It was a fairly nice day on Saturday, so we took Aria to a nearby park. it was her first time on a kiddie swing, and at first she didn't like it, so we played on the slides, and she loved those! after a while, I showed her how fun a swing can be (probably the most weight those things have seen in a long time). then we put her back in the kiddie swing, and she loved it! here's a clip of her giggling in the swing.
remember that snow we got - oh say, about 3 weeks ago? well we took pictures of Aria playing in it while i was shoveling, but i guess i was too worn out to post em after the work out that wet snow gave my back ;-)
I don't mind shoveling snow, because it falls in with my love of vacuuming and mowing. don't ask me why...
I have to apologize to the grandparents. when you visit Aria on Tuesdays, you won't see her as much as you used to. and here's why:
She is now officially a 1 nap toddler! so, if you get here at 11, you will see her for about an hour. then she wakes up at around 2:30–3:00. your grand total of baby and you time will have dropped from 6.5 hrs to at most 4 hrs. so sorry. bring a book, or something to knit. or play scrabble. or play sudoku. or watch a movie. we have HBO now, not to mention our DVD collection...
yay. i called Comcast to turn on HBO halfway through the final season of The Wire. We figured we would watch the first half on HBO on demand, and catch the rest of the season as the episodes air - it's only a 10 episode season anyway, then turn HBO off.
The customer service (and i use that term loosely) agent on the phone gave us HBO free for 4 months, even though we've had it free before. so we'll be filling up our DVR :-)
BUT...
somehow, all of our digital basic channels got turned off when they turned on HBO. I called back and the guy i spoke to tried the standard reset the signal mess and me unplugging the cable box trick which only ever results in the guide losing all info on all upcoming shows over the next 2 weeks. and that's a pain cause i like to spend time just cruising the guide (and i like to think i'm an atypical guy - oh well).
So of course the customer service agent uses the standard fallback of scheduling a technician appointment. the last time I had to do this, they didn't show for the appointment because it never got scheduled. so this time, i made the guy promise that someone would show up between 6am and 9am. hey i'm awake anyway...
well, 9am rolls around, and no technician. i call Comcast, and guess what?? no appointment in the book! so the customer service agent says let me try to reset the signal... it's like a bad joke. even though i explained that it didn't work yesterday, but wow! this time it worked! stupid Comcast.
They must really want to keep customers as Verizon FIOS is being installed in more and more areas, our area just had it installed, but Verizon isn't quite finished. Honestly, that's the only reason we still have Comcast.
anybody have a fun customer service experience they'd like to share?
as some of you may know, one of my many hobbies is playing a little-known online game called World of Warcraft (herein referred to as WoW). some say it is addicting, a waste of time, etc... i will not argue these points because it is what it is, and everyone gets something different from it. i will say that ANY activity/hobby that detracts from other more important aspects of your life is detrimental and should seriously be looked at. this applies to anything, not just video games. there. done with that.
anyway, this is a game centered around killing creatures, monsters, and other characters to progress further. but because of its scope and utter freedom to ultimately do whatever you want (there are people who create characters to do nothing more than spam chat channels to get you to go to their WoW website and pay them money to progress), some people have been coming up with interesting things to do (as mentioned in previous parenthetical). There is an Auction House in the game that is setup very much like eBay for people in the game to auction off items they find in the game that others may need. Some people play this Auction House like the stock market and corner the market on high-yield items to turn a profit. when i say profit, i mean in-game money, not real money of course. the more gold you have in-game, the better things you can get for yourself.
one new-to-me thing that i've found people doing is being a pacifist in the game and still progressing their character — albeit at a very slow rate. instead of killing creatures or other characters to level-up their character, they complete quests that require them to collect things, or come up with ingenious ways of completing quests without killing things. it seems like a waste of time to me, but it is just another way to take something and make it different and use it in a way that wasn't originally intended. link below for those interested.
http://pacifistundeadpriest.blogspot.com/
i promise i won't bore you with WoW much anymore. :-) maybe i'll make a tanking (WoW term for what i am in-game) blog...
our plan seems to have worked. we gave Aria a pacifier early on to keep her from sucking her thumb. we'd read about how good it is to let babies learn to self sooth by sucking on their thumb, but i wasn't buying it — thumb sucking is just a physical way of self soothing, and plus if she knows her thumb is there for that, she'd use it all the time and then it would be tough to get her to stop.
so the pacifier was introduced. and she used it! at one point, she had it in her mouth 75% of the day. it was great. pacifier = mute button AND drool plug! when the drooling all but stopped, we transitioned to using the pacifier just for naps and bed time. there were times when she would wake up in the middle of the night solely because the pacifier fell out. kind of annoying, but she never thought to use her thumb but a couple of times, so i was happy. then she learned by herself to sleep through the night even if her pacifier fell out. then if i asked her to give me her pacifier when she woke up from her naps, she would freely give it to me.
So... Dana put Aria down for bed last night without her pacifier. she fell asleep like it was nothing. it helped that she's such a smart baby and learned how to not rely on it pretty much by herself.
yay! no more pacifier lines around her mouth!
update: of course after typing this up this morning, she had trouble taking her naps without the pacifier, and she wouldn't go to sleep at night without it. some people would say cold turkey is good and let her get herself to sleep, but we'll just let her choose whether she wants to sleep with it or not :-)
I really liked this story. the characters were developed very well, and the story overall was very good. I saw the main plot twist coming, but then there was an added bonus twist towards the end that i didn't see coming. there were a lot of similarities with newer sci-fi stories, and i think those writers got their ideas from Card. a couple times i thought to myself "oh man that is just like movie x, or book x!" but then i remembered this was written way before those, and got mad at them for stealing his ideas, even though a lot of them were universal sci-fi themes. This book was written a while ago, so i'm mad that i hadn't read it sooner. this is definitely going on my re-read list :-)
I'm wondering if the other books in this series as good as this opener? and is it a complete story arc about Ender or what? I will have to research this and/or find other good sci-fi books to read. with my possible upcoming boycott of Dean Koontz, and waiting for George Martin to finish the fifth book in his Ice and Fire series, i won't have anything to read except my standard re-reads (yes i do that)
Ender's Game: 8.5/10 - excellent story, good twist, excellent ending. on my re-read list.
