Apparently, I've been incredibly boring recently

...the truth is, the free time just isn't around anymore. Or at least, when it is, I just haven't prioritized my blogging duties.

So let's briefly recap my last few months. The bosses at work decided they only needed four shift managers, not five, to operate our 24x7 environment. As a result, my Mon-Thu 2PM-Midnight schedule became Tue-Fri 6PM-4AM (with alternating Fridays off).

While this isn't a full blown "3rd Shift" schedule, it may as well be. I come home at 4:30 AM, fall asleep at 5:30, get woken up at 6:30 AM by the wife's alarm, sleep intermittently until she's finished getting ready and leaves for work at 8, wake up again at 11, do my internet routine, eat lunch, fall back asleep at noon, wake up at 2:30 PM, shower, pick up kids from grandmom's at 3:30, come home, eat, leave for work at 5:15. Rinse, repeat. The one redeeming item is that her mother's been sleeping over on the nights I work, taking over the nightly baby feedings from us. Without her, I'd probably sleep even less.

And when I *am* off, I find myself trying to adjust to a normal sleep schedule, which still doesn't happen. Because I've agreed to baby duties until 3 AM due to my night owl schedule, I still sleep for about three hours before getting woken up to feed Grace.

As for semi-interesting things going on in my life, let's see...my hard drive died on my 4-year old computer about two months ago...the first time that's EVER happened to me. Apparently, freezing the hard drive has worked wonders for other people, but not for me. I bought a hard disk enclosure (that allowed me to connect it to another PC via a USB cable), froze the hard drive for three days, kept the whole damn enclosure in the freezer while I had cables running out of it to my wife's laptop...all to no avail. So I've spent the last couple of weeks of free time configuring my new computer to try to get it to the same standards as my old PC. It's amazing how much crap I had installed on there that was essential to my needs. And none of it games either.

Speaking of games, I finally got around to moving my Xbox back into my basement. It just wasn't getting played upstairs, plus I had no hard-wired network connection to hook it up to. I think I went, like, six months without being on Xbox Live.

So, uh, that's pretty much it. Matt's turning three on Friday and we're heading up to the Berkshires next week for our annual foliage trip. If I'm lucky and if I actually get a @#!*% internet connection, I may post about it.