Update #2

Hit a point about 4:30 this afternoon where I was just like, "Did we really go all the way up there and get the boy all set up and then come all the way back?" Not, like, denial exactly. It just feels so surreal. 

And, of course, we have cell phones. We can text him. He can text us. In a real pinch, there might even be phonecalls. It's really not at all like it was when I went away to college, and I have to say this is giving me some interesting perspectives on that experience. \

I'm still off work tomorrow, and hopefully I'll be decompressed enough to start with some cleaning; the house isn't desperate yet, but it could sure use some attention. Secondborn stayed with his Nana and biked back and forth to school (pretty much the same way he would have if we'd all been home), and apparently the dog kept coming in to check on him while he was asleep; I am so, so proud of him. He and the dog are both back over here, and I'm trying to figure out how early I can go to bed and still reasonably expect to sleep through the night.

Update to Long Day

 I don't know whether or not this counts as "processing" but I am profoundly exhausted.

Another Long Day

Okay, this one's going up unedited because there's a decent chance that I won't even be awake yet when it posts. Basically: better day, a lot fewer issues, but still very, very long. 

As planned, we popped up and grabbed breakfast at the hotel, then drove over to Firstborn's new dorm, where we were greeted by a pack of upperclassmen who grabbed his stuff out of our vehicles and got it all up to his room. We then managed to get our vehicles removed to an outer parking lot, so other parents could do the same. 

Then we set about trying to get the room into shape, which meant opening all the boxes, sorting out items... and realizing that there were really only three full-sized drawers and one desk drawer in the entire room (not counting the, um, shelf? at the top of the closets). Firstborn's room is built to be a (pretty tight) double and he's occupying it as a single, so it had a good amount of room, but the furnishings were a dresser with three drawers, a desk, and a side-table with another drawer and a storage space underneath -- all three set up as a single desktop underneath the loft bed. (The loft bed looked rickety as hell, but I think it'll hold; it also completely lacked any sort of steps or ladder.) So, we did some creative arranging and Beautiful Wife -- an absolute life-saver -- started making a list of other things that we needed to purchase for his room, starting with shelves and some kind of low cabinet that could hold the microwave. 

By the time we got all that sorted out, it was time to go meet Beautiful Wife's aunt, whom I'll call T, for lunch. You may wonder why we would interrupt the dorm-room setup to go do this when we had only one day to finish; I know I did. As it happens, T is an absolute treasure: delighted to see us, absolutely thrilled to meet Firstborn as a near-adult instead of a kindergartener, and well-connected with the local community. She had some ideas about how to get the medical staples out of the back of Firstborn's head, and was more than willing to accompany him whenever this happened. Plus, the food was really good. 

After that, we headed over to the local Target, which was absolutely swarming with incoming freshmen and their hollow-eyed parents. We went down Beautiful Wife's list, and I found a low cabinet which would fill in the space beside the refrigerator and a matching set of shelves, both of which were intended for garage/workroom/tool storage deployment, so they had sort of a cool warehouse aesthetic, were cheaper than the things intended for room furnishings, and also were much easier to assemble. Beautiful Wife managed, through what I can only consider a effort of pure will, to find a small and completely suitable card table, plus a couple of rugs and some cushions to complete her vision for the room. (I will note for the record here that I did not have a vision for the room; I just wanted to add places to put shit.) We checked out, taking advantage of a New Student Discount that Beautiful Wife knew about (and in the process endeared ourselves to the mother/daughter pair in front of us, who recognized Firstborn because they'd done the tour together and were thrilled to have a 20% discount to justify some extra purchases) then drove back to the campus. 

By then, though, it was time for the Convocation, which... I am bad at describing rituals and ceremonies. They don't do much for me, and I find them tedious. Beautiful Wife, however, tells me that she found it an emotional experience, and that it gave her kind of closure -- like, we were really here, this was really done, Firstborn was really getting started here. So this isn't a knock on the school or the Convocation, it's just One Of Those Me-Things. I will note that the invocation at the end was aggressively non-denominational and as generically religious as anything I've ever seen (while still being effective), enough so that ending it with the much-more culturally specific "Amen" was actually jarring for me. So really, well done on that whole thing.

In theory, after this, we were supposed to make our goodbyes and leave, but... yeah. Furniture. Still in the van, yet. 

So we brought the new purchases up to his room, and I assembled the shelves while Firstborn assembled the cabinet and Beautiful Wife unwrapped and arranged the rest of it. The three-step step-stool (which Firstborn described as a step-step-step-stool) allowed us to pull the broken-down boxes from the back of one of the closets and store them in the luggage space above the closets; it was later positioned to help him get up to his bed. Once we were finished -- amidst a certain amount of fuss over exactly how to arrange everything for the Optimal Dorm Room Experience(tm) -- we had about twenty minutes left before Firstborn was due for an orientation/socializing dinner, and it was definitely time to go. The furniture was arranged, there was at least one poster on the wall, and the room was comfortably his. The microwave fit perfectly atop the cabinet -- I'm still proud of finding something with exactly the measurements we needed to fit it into its little nook beside the refrigerator -- and the work- and play-spaces were arranged to his liking. So we said our goodbyes, Beautiful Wife got some pictures, and I grabbed the Giant Box Of Trash and carried it down to the dumpster. 

I could make some noises about how this was all such a Profound Emotional Experience, but if we're being honest I was too busy doing it to have much in the way of feelings about it. As I may have mentioned earlier, I'll probably do my actual emotional processing in a couple of days, so it's probably a good thing that I don't have to be back at work until Friday. (New Job takes a while to build up vacation time, but they also hand you a week of it the moment you start so as to cover situations exactly like this, because they're not idiots.) 

Then we turned around and drove all the way back home, because as much as it might have been easier to stop halfway and find a place to stay the night, I really wanted to just put a pin in this whole exercise and mark it as Done. 

So... Good day? I think so. Long day? Definitely. Emotional day? Yeah? Kind of? But also definitely, in some areas? I think we left Firstborn in a room that he can be comfortable in and has kind of marked as his own (which is a lot more important and a lot less superficial than it might sound). I think he was feeling a lot better after assembling the cabinet almost completely on his own, too. I know for a goddamned fact that we weren't the only parents in that particular emotional space, because we could see them all around us and also because we were far from the last to leave. 

This was the kind of quest where I really feel like after all that I should be able to level up, but of course I have to take a Long Rest in order for that to happen. So, on that happy note, good night! I hope you're all already sleeping well by now. You'll see this in the morning, or later, and I may even still be asleep when you do. 

Ye Gods, I love my wife.

Long Day

It's a long way to Arkansas with all the powers of the cosmos conspiring against you. 

What with one thing and another, we didn't manage to get going until nearly three-thirty in the afternoon, so by the time we got settled in to our hotel room it was 10:30 at night. Admittedly, that actually could have been worse, but... the doctor at the Minute clinic said that the staples in the back of Firstborn's head weren't ready to come out, and suggested that we wait until at least Friday; that was the start of the day. We'd intended to leave much earlier than we did, so our departure was marked by a frenzy of last-minute packing and making sure people had their meds with them... and then, of course we hit traffic, though in fairness we might have hit that if we'd left earlier, too. And the hotel parking lot is overrun with construction vehicles from a nearby project, so I'm actually parked at another hotel next door. 

The nice thing about having a plan is that when it all goes to shit you know exactly what you aren't doing.

Tomorrow morning we pop up, grab breakfast, and get Firstborn moved into his dorm room; we also need to talk to somebody about getting his staples removed. There are some Welcome New Students events, and then we're done -- around four-thirty or five, as I understand it. Not sure yet if we'll drive a bit and then stop for the night, or if I'll drive us all the way back in a fit of Let's Just Get This Over With; we'll see how we're feeling.

My new job, at least, hasn't given me even a hint of trouble about any of this. And I remembered to set my out of office and mark myself as on vacation on the staff board, so that was good. We stopped and had an early dinner at The Cracker Barrel, which was fun; I finally remembered how to solve the little peg-board puzzle. And we all made it intact, which I suppose is really the important part. But Lordy are we all tired. I'm going to have a drink and go to bed; a shower would do me good, but I'm not sure I'm up to it. 

Y'all won't see this until tomorrow morning, but goodnight anyway; I hope you were all sleeping soundly while I was typing it.

And so it begins...

Today we depart to take Firstborn to his college. There will be excitement. There will be adventure. There will be Really Wild Things. May the ever-watchful gods of Major Life Changes see us through.

Gonna be erratic!

We've finished a busy weekend going into what's usually the busiest two weeks of my year, with another busy week coming up after that and...

...Look, I'm just saying, no promises for what gets posted over the next month, how often, or whether it's even remotely been proofread. I can never tell, going into one of these, whether I'll be too busy to write, too stressed-out not to write, just in the mood to post a lot of music, or picking fights with people online. (Well, okay, probably not that last one. It's not actually that entertaining, and I have other ways of working out aggressions.)

I expect things to settle down again about the middle of June. That, or I expect to have a nervous breakdown. Whichever, really.

See you when we get there? Good, good.

We put the cat down

We took the cat to the vet this morning and saw him off. Firstborn is home sick (probably Strep - will we ever be rid of this wretched disease?) so it was everybody except Secondborn. It's probably for the better that he was at school.

It was definitely time. The cat was essentially immobile, so much so that the vet didn't bother giving him a sedative to prepare him.

Definitely time, but it sucks.

The cat is dying

When Beautiful Wife and I first got married, each of us had two cats. Mine were Wayward and Astrophe, while hers were Syn and Claire. We'd pictured merging the two households as a sort of fuzzy Brady Bunch kind of thing, but in the event they didn't blend well. Claire and Wayward kept scrapping for dominance, and various cats were spraying all over the apartment trying to mark territory, and... it just didn't quite work out.

So Wayward went to live with my parents, in a life of luxurious indulgence that I can only admire. The other three stayed with us. Astrophe, apparently, was sufficiently unthreatening that he could bond with the other two.

Then we had children, and I can barely describe the looks of betrayal that the cats gave us as they aged. Cats and toddlers are natural enemies, as cats are very particular about how they get touched, and toddlers will touch everything and have no sense of restraint. But we mostly kept them separated, and everyone was mostly all right.

And, of course, we all got older -- though when the toddlers do that, it's called "growing up". So, y'know, they grew up. The rest of us, cats included, just got older.

Eventually, for health reasons, we put Syn down. A few years later, we did the same for Claire. Neither was easy. Shortly after Claire left us, my parents did the same for Wayward.

And somewhere in the past two weeks, I've realized that we're looking at the same thing for Astrophe. On one level, it's almost overdue; he was looking skinny and miserable two years ago, but we altered his diet to something much more gravy-intensive and got him onto a semi-regular dose of miralax, and for a fairly long while he was doing a lot better. But over the last two weeks or so, well...

He's amazingly skinny. His bones are all very prominent. He keeps wandering into the kitchen and looking at us, but no matter what we give him he eats very little of it. He walks slowly, almost (but not quite) limping. One day last week, he managed to poop and throw up over a huge portion of the house, basically tracing a path from Firstborn's room back to his litter box. It took me a solid half an hour to clean it all up. And as of today, he keeps settling on this one mat beside the litter box -- way closer to his own waste than a healthy cat should be willing to settle. He doesn't seem to be in pain, he's just... increasingly, relentlessly weakening. It's been very sudden. And so far, our every effort to bring him back from this has failed.

He's still a sweet kitty. He's still... I don't know, not comfortable but also not miserable, and we're trying to give him as much affection as we can in whatever time we have left. But he's quieter than I ever remember him being, slower than I ever remember him being, more careful in his movements than I ever remember him being.

He's twenty years old, and I'm pretty sure the cat is dying.

Blah.

So, Firstborn woke us up at about 3:30 this morning, with a 102.something degree fever. On a related note, my sinuses are trying to kill me. For the moment, that's everything I have to say.

A Jolly Good Morning

How am I doing? Why, I'm lovely, thanks for asking! I mean, just look around you. The birds are shining in the sky! The sun is chirping happily in the trees! All the little squirrels dance and sing with joy on their way to school. Small children dart back and forth across the parking lot, chittering cheerfully to each other as they gather their nuts. And my voice! Just listen to my voice! It sounds as if I've either just hit puberty, or started gargling broken glass! It's a full octave deeper, and rough enough to sound positively demonic!

What? Tired? No, not at all! Bushy-eyed and bright-tailed, that's me! All ready meet my new project, and start new people! As long as I don't have to actually talk to them. The projects, I mean. Or the people. I got plenty of cats last night, and the sleep didn't wake me up at all! It's just that making words so people can hear them kind of, um, makes me cough uncontrollably. But that's a real thing, smally!

So don't worry. I'll just site writ here in my computer, boot up my chair, and get to work!

Season of Rebirth, My Fanny

Back in college we had a long talk in English 101 about the symbolism associated with the natural world. We talked about how the sun is traditionally presented as male, and the earth as female; we talked about the seasons, and how autumn was the season of death and decay and endings, while spring was the season of life, birth, and rebirth...

And I... just... no. No. I realize this places me completely at odds with most of Western Culture™, but that is completely wrong. Autumn is cool and clean, the season when I feel awake and alive and focused. The relentless heat of summer is finally letting go, the nights are getting longer, and I have my energy back.

Spring is the season of death. Spring is the time when I cannot breathe, when I walk around feeling as if someone has driven a nail into my forehead, when - basically - the air itself is trying to kill me.

Western Civilization has it backwards.

I need a vacation to recover from my vacation.

So, I took last week off work. (I'm lucky; I can do this.) It was meant to be a nice, quiet, stay-at-home vacation - a chance to get some rest, catch up on my reading, maybe play some video games, and get some writing done. Admittedly, there were also some useful/practical activities planned: sorting laundry, getting my car checked over, cleaning dishes, and like that.

The thing about vacations is that you're supposed to come out of them feeling relaxed and refreshed - or, possibly, tired but satisfied, in the wake of a particularly fun or interesting time. This time... not so much. I was exhausted when I went into the vacation, owing to the lovely game of Musical Diseases which has been a family pastime for waaaaaay too long now, and which finally caught up with me just as I started my shiny new vacation. And I'm just about that tired now; I think I slept about fourteen hours the night before last, and then another seven hours last night. It's not that I'm sick, exactly - it's more like I can't seem to completely recover from having been sick.

So, for most of my things-I-was-going-to-be-doing, what I actually accomplished was "some of it." Getting rest? Some of it. Catching up on my reading? Some of it. Playing video games? I started The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, so - some of it. Sorting laundry? Some of it. Getting the car checked out? Done, but now I'm waiting on a replacement for the catalytic converter, so - some of it. Sorting laundry? Some of it. Actually, most of it.

The big exception is writing. Writing requires uninterrupted time and unbroken energy - at least for me. Maybe there are people out there who can just keep plugging away at their writing projects, and get decent results. Personally, if I don't have enough energy, then it's hard to be enthusiastic about whatever I'm working on - and if I'm not enthusiastic about writing it, odds are it's not going to be very interesting to read. So I end up with basically two choices: work on little things (like blog entries) while I wait for my energy to come back, or else dig in and refuse to do anything except rest and relax until I have enough energy to write. The second option, unfortunately, generally means putting off things that really need to be done - laundry, for example - and is further complicated by the existence of two boys who really want to spend time with their Daddy and/or really need to be supervised.

Which is why my progress on my longer writing projects has totaled about three sentences over the course of this week.

And so but anyway, I think I need a vacation to recover from my vacation. (I'm not holding my breath.) Meanwhile, here's a picture of one of the more compelling distractions in my life:

You can see why he's compelling, right?

...And now it's my turn...

So, apparently my body has been waiting for me to get to my vacation before it let go and finally got sick. Because yesterday marked the start of my week-and-a-day off, and at four in the morning this morning... well, it was pretty grim. And then it was equally grim in a completely different way at about eight o'clock. And then I went back to sleep - sick and dehydrated, no less - until about eleven fifteen.

Remember last Thursday, when I was complaining about being inspired by a new story idea because it meant that everything else would promptly fall on my head? Well, there you go.

On a related note: I have weird, weird dreams when I'm really sick. The ones from this morning involved being trapped in an unstable, partly-collapsed, and partly-collapsing old mine complex. And in those brief moments when I sort-of woke up, I was so far gone that I wasn't sure where I was. I mean usually, I know which bed I'm in... and what direction I'm facing... and whether I'm lying face-up or face-down. This time? Not so much.

But I'm up, and I'm going to sit in a hot bath and read, and try to drink liquids (and hope that doesn't court any new disasters). Hopefully I'm now past the worst of this.

Fun New Game: Musical Diseases!

So, as of this afternoon, Secondborn is officially sick with whatever Firstborn had late last week - which has been both unpleasant and extremely messy. Which means that the tummy problems that Secondborn had earlier (a week before Firstborn came down with this) were something else entirely. Either that, or they're now passing their diseases back and forth.

The Beautiful Wife insists that we're actually all sick with more than one thing, which certainly seems possible. I seem to have the lightest case of it it/them, but that probably just means that the other shoe hasn't dropped on me yet.



One of the problems with being sick is that it makes it ever so much easier to get infected with new things. And once that cycle gets started, it's really hard to break. On the plus side, if we we can just manage to get everyone healthy, we'll probably be okay for a while.

So, my project for this evening is to cleanse our house. With bleach. Or fire. Or bleach that's been set on fire. Actually, that sounds pretty good. Burning bleach: because some days, over-the-counter disinfectants just don't cut it. Why the hell doesn't Target carry that?

Anyway... lots of cleaning. A lot of baths. Lots of laundry. Nowhere near as much sleep as I'd like.

...And, a small boy who just started whining again, because even though he's completely exhausted and more or less asleep, he's also very thirsty.

* * *
Well, that went just about exactly the way I expected. Remember, friends:

"Greater love hath no man than this, that he let himself be covered in the foulness expelled by his offspring." (John 15:13, Revised Parenting Edition)

Yuck.

I hate being right

Yes, I called it. Sick kid, maybe-sick parents, and one kid who's bright and chipper - and off to his Nana's and his daycare. (I can't tell you just how much of a relief that is.) Laundry's running, Firstborn is watching Transformers and sipping at a cup of ice, and I'm browsing the Internet in order to preserve whatever's left of my sanity. Whee!

Oh, no, not again.

"Curiously, the only thing that went through the mind of the bowl of petunias, as it fell, was, 'Oh no, not again!' Many people have speculated that if we knew exactly why the bowl of petunias had thought that we would know a lot more about the nature of the universe than we do now." ~The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

I'm stopping to offer the quote as context for the title. As you might guess from the juxtaposition, I'm feeling a bit like a bowl of petunias here at midnight thirty. What's going on? Let me explain...

(Emetophobes beware. Have some Red Pandas frolicking in the snow instead.)

Just as I was settling down to go to sleep, Firstborn picked up where Secondborn left off last Friday: being noisily ill all over his bed. Which probably means we're in for another week of illness. This, just as Secondborn was starting to get over being sick himself.

On top of that, Beautiful Wife is now coughing and looking uncomfortable, and has moved out to the living room. And frankly, I'm feeling none too stable myself, though that could be the product of carrying Firstborn to the shower and changing his sheets.

So, our house is once again a plague ward.

Somehow, the fact that we've gone through this before is filling me with dread for what's to come, rather than confidence that we'll make it through again. (We will, I don't doubt that, but the knowledge is wholly insufficient to stave off the dread.) Haven't we had enough of this shit?

Apparently not. In fact, I'll go further: no, of course not. We have kids.

I'd claim that the amount of garlic in my lunch (and, now, permeating my entire bloodstream and probably my nervous system as well), or possibly the amount of rum I had after dinner, or both, has clearly proven too much for whatever germ, virus, or blasphemous Elder God is behind this - but I have a sneaking suspicion that my body is about to prove me wrong. Maybe not; we'll see. But if I don't post anything tomorrow, that's almost certainly why.

Half a league onward!

So, the software for the new site got installed at four-thirty this morning, and we started the training-people-and-importing-content session at nine o'clock. We're off and running... at least for now. The contractor is still tweaking the software as we go, so there's always the possibility that our new site will eat itself, but for the moment it's up and we have about sixteen people importing content from the old site. The ideas is that once they're comfortable with the process - well, and once the logins are working[1] - they can go back to their departments and continue importing their pages.

My job, at this point, is basically to circulate and talk them through it. Mostly, this has not been too hard. However, owing to the abysmal quality of what we ironically refer to as "air" here in the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex, I am also coping with a lot of sinus drainage. At this rate, by mid-afternoon I'll have lost my voice completely.[2]

We're definitely doing things, though. Oh, yes. Things of great and profound importance. Things that might even manage - yes, yes, it's a very slim chance, but it's there - might even manage not to implode spectacularly at some undisclosed future time. Chin up, stiff upper lip, and all that.

Was there a man dismay'd? Maybe one or two. But don't tell anybody, it would spoil our image.

[1] We don't actually have those set up. They were supposed to be able to import from our network, but that's... not working yet. So we have a temporary workaround. Which, again, may decide to eat itself as soon as they do try to import the network logins.

[2] There are not enough cough drops in the world to prevent this, though they certainly do help. Note to self: buy stock in Halls.

Our Weekend With Bats

This past weekend, my wife and I took the boys down to Austin for the weekend to see the bats and visit my wife's friend and her new boyfriend[1]. This was a really good trip and a really bad trip, all rolled into one.

The drive from Dallas to Austin takes about three, maybe three and a half hours. For us, with one thing and another, it was more like a five hour drive. Fortunately, we weren't trying to hold to a strict schedule - and Beautiful Wife's Friend was very understanding. When we arrived, we met them at a beer-burgers-and-playground sort of place near their apartment, which gave the boys a chance to get out and exercise. Then we went swimming at their pool, which was cold but welcome. I stretched out on the side of the pool to dry off, or at least I tried to - Firstborn kept rolling me into the water.

Then we dried off and went down to the Congress Avenue Bridge. After a certain amount of walking at a quick march - harder than you might think with a five-year-old and a stroller full of toddler - we found a nice spot under the bridge and waited for it to get dark.

And waited.

And waited.

And listened to the bats squeaking and rustling under the bridge.

And waited.

And watched it get darker.

And waited.

And saw one bat.

And waited.

And waited.

And then we saw a whole bunch more bats come out and start flying around, until there was this steady stream of bats pouring out from under the bridge, and it was really really cool. I don't think Secondborn really cared - he was more interested in the rocks on the ground - but Firstborn watched the bats flying out with great interest and enthusiasm.

Then we went to another, different beer-and-burgers-and-playground place, and had dinner. Firstborn played Aliens vs. Zombies vs. Humans (or some variation) with the other kids on the playground, while the rest of us ate and drank and were merry. It was more than a little bit past the boys' bedtime when we left, and on the way out Firstborn informed me that his stomach hurt.

We drove back to our hotel, and got the boys out of the car. Firstborn had apparently been waiting, conscientiously, for that precise moment when he could be copiously sick without dirtying either my wife's car or our hotel room. (He explained this after he was, y'know, done.) Once we were sure he was finished, we took everybody up the room and dropped most of them in a hot bath. Secondborn was already passed out, so he missed out on that experience.

Bedtime preparations followed. I'd done all the packing for the trip, so I had a nice moment where Beautiful Wife said, "Oh, I forgot to pack a toothbrush..." and I said, "No you didn't," and handed her toothbrush to her. (Because I'm cool like that.) Then we all went to sleep...

...For a little while, anyway. Until Secondborn woke up and repeated Firstborn's earlier performance, only without the presence of mind to choose his targets. So it was not exactly the night of deep, restful sleep that we'd been hoping for.

On Sunday morning we got together with the Beautiful Wife's friend (and the friend's boyfriend) again, and had breakfast. We'd stopped by Target on the way over there (mainly because we were afraid that, with the kind of night we'd just had, I might not have packed enough spare shirts), so we were late again. Firstborn was playing with a new Transformer and cheerfully showed it off to our hosts. I say we had breakfast, but we really spent a fair amount of time just hanging out, too, which was fun.

And then we drove home. Which, again, took longer than it really should have, but wasn't all that unpleasant - the big problem was that Secondborn wasn't any too happy about being trapped in a car seat. He was firmly of the opinion that he should be out of the seat, moving around, creating chaos, and putting himself in danger. He settled down after we put Elmo on the portable DVD player - and, not coincidentally, after we got some food into him.

And then we got home, and unloaded the car, and started the laundry, and made sure both gas tanks were full for the beginning of the week. Because, again, I'm good like that. Indomitable, that's the word for it. Could be my middle name, if I didn't have one already, and if my parents were completely off their gourds when I was born.

...But I digress.

So that was our weekend. To recap:
1. Road trip was long but went fine.
2. We were late to everything except the bats.
3. Bats are cool.
4. Everyone was sick.
5. My wife has cool friends.

Got it? Good. And good night.

[1] The friend's new boyfriend. Not my wife's new boyfriend. I'm quite sure my wife doesn't have a new boyfriend.

Tidings of Autumn

Maybe it's just this time of year. Weather's changing, nights are getting longer, holidays loom like an impending landslide, and - at least at my house - everybody's sick. Or almost sick. Or trying very hard not to get sick. It's easy to feel a little down, or maybe more than a little. I've been feeling it, too: tired, stiff, hazy, uninspired. I have the attention span of a gnat on crack. And what I really want is to spend a couple of hours sitting in a hot bath with a good book, but if we got that sort of chance the Beautiful Wife needs it even more than I do.

And anyway I'm stuck at work, because we're training on the new website that we're setting up. Hopefully. Someday...

On the plus side, I'm listening to No More Kings sing "Zombie Me," which never fails to amuse me. And I can go home in an hour or so. And I do love my boys, even when they're certifiable biohazards. And hey, now I have something to post on the Blog o' Doom. So hey, here you go.

Let the Training begin!

This morning we started the training for for our brand-new completely-revamped website (the Content Management portion in particular). It went almost exactly the way I expected it to.

That is, we got the laptops set up in the room where the training was supposed to take place. A phone switch then died, which prevented our network guys from setting up the switch that we had planned to use to connect the laptops. So, we set all the laptops to use the WiFi. This worked, mostly, except for one laptop that simply couldn't pick up an IP on the internal WiFi network - presumably the wireless router was overwhelmed by all the attention.

The training was due to start at 9:00 a.m., so naturally that was when the trainers (/technicians) arrived.

The new site is not set up - they haven't finished enough of the code for us to put it on our server yet - so the training was going to be done on their development server. Which, unsurprisingly, crashed last night, and was therefore completely inaccessible this morning. And since the trainers arrived just in time to start the class, they didn't find out until we already had everyone waiting at their computers. So, naturally, they were unable to get it fixed despite buying some time by showing off what elements the website contains and what cool things it will be able to do.

So we called off the training, and rescheduled it for Monday. And then I went back to my desk to try to catch up on the stuff I'd missed while I was in training waiting for them to get their shit together. And then I went to lunch.

On the plus side, that meant I was able to attend the Weekly Family Lunch; and they did manage to get the thing fixed in time for the afternoon training, which didn't help any of our content suppliers but was something of a relief to those of us with publishing rights. The system looks pretty easy to use from their end, which is also to the good.

Tomorrow, we'll start looking at the back-end stuff: generating and modifying templates, setting permissions, creating workflows, and like that.

Anyone care to place a bet on whether we actually manage that training?