Baby It’s Cold Outside

One thing you don’t want to see on your first official day of house husbanding is ice dangling from the eaves. That means you’ll be stuck inside the house with a television-addicted kid. “Can I watch one Dora, please,” is printed on the official seal of the Dailey household.

Our new place is tiny but pretty nice. Apparently, it was built at gray-squirrel ground zero. The yard is overrun with dozens of the little tree rats.

It took four days, but I finally met the stringent criteria the cable company requires to get cable hooked up. I’m back online and we can stop watching the same Dora the Explorer DVD over and over. But the cable box the man brought didn’t work right so I had to go to the official Cable Co. building and get another one.

Afterward we took a driving tour of Little Rock and I showed Abby the places where Mom used to work and where Mom and Daddy used to live way before she was born. That business about us doing stuff before she was born seemed to upset her greatly. Then we went to a weird eat-in Sonic that didn’t have carhops. We got a cherry limeaid and a large thing of tater tots.

Then we went to Best Buy to get an HDMI cable to hook up the TV to the box. (The original box wasn’t HDMI equipped.) Comcast apparently wants to remain in the early 2000’s. I stayed in the store for about an hour so Abby could run a few laps and burn off some energy.

All that used up about 2 1/2 hours and then we had to go back to the house to fight over the pacifier and watching TV. Gina is gone overnight to Nashville on business, so there was no bullpen to provide some relief later in the afternoon. We watched the Dora DVD again. (Hopefully the DVR will be fully stocked with fresh Doras by morning. That show comes on about 15 times a day on various channels.) Abby had macaroni and cheese for dinner. It was the first time I’ve ever fixed mac and cheese. (I hate the stuff.) The cheese part is actually a hunter-orange powder that you mix with butter and milk. I threw in some extra butter and milk to take some of the toxic edge off that powder. It didn’t matter. She only ate about three bites of it and started badgering me for cookies. I gave her one.

We closed out the day with a good tickle fight and then she read the book we got at Best Buy to me before going to bed. I’m starting the job search tomorrow.