I’m supposed to write. It was one of those evenings where after I picked up groceries, I stared at them when I arrived at home, and wondered how I was going to get through cooking diner and helping with the kids. Work wasn’t particular hard today but I was exhausted. I’ll admit I drank a glass of wine after unpacking the groceries, and that calmed me down enough to cook a batch of chicken cutlets. I’m now more relaxed. I had come over to the computer to play around before remembering that I was supposed to write these words. And here I’m writing them.

Doolies is upstairs with Tiger and I’m in the computer room with Dinosaur and the stinky iggies. It is past time that they went to the groomers but I keep forgetting to make the appointment. Doolies has taken over responsibilities for scheduling them, and they’ll hopefully be clean again this week.

Dinosaur is in the bouncy moaning a bit but generally happy. He had his six-week checkup this morning and everything was fine. He’s fifty percentile for height and head width, and seventy-five percentile for weight. He’s a good eater, as would be expected of a dinosaur. Doolies said he’s been a bit more sensitive today than usual after this five vaccinations. Part of the possible side effects.

We’re planning our parent’s night out when my mother visits next week. I originally had a work dinner with Doolies on Wednesday, but they postponed it until February. That means we have an evening free sans children. It’s time to dust off my OpenTable account and see what restaurants will take us next week. I can’t remember the last time Doolies and I went out to dinner alone. (Not that dinner with the children is bad. For such small monsters, they’re pretty good when we go out. But it’s different when your only responsibility is yourselves and overpriced food).

Some boring technical notes from this weekend. I packaged it all in this long paragraph so it’s easy to skip: I tried out Node.js to see if I could use it to replace PHP for my website rewrite. I was initially very excited by the lack of page support. While I use HTML and Javascript pages, I prefer they are generated through code and not markup. When I saw that Node.js does just that, I thought I had found my dream language. After finally getting it up and running over the weekend and playing with a few configurations, I ran into a non-starter. While I’m generally used to Javascript now (after using it periodically on my webpages and for my sewcrates.com Windows 8 app), I realized that Node.js is designed for async operations. While that’s perfect for a UI-intensive app, it doesn’t make as much sense for a webpage that is generated synchronously. I need to wait on queries to generate earlier elements of the page before moving on to later elements. While I’m sure there are efficiencies in a few parallel parts of the generated webpage, dealing with coordinating lots of async calls for what is essentially a sequential page just seemed too much work. Not to mention that Javscript code, while somewhat pretty when designed properly, is not the easiest language to get my head around. The error handling of Node.js is also a bit lacking, which made finding basic syntax errors a bit more difficult than it should have done (this is not to say that PHP is that much better on this account). Which brought me back to PHP. I guess since I learned something it’s not a completely wasted effort. Designing the Node.js version did give me a few ideas on how I want to re-implement the PHP version, including redesigning the file layout and the generation of the pages.

It was warmer today, reaching into the 50s. I thought I saw a cold front in the forecast. I guess we’re in the lull between fronts.

I’m again fighting with the Internet Wi-Fi signal in my house. If I take the cost of all the different wireless routers I’ve purchased over the years, I’m sure I could have wired both my Seattle house and now my Mercer Island house and had a few dollars left over. We’ve been having trouble watching our Crunchyroll animes at night. The signal keeps going in and out, leaving us to watch the spinning circles of buffering until it catches up. I’m not sure how they do it, but this seems to happen most often at the most interesting points in the episode: usually when a mystery is about to be revealed or in the midst of a big fight. One day I’ll find the perfect solution, or finally finish wiring at least my TV to the router, and rely on the Wi-Fi for non-real-time streaming devices.

Dinosaur is still moaning a bit. We now think he may have gas. Our pediatrician said that many babies suffer from it, and they’re more vocal about it because they don’t understand that it’s not something permanent, that it does go away and is something you need to learn to live with. I guess that’s one theory. We’ve been discussing moving him to another room so we’re less likely to pick him up when he gives off his dinosaur moans. Doolies has still not bought off on this idea, but I do see sleep training in his near future. Everyone will be happier once we accomplish it. (Especially me.)

I’m getting closer to finishing up my philosophy book. It’s gone a bit downhill, as the author has begun spewing off his own rather silly versions of the answer to why is there Something rather than Nothing. Before he started on his diversion into homespun philosophy, I thought he was finally getting somewhere. Now I’m not so sure. I’m hopefully he’ll get back on track and we’ll end up somewhere interesting on this journey. I do have a few new books in the queue, so I’m ready to finish this one up and move on.

These daily musings are more difficult during the week when I have work on the brain. There are plenty of interesting things going on at work but not much I can talk about. Even industry stuff, which I follow avidly, is not something I like to talk about on this site. I was talking to adversarial lawyer (from my old law firm), and he mentioned that he researched me and found much more information about my family than my legal practice. I told him that was something I’m rather proud of. (Especially since I was deposed and they brought up this short post I made about work.)

I’m wasting the last few minutes staring off into space. I hear Tiger running upstairs, which means her bath must be over. I’ll take the dinosaur upstairs with me so we can watch her get ready for sleep. I’ve been putting her to sleep the last few nights, as Doolies is not capable of dealing with Tiger’s delay efforts. She gives in too easily to her requests for her diaper to be changed (they seem to get wet multiple times before she goes to sleep) or to read just one more book before tucking her in.

Okay, the dinosaur is groaning and wants to get up. Night.