Jennifer and I both had Martin Luther King Day off from work, which made for a three day weekend. Dr. King was actually born on January 15th, so this is one of the years in which the national holiday coincides with his birthday. If I do something amazing such that my birthday is celebrated as a national holiday, I want it celebrated on the day every year. Just saying.

For the last several months I’ve struggled with writing about my kids; particularly Anna. She is getting to an age now where I think she has some right to privacy and it won’t be very long before she is able to read all this stuff I’m writing about her. Yet, she’s not quite old enough to grasp the concept of “everybody” when I say that everybody can read this. In any case, if she were able to grasp what sort of people there are on teh internets, she probably would not be favorable to me blathering away about her. I’m really not the blathering type anyway, at least not in person.

I can, however talk about myself and say that I have been doing a lot of blog reading these days. Apart from techy stuff and my friends’ blogs and the always funny Scott Adams, I read Dreamdust, Jonniker. There are so many good writers out there, but just like people you tend to gravitate toward some for reasons unknown.

For our long weekend we were mostly hunkered down in the house because it has been unacceptably cold. I was out on Saturday night and the temperature was below freezing when I got home, which I’m sure must be a violation of some city ordinance. I went out this morning in the backyard, but quickly moved to the south-facing front of the house with Anna, so my foray into long pants was happily short lived, as the weather turned warm finally. I managed to straighten up in the garage while Anna painted some contraption she had made by gluing pieces of wood together. I convinced her to let it dry on top of the garbage can for now, and she didn’t seem to catch on that was mostly for my own convenience.

I’m glad to be facing only a four-day week of work, but I have to admit that things are less crazy busy than they used to be. I’m now at a part of the project were I don’t have any significant deadlines facing me. This doesn’t mean that I don’t have a ton of work to do–I really do–but I have some flexibility about what I do and when I do it because nothing in particular is on fire at this time. It’s a nice feeling. For me it’s a relief not having to rein in my technological wanderlust in order to meet deadlines. I really like to flow from problem to problem; it’s the situation where I do my best work. Some day, I hope to land some sort of dream job in which I only have to complete the first 20% of any given