Monthly Archives: December 2025

Obstacles to writing, 12/18/25

Posted on by Henry

I’ve got a persistent computer problem; my computer will, at random intervals, lose focus on the window in which I’m working. If I’m typing, whatever I type stops being recorded. If I’m playing a game, the game stops responding to my input until I’ve clicked inside the game’s window again (yes, this gets weird with fullscreen). This has weird side effects! I’ve had my computer put the display to sleep while I was watching a video, because it lost focus on the video player and then didn’t receive any input for five minutes.

This would be merely annoying, if it weren’t for that typing problem. Having my typing interrupted because my computer lost focus on my word processor is aggravating. It’s awful.

It’s like playing music only to find that your instrument isn’t in your hands anymore. Instead, your instrument is hanging in midair, right there in front of you, but you have to reach forward and grab it again and settle back in to what you were playing. Your music only comes out in fits and starts. It is nearly impossible to relax into a flow.

If, like me, you sometimes enjoy closing your eyes and envisioning a scene and just typing until you figure out where everything is going… tough luck.

I have struggled with this. I’ve hunted through forums for similar experiences. I’ve searched for the culprits they identified, or the methods they used to find their culprits. I’ve tried setting up programming shells and running code that I found online to log whatever program keeps stealing focus. I’ve done everything… except painstakingly tagging all the documents that I want to save, copying them onto an external drive, and then reformatting my machine and starting over.

Why?

It’s a stupid reason, really: it takes time and effort that I’d rather spend writing. Or which I’d rather spend doing anything else. Yet the longer I put this off, the more time I lose and the more frustrated I become. It’s been a problem for an embarrassingly long time at this point.

I’m going to give myself a gift this holiday season. I’ll finally do the prep work necessary for a factory reset on this machine. Then, I’ll set myself up with some hot beverage(s) and a good book, and I’ll let all the necessary file transfers grind along until I can wipe this thing clean and start fresh.

Or, more likely, I’ll start this and then be busy taking care of the baby or doing house work. At least this will be done.

If you can keep it, 12/11/25

Posted on by Henry

I am not-sick again, for however long this lasts. I had nearly forgotten how good it feels to not be ill. This isn’t terribly surprising, but before my past several months of back to back sicknesses I had stopped consciously appreciating how good being well felt.

In very similar ways I had failed to appreciate how good it was…

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Sick baby part dunno of lots, 12/4/25

Posted on by Henry

Once again, I am taking care of a sick baby. This time he’s less sick! By that I mean that he’s less sick than he has been in the very recent past. He was rocking a worryingly high fever until yesterday. It had just been climbing and climbing despite our best efforts. Yesterday we returned to the doctor’s office, got a solid reassessment, and were prescribed antibiotics (which Gibby has been doing his best to spray into my face while I dose him). Now his fever has dropped significantly and he’s merely hungry, sleepy, poopy, sometimes cranky, and full of head-gunk.

I’m not caring for this sick baby alone, thank goodness. Ley and I have been swapping off or stepping in for each other as extra support. I have come to feel, however, that the nuclear family model is designed to break you. A mere two adults caring for a sick baby—with baby-induced terrible sleep and everything else—is a recipe for suffering. It’s a recipe for suffering even when those two adults take time off work. There really ought to be two to four more people on call all the time so that people can sleep, or do anything other than care for the baby. Even one more person would be a big help.

I’ve had these thoughts before.

We might have been able to avoid this fever if we’d found a better way to manage his congestion from his fever two weekends ago. He produced lots of snot while fighting that (milder) fever. That was good, mucus helps! He didn’t manage to eject all that mucus though, and his resulting congestion likely fed his current ear infection—in other words, his body’s healthy reaction to the previous virus created fertile ground for this bacterial infection. Next time he gets snotty and feverish, we’ll need to find more ways to help him drain all the mucus instead of allowing it to linger and get infected.