February 14, 2006: Happy St. Valentine’s Day

Today Dominica had to get up early and I got to sleep in with Oreo. He wasn’t much in the mood for being snuggly, though. As soon as Dominica was out of bed he moved over and slept on her pillow. 🙁 Neither Oreo nor I felt much like sleeping in this morning and we were both up long before Dominica even left the house.

Dominica made me promise that we were not going to do anything for St. Valentine’s Day. She has decided that it is just a commercial holiday without any real meaning and so she thinks that it is okay to ignore the entire thing. Works for me. I have never held much stock in the whole holiday thing anyway. If I didn’t like Christmas songs so much I would completely ignore the entire Christmas season. My biggest complaint today is that Ask A Ninja didn’t do a special Valentine’s Day Special Episode or something. That would have been really cool.

Oreo slept most of the day with me. I just worked around the house. I didn’t even really eat anything until Min got home so that we could go out to get dinner together. She got home at about 4:30 and we ran over to the Omega. That place was dead today. This was our big Valentine’s Day dinner. We came home and watched that new Reese Witherspoon movie. Something like Heaven Can Wait but I have no idea what it is really called. Min watched it and I ended up on the phone working for most of it. I really don’t like Reese Witherspoon anymore. She was great in A Far Off Place and Man in the Moon but she just hasn’t kept up the quality. Now she just does Hollywood fodder. Blah, I say to you. Blah.

Dad wanted to go out to see The Pink Panther this evening so he came over at 6:30 to pick us up. I took Oreo out just before we left and he started limping really badly. I am pretty sure that the problem has been with his rear right hip and not with his stomach at all these last few days. So we called the vet and he said to put him onto aspirin to reduce the inflamation. We didn’t have any aspirin so dad and Dominica drove over to Walmart to pick some up and I stayed home to watch Oreo. He was certainly in a bit of pain. He appears to be able to walk fine after he works out whatever the problem is but when it comes on it is really bad and he almost falls over. When they got back dad decided that it wasn’t a good night for a movie so he went back home.

Dominica and I decided to just stay in and spend some time watching over the dog. So we finally got around to watching Spanglish which ended up being a really good movie. I was really impressed. Adam Sandler needs to do more serious acting like that. He is much better being a light element in a serious film rather than being a silly element in a ridiculous film. I was very happy to have noticed that Paz Vega was not actually Mexican but Spanish. I figured it out from her accent. No small feat for a non-Spanish speaking American – world renowned for our inability to recognize cultural nuances.

After Spanglish we watched Ocean’s Twelve – not particularly because we were in the mood for it but because it was sitting upstairs in the living room and it meant that we didn’t have to go looking for it. It wasn’t a bad movie. Nothing really special. It is unbelievable how many people they get to be in such a middle of the road movie.

Tonight is the night that Microsoft rolls out their security updates and I always end up getting called early on Wednesday mornings because that always causes some disaster to happen so tonight I decided to stay up and deal with the problems myself before anything could go wrong. So at midnight when Dominica went to bed I went into the office and applied the updates and did a full system backup while I was taking everything down. It was a good opportunity to take care of a few things at once. While I was doing the system backup Oreo decided to get back out of bed and make me take him for a walk. I was quite happy that he was feeling good enough to want to walk but wasn’t too pleased with his timing. We ended up walking for about half an hour or so. He was plenty tired, as was I, by the time that we returned. I am very thankful that tonight is not one of the bitter cold New York nights. There is hardly any snow or ice on the ground and it is only mildly windy – mildly windy in Western New York is like saying blustery anywhere else. Unfortunately he caught be off guard as we went out so I was not wearing walking shoes and was only wearing a light fleece and not a jacket at all. And I didn’t take my mp3 player. But I needed the excercise so I shouldn’t complain.

It was just a little before 2:00 in the morning before I had a chance to get to bed.

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