I have to get this out of my head (Punkadyne Labs (Punkwalrus))

I was reading on this board about people who talk in their sleep, and it reminded me of many times my mother would do this during her various stages of drinking. I was never sure if it was the booze or sleep or lack of one of the other, but she used to have huge disjointed conversations with me. The worst was when she woke up at, say, 7pm on a Saturday and think it was 7am on a school day. Sometimes there was no convincing her I wasn't going to school, and she'd get ANGRY. But her conversations were both responsive and incoherent. For instance:

Mom: [sing song, like you do with small children] Greeeeeeegoreeeee... time to get uuuup...
Me: I am up.
Mom: Time to go to schooool....
Me: No it's not, it's 7pm on a Saturday.
Mom: No it's noooottt...
Me: Yes, it is. It's dark outside.
Mom: [pause] No.
Me: yes--
Mom: No. NO! You better... go and then go to see... you better go, Mister!
Me: It's night time. On a weekend!
Mom: Awwww... don't tell me... you... if you don't go. You will GET.... NO! No go and then I'll... you'll see! It won't!
Me: [says nothing]
Mom: ANSWER ME!
Me: Answer what?
Mom: You need... I'll tell your father and you'll see what I can go, and then you won't know what... you don't want that!
Me: Don't want what?
Mom: Yeah! That's what I thought... you get your coat!
Me: It's Saturday. There IS NO SCHOOL! Go back to bed!
Mom: You can't tell... the school won't get ANY and you'll be punished. PUNISHED! Don't be silllyyy..... Get any? No!
Me: Get any what?

And so on. Not answering her caused her to scream and come downstairs to yell at me, which would have been bad if she passed out ON the stairs. When she passed out, there was no moving her. You just kind of walked around her, or hoped you could wake her up enough to help you drag her to bed. Usually, though, she would abruptly end her nonsense conversation and go to bed on her own. Later, she would not recall the conversation at all.

This would be bad when my father was there, because he'd be furious and sometimes took it out on me (usually by yelling at me for a while about how if I got good grades, she wouldn't need to drink). I rarely brought friends over after the age of 12, it was simply too unpredictable.

Sadly, as a teen, I brought my friends over during trick or treating. wombat1138 and eeedge might remember that night when my mother didn't know who we were, and counted just the four of us (including Kate) three times... eeedge stopped her at 12.

I think about this every Halloween. :( Posted in: childhood , mother

This parenting deal? Yeah, it's going to work out. (Kilala.nl (Cailin Coilleach)) by Cailin Coilleach

Would you believe that I spent the past two to three hours investigating diapers? Diapers of all things! And I'm honestly quite intrigued by it all! ^_^

Over at GoT the lovely Llewella introduced us all to the Kaatje Katoen website. KK is one of the Netherlands' main proponents of washable/reusable diapers, as opposed to the plastic throw-away stuff churned out by Huggies, Pampers et al. their products look pretty damn good to me and we'll soon be ordering one of their trial packages so we can try some of the stuff out. The genius of these cotton diapers is that one can invest between 450 and 700 euros and be done with it all. We wouldn't have to spend 100 euros a month on disposable diapers :)

This is definitely something we'll be looking into. Of course we -will- be buying disposable diapers for daytrips and such, because it's no fun carrying stinky diapers around an amusement park ^_^;

Posted in: baby , diaper , father , mother , parenting

Haha haa ha haa (Punkadyne Labs (Punkwalrus))

Man... he totally got schooled. I am indecisive about the method, but it is very bold and daring on the part of the parents. Posted in: mother , smoking

In other news, here's some updates (Kilala.nl (Cailin Coilleach)) by Cailin Coilleach

* Family

My mother and her husband had flown over to the Netherlands for a long weekend, so we went to see them at my sister's yesterday. It was very nice to see them again since it'd been at least a year! I'm sorry to say that we had to leave early, in part due to the crap I described in my previous blog post.

@ Anu: we're sorry for leaving so early, we really -do- miss you you know? :)

* Website

I've been cooking up ideas for a completely new build of Kilala.nl. Most of the content will remain the same (although some parts will be taken offline) and the change will be mostly visual. I plan on finally -really- learning CSS so I can implement some nice, graphical trickery.

In order to get to a point where I can start working on the new code I'll first need to get some things sorted. I'm already working on moving all archived blog posts into the database (only 2002 and 2003 remain) and I've set up MySQL + PHP on my Powermac so I can run a local version of the website. Still, it'll be a very long road 'till I finally get to the end result and I hope that the creative process involved will keep me a bit happier.

* Doubts about work (see yesterday)

One of the doubts I was talking about earlier, about work, is that I would love to do something more creative than systems administration. Of course I "make" stuff now as well, but I can never go: "This is me! This is what I've built! Marvel at my handiwork!". Scripts and proposals and solved incidents just aren't tangible like that.

I think this website is here to at least partially fill that gap: I'm trying creative processes that I never would get to use otherwise. Thing is though, jobs with tangible, creative processes start to sound more and more enticing! Jobs like gardening, cooking and carpentry where you make something and people care.

That's something jobs in IT are renowned for: most people outside your sphere of influence, but inside the same organisation, don't really seem to care about what you do. So if you're part of a team of sysadmins the "we care"-level drops steadily once you moved outside your department.

For now I'll stick to my current job and get more creative hobbies. There's still that sewing project lying in the corner and woodwork sounds rather relaxing by now :)

Posted in: family , mother , overhaul , website