Level Orange

With a two-year-old son running around the house, a newborn waking every few hours, a wife on the mend after surgery and a full-time job (and then some), I’ve hit a wall of exhaustion. I knew it was getting bad when just the other day, while driving with my son in the car, I started falling asleep at the wheel. So much so that I scared myself. I couldn’t keep on like that–I needed something to wake me up, keep me going.

Now I’m not a coffee drinker for two reasons: 1) the taste and 2) it’s just plain funky. I almost considered stopping and picking up a cup of coffee, just to keep my eyes open, but that idea vanished when I remembered something.

Energy drinks.

Yeah, you know, the drinks that the college set use to stay up and party, cram and whatever they do at all hours of the night. Now, this was 8:30 in the morning we’re talking about, but it’d work just the same right? Couldn’t hurt to try.

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For some reason, as I was stuck in traffic this morning on my way to work, I was thinking about blogging. I was thinking about how many times I’d followed my normal route, only to discover that traffic had come to a standstill. Not because of an accident or a stalled vehicle, but because the route had changed. Whether it was a closed lane, a lane had switched or shifted or an all-out detour, it’s happened several times before. And it pissed me off every time.

You see, here in Houston, the roads are perpetually under construction. Not only highways, but everything from big eight-lane thoroughfares to small two-lane side streets. It’s all a mess. I think it’s been an influence on me and my recent fascination with the color orange. I used to think it was funny when people would say orange was the new black, but now I can’t deny it. It’s like some sort of subconcious conditioning. I mean, The Gates in Central Park ain’t got nothing on how much orange there is in Houston.

So as I sat in my car, in a daze at the oranginess of the morning, I wondered why people don’t know about changes in the roads before they head out the door. More specifically, I wondered why I didn’t know. Sure, they report major road closures on the news so people can avoid them altogether, and there’s even Houston Transtar to get information out on the web, but it’s all related to the highways and feeder roads. What about the little changes?

Why can’t I find out if the road two blocks from my house has changed from three lanes to two? Or if instead of a left lane being closed on a road, it’s changed to a right lane being closed? One peek at the construction report and you’ll see what I mean, but once again, where’s the small stuff?

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After hitting some snags trying to get some sort of site management tool for work, I’ve now got some great stuff in the works. I’d already exhausted any possibilities of a well-designed, user-friendly ASP application and without a separate database, was getting to the point of just using a crude flatfile system. I know, I know, Movable Type (which powers this site) has a flatfile option, but it’s also very flexible and works as either a CGI or PHP application. Yet, for some reason, there was this unwritten rule that the site had to use ASP scripting only. I say “was” because once I asked about using a PHP application and had a new database set up, suddenly the gates were flung open.

Perfect. Now I needed to find a suitable application. Capable of handling several users, very platform-friendly, had an intuitive user experience and most of all, little or no cost. Man, did I not know how many choices there were. From the start, I decided to look at open source systems only. That would not only lock the cost at zero, but would also provide a vast support and development community. So with that in mind, I started doing some research.

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After a week away to witness and celebrate and recover from the birth of our daughter, today was my first day back at work. Something just felt different about coming back to an empty office. So quiet. When I was last there, it was business as usual, that old train moving at a decent clip. This morning, though…something was different. Everything was in slow motion. This was the first time in a long time that I’d made it to the office so early. Seven in the morning, to be exact, and not a person in sight. It gave me some time to think about things as I worked.

There’s nothing like having a child to give you a new perspective on things. It happened with my son, and it’s happening again. There’s nothing old hat about it. In many ways, the experience of our daughter’s birth was exactly the same as our son’s down to the minute, only offset by about twelve hours. There was the same anxiety, the same worrying, the same excitement, the same joy. Everything that might make is seem like we’d done this before. But there was something different, a new factor that wasn’t around last time–our son.

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