Asymptomatic

Abby and Riley were trying to do handstands on the gymnastics mat in the family room. I guess maybe Riley got tired or forgot what to do at a later point, and had an amusing little faceplant.

Video was taken with the Flip, uploaded to Flickr, and inserted into the post with Habari's new Flickr video support.

Abby: You count and I'll hide, ok? Go!

Riley: 1.. 2.. 3.. 4.. Here I come!

Abby: NO! Count to ten, ok? Go ahead....

Last Tuesday was Riley's third birthday. Berta stayed home to prepare things for the day. She took Riley out and bought a lot of balloons and a cookies-n-creme cake that he picked out himself.

Since we ordered a few things for him from the mail-order toy catalogs as gifts, they were a bit delayed in coming, so we didn't have any gifts to give him on his birthday. Instead, we all went to the toy store and picked out a few things that Riley liked.

He picked out one of those claw/grabber things, where you squeeze the handle and the claw at the end of the extension arm closes. He also picked out a big two-headed rubber dragon from among the rubber dinosaurs. We convinced him that he might like this staff-glider toy that comes from the cartoon Avatar: The Last Airbender. It's a "wooden" staff that turns into an air glider, and he's been flying around on it often since then....

I'll just say it plainly -- today sucked.

It started last night after the kids got home from Trick-or-Treat. I was reassembling my computer, which I had to take apart partially to hook the projector to my notebook. See, I was projecting a Halloween sign onto our garage door that told the kids to go up the street for candy. Perhaps I'll explain that more later. In any case, I was reassembling things when I noticed that, unrelated to my reassembly, my center monitor's backlight seemed to have blown out. This makes it exceptionally hard to log in.

It's kind of a strange puzzle. The center monitor is the only one on DVI, and the side monitors are both VGA-only. This might have been fine if I had a DVI to VGA adapter, but there were none to be found. So, it was time to order a new monitor, and with me being off to take care of Riley while Nana was on vacation, I saw this as a perfect opportunity to visit Best Buy and get that upgrade I've been considering. But then, events seem to collude to conspire against me. more

Today was an interesting day for both Riley and me. Nana has vacation this week, and so she's not at the house to watch Riley during the day when I'm working. Normally, Berta would take off these days, but she's been taking off so many days on these occasions - from times that Nana needs off to times when I've got to be somewhere at the end of the day when Abby comes home from school - that it's becoming a burden to her work. So to ease that burden, I told her that I would watch Riley on the two days this week that he didn't have preschool.

I had originally thought that I would keep Riley at home and take the day off myself. I had mentioned to Nate that I might need a couple of days this week to be home with Riley, as I've described, and he suggested that I could bring Riley over to his house and his wife, Mary, would keep an eye on Riley while I got some work done. Riley would be able to play with his kids and it would be a good work day.

So that didn't work out exactly as planned....