What I've always wanted

Saturday morning, Oliver and I walked down to the Metrolink station. Sometimes he ran ahead of me. Sometimes he held my hand. Sometimes I had to carry him. When we got to the station, we took the elevator down to the tracks. While we sat on the bench and waited, Oliver had a snack of graham crackers. A few minutes later the train came in and we waved to it. A few minutes after that train left, another train came in and we waved to it. One more train and it was time to go home. The weather was cold and Oliver's mitten-less hands were cold. I told him to put his hands on me inside my jacket against my body. I carried him home like that - his hands warming against my body.

Last night, I stopped in his room before I went to sleep. He had fallen out of his new bed on to the pillows next to it. I picked him up and put him in bed, pulling the covers around him. He stirred briefly but went back to sleep after a minute or so of my hand resting on his back. I watched him for a minute as his breathing fell back into the rhythms of deep sleep. Back in our bedroom, I picked my wife's book and glasses off of the bed where she had taken them off before falling asleep. I spent a moment watching her as she slept, remembering earlier that evening when I tried to feel the new baby kicking her stomach. I turned off the light and gently kissed her forehead.

I'm in the place that I've always wanted to be for as long as I can remember thinking about the future. There are things about it that I'd change, but I wouldn't trade it away for anything.

Computing like it's 1969

My work laptop runs very, very slowly. When I have a standard set of applications open, opening another tab on my browser can take up to a minute. I can't listen to any form of sound from Pandora to CDs as they skip like a hyperactive toddler. This wouldn't be as much of a problem except the application that I'm working on requires several applications open at the same time. When I have them open I get shitty performance.

I can't figure it out. Other laptops with approximately the same configuration and installations run ridiculously faster than mine. It doesn't appear to be hardware related as every troubleshooting tool and scan returns that the device is working properly. It doesn't appear to be memory as my memory utilization is low compared to the amount of memory on the system. It's not spyware or anti-virus activity. I'm completely baffled.

I'm also really annoyed as it is sucking my desire to work. Each task become a Sisyphusian nightmare of clicking and waiting. Several tasks that I've been assigned to do I've had to farm out to other people because my machine was physically incapable of performing the task. The Sisyphusian tasks make for Sisyphusian days.

There is light at the end of the tunnel. We're getting a new machine for me to work on. And I may be able to borrow a co-worker's machine while he is away the next week or so. But in the mean time I'm back to waiting... and clicking...

Latest ultrasound

Getting an ultrasound when you don't want to know the sex of the baby is an adventure. You want to know how the baby is doing - verify that the baby has two of everything that he is supposed to and one of everything that she is supposed to. Verify that there is just one baby. You want to make sure that there aren't any serious complications and that the baby is growing at the right rate. So you want to see.

But you don't want to see everything. At one point the tech was making sure that the kidneys were functioning. She spent an awful lot of time in that area. At one point I turned away because I didn't want to see anything that I didn't want to see. I imagine when it comes to this point, it's easier on the tech to be one of the couples that wants to know gender as they can just fish around in the right area and announce, "It's a ..." I have the sneaking suspicion that the tech really wants to know and chooses an angle that will tell her something that the uninformed wouldn't see.

In the end, we still don't know gender and that's just fine with us. The baby is growing just fine, has enough of all the required parts, and not too many or too few. Our little nine ounce baby is on his way and we can't wait until June to meet her.

Update

I think the official deadline for blog slackerhood is one month post-free. Me being me, I am going to try and get this in just before the deadline. It's not that there hasn't been anything to write about or that I haven't had the time to write, I just haven't felt motivated at the right times.

The family is doing well. Oliver is going through a massive verbal growth spurt. Mostly he's still just using phrases with a word or two, but lately he's been moving into three and four word phrases. He's not quite as chunky as he used to be. He is getting much more precise in his gross and fine motor skills. There is a real marked difference even from his birthday a month ago.

Oliver has recently begun his transition to his own bed. We've manged to get him to go to sleep in his own room and his own bed, but he is so used to having other bodies around that he'll go hunting for us in the middle of the night, crawling over whatever it takes to find us. Even when that thing is the edge of the bed. The pillows and the carpet have been life savers. One night I decided to sleep next to the bed so that I could reassure him that there was someone in the room with him. We both had a scare in the middle of the night when he dropped down on me. It's a process, but he seems okay with it, so we continue.

My wife is doing well in her pregnancy with number two. She hasn't seemed particularly uncomfortable, but she hasn't had much of an appetite recently. We had a first name session and didn't come up with anything productive. It'll probably be a couple of months until we find something mutually acceptable. In the mean time, we have another ultrasound appointment today, so we'll have more art for the refigerator.

Work is going well. We're gearing up to go live at the end of January. I have a feeling that I'll be spending a lot of time at the office. the thing that has really been getting to me is that the laptop that I work on has been performing like a dog the past few weeks. Other developers have several version of visual studio open, several web browsers going, and I can't play a Cd and compile a piece of code at the same time -- Never mind having anything else productive going. It's sapping my will to work.

Personally, I'm doing well. I'm in the process of resolving to lose some of the copious weight that I've put on over the past few months. I know what I need to do. I just need to do it. But isn't that why I'm in trouble in the first place? Other than that I'm happy. I'm healthy. My family is happy and healthy. What else would I want?