elfs | Weekends at Home

The weekend has come and gone, and I had a good time doing, well, very little. Omaha and I looked out the doors, checked our inventory of stuff, and decided that our best bet was to stay home and do some of the indoor prep. We're rapidly entering that part of the year where the doors and windows are closed and the sky is dark most of the time. Yamaarasi-chan was over, complete with her new subject, homework, and a new set of exercises for her lazy eye.

Friday night, after a dinner of meatloaf and mashed potatoes (the girls would only eat it if the meatloaf was made into sandwiches), it was Omaha's turn to put the girls to bed but I sat with them to listen to Yamaarashi-chan read. She wanted to try A Wrinkle In Time by Madeline L'Engle. It was a bit too hard for her; she kept faltering over words, but when she read passages she did understand her comprehension was solid. Kouryou-chan read from a Hamtaro book, the originals by Ritsuko Kawai, which are nothing like that psychedelically colored cartoon.

Saturday and Sunday were cleaning days. Saturday, the girls were to clean their room while Omaha and I had cleaned up the bedroom and sorted through out clothes. Breakfast was home-made breakfast muffins and fresh fruit, then we set about doing the cleaning thing. Since we were dealing with little girls, Omaha and I had to constantly remind them to keep cleaning and stop playing, but we managed a happy compromise and they did eventually get their rooms cleaned. I vacuumed up the bedroom and the spare room, which we use a lot, including dusting the windowshades and drapes, and then I cleaned the dining room and kitchen, including mopping and bleaching the floors.

Afterwards, we took the girls out for an important errand. Yamaarashi-chan has announced that she wants her hair to grow out, and after we talked about it I said it was fine with me, but I said to her that having long hair is a responsibility. Omaha talked about how much of a pain it was to keep her hair, and we told Yamaarashi-chan that, especially since she's wearing an eyepatch now for a few hours every day, she needs to learn how to keep her hair out of her face. The shaggy dog look gets old. So went over to the drug store where Omaha and she proceeded to pick out barrettes and other hair-control devices, ones she picked out herself and would like.

And while we were waiting we had our crisis of the day. Kouryou-chan was playing around, bored, when she came and started bouncing. "Daddy, I really have to go potty bad!" I took her hand and started for the bathrooms, and she said, "I can't hold it!" and peed all over the floor.

Sigh. I found some store staff and got a cleansup, but that was embarassing, for both her and I. I asked her what happened asd she said she just forgot, she was too busy playing hide-and-seek with me in the aisles. I found a plastic bag for her to sit on in the car while we waited for her sister to finish her girl-stuff.

Dinner for the girls was leftovers and miscellany: a hot-dog and french fries for Yamaarashi-chan, macaroni and cheese and a breadstick for Kouryou-chan. Omaha and I decided to have dinner by ourselves; I baked two potatoes, broiled a large T-bone, and steamed some green beans, and we ate over a candle-lit table and tried not to think of the kids downstairs for just ten minutes.

I bathed the girls and put them to bed. Kouryou-chan was unusually tired and cranky, which led to the bath being called short, but after they were dressed I sat and we went through grooming, helping them get the tangles out of their hair and, in Yamaarashi-chan's case, trimming those claws at the ends of her fingers. Then I read to them. Yamaarashi-chan read from Shel Silverstein's Falling Up, and Kouryou-chan... more Hamtaro.

While we were reading, the phone rang.

tygereclipse was stranded at the White Center transfer station, not a nice place to be even in the daytime. I dressed quickly back into my dayclothes and ran out to get her. She was pretty freaked out; the guy who ran the convenience store was yelling at her to get lost, and there was a guy with a scruff predatory leanness to him pacing back and forth outside, smoking and watching the door to the convenience store. I was glad to be able to get her out of there.

I couldn't sleep after all that, and went back downstairs to kill monsters for a while. Doom 3 for Linux has its problems, and it's hard to tweak the performance as much as I'd like. I tried some of the video card tweaks to get the resolution up, and some of it worked, but it keeps resetting after I shut it down.

Sunday, more cleaning. We all rose late, and while Omaha geeked I woke up the girls and snuggled with them until Yamaarashi-chan was fully awake and ready for breakfast. I made blueberry pancakes and then we were on to more cleaning.

Omaha helped Yamaarashi-chan with her hair, putting pretty butterfly bows in that held her hair out of her face. She's a very pretty girl when you can see her face, and when she's not running into walls and things. We put the eyepatch on, and Kouryou-chan started making cracks about her "pirate sister." This led to much playing of Heather Alexander CDs. I cleaned house some more-- the living room and the upholstery. Lunch was egg salad sandwiches.

The afternoon was whiled away in miscellaneous pursuits. I spent some time trying to figure out how to do an RSS feed for Omaha's company, only to discover that each host has his own database, most of which are hand-edited, idiosyncratic, and typologically unreliable, making generating an RSS feed impossible. I'm tempted to lay out a navigation and underlying design proposal for their website. I geeked some on my own, enjoying my new toy, an Archos Jukebox 20, on which I can hold all of my Japanese Lessons, plus 90 lessons of French and Spanish, and 10 each of Korean and Thai, and 70-odd CDs, and audiobooks of The Diamond Age and Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations. Gads, I geek.

The girls, meanwhile, struggled to clean up their recreation room so we could vacuum it. We did get it done, but not without protests and difficulties with Kouryou-chan. Eventually, it was time for Yamaarashi-chan to go back to her mother's house, and neither girl wanted her to go. Both were having too much fun by then. But we did get her going, and I dropped her off without incident.

Back home, I took over the kitchen; Omaha was burned out after a day of dealing with the kids and the laundry, so I made a dinner of Brunswick stew-- potatoes, onions, corn, lima beans, chicken, bacon, and chicken broth-- and saffron couscous (only to find out halfway through that we were out of saffron-- *sigh*). It was quite yummy; even Kouryou-chan ate it, and she hasn't yet learned to appreciate savory foods yet. We sat and watched some TV, and then Omaha put Kouryou-chan to bed while I finished up in the kitchen. Kouryou-chan did not want to go to bed. I suddenly understand part of the point of Sunday morning cartoons-- they got the kids out of bed early, so they'd be read for bed and school the next day.