1. A little bit of Facebook hilarity. I have good friends.
2. Homemade yogurt with strawberry jam.
3. Getting the garden weeded, fully, in time to start over again. Ha!
4. Sitting on the sofa, playing DS, with my beloved husband.
5. Remembering to take my vitamins.

I spent a bit of time out in the garden today, ripping up the weeds that have invaded. My style of gardening can at best be described as “wabi sabi” and, at worst, “neglectful”.

I have harvested two zucchinis, though, and a very fat cucumber. There are a few more of each growing and a lot of flowers on the vines. I’ve been eating the cucumber in my salad all week.

The cherry (or was it grape that I planted?) tomatoes have exploded far beyond the reaches of the tomato cages. Once again I have failed to pinch the lower growths and the plants are each about 4 feet wide and 3 feet tall. They’ve covered in flowers and I am no longer mad at OneBun and her babies for eating the other plants before they had a chance to grow much.

The jalapeno peppers, however, were sacrificed to the weeds – I couldn’t find them, literally, and yanked them out along with the invaders. The loofahs died on the vine, for the second year, confirming that we’re not making them happy in our garden.

In lovely surprises, however… A few years ago we planted some sunflowers. Last year we had one spontaneously grow – we didn’t plant anything at all in the garden, and it was nice to see that flower show up. This year there are three of them with trunks – no, they’re not stems – about the circumference of my fist. Coffee is a bit giddy about that.

Now that most of the weeds are cleared, I can go back to neglecting the garden for a few more weeks. This pleases me.

I may need to rethink my plans of owning a farm someday.

Often, computer geeks who started programming at a young age brag about it, as it is a source of geeky prestige. However, most computer geeks are oblivious to the fact that your parents being able to afford a computer back in the 1980s is a product of class privilege, not your innate geekiness. Additionally, the child’s gender affects how much the parents are willing to financially invest in the child’s computer education. If parents in the 1980s think that it is unlikely their eight-year-old daughter will have a career in technology, then purchasing a computer may seem like a frivolous expense.

Read the rest here.

1. Sleep. Sweet, precious sleep.
2. Spending a bit of time on the treadmill didn’t kill me.
3. My husband. He is a good egg.
4. The most amazing salads for lunch every day for the past few weeks. *drool*
5. That “hope” thing again. Still clinging to it.

1. I got my eyebrows threaded, my nails painted, and my hair dyed. Phew.
2. After a long delay, I finally re-setup one of my domains (it’s my last name + .ca – but there’s nothing there, yet!)
3. My husband and his infinite patience and willingness to stay up FAR too late.
4. Hope. I am struggling to keep it, but it’s still there anyway.
5. Love.

The problem with Mondays is that, eventually, I have to put on pants.

1. I am finished working for the weekend.
2. Coffee let me use his duvet so I could sleep under two duvets and ohmygod it was awesome. The weight, alone, made it worth the price of admission.
3. Running some errands with my husband and getting some cherry pop to drink.
4. Pierogies for dinner and a lovely salad. Mmmm, red onions!
5. My husband reminded me not to eat the red peppers (they upset my stomach).
6. Tonight I’ll sleep next to my beloved husband. YEAH!
7. The library’s collection of ebooks has not yet failed me. I keep finding stuff I’d like to read!
8. Big turtles. (Even if Coffee won’t let me get one and keep it in our bathtub.)
9. Watching Coffee try on running shoes. His feet make me laugh. (And he DID buy some, which clearly means the end of the world is nigh.)
10. Knowing how lucky I am.

1. The Sex.
2. Spending time with my husband, including the non-sex time, before heading to work is a really nice thing.
3. Heaps of ebooks to read. Now I just need to find TIME to read them!
4. Clean laundry – already put away.
5. Sleeping and being awakened by my beloved husband on his return from work.

I am trying to figure out how to sleep when I’m doing the overnight (midnight to 8 a.m.) work shifts. I am definitely over-thinking this but I can’t seem to figure out what’d be ideal.

I have to be awake for the shifts, so that’s obviously not the time to sleep, but otherwise I need to figure out some sort of schedule that makes sense.

Today is Friday. Tonight I go in to work at 11:50 p.m. and I return home around 8:15 a.m. on Saturday morning.

Tomorrow is Saturday. Tomorrow night I go in to work at 11:50 p.m. and I return home around 8:15 a.m. on Sunday morning.

I want to maximize my awake-with-everyone-else time – so I don’t want to spend all day Saturday or all day Sunday asleep. At the same time, I need to make sure I’m not exhausted for either shift as a result of not getting enough, appropriately-timed, sleep.

My first thought is to break the sleep up – to ‘nap’ from around 6pm to 10:30pm tonight. Work. Come home and sleep from around 9am to 1pm.

But then do I sleep again from 6pm to 10:30 on Saturday night? That only gives me about 5 awake hours on Saturday afternoon which seems very short. On the flip side, I’ll want to go to sleep at my normal 11:30-ish pm on Sunday night so I can wake up at the normal time on Monday morning.

Normally I’m awake for about 16 or 17 hours straight during the day – from a bit before 7 am ’til around midnight – so it would make sense, then, that I could be awake for 8 hours of work and then some more time, right? Except that I don’t get the full sleeping time between shifts and awakedness. And, again, I want to maximize my awake time to correspond with doing things I want to do with the people with whom I’d like to do them.

I want to figure this out before school starts again in September – if I’m keeping this every-other-week overnight shift thing, I need to make it work properly.

This is just stupid.

Factors: I have earplugs that work and can make my bedroom reasonably dark for sleeping. Coffee is fine with keeping the kids from stomping around above me while I rest. I do not have any other obligations this weekend (nothing structured, at least) so I can sleep whenever it makes the most sense. I am clearly over-thinking this. Someone, quick, slap me.