January 16, 2011: Blues Clues, The Sims 3 and New Europe

I got up at eight this morning.  Dominica and Liesl were up just minutes after me.  Liesl immediately demanded breakfast (S’mores Poptarts) and to watch Blues’ Clues which she has started getting into since having been in Frankfort for Christmas.

My first project this morning was to do some additional carpet cleaning in the living room where, no matter how hard we try, there seem to be an unlimited number of lingering floor stains from the previous home owners.

Souder’s schedule got thrown off this morning so he is not coming over to work on the wiring.  Dominica settled into the living room to play some Sims this morning.  I worked on light stuff like SGL, some forum posts, installing Xen Cloud Platform to test it out, etc.

Liesl manage to talk on the phone for the first time today.  Sure she had held the phone, maybe said a few words, listened to people before but today was the first time that she immediately took the phone from Dominica, said “Hello grandpa” and told him about the drink of water that she had just got and that she had to go watch more of Blues Clues.  She wasn’t shy and immediately just talked on the phone at an appropriate volume.  A major breakthrough!

Liesl decided that today was a day off from playing and that she was going to watch Blues Clues all day.  She doesn’t often watch very much television anymore so her taking a day to really spend in from of the television doesn’t seem so bad.  She likes to spend time on her own just playing in our bedroom with her shows on from Netflix.  It is amazing how good she is at entertaining herself.  We sometimes forget about her for hours at a time because she goes off somewhere and just plays quietly with her Little People, her plastic animals or some other toy.  She is so funny.  During the day when Dominica is in the living room Liesl will often go into our bedroom and in the evenings when we often like to watch shows in our bedroom (on the only television in the house) Liesl likes to go into the living room to play quietly on her own and just stops in every hour or so to check in on us.  Just to make sure that we haven’t left or something, I guess.

Overall today was a productive day.  The house is looking better and better.  There is a long way to go but we are slowly marching forward.

I took a little bit of time while Liesl was sleeping to play Oblivion.  I only got to play for about an hour but it was enough time for me to knock out one dungeon at least.  I’m getting a bit burnt out on the game.  It just keeps going on and on and, thus far, the storylines in the Shivering Isles are not very engaging.  It makes it harder to make consistent progress through this part of the game.

Dominica decided, much like Liesl, that today was a video game day and she spent the day addicted to playing The Sims 3.  She is really far into the game at this point.

This evening, before going to bed, Dominica and I watched some of Michael Palin’s “New Europe” from the BBC.  It is the television show made in conjunction with the book that I just finished reading this morning.  It is not as good as Rick Steve’s Europe or anything like that but it is interesting and gives a good view of lots of parts of Europe that I know very little about.

This morning, after finishing “New Europe”, I began reading / listening to the biography of Captain Kidd which, thus far, has proven to be really interesting.

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