Online social media, at least the corners of it that I find myself in, or have the opportunity to glimpse from where I wander, pretty much sucks. There's a strong subtext of "Me! Me! LOOK AT ME!" applied to everything. Someone posts a link to something they didn't have anything to do with creating, and it gets titled, "Look what I found while I was something something."

Fuck you. That is all.

Oh the mornings you'll have

I woke up a little grouchy, like yesterday (reasons), but I remembered that coffee and magnesium and breakfast will help that. I thought to myself, "Wait until after all those things are in full swing, and if you're still pissed off, go to town." Waited. S'fine.

Last night was busy, and stressful at the end with the school project bullshit, but it was also fine. I stayed out of Bridget's hair for the rest of the evening by staying up way too late doing online shopping and then falling asleep on the couch. Today feels promising. The weather is holding up well enough that I might try and get in a motorcycle ride, but more than likely I will just take a nap.

That's the basics. What follows is an example of the straight up bullshit that goes on in this house any time two or more children are left unsupervised for longer than eight seconds. Those of you who are easily disgusted may want to look away.

-----

Bridget left the house early enough to be to work by 7AM, so the girls' morning routine was all on me. Caden takes care of himself just fine, he's waking up to his own alarm and not depending on his parents, which is nice.

Sarah needed a shower this morning, because we were all up late last night finishing her school project, which she should have worked on last weekend (but I failed to push her hard enough on that), and for the last few days there just hasn't been a lot of time for her to do it at home. Not to mention that her teacher apparently instructed them that the project had to be worked on entirely at home. Thank you, teachers, for forcing parents to essentially drop anything else out of their schedules so that they can oversee a big fifth grade project. I have to admit that I fail to see the usefulness of pasting crap onto posterboard as well.

Anyway, I woke Sarah at 7AM, she wanted to hit the snooze button, so I gave her a few minutes. Which turned into a half hour, because I also had to shepherd Megan through breakfast (fully one-half of one French toast stick), and then convince her to stay on track so we'd have time to do her Cindy Lou Who hair. Because it's Grinch Day at school and she wants to be Cindy Lou Who.

I finally get Megan's hair done at 8:05, and it's awesome. We were supposed to have left the house ten minutes earlier. Sarah is just at that moment done with her shower and dressed, hair unbrushed. She still has incomplete homework to finish. We're already late. I'm already late for work, and because I'm going to have to drop them at the school (because Sarah has her fucking posterboard to carry, and pieces are already falling off of it), I'm not going to be at my desk until 8:45.

Also, I have to take visit the WC, and it's not going to be pleasant.

I say to the girls, both sitting at the kitchen table, Sarah working on homework and Megan mulling over how she's going to annoy Sarah: "I have to poo. Do not fight. If I have to get off the toilet mid-poo, and come down here to break up a fight with poo still hanging from my butt, you're not going to like it."

Sarah screwed up her face, and rightfully so. I continued. "If you don't want to think about that, don't fight." I tell Megan that she should go somewhere else, but "I wanna be with Sarah." Fine. Fine. You have accepted the consequences of your actions.

Needless to say, I had to get off the toilet mid-poo and come downstairs to break up their fight. I was fucking livid, and I yelled. And I swore. They deserved it.

Yes, we all were calm and happy by the time I dropped them off at school. Here's how the investigation of "WTF happened?" went down:

• I am alerted to trouble by one of the girls screaming. I scream back, from way upstairs. This accomplishes nothing.
• Megan then screams, quite loudly, forcing me into action.
• After the aforementioned yelling, I learn that Megan was screaming because Sarah "did something" (which I now forget, but which I guarantee was not screamworthy).
• Sarah reports that she "had to," because Megan took her pencil and threw it.
• Megan reports that she threw the pencil because Sarah was stabbing her in the arm with it.
• Sarah says she was not stabbing Megan at all
• Megan backpedals to "Well, Sarah was squeezing my arm, and I felt like Sarah might stab me with the pencil." (That's not an invalid feeling.)
• Sarah "had to" squeeze Megan's arm because

-- Parental short term memory failure --

What sparked this whole thing was that Sarah wanted to see if Megan could give her some game items in the online game Animal Jam, so that Sarah could test out a "demonic ritual" that she's seen a video of on YouTube. "I know it's not real, but I wanna test it," she says. Megan is not to that point yet. She doesn't understand that just because someone made a YouTube video of something that doesn't make it real, and she got a little freaked out, and didn't want to have that conversation with Sarah.

My final advice to both of them was, "Sarah, you know that Megan doesn't like to talk about that kind of thing, that it scares her. I know it doesn't scare you and that you know it's not real, but she hasn't entirely figured that out yet. So don't have those kinds of conversations with her."

"And both of you: a conversation should never rise to physical violence, and certainly not to the point where a parent has to interrupt their difficult time on the toilet to come referee it."

Grouchy and wiggly

Yesterday: was okay until all the days events piled up on each other, with me working on my laptop on the counter at YPAC at 8PM, the girls fighting with each other, and all of us having to get packed up and out of the house to go home, then Bridget and Caden arriving shortly after we got home, and my having to answer to Bridget about the status of Sarah's school project, which she was supposed to have worked on at YPAC and kind of did but not nearly enough, which I felt like was my failure, and Caden was standing there (no, kind of dancing around) listening to me. That was really the only "bad" event of the day, and I managed to push through it by sitting in a chair. Fatigue was high in the afternoon.

Today, woke up grouchy, because reasons, turned out it wasn't anything coffee and magnesium couldn't fix. The reasons remain, I just gave less of a shit about them. Weird wiggly-head fatigue this afternoon, but I closed my eyes for a while and I'm all right enough.

I was actually kind of talking and singing to myself out loud this morning after my conference call, and looking for the video camera tripod so that I could make a video of me cooking my favorite breakfast food. Couldn't find it, though, and I was too hungry to look very hard.

Thinking about taking advantage of 57 degrees Fahrenheit to go for a motorcycle ride, but that might require a level of preparation and motivation that I am unwilling to summon at the moment.

Wow, this thing is still here?

Time to repurpose this place.

I've been on duloxetine hydrochloride (generic for Cymbalta) for about two years? Eighteen months? And I'm better for it. But a series of events has led me to stop, not the least of which is some withdrawal symptoms I seem to be experiencing. The primary symptoms are a weird intermittent dizziness that feels like a combination of dehydration and lack of sleep (but addressing both of those conditions doesn't seem to have an effect), and heavy fatigue. I'm already a professional napper, and the fatigue is making that "worse" or "better," depending on your perspective.

Anyway, Bridget suggested (read: insisted) that I keep a log of how I'm doing in the wake of coming off of the duloxetine HCl. I concur.

My idea for this log format is to, each day, talk about what yesterday was like, and what I think today will be like, in terms of physical and mental conditions. Let's begin.

-----

Yesterday was kind of a long day for me, but I took it in stride. I had a lot of running around to do for tests pursuant to my follow-up doctor's appointment next Thursday, and I had some confusion about whether or not I had all the test orders in hand. I did, but I didn't recognize the blood test order as being what it was until being on the phone with the doctor's office to get them to send it to me ... while I was holding it in my hand for the nth time that day.

I did find myself being surprisingly outgoing and personable yesterday with all the people I interacted with. Kind of surprised myself a bit there, but it was real nice to get out of the house and go gallivanting around among other humans. I did have some unscheduled grieving right at the end of my CT scan in the morning, probably brought on from a lack of breakfast and not enough coffee, combined with the weirdness of the test and the weirdness of being around adults in public during the day. Oh, also, because I haven't really sorted out my father's dying and death (two separate things) and serious consideration of my own mortality and its greater consequences, both of which came in a one-two punch back in July. The woman doing the testing was great about it, though, and I got myself together for the most part. It'll come back around again, I'm sure, but I wasn't unhealthy in my thoughts yesterday, even though I was upset.

Dizziness was not really an issue yesterday, fatigue was. Some of that was Monday's busy and eventful day (Sarah's play, Caden's guitar), and then not getting to bed until late, having to wake up at 6AM to take Caden to school.

What of today? I've got a little dizziness sitting here at the desk, but it's not severe. I am a little tired, we'll see how this afternoon goes. Mood-wise, I'm still riding yesterday's wave of "being a good person" and "making other people happy, even if just a little bit for a moment." It's also nice to have a little break from that, feed the introvert kind of thing. Bridget is at work, kids are at school, there's something to be said for an empty house.

My prediction for today is that I'll be all right, a little tired, but not down on myself. Megan has classes at YPAC tonight, maybe I'll take her and do some "talking to adult humans" while she's in class, to keep that wave going.

Well, it's been a long time again. Short updates since the last post:

1. Caden is now four and a half. He reads everything, with proper inflection even.
2. Sarah just turned two.
3. #3 is on the way, to be birthed in late February 2008.
4. I'm on another anti-depressant, Wellbutrin (or rather Bupropiol, also marketed as Zyban, for smoking cessation).
5. Pursuant to #4, I have quit smoking, for about three or four weeks
6. I've been working in the Loop for almost a year, now at my second job there, in the shadow of the Sears Tower.

Bridget had a complete breakdown when she found out she was pregnant, which was about three months ago. She called my cell phone at work, and was so hysterical that I thought something tragic had happened to one or both of our children. When she was finally able to get out that she was pregnant, I was relieved. I went home, because she was going to work that night. She's not freaking out about it anymore, but she's also not said anything positive about having a third child.

The only thing close to positive was her getting upset about having a stomach bug last night, which she thought was food poisoning from the crappy A&W food we ate, and which she believed might be putting the fetus in danger. So, not happy about it, but sad about the possibility of it ending prematurely.

Sunday was not a good day.

Bridget left for work in the morning, going to her regular retail manager job (which she's going to quit, but that's another story). Caden refused to go to sleep. I got really upset, put a giant hole in the drywall in the hallway upstairs, called Bridget and she came home to rescue me.

Bridget can get him to sleep without any trouble. Her mom can get him to sleep without any trouble. Her sister can get him to sleep without any trouble. He hates me. Or at least that's how it felt yesterday morning.

Since then, everyone has assured me that that's completely normal, and it's nothing I'm doing wrong. So now I just have to patch the gigantic hole in the wall.

Saturday was not a good day.

Caden had his poop the night before, so I was expecting him to be in good spirits. He wasn't. Here's how it went instead. Hour long screaming fit, sleep for fifteen minutes, hour long screaming fit, sleep for fifteen minutes, etc. I got mad. I yelled and threw stuff and punched the wall once hard enough that my knuckles are still a bit tender this morning. There were a couple of times in between the screaming fits where he'd be happy and smiling for about 80 seconds.

He didn't sleep much all day, and finally went down for a long time at 9 PM. I'm sure he was overtired, and that was what was making him grouchy, but he refused to sleep. Oh yeah, I got my teeth cleaned and had a headache most of the day because I hadn't had any coffee. I finally had coffee at about 7 PM, and things started to settle down then, too.

I pulled all the video off of the camera overnight last night. I'm going to assemble it into a montage and send it to my mom in Florida. I'm glad I finally get a chance to play with Windows Movie Maker. I'm not sure yet whether I should try and create a video file on CD, or pump it back out to the camera and then to videotape. Or maybe both. We need to buy a new VCR, since ours is all sucky.

Caden pooped today. Bridget called me while I was on my way in to work to let me know. That is how important baby poop has become in my life.

Not that I mind. It's nice to know that my greatest concern is about the timeliness of Caden's bowel movements. This one was a big deal, too, because he'd been grouchy all weekend with mild discomfort. Maybe it was more than mild, because he was having some serious crying jags, and he's really not one to cry at all. It was heartbreaking on top of it, because he'd lay there trying to understand what was going on in his gut, and not be able to, and trying to fight back the cry, and getting scared and wrinkling up his mouth into a little frown and finally having to let the crying sneak out because he couldn't hold it in anymore. He was scared of what was going on, and there wasn't much we could do about it, besides hold his hands and work his legs up to his chest. What a trooper.

Here's the latest bullshit that happened at the office.

Used to be we could wear jeans here on a regular basis. There's no public traffic through this office; if anyone who doesn't work here is going to show up, they've got a scheduled meeting with someone here. Technically, Fridays were "casual days," but we IT folk kind of expanded that to include every day of the week, because we were always crawling around under desks and shit. And in the summer, everyone was wearing shorts and stuff. If there was going to be a meeting in the office, someone would send an email the night before, saying, "Hey, meeting tomorrow, no jeans, dress nice." That worked just fine.

Not too long ago, CEO decided that there would not only be no more jeans or shorts wearing, but that casual Fridays were right out. Everyone hated this. It seemed stupid and pointless. CEO's Old Asst (who could lay smack down on CEO like no one else could) got all up in his face.

See, CEO liked to come in in the summertime wearing shorts, golf shirt, baseball cap. So Old Asst told him he'd better not show up wearing shorts, golf shirt, and a baseball cap, or she'd put her foot in his ass.

Last Thursday, July 3rd, CEO shows up midday. Guess what he's wearing. Take a wild guess. That's right, shorts, golf shirt, baseball cap.

People were hella pissed. My cohort, John, sent a rash of emails to CTO and others in our immediate vicinity. Then word comes around that someone (I'm not sure who) actually approached CEO and pointed out that he was wearing shorts and breaking his own rule.

His reply: "These are not shorts. These are culottes."

(Note that that is the correct spelling of 'culottes.' I know this because I had to search high and low to figure it out. Check it out at Merriam-Webster.)

It doesn't take long for me to pull up a zillion sites about culottes at Google. Of course, these are all displaying articles of clothing which are sometimes thought of as fat old lady shorts, skorts, or even a specific undergarment. Needless to say, these are all womens' clothes.

What a fucking piece of shit asshole. The guy has no respect for anyone; we're all just supposed to be his peons, giving our undying loyalty to him. Oh and all sorts of money, too, because we all should be making more when the company is constantly talking about belt tightening, and that fuckwad goes on depressing morale, insisting that people work after hours for no additional compensation on his personal shit and having the company pay for all sorts of toys.

I am so getting another job.

Yesterday afternoon, I finally got around to putting my certificate of completion into my Monster resume. I did this for exactly one reason - I could use the acronym MCSE when doing so, even before I've passed all the tests. First thing this morning, my cell phone rings. It's a recruiter from a staffing company. The position he was trying to fill was for a $15/hr help desk call center schmuck, but I thanked him for calling anyway. He was nice about it, and got right to the point with "It only pays $15 an hour, and I'm not sure that's within your acceptable range." I wonder if any other calls will come in today.

I told the story of an email exchange between Me, Dick, John and CTO to a Friend on AOL Instant Messenger this morning. The events happened last night. Some names have been changed to protect me.

You have just entered room "Payback Chat."
Friend has entered the room.
Friend: this should be good
Me: check this out
Friend: checking
Me: A couple weeks back, I'm talking to another (more highly paid) manager on the phone
Me: she's asking me to help troubleshoot the office in Deerfield the day before I went out there
Me: So I asked her what kind of information she'd gathered:
Me: Have you looked at event logs on the workstations?
Me: No, they hadn't. "I'll check that now," I said.
Me: "Oh, you can do that?" she says
Me: "Yeah, just MMC, add snap in, computer mgmt, bingo."
Me: Her reply:
Me: "MMC?"
Me: Now let me go on a tangent here
Me: MMC stands for Microsoft Management Console, and it's the generic interface that just about every Win2K management software uses.
Me: Anyone who has ever administered a network should damn well know about MMC.
Me: Later on, she sends an email to John with some comments about the "Sequel server."
Me: Fast forward to yesterday afternoon
Me: Late in the day, CEO Asst comes to me wanting me to post a file on the intranet so that a link can be sent in CEO's weekly update.
Me: This is appropriate; it was decided that that's how these things should be, since the week before, a 7mb attachment went out to every mailbox in the whole company.
Friend: ha!
Me: But John has gone home, and I don't even know which machine he's got the intranet running on
Me: When I go into the server room to look, there's someone else at the console.
Me: I look at the file again, and it's not huge, so I tell CEO Asst to just send it as an attachment, and we'll do the link next time for sure
Me: (This is a long story, nowhere near being finished.)
Me: Anyway.
Me: So that goes out, and the highly paid network manager in LA (who shall be referred to as Dick) sends an email to all the managers:
Me: "Weren't we supposed to do these attachments as links to the intranet?"
Me: My reply: Yes, I know, here's what happened. Feel free to lay smack down on me if you must. (The last sentence a direct quote.)
Me: John immediately called shenanigans on me (which I appreciated greatly)
Me: CTO replied with "SMACK, BOOM, POW - we need to have a backup system in place for this kind of thing."
Me: John replied to only CTO and me that CEO Asst should have given more lead time, since that attachment had to exist way before 4PM yesterday, and gave me a little grief about how the intranet server has a big sticker on it that says
Me: "INTRANET"
Me: and followed up with "Do I have to tell you what MMC stands for?"
Me: Here's where it starts getting good
Me: So the MMC joke is out there, and CTO is unaware of its source
Me: so I reply with (among other things): "MMC?"
Me: CTO replies: "Yeah that's MS Mgmt Console"
Me: I reply: "He fell for it!" and tell the story of where that little joke came up, without revealing the specific person, but saying it was someone who "dman well should have known."
Me: CTO replies: "... if our employment system works for you great, if note let me know ... :-)"
Me: It was funny - but I took it to another level with:
Me: "As requested, I will let you know if the employment system *does not* work for me. You'll know it when you see it."
Me: I get a reply from CTO only to me, making triply sure that he was making a joke, and apologizing if he "offended" me.
Me: BAM
Me: I love having even the teensiest upper hand.
Me: (That's the end, so far)
Friend: ha
Me: Of course, I replied with "No it was funny, no offense taken, no apology required."
Me: I also didn't retract or clarify any statement I had made
Friend: george costanza: "but I've got hand!"
Me: ha
Me: so I can't wait until CTO is back in the office and comes in to chat and smooth things over
Me: I've been considering my reply to that all morning
Me: Basically, unless I retire early or die young, I don't see this place as being my last employer

Today I am in Mequon Wisconsin. Came up here with Frank.

The issue I proved before has been fixed. They changed long distance carriers, and the weird echo went away. Must have had something to do with how the telco handed off to the LD carrier - but whatever.

Frank is working on the phone system, and I am here to look pretty. Damn, I look pretty.

The thing that really torques me off is that I can't get on AIM because AIM traffic is blocked by the firewall here. Lame. But the thing that really totally torques me off is that I can't even get the Java AIM client on the web to work. Completely lame.

So anyway, now I'm going to help the office manager here move from one office to another. I just moved her phone and made sure the network port was live. Next to the computer.

It looks like it'll be a short day, I think. Sadly, I have to drop Frank back off at the office, so I might have to actually go back in there. Or not.

Haven't checked in for a little while, so here I am.

Caden has started "gooing." When I say this, what I mean is that he is speaking in full sentences, all the words of which are "goo" or "gooo" or "goooo" or sometimes "boo." He does this for fifteen minutes at a time, and there is no possible way to pay attention to anything else while he's doing it. It's amazing to see that he has control over his voice and chooses to use it to communicate with me and Bridget.

My MCSE class is almost over. Thursday is the last one. I still have five tests to take, and I was kind of planning to take one this Friday, but I am required to go to Milwaukee for no reason. They're having an issue with the phones in their office there, and last I was there I proved that the issue was with the phone company. But the phone company guy who came out was a complete moron and chose not to understand what I was explaining to him. So Friday me and Frank, a consultant, are going up to lay smack down. At least I'll get paid mileage and the company is damn well going to buy my lunch. I may get back home earlier than I normally would anyway.

Mike Hentschel is in town this week. Bridget ran into him at a wedding, and he came over Monday night to hang out and stay with us for the night. He drank one of those Sparks drinks, so I only have two left. He's talking about getting a job with USAID and going overseas for a while. It's weird what people end up doing without even thinking too hard about it. He realized recently that he has ten years' experience in law enforcement. He's been a kind of parole officer for a long time. Who knew?

First Father's Day report:

That was pretty cool. I got this grill. I drank some beer. I ate some bratwurst from The Wurst Kitchen, which has no web presence whatsoever, apart from weird things about rendering and meat processing.

I also bought some of this crap. Tastes like Triaminic. Comes in a four-pack. I have three left, for whoever wants them.

So here's what's happened to me at work over the last two days.

Tuesday night I'm in class, and my phone beeps with voicemail. I don't get good reception in the classroom, that's why it didn't ring. I checked caller ID to see if I could figure out who it was, but it didn't register. So I step out to check it. Bridget doesn't call me during class unless it's important, so I figured there could be some emergency. This was about 8:15.

The message was from my CEO's assistant (to be referred to as Asst from hence forth). It said, "CEO is having a problem with his computer at home, please call him at [phone number]." His home computer is a home office computer, so I am responsible for it, but not knowing what the problem actually is is frustrating.

I troubled over this for a moment before I decided that I was not going to call him back. I sent Asst an email by Blackberry to find out what the problem was, to state that I wouldn't be in a position to do anything until morning, and that if it was a real emergency, I could do something about it at ~11 PM that night (after getting out of class and home and greeting my family).

Then mail started arriving on my Blackberry. Turns out the issue was with a program called Earth Viewer.

Let me explain what Earth Viewer is. It's a subscription service which allows you to view 3D images of the earth. From any distance. In fly-by if you want. The images are assembled from satellites and aircraft with cameras on them. The images are not realtime; rather they are between 6 months and 2 years old.

Asst also sent an email to me and the other guy here in the office to try and get someone to take care of this. She reported that CEO got an error message about not being able to connect to the server. Other Guy replied with the information that his home phone lines were out of service, so he wouldn't be able to do anything. Asst replied saying that she had called me and CTO, and hopefully one of us would call CEO back.

At this point, I'm livid. I reply to Asst and Other Guy and add CTO, saying that this is not at all business related, nor is it an emergency, and that no one should be calling my personal cell phone under these circumstances, nor should questions about non-work related things ever reach me after hours.

CTO calls me about an hour later. He'd been in meetings in the city till late. My first instinct was to tell him that this should wait until morning. While he agreed with everything I said, he told me that I should have put that to him and not to Asst. Fine. He related that CEO wants everyone to be at his beck and call 24/7 -- I interrupted, saying that I would be glad to do that, as long as I'm getting paid. CTO also related to me that Asst had called his house and talked to his wife. He also said that I didn't want to lose my job over something like this.

Whoa, hold on. I stopped him. "You mean to say I could get fired for this?" No, he said, but there could certainly be issues is Asst didn't handle things properly, and decided to just tell CEO that I wouldn't help him.

At this point, I'm thinking that Asst, who's fairly green in handling CEO, is the stupid one. Don't get me wrong, she is stupid, as evidenced by the fact that she forwarded my mildly scathing email to CEO.

Next day, Asst starts talking to me, and she's as pissed off about this as everyone is. Apparently, when CEO called her at 7PM, she asked him if the issue was personal of company. "Company," he said. And he kept pushing her to get someone get someone get someone.

(Sidebar: the actual issue was that the EarthViewer server was unavailable. Nothing to do with the company network at all.)

Later in the day, about 4:30, I get email from CEO saying that it was work related, that he was entertaining fancy-pants clients at his house, that "We were discussing a multi million dollar transaction that will benefit our shareholders.," and that "If our employment system works for you great, if not, let me know."

Apparently, the business purpose of the expensive toy (which I also found out was paid for by the company, and we're buying him a new computer for the office office so he can use it here, never mind the fact that it's going to hog all the bandwidth on the T1 and cause employees who are trying to get to the CRM and accounting systems to have trouble) was to be something to impress other important people with. By that logic, his house and fleet of expensive cars should be paid for and maintained on the company dime. What if he'd wanted to show off one of his cars, and it wouldn't start? Does he have a mechanic on call 24/7, and how much does the company pay for that?

After I forwarded CEO's threat to CTO, he called me again to reassure me that everything would be just fine, that he would handle it. We keep getting pushed by CEO to cut costs and watch budgets. We also get prodded for ways to make this company the best company to work for. Hell, our tagline is all about helping clients keep their best people.

So at this point, I have to think that either the company is trying to keep its best people, and I am not one; or that the company is not trying to keep its best people and it's all just a big lie.

Either way, I'm looking for another job. I haven't lost this one, and I doubt I will. But CEO wanted me to let him know if the "employment system" worked for me or not. I'll tell him with my resignation. Besides which, I was wholly unaware when I took this job that part of my job description was to be the CEO's bitch. If I knew that ahead of time, I would have insisted on a much higher salary. They wouldn't have given it to me, and I would have taken the job anyway, so it's really a moot point.

Oh yeah, when Caden woke up this morning, Bridget sent me in to take care of him. Which is fine by me - I get to spend some time with my boy while my wife sleeps, and I get up on time to get ready and leave for work. As soon as he saw me, he smiled. Then fussed. Then smiled again. Then fussed again. While I was changing him, he was both extraordinarily happy and completely pissed off at the same time. What a riot.

So I put him in his bouncy seat show, which he usually likes. He liked it well enough to pay attention and be quiet, but he was still a little fidgety. Once I got out of the shower, I picked him up and he calmed right down. Almost went to sleep. It was time for me to go to work, so I gave him to Bridget and they both went back to sleep in the bed.

Bridget reports that Caden has begin punching things, most specifically the octopus which is one of the hanging toys in his little activity center thingy. She also reports that he has been saying "goo." All of these things happen during the day when I am at work and class.

When I got home last night, it was time to put him down to sleep. I wanted to do it, and he was fine with that, so long as he could see his mom. As soon as she stepped out of view, he began squirming and screaming. She came back in and took him and he was fine again. After she got him settled down, I took him again and he woke up fussy once more. But I did finally get him to relax and he was mostly asleep. Then he was wide awake again, and Bridget took him back. I was satisfied by that time that he didn't hate me, so that was okay.

Okay so the last one was a little somber. And it's been a while since I put anything down here, so I'm sure you're wondering whatever came of this.

I picked Caden up from Bridget's parents' that evening, and instead of crying and getting down on myself, I was thrilled to see him. He was happy, I was happy, everything was right with the world. When Bridget came home, I slipped back into my old ways.

Skipping over all the intimate details, we discussed the issue, I got pretty upset, but when that part was finished, I felt a lot better. Have I smoked since then? Yeah, like one a day. But I'm doing a lot better than I was before.

Caden had his giant poop this morning. It was one that required him to take a bath immediately afterwards. The big problem is that he does part in the diaper, then a bunch out of the diaper, and only pees after the pooping is finished. So while we're trying to keep him from getting covered in his own shit, he throws a curve ball and pees into the air. Justice is served, however, as this morning the pee went right in his own face. Twice.

The jig is up.

Back in August 2002, when I found out about my pending fatherhood, I quit smoking. I had been smoking about a pack a day since 1988. I did a damned good job of it, too. Three days on the gum, and then nothing.

Well, I can't really say nothing. I did have a cigarette every once in a while. Like one every couple of weeks. And when I was out of town on business, I'd break down and smoke a packe over the course of three days. But when I came back, it was back to normal.

So the new year comes closer, and I finally get down to finding a psychiatrist, so I'm not a total wackjob by the time the kid comes out. That was a complete ordeal, getting passed around from operator to operator, asking them all to find me a shrink, and each one saying, "We don't really do that ..." What the fuck do you do then??

But I struggled through, and found someone and made an appointment. There was a wait of about six weeks between my making the appointment, and the appointment date. But okay that's done. I have that to look forward to. I even did the math on when the meds would probably start kicking in; I was cutting it close, but they should be taking effect by the time my son was born.

On the day that I was all ready to head in for my first appointment, I get a call from the doctor's office saying that they had to reschedule it for two more weeks out. Well that just fucked everything up! I was livid, after all I had gone through to get this set up in the first place. I was panicking. I bought cigarettes.

Just a pack, and smoked them over the course of those two weeks. That did it, though, and I've been smoking a couple of packs a week since. Am I proud of this? Not at all. Do I think I can quit again? Yes I do. Has this been a difficult thing for me? Yes it has.

Could I tell Bridget? No; she'd made it perfectly clear that if she found out I was smoking, she'd kick my ass. And this was before Caden was even born, so I certainly couldn't tell her then. She'd have gone ballistic on me. So I hid it. I would be able to reel it back in at some point, now that I'd be on a regular schedule with meds and doctor's visits.

That didn't work out as well as I'd hoped, since every single appointment I make with the shrink gets rescheduled for two more weeks out. Once I ran out of meds and had to chase around to get the prescription refilled. Add to that the fact that the guy I'm seeing doesn't ever really ask me anything about how I'm doing, and I'm basically on my own plus meds.

So last night, after class, I come home and she smells it on me. She asked if I had been smoking and I came clean. I got the silent treatment, she went up to bed with Caden and I slept in my chair downstairs.

I'm sure she's upset because I hid this from her. I can think of several times when I outright lied about it. Her: "Can you even imagine being a smoker now that you're a father?" Me: "No." As time went on from the beginning, my failures only multiplied.

When I woke up in the morning, I went up to bed first and lay there next to Bridget and Caden, who were both sleeping very soundly. Caden was completely snuggled up with her. This was 6AM, about the time he usually starts to stir, and she asks me to go change his diaper and then we have happy, smiling awake time. Or I carry him around in his bouncy seat with me while I take a shower and get dressed.

They were sleeping, and stayed that way. Caden made a couple of noises, and I tried my best to peer over the top of his head to see his face. But he was turned in towards Bridget, and I didn't get very far. I could see his long eyelashes, and the tip of his nose, and I wanted to stroke his fuzzy head.

I didn't. I went downstairs and took my medicine, then headed back up to take a shower. About halfway up, I sat down on the stairs crying. I'd been down since the night before, just like I used to be all the time. I had tried to be a good father and failed. I was separate and distant from my family that I love so much. I had been voted off the island, and the remaining contestants had decided to share the grand prize between themselves.

Bridget has had a brief conversation about my paycheck with me on IM today. She goes to work at 3:30 today, so I won't see her until late tonight. I'll be picking Caden up from her parents' after work. I expect that she'll have told them all about all of this, and that I'll be voted off their island, too.

I'll drive him home, and he won't remember anything about any of this. He'll be the same baby he was yesterday and the day before. I'll have to feed him at least once, which means I will have to hold him, and he will probably be smiling and happy at some point. I really don't feel like I'm responsible enough or good enough to hold him and play with him. I don't deserve to be a father.

I will very definitely do all of those things that need to be done with babies, because I am a father, even though I don't deserve to be one. I will also cry.

I have caved. I have made the background image on my work computer's desktop a picture of Caden with his arms out, smiling.

I have always hated those people, with the pictures of their kids all over their computers and desks and everywhere all the time. Now I am one of them. I still hate those people, the other people, who set the background to "Stretch," so that the tiny picture is now huge, out of proportion and grainy. I have not done that. I have only sharpened the image in Irfanview, and left it on a black background. Not some crazy, twisty, make your eyes freak out and cause remote control sessions to behave erratically crap. Just plain black.

I went to the shrink again on Friday. I'm less than satisfied with the level of service I'm getting from that office.

First, they called my house early and told my wife, "We've had a couple of cancellations, so we need to move the appointment to 2:45." It was originally scheduled for 5:30. Whatever. I do not understand how other people cancelling their appointments cause my appointment to have to be moved, unless the doctor wants to leave early for the holiday. This on the heels of all three appointments I've already had being rescheduled for completely different days.

So I get there at 5:30. Only the doctor is left in the office. He talks to me for a while, and I say, "Yeah, uh-huh. Yeah," a lot. I actually had to interrupt him to say things, which he then moved right past anyway. He gave me the title of a book he wants me to read.

Then, while bidding me farewell, he said I'd have to call on Tuesday to make another appointment, because there wasn't anyone left in the office to make appointments.

I'm starting to wonder what I'm paying for. So I'm going to look for another doctor's office. The prescription I have now actually has a refill on it, so that gives me a little time.

We went to Madison this weekend to see David and Vanessa and teeny Max. Bridget was telling them what to do, and they enjoyed receiving those suggestions. Still, I felt it necessary to temper Bridget by telling her to stop telling them what to do. We had a good time, going for a walk, eating bagels, cooking out, watching Cops. Watched a lot of Cops, so I got that going for me.

The Cops episodes were real old, too. Like over ten years old, gauging by the cars. But apart from that, hardly anything has changed. Criminals are still doing the same stupid crap now as they did then. Cops still have the same cop haircuts now as they did then.

It's good to have some stability in your life.

Sometimes, in the past, I would have dreams. Good dreams, where I was happy and things were right. Sure, maybe the dreams would be all weird and surreal, but the feeling I had in the dream was good. Then I would wake up and realize it was just a dream and realize that I was still in the drudgery of my awake life.

Not that my awake life was actually intolerable. I was only perceiving it as such.

Now, I look at Caden and Bridget and I feel like I did in those dreams. And I keep expecting to wake up to drudgery again. I can feel how good things are now, but the goodness still feels fleeting and intangible. It's a nervous time for me because of that.

Bridget says his cord is hanging by a thread, and will likely come off this week. It's about time. I can't wait to play with his bellybutton, because I think he might find that amusing, and I will definitely find it amusing.

Speaking of Bridget, she's been working as a waitress for three days now, and doesn't completely despise it yet. The rest of the staff is giving her a little crap about how she thinks she's going to hit the floor and make mad tips, even though she's a total rookie. Her response: "I might just be good at this. You never know." They don't know who they're talking to. She's gonna show them all up.

This morning, on the way to work, it was overcast. It must have been quite an interesting world when no one knew what clouds were. When I look at them, I think big bunches of water vapor condensed around dust particles, and sometimes it rains. Caden, on the other hand, has no idea. He just looks up and sees a big, wide swipe of various shades of blue-gray.

I tried to look at the sky through his eyes, and I succeeded to some degree. And the cows and the trees. But not for long, because I was driving and you have to stay in the moment with that.

What I did realize, once the strip mall area came up, was that people's creations of signs and buildings and roads have nothing on nature's trees and hills and animals.

Maybe I'll go hang outside at lunchtime today.