wink     ; )

Children's Books review - Baby's Animal Friends

One of Spark's favorite books is Baby's Animal Friends. Unfortunately, I cannot stand it, and neither can Tree. The text is completely random from page to page (published, appropriately, by Random House), thus giving it the feel of watching TV while someone with ADD is holding the remote. At the risk of violating copyright, the text of the book is reproduced after the fold. (If Random House or Phoebe Dunn is reading this and would like me to take this down, just let me know and I'll happily do so.)

Presidential Debate reform

You know? I think that Defective Yeti may be onto something here.

Whining

The problem with owning your own business and being your own boss and sole employee is that when life gets a bit crazy and time gets harder to find than, say, leprechauns, and existing clients come to you with entirely reasonable requests, there's no one to foist the work onto. Sigh.

Background to 'Wasted'

(Or, the reason why last night pissed me off more than it probably should have.)

It is impossible to find enough time to sleep.

I hate getting up early in the morning. I am by nature a night person; left to my own devices, I'll stay up until 2 or 3 every morning and wake up around 10. But I am not left to my own devices--I"m left to Spark's devices. And that requires that I wake up by 7 every morning.

Which requires that I go to bed by midnight, even though I would like to stay up so I can get things done, like, for example, my homework. But I go to bed at midnight anyway even though I feel like I have 2 more productive hours in my day because I know that otherwise I'll have no productive hours tomorrow.

Forcing my body to work on this schedule is not working very well. I'm worthless from 7 until 10 every morning. And I never feel rested enough. I have to take naps in the middle of the day in order to keep going. My sleep at night never feels like it is actually giving me any rest when I go to bed at these hours.

But I don't really have a whole lot of options here. I'm not sure what to do.

Wasted

I was so exhausted this morning that I couldn't keep from crying in pure frustration for the first hour or so that I was awake.

Two nights ago, I got very little sleep because my friend was in town and we stayed up till midnight talking and drinking tea. As soon as I got home, I took a sleeping pill so that I could attempt to go to sleep at a decent hour. All it did was take me from "wired" down to "very alert". I couldn't fall sleep until about 3.

I was fine yesterday because I was mostly running on adrenaline. This is normal for me; the day after I get no sleep, I'm fine, but the day after that, I'm screwed as the sleep deficit catches up to me. I can only outrun my lack of sleep for one day.

Last night, my friend came over again. This was the last night he was going to be in town, so I was happy to be able to spend time with him, even though I should have been either doing homework or going to bed early. But I'm always more than happy to shirk school in order to make time for my friends.

I figured we'd have a fun time hanging out. Unfortunately, it was not meant to be. My friend ended up spending most of the evening planning his trip back to the east coast. By 9:30, I was ready to go to sleep due to my lack of sleep the night before. That's when he started surfing the net for hotel deals. I spent the next two hours impotently watching him check hotel prices on orbitz and hotwire and priceline and listening him debate whether or not he should upgrade from a 2 star hotel to a 3 star hotel for $11. The whole time I was thinking to myself that I should be either 1) sleeping, 2) doing homework, or 3) hanging out with my friend. But I was doing none of them. When 11:30 rolled around and it was clear that he was not even close to being done, I could stand it no longer. I was falling asleep in my chair and was growning exponentially more bitter. Though I hardly wanted to say goodbye to my friend in this manner (seeing as I probably won't see him again for several months), I kicked him out of my house.

So when I woke up this morning, I was frustrated and exhausted beyond all measure because of the colossal waste which was last night.

Luke, I am your Father...

Over on Slashdot, they had an article about the Star Wars Trilogy recently released on DVD. The comments were filled with "humorous" changes to the original trilogy that might conceivably have made. Most were stupid one-liners like having Leia say "Luke, I am your Mother", etc. One, however, was truly inspired...

Walking Backwards

Spark has taken to walking backwards recently, I'm not sure why. It's rather cute as he tends to do it with a disarming grin on his face as if he's doing something remakably clever. This is all fine and good until he inevitably trips over some toy or hits his head running into some piece of furniture that he hadn't seen because he was facing the wrong direction.

I always see the collision coming. I never do anything about it. Sooner or later he's gonna figure out that he should check behind him every now and then.

Disappearing links

Chez Miscarriage had a post up about how women who became mothers in one way would look down on women who became mothers in some other fasion. And vice versa. Each type of mother seeking to put some other kind of mother lower on some hierarchy of better-motherhood. She mentioned adoptive mothers at the end noting that adoptive mothers never seem to fall prey to this, but rather they frequently wonder if they are indeed at the bottom of said heirarchy.

At any rate, the post is gone. Anyone have a mirror of it? Or getupgrrl's email address so I can ask her for the text?

media hedging

You've just got to love it when the media hedges its bets. Defective Yeti has a great little article with the following examples:

Two stories on the morning's wire: Clinton Absence Spells Either Boost or Bust for Kerry and Cheney May Help or Hinder Bush's Chances.

hope

I got the following email from enji:

bravo for being a stay-at-home dad -- it's not an easy thing to defy societal expectations in the name of doing what's right for your family. if it's not too grandiose to say so, you're the hope for our generation. :)

Thanks enji!

Going bald?

Lately, every time I take a shower, enough hair falls out that I totally clog the drain. This was not the case, say, two months ago. This worries me. Things got slightly better after I got a haircut, but then I realized that it was just because the volume of hair that fell out went down, but the number of hairs that fell out seemed to stay the same. If this keeps up for a year or so, I'll be bald. Sigh.

blink blink

please excuse current catatonia. am in syllabus shock.

Hero

My in-laws are here for the weekend. I love spending time with my mother-in-law. She's great. But my father-in-law is here too. It's not that I don't like having him around...it's just that I have no idea what to do with him. About the only thing that we have in common is a love for movies (though we have pretty different tases). So we went to see a movie tonight.

We saw Hero.

My God what a beautiful movie. Think how beautiful Crouching Tiger was. Now think more beautiful than that. Now you're kinda getting close to how stunningly gorgeous this film is.

In addition to the amazing cinematography, I loved how the story just kept uonfloding and unfolding and unfolding. During the first half-hour, I thought that they were gonna run out of story. How were they gonna fill the rest of the time? But then they delved another layer, and then another, and then another. By then end I was crying. Very cool.

And China must be the windiest place on the planet what with all the billowing robes and sashes and hair.

At any rate, it you liked Crouching Tiger, then definitely go see Hero. Maybe not as emotionally complex or deep as CTHD, but more complex structurally and oh the images and colors which get seared on your retinas. (Now if only it had cellos instead of violins in the soundtrack...)

Back in Action

Finally I have my computer back up and running. For the past couple of months, I've been having more and more trouble with my computer. In the past week, my internet connection has been flaky. Three days ago I my internet connection quit altogether. I know it was something to do with my computer and not my internet connection in general because other computers hooked up to my router are connecting to the net just fine.

So finally I did what I had been planning on doing for quite some time but have been putting off...I reformatted my drive and started over.

Typically this solves all your problems but is a royal pain.

Imagine my surprise when I still couldn't connect to the net. Urg. I tried a different ethernet cable. No dice. I figured that my network card must be fried. Great. So I pulled an ethernet card out of a spare computer and plugged it in and now I'm funally up and running again. Whew!

I was amazingly relieved to be my computer back. I felt like I was missing part of my brain. Having a dead computer under my desk was also a huge insult to me...I worked the help desk for three years and here I was with a dead connection--I should be able to fix this in my sleep. What was wrong with me??!? I'm soooo glad that that's over with.