Milly had a checkup and shots today.  She’s 27 inches long, in the 90-somethingth percentile.  Her weight was much more average, which surprised me a little.  She’s got some cheeks and a belly, ya know?

She did really good with her shots.  She got four of them and she let out a couple really pained screams, but once again the sugar paci saved the day.

One thing that will come of this visit is that we’ll start giving Milly some juice to drink.  She’s had much more… let’s call it “consistent” poo lately, which, to be honest, make cleanup a LOT easier.  They seems to cause Milly some stress though, and Dr. Hill said the sugar in juice can help with that.

After we got home Amanda got ready to go to her office Christmas party.  Every year up to now they’ve had a really big to-do where they rent out a restaurant and have an open bar and all employees and their spouses are invited.  This year I think they’re just doing things department by department.  It’s been a tough year, economically, for pretty much everyone and it’s great that they have been able to do parties like they did in the past, so there’s no room for complaining.  Amanda headed off to Hiro Japanese Steahouse and Sushi Bar while I watched Milly and worked on into the night.

Well, that was the plan anyway.  Amanda did leave (Cyra picked her up) and I did watch Milly, but I didn’t get a chance to get really anything done.  Milly was not a happy girl.  She was screaming as though someone had thrown her on the floor, and the only thing that made her happy was holding her.  Now, while I appreciate that she wanted to be close to her daddy, it wasn’t very conducive to me putting in a little extra time at work.  Eventually I tried putting her down for a nap, but she was screaming so loud that I really couldn’t concentrate, so I got her back up, walked around with her a little and let her play with some things in the nursery.  That did the trick for a while, but she ended up getting really fussy again and this time even carrying her around didn’t make her happy.  I changed her and put her to bed again, and this time it worked.

At this point I was pretty bummed though.  Amanda was off at a Christmas party (which is fine, I don’t begrudge her that at all) and I was feeling slightly overwhelmed with work.  On top of all that, Nick Warkentien had planned to come over.  We were gong to eat pizza and play video games, which sounded like a good, relaxing time, but Amy was working (or sick, or both) and Eli had come down with a fever, and being contagious we decided it was probably best for them not to come over.  So my guys night was shelved.

So there I was sitting on the couch and feeling self-pitiful, trying to get some creative juices flowing for my work when I decided that really, I just wanted to do nothing and play some video games.  I really felt like playing an RPG though, and most of the PS3 games that I have are first-person shooters.  They’re good games, just not what I was in the mood for.

So anyway, I decided to look up solutions for fixing an Xbox and found one that may or may not be a permanent fix.  The problem with my Xbox 360, as I’m sure you don’t remember, is that the color went wonky on it then the video went to black and white bars, even though the sound works fine.  One fix I read about basically involved overheating the Xbox in order to melt some interior parts back to where they’re supposed to be then letting it cool for a while.  So I let it heat up from the time I studied up on that and when I got Milly up then I let it cool off until I got her down for the night and, presto-bingo, it miraculously started working again!

I’ve been wanting to play Mass Effect since I started telling Jason about it, particularly since he just started playing it, so I fired that up.  According to my save games it had been a year and a half since I played.  Turned out that I was really really close to beating it.  There was one side mission I had available, but I missed out on it.

Amanda got home, I want to say around 10:00, but that might not be right.  Sounds like she had a good time out with the girls.

Zach Dotsey