Title Goes Here

I've been neglecting this thing lately. Almost two weeks since my last post.

I've fallen behind a bit as of late and as such am juggling multiple projects and running to catch up. This leads to me staying up late working after the family goes to bed (which I don't especially mind that much I just don't like worrying about not getting things done on time). Which then leads to me being rather exhausted most of the morning after our 14 month old gets us up (though huge thanks go out to my wife for letting me sleep in a little after the really late nights). I then become actually productive around 11am and the cycle continues.

It's almost 5am and I tried to go to bed around 3 but wasn't quite able to shut off my brain. Around 3:30 I decided to get back on the computer and get some work done. A little while after that I decided that drinking brain function impairing beverages (beer) was a stellar idea and a sure-fire way to get to sleep sometime soon-ish. I'm on #3 and I predict that by the time I finish this one I'll be lubricated enough to head to bed and get some sleep.

Casey's recipe for shutting your brain off when you're up way too late and can't sleep:
1 - Get beer #1 from fridge
2 - Continue to work.
3 - Get beer #2.
4 - Continue to work.
5 - Beer #3.
6 - Decide you're in no shape to work and post to your blog or go play what may very well be the most addictive and frustrating game ever or something.
7 - finish beer #3 and head to bed leaving empty bottles on desk in case anyone comes over and wonders what you do all day.

For best results the above steps should be completed inside of around 30 minutes.

On that note, I'm rounding the corner on 3 at which point I'm going to head to bed and try to sleep.

Work vs Home

One thing that's kind of hard about working from home is that you're never really at work and you're never really at home. I can go downstairs to my "office" but I'm still home. At the same time I can be hanging out with my family or watching a movie with them but work is only a flight of stairs away. I find myself getting distracted and feeling like I should really be working and visa versa.

When I worked a real job I tended to not work from home very often most of the time. There would be periods of time where I would have something I needed to work on from home but in general most of the time I spent working was in the office. While I still had trouble leaving the stresses of work behind when I was at home it was much easier to differentiate that time as not work time.

If I tried to keep set hours that might help somewhat but I'm not really a set hours sort of person. This morning I slept in and didn't get started until late morning (10 or 11-ish) and in the past I've tended to wake up before my family and head downstairs to work until they're up. Weekends are just times when I tend to work less but I still typically put some time in (sometimes a lot of time in). I don't even really keep a mental summary of how many hours I've been working anymore.

In this case I have work I need to get done but it'd sure be nice to go sit and read stories with my wife and son (I can hear them reading Goodnight Moon) and then head to bed. The work isn't going to do itself though.

Home Again

Oh man, I had a great weekend. The wedding I went to was quite a departure from the standard wedding one typically goes to and was much more of a weekend party with friends than anything else. It was a lot of fun but an exhausting weekend made worse by the exhausting trips down and back. Something about being in a car for an extended period of time, even if you aren't driving, is just plain tiring. I drove about 10 hours yesterday (SF to Washington) so that wasn't helping either. Today I feel like a bit of a zombie and am having a hell of a time actually getting any work done.

It's continually surprising to me how much I miss my wife and son when I'm away from them for more than a day or so. This whole marriage and fatherhood (married last November '05 and our son was born June '06) thing is still kind of new to me and I'm often surprised when I realize something like this even if it's something that is expected or the norm.

When I got home last night around 11pm my wife and son were still up (apparently he was just starting to go to sleep while they watched a movie) which was really nice. When they heard me come in they came down and met me and our son did his little happy full body shake thing. It's good to be home.

Crunch Time Update

Well, it's Friday morning and I'm waiting for my ride out of town to show up.
I finished the largest project of the three however it took longer than I had anticipated. The project itself is a library for the creation of images in a variety of formats with really flexible text rendering capabilities as well as some helper functions and whatnot. I think the time was worth it though as the extra time I put into it went a long way towards making it more usable and flexible.

Because of that extra time the project took I haven't been able to focus on the other two as much as I'd wanted. I'm about halfway through the larger of the other projects and should be able to finish that Monday night or Tuesday. The good news is I managed to get the target date moved out to EOD Tuesday since both me and my "boss" are going to be on the same trip and he understands that we probably won't be back until afternoon/evening on Monday and even then won't be good for a whole lot. Though when I get home it’s definitely family time as I’m going on this trip without them.