As Jenny and I grow older and nearer to the point where we will be starting a family (not to worry, a few years yet), it occasionally occurs to me just how scary raising a child can be. Children, especially infants, are fragile, and there are so many things to keep track of -- this Salon article about breast-feeding vs. formula, for instance. The list of things infants and young children die from, even today and even in this country (a selection: diarrhea, lower respiratory infection, otitis media (ear infections), bacteremia, bacterial meningitis, botulism, urinary tract infection, and necrotizing enterocolitis), is frightening all by itself. The days that I end up thinking about things like this, and all the things that those thoughts imply, are the days when I feel paradoxically too old and too young at the same time. It's a very somber feeling, contemplating what it would (will) be like to be so immensely responsible for the very life and health of such a fragile little person. Awfully deep thoughts for an unpleasant Friday at work.

Speaking of work, this job has somehow made me dislike company holidays. How on earth could it do that, you ask? Well, my normal work week is 10 hours each day on Monday through Thursday, with Fridays entirely off. Working 8am to 6pm took some adjusting, but it's fairly normal now, and I definitely prefer it to working on Fridays. In any case, in order not to screw up the company payroll system, in any week in which I take a vacation day or which includes a paid holiday, I am forced to work a normal 5×8 schedule. This is because we are not allowed to take partial vacation days (a terrible crime IMO), among other things. So if there's a holiday on, say, Monday, then I end up working 4 8 hour days so that I can have that holiday off. Thus instead of 4 10 hour days and having an extra day off, I end up working 4 8 hour days and getting an extra day off. The difference between a 10 hour day and an 8 hour one is not even close to enough to make any real difference. So instead of lazing about this morning, I had to get up and come to work so that I could get paid for Monday's holiday. What I would like to do is work my normal schedule, and come in for 2 hours on Monday to bring the total (8 holiday hours + 2 normal hours) to my usual 10. Sadly, companies with over 200,000 employees aren't precisely flexible or responsive to individual employees' desires (well, at least those at the bottom of the food chain; I'll bet Phil Condit can take a half vacation day if he wants…), so I'm out of luck.

At least I get Monday off. :sigh:

I've also resolved to post longer posts; a link and a sentence probably isn't very interesting to the few regular readers I do have. This isn't instapundit, after all. :)

People who refer to their SO as "the boy" or "the girl"… they annoy me. I see this on a number of blogs, which makes me think it's reached some kind of critically massive blogger slang stage or something, but it feels so incredibly… detached. Like the SO in question is just J. Random Girlfriend, who could be replaced at any minute by any reasonably priced competing model (think dishwashers and refrigerators here) without a problem. Of course, for many of these people I suppose that might be true. But it still irritates me.

In other news, the drive back into town last night was horrific and impressive all in one. Illinois was one huge Severe Thunderstorm from Indiana to Missouri, and we drove smack through the middle of it. It was bad enough that at one point we actually pulled over and sat under an overpass for twenty minutes or so. There's something slightly nerve wracking about sitting under an overpass in the dark, with rain coming down so hard you can't see the street ten feet beyond the overpass edge, and having semis come roaring by at 60+ miles per hour. On the other hand some of the lightning was something to see… there would be cascades of lightning that would start at the edge of the southern horizon and ripple overhead all the way to the northern horizon, lighting everything up with pure white light, and then plunging you into darkness that seemed that much more dense by comparison. Of course, after 2 or 3 hours of that, my whole body was one tensed muscle group, and I'm a fair bit sore today because of it.

Finally, Morrowind seems like it's going to become an addiction, if I ever have time for it. Between the already huge world, millions of side quests, and complete non-linearity of the game, and its impressive flexibility (at one fan site I've already noticed a couple dozen user mods for the game, and it looks like it would be fairly easy to come up with more myself), this game could last years. Not that there aren't a few improvements I'd love, namely NPCs who actually seem to have lives and a multiplayer, persistent version, but this game is shockingly well done.

Okay, that wasn't finally, this is finally: It is occurring to me more and more often that in less than a month Jenny and I will have been married for a year. Life is an interesting thing.