January 5, 2009: Back to Normal Work

Today is the first day back to “normal work” after the financial industry freeze has lifted.  So I was up at eight thirty and down to the basement to work.  Oreo came down with me as he always does in the morning.  Today he found his inflatable ball in the middle of the room and played for a good twenty minutes.  He was very excited.

Work ended up being much slower today that I had assumed that it would be.  It was not bad at all.

I spoke to the management at Eleven80 today and our deposit for the apartment is on its way back to us (with over two years of interest from the savings account that it was in during that time.)  We are getting back all of the deposit, not just some of it.  So we have enough to be able to buy the new 52″ Samsung LCD that we want for the living room and will still have some money left over to put into the bank.  That is awesome.  We were thinking that they were going to charge us a minimum of two hundred or so for carpet cleaning or something.  Although we did have the whole place professionally cleaned after we had moved everything out of it.

At eleven thirty Dominica and I took Liesl to her doctor’s appointment.  Just a checkup to make sure that this are going as they should.  Liesl weighed in at 9lbs. 6oz. today which puts her at the perfect weight for her age (five and a half weeks) so everything is looking good.  We got to meet another doctor in her pediatric practice today.  We really like this doctor.  It was really easy to deal with him.

We got home and I played some Oblivion during the lunch break.  I was on my BlackBerry checking emails and working when things came up but very little did.

I have been playing enough Oblivion now that I am starting to get back into the game.  What a huge game that is.  I have heard that it takes roughly two hundred hours to complete the main game itself and possibly another one to two hundred hours for the Shivering Isles part of the game and a nice additional chunk for the Knights of the Nine portion.  I really want to play through the game but four to five hundred hours of gameplay is a daunting task.

The afternoon was quite slow.  A mixture or work and relaxing.  Dominica and Liesl ended up taking a very long nap on the recliner from mid-afternoon until the middle of the evening.  We didn’t end up being able to have dinner until after ten at night because we didn’t remember to thaw the frozen tofu that we needed for our PB-BBQ Tofu and Hokkian noodles.

Tonight was watched Prince Caspian on BluRay which I have been dying to see for a long time.  C. S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia were my childhood books which my mother read to me and recorded while reading onto cassette and that I then listened to over and over again all throughout my younger years.  There are no books that I know better or are more passionate about.

Overall I thought that the movie was really good.  It was more true to the book that I had thought that it was going to be.  This particular title is a bit more challenging to make, I think, than some of the others like TLTW&TW and Voyage which are more adventure oriented.  This one was more political in nature and had more interpersonal interactions.  In general I was quite pleased with the film and am very much looking forward to the next installment – Voyage of the Dawn Treader which is the most “adventure” oriented of the series.

What I really hope happens is that the entire series gets created and not just some of the titles.  A few of them are going to be very challening such as The Magician’s Nephew and The Last Battle which are so different from the others that I am wondering what they will do for them.  Leaving them out would be horrible though.  Right now they are doing such a good job with the more popularly known titles that it would be a shame to not do the whole series justice.  It is very common for people doing anything with the series to simply ignore the three lesser known or understood works and to focus only on the more action oriented titles (and sometimes that involves skipping The Silver Chair too even though it is the most Lord of the Rings feeling of any of the books.)

Still no mailbox keys.  I think that we are making the decision to have the lock replaced in the morning.

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