fine whine

... or rather, lack of content.

First, let me be the last to wish everybody a Happy New Year 2007*. I never intended to let the entirety of January pass without writing anything at all, but the fact that I'm actually writing this on February second would show that exactly that has happened.

I didn't have any drafts started for the month, at least not in my software.

This is not to say that nothing interesting has happened; only that writing about it isn't atop my to-do list anymore. Coincidentally, neither is beating up the denizens of Azeroth - I'm almost completely weaned from the World of Warcraft, too.

But enough about things virtual and insignificant.

It's been a big month for our daughter, too. Just last week Natalya started attending daily day care, and Jessica's gone back to work. Our day-to-day routines continue to evolve - I now wake up more than twenty minutes before I leave as it is my responsibility to feed (and sometimes re-clothe) Natalya. I think I'm going to assemble a DVD or two of TV episodes to watch in the morning as I feed her, since my initial experiments into holding a baby, a bottle, and a Playstation 2 controller have been less than successful.

I haven't added many new photos of her to my gallery recently, and in fact haven't taken as many either. But I do have a few to upload, and have no intentions of stopping taking pictures anytime soon.

So then you ask, other than not taking pictures of my daughter, what have I been doing these last several weeks?

At work I've been spending a considerable chunk of my time doing workshops that are not exactly in the scope of my day-to-day responsibilities. My day-to-day responsibilities have not exactly shrunken to accomodate these added demands, however, and as such have had some extra workload issues.

As such, I've been borrowing a laptop at night. A laptop which, I have discovered, gets better wireless reception than any of the ones I've tried before in my house. In fact I am able to piggyback onto the wireless network of one of my neighbors across the street, as long as I stick to the front rooms of our house, particularly near the windows. I've entertained the notion of trying to figure out exactly which house houses the router to which I connect, but haven't tried very hard so far. I have, however, finally seen the first season of Arrested development and the first two of NBC's The Office, and I must say, they're quite funny.

Of course both shows would be perfect feeding-time entertainment, but this idea has only occurred to me after I've already watched them, before I was consistently feeding Natalya every morning. I suppose I could always re-watch them, of course.

As ever, though, watching TV shows is the merest fraction of the time my TV is on; I'm watching movies at pretty much my usual pace. Unusual, however, are the movies themselves: I've begun watching Bollywood movies. Though I haven't made it through ten of them, I (arbitrarily) decided to watch 50 Hindi movies by 2008, though I may need to revise that goal to 'movies from India' to better cover the non-Bollywood films (i.e. ones not in Hindi). Even from the few I've seen I have much about them to write, and hope to get around to doing that soon, since I've been bouncing the ideas around in my head for quite some time.

At the risk of promising almost nothing and still failing, I'm not going to make any promises or resolutions about posting more.

And any rumors that this post is timed to match yet another threadless sale are, well, nonexistent until now, and entirely untrue. They are, in fact, doing another sale, however this time around to save $5 per shirt you need to buy two of the same, for you and ostensibly for your sweetheart. This is also your chance to stock up on duplicates, I suppose.

Whenever Jessica and I inadvertantly wear the same color shirt I'm tempted to change clothes - I'm not sure I'd be interested in wearing the same (trendy, hipster approved) shirt as her. So it goes.

* Or may I be one of the first to wish a Happy New Year of the Boar? Chinese New Year is rapidly approaching - it won't be 4704 much longer!

This sounds cruel, but is it bad that I can't stop laughing when my baby daughter hiccups?

She's been doing it a lot more lately*, and it just cracks me up. Especially when she's trying to cry while she's hiccupping.

Waaa-hic!-uhwaaaa-hic!-waaa-hic! and so forth.

Of course after I've had a good laugh (around seven or eight minutes) then I'll try to figure out why she's crying, and change her diaper or whatever, all the while still chuckling because she's still hiccupping.

It'd be worse if there were something I could do for her, but as much as I have heard, there's nothing that conclusively cures adult hiccups, let alone anything safe enough to try on babies. So all I can do is let her do it, and try not to laugh too cruelly.

* Please understand I am using the term 'lately' very loosely, as in the last day or so, since we're only talking about a week total here.

I haven't quite mastered this business of sleeping when the baby sleeps. That phrase seems to appear almost verbatim in all of the books and other materials I've encountered about the first few weeks of raising a newborn.

None of them of course suggest any methods to do this, of course. I have a difficult enough time sleeping when my wife sleeps, and she formerly would get many more hours of sleep a night than our daughter does, so far*.

She doesn't get that much anymore, of course, so I'm trying to make up for it by being rested cooperative, and helpful.

One of the things I try to do is make sure she gets sleep between feedings. Tonight I let Natalya sleep laying on my chest as I watched a movie**, so as to keep her quieter.

It seems that's the most sure-fire sleep position for her (and sometimes Jessica too), but I haven't quite gotten the hang of dozing off with this tiny little baby laying on me.

There's really no way to describe what's going through my head as she lays there, occasionally burping or grunting and shifting around. She's a person, a little person, and I'm her dad.

These things take some time to sink in, you see, and I'm more than aware that all too soon she's going to be too big or too, well, not a newborn, to be falling asleep on me. Until then, though, I'll probably do this sort of thing a lot, prevailing advice or not.

* "So far" being somewhat of a laughable conceit since she's only three days old.

** That movie being 50 first dates, which I may discuss later when I'm not trying to be heartfelt and sincere.

Yesterday morning, in the wee hours*, a baby was born. Actually, I can vouch for a more than a couple babies being born yesterday morning and the night before because I could hear them crying somewhere down the hall from me - I spent the night in a Labor and Delivery room at the hospital.

Which would seem an odd choice to spend a night, except for the fact that I was there to coach my wife through having our baby daughter, Natalya Anne.

"Coach" seeming to be an odd term, since I really had no idea what it was she was supposed to be doing, and moreover physically how she could do it.

But back to the room. It was a pretty nice room, though some of the chairs might have been a little more comfortable. Jessica had a nice bed, but I was stuck fending for myself in what I could piece together from what I could scrounge together.

Surprisingly we both got some rest (apparently I was actually snoring at one point) after Jessica received a much-needed epidural, though to her credit she toughed her way through a considerable amount of pain (or at least made noises like she was, and squeezed my hand rather convincingly) before having it administered.

These are the sort of battle stories mothers trade. For my part the guys compare stories of shouting and squeezing and little else.

But that's for later on. For now I'm spending some time quality time with my family, in a smaller room with considerably less (comfortable) seating. I think we're going to be here for a couple days, and nights in which other people will be more than willing to take care of our (presumably) crying baby for us. This, I have heard, is a good thing.

* 3:48 AM to be precise, and furthermore she weighed 7 pounds, 1.5 ounces and measured 20 inches long. Why do these numbers matter so much? And not any others, like width, or volume?

Few of my timepieces* display the correct time. In the house we do have one clock (actually a weather station) that syncs itself with the signal from that atomic clock in Colorado, but all the others range anywhere from a minute off to half an hour or more.

My wristwatches, when not out of commission or battery, are all at least a couple minutes fast, generally around seven.

My car has two digital clocks in it (both factory installed, no less) and they're both wrong, though within twenty seconds of each other. They're ten minutes fast, tested against the NPR announcer's clock almost daily.

Ten minutes is also the amount of time it takes for me to drive to work in the morning. Knowing that, as soon as I sit down in the car I know what time I'll be at work, all without doing any mental math**.

As nifty a trick as this may be, I'm working on my morning routine so that as soon as I get out of bed I know what time I'll sit down in the car. I'm within five minutes, I think, but I know I can improve my time.

Then again, it's just a matter of time before one of us clumsily fat-fingers the time-setting buttons searching for the snooze button, anyway.

* Because I seem to be writing about time so frequently, I have created a corresponding 'time' category. It's about time, eh?

** Closing my eyes while driving is something I've tried to avoid, over the years, to the extent that I am capable of, and moreover inclined to, sneeze with my eyes open.

Lately at work I've found myself closing my eyes to do a mental calculation*.

I don't recall doing this as a child, and even doing this months ago.

It's likely I've been a little more sleep-deprived lately than usual (though somewhat of my own doing) and work has been tenser and more stressful than usual (somewhat less of my own doing), but are those factors enough to degrade my mental abilities this much?

Also, am I sticking my tongue out as I do it?

* Well, actually I'm just doubling a measurement: seeing, for example, 11 7/8" and needing to write down 23 3/4". Why I now need darkness to concentrate on this simple task, I do not know.