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Well, Ian's sick. Not nearly as bad as that time Miranda ended up in the hospital, but any time your kid is sick it's trying. Of course, right now you watch them like a hawk for signs that it's H1N1, but so far it's just the fever and nausea. No respiratory distress. He seems pretty perky from time to time, too.

On a happier note, Miranda's continuing to develop nicely. I know, what a clinical way to put it. But she is. Her reading is really progressing. She's now pretty much off the charts for a kindergartener. Her SIDES teacher is struggling to find something to challenge her. She's asked Tammy to start getting her to write her own stories now. I had a laugh this morning: I'd heard her saying something when we were all at the breakfast table. I eventually looked to see what she was doing, and she was reading the word on Ian's shirt. It said "SPOT", under a picture of a dog. But Miranda said "STOP". I corrected her, thinking she'd misread it. She said "I know, Daddy, I was just making up other words with the letters. SPOT, TOPS, STOP, POTS." I was flabbergasted. I told her she'd start playing Boggle with us soon.

Since Ian was sick, I took Miranda to her swimming lesson and took a seat in the parents' area with a book. I got a chance to see what she was doing. Normally, I am in the pool with Ian for his lesson. I was very impressed. Most of her lesson was in the big pool, and I saw her kicking along on her back, trying the front crawl, and treading water. That's a lot further ahead than when I saw her the last time.

She also had a pretty good karate lesson today. It was a sparring lesson, and she did okay in the first part, where Sensei was getting them to punch and kick the heavy bags. Then they moved to the back half of the dojo and started sparring while the big kids got their turn with the bags. Then hilarity ensued. She sparred with Rylan and then with Declan, and she did well in both of them, but better against Declan. She finally stopped moving backwards all the time and moved forward. She managed to "corner" him and he was just covering up and she was (lightly) raining punches on his (helmeted) head. It was hilarious to watch. I was the only parent who had moved down to that end to watch, and I was laughing out loud. Sempai Kieren was laughing also and he turned to me and made a comment that Miranda was a real scrapper. All in good fun. Miranda's never mean or bullying when doing it, she's just starting to get the hang of it.

This afternoon, she helped me get the Christmas lights organized. Evan arranged for new LED lights this year and they've arrived. I had to unscrew all of the old incandescent bulbs and then replace them with the new ones. I managed to get the strings up around the garage doors; I'll do the rest tomorrow if the weather's good. Miranda even managed to impress me there. I was unscrewing the bulbs, and I asked her to pass me the colour that I asked for. I passed her the old bulb, which she was piling by colour. Eventually, she came up with a system that she would leave one green, one red and one white bulb sitting right were I could get it and I would pass her the old bulb. Whatever bulb I grabbed, she replaced. It was super-efficient and we finished quickly. I was thrilled. In computer terms, she independently figured out how to make a high-performance cache.

Enough gushing about her. Sorry about that. She's just been really impressing me lately.

System Architecture Design Strategies. That's the course I'm teaching. Today was day number two of three, and I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. It's a course that I seem to have a knack for teaching, but it is such a challenge to do so that I was dreading it before it started. The biggest problem is that the material is so far-reaching that I can't possibly be an expert in all of it, but I know that the originator of the course, Dave Peters, is. It makes me feel like a cheap Canadian knock off. I know that from the feedback that's not how other people see it, but that's how I feel, nonetheless.

We've still got a lot of material to cover tomorrow. My feet are sore from standing. My voice is rough from speaking.

Come on, weekend!

I've just crossed the 25,000 word halfway mark for NaNoWriMo 2009. I'm not bragging or anything, just thought it was worth shouting out. Last year it took me until the 15th to get this far. I don't think I'll be able to finish in 50,000 words. I think that this novel is a little longer than that. I still hope to type "The End" before the 30th, though.

Ian is funny. I've been here in the living room for a while watching hockey. First Miranda was practicing piano with Tammy. She was doing well, and after a while was done. She closed the lid and turned off the piano (it's a digital, remember). After a few minutes, Ian pulled out the piano bench and opened the lid on the piano. He sat down and tried to play, but nothing happened. The cool part was that he tried to solve the problem by fiddling with the volume slider. Then Miranda helped him, turning the piano on. She showed him how to do it. Now he's been going back to the piano every ten minutes or so, opening it, turning it on, opening it and playing a "song". Then he shuts the piano off, closes it and gets back down, to applause from the rest if us. It's hilarious to see him doing it. He even sits at the piano properly, with excellent posture.

Last night was day #3 of National Novel Writing Month and both Tammy and I are off to great starts. As of this morning, our word counts are neck-and-neck at almost 6500, which is a healthy 1500 more than we should have at this point. Almost a day ahead, three days in! Again, Tammy's finding that she needs to write in longhand, at least when she's thinking really hard, and then she's transcribing onto the computer. I'm finding success with my typewriters; I switched last night from the Underwood Standard to my Smith-Corona portable just for fun and fancy. I think I'll continue swapping night to night. It's what I expected: physically strenuous but viscerally exciting in a mechanically percussive sort of way. My forearms and hands are already getting stronger.

So we both have our "challenges", but at this point our greater uncertainties are over the novels themselves. That's to be expected. Last year it wasn't until the 40,000 mark that I really felt confident that I would win: I could see everything that needed to happen, and it would take about 10,000 more words. You can watch our progress using the little graph in the sidebar. I whipped that up myself this year. The PHP code accesses NaNoWriMo's word count web services and generates the HTML. I would have used the stock widget from NaNoWriMo like last year, but even as of last night, theirs weren't working.