Smithology

I haven’t had much to say on here for a good while but for anyone “out there” who’s doing the baby thing, here are my thoughts on it.

Tomorrow we have an induction scheduled for baby #2 so we’re kind of pacing about trying to make sure we’ve thought of everything and to fill in the hours. I’m sure in all the little details we’re addressing, there are big things we’ve forgotten but we’ll deal with that as it comes.

• overnight bag
• phones
• cameras
• MacBook and speakers (for playing “Eye of the Tiger” and other motivational music)
• books (for reading whilst waiting for the drugs to do their work and so that Matt has a chance of finishing his assignment this week (wishful thinking?))

I’ve tried to explain to the 3yo what’s happening but he wasn’t very interested. He knows mummy has his “sister” in her tummy (he’s convinced it’s a girl) but I wasn’t able to get it through to him that grandma would be looking after him tomorrow and that mummy was having the baby.

He fell asleep tonight while I was reading “The Tiger Who Came for Tea” (after the mandatory “Magic Hat”). I felt very sad to realise that this is the end of our time with just him. After tomorrow we’ll have “kids” instead of just him and he won’t be the center of our lives.

Steph and I spent the day together without Mr I’m-wearing-buzz-lightyear-undies to try and remember what it’s like to be just good mates who are probably a little bit too into each other instead of responsible parents living in the suburbs with a home loan. It’s not like we did that much that you can’t do with kids: the difference is we could do it in our time and talk without being interrupted and not having to mop up spilt milkshakes or apologise to other customers on our child’s behalf.

The Mother-in-law arrived on scene this afternoon which should keep me on my toes but she has filled our freezer with pre-made meals which is much appreciated. So everything seems like it’s ready to go and all we need to do now is sleep (yeah right).

P.S. The Photo is Sol when he was 1 day old. I resized the image with Acorn image editor. The first attempt was with Pixemlator but they stuck a big watermark on it. I will probably buy Acorn: it’s just a simple no-frills image editor: great for bloggers.

[tags]babies, children, kids, sentiment, fatherhood, induction[/tags]

fatherhood

I intend to blog.
Somehow I will make the time.
I have some ideas floating around my head.
Stories I’d like to tell.
In the meantime, send me good wishes because I will be a dad x2 any day now.

Uncategorized, fatherhood

I’ve been doing an interesting experiment on last.fm for the last week or so. I might call it the ‘six degrees of last.fm’ experiment. How it works is that I listen to some music and then I look at the similar artists on last.fm and listen to that artist next. Sometimes I have to go a long way down the list of similar artists before I get another one that I have but it’s been fun so far.

I started with Eric Clapton as I got his “Complete Collection” double disk set for my birthday. I then moved through Dire Straits, A bunch of random eighties bands that I only have because of all the eighties compilations I bought when I was in an Eighties band, The Cars, The Pretenders, R.E.M., U2, Crowded House, Split Enz, Bic Runga which led to a rather uninspired trudge through a bunch of female artists singing about their ‘feelings’ and eventually to Garbage which seems to have brought me into the early nineties with The Smashing Pumpkins.

The main thing I’ve learnt from the game so far is that last.fm’s ‘similar artists’ thing is less than accurate and may in fact be only slightly better than putting iTunes on shuffle. Unless you think that similar means ‘they both are bands with guitars in about the same era’ or ‘they both have female singers’ or ‘they both come from New Zealand’. I would have thought similar would mean that the actual mood, lyrics and style of the music was similar.

UPDATE: It occurs to me that I assumed when writing this post that everyone knows what last.fm is. In a nutshell it’s a site that tracks the music you’re listening to and allows you to compare your musical tastes with other last.fm members. It also attempts to suggest music you’d like based on your listening history. Finally it provides wiki-style biographical information on the bands and tracks you’re listening to. It accomplishes all this using a lightweight application that hooks into your music player on your PC.

[tags]last.fm, music[/tags]

Uncategorized