Three months

It's been a busy quarter of a year. Started with a lot of stress, then I had to take an enforced vacation in a psychiatric ward, and since then I've been rebuilding myself (with help, this time; I've suffered breakdowns before, and I strongly discommend attempting to rebuild oneself solo) and trying to make sure I properly bond with my little girl.

I think I've managed to.

It's a start.

Today, I took some time to myself, and wrote a 3000 word article that I'm now planning to attempt to sell. If it doesn't sell in a reasonable time frame, I'll post it here, because it really deserves to be out there, but I'll try to get paid for it first.

Apparently, the future is a pluperfect hell.

As part of an email conversation recently, I was directed to a video on YouTube, titled "The Future of CX". CX is apparently shorthand for "Customer Experience", and while the video purports to show how wonderful things will be in the future, it is in fact a vision of uncounted ways to get things horribly wrong. It begins poorly, and only gets worse from then on. But, before I viciously deconstruct precisely WHY it's horrendous, you ought to watch the video. Here it is, and below the jump I will unsheathe the claws.

Progress!

I got one heck of a productive day made today, despite starting off with a serious whack to the noggin. My anti-anxiety medication had been getting slightly less effective, so my psychiatrist suggested I switch from taking it without food to taking it with food (active stomach means greater absorbed dose - this particular medication states in the accompanying material that you need to pick one and stick with it, and since it had been without food in the psych ward, that's how I'd been taking it) and the breakfast dose made me lightheaded and shaky for a couple hours. I wound up having to snap myself out of an anxiety attack (using a technique I figured out from talking with my therapist, who's very good at giving me ideas that I can work out the techniques from; she specialises in cognitive behavioural therapy, and I understand that part of that discipline is getting the patient to think they worked it out on their own) but then I got on with the day and was absurdly productive. Grocery shopping, mostly produce (when a 15lb bag of spuds is $5, compared to $4.50 for 10lb or $3.25 for 5lb, it doesn't make sense to buy anything but the 15lb bag), and then I got laundry done, got a couple meals made up, had to take over baby care for the LA for a decent chunk of the afternoon, and ran more errands to finish the day off. Somewhere amongst all this, I also found time to finish the book I'd been reading, despite not feeling like I'd had two minutes to myself.

Surviving...

The LA and I are still around. It's just that most of the time we're either caring for a baby, or taking a well-earned break from such duties. The baby is doing magnificently; she's up almost a pound from her birth weight, and well ahead of her developmental milestones. Things have been a little more difficult for the LA and me, though. The reason is a little personal, so it's going behind a link.

I feel like I'm not doing my share...

I'm feeling like I'm not shouldering my full share of the burden, and so does the LA. We've been gently dropped into the deep end, and we're learning rapidly how to keep Munchkin happy at home (the answer so far: give her a swaddling she can fight her way out of, change her diaper often, and feed her far more than you ever imagined necessary) and how to stop worrying and love the gurgles. I'm still in the mild panic at every noise stage, but Munchkin is a noisy sleeper, so my brain will have to develop a filter to distinguish important noises from charming little baby snores.

We brought her home yesterday, and the cats are working on figuring her out. Sheba has gotten to smell her, and is probably well on her way to conspiring with her, while Graham is being a stereotypical nervous-father type. He panics at every noise, and is constantly hovering on the sidelines wishing he had the nerve to help.

We're both too shattered to cook anything worth eating. Fortunately, we have friends who know the score, and we can cope with other people cooking for a while. The sole exception is my morning porridge; what I make isn't a patch on my dad's porridge, but it beats the heck out of anyone else's. I think that's the case with anyone who likes porridge; theirs is the second-best, whoever introduced them makes the best, and anyone else is a distant third...

Books I miss, or would like to miss.

While in general the selection of books in the US is good, there are some I've been having great difficulty finding. Therefore, if you're stuck for a gift idea for me, and you run across any of these, feel free to consider them. I'm very much in favour of secondhand books, so long as no pages fall out and nobody's been at them with a highlighter.

Barry M. Hughart, The Story of the Stone; this is the middle one in a trilogy, the ends of which I have. I don't know how available it is worldwide, but it's in the "duelling algorithms, silly money" state on Amazon in the US, which means people aren't selling copies.

Goscinny & Uderzo, trans. Bell & Hockridge, Asterix (series); these comics were a major element of my childhood, and I'd love my daughter to have access to them as well. Besides, I can now read them as an adult and understand far more of the jokes than I used to.

Lindsey Davis, M. Didius Falco series; so far, I've seen ONE of these excellent historical-comedy-detective novels this side of the Atlantic. Naturally, I snapped it up, but it was Venus in Copper, and I'd forgotten most of the details of The Silver Pigs and Shadows in Bronze. I'd love to re-read, and indeed to continue reading after I left off (which I think was somewhere around Last Act In Palmyra), and besides, Amazon tells me that the US covers are terrible. No character at all, nothing to draw the eye, and no relation to any events within. Far be it from me to cast aspersions, but I would suggest that a good cover is a particular necessity when dealing with unconventional content.

Dmitry Glukhovsky, Metro 2033; this one is translated from Russian, and distinctly dark. It's since been turned into a very interesting computer game.