Joshua's Spot: Placeholders, plans, and excuses

Well, so - here's the good news: there are a few new pictures in the photo albums. Well, not all of them "new" in the sense that they were just taken, but "new" in the sense that they're old-ish pictures that I've finally gotten off my camera and uploaded so you can see them. The one to the right is truly new, taken just yesterday - the rest go back as far as June. (Shame on me.)

The other good(ish) news is that there are nearly 1,000 (yes, you read it right) other photos waiting in the wings, either on CDs that my mom sent of photos she took while she was here, on on the CF cards from my camera. Not to mention several hours of video on three tapes from the video camera.

The bad news is that all those pictures and all that video are basically stuck where they are. My old computer is slowly dying, bit by bit, starting with (inconveniently enough) the USB ports, which are flickering in and out of usability. I can access devices plugged into the USB ports itermittently, just long enough to, say, import one photo off a card reader into Photoshop Elements - at which point the USB connection will be lost, forcing me to re-establish the connection before I can load another photo. Video works better, since it's over FireWire, but the software I have (ULead Videostudio 9) is so clunky that it's painful to try to get a movie out of it - when it doesn't crash altogether.

So basically, I'm still waiting for the new iMac to arrive before I torture myself any further trying to get this old Dell to function properly. Which means the pile of photos and video waiting to be processed just keeps growing.

Thankfully, once I do get the new machine, it'll be much less painful to clear out the backlog than it would be on the PC. I've been reading through the manual for Aperture 1.5, and am already licking my chops in anticipation, waiting, just waiting to see it do its magic on all those pics. And iMovie '08 sounds like it'll do a far better job of turning raw video footage into interesting movie clips than anything I've used to date on the PC.

Now, if I could just get my greedy hands on that iMac, I'd be all set. Unfortunately, there seems to be a huge backlog of orders that aren't being filled, for mysterious reasons - supply? Hardware issues? My reseller pissed off someone at Apple and won't get a machine out of them until the moon turns blue? Who knows.

I just hope they get that iMac here before I throw the Dell over the side of the hill...

The kids, meanwhile, have been presenting their own challenges this week. Josh has discovered the fine art of changing his mind, much to my annoyance. He'll be standing there holding, say, a plastic orange, and suddenly announce, "I don't want the orange." (To which I'll say, "Fine, then put it down.") Yesterday he changed his mind four times about what he wanted to wear to school - he wanted the white socks, then no, the red ones; the brown shoes, then, no, the red ones; to wear the froggy raincoat, then no, no froggy raincoat... until I finally got so fed up with changing him back and forth that I gave him a time out and told him he was going to school in whatever he had on his back when I was ready to leave. He's been expressing his opinion about what he wants and doesn't want a lot in general, which I suppose is a sign of important progress in developing and expressing a sense of self - but man, can it grate on the nerves at times.

Ben, meanwhile, has finally awakened from his protracted post-delivery slumber, and now wants to play. Which is great, it's wonderful to see him awakening to the world and wanting Input at long last, instead of just napping and eating and pooping and napping again, but running from one little boy to the other for 12 hours a day more or less non-stop has been exhausting the past few days. I'm beginning to see why some parents are so adamant about the need to put kids on a schedule - not for the kids' benefit, but for the parents'. Knowing that however badly they're running you ragged at the moment, there'll be a three-hour period in the middle of the day when they're all safely locked up and quiet would be a great relief. If only I could get Ben to quiet down and stop eating us out of house and boobie long enough to take a solid nap in the middle of the day, while Josh is sleeping, I'd be all set.

Night-time is a different matter - Ben is turning out to be, in addition to a champion eater (something Josh never was, and still isn't), a world-class sleeper. For several nights in a row now, he's slept solidly from about 8pm to 3:30am. That's more than seven hours, folks - and he's just two months old today. People kept bragging to me that their 6-week-old kid would/did sleep through the night, and kept asking how Josh was doing and expressing pity and urgency about the fact that he still wasn't sleeping through the night at nearly a year old - and I thought they were just making the whole thing up. Until Ben came along, that is.

Now, of course, we're getting all anxious in the middle of the night, getting up to check to make sure he's still breathing, because it just seems so unnatural that such a little guy could sleep that long. I guess we're just not the types to be satisfied. Go figure.