I woke up on my own very early this morning, around five. I lay in bed for a while contemplating whether to get up or to attempt to fall back asleep. Oreo wasn’t snuggling with me this morning so getting up was more of an option than usual. I tried going back to sleep for a while but the weight of all of the tasks waiting for me was weighing on me. I tried playing Triple Town but only got five minutes of it or so before Oreo got up and had an accident on the floor. So, at around five thirty, I was out of bed and cleaning the floor and taking Oreo out for a walk.
No point in going back to bed after that. So I logged in to begin working, wrote some updates, did some SpiceWorks posts, updated some tickets, cleaned up the kitchen, did some general cleaning around the house, put Oreo’s food away that Dominica had cooked yesterday but that we had forgotten to put away last night, etc.
Dominica and the girls got up around eight thirty so I had about three hours to myself to be productive alone.
This afternoon Liesl came up to us and said something that we thought was “Mr. Lumley!” We were very confused. She was wearing a toy on her head as a hat and kept coming up to each of us stating “Mr. Lumley!”
Finally I figured out that she was pretending to deliver mail and was saying “Special Delivery.” She was pretending to keep mail in her hat and was taking it off and handing it to us. She has such a vivid imagination that sometimes we have real problems following what she is saying because she responds to questions from inside of her fantasy context but when we are trying to figure out the context, that can be nearly impossible to do. Once we repeated “special delivery” to her she said “Yes, Special Deliver! I’m the post officer.” We were dying. “Post Officer” is a perfectly logical name for the mailman but heaven only knows where she came up with it!
Last night she did something similar telling us all about this yellow cat that she used to have that ran away and that she doesn’t have any longer. We were so confused as we have never had a cat. Today it finally occurred to me that she was referring to the pretend cat that she used to pretend to be. At times she would not answer to her name but only to “kitty.” She would meow and in her mind, she was a cat. She no longer pretends to be a cat, but is a dog more recently, so I guess she sees it as the cat having left.
I am the on call for the office this weekend so I was tied to my desk for most of the day. I swear that there is more work to do as the on call than there is to do when you are in the office.
For dinner Dominica cooked a lean Medifast style meal of shiritake noodles and mushrooms in a cream sauce. We re-watched the new travel video that we got yesterday about Belgium and The Netherlands. Liesl watched with us with interest and mentioned that several of the places that she saw were places that she would like to get to go. That works out pretty well since we plan to be going many of those places in just one month! It is hard to believe that we are two days fewer than a month until we fly off to England!
I was working in the office pretty late this evening when I found that my friend John the storage engineer from Houston was in town. We were both posting on SpiceWorks at the same time when he mentioned that he was down in Preston Hollow, practically down the street. So I ran, showered and headed out to pick him up.
John and I headed out to Sfuzzi to hang out for the evening. We ended up hanging out very late then going back to his friends’ place in Preston Hollow where they were having a party. It was nearly five when I straggled home.