Half my Dear Readers complained last night about the lack of new posts. I decided to skip my 30-minutes yesterday as I was too tired from a good evening of Naginata. Not 102-fever tired, thankfully, but tired and late enough to decide I was creative enough for one day.

It was a mistake because I sat in bed for many hours before I finally fell asleep. I don’t know if the class energized me or I was coming down off too many nights of Nyquil. It’s probably the latter as I did warn that’s the usual result of Nyquil: great for when you’re sick with the aftereffect of jetlag-style sleep. I wonder why it does that. It’s probably similar to why people grow addicted to sleep medication. Once you start using it, it’s difficult to sleep in natural ways. Hopefully I’ll be back to my wonderful sleeping habits tonight.

Dinosaur is in the kitchen. He’s starting to make dinosaur groans. Doolies is upstairs bathing Tiger. I’m writing this.

I think I can (again) say that I’m at the tail end of my sickness. I’m still congested in the morning and I talk funny but the worst does—it really does this time—seem behind me. That’s good as three weeks of a sickness with not enough sleep does not make a happy David.

Dinosaur slept an amazing amount last night in the crib. He slept from around 11pm to 5am before Doolies had to bring him into our room. That’s quite an accomplishment for the little guy. It remains to be see if last night was an outlier or the real thing. Maybe he’s one of those magical natural sleepers that the sleep books talk about: the one whose parents laugh at the proponents of sleep training; the same parents who probably think to themselves that if other people were as good parents as them, then their children would sleep through the night because of proper parenting and not bad advice from books. I (and I know Doolies) would be quite satisfied if Dinosaur was one of those happy-go-lucky babies. And after our experience with Tiger, I can promise not to become one of those smug parents.

Dinosaur is certainly laughing and smiling more than Tiger. Tiger was similar to me in her serious disposition. While she has started becoming more outgoing, she certainly reminds me of an old soul. Dinosaur seems closer to Doolies in that he smiles and laughs all the time. He’s also trying to talk at two months old. He says “hell-oo” quite clearly now—at least to his parents’ ears.

Not much has been going through my brains lately. I still work on my website when I have a few minutes of free time. My Chinese language lessons have dropped off a bit and I restarted them today. I use memrise.com to learn the words and phrases. I learned 167 character/phrases (that includes one for each the simplified Chinese character, and one for the corresponding pinyin, i.e., the English transliteration of the Chinese word). I had to restart the lesson when they redid it as part of an upgrade for the website, but for learning vocabulary words, it’s a helpful website.

This will only get me so far, though. I have to get over my fear of talking to people and practice speaking. I can’t practice with Doolies since she’s not a good teacher. She tends to yell at me and make fun of my pronunciation, which is not what you should do with introverted, shy people, particularly when they are trying something that is difficult for their simple brains. (Language is similar to my directionless-sense, in that the wiring in my brain is very loose and words do not stick properly.)

I should set a goal to get through level 1 by June. That gives me six months to learn another 600 characters and phrases. Not sure how realistic that is, but maybe that’ll inspire me to work on it every day. Similar to this writing. Except when I don’t. Yeah, I see how these goals work.

Oh, and the novel I’m reading continues to get better. I have a colleague at work that’s reading it at the same time, and it is fun to discuss where we’re up to and what we expect will happen. We’ve been pacing each other rather well, switching lead every few days. Not that either of us are rushing through it. We’re both enjoying the stories and are not looking forward to waiting another two years for the next book in the ten book series. Ugh, I hate starting ten book series before the author is close to finishing. I no longer have the luxury of rereading the series every time the author releases a new book like I did for Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series. (Don’t worry, I stopped doing that after the first few books. There was no way to sustain it given the size of that series.)

Okay, that’s enough pretending to write for one day. Hopefully I’ll be properly caffeinated tomorrow and maybe my brain will have actual thoughts.