Sodden

It's misting, just a bit, outside. Other than that this is the classic 'oh, damn, it's Monday' weather, it has a new meaning for me. For the first time in a while, I find myself thinking 'what will this do to my plan for mowing today?' Hardly the stuff of great drama, but unusual, nonetheless. I shall have to get into the habit of looking at the weather forecast.

It would not be as big a deal if I were working from home -- I'd probably go out and hack at the lawn from time to time -- but as it happens I am going into the office today. I have a major change, about which I am moderately apprehensive, but the really big deal is that I am going to find out if the release of Java that I put onto my work laptop will allow me to connect to one of the systems. Up to now, I have not successfully done it. This is two or three major reworks of the application install, and four or five major redos of the Java installation, so I am not sanguine about it working. I simply want to scrunch up my eyes really tight and clench my fists and hope like hell that it works. In about 90 minutes, I'll know.

My wife and I rarely argue, or even disagree. That sounds like a recipe for a pabulum life, or one wherein we really do disagree but don't acknowledge it, but in fact we're usually on the same page for any major topic. We will occasionally read articles about people planning to get married, wherein someone will advise them to run down a checklist of attitudes, particularly attitudes towards things that aren't an issue yet in the relationship -- do you want children? how many? If one person's job goes away, do they have to look for a new one immediately? -- and we will mull over whether we did that. Usually, it comes out that we didn't, at least in any formal sense -- we talked a lot, and that illuminated underlying attitudes without ever explicitly stating them. That seems to have worked pretty well. This morning, I was surprised when, while reading from articles in the Times' about attitudes towards money when you've got it and they don't, or the reverse, and then reading a followon article about the need to be lavish with yourself when you're with child, my wife and I disagreed, even if only a bit. Neither of us was saying that being lavish or ostentatious was good, but we disagreed about whether the article was even worth reading. Interesting.

The daughter is up and prowling about. She's just about ready to leave for school, and has informed me that it is not fair that I baked the three cakes last night for the torte but did not make the icing -- as she would have liked to have some of the cake for breakfast. Am I a tough father, or what....