Evening with Kouryou-chan

Omaha came by my office around six in the evening. She had a class that night and needed to hand Kouryou-chan off to me, so we all trouped from my office over to the car, belted in and hurtled to the college, skirting the downtown which was completely socked in with protestors. Kouryou-chan fell asleep during the ride there and slept the entire trip home. Not good, as I needed her to go to bed on time. I had not slept well the night before-- bad dreams and a bad stomach, the latter, I suspect, from a dubious bottle of Snapple that tasted odd.

When we got home, waking her from her nap was a trial. She whined and complained a little, but eventually she was awake. Since it was late, I offered to make a simple dinner: hot dogs and french fries. She readily agreed. While the fries baked and the dogs boiled we sat together and she showed me how to make a little decoration she'd learned at school with two sticks and a strand of colored twine, turning the sticks into a plus and then weaving the twine back and forth into a pattern. It was very pretty.

After a quiet dinner sitting together-- and she actually finished her hot dog-- we shared some ice cream. She had the raspberry sorbet in a cone. Then it was bath time. She very seriously showed me the scrape on her chin where she and a boy had collided and fallen to the sidewalk at school, and I held up my little shaving mirror so she could wash her face without touching the injury.

I think, when Kouryou-chan is tired, her brain misfires. I mean, that's true of everyone, but for Kouryou-chan the signs of exhaustion are a kind of hyperactivity and an inability to stay attentive. Because she was not tired last night, and bath time and reading time were very easy. She was nice to be around. We read a whole bunch of books and even sang songs from a Disney "Pooh" collection ("Pooh" in quotes there).

She was even easy to put to bed. But not to sleep. An hour later, around 10:30, she came crawling into my bed. "Daddy, my music's over." So, I let her sleep on Omaha's side of the bed, putting a pillow vertically between us to discourage her from rolling up and kicking or kneeing me, which she frequently does when she's dreaming. She did finally fall asleep after a bit of tossing and turning. And I got to sleep as well.

Geekery

Well, it seems to have been the batteries. I hope. The Archos booted up this morning and has played music reliably. It had one brief dropout this morning while I was navigating which has me concerned, but it's working now. It had better work well for at least another year and not make me regret giving Omaha my 4G IPod Mini.

My laptop went through a bad patch, but it was entirely my fault. I upgraded to version 4.2 of XFCE, the window manager I prefer for laptops, even though it was marked as "unstable and untested" on Gentoo. I went ahead and installed it anyway, and sure enough, it was unstable. The laptop locked up when the network card was popped out and then suspended; on resume, the window manager would cause the window server to lock up bad, requiring a reboot. But a quick upgrade of the kernel and a restore of the stable version and everything's good again. I noticed today that there's a version of Sphinx speech recognition software for Gentoo; I may try it out this weekend.

My Palm is back up, but I'm still restoring all my address book and appointment information. Likewise my cellphone. In a way, all of these devices, except the cellphone, can talk to one another, but it's just not efficient.

So, did someone sabotage Bush's inauguration speech?

Apparently Bush's speechwriter chose to include the sentence "By our efforts, we have lit a fire as well; a fire in the minds of men," into his speech when Bush was prattling on and on about his idea of liberty.

The sentence comes from a novel by Dostoevsky, The Devils. The speech is given by a member of a titular group of terrorists who, by the end of the book, fail to end the despotic regime under which they live.

Did Ms. Rice just wince?