Looking Up!

Friday’s only a few hours away, after all! Not to mention spring sproinging up here on Planet Georgia… and health insurance reform passing… and Nathan “Raw” Deal resigning (when you live among pod people, no reprehensible is A Good Thing). Even Monday at work was pretty tolerable. Sure, there was a meeting that took all afternoon (and I mean all afternoon), but it was about some user interface issues — for the longest time, it seemed that I was the only one in the company who cared enough about that to make any noise about it — so there’s finally some progress on that front.

Mason has pretty much mastered the walker that we picked up for him in Florida. He managed reverse gear almost immediately, but now he’s got forward down pretty well. He’ll trundle right up to whatever he wants to get his little mitts on. In fact, that got him his first hand-slap yesterday: he was trying to grab the lamp cord and Mrs. Fetched gave him his first taste of a word he’ll soon love to hate — “NO!” He let out quite the wail over that one.

I worked at home the last two days, which meant I got a fair amount of Mason time when I should have been working. But it wasn’t too bad; I was reading specifications (which I can do one-handed) and held him until the text knocked him out cold (it almost got me today too). He’s had a bit of an upset stomach the last couple of days, and I have trouble remembering to not jounce him around — he loves it, but it can lead to a mess…

For reasons I can’t figure out, this has been a week for making cookies. I got bored Sunday night, got out the Betty Crocker cookbook and the bag of chocolate chips, and had at it. Mrs. Fetched decided to throw two cents in and got the white chocolate chips into the mix, so we had piano-keyboard chocolate chip cookies. They lasted… until Tuesday night. So last night, I went to get a cookie, and there already weren’t any (except a few I took to the office with me, hee hee), so I grabbed the cookbook again and started peanut butter cookies. Mrs. Fetched once again threw in two good cents and replaced the jar of Jif with some “natural” peanut butter. Much more tasty that way… of course, I didn’t read far enough down the recipe when I started and I got to the part “chill at least 3 hours.” Seeing as it was already 9 p.m., I tossed them in the fridge overnight and finished them this morning. Again, I filched a few for the office, but the rest of the crew has already made a serious dent. Mrs. Fetched suggested I double the recipe next time, and that might be a good idea. For the record, I’m not sure what kind I’ll make next.

Next week’s White Pickups is going to be a double-feature: it ran a bit long, so I split it in half and will run it Monday and Tuesday mornings. I think I’ve figured out the rest of the story, I just need to hook up the pieces I have and write some other pieces. A sequel is already suggesting itself, but maybe it’ll let me bang on some short stories and a few FAR Future spinoffs I want to mess with.

I think I’m going to slip into bed a little early this evening, maybe I’ll be able to get up early and take my time getting going…