This week has not been going at all like I intended. Going into it, I knew it was going to be stressful — TheWife was out of town from Sunday afternoon to Tuesday night for a meeting, which meant that I’d be in single parent mode. Generally not too bad for a day or two, but stressful nonetheless. We’ve also got a number of big things that are starting to ramp up at work this week, and because of the drop-off and pick-up times we have at TheChild’s day care, I end up being limited to six-hour days when I have the Mr. Mom hat on. So I was ready for some frustration (and, to be fair, I was looking forward to hanging out with TheChild too — these things balance out).

What I didn’t count on was coming down with some viral crud. So in addition to the Mr. Mom-ing, I’ve had a two or three degree overtemp for the past several days, and (as a consequence of missing work) am completely off the rails in terms of things I was trying to get done. I’ve also been sleeping rather poorly; I keep having fever dreams which make absolutely no sense, and then I wake up and try to understand them, and just get annoyed.

For whatever reason — the fever, or the missing sleep, or both — I’ve had a persistant “this is what it’s like to be stupid” feeling. My short-term memory is non-existent, I tend to forget where I am in multi-step tasks, and I grow frustrated fairly quickly when I’m forced to think about something for too long. (Feel free to insert your own political joke here.)

The additional hanging out time with TheChild was good, though (although she was probably the source of the viral crud, and seems to have picked it back up from me…) I recently bought a “best of” compilation of the Pixies, which she really likes. She’s particularly taken with “Monkey Gone To Heaven”, and seems to be constantly asking for me to play it on my laptop — and then she sings along. She doesn’t know all the words yet, but she does have the chorus and some of the verses (in particular, “there’s a hole in the sky / and the ground’s not cold” has been getting repeated quite a bit).

The Pixies are also responsible for the funniest thing that TheChild has done recently. It’s important to understand that, because she’s three, there’s a good deal of perfectly age-appropriate body exploration going on. And as I’ve said, she’s quite taken with the Pixies. So while I probably shouldn’t have been surprised the other day when she walked around the corner with her hand shoved down the front of her pants singing the chorus to “Diggin’ For Fire”, I ended up falling off my chair laughing anyway.

Spent the morning pounding away on the ticketing system, doing the administrative stuff that seems to inevitably pile up. (And I’m happy to spend the couple hours a week it takes to keep the queue tidy, and give other people more time to do the actual work of helping the users.) Spent the afternoon in the usual meeting, which this week included a 45 minute session of me attempting to explain why we wouldn’t be putting 32bit libraries under /usr/lib/ on a 64bit machine. sigh

Home relatively early for some peace, quiet, and relaxation. TheWife and TheChild were down the pool, which probably helped. Ended up finishing the most recent book for our discussion group as a result.

On a totally unrelated note, the spam situation at home is completely out of control, due to a combination of some catchall mailboxes on my domains, spammer scum using said domains in spoofed From: lines, and some slackness in keeping my Bayesian dataset properly trained. Some time this weekend is going to have to be devoted to shifting things around so that I can go back to the blissful days of a clean inbox and a spam folder that bulged with real positives, not false ones.

Nothing like kick-starting your day by catching the blame for problems that arose because of somebody else’s failure to execute properly. Ah well, it was only half the day shot, eh?

Afternoon blown on regular team meeting prep and then the meeting itself, followed up a meeting with a user to discuss server configuration, and then a big batch of mail catchup. Whee! This was my weekly “Late Night” (I’m trying to restrict myself to no more than one night a week of working late), and it actually turned out to be pretty productive. I managed to get past a block in my FTP log analysis scheme, and got things loading into a database layer. Now all that needs to be done is the visualization/display layer (which will hopefully be pretty easy), and then we should be good to go. Yay me.

What Monday is complete without an ad hoc meeting or two? Got mostly caught up, sorted out, and otherwise reloaded my mental state. And then it was time to come home.

One more office tweak in the evening, of the “done when there’s nothing more to remove” fashion. Ultimately ended up in bed relatively early; still suffering from the exertions of Sunday, I suspect.

Spent the morning getting the wireless access point working; finally had to resort to Google and some forum posts, but I got it figured out. Once that was in place, I started shifting computers down into the basement (the, ahhh, point of the access point was so that I could move several “server”-type boxes out of my office and into the basement without having to do an actual cable run from my second floor office). That got wrapped up just about in time for lunch.

High off the morning’s success, and buoyed by lunch, I decided that I would forge ahead and try to re-organize my office. This was probably a bit of an over-reach — it was almost midnight by the time I finally got everything arranged, plugged back in, turned back on, and sorted back out. At the end of it all, collapsed gratefully into bed, ready for the work week to start so that I could relax a bit…

Grind, grind, oh wait it’s Friday afternoon…

Grind, grind, grind.

Long head-down Mr.-Nose-meet-Mr.-Grindstone day.

Day slid by in a post-long-weekend daze of mail catchup and “whaddya do this weekend?” stories.

The plan was for this to be a productive day. Instead, I slept in for a bit, grabbed some lunch with the family, dinked away the afternoon, and then finally managed to wrestle a bit of work out of the jaws of procrastination after dinner.