How Do I Blog?

A lot has been going on to prepare me for the immediate birth of my second child, it seems.

We’ve had a fair share of midnight dramas recently, hospital related nonetheless to pre-empt our (likely late night) visit to the maternity ward. I had some issues with my heart a week ago that turned out to be minor palpitations caused by a bit of over-exertion on a few levels, so I’m trying to take it easy (stress-wise, booze-wise and so on). Then Evie came down with a bad turn of croup on Sunday night to make for another dash to the hospital, this time in an ambulance with her on the nebulizer for her breathing, but thankfully she quickly came right.

Now all that’s done, we’re ready to have the kid thanks!

Clare is winding down work this week and prepares for a six month stretch of … being a mother! Baby was due on Monday (revised due date) but still hasn’t arrived and tomorrow is the official (original) due date and we’re hoping this weekend will yield the eventual winning date. Evie finishes creche (as it is closing over the Christmas break for good!) and will spend a lot of time at home with mother and child, which will also be an interesting new development.

Work has finally slowed down a notch. It’s still hectic and full on, as it has been since the turn of the year, but it’s at least not providing me with as many late nights and stressy deadlines. That said, I’m busy procrastinating from my Board Report right now… so I’ll be back to stressing soon.

Evelyn has been developing a lot as of late, tons of talking and expressing herself - still difficulties in getting her to understand concepts at times and getting specific answers to specific questions, but she decided herself that she was too old for nappies, as well as a bunch of other stuff. She’s decided she’s excited about “babby brudda” so let’s hope that positive force continues once he arrives.

I’ve quit poker for a while since I won’t have any time for it and I’ve essentially bust my online roll. A dry spell that lasted about $1.5k worth of MTTs will do that. Variance is a bitch. I’m still considering a live tourney appearance at some point… not sure when though, I’m keeping that possibility saved up for a rainy day.

On the hobby front, not much to report, but I’m finally reading again:

Okay so far, nothing amazing… I’m only a few chapters in.

I’m going to try to get back into gaming again… I’ve picked up Fallout 3 once more, though I only played maybe 10 hours of it previously, it seemed like a fun and engrossing game. I’ve also got a bunch of levels to get through in Plants Vs Zombies, which is always good for a 10-15 minute play… I think I’m on level 4 of 5 so not too much to go.

I also played a demo of a game called Machinarium yesterday, beautiful and intriguing little game - hard to say whether the charm would hold up over the full duration of 30 or so levels, but I’m considering it once I get the current games out of the way.

We’ve also been watching Dexter season 3. I was skeptical about returning to it seeing as they really seemed to jump the shark with season 2’s finale and losing Doakes was a blow to the continuing cast, but it’s actually a lot of fun. They’re really playing fast and loose with tricky moral code issues this season through his less than savoury friendship he’s developed with an Assistant DA (played by the typically hammy Jimmy Smits) who shares his passion for less ethical forms of Justice. Some of the soap opera padding shit (like Debra and her CI, fuck that storyline seriously) is boring, but there’s never too much of it and some of it is very worthwhile to make a decent character beat (like the records-lady dying of lung cancer).

My mind has been wandering back to fictional tales as of late; snippets of script appear alive and playing out in my head, a one-liner here and there, a character twitch. I’ve started allowing myself to daydream in those worlds again as I used to. Taking a break from poker might afford me the luxury of playing in my own headspace for a while as opposed to concentrating getting into the minds of others.

That’s enough of an update for now! Next time will be a direction to facebook baby photos I suspect!