May 18, 2009: Professionally Published

Today was destined to be a good day.  First, I got plenty of sleep.  About ten hours, in fact.  I can’t tell you how great it felt to get ten hours of sleep.  It was not quite solid sleep – that would be far too much to ask.  But it was enough sleep and that is good enough for me.  I felt great when I finally got up this morning.  Oreo snuggled all night too.  Liesl was in a very good mood this morning as well.

My first really amazing news for the day was that my very first article was professional published today!  Internet.com’s Datamation magazine published my article “Being an IT Manager: Joys and Headaches” as one of the three headlining articles for the day on their site.  It is very exciting.  And yes, being professional published means that I am being paid to write.  Not just doing it for fun.  I have wanted to be a writer for a long time.  It is relatively hard to break into writing.  So this is a very big deal for me.  Nine years of blogging on SGL finally pay off!

The server that I was expecting on Friday still did not arrive today.  I do not have a tracking number for it so I am not sure when to be looking for it.

What did arrived today is my copy of “Practical Programming: An Introduction to Computer Science Using Pyton” from Amazon.  I am always interested in teaching techniques being used today and the Pragmatic Programmers always turn out good books so I am checking it out.

Lot’s of work to do today, but that is okay because I am feeling much better and I am making good progress.  It is much easier to feel relaxed when you don’t have a mountain of work waiting for you.

Liesl had a pretty weird sleeping schedule today.  She is definitely worn out and has her schedule all messed up.  She has a cold too and is very congested.  She is having a hard time breathing which is making her sleep more poorly than usual.  This is her first time being sick.  She is not very sick – just a normal cold.  Lots of sneezing and coughing.

Because of Liesl’s shifted schedule I actually got a bit more time to spend with her today than usual.  It was very nice getting time with my daughter.  We had a lot of opportunity to play and just snuggle on the recliner today.

I have been going through some of my old books that came from dad’s house this week.  A lot of them are the old Sugar Creek Gang series.  Much like the Hardy Boys.  There are also several children’s “adventure” books like “Trapped in Death Cave“, “Trapped in Slickrock Canyon” and “Danger on Panther Peak“, all of which I read when I was quite young.  I also found my original copy of “The Cricket in Times Square” which was read to my class in second grade by our teacher.  Listening to her read that book to the class is one of my favourite memories from school.  It was one of those moments when I really started to like the idea of books and it was at that point that I really started reading.  I had been reading since Kindergarten, of course, but never really enjoyed it until I started discovering books that were more my style like this one.  In a few years I will be able to start reading it to Liesl!

We watched a doube-header season finale of Murder She Wrote tonight from the end of the fifth season.  Liesl stayed up late or we would not have watched the second half.  Then we tried to go to bed at eleven thirty.  I was actually in bed but got an email that required my response.  So I went down to the basement and ended up working until half past twelve.  Then I went back up to bed.

I wasn’t in bed for ten minutes before my mobile rang.  Back down to the basement again.  I ended up working until two in the morning.  Now I am really tired all over again.  The work was important that I do it tonight.

Leave a comment