A snapshot of the status quo, January 2010
Started: 2010-01-28 20:25:00
Submitted: 2010-01-28 20:58:30
Visibility: World-readable
As of two days ago, Calvin is ten months old. He can crawl vigorously around the house, usually muttering to himself as he goes. He enjoys chasing Willow, who is smart enough to maintain a one-foot Calvin Exclusion Zone. Calvin and Cat5 are less interested in each other; Calvin will grab enthusiastically at her fur or tail, and Cat5 usually ignores Calvin. Calvin can pull himself up to a supported standing position and can cruise (walking while holding furniture), but he's faster crawling. He's figured out how to pull books off shelves, so we had to clear out the lowest shelves and seeded one sacrificial shelf with a bunch of baby-grade mostly-indestructible books. Calvin grabs at books enthusiastically, so we can no longer read him anything other than baby-grade board books. (He enjoyed The Cat in the Hat but for the fact that it's unavailable in board book format.)
Kiesa gets up with Calvin every morning but Sunday, when I get up whenever Calvin decides it's time to get up, and Kiesa sleeps in. (He usually gets up between 06:00 and 07:00.) A month or two ago Calvin figured out how to take two-hour morning naps in his crib, and he'll often take an afternoon nap when he's at home. This gives Kiesa more time in the morning; she no longer takes Calvin to daycare before mid-day. (I still find that listening to the monitor keeps me slightly on edge; I'm still on call, noticing for any changes portending the end of Calvin's nap.) In the evening, Calvin gets a bath and a final bottle before going to bed by 19:00.
For most of the month of January, I felt like I was simply treading water, keeping pace but not really getting ahead with the things I wanted to be doing to keep myself grounded. It took me a week to decide that might be ok; Calvin gets easier to take care of every month, so if I'm keeping station now I might actually get traction next month, or the month after that. It doesn't help that I don't have a dominant winter sport; I hiked all three of Boulder's highest peaks in one day before Christmas, leaving little left to do in Boulder's mountain park. I can snowshoe, and I keep thinking about getting cross-country skis to let me cover a bit more ground. The snow that fell around Christmas never melted on the unpaved path I like to run on from work; it started as loose snow, then packed snow, and has now turned to ice. Elsewhere the dirt paths have turned to mud. On Tuesday I ran with my Yaktrax shoe chains, and today I abandoned running outside in favor of a treadmill.
Most of my available discretionary time is absorbed by my trip to India in five weeks. I'm working through a very long history of modern India (1947-present), and having actually purchased plane tickets, I need to start thinking about my actual schedule on the ground. I know I'm not going to make it through my reading list before departing, so I need to start triaging and picking out the more important books.
My day job continues to entertain, amuse, and occasionally frustrate me. I'm finally on the cusp of wrapping up a project I've spent a year on (an interim version is currently in use; I'll deploy the final version and hope I don't annoy too many stakeholders by the different design choices made in the final version). Today I spent much of the day looking at a strange bug that seemed to manifest itself as a heap corruption issue but turned out to be an uninitialized variable; the init function I was calling expected the variable to be zeroed, and my code didn't zero the variable first. (I knew it would be a stupid error but I wasn't quite sure where to find it.) The six-month review period officially ends tomorrow, so I spent some time today remembering what I did for the past six months and writing it all down in one place.
I'm never quite sure what each day will bring, and each week is an adventure, but the trend seems encouraging.
