

2 Aug 2008 (Saturday)
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Too many remotes. Caroline's holiday. |
I'm pretty sure I've got too many remotes in here now. By my count there are 5 remotes here (DVD, Telly, XBox, Squeezebox, Fan) for things that are in use. 2 more (Another DVD, Amp) could be used but aren't at the present time. That's just excessive. So... Could be time for a universal remote I think. Just to cut down the number.
"The Wonderful End Of The World" has appeared on Steam and... it looks like a version of Katamari Damacy, and looks quite fun!
Caroline's off on Holiday tomorrow, so I'll have a week without being able to talk to her. How exactly am I going to get through a day without stabbing people to death ?!
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Remotes. Bad feeling. |
I've just realised that the 'on' button on the fan remote triggers the
'on' for my telly as well. That's a little frustrating
.
I've had a bad feeling which got worse and worse all day. It wasn't until about 8:30 that I realised that it was because I'd not heard from Caroline and was worried. I knew that I'd not heard from her, but I hadn't quite associated the knowledge that I'd not heard from her and was thinking "I've not heard from her, I hope everything's ok" with the really bad feeling and pain in my chest. Anyhow, once I'd worked that out and decided to give her a ring and check that all was well I managed to calm down.
It's not all that strange to worry about her (I'm good at it, even when completely unnecessary), but I sort of hadn't associated the two things together. Anyhow, far, far calmer now.
About a week ago, I caught an advert for the film 'War Of The Worlds' on
telly. It amused me that the advert was using Jeff Wayne's War Of The
Worlds music as the incedental music over the clips.
Tired tonight.
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Embarassing yourself. |
It's sort of amusing how you can think so much about not embarassing yourself and then manage it so easily. Now that's a normal thing for me, particularly when things are important. I should relax and try to be calmer but that never seems easy - and when it is easy it's usually setting me up for a huge fall.
I'm getting really nervous about Caroline coming up this weekend. It's just that every part of me is telling me 'you're useless' and 'you'll screw this up'. Oh, plus I'm really tired and making decisions or even sense isn't exactly an option at the moment.
I managed to get half way down the street today before I realised I'd
left my laptop behind.
Today's XKCD is pretty cute, partly because a quick check of their stats shows that it's correct (although inevitably skewed by the end of today's linking), and partly because I'm sure I should have written that many times but haven't dared.
I made some little comments to Matt Godbolt on his stacks entry yesterday, and he's gone and posted a nice little response to that. It's amusing. My Point Of View isn't entirely skewed by Picsel - I did a lot of work with memory allocation and its effects with RISC OS - but it is most of the reason. Virtual memory ? Ha!
The original email to Matt - as it's probably worth keeping, if only to
see how wrong I am in the future
was something like this...
Email to Matt...
Brief thoughts on stacks and stuff, as you've mentioned it - and remember
that I only know a little bit about modern OS design so I might be talking
complete rubbish
The allocation of pages only on access is a great way of saving memory that might not actually be needed by the process, especially on systems where the allocation of memory would be costly due to synchronisation issues (I'm thinking of earlier ARMs specifically here, where the cost of the cache and TLB flush as excessive compared to allocating pages immediately the program says it needs it - also a multi-processor system will need to synchronise its memory use if they are using a shared memory model). This also pre-assumes the use of a MMU based system which may not actually be the case - a lot of small systems are MMUless, or - in some cases - a dual processor system has one CPU with an MMU and one without.
In the MMUless case the system will always be constrainted to a more limited stack size because each application will invariably be using the same logical memory. Your address space is shared by all the applications, so stack size requirements must be predetermined.
I'm amused that the windows compiler cleverly spots the no-opness of the stack operations. That's quite cute.
I'm guessing that the on-demand access to stacks in this way removes the need for an explicit stack limit register (from my archaic ARM knowledge) which helps in some respects with register allocation and efficiency. I'm actually more interested in the failure strategies that the systems use when the stack allocations fail - the tests are only as good as the systems that they run on and just because it works on one system doesn't mean it'll work on another. How the system fails is more interesting. In the Windows case, probing the memory before use has a number of effects:
With the on-demand (non-probed) stack system, you have a few issues:
char buffer[bigsize]) then
you expect it to be there, pretty much. Unless you explicitly write to
every single byte of the buffer (unless you know the page allocation
size - and remember that it is the perogative of the operating system to
change its own internal allocation size for pages as it deems fit -
there may be different page sizes in use depending on the usage pattern
of the application) you can't be sure that access to those pages won't
fail. It's not unreasonable for the developer to assume that just
because the memory has been allocated that accessing it should work.
... but of course you gain in that you're not allocating the pages and not initialising them at the point of allocation.
Both of these methods, however, suffer from the single-page-allocation problem (although probably less so than I'm going to put across because no doubt the systems are aware of it and optimise things so that it's not as big a deal). Essentially, if you're modifying page tables you inevitably have to flush some caches or perform some synchronisation. If you allocate 512 pages by probing each and every one to cause a page fault then you're causing 512 page faults, 512 page table updates, 512 synchronisations (I don't know how bad this is across multiple processors, but I'm assuming it can't actually be that costly), possibly flushes to disc of other pages which have been displaced in order to satisfy the request, and (to be secure) writing empty data to those pages. That's gotta hurt.
If the allocation were performed as a single operation ('I need the stack size to be blah') then these overheads are minimised. The clearing of memory and the flushing of pages will still be necessary (probably), but you might even avoid the page fault and reduce the number of page table updates and synchronisations to just 1. Clearly that's a lot more scaleable. Whether that's what the systems do or not isn't something I know much about.
Where I work, stack size limitations are quite intense (not as bad as some systems I've used but pretty tight) so any 'large' allocation should come from the heap and not the stack. Large being relative to what you're doing, but I tend to get concerned beyond 32 bytes for a single stack element (eg local structure, character array, etc).
Anyhow... some random ramblings based on... your more coherent entry :-) Wow, that's a lot of ramble.
End of email
One interesting thing that Matt mentions which wasn't immediately obvious to me is that if a page isn't presently available you can block, if you're on a multi-threaded system. I'm still thinking in terms of RISC OS at times, where blocking is just not something you can do. Not sure what algorithms you might use to prevent blocking forever and crippling the application, but that's because I've not thought about it much. Which process do you kill if memory pressure becomes too great? If it's a low level process (say part of the windowing system, or the graphics handlers) is it safe to kill it or do they have a higher priority so that they don't get killed off by such things? What happens to the process that's killed ? Presumably it can't get any memory or you wouldn't be killing it for not being able to allocate a page (or maybe it's reached its resource limit if your environment uses that), so how will you kill it ? If it's a stack allocation failure (which is what we're talking about) then how do you execute the signal handler? The obvious thing is to have a signal handler stack in hand so that you can manage that, but the amount of stack available to you is equally undefined for your signal handler. These and many other issues are things that I don't have to worry about any more. I actually miss that.
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Strange days. Andrew. Katherine. |
So today's been very strange. I've been very tired all day so it's not
really been a great day. It's been raining all day, so it's been
bothering me that Caroline's going to have got wet as they're camping
. Hope they're having a good time even still.
This evening Andrew Hill gave me a call to catch up, which was pretty
neat as I've not spoken to him in ages. Amusingly... he's been playing
with MythTV
. It sounds like he's in his wife's good books for
having something useful related to computers
. He's well and
sounds like he's enjoying himself anyhow.
And then a little later this evening, a strange girl called Katherine wanted to ask me for some tourist information about Reading. Which was pretty odd, but... well, we go with it. Of all the un-solicited messages on Skype, almost every one is from a hot girl wanting to talk to me on her camera. Almost, because this was the first time it's been a real person there :-) So we had a quick chat about Reading and places to go and see, around and about, and that she's Spanish - and a very good English writer - and about how we're bad at speaking other languages, and a little bit about religion and rent price... And it was odd. I've not chatted to anyone randomly in ages. It's kinda strange because I'm not all that sociable and I don't go out of my way to talk to people so it's rare to find myself in that situation.
Anyhow... the plan for this evening had been to come home, do some more tidying and washing and then settle down to watch The Cat From Outer Space. What with Andrew and Katherine this evening, the latter has been abandoned and I'm just going to bed now. At least it's before midnight.
Speaking of which, I keep thinking that 'Midnight' is a really cool name for a story. Obviously it'll have been done a lot, but I still keep thinking it.
My nail's a bit long now - I might need to put a better plaster on it.
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Sort of quiet day. |
Well it's been a quiet day. I woke up from a dream this morning that lots of people had died (and seemingly had the good curtesy to clear away their corpses) and there were only a few people left in the world. Caroline and I were two of the few, and we were rushing around hospitals because after all the people had died/gone there was nobody to look after the babies.
I spent some time this evening ranting, 'cos I was rather annoyed - it seems that my pay rise isn't quite the figure that I was told it was. Maybe I shouldn't be annoyed, but... it's really quite irritating to be told one thing and to find out later 'oops, we screwed up and you'll not be getting that'.
Otherwise this evening, I've been playing with my new Harmony 555 remote. It's a bit clunky to be honest. It does the job alright, but it's a bit of a pain to set up, the set up program (on Windows, so it could be quite comprehensive) seems to be a little unintuitive and - as far as I can tell - is basically a few based application that keeps all your settings stored on their website. Certainly that would explain why it's incredibly slow and fiddly to do anything.
So much so that I ended up missing tea. I've hoovered though, because that was one of the things I said I would do this evening and I've done it so at least I don't feel bad.
Haven't heard from Caroline; I hope everything's ok.
I've also not yet got around to watching The Cat From Outer Space. The encode nearly worked right but I wasn't happy. Although the automatic cropping has happily trimmed off the edges, it's also left the aspect ratio in the file (the DAR - display aspect ratio) set to the 16:9 because that's what it was originally. Now that's wrong because it means that the now 4:3 ratio film is going to be stretched to be 16:9, which isn't at all nice. So anyhow, I've fixed that with some cunning (or maybe not so cunning) logic that works out the new DAR. I think it's right anyhow!
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Exciting. |
I'm kinda excited today, 'cos Caroline rang. It had to be the day that my phone had no charge and was off, but... oh well... I think I was so excited that I ended up asking her if she was having a good time like 4 times.
But... whee!
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Lovely weekend! |
I've had a lovely weekend with Caroline and Jess, Julia and Sharon, and Simon. I've really loved having them all here and I hope they've enjoyed it as much as I did - I'm completely knackered now, but I've loved it still!
They brought me a lovely necklace (can you say that for a
guy ? I'm not sure I care - that's what it is) which will sit alongside
my St Christopher. I gave Caroline the 'Tweezer Lifecycle Experiment'
box, which seems to have been taken quite well
. There's all
sorts of little things that happened that are too numerous to mention
too - people seemed to like sticking stuff, though. Jessica's box of
things to make seemed to go down quite well which was really nice to
see and made me feel a little better, too. I find it hard to know what
to get for a 7 year old, but that really worked
Oh, and Caroline also brought me down a power extension lead, so that my external drive box can be plugged in to the UPS, rather than in to the mains. Which is a really good idea!
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Obscure errors. Strange dreams. |
"Windows - No Disk"[ No Disk; Microsoft Windows ] |
Dreams recently have been a little strange, particularly the ones from last week. I don't remember much, but I do remember that Thursdays was about having to leave here because we couldn't afford it and I wouldn't be able to see the people I wanted to be with. Last nights was strange and I meant to write down something about it but I can't remember what it was now (late in the evening). I'm sure it involved expectations and how they've changed.
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So very very tired. |
Yesterday was incredibly exciting. Well it was intended to be. It turned out a bit of a mess, but... oh well.
The plan was to go in to town, meet up with Caroline and her sister-in-law and sister-of-her-sister-in-law, and have tea, then spend a little time with Caroline and go home. Only - should probably have been guessed - it didn't quite turn out that way. I arrived late-ish and so only had dessert, and then Caroline and I went off to Covent gardens to see a guy doing fun things (which was pretty neat). It was nice to see Catherine, although she probably remembered as little of me as I did of her - it has been, so she tells me, 14 years or so.
Afterward, we went back to the station to drop Caroline off and then I
could head home, get some tea and - hopefully - fall asleep
.
Alas, Caroline really wasn't very well, so we abandoned that. Instead we
decided to stop at a hotel and she could sleep. I, on the other hand,
managed to fail sleep. I think I got a couple of hours last night, and
then had the fun of being in the middle of London in the morning.
Left Caroline on the train and went off to work - which was made harder
by the large queues for train tickets and the like.
All in all then, it wasn't exactly wonderful. But, I got to see Caroline.
Now, however, it's late on Friday evening and I'm really tired. I'm hoping that this will help me sleep and my mind won't be worrying so much.
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Quotes. 'Local' TV. |
I've slept a little today and feel a lot better for it. I also spent a little time chatting to Caroline and Chris this afternoon (which, obviously, makes a change!).
Me: My Monday worry is Caroline.[ Worry; Chris and I ] |
I'm getting tempted by the idea of writing some simple software to 'schedule' TV programmes. It's a pretty illogical solution to an interesting problem of selecting what to watch, but albeit illogical it makes some sense.
The logic runs like this... Selecting a film or TV show to watch, when you can watch so many things, is hard. One thing you regularly (I say regularly, but I don't anymore because I don't really watch live TV, but I would, if I did) end up doing is watching something that's on live TV but which you already own - not because you don't want to watch the DVD but because it's reminded you that you can watch it and you like it. The same goes for watching things to pass the time - if you don't know what you want to watch then selecting something from a list of all the things that you have is hard. You want the choice taken away from you. You want to have something that tells you that something is 'on' right now so that you can just watch it.
I guess that's why people have random playlists. Essentially it's a way of suggesting things that you could watch.
I'm not sure if it would work, but... How about a 'local' SciFi channel that picked up films and series from the collection and 'ordered' them about the day. Playing random films and episodes (preferably in increasing order) and would schedule them across a day, or a week. You don't actually need to watch them then, because they'd be just on a rolling schedule, but the option would be there so that you could watch the programmes as they were scheduled in your own little channel. SciFi's one thing; there could also be a channel for 'oldies', or a 'kids' channel (ok the kids channel is one major thing that I think's a good idea about this!).
Of course these wouldn't actually be streamed live to anything. They'd just be potential things that were available - so you'd select the 'Kids channel' and it would start playing whatever had been (approximately) scheduled at that time. It's possible, of course, that I've gone mad and this is an insane idea !
Oh. The Olympics are on.[ Olympics; Chris ] |
Chris was just checking out what was on TV - real TV, that is.
Things at the moment seem a little up in the air. I've got very little
idea of where I'm going at the moment. The few things I am sure of, I'm
holding on to quite tightly, but in general I'm frustrated and not sure
what to do about it. I keep hoping that work will change and be a little
less frustrating, but that doesn't seem to be happening. I'm not sure if
it's because I'm being awkward or what - it might quite possibly just be
me.
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Reorganising discs. |
After chatting to Ian last night, it became obvious that I might be able to remove two discs from my server without any serious problems. It would reduce the number of discs in the box, so increase the ventilation in there, decrease the heat generation and the power draw, and it would increase the speed at which they could be mounted. All in all, it's a win-win situation.
So, I've moved the files that are on the discs off to the 1T drive that I bought recently. Now that they're empty, it means that I've got a 120G and a 160G drive that are 'spare' in the server. I'll remove them at some point later - it's not vital that they come out just yet.
Otherwise today, I've done some shopping and spent some money on Caroline, and generally not done all that much. I was sort-of planning to go in to work, but I've felt tired and decided I'd prefer the break.
I had a dream last night about travelling forwards in time with Caroline, to see how things turned out. We were going forward in small jumps, but after a while she got fed up and left me on my own to jump forward.
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Dreams. Diary brokenness. |
I woke up last night from a dream that I was being strangled. Which is always a good thing to wake up from - I think it's been a few years since I woke up from a dream like that. It's not particularly pleasant. This time, however, I decided to take off the necklace that Caroline gave me, as it was indeed quite tight. The thing is that it's not that much smaller than my St Christopher, so I'm not sure why it should be so different. (yes I wear both, the St Christopher because that's what I've worn for years and I've never been hit by a bus, and the other one because Caroline gave it to me). I'm going to treat it as a literal thing - that it was a little tight on me - and not anything like my dreams hating me. I feel better doing that.
The diary turned out to be broken today - whilst looking for music, I discovered that the 'quotes' page had its music quotes looking silly. But only in Internet Explorer and Firefox. In Opera it looked fine. I'm not entirely sure why, but there you have it. It's fixed now, by moving around a few tags.
Bah, it's late and my mind it racing again. Ah well.
The music I was looking for earlier today was 'something more happy'.
Most of the things that I listen to tend to be pretty down really.
There's not a lot that's that bouncey. Heds suggested
Lightning Seeds
which seemed pretty good as a choice. The only
thing is... I'm not sure that some of the tracks are that happy. They
seem that way but I'm sure they're not.
Looking through the things I've had as my alarm clock, I've got
Anastacia
, by
Anastacia
,
Images and Words
, by
Dream Theater
,
The War Of The Worlds
, by
Jeff Wayne
,
Fallen
, by
Evanescence
,
Central Reservation
, by
Beth Orton
,
Lights
, by
Archive
,
Dreamland
, by
Robert Miles
and most recently
Under The Red And White Sky
, by
John Wesley
.
All of which are... well, they're not exactly that happy really.
I'm regularly stuck for something happy to listen to. So... let's see if
we can change this. Something a little brighter.
Last.fm
tells me that of the things I listen to most,
Zero 7
is probaly the most 'happy', or at least not unhappy. It's probably a
toss up between them,
Royksopp
and
Jem
in the top so many. So... let's see how we go with that,
shall we ? You never know, it might work.
Simple Things
, by
Zero 7
shall be the new alarm
clock. Whee!
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Haircut. |
Oh, I had my hair cut last week. All on my own. The only people that commented on it were one girl in the office and Caroline. I'm really pleased that I did it. Yay me.
[ |
[ |
The new choice of music seems to have given me a little bit of a happier morning, though. So that's good. Let's see how we go tomorrow.
I spoke to Sue today, too. I was wondering if she was doing anything on Saturday, as I thought it'd be nice to meet up. It turns out she's being shot at at one of their reenactments this weekend, so that's not happening. Oh well.
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Time management. |
Today has been a long day. I've been on a course for Effective Time Management. Which has been incredibly interesting and - actually - really useful. Whether I can apply any of it is another matter, but it's been really good. A lot of the personal stuff was incredibly useful. I was really quite upset last night because of a few things, and whilst we were going through some of the things in the Discovery phase it was very clear what I needed to do to not be upset. Whilst that might just have mitigated things 'for now', that's fine. If I find in the future that I get upset I should just look back at this and go 'oh, that's ok then'.
As for the actual management part of the course, that was less interesting but probably useful. Again, difficult to apply but probably very useful. Certainly if it can settle me after last night then I think I can feel a lot better that it can do useful things for me.
We've also got walls in the office now, and our IT guy's down here, too. It's all quite exciting.
This evening I was hunting down a rather amusing little 3-way deadlock (actually slow-lock, rather than dead-lock) situation which we've managed to get ourselves into. I like those sorts of things.
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Day. |
You know what it is today ? It's a day. That's about all I can really say.
Caroline and her mum enjoyed her birthday present yesterday, which is cool, though.
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A day like any other day. |
Today is a day like any other day. But special. Because today will never happen again.
Sarah: Through dangers untold and hardships unnumbered, I have fought my way here to the castle beyond the Goblin City to take back the child that you have stolen. For my will is as strong as yours, and my kingdom is as great...[ Remembering the lines; Sarah and Justin; Labyrinth ] |
It's amusing what you remember when you watch things from years ago.
During the Discovery thing earlier this week it was very amusing in going through the things that I find important. Not only did it make a lot of things clearer to me, but it amused me that I'd done some of it before without knowing what it was. In particular, the 'Statement of Purpose' type thing I'd done a couple of years ago and for just the reasons that Storm, the instructor, gave. It hasn't changed really in that time, so it was simple to just write down. But doing so reminded me of it. It might be that what's foremost in my mind is the minutiae most of the time that it's possible to lose sight of that purpose.
Reminding myself of it really helped then. Whether that will last, I'm not sure, but it reminds me that I do have a purpose. And if I find myself being upset, or lost, I should look at it again, and be reassured. If - at some point - it doesn't reassure me then it means that the statement, or my values are no longer valid. I don't see that happening. It's been constant for a couple of years, and the foundation has been true for far longer even if it was never quite so phrased.
The server had problems this morning; IDE controller reset itself back to PIO so everything ran like treacle. There's two possibilities as far as I can see. One is that the root drive has problems occassionally which is what causes the resets. The other is that the ATA driver has problems occassionally and that's what causes the resets. As the ATA driver has been changed from 2.4 to a 2.6 kernel over the period that the problems have happened, and the motherboard has been changed, it seems to me that it's more likely that it's the drive that's the problem. One solution, therefore, might be to replace the drive.
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Enemy without. |
[ |
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Stuff arrived. |
Stuff arrived today - my train tickets and the second of my two books I ordered. Just have to read them now. And go on the train, obviously.
This evening I've been copying things for Claire. It's amazing what you can find lying around.
I had a Pineapple and Passion fruit milkshake today. It was quite nice.
I wasn't so keen on the Cherry yesterday. Tomorrow, I'm hoping to have
Strawberry. But I was hoping that yesterday and today.
Across from the office there's some scaffolding up. Or there was. It's mostly gone now. They've finally dismantled it. It seems to have been there about 4 months. Dunno if it really was that long but it seems it - certainly since before Vicki left. It must have cost a lot to be up that long. And I don't think I ever saw anyone doing anything.
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Nothing much today. |
Nothing much today - but I did have a strawberry milkshake. Whee. Otherwise, today's been pretty crappy.
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Holiday. |
Wednesday was, I said, a pretty crappy day. But just after midnight, I
was just going to bed and Caroline rang me and the day was so much
better.
I'm on holiday now; I took the train up to Claire and Justin's for Bethany's birthday, yesterday. Had a pretty fun day yesterday and lots of talking with Claire about stuff that's bothering me and work and life and stuff. All pretty nice really. Still didn't sleep particularly well, but I think that's become the norm again.
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Calm day. |
Today's been a pretty calm day. Nothing too major to panic over. Played
with Alex and Bethany quite a bit - apparently Alex was really worn out
at the end of the day
. Hopefully that means he'll sleep through.
It's lovely having the two kids to play with, although I admit I tend to
side with Alex when there's a choice between them. It might not be fair
but he's not old enough to help himself just yet.
I was really quite amused with him playing with a light earlier. I'm not sure that Claire was so impressed that I was letting him play with the light switch, but... He'd been amused by Justin turning the light on and off in the living room yesterday, and he's been pointing at lights all day, so when he was on the landing pointing out the light I decided to try it, just to see if it kept him amused whilst Claire was bathing Bethany. Turning the light on and off he began to point at and then press the switch whilst watching the hall light. I thought this was really cute - maybe he'd done that before but... he's associated the two and knows that the switch makes the light work. A little while later I was in Bethany's room and he was pointing at the light in there, so I pressed the light switch. He noticed the switch and reached out to press it. As he did so, he looked around at the hall way light that he'd been turning on and off. I think that's just really cute. Hopefully Claire doesn't hate me for that.
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Really tired. |
Really tired tonight. Bethany's party today and it was quite tiring.
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