coffee (I had iced tea). We parted ways with Brad and then headed to Costco. We bought some supplies for dinner tonight and I managed to sneak in a purchase of some good cookies too.

Once we were done at Costco, we went to a shoe store for Scott who was looking for a new pair of shoes. Finally we went home after that.

Jen and I began preparing for our large dinner tonight. Katie and Chris came over, followed by Jen's parents. This was their first time to meet Scott's girlfriend, Kristina.

In addition to the eight people, we had three dogs: Sydney (a collie), Toby (some type of hound), and Addie (a very large great Dane). It was chaos and I was a little overwhelmed by everything.

To start with, we had wine, cheese, and crackers. Our dinner tonight was shish kabobs that I grilled outside. I had a hard time grilling the shish kabobs for eight people with them having a mix of beef, chicken, tofu, and vegetables. They all don't take the same amount of time to cook.

Jen's mom brought over a really good dish. It was some sort of cheesy chunky potatoes. I loved it!