b Papa Dog's Blog: Just Kind of a Streak Saver, to Be Perfectly Honest

Papa Dog's Blog

A Thing Wherein I Infrequently Write Some Stuff

Saturday, September 25, 2004

Just Kind of a Streak Saver, to Be Perfectly Honest

I had something more grandiose than usual planned for today’s entry but alas that and other plans have been viciously curtailed by the crumbling of the infrastructure around my ears. The computer infrastructure, that is. The virus problems mentioned a while back have continued and maybe escalated in the past weeks, and I’ve spent more evenings than I’d care to admit to scouring dismayingly fecund adware from the hard drive. Today, things have taken a great leap for the worse. I was in the middle of perusing my hit tracker data when things went totally monkeyfeces, with blue screens of death popping up every three seconds or so. I restarted, and Scandisk informed me that I’d developed bad sectors and that some crucial startup file was damaged. I’ve gone through every fix my limited expertise allows, and I still can’t get the thing started up in anything other than Safe Mode, with the display shifted to great huge Senior Citizen Type and the desktop photo of Baby Dog on the Half Shell all disturbingly pixelled up like a student film shot in the nineties on one of those Fischer-Price cameras.

In truth, I probably wouldn’t have gotten around to my big plan for the day anyway. It requires thought and effort and even research, and to do it right I’d probably have to go through a couple of careful revisions rather than just spewing spontaneously the way I normally do, so fuck it. I mean, you guys are swell and all but it’s the weekend and it’s not like anybody’s paying me to do this.

So instead, more about Baby Dog, who’s snoozing in the swing behind me as I type. She’s been making, in baby terms, leaps and bounds the last week or two. Yesterday, for the first time I saw her lifting up her head during tummy play. She’s kind of late for that milestone because we avoided having her on her stomach much, but I don’t think it’s going to take her long to catch up. She’s awake a lot more of the day now, and is a great deal more interactive. It used to be we could count on having her nurse and/or sleep through the length of an entire video. Not no more. It took us three nights to finish How Green Was My Valley, which is just slightly under two hours long. On the last night, we finally figured out how to keep Baby Dog happy while still being able to watch the movie. We set her up in the bouncy chair with her back to the TV, then took turns sitting on the floor wedged in between the bouncy chair and the couch. We could reasonably watch the screen while still entertaining baby. I kept her riveted for a good twenty minutes just by waggling my fingers up and down. Apparently, that’s an awesome game. Story time is still a staple, though of course I can no longer do it every day. Today she was in a bit of a cranky state by the time I got the first book open, but that book was Ten Little Ladybugs, which has great huge bright pictures and caught her eye immediately. She stopped crying, became transfixed by the pictures, and absently grabbed hold of my stubbly cheek with her right hand as she sucked her thumb on the left. Oh, that’s another thing. She’s discovered her fingers in a big way, to hilarious effect. Sometimes she laces them together in Monty Burns-style contemplation. Often she’ll hold them up and stare at them like The Littlest Stoner.

That’s all for now. Black Narcissus is up on the Netflix queue tonight. 101 minutes. Let’s see if we can’t finish it before the party next Sunday.

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