Today was a bit of an unusual day for me.
First of all, last night around 3 AM (technically today) my wife woke me up needing some water. She is pregnant so of course I obliged. I removed my CPAP mask, went to the kitchen, got her water and returned. When I tried to go back to sleep, I had an epiphany of sorts.
This happens to me often when I'm trying to either get to sleep or get back to it: my mind starts crunching on all sorts of things: important things like finances and money and non-important things like how many years the TV show Charles in Charge lasted. The fact is, my brain hates me and likes to see me suffer as I try to keep from falling asleep in front of my computer at the office and not get in trouble.
Anyhoo, I came to the conclusion that I could not afford daycare for my future baby working where I do now. It just wasn't going to happen no matter how I worked it. All my research had indicated that daycare was going to cost at least $500 a month. You could do it for less but you might also get people who like to shake your babies for fun and play raquetball with them. I decided that I was going to have a chat with my neighbor, a woman (part of a family of five: her, husband, two sons, daughter, all gamers and computer geeks) who knows how to build computers. On Super Bowl Sunday we'd discussed building a server, as it was the only thing she hadn't tried to do as far as creating a system. I'd said I'd be interested in getting in on that action. Then I missed Janet Jackson's boob, turned away at the wrong second. Don't worry, somebody emailed me a pic later.
Since I have been working as a pro web designer for this particular company since 1999, I have gotten to know kind of how these joints are run and I know design and necessary software like Photoshop and Dreamweaver. Since she knows how to build computers, with what she knows and what I know, and the people we both know, I figured it just might work; if we pooled our resources, we could make it happen. I even had come up with a name for the business and a logo before I finally got back to sleep, about 20 minutes before my alarm went off.
I was tired at work, sure, but I kept myself awake by mostly chatting with somebody who knew how to build networks, not actually getting a whole lot of work accomplished (don't worry, I looked busy every time the boss whizzed by). Also, the big container of coffee helped, too. And, another thing, I was happy because last night my hockey team, the St. Louis Blues won for the first time in nine games. Anyway, after that productive conversation fizzled out I turned to stimulating myself via reading news on CNN and Yahoo. Another strange thing about the day was all the weird stuff in the news. There was the baby with two heads. Then there was that disease in the Sudan where kids nodded to death at the sight of food. They found that missing Florida girl dead, which made me want to blow a gasket. Oh, and there was also an article about weird deaths of elderly women in Shelby, North Carolina.
(http://www.cnn.com/2004/US/South/02/06/mystery.deaths.ap/index.html)
After work, where'd I'd accomplished about 5 hours worth of work in 8, I went home and talked to my nieghbor. It was a very productive discussion and hopefully this thing I thought of early this moring will come to fruition.
I have see the future, and it is good.