Fresh, Hot Wastes of Time

Last night we couldn’t get the kids to sleep until after 1:00. Then I stayed up for a couple of hours more because I was working on getting the linux box set up to host 2 domain names, and what I don’t know about linux can fill about 84,000 books. So I fall into bed exhausted in the wee small hours before dawn. 30 minutes later Jo wanders in, saying she wanted to go downstairs and play with her puzzles. We tried for hours to get her to sleep to no avail. Finally hub took her downstairs around 7:00. 3 hours later Caroline woke up. I brought her into bed with me and tried to sleep for a couple more hours while she groomed me like a gorilla, interspersing her grooming with occasional bops on the nose. Needless to say I didn’t sleep well.

So now I just got Caroline to sleep, and Jo is still awake. She’s a maniac. Neither one of the kids will go to sleep in bed alone. Caroline requires that Mommy holds her until she is sound asleep, then tries to slip her into the crib. Jo requires that Daddy sit at the foot of her bed and read, like a good Daddy should.

Speaking of a good Daddy, while Caroline falls asleep she likes to talk to me about her day. Since she’s not even 2 yet, the conversations are usually a bit garbled. Last night she was talking about how Daddy said he was going to spank her hiney for writing on the walls with a crayon. (The orange blends in with the tan walls so well.) I agreed, and said I would spank her hiney too because it was very naughty. She said “No! No naughty. Daddy naughty. Mommy naughty. Spank my hiney. Humph.” I expected to see a headbob and a fingersnap.

She also had encountered a cat dingleberry in the hall, which I missed, and she ran into her room to babble excitedly and unintelligably at me, and I nodded and uh-huh’ed at her until she grew frustrated that I wasn’t paying attention and put her hands on her little hips and said, “Well, did you see it??”

Of course I had to go look then.

Sorry this is KidBlog lately. Not much else going on. Lack of sleep really kinda consumes lives; anything else that happens is just remotely relevant. Like the hurricane. We had nice windy weather and ominous looking skies all day, but no storms. The ranch got hammered, though.

I set up my photoblog, called Clicking Away With My Sanity, today. If you like pictures, keep an eye on it and see if it strikes your fancy. I have a bunch more to post; it’s pretty sparse right now.

You know, I find that I have a hard time staying current with blogs that don’t have comment systems. Does anyone else feel like that? I wonder if it’s a subconscious need to hog the spotlight, or that I prefer interaction, or something else entirely. I mean, there are some wonderful blogs and journals out there without comments, including quite a few in my blogroll. I’m just not as excited about them as I am about ones with comments.

Update – Chip Rosenthal was discussing the same issue on his site a couple of weeks ago. Always a day late and a dollar short!

I installed the most awesome server log statistics program last night. It’s called AWStats and it’s nice and free. Configuration can be a little confusing to those who aren’t into that sort of thing, but once it’s in it’s a joy to behold. My “recent referrers” script hasn’t been working very well lately (maybe it’s a Safari cache thing, I dunno, Blogrolling recently updated’s been on the fritz too) and I’d gotten so used to it that I was feeling a little forlorn without it.

Anyway, check it out. It rocks. I’ve got my stat page unprotected (for now, don’t abuse it!) here if you want to see what it outputs.

Another sign of the impending apocalypse:

Christopher Walken is front-runner to play Willie Wonka in a Tim Burton-directed remake.

Normally I keep my weight loss stuff and my blog stuff separate, but I just spent days working on an Excel spreadsheet for weight loss and measurements and posted a copy available for download. You can read about it in this entry on my weight loss blog.

There’s this new plugin for iPhoto, called iPhoto2Weblog, that basically exports photos from iPhoto to your MT blog automagically. Meaning that to create a new entry for a picture, I’d just have to plug my camera in (iPhoto detects when it’s plugged in, starts itself, and asks if I’m ready to import), click “Import”, then “Export”.

Right now I can’t seem to get the settings working right, but when I do, I’m thinking about a photo blog. Which means I need to check some out to see what a good layout is, then make a good layout. We’ll see if the inspiration lasts.

I just had to get a new power cable for my 12″ Powerbook that I purchased in February. Wonder if Apple will reimburse me?

I’ve been fighting with Excel for just about 24 hours. I couldn’t find a weight loss spreadsheet I liked, so I decided to teach myself how to make my own. Apparently there’s something I’m putting in it that makes it unable to open. I’ve made the damn thing 3 times now to no avail. This time I’m saving a copy on each step so I know where it’s going wrong. At least I know what to do now so it’s not taking the 3 hours that the first one did.

To tie this in with the previous post, I’ve had bad experiences with both an Apple and a Microsoft product in the past 24 hours. What a headache.