And she does this every day?

So, after I managed to corral Omaha into going to bed, I proceeded to do two loads of laundry, clean up the kitchen, and fetch Yamaarashi-chan, then stopped by the grocery store to pick up some stuff for lunch.

I boiled some hot dogs and made coleslaw, the good stuff, by hand. Nappa cabbage cut into thin slices with a knife rather than "shredded," grated carrot, some mayonnaise, and a teaspoon each of honey, flax seeds, and dijon mustard. To my great pleasure, Yamaarashi-chan actually ate hers all up.

I also cleaned and sterilized the bathroom with bleach, just like we do every week. Then we went outside where the girls played on the monkey bars and ran around with the kids from next door, playing with squirt guns, while I weeded a six-foot patch of the garden in preparation for replanting the cucumbers I've got growing in a seed box.

Omaha rose and said she felt good enough to try and make dinner. It was a one-pot chicken and rice thing that didn't involve a lot of bending or lifting, so I said she should do it if she felt up to it. With ibuprofen, she does. The kids ate that, too. Amazing: we've actually managed to get two whole, decent meals into them. Usually, it's "I don't like that," and "That's yucky," even when they haven't tasted it yet.

After dinner I dunked the kids into the bathtub, washed their hair and then let them play in the tub for a while, then routed them out to get them dressed. They're fascinated by the lavage procedure I go through with the irrigation syringe. It's not just ordinary tooth brushing. I'll be glad when the wound stops hurting and I can eat again. I read them four short books and then got them into bed. They fell asleep pretty quickly, which is a good thing, but they did a lot of running around. Kouryou-chan was showing signs of heavy stress earlier, getting upset easily and crying. She also managed to cut her foot on an art clip she'd somehow liberated from her drawing board, and while it was just a little thing it was slowing her down.

Wrote a niftly little script called 'nodoubt' for LJ. You give it the name of a user, and it then figures out who that user's friends are, and then checks every thread of every friend from the day before to see if the user participated in any of them. Just in case you happen to be really interested in someone and want to see what they're saying to their friends. I should probably expand it to include communities, too. Python rocks.

I'm gonna go play with gramofone for a while. It'll be interesting to see if I can get my old high-school glee club albums onto compact disc. And if I can't, there's a level of Half-Life to finish.

Another Day, Another Duty

2,622 songs in my XMMS collection and that's the title I get. The Gods Are Watching.

I don't think anyone slept well last night except maybe Yamaarashi-chan. Omaha had it with her back, I just couldn't get to sleep, and Kouryou-chan came in during the night having had a terrible nightmare; from what I could make out in her mumbling she was upset about the "monster" in Mommy. She's a brave little girl, but she's still a little girl, and at three and a half she needs her reassurance.

Although I was awakened repeatedly in the night, I was truly awakened around 10:30 this morning my Kouryou-chan, who had finally roused herself from the hard crash she decided to take now that she had a reassuring warm body to sleep next to, namely mine. I remembered Omaha having gotten up about an hour earlier or so and saying something, so I looked at her sleepy eyes and said, "I think Mommy said something about doughnuts."

Her eyes immediately widened and a big smile crossed her face. "Doughnuts, doughnuts, yeah!"

"Okay, then, but you have to eat something good for lunch, like egg salad or tuna fish. With lots of veggies."

"Okay." Then we went to look for Omaha and Yamaarashi-chan.

They were nowhere to be found. I found the cell-phone and called her, only to discover that they'd headed out and were already on a bus to take them the two miles or so into town. I promised we'd catch up in the car. Kouryou-chan put on a pretty yellow dress, demanding, "Get out of my way, I can dress myself!"

I picked up Omaha and Yamaarashi-chan, and we went back home for our orgy of fat and sugar.

Now, I'm at work, waiting for the servers to rebuild and the latest code updates to come down. Because of Omaha's seziure I had to skip a half-day of work Friday and came in Saturday to make up for it. My manager actually agreed to come in as well and we had a two hour meeting where we discussed all of the niggling little corners of the system that were a little off or just plain broken. Some days, being a grown-up just sucks.

Omaha called about 3:00 to tell me that her back was feeling "okay" but that she was feeling otherwise rested. Well enough to pull out the kids' inflatable wading pool and blow it up. It's 30C outside and not a cloud in the sky! What the heck am I doing at work, eating bad microwave popcorn and drinking sugary iced teas?

I've got my system at home set up so I can now rip vinyl. Rockin'. I've got a mid-range Tandy linear tracking turntable that I picked up at a garage sale for two bucks and repaired with a screwdriver and some gun oil-- the slide that the linear tracking head used had become gummed up with old grease and ambient dust. It works great, came with a fresh needle, and even has a strobe adjuster to make sure the speed is exactly 33.3 or 45 rpm. However, even though the album I was trying to rip (Patrick Gleeson's computer realization of Vivaldi's The Four Seasons, never released on CD) looks absolutely pristine, it still has these annoying mechanical clicks when it plays. Anyone got any ideas?