New Year

Yeah, it's the 4th, so I figured I'd talk about New Year's now that the suckers have cleared out. Of course, I worked on New Year's Day, so as I said before, I went to bed earlyon New Year's Eve. Turns out there were fireworks going off, I just slept through them, mainly because they weren't on this block. The Wife says it sounded like Beirut a couple of blocks over, though (I started to write "Baghdad" but changed my mind - seemed in bad taste somehow - odd, isn't it?). I apparently just slept through it all because I was just dead tired.

My sleep patterns could use some improvement. The Wife works several evenings a week, so I stay home and take care of The Girl. If I were to go to bed in time to get eight hours of sleep, I'd have to be in bed literally at the moment The Wife usually walks in the door. "Hi, how was your day, here's The Girl, goodnight." Since I'm up and out the door long before The Wife gets up in the morning, that means we would literally not see each other more than a few minutes for two full days out of the week (more like three, really). Which would leave me no excuse to go out and do guy things on Saturday afternoons and Monday evenings, which right now is the only thing keeping me sane, living here in Casa Estrogen (for the record, I live with The Girl, The Wife, The Mother-in-Law, and The Grandmother-in-Law, along with three dogs, all female, and one cat, male, who never leaves his room). So no sleep for Frazier during the week.

January is a frustrating time. Lileks had some interesting observations about January the other day. My own frustration stems from the fact that November and December have yielded so much free time at work. I usually have tons of unspent vacation left by December, which I unload in a big lump in the middle of the month. Add to that three holiday weekends, which means the station is mostly deserted and peaceful, and the extra football, which is low-stress, low maintenance programming, and the time from Thanksgiving to New Year's is an easy coast.

Now it's January, no holidays coming up, no large blocs of unspent vacation to give me oodles of free time. Just a vista of unbroken work stretching from now through, what, May? Bleh.

Speaking of Lileks, his blog partially inspired this one. That and the fact that I wnted the discipline of having to write every day (or almost). So what does Lileks go and do? He starts a parallel blog, about matchbooks. It's entertaining, but hell, where does he get the energy?