The Notes of Summer...

Well, it was a stressful day, but it ended on a couple of very nice notes. The best note was watching Kouryou-chan wade about in the water down by Angle Lake as her school had its end-of-year picnic. I really liked her teacher and I'm sad to see her go, but she's heading on to her native country of Ireland and seems to be happy with her decision. It probably has not yet sunk in with Kouryou-chan that there's going to be no school, and no daily visits with friends, for three months, but we got the phone numbers of all of her friends and are planning on scheduling play dates and the like. Fortunately, Kouryou-chan has the neighborhood kids for playmates, but Omaha and I are still going to have to work pretty hard to give her the kind of stimuli to which she's used. She reads by sound well now, and I want her to maintain that level and reach for sight reading.

Another nice note was that I've finally got my stuff together at work. With two weeks left to go, I'm finally starting to see light at the end of the tunnel. Programs are running and in many of the subsystems for which I'm responsible I'm in maintenence mode: uniform applicability of internationalization, guaranteeing that all the HTML is uniform and valid, stuff like that. The last major subsystem is a scheduling system with two tasks-- firing off maintenence routines and throttling those routines up or down at set times of the day. The guy who's working on the system is just now starting to clue into how to get it done. I'm dependent on him having a configuration spec before I can start writing a nice UI for it.

A third nice note was that over lunch I finished, as best I can imagine, editing Dreamteam Calamaties. I may just post it, order be damned. It's that good. And Lost Crew of the Palantir, which is the stumbling block, just isn't going anywhere yet.

And a final nice note, of a sorts. As some of you are aware, Yamaarashi-chan's mother and I are in a bit of a conflict over her well-being. Yesterday we had our first-- and probably last-- non-judicial conference over that conflict, and there were no surprises. Things will proceed as we had more or less anticipated. It was reassuringly civil, and I will say this for the mediators: they're some of the most competent people with whom I've had the pleasure of working. They made me feel as if they were on my side-- although I'm sure that was just their professionalism-- and trying to find a resolution, and they knew their stuff. When it was over, I felt I had dealt with experts.

More to come. Que sera, sera.