Sleep Interrupted

I was just ploughing through my Google Reader backlog when Ben walked up and asked, “How do you make it go up and down?” He was referring to the page on screen.

“I use the mouse wheel, you know, on the mouse. The little wheel you use to make things go up and down.”

“Can you use the arrow keys?”

Without waiting he reached out and sent the page flying across the screen. Laughing he said, “Why does it go up when you press down?”

I had to stop for a moment and suddenly I was thrown back to the mid-eighties and the first time I used an AMX mouse with AMX Pagemaker on our BBC Master. The problem is, to go down the page you press the down button but in doing so the page appears to move up the screen.

Clearly our brains are wired the same way.

While writing this post I had music on random play and it produced a surprisingly good track transition: From Hemp by Living Colour into Into Temptation by Crowded House with a three second crossfade. Not perfect but not bad for a random selection!

Ben : “Mummy, when I’m grown up, like when I’m six, can I go to the skate park?”

Me : “Umm, I’m not sure, where is the skate park?”

Ben : “I don’t know exactly, but you have to climb over a fence to get there.”

“Mummy! Daddy! Guess what?! It’s snowing! It’s amazing!”

And so started our Sunday morning at 6.55am. This is one case where I’ll let the pictures do the talking.

Yesterday evening, after I’d put the kids to bed, I lay on our bed. Through the open window I could here the sound of voices drifting in, people living their lives somewhere outside. A first glimpse of summer on the breeze.

I treasure those few minutes after the bedtime when you know they are asleep. It’s the first time in the day that I don’t have any responsibilities that require immediate attention. A serene quiet settles on the house and I can relax, read a book, doze off for ten minutes or cuddle up with my darling wife. If I were looking for a definition of Domestic Bliss, this would be it.