February 10, 2014: The Empire Strikes Back

Monday and back to work. I was really exhausted getting up this morning after having worked so hard over the weekend and especially yesterday. I was really dragging this morning.

On my commute I am now reading Jules Verne’s “Journey to the Center of the Earth”, translated to English of course. So far I am really enjoying it. His writing, at least the English translation of it, is really approachable.

Work felt long and stressful today. It really was not a bad day, just a tough one. Kind of a “blue” day, possibly more related to feeling worn out than to anything that happened during the day. I am easily affected by outside influences and little things can make me have a “blue” day rather irrationally.

I did not leave until late and got home at eight. Dominica had plenty of work queued up for me. We had to prep the mattress for someone to be able to take it tomorrow, do some cleaning in the living room, head up to the attic with more cardboard, etc. Probably an hour of getting unpacking work done around the house.

Dominica took the time yesterday to put our older queen mattress and bed up on Freecycle. She got some hits today so we are hoping that someone will come and get that soon. It is really a pretty decent mattress still and a lot of people pay a lot of money for memory foam mattresses like these. It is still better than most peoples’ beds these days.

We were far enough along today that, for the very first time since we got into the house, we were able to run the Roomba (robot vacuum cleaner) on part of the house. Dominica turned it loose in the girls’ room (the guest bedroom this week) and the hallway. It feels great to be able to do that. It is like we have been fighting a battle and have claimed a small amount of space, some territory that is now ours again. I think that the entire upstairs might be Roomba-able tomorrow.

The girls really enjoyed Star Wars yesterday and today requested that we watch the next one. So we watched most of The Empire Strikes Back, although it was not as exciting for them as Star Wars and Luciana just played with her toys while snuggling on my lap and did not pay attention to the movie at all and Liesl was easily distracted during it. We ended up not being able to quite finish it as we were all very tired and the girls were not able to concentrate enough to make it through the movie. I remember being very young and having a tough time staying with Empire too until I was older. The Hoth scenes are gripping but after that the bulk of the movie is not action. But I think that Liesl will really love Return of the Jedi. That was, by far, my favourite movie when I was seven. It has so much more action and is so much easier to follow than the first two.

We put the girls to bed and I read to them the final chapter of “The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.” That means that tomorrow night we will be starting book four, “The Silver Chair” which is my favourite of the “main line” of the Narnia books. Dad will be able to join us for that. We should, if we stick to it, be able to read all of it while he is visiting.

It is awesome that our girls are now, finally, at the age where they are getting exposed to awesome literature, like the Chronicles of Narnia, and great cinematic literature, like Star Wars. And, to some degree, their video game literature as well.

Dad spends the day tomorrow on the train. He is taking the Lake Shore Limited, number 48, from Rochester to Croton-on-Hudson and should, if the train is on time as is never the case, arrive around six in the evening. The girls are very excited.

Leave a comment