Mark O’Meara: the blog

Nicky has been up half the night with an unsettled Funster and a half crazy me but now she is sleeping. This is a very good thing. But there is only so long I am going to last on Funster duty before I fall in a heap so I figure I will wait until 10am (two hours from now) before I wake her and ask for help.

I could ask now but I am sure I can manage this little things and I could let her sleep all morning but I know she would want me to ask for help when I need it.

Lesson for the day - it is hard to make good decisions when you are half crazy.

The thermometer says I am fine but it is just plain wrong. I lie in bed and can’t get warm and at the same time am suffocatingly hot. I don’t want to covers on but I am cold with them off.

My throat is dry and my will is gone. I went to bed at 7.30 but was awake again for an hour at 10.30. I know I am not thinking straight and the thought of the long night ahead fills me with fear. I try to remember what the options are for flying with babies. There are three options, but how do you know which one to choose?. What if you change you mind? I dream of not being able to find my flight. There is no flight.

And now I am awake again and my throat is painful and dry and I feel like throwing up. Perhaps I should. Perhaps there is nothing there to come out.

All of this over a standard no-frills cold that half of Melbourne has.

Lesson for the day - coping in the face of minor madness is a good deal harder than it looks.

There are three basic types of blog it seems. Ones that are basically journals (like this one), political and often right wing ones (who get the lion’s share of media attention, and people who use their blog as just a list of funny things they see on the internet.

And if you are an A-lister in the first two categories then you might not have comments on your blog. In fact in serious blogging circles comments is a sure sign of being amateurish. You the number of comments wouldn’t completely destoy you server then you are probably a no-body.

And this sounds snobby but I can see why people like Heather don’t have them. Last time she opens an entry for comments she got about 300 on just that one post. That’s not a conversation, that’s like being in hell.

For my money I like having them, I don’t know every damn thing and am happy to hear from other people. Some people with tiny readerships like mine don’t have them because they dream of being massive on day and want to have the look now. Personally I would hate it is dozens of people commented here, I think it would feel like losing a community.

Lesson for the day - what to let other people say can be tricky.

Nicky is home.

Lesson for the day - home is where your loved one is.

Perhaps I have a fever. Perhaps I am just tired. Perhaps I am just being pathetic, I certainly feel pathetic.

I suspect Nicky is in a similar state so we’ll just have to take it easy and be as helpful as we can to one another. Happily the Funster is being really good as well as having nice long sleeps.

Lesson for the day - fading is not all that much fun.

Having narrowly escaped my encounter with the wireless internet connection at home I set to work on content managing the Deborah site. For the unsure that means all 300 pages are managed like blogs are via a web interface. Right now the whole thing is just individual HTML files and it makes managing the whole thing quite cumbersome.

So I looked and looked for software options and finally came back to Movable Type. There are other things that are similar but I have some experience with MT and know a few tricks that might make it suitable for this site.

Anyhow all of this is quicky destroying my brain and what is left of it will surely be killed by putting all that content into the site. On the bright side it means if I ever decide to give it up (and there are no plans at this stage) someone can easily run it)

Lesson for the day - change is a massive effort.

The Funster woke up at about 2 and was very unhappy indeed. So we sat and had a cuddle but it did not stop the howling and frankly I wish very much that it would have. Next step was a bottle in front of Drew Carey, both of which were well recieved. Then a little sit and back to bed for him about 3.

But he grizzed a little so I stayed up for another 20 minutes or so. Then back to bed for me, lovely warm bed.

And so I lay in a lovely warm and comfortable bed and stared at the clock. Nicky woke to ask if something was wrong but nothing was bothering me aside from being awake when I wanted to be asleep. Four o’clock came and went. Five o’clock I just remember.

Happily the next thing I knew was the radio coming on at 6am. While I was tired I was glad the night was over.

Lesson for the day - give me a hard day over a hard night.

The Funster is having trouble sleeping but I should go back to bed and do what I can to sleep.

Lesson for the day - hmmm, sleep.

In talking through stuff I became aware of how difficult (and largely pointless) it is to try to isolate behaviour down to a person in these situations. Particularly after a few years most behaviours and habits are something that relate to us rather than just one of us.

I do something and Nicky does something else and I react to that and she reacts to that and so it goes. In a way this is good because it means we need to work as a team to fix them rather than assigning fault or improvement to a single person.

It also means that it is not so obvious that I suck.

Lesson for the day - there’s no W in team.

Well we are just listening to The Wily Tim Hackett and Tom on the ABC. Tim got to talk about the dobro that me made and, of course, played his considerable skill down.

His playing is, as always, superb.

Lesson for the day - oh wily one we salute you.