Sheep Guarding Llama

I stayed up really late last night so that I could sleep in with my wife this morning. We didn’t end up getting out of bed until the middle of the afternoon. Dad came over and he, Andy, Min and I went up to Avon for some Tom Wahls dinner. That was really good. We don’t go there often enough. It is just far enough away that we never feel like driving quite that far for dinner.

After dinner I drove down and borrowed The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen from my cousin. Min really wanted to see that. We watched it. The basic storyline was okay but the movie itself was terrible. The directin, effects and acting was all just pathetic. We are really glad that we didn’t buy this movie. After that we watched one of Spielberg’s few good movies, Empire of the Sun. Christian Bale delivers a totally amazing performance in this tale of a British child taken captive by the Japanese during the occupation of Shanghai in the 1930’s. I hadn’t seen the movie since 1988 or so and Min had never seen it at all.

Since it is Friday of a vacation week, I decided that no work was going to be done today so I slept in late and made it a relaxing day. Min informed me that she really wanted to spend some time today playing The Sims so I planned accordingly. Andy and I went up to the city and did some shopping at Borders. I found a book on MUD programming that is incredibly interesting and the first book that I have ever seen on the subject. Andy found it recently and had told me about it so I was anxious to get a look at it. We were there because Andy needed something particular. He is doing a ton of work on a video game engine of his own so that we can develop a real time strategy game. While we were there I found a ton of Golden books on bargain. These are reprintings of the same books that I still have from my childhood that I have used for years to look up all kinds of information from Astronomy to Meteorology to Entimology to Geology. I learned tons from those little books. So, since they were on sale and I get a corporate discount at Borders, I decided to pick some of them up for Michael. Eleven of them actually. Quite the stack of books for a six year old.

Min spent the evening playing her game and I spent it relaxing at the computer. It was a very uneventful day, but you need those from time to time.

The morning after. Leannne and Bob got up and disappeared early this morning before anyone else was awake. Min had to go to work last night and she was hoping that some of us would make it out to have breakfast with her before she made it back home. So I got up early and Jen was awake so the two of us drove out to Lakeville to have breakfast with Min at Leaisures.

Everyone decided that we were going to take advantage of the day off and have a big AoE2 day. Bob and Lise took off late in the morning after sleeping in a little bit. Arti and Phil came over midday around the time when Andy got up and we played a bit. Josh came over later in the afternoon. Kate, Danielle and Joanna came over and hung out upstairs. They watched movies while we played. Phil had to take off kind of early because he had to work tomorrow. His schedule really sucks. He gets Sunday and Tuesday off every week. That means that Saturday and Monday nights are the good times for him to play when Friday is typically good for everyone else. The rest of us stayed up for a little while and played a little longer. Our final game went on for forever. It was a really good, well matched game but it was so late in the night that we were all hoping that the game would end soon.

Today I got up and headed straight off to Frankfort to pick up Dominica who has been out there all this time. I arrived at her parent’s house around 1:00 in the afternoon. We had some lunch, pizza from Ilion, and then hung out at the house and watched some movies all afternoon. Min’s parents were at work today. Bennie was working hard putting in a new staircase for them. Francesca had a very stressful trip to a lumber yard to keep her busy.

Min and I hung out until fairly late. We had wanted to leave earlier but Francesca was copying CDs to listen to in the car during her drive back to Texas and that took a lot longer than we had expected. So we didn’t end up leaving until very late.

Today is my day off. Today is my day to relax. To really relax. Nothing to do today. I have the entire day off to do nothing at all. So I took advantage of it and just hung out at the house playing video games and watching movies.

Andy and I went to Wegman’s tonight and I found (Andy told me that he had found it there) DVD’s of the Canadian television show Once Upon A Hamster which is based on the older Tales of the Riverbank that I loved as a child. When my family used to go on vacations to Canada or New England, I used to watch this show whenever I could. It is really cute and adorable. Perfect for young children. So when I heard that the DVDs were there, I had to go get them. So I picked up all six DVDs of the show. It is live footage of critters like Hammy the Hamster who are filmed with voices dubbed over them. It is hilarious. In the US, it looks like they are marketing the shows as Hammy the Hamster even though that isn’t the show’s real name.