the adlards

With a quiet bit of deck, a patio heater, good company and an inquisitive robin.

I suppose it’s unlikely Josie would turn to me again, proffering her fork and saying, “Have some sausage, James. It’ll make you grow little like me.” Converse theorems are going to be a doddle.

Sophie slept late this afternoon. Having not slept the last two nights we decided to let her get a bit of sleep (yes, the shards of Michelle and I are being held together by sheer will-power, caffeine and carbohydrate). We wound up heading over to the park quite late to let Jo burn off some energy. There was an immensely entertaining moment in which Josie, on top of a wooden tower, noticed that she could see through the gaps between the boards of the platform and immediately went bandy-legged and weak at the knees. Reminded me precisely of her maternal grandmother. She tiptoed, orangutan-like, to the edge avoiding gaps as far as possible then hung on and yelled for help. This from a little girl who was up ladders picking paw-paws and helping me build stuff almost before she could walk. When Michelle and I had picked ourselves up off the floor where we’d collapsed in hysterical laughter I talked her down gently. Last time I tried that was on my brother and it didn’t work; this time it did … it’ll be interesting to see how her confidence (re)develops.

I re-commenced work on my climbing wall today. I started it sometime last year and feel, once again, like I need a bit more exercise, so started with drilling holes in board, which exercises my right arm and shoulder and more importantly makes me feel manly as I wear out battery pack after battery pack on my industrial-strength cordless drill. At current rates of progress I expect I’ll have a serviceable wall sometime in 2007, so opportunities for exercise will be plentiful, if sporadic, for quite some time to come.

My thirty-fifth year began with Josie saying “Happy birthday, James” (I’ve been James all week and am quite enjoying the novelty) and presenting me with a re-purposed Christmas card. It was a bright wet autumn day outside, my favourite.

Cool pressies – thanks all (especially Mark & Sarah). After a long lunch at a meze bar with The Three we went for a drive while the two littlest ones slept and the two older ones wished they could. This evening Michelle and I are off to watch Wallace & Gromit, the Curse of the Were-rabbit. We went to see a movie once last year too …

It’s been a great day.

The shops are inexplicably full of pumpkins at the moment, so Michelle and Josie made a lantern. Novel, I know. It’s this kind of unprompted spontaneity just sparking off around me that keeps me sharp.

Jo’s getting more fluent by the hour, and developing logic very quickly too:
“Dad, watch telly please?”
“No darling, it’s not telly time.”
A little later …
“Mum. Not feeling well. Need watch telly.”

That’s playing us off against each other and reasoning in one sentence. Impressive. We called her Jocelyn so that she could choose her own rules of engagement – Jocelyn, Joss, Josie, Jo or J – and she’s going to be formidable.

I’m feeling Really Rather Rough. Embargo on all journeys more than 15 minutes round trip from a toilet.

Josie’s current favourite accessory at H&M. Unfortunately (for her) it wasn’t raining outside so there was clearly no need to make the purchase …

Scintillating Saturday spent cleaning in the morning and shopping for most of the afternoon. Sophie has started saying “mama” this week. Whether she knows what she’s saying or not is subject to debate. If she knew what she was saying it would almost certainly have come out “daddy”.
I should also mention that we think we’ve found a suitable replacement to the Fart, following our appalling service experience a couple of weeks back.

Well, Bilbo turned eleventy-one this morning on the train (belatedly), and Michelle’s out to dinner this evening. The girls are sleeping (long may they remain so), and I may actually get to read this evening. Quietly. Without interruption.

Wouldn’t that be something.

I thought I’d give you a little insight into my day. Below is a page of notes from one of my meetings. I know you can’t read it (I’m not professionally suicidal) … . It consists of some of my thoughts about my budget for next year, most of the text of “The Gruffalo’s Child” (verbatim), and one fully dismantled pen (at top of picture). Nuff said.

Apparently it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae yrou mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

More to the point, did you have to be able to spell right to start with to be able to read that?

Michelle was going out for the evening. The girls were both down by 7.45 … I was going to get to read! A real book! I cleaned up dinner, loaded the dishwasher, crept upstairs and brushed my teeth then a 12 stone man with a rough beard pinned Sophie down and started cutting thin slivers off her toes with a chainsaw.

Nothing else could explain the noise.

He didn’t go away when I ignored him (even though my book was ready on my bed). He didn’t go away when I held her as I set up my out-of-office message to cover my next three days of meetings. He didn’t go away when I carried her downstairs in case Josie woke up too (eek!). He didn’t go away when I decided, for lack of a productive breast, to make her some apple porridge; sterilised a dish, defrosted and boiled some apple, measured in some powdered rice and added boiling water …

It was while I was stirring the porridge madly, with the dish standing in a second dish of cold water to try to cool it faster, that he left. I peeked around the door and she was out for the count. I switched all the lights out on the route to her room, carefully lifted her little body and BANG he was back in full force. I scampered back to the kitchen.

It took about two spoons to chase him off again for good, and by the time she’d got to the bottom of the dish I was having to wake her to make sure she swallowed.

Now of course I’m too proud of myself to just read a book.

Bilbo Baggins will turn eleventy-one again this evening despite the lack of good red wine.

With great power comes great responsibility. Unless, apparently, you manage a nuclear reactor in a developing nation, carry enough storage capacity in your pocket to hold a couple of mid-sized libraries, or are able arbitrarily to publish your rambling thoughts to an unlimited audience of intensely interested strangers. The fact is that the great responsibility bit only kicks in in the middle bit of the hype cycle.

Take nukes for example: early adopters in the forties had something of a cavalier attitude toward them right up until the weight of mutilated corpses necessitated a sudden and visible surge in responsibility – the kind of worldwide responsibility we still enjoy laughing at today; late adopters, as we’re seeing on and off this year, are similarly cavalier because, “Oops, we’re too late to squeeze one iota of competitive advantage from this thing, aren’t we?”

Or overhead projectors, remember those? Ms Sutton was an early adopter. She used them to enable her to break away from mainstream 8-year-old singing lesson fare to lead her little flock twice a week into Don McLean, Merle Travis (via Tom Jones I suspect) and other deeply depressed territory. In 2005 a keynote speaker at a CRM conference talked (loosely) to a set of dingy OHP slides for forty minutes and what I wanted to know (before I walked out) was, “Where did they find an overhead projector for her?” Closely followed by, “Where did they find her?”

The Thing is, the balance is shifting. Early adopters are driving the market, and most of us are early adopters. Consumer electronics is leading the way in a tech landscape that is increasingly driven by early adoption; instead of massive investment up front and a slow crawl into the mainstream market, new technology is released just in time to catch us falling off the initial hype of the previous release. Technology is driving much of life and the way we’re learning to make decisions, in the heat of the hype, fundamentally alters the Way Things Work; for the first time large companies are choosing up front (as opposed to halfway through inplementation) to change their processes and practices to fit with commercial software rather than going to find software that’s a good fit for the way they’re used to working. Of course they are, it’s faster and cheaper and so gives competitive advantage. Reputable companies are implementing Microsoft products in beta. I mean come on!

And my point is? Well, not a very interesting one as it happens. I think it’s cool – more from an interesting-thing-to-think-about, my-goodness-the-world’s-changing perspective than a vacuous consumerist my-iPod’s-smaller-than-your-Library-of-Congress perspective, but there is something about riding a wave of new development that just refuses to break. Of course the ethics of our little technocracy are more than a little questionable, and it’s hardly likely, in an environment in which early adoption is the norm, that responsibility will grow as a factor. In its absence regulation will, of course, but don’t let that depress you …

As Ms Sutton would croon: when no hope was left in site, on that starry starry night, you went down the company store to see if they’d got any iPod Nano’s in yet.

Apologies if this has bored you terribly. I’ll stick to my usual for the rest of the week.

nuff said