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I may be a little while…

Please forgive the lack of posts for the next couple of weeks. I’m deeply involved in the circle of life at the moment.

Dad passed away on Wednesday, and we’re expecting baby 2.0 this Wednesday. Both a blessing and a curse all in the space of a week.

Wallace Gracewood
Wallace Gracewood

My engineer brain can’t help but observe the feelings I’m having with deep interest. I often marvel at the cognitive dissonance when you imagine diving into the sea on an acid-cold Winter day. Yet that same grey, icy sea is so welcoming in February.

Perhaps the only way to truly appreciate life is to witness death first hand? Or the best way to understand the warmth and love of family is to have a member torn away from you too soon?

Hard and Soft. Yin and Yang.

Death and Life.

 

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Perspective

Gadgets. Work. Software. Solving a tricky user interface presentation problem. More gadgets. Concern at messiness of email inbox. Baby not breathing. Wait a second. What!?

It’s amazing how a simple phonecall from daycare can totally change your perspective. Apparently Ollie had a wee issue at daycare yesterday and stopped breathing for for around 15 seconds. Blue lips and all that. Shit. We’re presuming he choked briefly on something, but from the description and the doctor’s analysis, it could have been a short (but bad) asthma attack. Bugger. So we’re on a watching brief for the next couple of days.

It’s also times like this that one realises the quality of a workplace. My workmates at Datacom were fantastic, almost ordering me to go home when I considered staying until the end of the day. I’m sure Ollie would have been fine, but it was reassuring to see his smiling face first hand.

So now I’m shut-in dad for a day. I’m tossing up between getting some Teletubbies out of the video store so I can get some work done (yes yes, bad parenting and all that, but it’s genuinely the only way to keep the little guy in one spot), and going window shopping or something. Apparently we’re meant to keep a very close eye on O to see if he has any funny breathing patterns. Parents of 1.25 year olds might want to suggest how one manages to keep ‘a close eye’ on the breathing of an upwardly-mobile child?

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New Phone

I gots me a new phone. It has a camera on it and everything. Very snazzy.

What annoys me however, is that I can’t post an image from it directly to the phlog. Sure, I can send a picture to any email address, but damned if Telecom don’t go and embed the picture amongst some nasty HTML, and don’t even provide a plain-text content-type with the message. Poor old MFOP couldn’t find the picture amongst all that crap if it tried.

What is it with technology these days? Why can’t people just use the existing protocols available and send the picture as a simple attachment to an email? Do we really need to be hand-held through the process of receiving an godsdamned jpeg file? I mean do we?
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Fistula

There’s no easy way to describe a fistula-in-ano. It’s basically a big nasty infected anal gland that has ruptured to the surface of the buttocks, thus creating a duct that continues to get clogged with faeces, and in turn repeatedly gets infected.

So how’s your dinner tasting?

It’s not quite as bad as it sounds. We’re talking the proportions of a bad pimple rather than some sort of bubonic boil. Unfortunately for wee Ollie, a fistula is something that doesn’t fix itself with any amount of time or antibiotics, so it was off to the surgery.
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