Time flies.

Every week I hope to get a word in edgewise on the old blog, but every week I find it's Friday once again before I have the opportunity to sit down and string a cogent thought or two together. Ah, well. As long as you folks out there in the blogosphere don't mind the feast or famine style of the Jersey Exile, I guess I shouldn't be obsessing too much over it.

Blogging at home is tough, as either I'm just coming home from teaching at ten or eleven thirty at night and am thus a little too fried to make meaningful insights, or I've been home with the baby, a.k.a. "Little Shiva", who is enamored with my typing away on my laptop as a bull is with a matador's bright red cape. If she sees me with the computer on my lap, Andriana will immediately toddle over and either mash the keyboard enthusiastically (sometimes pulling a key up with her deft little fingers!) or slam the screen down onto my knuckles over and over again. Only rarely is she distracted by something on the monitor itself - say for instance, Homestar Runner - although she's quite fond of the trippy colors and shapes of Windows Media Player's "visualization" display.

We used to keep my previous laptop - a junky used and restored Omnibook from Hong Kong with the Japanese and Chinese character sets printed on the keys along with the Roman alphabet that I dubbed "The Wickertop" - at hand in order to try and fulfill Little Shiva's urge to destroy, but it didn't take long for her to get wise to the fact that she was beating up a decoy. That happens a lot with a baby, actually. For example, out of all of the remote controls we have lying about the house, our daughter wants to gnaw on the one that we actually need to change the channels and adjust the volume, and not the one that looks just like it but has no batteries in it.

Clever Little Shiva...