How late it was, how late…


Today was sort of productive. Yesterday I was fairly exhausted, or perhaps ruined by staying up too late to watch the second Star Trek film, but today I’d had a full night’s sleep and should have been full of energy.

Not enough energy to go for a run, unfortunately, but enough to spend a couple of hours doing a module on Coursera about R. It’s been almost nine months that I’ve been trying to try to learn R, so before the year is up I thought I should have a proper go at it. One advantage of Coursera is that you can speed up the playback of the lectures, so I run them at double speed until I don’t understand something, and then drop the pace down until I feel confident again. There’s some awkward bits where I fail to grasp simple things (for example, if you have a data frame, dataframe, with a column, quantity_of_monkeys, in it, if you were used to SQL you’d expect to be able to query it using dataframe.quantity_of_monkeys, whereas in R it’s the subtly different dataframe$quantity_of_monkeys) but it feels like I have a fighting chance of gearing myself up a bit before the end of the year. And if I think of some of my other resolutions, well, I can now say “Quien es mi chica guapa? Tu estas mi chica guapa!” and although I’ll be missing the inverted exclamation and question marks at the start of the sentences, and probably have fouled up some of my conjugations, I’m still close to offering some endearment to my child. Swimming, shuffling cards and dancing … Well, there is still time…

In the afternoon, I had to nap, exhausted by extending my brain, and then in the evening we made the cardinal error of going out to friends for dinner. That would have been fine if we didn’t have a baby, but all of a sudden a mellow 10:30pm end to the evening becomes the start of a multi-hour attempt to make a confused and sleep-deprived baby calm down enough to go to sleep. For more than five minutes. Cue vast amounts of swaddling, feeding, rocking the baby, reswaddling her, rocking her again, feeding her again, thinking she’s sound asleep when she’s a second from full blast complaining, and then rocking her again. And it’s all self-inflicted.

Still, we have four more nights to get her on a proper sleep schedule, and then we’ll ruin it all by shifting eight time zones. Gluttons for punishment, that’s apparently what we are.


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