Thursday, September 2, 2010

Three Cheers for us!

Lily led us in a cheer yesterday, about how happy she was to be a part of our family. That was really nice. She had us all join hands and she said how much she loved us and how happy being a part of our family made her. I've got to write this kind of stuff down, because someday she'll be an emo teenager and won't believe that she once felt this way.

She had a big scrape on her chin when I got home last night. Jen explained that she'd tried to jump over a wagon, but didn't make it. Lily insisted that she'd actually made over the wagon but fell down afterwards. That's my little pedant. Whatever. It looks nasty, but I doubt it'll scar.

The temperature gauge on my dash has been running high in the past couple days. I wasn't sure if it was the same problem with my gas gauge or there was something wrong with my radiator. I like to spend my lunch breaks walking, and even though it was a huge pain in the ass, I decided to run to the store to pick up some anti-freeze.

I emailed Jen about my shopping trip ("We now have coolant, dental floss and diapers! Hurray!") and she responded, "Good luck catching those Nazi art smugglers, McGuyver!"

It seems like it paid off.

On Tuesday morning coming in, the temperature gauge would read anywhere from about 75% to nearly 100%.
On Tuesday afternoon, after adding the coolant, it read from 40% to 75%.
For this Wednesday’s drive in to work, it never got about 40% and was often lower. On the way back it never topped 20%

I’m not sure if we fixed this all the way, but at the very least, we avoided something that would have become bigger trouble very shortly down the line. If we haven’t fixed it, we’ve bought ourselves some more time to deal with it.

And on the opposite end of the spectrum, I bring you a tale of easily avoided problems into which I rushed headlong. I fried our router last night. Lily was acting up, and I was getting mad, and the modem was having trouble maintaining a connection, so I decided to cycle it by unplugging the power cord and plugging it back in after a minute or two.

I unplugged both the modem and the router. Meanwhile, I was getting pretty annoyed with Lily and I wasn't watching what I was doing, and I wound up plugging the 12 volt power supply for the modem into the router, which only takes 9 volts. It started smoking immediately, and it turned out that I blew both the supply and the the router. The modem was fine, but I no longer had a supply to go with it. I dug out an old router/modem combo and we're using that for the moment.

We watched Extract because it had J.K. Simmons in it. It was a little disappointing, because I was expecting another Office Space. It does what it sets out to do, and Mike Judge has a really keen eye for identifying the archetypes of any given setting, but somehow this one wound up falling a little flat.

At bedtime, we were reading "I Love my Daddy Because..." and Lily decided that she wanted to read it to me. It shows different ways daddy animals take care of baby animals. Daddy penguins keep baby penguins warm, and daddy lions nap with baby lions. Lily can sound out some words, but she wasn't really reading here. She was just remembering it because we read it so often.

When we got to the page with the giraffe ("I love my daddy because he helps me reach things") and I asked "Do you know who really likes giraffes?" and she answered without missing a beat, "Your friend Miss Karen." Such a smart kid!

No comments:

Post a Comment