Making the busy season even busier

So, my Urban Camping Experience(tm) was successful: firstborn will not attend kindergarten at the overcrowded and disorganized school closest to us. Instead, I have secured a transfer to another, better organized school that happens to be just a bit further away.

To do this, I spent eighteen hours camped out in front of the local school district offices. I arrived Sunday afternoon. Shortly after setting up my hobo camp, I was joined by two other parents, equally intent on the same goal. By eight p.m. there were eight of us in line. By midnight, it was up to about twenty. The real rush started around three or four a.m., and there were probably forty or fifty parents in line by the time they opened the door.

But let me tell you, that first dozen (or so) of us? We bonded. We have kids the same age. We were all stuck out there overnight. (At least the weather was nice.) We shared folding chairs, set up portable DVD players so multiple people could watch, held each other's places for bathroom breaks... And, of course, every one of us was the sort of parents who were paranoically concerned about our children's education.

So right now I'm tired, my back is stiff, and my sleep schedule is neatly inverted (or, to put that another way, it's slipped back into its default "nocturnal" setting). Ne'ertheless, I am basking in my success.

Meanwhile, my wife's sister gave birth to twins on Sunday, bringing her up to a total of three children. Happy (and relieved) as we are about this, it has taken my mother-and-law out of town. (She's gone to help out with the new babies.) MiL, as I've mentioned before, takes care of our boys on the two days a week that my wife teaches. In some ways this is good timing - I'd already taken a day off to wait in line for the transfer, so wrangling the boys yesterday didn't cost me an extra vacation day. In other ways... well, this is my busy season. Not just building up to the busy season; oh, no. We've got two major festivals coming up in May - the second one is thirty-one days and seven hours away - plus a fund-raising campaign for the United Way, plus all the stuff we keep up with normally. We're there. So all in all, it would have been a bit more convenient if my sister-in-law could have gotten pregnant, say, a month earlier than she did.

Also, on a not-entirely-unrelated note, Firstborn has reached the point where he thinks it's funny to try to drive Daddy absolutely insane. He does this by repeating questions back to me with one word wrong - like this:
Theron: "What did the window say?" instead of "What did baby Roland say?"
Me: "The window didn't say anything. Baby Roland said, 'biggack'."
Theron: "What did the shelf say?"
Me: "The shelf didn't say anything. Baby Roland said, 'biggack'."
Daddy's responses gain increasing numbers of "Ahhhgk!"s as the game progresses. Yesterday, Firstborn was laughing so hard he could barely breathe before I had to call a halt.

All of which is to say that I have no idea what's going to happen in terms of the posting schedule here on the Blog o' Doom. (The Deranged Cultist is overdue, and I had another idea for the Mad Science Lab, and... well, anyway...) Posts may be few and far between, or I may compose more than usual in an effort to maintain my sanity, or anything in between. I really have no idea.

I did change the background on my desktop in honor of the season: