My New Year’s resolution for 2004: “Less talk, more do”. More hands-on software development, less reading about others’ work (proportionally, that is). More half hours on the treadmill and reps with the weights, less dreaming of marathons and a perfectly trimmed waistline. Take things in small manageable chunks, rather than big overwhelming aspirations.

Accomplish, rather than dream. Take a step towards the outcome now, rather than plan the perfect journey and never progress towards the goal.

Shakespeare said (or more specifically a character in one of his plays): “The play’s the thing”. In this blog, the entry’s the thing. Sometimes, even the idea for an entry that never gets written is the thing. Cogitating on blog entries, rolling the ideas around in my mind, and then typing them out for the world to see helps me to focus my thoughts and even recognize some ideas that otherwise might have just floated away as worthy of more exploration. So, the blog’s for me, more than for the audience. The ideas expressed here, though, expose something of me to my readers. That I’d find an idea worthy of exposition tells something about me, before you even read what it is I actually write about it. For some bloggers out there, I think the reason that the blog is to do some sort of intellectual streaking – baring themselves before the world for the thrill of it. But just as I’d be more embarassed to have my mother-in-law or my boss see my bare bum running down the road than I would a stranger seeing me, I have to consider who may actually know me among my audience before deciding what to post. Friends know who we are; co-workers have now visited the site; I’ve even been approached by my clients at work or folks in our church. It’s not as if our site is a secret: if we give you our email address, it’s pretty easy to find the site. But I don’t always connect the thought that letting someone send me email is the same as giving them a blinking arrow to my blog.

As a concrete example of the complications involved, playing with ideas of impending motherhood wasn’t doable until work knew that we were expecting. Making jokes about the in-laws? Not cool, when your readership includes your mother-in-law. Providing op-eds on gay marriages? Only OK if I’m willing to be challenged on my opinion on Sunday in church. Either makes for a very tame weblog or a choice to accept flak for opinions expressed, since they _are_ the opinions of the writer. So far, I’ve walked a more tame route, but it feels chafing. Censorship is a confining sensation, even if it’s self-censorship. I’m contemplating free range ideas, setting those little dogies free from their pens and seeing where they wander. Figure out then how much I need to rope ’em in. The fear is that I wouldn’t need to rope ’em in at all – that I’m that tame that I never raise an eyebrow anywhere. Bland is not only boring to the listener, but ego deflating.

Wish there were just a few more hours in your day? Want just a little bit more time added in somewhere to think deep thoughts, catch up on television, or sift through that stack of magazines? I have the solution you’ve been looking for – have (or adopt) a kid. No longer will your nights be spent slumbering. Those hours previously “wasted” on sleep will be yours… as long as whatever it is yu want to do can be done with a child in one arm.

This blog post brought to you courtesy of Callie, and through the one-handed typing skills of my right hand…

Our cat now has a prescription for antidepressants. If you see her drinking alcohol or driving heavy machinery, please report her to us, as she’d be a danger to herself and to society.

We’ve had to put her on the happy pills since Callie came home. Cat’s don’t show that they’re depressed by moping and sleeping all day – that’s normal cat behavior. No, how cats show that they’re depressed and stressed is to scratch on furniture and try to mark things as their own. It’s a turf war, basically, and my house is the ‘hood.

Cats on pills are a recursive problem, though. To sedate my cat by giving her a pill, you need an already sedated cat if you’re going to get the pill down her throat. My arms are marked with cat scratches from attempts to solve this inherent problem, and yet still no medication has gone down her throat. She’s a suspicious cat, too, so pills or even liquid versions of the medication haven’t been successfully hidden in tuna.

Today I had my six week post-partum checkup. After seeing my wrists, slashed with cat claws, I got a slew of questions of ‘feeling depressed? Angry? …’ No, I haven’t been trying to slit my wrists – my cat’s been trying to do that for me!

Well, our cat has it coming – Monday she’s scheduled to be spayed. Supposedly that’ll help calm her down. Too bad animals are allergic to chocolate – liberal doses, I’ve heard, have near medicinal properties for such things in women.

I wonder what it says about my level of fitness that my toddler laughs at my attempts to do sit-ups…

Priorities, priorities, priorities… Write a blog entry? Clean a bathroom? Try to learn something more about Java or BEA’s WebLogic product? Heaven forbid, spend time with my husband? Nah – I’m a mom with an infant who goes two, maybe three hours tops between feedings, max, round the clock. Priority #1: get a shower. Priority #2: go to sleep. Anything else will either slide into some time slot when I can’t sleep (that whole sleep when the baby sleeps thing works great with the first child – doesn’t work so well when it’s child #2 and child #1 is a toddler) or will just have to slide off the plate together. All brain cells are now targeting pillow territory.

And for that co-worker who questioned my commitment to the company for not coming in for a non-billable meeting on my non-paid maternity leave on the morning when my daughter had a doctor’s appointment that was otherwise keeping me from sleeping??? Pffffffft. Remind me to remind you about your commitment when/if you have children. And should your wife take all the burden of childcare off of your shoulders, remind me to remind _her_.

Upcoming blog entry: thoughts sprouted from reading Fortune magazine’s annual issue on women in business, combined with reading ‘I Don’t Know How She Does It‘, by Allison Pearson. An interesting convergence of reading material, not consciously chosen to point and counterpoint.

I’ve been Jonesing for another PDA again. It’s not as if my Treo 90 doesn’t work… I depend on it to keep my calendar, contacts, to-do lists, and the like all in order. The problem is one of layered Jonesing. See, SanDisk is releasing a wireless access card for Palm OS 5.x sometime this fall. My Treo only supports OS 4.x, so I can’t add the card/get the really cool geek toy on my Treo. Combine that with a Jonesing for a new phone integrated with my set of phone numbers stored on my organizer (Jason got me started here), and suddenly I’m out surfing PalmOne and Handspring.

Problem is, there doesn’t yet seem to be a product that meets my needs/wants. I love the keyboard on my Treo – don’t want to give that up. I don’t want to pay for a data access plan, so don’t want to use the wireless capabilities that are built into some of the PDAs. I’d rather use the SanDisk card and just use the network available at home or at work. (I really don’t need instantaneous access to my email or the web while I’m at the mall or the grocery store – at least not at today’s data access plan rates.) And I want a built-in phone. So, I need a PDA that has a built-in keyboard, is a smartphone PDA, and uses Palm OS 5.x. Doesn’t seem to exist yet, unless the Treo 600 ends up fitting the bill (and then I suspect I won’t like its price). Palm’s Tungsten W _almost_ fits the bill, but its OS is listed at 4.x, rather than 5.x, so that card (when it’s available for the Palm OS) won’t work. I have hope, though – the Palm datasheet for the Tungsten W lists it as 4.x, but on their product comparison sheet, they list it as 5.x. Not much hope, though – the product data sheet also lists it as 4.x – and you can’t upgrade from 4.x to 5.x, ’cause they require different processors. Boo hoo. Guess I’ll have to restrain myself for a while…,and just keep drooling for the “perfect” PDA.

A thunderstorm rendered our power system kaput last night. Sometime between 7 and 8 pm, the lights went out, and as of this morning, they still hadn’t come back on. Our usual evening activities – reading, fiddling on the computer, watching a DVD with our daughter, seeing Leno/Jon Stewart/whatever else my husband surfs across – all were knocked out of commission by the lack of juice. The game of the evening was to avoid stepping on a cat in the dark. Getting ready for work this morning was fun, too – doing one’s hair and makeup by candlelight, you tend to use a very light hand, for fear of looking like this.

All in all, assuming that the power’s back on when we get home this evening, a relatively low impact event. We got a little bit of extra sleep (not much else to do), but otherwise, other than needing to replace some food in the fridge/freezer, all it did was convince us that we need to be better prepared should something like this happen again. We had the one flashlight at the ready, but one flashlight for three people isn’t very useful. Better to have some money on hand, in case our outage were more widespread than just our little neck of the woods. Supply of bottled water would also be good to have in stock. But candles were easily found, there’s plenty of canned food in the pantry, and our stove is gas (though uses electric to spark the gas – a candle lighter works just fine in a pinch) – we weren’t going to starve. Die of boredom- maybe. Die of starvation – nah.

Testing ‘new’ functionality… If you hit refresh on this site, it should try to write a cookie to your machine (if you have cookies enabled) that’ll keep track of when you last visited here. The next time you visit here, any entries that have been written since your last visit will have the text (New) before their title. Eventually, I’d like to mark which categories have new stuff, etc, etc, but we’ll start with small steps. Note that this particular entry has a post-dated date of authorship, just so that folks who visit in the next couple of days will see something New, whether or not I post anything else…

National Public Radio had an interview with Weird Al Yankovic this morning. (Info and replay available on NPR’s site.) Made me stop in my morning routine to take a listen. Even better, this evening I got a chance to hear the EXTENDED version of the interview. Beats listening to the BEA webinar that I tried to connect to – luckily for me, their webinar presenter’s site was down, and I got to hear Weird Al instead.

True confessions: Weird Al’s music was the stuff I can first recall singing out loud while listening to my Walkman in the 80’s. I snatched up each cassette as they came out, and had the great luck in college to get to go a Weird Al concert. At one point, an ex-boyfriend gave me the boxed set of Weird Al, knowing that this was the way to win my heart.

I’ve since given away my boxed set to a young friend who’s captivated by Weird Al’s music, and had decided to pass up his latest release (Poodle Hat) because I was too grown up to buy a Weird Al CD. (Note that I do own Running with Scissors, released in 1999, so this a fairly recent “maturity”.) Hearing him on the radio this morning, and checking out the info on Amazon for it, I think I’m going to have to dive back into my childhood spirit and snag Poodle Hat. Maybe even a Weird Al t-shirt… think I like the anime one best…