Well, on Monday, Cam woke up at 3:15am. So when I woke up at 9, I took Cam for a few hours while Susan slept. Then we ran a bunch of errands, including dropping Cam for a short stint at day care. We had been working on a theory that it was hard for him to adjust to the first day back at day care after the long weekend he got each week. Two hours on Monday, it was hoped, would soften the blow.

Later, I volunteered to pick him up because I wanted to see how he reacted. Susan said that he breaks down in tears every time she picks him up, when he realizes that he's been stuck with strangers for a few hours. Sure enough, he suffered a complete emotional breakdown when I arrived. As soon as he saw me, he could only be comforted by being held by me. Heartbreaking. (But also rewarding to me in a way.)

The only thing remotely useful I got done on Monday was wishing Dina a happy belated birthday.

The next day, I woke up at 4:45am to pick up my father at Heathrow. When I got back, I took a long nap. When I got up from that, it was time to start preparing the guinea fowl. Woohoo! Culinary curiosity soon to be satisfied!

You know what? The guinea fowl tasted just like chicken. I don't think I could have told the difference with my eyes closed. It may have been just a tad more flavourful (check out my extraneous British 'u'!) than chicken. My Dad thought so. But I thought it was pretty effing close to chicken. I began to think that maybe I was tasting another Tyson invention.

Then I remembered what the guy said when I told him that I was going to cook the guinea fowl on Tuesday. He said, "That will be perfect. The birds were just killed today, and yours will have ripened to a nice gameyness by then."

Perhaps I am an Ugly American after all, but I put the guinea fowl in the freezer as soon as I got it home. I consider the verb "ripen" as applicable to vegetation only. Okay, maybe I'd use ripen when referring to teenage girls, but never, ever to poultry. When I told this (except for the girls part) to the housekeeper, she said that her father used to hang game birds up in the barn for a fortnight before eating them! Whoa! How could that possibly be healthy?! I am one of the least squeamish people I know when it comes to "food on the edge of spoiling," but even I would throw out a raw chicken that had been in my fridge for half that long.

Then, my Dad asked if I remembered that scene in Shogun when Richard Chamberlain's house keeper gets in trouble for throwing out a bird he has ripening. Oh, yeah, but I didn't understand that scene any better then, either. If I were shogun, I'd have sent that fruitcake Anjunsan packing. Honestly! Who ripens poultry?! It's no wonder the Brits invented penicillin.

For the first time, Cam was all smiles when Susan picked him up from day care. But on Wednesday, Cam woke up before 4am again. I woke up, too, and offered to stay up with him so Susan could sleep, but instead, she stayed up, and I relieved her of Cam duty at 9. I finally got something PPLP related done in the afternoon, the first real addition in three days. I wrote A Brief Explanation of PCS.

Now, despite the early mornings and the arrival of another guest, one might wonder how it came to be that I had so little time to work on the PPLP. The time just doesn't add up. Okay, I'll admit it. Over these three days, I had also developed a bad, "unemployed proportions" case of Olympic fever. Instead of looking into how network layer protocols like PPP and WAP interact with IP, I was in a deep slouch in front of the TV thinking: "Now that was a nasty spill. (How about a replay?)"

And, thanks to the Super Bowl obligating Susan to a month of the sports package, I could watch the Olympics 24 hours a day on EuroSport. I could wake up when it was 2am in Salt Lake City and watch a rerun of that phlegm covered guy winning the biathlon, just as I had watched him win the night before. I was surprised how riveted I was by a sporting event to which I had seen the outcome 12 hours earlier. Go Ole Einar!

Weight Watchers meals over this period included half a guinea fowl with loads of potatoes swimming in a heavy gravy and scones smothered in raspberry jam and buried under whipped "double weight" cream. When I tried to calculate points for these meals on the Weight Watchers website, it crashed, giving me a "floating point calculation error." Awwww yeeeaaahhhh.