After the Kirby demonstration last night, Oreo and I were not very tired so I made my dinner and settled into the recliner in the living room to watch Come September with Rock Hudson, Gina Lollobrigida, Bobby Darrin and Sandra Dee from 1961. Then, around three in the morning, Oreo and I headed to bed.
I discovered a high pitched alarm sound as I ascended the stairs. Not what I was expecting as I was heading off to bed. I found that at some point recently my Respironics CPAP machine had gone into error code E-24 and was no longer working but was wailing pretty loudly. This is not good!
I spent twenty minutes or so playing with the CPAP and finally managed to get it to start up before giving the alarm (the alarm disables the unit – what great design) and once the blower started the unit ran fine all night. Pretty scary, though. I guess that I need to deal with this problem right away.
I was pretty tired when I got up to get to work this morning. Oreo was very sleeping on Dominica’s pillow all night. He definitely misses her and is not entirely happy to not have everyone home together. I think that having people in the house vacuuming and shampooing did not do much to calm his nerves either. It has been a long week for a little Boston terrier.
There was actually some real work for me this morning but nothing major. I sure do enjoy the winter industry freeze. It is a good thing that we have it, otherwise the Christmas holiday would be way too difficult to handle with all the traveling and activities and everyone being out of town.
I spoke to Dominica around lunch time today. She hasn’t seen the Kirby yet but she said that it sounded like a good decision based on the amount of repair that already has happened to the carpet. So today I am continuing to do carpet cleaning to try to get the carpet to as close to “as new” condition as is possible. After shampooing you have to vacuum a bit because part of the shampoo process leaves behind some residue that has to be sucked up once it is dry by design.
Our new Onkyo receiver that we bought from Amazon shipped today and is expected to arrive on Friday which is perfect timing since we are giving up the HDMI switch that we currently have on Thursday. Originally the Onkyo was not expected to arrive for several weeks so this is good news.
While I had some time this evening, I began playing the original Fable: The Lost Chapters (the extended second release of Fable including all of the original title plus extra quests) for the XBOX (original, not the 360.) Dominica has already started playing Fable but is not very far ahead of me in the game.
Six Amazon shipments arriving via UPS came around seven this evening! Six more boxes to go into our massive cardboard recycling stack that takes up half of the dining room. We really need a storage spot for empty boxes waiting to be recycled each month. What a silly thing to have causing a storage headache.
I got three movies today: Shinobi, The Forbidden Kingdom and Strange Bedfellows. I also got several books including the Pragmatic Programmer’s new book on programming Groovy (the Java scripting language that runs on the JVM) and two books on Ruby and Ruby on Rails. We also got another atomic clock because you can never have too many clocks that have the right time. This one is a Honeywell unit that also includes weather forecast information and temperature information.
I am hoping to have all of the DVDs that we currently have here in Peekskill converted for the AppleTV before the end of the weekend so that the Ralstons can transport them back to dad’s for us. So I have my desktop and Dominica’s laptop both working on Handbrake conversions tonight. We only have a handful of DVDs to convert – all but two of them are ones that we discovered at the Toccos’ this week while searching for Dominica’s Nintendo DS.
Speaking of the DS, Dominica’s DS is still missing along with a book that was packed somewhere with it and, possibly, a set of keys. It is getting hard to believe that that DS and all of the other stuff have been missing for an entire week with us looking so hard for them!
Most of my evening was spent taking care of Oreo. He is having one of his needy nights where he constantly needs to eat, walk, play, get attention and start the cycle over again with just enough time between each thing that you think that he is done for the night and going to go nap and so you attempt to do something else. It ends up taking two to three hours to take him through his nightly routine on nights like this. Quite exhausting.
So far, after just getting through the “learning” functions of the game and then the first tiny quest, Fable 1 is looking to be really awesome. It is, thus far, much better than I was expecting. I am really impressed by the graphics and dialogue and how closely it resembles Fable 2. I was expecting it to be “older” and more dated than it is. This is a completely enjoyable game that in no way is hurt by the passing of time. No wonder you can still find places selling new copies for $40-$50!
Around midnight I started a serious basement cleaning binge and finally managed to get all of the random stuff that has been collecting all over the basement put away and organized in the basement closet. Lots more space available down here now and the closet is pretty well organized – for the moment. Once the stuff starts pouring in from dad’s house then it will be a different story. Some of the stuff that is in there now will end up going to the attic I think.
I ended up working until two in the morning. I sent out my last email of the night at five after two in the morning. I signed out of my instant messenger and decided to walk away from the basement or I would just keep working until it was way too late (as if two isn’t way too late!)
The plan for tomorrow is to work around the house and continue cleaning in addition to the normal office work, cook Oreo’s food for the week and then, if the weather cooperates and everything is going okay here, to drive up to Frankfort fairly late at night so that I can crash at the Toccos’ and then drive back to Peekskill in the morning with Dominica, Liesl and Oreo.