It's been AGES. Things have been massively stressful, mostly due to things outside of my control. For now...all is well at Dragonfly Farm.
Somewhere in the gap Miss Em turned three. Her Royal Threeness. Suddenly she knows how old she is - before her birthday, if you asked how old she was, she'd look at you blankly and then say "I'm Emily!" Now she tells everybody who will listen how old she is. AND she's willful, and opinionated, and often hypersensitive. She's also starting to make jokes, and to goof on us, which is lovely beyond my ability to describe.
She's still in diapers at night. She's occasionally dry in the morning; but what's more interesting to me than those spotty successes is that her diaper is slowly becoming less wet overnight. (Tonight will be different. Tonight she REFUSED to go before bedtime - I think she was cold, and wanted to get under the covers.) Slowly but surely she's reaching that physiological stage. She's still a bit cranky when I put her diaper on at night - but sometimes I think that's just because she knows it means "bedtime," and at this time of year she's trying to sell me on the idea that if it's light outside it can't POSSIBLY be bedtime. Con artist. What am I going to do when she's 14 and so much better at it?
In other news, I've decided to shift my career focus a bit. Just as I once grudgingly caved in to the fact that I enjoyed computer programming and had an aptitude for it, I am now grudgingly admitting that I enjoy user interface and web design. So I'm working on finding some formal education to that effect - not a bachelor's program, but something I could put on my resumé to mitigate as much as possible the miniscule amount of experience I have in this area. The trouble is, the most promising place I've found - they offer online certificate programs in both web design and graphic design - doesn't offer college credit classes, and my employer will only pay for college credit classes (even if you're not working toward a degree). So that means we'd have to foot the bill. You can do it month-to-month; but still, I feel like I have to be Absolutely Certain before I commit my family to something like that.
But it sure does look like fun.
And here's my thinking about all of that: the more I work with (and on) graphical applications, the more I'm becoming convinced that everything is eventually going to live in a web browser - probably pretty damn soon, too. (Yes, I know I'm not the first person to have made that observation.) I've been studying Swing (a Java GUI toolkit) for about a week, and I'm amazed at how much of it I could do with HTML and CSS (which I know a lot better than I know Swing, but still don't know in depth). I think rich clients will become more and more boutique or niche applications, and will eventually suffer the fate of the dinosaur. Maybe not in my career lifetime; but it wouldn't surprise me.
Right now web designers don't get paid much - at least the storefront/shopping cart-type web designers. And I suspect it'll never pay what software engineering did in its heyday. But I think this area of programming has a longer shelf-life, and I have to think my experience with applications - even non-GUI applications - and programming languages will lend me some credibility.
Hence my desire not to pick some fly-by-night certificate program. (I can't find much about these guys out there; but they did win an award back in 2001.) There just isn't much out there available as on-line self-paced courses; and realistically that's all I'm going to be able to do until Em is quite a bit older. (Well, okay, I probably could manage - I've got a colleague whose son is about a year older, and she's almost done with her masters in computer science - but y'all know me, and you know I'd blow it off too much.) If it was less money - even half the price - I might chance it. I might chance it anyway. I mean, really, what I NEED to do is stop dithering.
It would be awfully nice to have fun at work again.