To Blave!
/comes up for air
Aaaaaron: Man, I hate those moments of panic-attackness. I had one of those a few weeks ago when I forgot my flash drive plugged into the back of a computer in the college rendering lab.. GAAAAAAH! My whole academic life is on that damned thing. It was fine and right where I left it, but the panicky sick feeling was the suck.
Elrockenstein: Hehe.. it's no joke! Me and Haylee usually spend the first hour or so after waking up just relaxing, snacking a little bit and trying to muster the courage and energy for a new day. OK, so maybe that's mostly me. She's usually at full speed within 20 minutes of her eyes opening. Hehe. I totally get you on the braindead feeling though. Trying to be Dad all day long and then be Mr. Student at night and off and on through the day trying to study has been much harder than I thought it was going to be. Your brain just turns to oatmeal when you're consumed with the well being of another person 24 hours a day.
Regarding the milk/food statement (too much information ahead) .. it's a common problem. The problem is that only Wylie is able to get nearly all of mom's milk out. The pump just doesn't have the nature factor going for it. And, the cycle gets worse because when there is less milk removed from the boobage, then the body produces less milk in the future to replenish that unused milk.. the only way for it to really work is for mom to be a 24 hour a day food machine, which can be really rough. Michelle did it for the first 6-8 weeks straight and I was more or less on support duty for everything else around the house. Once Wylie starts getting into eating rice cereal and other supplemental foods does it let up a little bit, but that's not for a little while yet I think (my brain IS oatmeal, though.. so I may be recollecting wrongly). Anyhow. It ain't fair, no. But there's just no other way to increase or maintain a full milk supply for a baby in the first few months without 24hr/day of mom-baby pipeline happening. One of the funny (and not so funny) lines in Michelle's great book called the first 12 months (or something like that) had to do with just this issue. In a section of Q & A, it was asked "Why didn't anyone tell me I'd be breastfeeding 24 hours a day?" And the answer was "Because then you wouldn't have done it (or believed us)!" Or, something to that effect. Sucks to be a woman. I feel for the womenfolk.. they have to bear the brunt of a lot of nature's not-so-fun life-shit.
Oblivion: The Xbox version is cool because it does HDR *AND* Anti Aliasing at the same time.. but the major suck part is you can't get your hands on the community made patches and modifications for the game. I really really hated the levelling paradigm used in "vanilla" Oblivion. Basically, everything levels along with you, as do the loot tables (stuff that you find in the world, stuff that baddies are armed/armored with.. etc) ... so you will never be able to go explore a remote section of the universe and find yourself in a world of shit because you're WAY in over your head. Likewise, you'll never find yourself in a position where you fight enemies that once kicked your ass but are now relatively easy. Don't get me wrong, it's still an amazingly immersive and interesting game, but after having installed some of the overhauling patches/modifications that fix not just the aforementioned level/loot idiocy.. but add everything from significant visual improvements (water shaders, environments/weather additions, textures, etc) to additional character classes, quest lines, tweaks to the various questlines to make them more playable/challenging.. so on and so forth.. I just couldn't imagine going back to vanilla Oblivion.
School: LOL.. if anyone hasn't given up on the length of this post and is still reading.. it looks like I'm scheduled to graduate from UNLV either Fall '07 or Spring '08 at the latest. After that is MBA school.. and I'm actually leaning towards the San Francisco Wharton School of Business campus. So, who knows. I may be living in the bay area in a year or two. Maybe I can figure out how to snake an internship with the Raiders. Man, wouldn't that just be unbelievable. Heh.
/O.