Fortunately

It's a good thing that last Friday was my last day at work. Timmy has had a bad cough all through Christmas. We have to nebulize him with salbutamol three times a day and sometimes at night, if his breathing is particularly bad. We need to give him medicine for his colds and lung phlegm and sometimes paracetamol if he's uncomfortable because of fever. So I wouldn't have been able to go to work yesterday or today anyway, since often we need to be up late at night taking care of him.

We're going to Cagayan de Oro. We're hoping that the air (or the huge decrease in pollution) there will help his cough. He's still very happy and cheerful (except when his body or teeth ache because of fever or teething), but I wish the noises from the phlegm in his chest would go away.

I'm sure they will. He had coughs in December last year, this is probably the same. It could go away FASTER though. It's a bit hard to listen to him breathe :-(

Timmy - Growing U.P.

Timmy is growing fast. He seems to be growing longer, rather than wider. At his doctor's (the lovely Dr Maelene Pile, highly recommended) appointment he hadn't gained weight but had gained length. He's also very active, so maybe that's why he's not gaining so much weight.

Even though he does enjoy lounging like an adult
He still enjoys pretending to be laundry

We don't go to U.P. enough. Sol and I graduated at The University of the Philippines at Diliman, although, ahhh, in different decades :-). We hope that Timmy goes to college there too, although if he doesn't, I'm sure he'll go somewhere better :-).



I'd have more pictures of U.P., except I mostly take pictures of timmy and sol


In those pictures, by the way, Sol is modeling the baby sling from Next9. It's very convenient and it looks lovely (although they have production problems, I think, so some things are out of stock).

My stepfather arrived from the U.S. and we stayed with them overnight one weekend before they flew onward to Cagayan de Oro. My stepfather had an unexpected long stay in the U.S. because he had some blood clotting related problems (in his leg, fortunately, not his brain).

Timmy spends a lot of time with my mother-in-law
We've been coughing a lot lately, Timmy and I. Fortunately, he's been taught by my mother-in-law to cover his mouth when coughing. And to pretend to cough and then to cover his mouth when he sees me coughing. Or maybe he's joking when he does that. Or suggesting I should cover my mouth. But I think he's joking, he always is, when he's crinkling his eyes like that.

He likes standing around with books, looking cute.


Something he might have not done so effortlessly if he'd known it was hair clipping day.

The first few minutes he was entertained by Barney on the TV, and his toy car barber's chair
After that he realized how unusual all these events were and the tears started flowing.

Fortunately he's very resilient. These were from a few hours later, at home, but he'd forgotten the tears just five minutes after we left the barbershop.
And a few days later he was back being cute again :-).

Last day

Yesterday was my last day at work. I'll continue to provide completely optional support, unpaid. But this is because I really want to do the work. The database there is on the order of 400GB (I thought it was 500+GB, but then I ran a few clusters and lost some bragging rights). That's the main reason I want to work with it. I have permission to continue some experimental work to enhance performance and since I don't have access to any other database that large, I'm happy to do the experimental work for free because I'll learn from it :-).

The last week or so of work I was sick a lot. Some of that was due to the weather, some of it was, perhaps, over-adventurous eating :-). But a lot of it was just fatigue. Timmy is a handful and I'm not in my prime anymore. I'm going to have to get much more fit so I can take care of him fulltime when we get to New Zealand.

That's the proximate reason for quitting a job I enjoyed thoroughly. We're migrating to New Zealand so it was convenient to quit at the end of the year and take a month and a half to get ready for the trip. Now I'm trying to figure out what I'll be doing. I need to limit reading online articles. If I don't consciously limit it, I'll do it all day. every day. I need to be much more hands on with Timmy, and I need to exercise (weights and aerobics work) so that I get more fit.

I'm planning to learn how to use git too, and oracle, and visual C#, probably. I'll work more with java (after a very long hiatus) and maybe play with SQL Server. I'm working with the developer or express editions of all that payware, so there will be some things I won't learn (e.g., how oracle works on grid hardware or how to cluster oracle or SQL server for multi-master functionality). But it should be enough to learn the basics.

I'd love to learn more about postgresql, maybe even enough to be able to submit some patches. But that's just a wish, not something I'll be pushing extremely hard to do.

sick

I've been sick since about Thursday. It's something like the flu, with the aches, runny nose and chills. Lately I'm coughing up a lot of phlegm and have a stuffy head (with some dizziness). It'll go away, it always does. It's miserable though. I hope I'm well enough to go to work tomorrow.