Patti and I are both pretty logical people. I mean, we’re programmers so it comes pretty natural at this point. Now I think that more formal method of thinking is starting to rub off on the kids.

I’m starting to see our oldest son apply logic and given that he just turned 3, I’m pretty damn impressed. For example, I told him tonight that next week I would be going to San Francisco and so he wouldn’t see me until Friday. Usually he sort of shrugs these things off, but tonight he got very, very upset and kept saying that HE wanted to go to San Francisco with me. He even managed to turn around the tenses at one point and say “I’m going to San Francisco and you are coming with me!”.

The part that blew my mind is when he stuck a couple of pieces of knowledge together like so: San Francisco is far away (he knows this because we recently got him a map to show him all of the places Patti and I travel to along with where all of our friends and family live - it was very handy when Patti was traveling a few weeks ago, let me tell you!). Because San Francisco is far away we need to take the car. Because we need to go outside to get to the car, we need our coats.

The result of this is that when I thought Kai was done throwing a fit he was instead planning our trip and immediate departure. He popped up next to me a second later, coat and hat in hand telling me to put it on him and to get the car keys… we were going to San Francisco! Wow.

As I get older I find that I can get grumpy easier and then stay grumpy for no real discernible reason.

Case in point, today I went out to my office and it stank. It *really* stank, and that made me grumpy.

The thing is, it stank on friday so I cleaned it all out all the trashcans, sprayed a ton of air freshener, and got rid of the smell - or so I thought. It turns out that someone (don’t worry about who, they will be teased unmercifully on monday) left a styrofoam takeout container on their desk early last week. Apparently it got pushed aside and covered up by some papers and thus forgotten. Let’s just say it’s contents weren’t easily recogizable as “food” today when I found it.

So there’s the thing - I smelled an aweful stink in my office and that made me grumpy. But then I found the source, binned it (outside of course) and frebreeze’d up the office enough to make it livable again. Yet, I didn’t drop the grumpy. I had been happy all day, and then it was BAM grumpy. It actually took me semi-snapping at my wife for me to realize that I was grumpy and then traced it back to the stink.

I have to wonder why this is happening more and more. I mean, I know my dad is this way (or at least was when I was growing up - these days I when I see him he’s playing with my sons so he’s always in a good mood!). Anyway it looks like it’s just something I’ll need to work on.

First off - I have managed to play some lately! First I did some fun spiking in Flash figuring out some interesting solutions to a problem I was having (I’ll post more about that soon on the Automata Studios blog.). Then, this weekend I managed to spend some time digging in with some electronics. We currently have a project that requires a lot of hardware integration and I needed to build a debugging module for all of it (let’s just say I didn’t want to setup a full HVAC setup!). I ended up designing and building the whole thing - and it worked the first time! Holy cow!

It was a lot of fun really defining the problem and then scouring the net for the information I needed. I re-learned a lot of basic electronic theory that I learned back in high school and then went further to really finally understand capacitors, diodes, rectifiers and even a bit of AC theory. Oh - and I found out I haven’t fully lost my soldering skills too!

I keep forgetting that if I take the time to write down each and every task I need to do in order to complete a larger goal I actually get things done a lot quicker.

I feel like an idiot as I write down dozens of these teeny-tiny tasks - it just feels silly. But then as I work, the rush of breaking out the red pen and slashing out a task drives me to do the next one, and the next one, and then before I know it, I’m done. I think I’m going to start calling it the potato chip method… cause you can’t just do one!