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Thursday
I left off last Thursday with a tale of woe concerning our garage door opener. Thursday afternoon when I got home, I immediately set to work on that. I climbed up in the attic to figure out where the mounting bolts actually came through the ceiling, and it turned out they’re actually driven into studs. That gives me a little more hope for the one that I replace. I went back down, got out the ratchet, and tightened it down until it wouldn’t budge (something I’d been afraid to do when I thought it was only anchored in drywall).

After that I put some weight on it, and the bolt held. I’ve also got the line now to put in two more bolts on each bracket, so it should be well and truly secured soon.

I also mentioned that the button was broken. Seems like that was actually because of the bolt giving — the (very old, very thin) wire connecting the opener to the button by the door runs down from the ceiling, and it was pretty much taught. When the bolt gave and the opener fell, it tore the wire free.

Once I figured that out, it was a simple enough matter to scavenge some electrical wire and splice it together to get the button powered again (and add a little slack to line, in the process).

Later in the evening D– brought us some supper from Buffalo Wild Wings. I’d requested the Blazing sauce (their hottest) to try for the first time. It is, indeed, hot.

Then we all watched some TV and the night sort of disappeared.

Friday
Friday night I had a mandate. And as soon as you read that, you’re probably thinking, “man-date,” because you’re so juvenile, but no. I mean a mandate: a purpose, a quest, a compulsion to do something of personal and moral significance. In this case, my mandate was to go see The Watchmen, a screen adaptation of what is widely considered the best graphic novel on the market. The story is powerful evocative, and the adaptation was incredibly well done. It’s probably the most meaningful movie that I’ve actually enjoyed since watching Stranger than Fiction (and if I had to eliminate comedies, it’s probably the only really meaningful movie I’ve ever enjoyed, but I haven’t put a ton of thought into that evaluation, so don’t hold me to it).

Okay, and as it happens, yes, I did go to the movie with D–. But that’s beside the point.

Before that, T– and AB and D– and I had dinner at Belle Isle at 50 Penn Place (yeah, I was just there a week ago — you’ve got a great memory). I stated my intention of ordering the same steak again, but T– pointed out that my leftovers from the last time were still in the fridge, so I had a Theta Burger instead. Phenomenal.

Then the movie, as I said, and that took the rest of the night.

Saturday
Saturday I slept late, and spent much of the afternoon programming. I’m sure there was something else, but I don’t really remember it.

In the evening, T– went to scrapbook with her friend Rebecca, so I watched AB. D– came over to help out, and we ended up taking AB to McDonalds for dinner. There’s one nearby with a big indoor playground area, that we’d gone to visit last time Mom and Dad were in town, so I took AB up there to let her play. She made friends with the other two little girls who were there, and spent a long time climbing up, going down the slide, then shouting “Again!” and doing it again.

At one point, she’d come running over to the table to eat two fries before rushing back, and she wasn’t looking, and she smashed the side of her face into a table. She was over it a minute later, too caught up in having fun, but she had an angry red line drawn down her cheek for the rest of the night.

Later, she was trying to climb up the slide, on hands and knees, and her hands went out from under her. When that happened, her face smacked down into the slide, and she busted her lip open. I could barely get her to sit still long enough for her lip to start bleeding before she rushed back into the fray.

Last time we went, she was scared of the big slide. I’m not sure it’s the slide itself, but there’s a lot of climbing around in high-up, enclosed spaces, and she didn’t have the same zeal for that as some of the older kids. I was surprised she was so excited to do it this time. Then, when I was ready to go, I watched her climb up and then I crouched down just inside the bottom of the slide so I could catch her when she came down.

I could hear her climbing above me, then sitting down at the top of the twisty slide (so out of sight), and then nothing for a moment. I waited, and then I heard a tiny voice saying very definitely, “Careful. Be careful. Be careful.” She was psyching herself up. A few seconds later she finally came zipping down, and laughed in delight when she saw me waiting for her.

I put her to bed around nine, and a little bit later T– showed up and reminded us that it was Daylight Savings Time, so we’d just lost an hour on our sleep. A little after that she headed to bed, but D– and I stayed up watching I Heart Huckabees (and him reading, and me programming), and then afterward we talked existentialism and purpose until two or three in the morning (depending how you want to count it).

Sunday
So I woke up late on Sunday, but made it to church before they’d finished the first song. The sermon was on Fasting, and a pretty good one. Oh, and N– and K– were there! It was fun to see them, if only briefly, but I’d told T– I would take AB home for a quick lunch and an early nap right after services, so I didn’t hang around.

I grabbed her some food, then ran up to P. F. Chang’s for some take out. AB was able to eat her quick lunch while we were in the car, so by the time I got home, she was ready for her nap.

I worked on some fileserver stuff while AB napped. Then T– got home and started getting ready for their afternoon. Shortly after AB woke up, Diana got to the house and then the three of them went to see Sesame Street Live (T– has it documented on her blog).

While they were out, I worked. Mostly I’m getting my media files sorted out so that we can watch them on the HTPC. I’ve also got a handful of little projects I’m working on, and I’m constantly spending five minutes here and ten minutes there, making gradual progress.

D– called around 5:00 to ask about supper plans, and I told him we’d be eating whenever T– got home, and he was welcome to come over. T– ended up making some chicken parmesan for us, and it was awesome.

We watched a movie, and then the new SNL, and while that was on K– caught me on GMail chat and asked if I could take a look at the HTML parser for our current XBMC project. I opened that up, and ended up working on it for hours. I stayed up after the show ended, and T– went to bed, and D– left, and it was probably midnight before I got to bed. But I got the parser rewritten, and it’s a lot more powerful now. So that’s something.

Monday
Then last night T– brought home the stuff for me to make chili, and then she ended up making the chili (because I was distracted with one of my little projects, and she was hungry). It was fantastic, though, so I can’t feel too bad about my laziness. It paid off in the end.

We watched The Big Bounce, which we’d been excited about but then never saw because of the terrible reviews. Turns out…it’s not that bad. It’s slow (especially for a heist flick), but the characters are strong and the story is good. Maybe it’s just a good one to have on in the background, because neither of us was paying full attention to it. There were some laughs, though.

After that AB got to watch a movie while we ate dinner, and after she went to bed we started on the Monday night TV shows. We watched Heroes and Chuck before we gave up and went to bed. Big Bang Theory and How I Met Your Mother and Rules of Engagement are all still waiting for us.

How did people watch TV before TiVo? Seriously.

Other than that, it’s just things and stuff.

When we were robbed last December, the most crushing loss by far was the information that was taken. I think T– would readily agree to that. We lost a bunch of electronics and some of T–‘s jewelry, but they also got all the movies T– had recorded on her camcorder and a year’s worth of family photos (more than that, even, but most of the pictures prior to 2008 were backed up on CDs). I also lost all the family papers that I’d scanned in over the course of the last year (a major project, which I talked about more than once on this blog).

So we’re pretty much recovered from the robbery now, settling back into our lives, but I’m more concerned than ever with data integrity. In support of that, I decided that I really wanted to make a dedicated fileserver and tuck it away in a back corner somewhere, so if we get hit again it’s much less likely they’ll take our information. They can take the HTPC and the laptop if they must, but I would hate to lose all my writing again.

I ordered the parts for the fileserver about a week ago, and they came in last night. And when I say “the parts,” I actually mean “about half of the parts,” but we hadn’t entirely thought through that at the time.

I got a CPU without a fan or heatsink which was the biggest problem. By sheer luck, D– had one tucked in the back of a closet that fit. I also forgot I would need a CD or DVD drive to load my OS, but I was able to find a working one in my closet. We were stuck for a while when it came to finding a hard drive for the OS (I could have used one of my big new media drives, but it makes everything MUCH easier if data and OS are on completely separate drives). I had said offhand that I would just use the drive from one of my XBoxen, but when it came time to get them I ran into a problem.

Cracking open an XBox requires a specific Torx bit, and I searched the house high and low for half an hour before I finally tracked down the screwdriver that could do it. Then I opened up the box I’d gotten at a garage sale and pulled out its hard drive, only to discover it was a stock hard drive in an unmodded XBox — meaning it was locked, and unusable unless I could get it installed in a modded XBox to unlock it. Problem is, neither box is working anymore. I finally cracked open my modded box, which I’d been half hoping to preserve, and scavenged the old 15 GB drive out of it. Mercifully that one had been left unlocked, so I was able to get my system up and running.

It took all night. Finally finished up around eleven, and it was after midnight before I completed the cleanup. Now I’ve got a fileserver in a closet, an HTPC in the entertainment center (with just the OS drive, which makes it quieter and cooler), and access to all my media on any machine in the house.

After eleven, as I said, I got to work cleaning up. As part of that I took a big box of XBox remnants out to the trash, and when I went to close the garage door afterward the button wouldn’t work. I walked over to the car to use the remote to close it, and as the door started rumbling down I got a rain of drywall dust on me, and stepped out of the way just as a half-inch bolt fell from the ceiling. It was the one bolt holding up the right-side brace for the opener, which immediately began sagging from the ceiling even as it was still closing the door.

I pushed it back up frantically, and held it in place until the door was safely down, then retrieved a stepladder and did what I could to screw the bolt back into place, but I was just reusing the hole it had already jiggled out of, so I don’t think that’s a long-term solution. Now I’m going to have to figure out how to secure my garage door opener (and figure out what’s wrong with the wiring, too). I’m just glad nothing catastrophic happened when it came loose.

Other than that, it’s just things and stuff.

Yesterday I got some major rewrite work done on Gods Tomorrow, and I hope to get as much again done today. I’ll do a project report on the Projects blog sometime today or tomorrow, in case you want more details.

After work yesterday, we had dinner at Taco Bell, then grabbed some Church’s Chicken (by request) for N– and K– and N–‘s parents, who are staying with them. We took dinner to their place about 6:30, and T– held baby Jason while I corralled AB, and talked with them some.

Once they were done with dinner, we all moved to the living room and sat and talked for about an hour. Those first couple weeks home from the hospital are pretty bad — I remember all too well — but they seem to be falling into their stride. They were both looking a lot better than they had in the hospital, and I’m sure they’ll be right back into their normal lives within a week or so.

We got home around 8:30, and watched some Conan with AB before we put her to bed. Then we didn’t last long after that. T– went to bed to read, and I took care of a few quick things in WoW, then headed to bed myself.

I woke up around 4:00 with a nosebleed, and had to take care of that, then AB woke us up crying around 5:30, and she’d gotten sick in her bed, so we had to clean that up before we could get her to go back to sleep. I went back to bed, then, but didn’t really fall back asleep before my alarm went off.

So it was a rough night. Still, it’s Friday, so all I’ve got to do is drag through the day at work, and then I’ve got a quiet, relaxing weekend to look forward to.

Other than that, it’s just things and stuff.

So, I don’t think I mentioned this yet, but we’ve been having plumbing problems.

As part of the construction project to renovate the kitchen, we had to bypass an old copper drain vent that ran from the sink/dishwasher drain up through the roof (and right through our window). As I mentioned when describing the project, we just capped that off, knowing it could impact our plumbing, but hoping it wouldn’t.

Then over the weekend T– was doing a load of laundry and I stepped out in the garage to grab something, and noticed a stream of water creeping from the water heater cabinet down toward the door. We’d encountered that a couple years ago when we had a clog in one of our drains, and the washing machine would regularly flood the garage when it drained. I recognized the effect immediately, and given the timing I just assumed it had to do with the capped drain vent.

Yesterday I opened that closet in the garage and pulled off the sheet of drywall hiding the drainpipes, and discovered (remembered?) that there’s a dedicated vent right above the washing machine drain. So that gave me some hope that a plumber would have access enough to fix the problem. It occurred to me that maybe that vent had been clogged for a while, and the one upstream was doing double duty. In that case, a quick snaking of the vent pipe would stop the drain from backing up.

So T– called our favorite plumber, and he came out this morning and did exactly that — snaked down through that vent, and it immediately fixed our problem. T– even had a coupon from the phone book, so it cost less than a hundred bucks to get it taken care of. Before he left she told him exactly what we’d done, and he told us (as we had guessed, before our garage started flooding) that we probably wouldn’t have any serious problems with the capped vent. So that’s a relief.

Anyway, the plumbing situation is resolved now. Last night, we went to El Chico for dinner with my sister and her family. We showed up at 6:00, and the waiter didn’t come around to take our orders until 6:30, and then the food didn’t show up until about 7:10. That was a problem, because T– had prepared cupcakes for a birthday party for AB at church, which started at 7:00. The girls ate quickly, and then my sister complained to the manager and we got a free dinner. Nice!

Then I took my brother-in-law back to the house while the rest of them rushed to church late for AB’s party. It was Jeff’s first time seeing the remodeled kitchen, and we spent half an hour discussing the work that had gone into it.

When the girls got home, we talked for a bit until the little ones started fussing, and then my sister took her kids home to go to bed. T– and I watched Lost (a really good one, and frustratingly short even at 40 minutes), and a couple other shows before going to bed.

Other than that, it’s just things and stuff.

I’m finally over whatever ailment had me down all weekend. Last night I was still dragging some (and T–, too, but of an ailment all her own), but today I’m finally feeling pretty much well.

After work yesterday we had D– over, and T– made him steaks as a birthday treat. They turned out awesome, as did the homemade mashed potatoes and the fruit salad she threw together as a dessert.

Then we spent the evening watching TV. T– gave AB a bath, and I spent some more time getting the fileserver up to speed, but all around it was a quiet night.

Other than that, it’s just things and stuff.

Last Thursday night, T– and I went out for a Valentine’s date. She was at the zoo when I first got home from work, which gave me time to wrap my gift to her (season 6 of Law and Order) and scribble down a quick card by way of iambic meter. Then T– got home from the zoo, and shortly after D– showed up to babysit AB.

T– and I went up to the Old Chicago in Edmond, and had some fantastic pizza. Then on the drive toward the theater we looked up showtimes for Bride Wars, and learned that our options were either ten minutes in the past, or two hours later. So we decided to go shopping instead.

We found AB’s birthday present at Toys R Us, then picked up some gellato and headed home. We spent most of the rest of the evening on the couch, watching Thursday night comedy.

Friday I woke up feeling sicker than ever, but I’d used up my RDO on Monday, so I came in to work anyway. Late in the morning, I started getting calls about K– and N– being at the hospital, with the baby apparently ready to come out (two weeks early). I cooled my heels until a little after noon, then finally decided to call it quits for the day. I figured chances were good I’d be spending the afternoon in the waiting room at the hospital, but if not I wouldn’t mind taking the afternoon off to convalesce a little bit.

K– and N– ended up going home a couple hours later, but they were back that night and by 11:00 it was clear that it was really happening this time. I took K– some dinner around midnight, and hung around until a nurse said they should probably get some sleep, and plan on having the baby in the morning.

N–‘s mom came to crash our place, just to be close to the hospital, so the two of us got to the house between 1:00 and 2:00 Saturday morning, and it was a while before I fell asleep. When I finally did, I slept until about 11:00.

I got up and got dressed in time to take some lunch up to the hospital for K–. Things hadn’t benn progressing very quickly at that point, so we spent about an hour waiting out in the waiting room, having lunch and talking with K– and N–‘s family as they arrived, and then finally gave up and headed home so an increasingly fussy AB could get a nap.

D– called and asked if I could pick him up from Best Buy, where he was getting a new stereo installed in his car, but halfway there he called and told me they couldn’t do it, so I took care of a couple errands and headed back home. Right about then AB was waking up from her nap and K– called to say things were starting to happen, so we headed back up to the hospital.

We got to see N– briefly, then went out to wait in the sitting room with the family, and E– (joined shortly by B–), and eventually even D– showed up. We had a real party going on in the waiting room.

Of course, as you’ll know by now, the baby was born at 6:14. We waited another forty minutes to get in and see him, congratulate K– and N–, and then we headed home, leaving them to be with their visiting family.

I dropped T– and AB off, and ran up to Edmond to grab some barbecue from Steve’s Rib. When I got back to the house D– was there, and we ate and watched some TV for a while, then T– headed to bed early and I threw The Big Lebowski in while D– and I played WoW.

Around 11:00 again, K– called and asked if I could bring him some dinner. D– came with, and we took some food up and got to visit with them for a while before they decided they were ready to get some sleep. I remember what it’s like those days in the hospital — you’re desperate for some diversion, like a good conversation with visitors, but even more so for sleep. We cleared out, and got back to the house around 1:00.

Just before we left I’d gotten caught up in a project on the computer, organizing my fileserver, and instead of going to bed I picked up where I’d left off, so I was up until nearly 3:00 working on that. Then I woke up Sunday morning on time to get to church, but I still wasn’t over my sinus infection, and my stomach rebelled something fierce. So I stayed home, waited it out, and then didn’t go along when T– headed to the hospital for a quick visit after church.

We spent the afternoon on the couch, T– watching Law and Order and me working on the fileserver. Later in the afternoon Toby called to say he and Gwyn wanted to visit K– and N– at the hospital, and asking for the room number. They suggested we could get together for dinner afterward, and we were all for it.

We ended up going to Texas Roadhouse, and spent a couple fun hours with the Nances. It’s always good to see them. Afterward we headed home, and spent the rest of the night the way we’d spent the afternoon.

Monday was President’s Day, so I was off work. I slept in again, but woke up in time to pick D– up from an automotive shop that was going to install his new stereo. That was up in Edmond, and I took him straight from there to the hospital, where T– was already waiting for us.

We spent a while in the waiting room, chasing AB around and chatting with the family, then got to see K– and N– and little baby Jason all in a crowd. We packed the room, and everybody who was healthy (read, “not me”) got to hold the baby, and we had a grand old time. We also learned they would be going home that evening, which was good news to all, I’m sure.

We left after a bit, sometime early afternoon, and I dropped D– off at his place then went home to play some WoW. A few hours later, 5-ish, he called to tell me that the automotive place had been unable to install his stereo (but had waited six hours to tell him that), and he needed a ride to go pick up the car. Ugh.

We got back from that errand a few minutes before our babysitter arrived to watch AB. Then we (D– and T– and I) headed up to the mall for a quick meal in the food court, and then an eight o’clock showing of Coraline.

The movie was great. Nightmarish, but in a good way. It’s billed as a scary fairy tale, and it does the job. T– and D– liked the artistic style a lot. I wasn’t really a fan, but I did enjoy what they did with the story. It was captivating.

We got back home after ten, so that was pretty much it for the day. Bed, sleep, and now it’s Tuesday and I’m back to work.

Other than that, it’s just things and stuff.