Blogs and journals I think I'd like to keep the archive of this blog around as a record. I've never kept a diary for more than a day or so, but I think it may be interesting to look back on what I've written here -- all the ups and downs. If you blog, do you plan to keep your postings "forever" or would you like to trash the whole thing and start afresh (as some people have done)?

Back to work time Tomorrow I have to go back to work. In some ways the quiet of the office will be a respite from a rampaging 2-year-old. But still I find I am very apprehensive. I think the problem is that there's no spark to it anymore, no real motivation. The best part of software development is coming up with something new. It may not always work and it may not make money, but it is something new that no one has done before. That's not the way things are now -- too often we are in the business of recycling old code and designs because someone thinks it will be "cheaper" to do that than to innovate. The problem is that it won't be, and we will have all of yesterday's problems with a bunch of new ones from trying to adapt things that don't fit. I have to go to work to make money to feed the family. There ought to be other reasons. I hope there are.

Silly cat photo

Early morning I set the alarm for 6:30 today to try to keep getting myself back to a normal schedule for work, as opposed to the 2-year-old's stay-up-till-midnight routine (when will THAT end?) I'm not much of a morning person usually, but now I find I really like getting up before everyone else and having breakfast alone in the quite house. I've never liked eating dinner alone, and lunch is a great social time, but breakfast is another story -- I prefer to get ready to face the day at my own pace. I'm very groggy when I first get up, and prone to stumbling into people and have trouble doing things like making coffee if anyone else is within 10 feet; I need my space then.

The best TV salesman ... ... is a 2-year-old angrily pointing into the air where our circa-1985 TV was before its CRT died in a shower of internal sparks. My wife got that TV at Sears and it lasted a long time; oddly, giving out just a couple months after our other smaller, but equally ancient, set. The little kitchen TV had to fill in last night, but today we went shopping and got a Sony 20-incher, that should be nice and also will have some of the things like video inputs the old one lacked. I hope the boy likes it because he is quite the critic. We don't want to feed him too much TV but sometimes a Teletubbies video can do wonders to calm a tantrum.

Railway strike Yesterday at Barnes and Noble they had a Thomas the Tank Engine railway set which the boy loved to play with, so we got him a little circle of track and a few cars. Now he won't leave it alone -- right now he's refusing a snack if he can't have it where the trains are. He gets very frustrated when he can't get the trains to do what he wants. This is annoyingly like the way I am.

Postponed posting Despite being off from work it seems like a 2-year-old in the house doesn't seem to leave me any time to post here. One day's fun and frustration is quickly replaced by another. He's mostly doing OK now, but sleep is still a problem. He was asleep by 11 p.m. last night, an improvement over previous nights, but did not sleep well. None of us did, really. Yesterday we visited a house that had a Fisher-Price school bus. The family was done with the toy, so they gave it to us. So now these unfortunate plastic pupils can be added to the list of accident victims from running off cliffs and crashing into things, along with airline passengers and the woman who keeps getting thrown down the elevator shaft at the garage.