I now present the weekend, by the numbers:

• Clothing items purchased for children: 2
• Clothing items purchased for self: 1
• Video card installations at the kids’ place: 2
• MST3K episodes watched by the oldest child: Unknown, presumably several
• Masterminds created in City of Villains: 2
• Roll on ten-sided die to indicate years old more than 16 my new Cyberpunk character will be: 4
• Years past 16 for which I rolled “No significant life event occurred” on individual rolls: 4
• Bags of candy purchased for the in-office “trick or treat” scheduled for tomorrow: 3
• Loaves of warm, fresh french bread purchased for light snacking: 1
• Loaves of french bread consumed in entirety: 1
• Phone calls: 4
• Phone calls to girlfriend: 2
• CDs converted to compressed digital audio: 1
• Vinyl records converted to digital audio: 6
• Costumes prepared for All Hallow’s Eve: 0

Quite a weekend, eh? And the numbers only tell half the story. Of course, if you want the rest of the story (“this is Paul Harvey… … …good day!”) you’ll have to ask. Why? Because I’m lazy, and because my body’s telling me it’s after midnight while the clock says it’s only a bit past eleven PM…

You know it’s coming up on December when you find yourself wondering how far downward you can adjust your normal living expenses to get through to the new year. Kids need coats, presents for the holidays need acquiring, thermostats need dialing upward. It’s enough to drive a man to drink, if he can afford such, that is.

(Okay, I don’t drink. But still.)

Not that I’m begrudging anyone anything. The kids really do need all sorts of things on a regular basis, after all. It comes with the territory. I just wish that everything I want and everything everyone else needs didn’t all have to land at the same time…

Wednesday night featured a horrible nightmare sequence. I hoped that last night’s sleep would be an improvement.

I hoped in vain.

Around midnight I took a call from the office. One of the broadcast studios suffered from two different problems, one computer unable to get into email and another unable to use the mouse. The email problem was easy to fix (by virtue of actually logging in to the network), but the mouse problem stumped the overnight guy and me. What’s more, upon investigation we discovered that at least one of the other similar computers elsebuilding also couldn’t respond to mouse input. The common denominator turned out to be the news server, so I had the overnight guy reboot that, then reboot the affected workstations. Voila, that was it!

It only took half an hour to get to that point, and then another half hour to get back to sleep.

Around 4:30am the smoke alarms went off. Wait, I don’t think I described that accurately enough. Let me try again. Around 4:30am, a pair of piercing sirens wailed at earsplitting decibel levels… for about three seconds. “Okay,” I thought, once I could string two syllables together in my adrenaline-spiked mind. “What the hell?” But the alarms stayed silent. That is, they stayed silent for about three minutes, then went off… again only for a few seconds. This took place no less than four times over the course of half an hour. We investigated the house to no avail. We found nothing burning, nothing at all that could remotely be considered a cause for this behaviour on the part of the smoke detectors. By 5:00am they’d had their fun, apparently, because we didn’t hear a peep out of them afterward.

Another half hour of fun, but it took me a lot longer than just another half hour to get back to sleep.

Look, just because it’s almost All Hallow’s Eve doesn’t mean there’s an open invitation for bogeymen, sandmen or spectres in my house, thankyouverymuch. This sort of nonsense can stop, now. Please.

I need my beauty sleep, after all.

Between three days of back pain and a touch of the stomach bug that’s been making the rounds, I ended up at home today. You might think this a chance to relax and be, generally speaking, a good lazy bum. You’d be right… but I don’t like having almost nothing to do all day and no energy to do it with.

I’ll be glad to get back to work tomorrow. I kid you not.