Tired.

15 September 2002

Where do I start?

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We have a difficult baby. That is the consensus amongst parents who hear about our troubles getting Alexander to sleep properly. Day, night, whenever.

"Make sure he's still awake when you put him down. Don't let him get used to falling asleep in your arms."

Why the fuck didn't anyone tell us this before???

You'd think it would be an obvious warning to any new parent. The instinct (are our instincts wrong?) is to let the baby fall asleep in your arms, because, well, he's cuddly and it's really nice to hold him like that.

We read books. We talked to lots of parents. Not one mention of this.

It's a long, tortuous (and torturous) road to fix the problem now. We can't do it by ourselves. We're going to sleep school.

I'm too tired to hear about how parents muddled along by themselves in the old days. Why should we have to suffer just because everyone else did? Anything that lessens the urge I have to yell at my kid, I'm going to do.

~~~~~

I got retrenched this week. Actually, the news was given to me on September 11th. You'd think they could have timed it better.

I'm not upset, really. My job was getting dead boring, and nothing exciting was visible on the project horizon. I got what seems to be a generous payout, so I'll take some time off, possibly take Alexander and his mum to meet the rellies in America, and then I'll find a better job.

Yes, I know the I.T. industry sucks at the moment and there are no jobs. I'm too tired to care.

I will miss the daily interaction with the friends I worked with. That makes me sad.

~~~~~

Over the past four months, I have spent many nights and weekends escaping from the daily grind of configuring and re-configuring endless water delivery systems. I need something interesting to play with, from a technical (and geeky) standpoint. Work used to be fun, but recently I've had to make my own fun.

The fun is nearly ready to share. If only some of my 30 beta testers (and you know who you are!) would give me some feedback, I could finish it sooner.

It's geeky enough that it's going on my resumé. Unfortunately, it's probably too geeky to have enough widespread appeal for world domination, which was my original goal. But that's all right. I'm too tired to care about world domination anymore. I'll settle for my name in lights, or even just a really cool job.

Yes, Alexander's late nights have been a convenient excuse to stay up. I'd rather sleep, but if I can't, I've got to find something interesting to do besides constantly burping him and trimming his fingernails, which seem to grow about four centimetres a day.

~~~~~

There are now about a hundred photos of Alex which need to be sorted and selected for an update to his website. I will get to it, honestly. At the moment I'm too tired, but it's not like I have to go to work every day for the next few weeks.

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Dave and I are still doing our lunch reviews, if anyone cares. So far we've tried 14 different places, if you include Dave's House.

Actually, I got an unsolicited e-mail from the manager of St. Arnou last week, so at least one person has actually read the review.

Hopefully I won't be too tired to continue joining Dave for lunch every Friday. Good food (and Dave's succint comments on the world) do a lot to motivate me.

~~~~~

Finally, I got a couple of "I want to be notified of updates" e-mails recently, but without any return e-mail address. If you want to sign up, you have to enter your address before clicking the "Yup" button.

If the e-mails were intentionally anonymous and intended to annoy me, I place the perpetrator(s) in the same category as the lowlifes who spray painted a yellow line down the length of our front fence. Okay, maybe not quite as lowlife. But I hope someone spams them. I'd do it myself, but I'm too tired to trace the buggers.