January 30, 2014: Reading The Moon by Night

Got up at five thirty and was in the office at a quarter till eight.  Very cold one today.  It was eight degrees as I waited for the car to warm up and dropped to as little as two degrees on the drive into the office.  Very, very cold.  On the drive in I started reading “The Moon by Night”, the second in the Austin Family Chronicles by Madeleine L’Engle.  I like the Austin Family books more than the others, I think, because the author doesn’t know anything about science (or the world at large) and these books are much more down to earth and about realistic people and real, human problems instead of being bizarre fake science and immature fantasy writing (or worse, a combination of the two with flying, time traveling unicorns and mice that live inside mitochondria and turn into trees.)

January 29, 2014: Starting Deponia

I had to be up very early this morning so that I could take the Spark into the dealer to get an oil change (no way to do that at a normal shop yet), plus get a new air filter and tire rotation. I had to be at the dealer at eight this morning which meant leaving home at six thirty.

I got to the dealer in Connecticut just fine and they got the car right in. It took a little over an hour but I had a chance to read the entire book “Deploying OpenStack” on the Kindle which I brought with me and a good chunk of “CFEngine 3 Beginner’s Guide”, also on the Kindle. I was well prepared for my free time. It was a nice chance to just sit and read for a little bit while enjoying some coffee in the customer lounge at the dealer.

It is cold but bright today. We figured out at the dealer that my windshield wiper fluid is frozen in the tubes so will not work, as it has not for weeks, until the car has a chance to sit someplace that is above freezing for some time. What a pain that is. The fluid tank was full of ice, they said, when they had looked at it. It is bright and sunny today, very crisp. Only ten degrees on the way in but this week is supposed to warm up as it goes on.

Work was good today and I managed to leave at six after a ten hour day.  On the drive home I finished reading “Meet the Austins” which I first read as a young child.

I got home at seven thirty and then had a nearly two hour conference call. I dropped off so that I could spend time with the girls. I had promised Liesl that we would start playing Deponia (the first installation of the series) tonight and Luciana had been begging to start playing a new game too (actually she just wants to play Night of the Rabbit again but this will do.) I was getting the girls snacks before we started playing and Liesl asked if we were able to play the games again once we finished them. She was very excited to learn that we can – now she can look forward to replaying many of these games potentially on her own as she gets older. Playing them “again” is so much easier than trying to figure out the quirks the first time through. And I explained that when Luciana is Liesl’s age that we will have this collection of games that Luciana can then play too and Luciana got really excited about that.

The first night of playing Deponia was good. It is by the same company that made Night of the Rabbit. Liesl made it through the first few scenes and has the controls mostly down now. We played for nearly an hour and a half. Dominica stayed on the conference call all night and after I had the girls getting ready for bed.

I took the girls up to bed and read three chapters of “Voyage of the Dawn Treader” to them. They both stayed awake for all of the reading tonight and, I think, were getting into it a bit. Both girls seem to be following along pretty well. Liesl especially is really into it and had a lot of questions about the older stories and why things had happened the way that they did.

It was after midnight when the girls went to sleep and I managed to get into bed myself.