Hmn. Maybe I should blame my long silences on the fact that almost every time I write something bad immediately seems to happen to flick, the wonderful place which hosts my website. This time it was the DSL that went down, cutting flick off from the rest of the world. Happily it's now all fixed.

Instead of writing in my journal I fixed a lot of bugs, including some fiendishly clever ones, and did meetings. Both Omi (our project manager) and Sunil (our release engineer) are going on vacations, so most of Sunil's tasks are being handed over to me. A lot of it is stuff I already know, since I was doing the releases before we hired Sunil, but there's been some new things added on, plus Omi wants me to write some documentation for the new release. I feel very necessary, except that's not quite the right way to put it, since I don't feel it at all. It's deeper than that; I know I'm necessary. It's cool, but sort of scary, especially with people being gone.

Tuesday I got food from Hobees and took it over to Rachel's; she's at home with her ten-week-old daughter, Miriam. It was really good to talk to her, and I got to spend a lot of time playing with Miriam and carrying her around when she cried. It's amazing to me how much of a person she is despite being so incredibly young; I guess I was assuming somewhere deep inside that kids aren't really there as people until they're at least moving around on their own. Spending time with Miriam, though, it's clear how much there already is to her. She's got a great smile.

Other news? I've been reading a lot, talking to Liralen a lot, recovering from being sick over the weekend -- I either had food poisoning or a particularly nasty case of stomach flu. It gave most of the weekend an unpleasant surreal cast, and kept me from doing the gardening I was hoping for. Very frustrating. This weekend is given over to Jim's family, but the weekend after I hope to do nice outside things in the backyard. I need to go to OSH (Orchard Supply Hardware) and get a shovel and probably some bulbs, since my garden book tells me that planting autumn-blooming bulbs is the thing to do in July. We shall see.