Brain Dead and Mind Numb

These last few days have been pretty hard on me. I still have some lingering mucus from my cold / allergies. We’ve also been pretty busy at work. In addition to everything else, I’m “on call” this week. My last job, in web programming, didn’t have a call rotation. If anything went wrong, they called me regardless of the time or day-of-the-week. Luckily our web stuff is pretty solid and we hardly ever had anything break. That kind-of spoiled me. Now I’m in a group with hundreds of servers that span dozens of applications. Being “on call” can now mean something. And by “mean something” I mean that it could be horribly inconvenient as things I’ve never heard of break in new and interesting ways. Of course this is also a great learning opportunity. Doesn’t every one like being randomly woken up at 2:30 in the morning so you can learn something totally new.

Maybe I’ll try to write something more creative later in the week.

Assassination Vacation

I’m feeling much better today. My allergies / head cold aren’t bothering me that much. I had a pretty busy day at work and the movement helps me feel better. I don’t know if it really makes sense or not, but sometimes I feel worse if I just sit around when I feel sick.

I’ve been reading Jonathan Lathem’s “The Fortress of Solitude” and its been pretty slow going. The story, so far, focuses on a white kid growing up in a predominantly black part of Brooklyn, NY in the mid to late 1970’s. Latham’s other books I’ve read always had some surreal aspects that helped keep my interest up when the prose draged. There’s very little of that here. There is honesty to the descriptions of what the kids do and how they interact that’s pretty interesting. But there’s something about the book that just doesn’t really make me want to pick it up.

So while I didn’t feel well, we went over to Borders and bought Sarah Vowell’s latest book “Assassination Vacation.” There’s something about the way she writes that I like and after three days I’m almost done with the book. The book follows her trips exploring the Lincoln, Garfield and McKinley presidential assassinations. She has a pretty good sense of humor and I’ve liked all of the other books we have by her.

I’d heard some of her radio essays on public radio’s "This American Life." I mainly listened to hear stuff by David Sedaris; but I’d hear her stuff too. It wasn’t until she did the voice of Violet in the movie “The Incredibles” that I was reminded of her work and went out and bought some.

Ok, that didn’t work.

My writing every day and posting to the blog only lasted 4 days. I did some extra writing but, for the most part, I’ve let life get in the way of writing. I’m only marginally able to manage my time – at the best of times – so it’s no surprise to me that I wasn’t able to keep this going.

I find it too hard to get up in the morning and be productive at something like writing. Most mornings I feel pretty good if I can get me to work and Duncan to school without forgetting something. The problem, though, is that the freest time I have is after the boys have gone to bed. I’m usually pretty tired by then and find it difficult to do more than read.

I don’t want to whine here about my time mismanagement / being a slug issues. So I’ll. Just try to do something here. It may be fiction, diary, rants, I don’t know yet.

I’m also coming down from a head-cold / allergy attack that’s lasted about 4 days. At this time of year it gets hard for me to tell the difference between a cold and an allergy attack. Usually if I’m not generally achey then I assume its just allergies.

That’s about it for now. Let’s hope I can write some tomorrow too.