February 4, 2009: Home Alone with the Kids

This morning I am doing the early shift at the office so I had to be up extra early.  We didn’t manage to get to bed until pretty late last night so I was really tired when I got up this morning and was dragging all day long.

Work was quite busy today.  Not what you want on the day that you are doing the early shift.  It means that there is no quitting work.  It is just a really long day.

During the lunch break, Dominica decided to make a break for it and run to Babies R Us and Shop Rite to do some emergency shopping that just could not wait any longer.  I stayed at home with Liesl and Oreo.

Anytime that Dominica goes out shopping it is always a problem.  I think that Liesl knows that her mom has gone out and gets very fussy the moment that Dominica is out the door.  Oreo always has to go out for a walk or two during the short time span as well which he only has to do when Dominica is not in the house.

Today was, of course, no different.  The entire time that I was home I was literally running up and down the stairs trying to deal with work while keeping Liesl and Oreo happy.  Luckily it was during the lunch hours but I had so much work going on today that I really did not get a chance to take a real lunch break at all.

Liesl was supposed to be sleeping while Dominica was gone and she did try but she was very restless and needed me to retrieve her lost pacifier for her every few minutes and then to hold her hand and rock her back to sleep.  Oreo made me take him out twice.

Dominica did manage to stock up on groceries and we got a little variety because she was able to make it out to Shop Rite instead of our regular Stop and Shop.  Shop Rite is farther away but on the way to Babies R Us.  Mostly she was returning stuff that we do not need to Babies R Us but a lot of the stuff, including brands manufactured by them (!), they refused to take back, even for store credit because we did not have a receipt for them.  Some of the items I can understand if there was a possibility of it having come from another store but refusing their own brand products is a bit much, I think.

I did get a chance, throughout the course of the entire afternoon, to sneak in a tiny bit of time playing Oblivion.  I managed to start and complete the portion of the Path of Dawn quest involving the Shrine of Dagon which was no small piece to complete.  It is not supposed to be that overwhelming of a section of the game but one of the people in the game who was carrying absolutely necessary stuff for me to complete the game was killed in a battle and fell beneath a number of other people killed in battle and I was unable to locate him due to the limitations of the console interface to the game.  Had the game been on a PC with a mouse interface the whole thing would have been very simple.  I was very thankful to get a little time to play Oblivion and to complete a good piece of the main storyline.  I am attempting to complete the main storyline as quickly as possible because I do not enjoy the Oblivion gates and don’t think that they make the game more enjoyable so I plan to close them as quickly as possible and then get on with the rest of the game once they are gone.

We had breakfast sandwiches for dinner which we ate very early because we were both really hungry this evening.  Breakfast sandwiches are delicious.  I am betting that we will be having them more often.  Dominica found Morningstar’s Maple flavored vegetarian breakfast sausage today which is awesome.

After dinner I went back to work for several more hours.  It was a very busy day.  I was really worn out by the time that I was finally able to permanently emerge from my basement dungeon and spend real time with my family.

After work was done, Dominica played some of Escape from Monkey Island on the PS2 which I enjoy watching as it really does play like a well written movie with poor graphics.  She did not manage to get very far, however, because there is some problem with the wireless controller and the PS2 which eventually made the game completely unplayable.  I did not have any spare time to address that this evening, but hopefully I will be able to track down the problem and get it fixed soon.

Our evening was fairly busy and quite short.  Liesl didn’t feel all that good this evening and needed a lot of attention and everyone was really tired.  So Dominica, Liesl and Oreo all went to bed at ten.  I wanted to go to bed then but there were several work items that demanded my attention and I was stuck staying awake until after eleven thirty.  So much for me getting to bed early.

I did get a chance to play with Liesl while she was wide awake and very alert for about half an hour this evening which is unprecedented.  We had so much fun just sitting on the couch talking to each other.  She was all smiles and giggles and talking to me telling me about her day.  After we couldn’t believe that Liesl was still alert and happy Dominica ran down to the basement and grabbed the camcorder and brought it up so that I could get a couple of minutes of Liesl footage to show to the family.

There have been no Liesl videos posted on LieslTV because we discovered that since moving to a low-profile desktop some time ago we gave up all of our desktops that could fit a full sized IEEE1394 (Firewire) card which is what we need to connect to the camcorder.  So we are kind of stuck there.  So I ordered a low-profile PCI card that does IEEE1394 from Amazon tonight.  We should have that on Monday and be able to actually use the camcorder again.

Dad is coming down this weekend.  He is arriving no Saturday afternoon and probably leaving on Tuesday.  Tomorrow night Katie is coming up after work to hang out for the evening.  That will probably be around eight thirty or so with Duds in tow to play with Oreo.

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