As I sit here, mini-waffles (and a few little graham crackers) are being consumed, stories have been read, itchy butts have been cleaned, and all is well.
Evan’s had a pretty rough week; on Friday I got a call around lunchtime telling me that I needed to come get him from day care. When I got there, I was quizzed about why he had open sores on his backside. I was aware that he’d been having diarrhea and had a bit of rawness down there, but this was news to me. But he did indeed have some nastiness going on down there. My wife pegged it as a yeast infection, something I never would’ve guessed, being a guy and all; who even knew the kid was made of bread!? Anyway, one prescription ointment later, Evan’s on the mend, his backside looks almost perfectly normal, and he’s much happier (he had a total meltdown on Friday afternoon, which was followed at a close distance by my wife having one because he just couldn’t stop crying because he was so uncomfortable). The ointment has to be re-applied with every diaper change, so he may yet stay home with me on Monday so I can continue working on clearing up his ouchies. That’s okay – he happens to be pretty good company. He’s picking up words like crazy, and we can now have conversations with him – yesterday, he came to me and said, at various times, “More apple, daddy!” and “More water, daddy!” He also said that my wife’s cross-stitch in progress was “pretty.” I don’t know where he picked that word up – must be from day care, because I haven’t taught him that one yet. Wow. If we can get him to where he can maintain enough control to communicate like that when he’s hurting or upset, we’re onto something. He’s also turning into a voracious book fan – a while back I bought a couple of Dr. Seuss mini-board-books for him, one of which is Dr. Seuss’ ABC Book, which is his favorite – he actually goes to bed with it! I guess he reads it until the light coming in through the window is too dim to read by, and then he turns on his fishes and reads by that light for a while. There are worse habits to have than staying up to read, and I just don’t get tired of listening to him run through the alphabet via the baby monitor. And before bedtime, he’s book-crazy – he brings me stacks of ’em from his library, and we spend entire evenings (and what’s left of my already scratchy voice) reading stories. I have too many people in my life lined up to tell me what I’m getting wrong; listening to my son reading, actually reading, is enough to convince me that if I’ve gotten nothing else right in this life, I’m really getting this right. I hope so, more for his sake than mine.
On the home front, apparently the hack attack on theLogBook.com has all but completely stalled any momentum that my various DVD projects had beforehand. PDF Level 2 wasn’t doing badly, not exactly going great guns, but a couple of sales a week beats nothing; similarly, prior to the hack attack, the CGE DVD sets were selling roughly one copy every other week. I’ve been asked a few times about the DVDs’ presence at shows like CCAG and Midwest Classic. I’m not opposed to providing a door prize here or there, but to be honest, I’m not sure about the DVDs being available at a table there. Last year I sent copies of PDF 1 around to various shows, and what it basically boils down to is that you suddenly ramp up production to burn and package additional copies of a DVD, which you then spend a good little amount of money to ship off…and then out of 20 copies, 3 or 4 sell, the rest are shipped back, and just due to the law of averages, invariably, you wind up with copies coming back damaged just from being shipped around. (I’ve had copies arrive damaged on the leg of the trip that gets them from my place to whoever is selling them for me. It just happens.) That’s a lot of expenditure for a blind gamble that maybe a few copies will sell. I’m just not crazy about that idea this year, to be honest.
My health has a little something to do with that; I still have a machine gun cough that won’t go away. My throat is perpetually sore, and if you want to talk about sore, my voice has gone out several times during bedtime story readings. Now there’s an occasion where you have no satisfied customers. I’ve taken all of my prescriptions, but I’m still sick. I have a yard that needs mowing, a house that needs cleaning, and a little boy that needs to be cared for, and I just don’t have any energy because I wake up in the morning feeling like a circle of people wearing steel-toed shitkicker boots have been having a go at everything between my lungs and my throat all night. I wake up just feeling beat. If I can just take care of Evan, anymore, I declare victory for the day. (Meanwhile, my yard is almost as tall as I am.)
We still haven’t gone to retrieve Nimitz yet; he’s still with the other kittens and their mama cat at my sister-in-law’s place. The good news is that he’s been accepted into their litter – the mother no longer has to be all but strapped down so he can nurse. He’s also transitioning to cat food just fine, gaining the right amount of weight, and getting his confidence. His infected eyes have cleared up, and I’m sure he’s learning basic kitty skills from his adopted brothers and sisters – he’ll need those skills when he comes home to live with the two rambunctious cats who are already here! He’s apparently going to be a fairly large cat – Oberon-sized, if not bigger. So if I were Oberon or Olivia, I’d start being real nice to Nimitz the moment he walks in the door. As laid-back as Obi is, Nimitz has “potential alpha male” written all over him.
There are murmurs and whispers and, apparently, official Twitters (tweets? twits? twats?) straight from the source that this year’s Doctor Who exclusive figures for San Diego Comic Con may now include one or two variants of Jon Pertwee as the third Doctor – be still my heart(s). If we can actually get the first three Doctors in one go, I think this officially goes down as the best SDCC exclusive of any kind, ever, period. (And believe me, over the years, I’ve dispatched many a SDCC-bound friend to retrieve stuff for me – stuff which often had shockingly little to do with comics 😆 – so I know of what I speak.)
Starting with tomorrow’s update, theLogBook.com is going to go into its “lite” summer mode; we’re kicking off a new guide to the Planet Of The Apes movies and series (and yes, we’re going to cover the animated series), and trying to get back into the groove on getting regular updates on time (I’ll confess that my health of late has had a lot to do with the tardy updates – it’s just boiled down to several consecutive Sunday night cases of “don’t feel like doing the update”). I’m also hoping to announce a relaunch of the Phosphor Dot Fossils site soon, to celebrate all of the game reviews being in database form at last (taken long enough, hasn’t it?). That’s really the goal – get everything that used to be a static HTML page into database form so I can Just Concentrate On Writing New Stuff. Admittedly, the recent attack on the infrastructure that I’m depending on to help me with that didn’t help, but I’m confident that we’ve got things locked down now.
I think that’s all the disconnected random rambling I can muster for now.
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