This is week 136 of The Life of Riley, a weekly post detailing my activities since I ended a thirteen year career as a corporate drone. These posts are usually long, personal, and geared more for my own memory than the reader’s entertainment.

Sunday (Day 945): Christmas Is Over

I went out to shovel at 1PM because all of my shoveling from the day before had been negated by the constant wind. It was zero degrees with the windchill.

We took down the Christmas decorations, and I made one of my favorite dinners: pasta with leeks, apple-smoked bacon, and Italian parsley in an egg sauce.

Monday (Day 946): Imagination Vs. Reality In Baby Care

What I Imagined A Day Of Baby Care Would Be:

6 AM: Get up with baby feed her. The baby smiles and thinks all my jokes are funny.
7 AM: Baby goes to bed and I start writing.
11 AM: Baby wakes up cooing gently for food, as tiny cartoon birds fly in patterns above her crib to entertain her. She has a wonderful time while I prepare her food.
12 PM: Baby goes in for a nap and I split my time between writing the great American novel and fending off agents who want me to sign on with them.
4 PM: Baby wakes up to feed again. We have a good time playing after she eats. She simply loves Perl, and even though her code is not as efficient as it could be, she has a good handle on regular expressions.
6 PM: Mom gets home, takes the baby, and after a few button pushes on the Food-A-Rac-A-Cycle, dinner appears on the table as if by magic.
7 PM: I put on a tweed jacket with patches on the elbows, and retire to the office to write for an hour.
8 PM: I emerge to let the evening untangle while I sit on the couch and let #1GF! feed me bonbons.
10 PM: I drift off to sleep with a sense of satisfaction for raising a child and writing the great American novel.

What A Typical Day Really Is:

3 :XX AM: Something happens that the baby doesn’t like, and she spends some time venting about it in her language, which we can’t really understand.
5 AM: Baby goes back to sleep.
7 AM: Huh? Wha? I’m up, I’m up.
7:15 AM: The baby gets up and eats. I grab some cereal, take out the garbage, and re-shovel a path to the car that the wind has obliterated once again. I come back in and take the baby so that #1GF! can get ready for work.
8:45 AM: I get the baby to sleep, and get the tub and towels ready because it’s bath day.
9 AM: I shower, respond to e-mail, and start editing LOR 116. I’m twenty weeks behind on posts, and estimate that I won’t be writing another book for at least that long unless I let LOR die.
10:15 AM: The baby wakes up, and I bathe her, change her, and keep her occupied until her bottle is warm.
10:45 AM: I feed the baby and walk around burping her. #1GF! calls and reminds me it’s our anniversary. I thought that it was six days away. The odds of me going shopping are fast approaching zero, so I give her gift by wishing her a happy anniversary. It will happen to you one day. Oh, you’ll see.
11:45 AM: The baby gets a bowl of solid food and I walk around burping her. She throws up on my shirt. She doesn’t seem to mind. Oddly, I don’t seem to care, either.
12:10 PM: The baby falls asleep, so I snatch some leftovers out of the fridge and eat them while I wash the bottles, bowls and spoons.
12:25 PM: I start editing LOR again. Even though I have an hour and a half of writing, that only takes me halfway through the first draft.
2 PM: The baby wakes up, I change her, and I get her to laugh by jumping around until I’m ready for a nap. I distract her with a toy and slip away to prep her bottle.
2:45 PM: The baby eats, gets burped, and I read her a few books to keep her occupied.
3:30 PM: The baby isn’t anywhere near falling asleep, and I dig deep to come up with something to keep the baby entertained. I come up with two dust bunnies and a handful of nothing. I surround her with a moat of toys and talk to her while I start dinner.
4:15 PM: The twenty-minute dinner prep takes forty-five minutes because the baby can only accept daddy substitute toys for so long. I put dinner in the fridge, and try once again to get the baby to sleep. The baby freaks out for an unknown reason.
4:20 PM: I get the baby to bed, and try to sneak out of room. I get busted by a squeaky door. The baby starts wailing. I calm the baby down and try to get her to sleep, and all she wants to do is chew my finger.
4:25 PM: I try to sneak out after getting the baby to sleep a second time, and she busts me again by sheer clairvoyance. She starts wailing because her dad is trying to abandon her in her crib at nap time.
4:30 PM: The baby finally falls asleep, so I sneak out of the room to clean up the pots and pans from making dinner.
4:55 PM: I start LOR 116 again…for ten minutes.
5:05 PM: The baby starts crying. I ask the baby monitor if it’s kidding me. It’s too afraid to answer that it isn’t. I tell it that the baby can’t possibly be awake, and it keeps transmitting her crying noises in defiance of my sense of logic. I stare at the monitor for a minute, hoping that the baby will go back to sleep on her own. The phone rings as if it has the baby monitor’s back. I dive for the phone, only to pick it up and drop it back into the cradle. Of course, it’s a fucking telemarketer. I go in to check on the baby, and she’s asleep. I go back to the office, and I swear that the baby monitor is smirking at me. I sit down at the PC, and the phone rings again, waking the baby up. This time, the call is an automated message telling me that they’re not picking up my trash today because they ran out of time. What garbage company runs out of time?
5:10 PM: I search for a bill with a callback number on it, with the screaming baby limiting half of my mobility and disabling 22% of brain function.
5:40 PM: I finally find the number and call the garbage company, only to get a message that says the offices closed at 5 PM. Fuck. They called me at 5:05 PM, after the goddamned office was closed. And the baby screams and screams.
5:45 PM: The baby finally stops crying, but she won’t let me put her down. I bring her in to the office to sit on my lap while I type out an online form to the garbage company to let them know that calling after they’ve closed to tell me that my garbage isn’t going to be picked up is not cool.
5:45 PM: I fill out the form and click it into the tubes of the internet. I then prep the baby’s dinner and keep her entertained.
6 PM: I feed the baby. #1GF! arrives home and steals the baby for a few minutes. She returns the baby so that she can get settled in. My brain function is limited.
6:15 PM: We all sit on the couch and laugh. The baby throws up on her pants and shirt and my pants and shirt. I think she’s the best audience ever because no one has ever thrown up laughing over such poorly thought out material.
6:20 PM: I’m changing the baby and talking on the phone at the same time. I’ve learned to multitask.
6:30 PM: I change the baby into her pajamas, which she immediately throws up on. I clean her up and hand her over to #1GF! for a solid food feeding. I continue talking on the phone.
6:45 PM: #1GF! feeds the baby. The baby is strapped into the high chair with a five point harness and looks like a fighter pilot. I never use the shoulder straps, so I ask #1GF! how many G’s she is planning to subject the baby to during the meal. #1GF! laughs.
7 PM: I load milk into bags and put it in the refrigerator and start cleaning up the baby’s bottles and dishes.
7:30 PM:
“Would you mind turning on the Christmas lights for me?” asked #1GF!.

“Yes,” I replied without budging. #1GF! knows that I hate answering questions that start with “do you mind” because one of the people in the exchange inevitably needs further explanation of the reply. It’s the most inefficient form of question, unless the person asking intends to bulldoze the person asked by pretending the question was a command.

#1GF! tried again. “Hmm. Okay. Would you please turn on the Christmas lights?”

“No,” I replied as I flipped a page.

“Hmm.”

I kept staring at a magazine. “Would you like to make another attempt at rephrasing the question to trick me into turning on the lights for a holiday that is past?”

“Damn,” said #1GF! with a little surprise. “You finally figured it out.”

7:40 PM: I write down and dissect the day’s events to find out which spare minutes I could’ve squeezed some writing into. I don’t find many.
8:15 PM: I eat dinner and sit on the couch with #1GF!.
10 PM: I go to bed, and lie in the dark trying to find a use for Google’s Social Graph API, if time ever allows.

I’m in motion all day long, so why do I feel like I’m not getting anything done?

Tuesday (Day 947): Wearin’ A Beard Like Yea

Once #1GF! was off to work, I fed the baby, and then dusted and swept a couple of rooms. I had to talk to the baby the whole time I was out of sight so that she wouldn’t freak out. My plan worked, except she barfed on herself instead. I cleaned her up and threw in a couple loads of laundry, even though I’ve been pretty much banned from doing laundry since 2004.

The baby was scheduled for a nap, but she had no interest in sleeping. She sat in her swing watching me dust and sweep out another couple of rooms. When I was finished, she screamed with joy, and then threw up all over herself out of pure excitement. To her, throwing up is like clapping, so I took a bow to keep her from getting offended or clapping louder. I got her cleaned up and looked at the clock. It was already 3:30 PM.

When #1GF! got home, she took over the baby care and I came up with a solution to a bug that cropped up in Better Blogroll 3.0. It’s about time a bug cropped up in my widget after all these years. Once the bug was fixed and released, I got carried away trying to add new features. I ended up eating dinner at 9:30 PM with my brain swamped in PHP and WordPress innards.

#1GF! turned to me as I ate. “Do you ever worry about getting food stuck, you know, around your mouth.”

“Not really,” I said, not getting the hint.

She motioned to my beard. “That thing is out of control.”

I shrugged. “The baby likes it.”

“She does not.”

“She does. She tugs my beard when she sits on my lap.”

“She does that to me too.”

“Oh? She tugs your beard?” I asked. “I think that she might be wishing you had a beard. That baby is going to grow up to be woman who likes beards. You’ll see. She’ll be supporting the struggle. Oh, and she likes Miley Cyrus, too.”

“What?”

“Yea, you can nod your head like yea, party all the time like yea, do all the dishes like yea, and she laughs immediately as long as you’re the slightest bit close to the cadence of that song and follow what ever you say with ‘like yea’.”

“Seriously. What the hell happens around here while I’m gone?”

“I feed up the baby like yea, change up the baby like yea…”

#1GF! shook her head at me like she is prone to do.

As I lay in bed waiting to fall asleep, my brain trekked back out into the fields of PHP without a computer as a guide. I did not fall asleep easily, but it wasn’t a bad way to doze off.

Wednesday (Day 948): Who Are The Commenters?

I got #1GF! off to work, showered, set up the baby’s bath stuff, and sat down at the PC to write. I checked my mail, and then tried to figure out a way to link regular commenters to social networks so that I wouldn’t lose track of them. The best I could do in the time I had was to work out a decent MySQL query. The rest of the day was standard fare of LOR and baby care.

After dinner, I went in to finish my edits on LOR, before returning to the den to watch Big Love with #1GF!.

Thursday (Day 949): She Pities Tiny Fools

I woke up relatively rested because the baby slept through the night. You hear that? The baby slept through the night.

Before she left for work, #1GF! read and edited LOR for posting. Once she was gone, I jumped in the shower. The baby was awake by the time I was dressed, and baby care resumed.

The baby was officially five months old, so I put her in a Mr. T onsie and took a bunch of pictures of her next to a plastic Mr. T head. I kept taking pictures until I got the expression I wanted, and then I posted it. When you entertain a baby all day, you have find ways to keep yourself entertained.

I wasted time looking for an image for a dyers.org eighth blogiversary post. I didn’t find anything interesting, so I shelved the idea for a bit. I left the office and dug into the still packed box-o-Christmas-presents to see what I could put away. I pushed around the contents and found a small tin of mustache wax. I shelved the idea of putting anything away.

I immediately stood in front of the bathroom mirror and dug some wax of the tin with the edge of a black plastic comb after failing to dig some out with a finger. I warmed it up and applied it to the ol’ ‘stache. It held better than anything I had used so far, and within thirty seconds, I had a decent mini handlebar going. I divided my time between making old-time threats and telling myself that I must pay the rent. There was a lot of wide-eyed, high-eyebrowed finger-pointing going on.

When the baby got up, she seemed like she was starting to sleep on a schedule. I smoothed my ‘stache back down, and put aside my old-time threats to put together an exersaucer for her. It didn’t require any tools and was complete in no time.

I plunked the baby into the middle of the ring, thinking that she’d have a blast being surrounded by all those new toys. She immediately got freaked out and started crying. For a kid who lives with a klutzy dad, and takes vaccination shots like a drill sergeant, I was surprised at her reaction. Maybe she was overloaded with too many new toys at once. I pulled her right out of there and accidentally threatened the exersaucer with a bout of bare-knuckled boxing for upsetting the little one. It wasn’t nearly as effective without the handlebar mustache.

#1GF! got home and asked me how the day went. I told her about the baby’s possible sleep patterns, eating habits, and fear of the exersaucer. #1GF! responded by telling me that I was giving the baby too much food. I wasn’t, so I defended my strategy. I had been trying to identify and reinforce patterns that got the baby sleeping through the night, and it was finally working. I wasn’t force feeding the baby, but giving her as much food as she wanted. Babies know when they’re full.

We had been tracking the baby’s sleeping and eating pattern since she was born, so I printed out spreadsheets to make tracking patterns easier. It was something that I should’ve done two months before. It made pattern recognition much easier. Yes, I created spreadsheets to track when the baby eats, how much she eats, and when she’s awake and asleep. Yes, I think it’s a little overkill, but at least I didn’t spend the time writing PHP to make it into a website.

#1GF! took over the baby care, and I went to the office to answer a lot of backlogged e-mail. It sounds sort of cool to answer e-mail from a ton of people who you don’t know, but it’s mostly beard related and trails off after a single reply. Today, I got an email from someone who wanted to know if I was an actor or a stand up comedian in real life. Nice. I’ll take it. I told him that I was just a stay at home dad, leaving not much left to talk about.

As I sat at the PC thinking about all this baby knowledge that I had been picking up, I wondered if being a stay at home dad was enough of a curiosity to get me a shot at writing a parenting article for one of the baby magazines. I shrugged and let it remain just a thought.

Friday (Day 950): Superhero Attack & Cosmic Ray Damage

The baby slept through the night again. They call me the sleep tracking super dad. I felt like I had solved a very complex puzzle.

#1GF! was working from home, which disrupted the baby’s schedule because when the baby saw her, it was like taunting her with a bottle. I let her hold the baby close to a feeding time, and the baby started crying, and I had to step in and take over. I wasn’t the most gentile person about it. I was just given a glimpse of a possible framework evolving out of my life of baby care anarchy, and it was fading back into the dust clouds of chaos. The situation returned to normal soon after.

After the baby ate, #1GF! went out to mail some letters, and I sat down to read our new insurance policy. Although we weren’t covered if the toilet started spewing sewage, we were covered against falling objects, including air and spacecraft. We were not, however, covered against hovercraft damage. I’m not sure what century the insurance company thinks we’re in, but they left the questions of superhero attack and cosmic ray damage open to interpretation.

Later, #1GF! brought back a coffee for me. It was an unexpected surprise. I got another surprise soon after when I cleaned up the biggest poop I’ve ever seen on the child yet. I called #1GF! in for moral support because I couldn’t see skin below the baby’s waist.

“This is absolutely remarkable,” I said after sending two baby wipes in to be slaughtered.

“So, when was the last time you left the house?” asked #1GF!.

“I’m not sure,” I said. “When was the last time the baby left the house?”

#1GF! thought for a second. “Two weeks ago.”

“Great. Then it was two weeks ago.”

“You need to get out.”

“There are people out there, honey. People who know things. About me. I’m not saying that they’re out to get me, but they are. They’re out there. Trying to get me. They’re after my flap jacks and they can’t have them. NO SIR, THEY CAN’T HAVE ‘EM!”

“Exactly,” said #1GF! as she walked out of the room shaking her head, as she is prone to do.

“Where are you going? Don’t you want to see how this turns out?” She obviously didn’t.

I called our garbage company because they were supposed to pick up our recycling on Monday, but didn’t. They were supposed to return today to pick it up, and it was already 3PM. Although the woman on the phone assured me that they’d pick it up by 7PM, they never showed up. I hauled our recycling bin back in from the curb for the second time this week. We pay for trash service here, so I wasn’t too happy.

I worked on writing and image searching for what should’ve been a quick post about running this blog for eight years. I ended up playing with images for far too long, and ended up skipping dinner. And thanks to the coffee, I was wide awake when the hour and minute hands jumped each other.

#1GF! was already in bed, so I closed the bedroom door so that the light wouldn’t wake her up. I brushed my teeth, and felt my way down to the kitchen for a drink of water. I then walked back to the bedroom a few minutes later, having completely forgotten that I closed the door. I kicked the door open with my nose, and the bang and ensuing whispered profanity had #1GF! sitting bolt upright and using a few choice words of her own. Luckily, the baby stayed asleep.

At 1 AM, the baby woke up, killing a pattern of two nights of sleeping through the night.

Saturday (Day 951): The Garbage Men Share My Sense Of Time

The garbage men finally picked up my recycling. I guess 10 AM on a Saturday is the same as before 7PM on Friday, which is the same as having it picked up on Monday, like it’s supposed to be. The same company skipped picking up my recycling the last time and left no reason at all.

I worked on roughing out LOR until 1PM, and got caught up. I was still twenty weeks behind on writing and editing, but at least the rough drafts were out of my notebooks and into the database.

Once again, the baby slept though the night.

What I Learned

• My garbage company thinks that leaving automated messages after they close telling me that they’re not picking up my garbage is acceptable.
• Baby care is not as serene as I imagined it to be.
• Google’s Social Graph API seems interesting, but I don’t have the time to find a use for it.
• The baby likes Miley Cyrus and beards. I don’t know whether to trust her instincts.
• When you entertain a baby all day, you have find ways to keep yourself entertained.
• Tracking sleep/eat times on a spreadsheet should be started at three months to figure out patterns.
• A few people out there think I’m funny. I mean, funny like I’m a clown? I amuse you? I make you laugh? I’m here to fuckin’ amuse you? What do you mean funny? Funny how? How am I funny?
• I’m covered against falling spacecraft, but not against sewage. And my hovercraft will not be covered.
• The baby sleeping through the night is awesome.

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