It is pretty chilly here in the Hudson Valley this week but apparently what we are experiencing is nothing compared to what I have been hearing about from family back home or Twitter friends across the country. Cold but not unreasonable. It is times like this that I really appreciate living in downstate New York rather than Upstate. I love Upstate but in January through March there is no comparison to the lower Hudson’s balmy climate.
We have been in desperate need of some shopping to be done so once I had a lull at work around lunch time Dominica decided to take off and spend about two hours running some errands. We needed some basic stuff like some plastic file folder bins and file folders from Staples (which turned out to be on sale), some earplugs, new waste baskets and other miscellany such as that. She decided to take Oreo with her so that he could visit PetsMart where he got his nails trimmed and his ears cleaned. He doesn’t like getting his nails trimmed, but he is much more happy about having them do it than having us do it. He does enjoy getting his ears cleaned. They are so soft after a good cleaning.
Leaving me alone with Liesl for two hours would normally not be a big deal but she was screaming and very unhappy from the moment that Dominica walked out the door. I had to wear earplugs the entire time as my head was swimming from the pain of my blown eardrums. I am really scared that I am going to go deaf. I really have to start wearing earplugs pretty much all of the time.
Liesl needed to be changed (really changed, like different outfits) immediately and needed to be fed, got sick and then I needed to be changed and a lot of laundry needed to be done. It was a good thing that Oreo was not here since there was no way for me to have been taking care of him as well. Liesl finally ate a bottle and was asking for another just as Dominica arrived home.
We had dinner and watched more of The Dick Van Dyke Show including watching the original pilot from 1958 with Carl Reiner playing the lead instead of Dick Van Dyck (the show was originally to be called “Head of the Family”.) I love Carl Reiner but that pilot was awful. It is amazing that the later show was ever made after seeing that. It is also amazing how much better the show made in 1962 looked than the one from 1958. A show from 1988 and 1992 look identical but there was a lot of advanced made in television filming at that point, I guess. One was blurry and had no contrast and the other is an example of how good monochrome television could look.
After dinner, Dominica decided that Liesl was sleeping early and that this was going to be her one chance to run to the grocery store to do the week’s shopping. So Liesl, Oreo and I stayed home alone while Dominica went out again. Leaving me alone with Liesl twice in one day – this is a first, and for a total of over three hours! That is just crazy.
Liesl slept pretty much the entire time that Dominica was gone but Oreo needed to be walked and given a lot of attention while she was out. Once Oreo calmed down and settled in to chewing a dingo bone I fired up Fable 2 and spent some time wandering Knothole Island looking for Volume 2 of the history of Knothole Island which somehow I missed on my first pass through the quests.
It wasn’t until after Dominica got home that we finally found the final book and I acquired the Bibliophile achievement in Fable 2. That is 25 additional gamer points. Tomorrow I am hoping to get all of the items from the curiosity shop to complete every possible task in Knothole Island. That should not take long at all.
My big project for today was wrapping up some Subversion via Apache with Active Directory via Kerberos integration. It took some doing but I have it working really well now. Using AD as an SSO solution works really well but setup is not always the easiest. I am really glad to have that working now.
After Dominica was home and we located the final book we put on Hulu and I started carrying up paperwork from the basement that needed to be sorted through. Dominica picked up those bins today so that we could sort through all of the paperwork that has amassed throughout the house and sort it into bins that can be stored someplace useful – like in the attic maybe. Almost all of the paperwork is long-term storage “just in case” kind of stuff and nothing that we plan to ever need to go through again but hate to just throw away.
I sorted through several large piles of paperwork before calling it a night. We are doing this now, with a high priority, because we realized that we have misplaced the American Express card. It came in a stack of mail recently and we expect is lost in the piles and piles of paperwork all over the house. So we are trying to dig it out. There is so much, though, that it is going to be a challenge.