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By Jay Johnson
We've had some excellent, very competitive BCS bowls so far.
I mean, this Fiesta Bowl is practically a nailbiter, with West Virginia struggling to hold on to a 20 point lead over Oklahoma.
48-28, WVU with 9 minutes to go in the game.
Sheesh.
By Jay Johnson
Quick question for the Mac folk out there. For those of you who use Safari, are you noticing it crashing a lot recently?
I'm wondering if I've managed to bollocks something up on my own, or if it's just an issue from Apple's side.
By Brendan Loy
We're home from the hospital. All is well.
A few quick observations from the first 52 hours of fatherhood:
• Has it really only been that long? I never would have thought it was possible for one's life to change so completely in just 52 hours.
• Anyone who ponders the question "Does 'love at first sight' really exist?" has clearly never had a baby. Of course it exists.
• Singing to your baby is one of life's underappreciated joys. (By the way, Brennan on the Moor is a great diaper-changing song.)
• It's amazing how quickly you come to think of two-plus hours of consecutive slumber as a "decent night's sleep," and anything over three hours as downright luxurious.
• Speaking of which: everyone who knows me knows that I tend to procrastinate, dawdle and waste time. However, suddenly I find myself overwhelmingly concerned with efficiency. That's not to say I'm actually efficient yet, but I'm always thinking about how to be efficient. If you want to get any sleep at all, there is simply no time to waste: you've got to plan out everything you do, and make sure you're doing things in an order that makes sense. You're also acutely aware that anything you do with your waking hours is taking time away from potential sleep. So, for example, activities like writing blog posts, responding to e-mails or watching bowl games must either be accepted as taking priority over sleep (a concept that has a way of very quickly reshuffling your priorities), be done simultaneously with other necessary activities, or be squeezed into brief pockets of "in-between time" that are too short for a worthwhile nap. (And really, is there any such thing?)
• When you're growing up, you think your parents are total dorks for getting all emotional about the milestones in your life, particularly the ones that involve greater separation between you and them. Then you have a baby, and you completely understand where they were coming from; in fact, you suddenly don't understand how they could possibly have handled it so well. The concept of this little one deciding, seventeen years hence, to move across the country for college, is completely incomprehensible. A father-daughter dance at her wedding someday? Don't even get me started. Nope. She'll be my little girl forever, I decided.
• Some concepts sink in more easily than others, even when they seem synonymous. The fact that she's my daughter -- that Becky and I created this life -- has already pretty much sunk in. I look into her eyes and I get it: she's mine. But at a totally different level, the fact that I'm her father still baffles me. I look at pictures of myself holding her, looking into those eyes, and I think: Holy s**t! I'm a dad?!? When did that happen?? Somewhere deep down, I think I still had this mental picture of myself as a dorky teenager who brings his camcorder everywhere and writes a newspaper on his home computer. My senior quote in high school was from John Mellencamp: "Hold onto sixteen as long as you can." Finally, however, I can't. I'm really, really not a kid anymore. I'm a dad. Me -- a dad. Wow.
P.S. By the way... the blogged baby pictures won't be coming as fast and furious henceforth as they have in the past few days. I'm sorry if that disappoints people; I know baby pictures are adorable and everybody wants to see them. But we want to avoid having every detail of Loyette's entire childhood play out in real time, in living color, on the Internet. So while there will be occasional baby-picture posts, there won't be nearly as many as you might think. Just so you know.
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