Making it up

watching a computer defrag.

So that was my working day.

Decent drive in. Reasonable drive in the dark home - saw my first shunt of the darker evenings. No one hurt, didn’t even appear to be any damage.

So actually home before children got into the bath, first time for that for a while. Not quite sure what happened while they were in there, but Small attempted to remove part of Big’s back, leaving a very nasty set of scratches across her. Took quite a while to persuade him that that was unacceptable, and that I did expect him to explain &/or apologise.

Eventually managed to have stories and puter time (one child with each adult, interchanging )

Then Tim and I got domestic, he sorted out washing while I hoovered throughout downstairs. And now I’ve just sort of waffled about doing nothing much, so I’m off to bed to do nothing much there instead. Early morning all round tomorrow - school day.

been and looked at a house.
Shopped.
Resisted making lots of jokes about poor Tim, given that he was stung several times by a wasp hiding inside a pair of pants. Ouch.
Got stuck on a motorway in traffic, so returned home via the scenic route through Rotherham. Ok, maybe not all that scenic.
Discovered that Small can sing, and that it’s rather pleasant.
Dropped in on Jan and Jonathan for a coffee, remembering to take chocolate, but forgetting other stuff I was supposed to take.
Put very tired children to bed.

To do:
Find kitchen.
Sort out clothing for next few days.
Write quick site report.
Move at least two sites between servers.
Eat more.
Drink more.
Put books back into diningroom, preferably in a way that I can continue to access them to continue to process them.
Work out plan for dealing with house.
Plan novel, along with place to write it. Thinking of using a tweaked text pattern that will give an excerpt per page, but display in chronological order rather than backwords, and I’ve found a script that will display wordcount per post. wrt doing the novel this year, last nights blogpost was 692 words, and I wasn’t trying for quantity then. So I think an hour or so a night, which I usually spend refreshing sage, or reading forums, and I’ll quite easily churn out 50,000 words. Whether it will be a novel that I ever want to show anyone else will be another thing entirely!
Find missing hoodie sleeve (anyone? Haven’t left it at yours, have I Helen? Or yours Kirsty? Don’t think I’ve taken it in anyone else’s house, except Jan’s and I’ve looked there already. Bother).
Paperwork.
Finances.
At some point go to bed.

Wonder where the weekend went. I know I spent a fair bit of it asleep, seem to be running with a residual tiredness level higher than you’d want really. Ah well, these things happen. It may be only Sunday, but roll on the weekend

eta the house. Hm. Had potential, which is indeed a way of saying it needs some work. Biggest drawback as far as both of us are concerned is the lack of outdoor space. Big drawback, especially when you consider younger offspring, who just adores being outside. When we arrived off the path today it’s a bit sort of grey and windy, and the garden was very damp, but he really really wanted to be out there. Got to think quite hard about whether it would be fair to him to live somewhere where he couldn’t run about easily.

[Beware, much techy speak moaning and groaning below]
I’ve got open boxes of books littering the downstairs of the house, ready and waiting for me to code this blasted bookshop I’ve been designing in my head for the last year or more. I’ve spent an hour exploring cvs (version control systems) in the hope that I could put into practise one of the pragmatic programmer tips, and use version control for the system.

I can’t figure out the first thing about cvs - I think I need a linux box to run as a server for it, and then I’d have to have apache on the linux box. I don’t know anything about linux. I’ve never set up apache. Bits where it talks about bootstrapping tarballs mean about as much to me as they do to my average reader (Jonathan, if you’re out there, I suspect in this instance you are far from average). My head hurts - I just want to code a site, exploring some development tools and methodologies along the way, and I can’t figure out the best starting point at all.

And I’m signed up to write a novel in a month starting in two days time, (which I would really like to do, don’t get me wrong, being a writer was my second life time ambition, second only to being a vet, which ain’t ever going to happen now, so I’d quite like to get the second one under my belt (having children wasn’t an ambition, it was just something I was going to do)), I’m trying to get my head around what I need to do to the house in order to be able to sell it, I’ve got a residual stress level still about working, children and education (I miss my children/ I like working - anyone for a quick inaccurate schizophrenia stereotype?)

I’ve lost track of so many things that I’m supposed to be doing and have started, mislaid, can’t do, waiting for other bits from ppl, so on and so forth, and I seem to be letting my life run away through my fingers rather than actually living it.

How did I get here? Today, now? Life is what happens when you are busy making other plans…I didn’t make plans, was that the problem? Is it possible to control stuff? Or is that just even more stressful?

Kids have been pretty great today, up until bedtime, which was late, because shortly after Katy left (lovely visit, really enjoyed having you round) I started with a headache and a dazed feeling, Tim suggested a nap, and I passed out for the best part of two hours. (And then passed out again with a cup of tea in my hand when he tried to wake me up gently!) Anyway, so bedtime was late and unpleasant, with horridly tired grumpy small ppl, and despite my nap, I still feel rather tired myself.

Which all goes to confirm that I made the right decision not to trek to the Halloween do this weekend, but doesn’t make me feel any better to know that so many of my friends are together having a wonderful time (and leaving blogland rather bereft!) and I’m not there. Sniff.

I’m getting nowhere here. I have at least performed major kitchen excavation. There’s washing finishing airing in the bathroom (or more likely, steaming gently as Tim’s just gone for a bath!) and more on the line. Katy did take away a couple of books, and some bathbomb stuff, as well as some of my stash overstock, so a couple more things have left the house today. But there’s so much stuff - and so many of the books I bought are basically crap, so I found going through the boxes extremely depressing. I don’t know what I was thinking a year ago when I bought them all, but it certainly wasn’t anything sensible.

I’m making myself more depressed by the minute here. Wish I could find my wool and finish off the hoodie. Then at least I’d have achieved something productive today. I think I’ll turn off the machine, perform a wool hunt, and take my crochet up to bed. g’night all.

Teachers tv

Cor, they don’t half talk some nonsense - “we’ve touched all the bases”, “behaviour mentors”, blah, blah, blah…

Let children grow and learn. Allow them to explore. Offer them opportunities, surround them with ppl that love them (parents would be a good start). Stand back, let it happen.

Not going to do that are they?

NaNoWriMo Young Writers Program - FAQs

Can homeschoolers participate in NaNoWriMo?
Homeschoolers can absolutely participate in NaNoWriMo. For families with kids 12 and under, parents can sign up themselves and access our teaching resources and young writers forums (including a new forum just for homeschoolers!). Homeschool kids (again, 12 and under) can sign up too and access the forums and other resources, with parental consent. Young novelists ages 13 to 18 who are not participating as part of a class should sign up on the main NaNoWriMo site.

Come on folks, they’ve got a home educators forum! Any volunteers?

Yeah, yeah, I know I’m not in bed yet….

I’m so ready for it, and so are the children.

Bad day at work today arguing with my development environment and losing. I *hate* that.

Terrible journey home, what is with the M1 these days? And if the radio person tells me one more time that I’m up to date when I’m sitting on a motorway that they haven’t mentioned, and I’ve got my handbrake on…. grrr…..

Children and I were too tired for each other this evening. I did have a moments pleasure when we got trick or treaters (who got extremely short thrift I can tell you!) but that is going to be an added stress over the next few days that I could really do without.

Right, I can either mooch around here doing bugger all, or I can go to bed. I think for once, I really am going to do the latter.

Childhood Goat Trauma Foundation

wanted to use from the sublime to the ridiculous, but I think I’ve used it before.

Small has a fan club. I rang the school today to sort out some admin issues, and spent several minutes being told how wonderful my second offspring is, first by the principal, then by the bursar.

I’ve often worried about him being overshadowed by Big, simply because she is bigger, more verbal, and generally a pretty out there girl. Now I get to worry that she’s going to be overlooked because of him!

Actually no, I think they’ll both do fine, but it was surprising to hear how enthusiastic all these ppl are about him. One of the comments that struck home was when I said something about him not speaking, and how that sometimes misleads ppl - the bursar said “he does speak, he just uses a different language”. Pretty accurate - apparently he has no difficulty at all in making himself understood. I’ll take a small amount of the credit there, as even though his signing isn’t always accurate, and none of the staff there actually know signing, knowing that that is what he was doing gave them the common ground.

So I have two very happy children, and we really appear to have landed on our feet as far as that school is concerned.

And the ridiculous? My amazingly intelligent wunderkind did very unpleasant things in the bath. Oh well. At least it’s been disinfected. Again.

One more day at work, then ridiculously busy weekend, even though we aren’t partying. I’ve been invited out to the pub tomorrow lunchtime with the blokes, and I got invited to walk into town with the women as well…not quite sure how come this happened, as generally speaking men and women don’t seem to mix in my office. Odd!

two days of school!

Well, not really, actually. It’s half term, and there are very few children there, so it hasn’t been very school like at all.

We made it up there by 8.30 yesterday, giving me plenty of time to settle the children in before I had to go to work. I’d nerved myself up dealing with a distraught Small, and Big had been looking forward to it all so much, so obviously Small wandered off pretty much without a backward glance (he did yell “No” every time I said I was leaving) while Big melted to my side and refused to talk to anyone or even look up.

Hohum. Eventually managed to detach her from my arm and get her sat down with some breakfast, but she was definitely wobbly, so so was I when I finally gave up on getting Small to say bye and just walked out. Spent the morning attempting to work and sitting feeling sick at my desk, caved at lunchtime and had a bad moment when I tried to ring to check on them, got an unrecognised male voice answer the phone and then have it go dead. Rang again ten minutes later and got one of the staff members I’d met that morning, who slightly apologetically told me that they were both having a wonderful time, and neither of them had mentioned me at all. Wasn’t quite sure whether to laugh or cry at that, but settled for pleased that they were happy.

Got there to pick them up about 5.20, after a nightmarish trip through the centre of Brighouse, which was completely unintended. This should have served as a warning for the rest of the evening Anyway, the children were mildly pleased to see me, although Small didn’t actually want to leave at all. Got them into the car and he was asleep before we’d made it onto the motorway.

Had plans to visit Skelthwaite ;), but due to my abject stupidity we ended up having a less than scenic tour of Saddleworth moor in the pouring rain and darkness, and driving for an hour and 20 minutes to get somewhere that should have taken 30 at the outside. We weren’t l lost precisely - it was just that I didn’t realise that you can’t get off the M62 at jn 23, so went past 24 and then had to go to 22…. and given the stress level of the day as a whole, I unsurprisingly drove the last 45 minutes in floods of tears, while swearing at myself and attempting to keep my glasses from getting steamed up.

It was not good.

Was very pleased to eventually arrive off the path, where the children finally woke up (was very pleased that they slept through my stupidity, not sure how I’d have held together while Big criticised my navigation skills as she is wont to do), just about in time to go to bed. Obviously then took rather a long time to get them to sleep, but they eventually settled down so that Jan and I could sit and chat, while she blogged and I crocheted. Not that I did much as I ran out of wool.

Journey this morning was much more pleasant. Small wandered off holding hands with a member of staff, and waved over his shoulder at me without looking back, and Big ran off to find her indoor shoes. I in turn had a much more productive day at work, assisted as well by the fact that I wasn’t in extreme pain today (I just love celebrating my womanhood, don’t you? ), and got to pick them up and have a good chat with A, the principal. After only two days with him, they’ve sussed that Small is quite bright really, and want to try him out in the children’s house, which is usually where the 3-6 year olds go. I think he’ll love it - this whole playing with physical stuff is right up his street. When I got there tonight they were both doing jigsaws aimed at age 5 (I know all this age related stuff is pretty off beam, just trying to put this in some kind of context for those of you that can’t see that this was a jigsaw with lots of very small pieces, and I was somewhat surprised to find him doing it as fast as Big was doing hers).

‘Bout the only doubt that I have about him going into the children’s house, is that that is where Big will be, and I don’t want them to wreck each others experience. But I get the impression that A will have her eye on that anyway.

So overall, the school gets a resounding thumbs up from all concerned, although it’s a very long day for the children, and they were incredibly tired by the time we eventually got home (mini rant, don’t you hate it when you’ve listened to the traffic report on the radio, they have done their round up, then tell you you’re up to date, and they haven’t mentioned the motorway where you are sitting with your handbrake on?).

No school tomorrow. Ballet though, and work for me and Tim.

Sure there were other things I wanted to cover, but I’ve been at this for over an hour now, and I’m beginning to weave, so I’ll call it a night.

Long drive in the rain this morning.

Long drive in the dark tonight. Got home shaking after a complete idiot demonstrated the M1 way of driving - manoeuvre, signal, mirror. I really don’t enjoy having to do emergency stops in the middle lane Took about two hours for the pains in my left arm to go away, I think I clamp on the steering wheel when something like that happens, and the adrenaline after shocks are less than enjoyable.

Tomorrow there will be less driving. The children start at their new nursery/school, so I’ve begged a bed for us for the night off the path, to cut down on the length of those first two days. Tim gets a quiet night on his own, which won’t do him any harm.

Big is excited but nervous, and I don’t think Small has taken in anything we’ve said about it so far. Not that I’ve tried to talk about it too much with him - didn’t want him to get worked up in advance. Wimp I know, but it’s so very difficult with a non communicating child. I’ve warned them at work that I may well be late, and I want to get up there good and early so I can spend time settling him in if necessary.

Good long story time tonight as I tried to get them to bed in good time. Big read to Small again - she is so happy that she can do that. Then she got four chapters of her Ballet Diary book, so she was pretty happy as well. Last night she was terribly upset that Tim didn’t get a story, but she didn’t seem to be too bothered tonight. Think we’ve finally managed to break down the fear she had that I would stop reading to her once she could read herself, and now she likes to make sure that we both read to each other, which works pretty well for me.

Now I’m amusing myself trying to write an online bookshop…

I should be pleased that Big is dancing around so actively to my Eric Clapton. It’s great that she’s getting exercise and activity on such a grey and stuffy day. But she keeps making my chair bounce….

Now we’re listening to Tears in Heaven. One of my favourite songs, but I don’t have to be feeling very down for it to make me cry, which it is doing right now. She’s stopped dancing and is standing leaning on me, being comforting. Not sure whether to explain the story behind the song or not.

Lots of duplo today. Big has learnt about lintels. She’s also getting rather good at this reading lark, being able to spot her name on this page over my shoulder, and getting increasingly intrigued at what I’m typing. I foresee a change to editorial policy in the non too distant future :-/

Small, when he builds, colour codes his towers, which amuses me for no apparent reason. He’s branching out into imaginative play - today his two pieces of toast were talking to each other and there were long involved games when they both had duplo houses.

Hm, shouldn’t have told her the Clapton background, she doesn’t feel like dancing any more. But felt I had to explain the tears dripping down my face. And now we’re having a deep and difficult conversation about what happens after death.

And friends that she *still* remembers from her first nursery, notably one little girl who has now taken on near legendary status as being *the* person she wants to play with but never can.

Sigh. Time to think about tea.

Managed a whole eight minutes of tidying earlier, making a start on the dining room, but was a bit stymied when two children came to join in. Bleargh. Will have to do this room too. Why am I such a hopeless slob???

Visions Of Science 2005 Winners

Really stunning pics.

We went to the library this morning, and posted yet more (shameless plug!) bookbags

Both children chose tapes, and we’ve just sat and listened to a disneyfied Cinderalla. While we were doing that, Small and I were dressing one of Big’s paper dolls. Really impressed at how gently he has been handling it, and with how much he has enjoyed it. He was listening to the story as well, a couple of times he commented on parts of it, signing cat when we heard meowing, and tears when he heard someone crying.

I’ve really rather enjoyed just spending time with him

The other day I changed some details on the router. It allowed me back into the admin page once, and never again since. Which is making setting up a VPN a touch difficult.

Today I decided to upgrade Sage, as it isn’t working now. I decided the easiest way to do this would be to uninstall it. So I did that. Now I have an empty, uncloseable, Sage page to the left of my main browser window.

What else can I play with today?

It would be irresponsible of me, with a full time job, two children and a blog, to sign up to write a 50,000 word novel in a month.

Yes well, I think we all know what I did next

And now it’s bedtime, gotta get plenty of sleep in in preparation for next month

Nuff said.

“Becoming increasingly harder to find, this semi-detached home enjoys ……” You what? Is it camouflaged? Shrinking? Playing hide and seek? No, of course it isn’t, it is just standing there being just as easy/hard to find as ever it was.

and tired parents! Not a good combination.

After a restless night (all on my own account, no nocturnal offspring ), we both managed to sleep through the alarm. Just as well that Small woke at 7 by falling out of Big’s bed again really :-/ So started off the day cuddling a weeping Small, and 13 hours later, he finished in much the same way. Fairly sure there were some happy times for him in between though.

Being 10 minutes late starting my trip to work was a stunningly bad idea, as it took an hour and a half to get there. The run home was pretty good, and in between, I put my first real stuff into QA, and confuddled the testers by treating them as allies. There’s always a healthy rivalry as it were between developers and testers, but when it comes down to it, we’re on the same side. It’s their responsibility, as I see it, to be my safety net, so that I don’t end up looking like a muppet to the customers. Not sure that they’ve been exposed to a developer who thinks that way before, and probably not to one who goes over and sits with them for an hour to make sure they understand the system they are supposed to be testing

Wasn’t too surprised when I got some fails by the end of the day, still learning the system, after all. So at least I know what I’m doing tomorrow.

Evening was noisy. Big was right on the edge, and very screamy, and when I’m tired, I don’t do screamy. Actually, I don’t do screamy when I’m not tired either come to that. So we ended up losing story time privileges, which was rather a shame, but she spent some time with Tim doing magnetic lasso-ing on Tim’s Photoshop. And I read to Small, which was pleasant, even if he was less than pleased when I declared it was time to stop and go to bed.

The only really annoying thing about it was that I left my cup of tea in there and haven’t dared go back in to get it yet

Oh, and the other thing Big managed to remember today was about her food groups, and eating her 5 a day of fruit and veg. And tonight I’ve finally managed to print her off a chart to keep track of it all. Boxes are smaller than I wanted, but I’m sure she’ll manage to do something artistic with it. And it’s got a Card Captor Sakura piccie on it to finish it off!

Cake Anyone?

And I decided that I would savour it.

So I hereby apologise in writing to Tim - there’s so much I could have (in all probability should have) done around the house. I did do washing. Lots of it, when I discovered the reason Claude got kicked out of his last home. The duvet’s almost dry, the cover is yet to be draped I cleaned the bathroom sink. How does somewhere where you get clean get so dirty?

Then I decided that I had children who were really rather more fun to be with. We started the day well, they were very happy to find me still in bed (back in bed, I got up and made sandwiches for Tim ) and clambered in with me for assorted cuddles and chatter. We had a leisurely breakfast, and I struggled some more with VPNs and IPSec policies and tunnels. Yup, I still don’t understand that at all.

Sarahthespeechtherapist left a different set of stuff for Small and we all did that together. He’s really breaking out into words - but only if you ask him. I’m guessing that sooner or later he might start dropping them into conversation, but right at the moment, I’m just thrilled to hear sounds.

Big did some more drawing, and somewhere along the way, sat down and read a book, Not now Bernard. She was pretty impressed when she realised what she’d done, and so was I. Tim was extremely impressed when she sat and read it again to him tonight.

Day didn’t stop there. We did some work on nutrition, mainly using a site linked from the excellent Muddlepuddle site (if you haven’t come across it, you really ought to :lol:) Big did a painting game that allowed her to colour in various members of different food groups, and we talked a little about what foods you need in what sort of quantities and for what reasons. Then I wanted to print out a chart for her so she could keep track of her fruit and veg, as I’d found something the other night on dltk that I thought we could customise together. Would also give her another in to keep track of the days to the weekend, as she does struggle with that. But the printer is attached to the machine in the dining room, and for some reason, it couldn’t see the network, and therefore, not the internet either. Grrr.

Having argued with networks for more hours than I cared to count up over the last 24, it was a real low point to my day. Even lower than finding what the cat had done with my bare foot. I think. And Big was disappointed - on other days that would have been the end of it as she fell into meltdown, but somehow, not least due to a timely phonecall from Kirsty, we pulled it together and went out to the shops, with a list that Big had drawn up. (And I do, quite literally, mean drawn ).

They were both well behaved in Morrisons - Small has now pretty much given up on trolleys, but he didn’t run away either, which was a pleasant change.

Then we came home and made shepherds pie from some recipe folder I’d had kicking around for a while, and you know what? It was pretty good. So even if we were so late I didn’t manage to get them bathed, I didn’t really care. And we made Barbie mini muffins too.

Part of bathtime was taking up with Big’s second rendition of Bernard (it’s a really good book, did I say that already?) and then there was the oligatory chasing about upstairs. We’ve finally found a toothpaste that Small likes, although it’s obviously going to take some work to get him to rub it all over his teeth, rather than just eating it (sigh). He wanted me to read Blake’s 7 to him, which amused me rather, and I told him he would have to learn to read himself, so he opened the book up and started pointing out words for me to explain. Cute wasn’t in it.

Couple of pages of Ellie’s Chance to Dance, and I left them to their own version of the dance, jumping in and out of each other’s beds. It’s all gone quiet now, and we’ve been watching tv, trying to work out how many sci-fi series are now represented in the cast of Stargate SG1 (Series 9, Avalon in case you were wondering).

Got to go excavate the kitchen at some point. And the bedroom. And the living room table. Work tomorrow.