 This couch is only a few years old, but it was heavily used. It is stained. It is torn. There is a spring sticking out of the bottom. We replaced it awhile ago and it is now in our garage. With a little TLC it could probably be OK for some uses. We won’t be giving it that TLC though. It will be heading to the dump later this week… unless someone wants it. If anybody out there wants this and can take it away from where it is now in the Newport Hills area of Bellevue, WA contact me at abulsme@abulsme.com to make pick up arrangements. Otherwise, off to the dump the poor thing goes.
(I’ll also be posting this to Craigslist and Freecycle.) Yes, it is time for the now semi-traditional interview with Alex as he turns another month older. This clip was taken just under two hours before Alex officially turned five months old at 21:04 UTC today (that’s 1:04 PM Pacific, 4:04 PM Eastern), or a little over two hours ago as I post this. (Remember, months are 30.4368499 days long or so… :-) ) Wow, has it really been five months already? I definitely already can’t remember what life was like without him around. :-) After having recently learned how fun banging things with his hands is, I of course put Alex in front of a keyboard. Here is the result:
Presumably there will be many more in the future. A day after my Four Years in the Jungle post, it is time to note that a little less than five minutes after I make this post, at 10:35 UTC (2:35 AM Pacific, 5:35 AM Eastern) Alex will turn four months old. (Keeping in mind of course that a “true” month is 30.4368499 days… :-) ) As with last month, I’ll let Alex share a few of his thoughts on this milestone. This time his comments were recorded during a video chat he was having with his Grandmother B at around 3:45 UTC on the 9th. He would like to add that over the last month he has gotten to really like his mushy foods in addition to his milk… especially that apple stuff… that he really can figure out how to get the spoon in his mouth by himself, and he prefers it when we let him try, even if he sometimes (OK, often) misses his mouth. He likes his toys quite a bit thank you and he really doesn’t understand why it seems we can’t always understand what he is saying when he talks. He also appreciates the help standing and stepping, because although he’s working on it, he doesn’t quite have those things down yet, but practices whenever he can. Oh, and he particularly enjoys pulling his sister’s hair. That makes him laugh. In just under 10 minutes at 16:45 UTC (8:45 AM Pacific, 11:45 AM Eastern) it will have been exactly four years since I first walked in the door at my current employer. On the whole it has been a good four years. I like it. Looking forward to the next year. There is more fun stuff to do! Four years! Woo! I’ve been here as long as a Presidential term in office! Woo! Thanks for your patience. I was testing some post by email stuff. I had tried this before in September and been pretty unhappy with the results. Today I was taking the time to work out some of the kinks. Done testing for the moment. Unless I decide to test something else, which happens sometimes. Just over 17 hours ago, at 00:06 UTC on the 13th (4:06 PM on the 12th Pacific time, 7:06 PM on the 12th Eastern time) Alex turned three months old. Exactly five hours earlier, he shared a few thoughts.
For the first time since I started keeping track about a year ago, the percentage of the last 20 books I’ve read which are available on Kindle drops. This is because the book I just finished is not available on Kindle, where the one that just fell off the last 20 is available on Kindle, and none of the other books in the last 20 have become available since I last looked at the ratio. I have said that I will “officially want a Kindle” once my ratio is greater than 50%. Although the frequency has slowed, I still occasionally get people asking how I am sleeping what with a baby in the house and all, and everything everybody always says about no sleep when there is a new baby. I’ve been meaning for a long time to post about this, since at least October, but am just now getting around to it. Anyway, because I am certifiable and track everything, I can give some quantitative answers to the sleep question. Here is a relevant chart:
This is a chart with daily values of the percent of the previous seven days I spent asleep. (Click the chart for a larger version.) Unfortunately I did not start tracking this number until August even though I had the capability to do so earlier. If I had started earlier we would have had a better baseline to do a longer term before and after comparison. In this chart I have used the smoothing factor for the trend line that I usually use for my one month charts, rather than what I would normally use to show the amount of time shown here. This allows me to show a little more responsiveness in the trend line to short term changes. For a current chart with my normal smoothing values, see here. Anyway, if one looks at how much sleep I was getting immediately before Alex was born, it is at about the 30% level. That would be about 7.2 hours per day of sleep. You can clearly see the deep dive down to about 14% (about 3.4 hours per day). But this does not last very long. 17 days later I recover to the immediate pre-Alex level. Of course I don’t stay there for long. You can see I move up and down between about 24% (about 5.8 hours a day) and 31% (about 7.4 hours a day). If I had to hazard a visual guess at an average for October and beyond, I’d say about 27% (about 6.5 hours per day). Because I only have the month or so of pre-Alex data though, it is hard to see if there is a distinct before and after longer term change. As you can see, I did have a pre-Alex peak of 34% (about 8.2 hours per day) that has not yet been equaled. But it impossible to say if that was an abnormal peak. Also, there was a dip down to 20% (about 4.8 hours per day) at one point when I was staying up late on a couple of personal projects. So the “normal” range may have been pretty wide to begin with. So the 17 day “back to normal” recovery time is probably about the best estimate that can be made with this data. I’m still annoyed for not having tracked this metric for longer. I had the ability to do so starting approximately in February, but I didn’t. Oh well. Now, this does show however that aside from the one peak in August, I’ve never been close to the 33% (8 hours a day) generally recommended sleep level, and I’m not very consistent at all in terms of how much I sleep. Oh well. I doubt I’m really all that atypical on that front, although I must admit I would probably enjoy it if I could get and keep my average closer to that 33% level. Finally, and this is an important point, this is MY recovery time… but BRANDY was the almost exclusive source of food and was the one that was almost always the one who got up and stayed up nights with Alex when needed. So HER chart would look vastly different, and her sleep recovery time much longer, if it has even recovered yet. I can’t show any graphs of that though, as Brandy won’t let me hook her up to machines to monitor her at night. I have no idea why. :-) |
||
