Morning coffee
Started: 2009-10-19 08:26:29
Submitted: 2009-10-19 09:00:45
Visibility: World-readable
Those paying attention to the timestamps on the last several weeks of changelogs may have observed that they tend to be written on weekday mornings. On mornings when I don't run, I visit a coffee shop somewhere between Longmont and Boulder and document my life. I'm still trying to find my perfect spot, with the right mixture of good coffee, handy location, free wi-fi, and environment. This morning I'm at Winot Coffee in Niwot, which is on the small side but seems reasonable so far. (Last Thursday night, for alternate-hacking-society, I visited Folsom Street Coffee Company and felt like the oldest person there. This morning, I think I'm the youngest person.)
In related running news, I decided against actually running a half-marathon (for the reasons documented earlier); I'm going to race a 10k this fall and peak for a 5k in December, then train for the Bolder Boulder next spring. I'm still trying to figure out the best way to record my training log; my Gnumeric spreadsheet is getting a bit convoluted. I have a bad feeling I may end up with another custom database application.
In the past month, Calvin went from being able to amuse himself for mere minutes at a time to being able to amuse himself for tens of minutes at a time without direct parental intervention. He's developed the hand-eye coordination to play with simple baby toys; Kiesa got him a Rock-A-Stack; he's fascinated by the bright colors and is able to knock the tower over and pick up and throw the rings. (I plan to get him a proper Towers of Hanoi set sometime in his childhood so he'll recognize the game when he gets to computer science class in college and learns about recursion.) He's also clearly teething; a thin white line is visible on his lower gum, and I can feel a rough tooth when he chews my finger. (His jaw is strong enough that I'm not particularly interested in letting him chew on my fingers any more, despite his lack of interest in teething on anything else.) He's on the cusp of becoming mobile; while lying on the floor he can roll repeatedly, a meter or more in any one direction, and he seems on the cusp of figuring out how to crawl. (This means we need to work on our child-proofing, which I've been mostly ignoring so far, with the notable exception of acquiring a Bluetooth A2DP transmitter and headphones for the stereo.) He sits up for ten minutes at a time without support, and he can stand as long as we're holding him up. Naptime continues to be a minor struggle; while at home, he's generally uninterested in going to sleep unless he's on a long car ride or in the stroller on a walk. It's getting better a tiny bit at a time, which is probably all we can ask.
We're keeping Calvin's grandmothers in the loop by weekly Skype video calls. Earlier in Calvin's life, we sat on the living room couch with Calvin sitting on our laps, but more recently we've put Calvin on the floor so he can play with toys, roll over, and think about crawling. Calvin seems to identify the on-screen images as actual people and tracks them and smiles. Yesterday he wasn't particularly talkative while talking to his grandmothers, but he was especially vocal earlier in the day, going as far as to say what sounded like the phoneme "da".
