We’ve paid for a complete phonics course from Phonics International and are working through it, and in addition we’ve  been letting him use MSN on my wife’s laptop (which he is fascinated by, calling it “mummy’s parootah”, aww.) Of course he needs someone sitting with him to help him out but he can answer simple yes/no questions and can type ‘cat’ all by himself. He also recognises his name and knows when a statement is directed at him. I believe that this will be invaluable to him in future as the world he is growing up in relies more and more on the personal computer for social interaction, information gathering and communication.

I have more thoughts on this subject but need to organise them more efficiently before commiting them to ‘paper’ as it were.

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You may wonder what I’m blathering about, well its this. I’ve been following CAD for some time now (if you like a good chuckle and a well written webcomic check out the archives) and honestly didn’t see this coming. The subject matter is a difficult one and as a away of breaking out of the pigeonhole of ‘Gaming Comic’ its one of the most effective plot twists I’ve seen. Tim sums up his reasons for it here, and I stand behind him wholeheartedly.

Gamers are people too with all the baggage and emotional turmoil that that entails, its about time someone said so. I salute you Tim and will continue to read CAD as long as you continue to write it.

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You may remember that I posted a couple of months ago about my new job, writing for a gaming blog, well I’ve been sloggin away at that for a couple of months now and am enjoying it immensely. I have a routine that I go through every day for this job, this is important if you’re working at home otherwise you just end up watching TV all day and getting nothing done. Now I’m not normally a disciplined kind of person, it used to be that I needed someone standing over me in order for me to get anything done (that wasn’t left till the last minute and terribly rushed), this is why I dropped out of university, among other things. Arthur has helped me in this regard, for his sake I’ve had to get into a daily routine and I have adapted this routine to enable me to blog about games.

My weekday generally goes as follows:

• 8:30am - Woken by my wife with tea, she has already retrieved Arthur from his cot and set him loose.
• 8:45am - Tea and morning nicotine consumned I dress and go downstairs to greet my companion for the days adventures, I make him breakfast, feed him breakfast and a bottle, and change his undercarriage. I learned early on to leave the changing of the night’s nappy until he’d eaten, according to my mother this is due to something called the gastrocolic(sp?) reflex. In other words you put something in one end, something comes out the other.
• 9:05am - While Arthur busies himself with one of his many toys, climbs on the couch, or wanders ,seemingly aimlessly, between the living room and his bedroom babbling to himself almost constantly. I switch on the computer, wait for it to boot, and then check my mail (Gmail) and open Google Reader. I then proceed to sift through the 30 odd feeds I have from various gaming websites for anything that seems interesting. I generally start with GamePress which is a site which collects the press releases from alot of the major publishers and developers in one place and is the place to get official information, screenshots and videos. I then move on to the others leaving the Digg gaming feed till last as it has the most stuff in it and I can immediately disregard anything in it that I’ve seen before. As I go through the feeds I use one Firefox window to display my reader on one screen and drag any links to stories that catch my attention to another Firefox window I have on the other screen, opening them in tabs grouped by subject. This can take me the rest of the morning (with interruptions as you’ll see).
• 10:00am - I start getting Arthur ready for our daily excursion to buy milk and any other supplies which may be required, this takes about twenty minutes depending on how long it takes to find where he’s hidden his shoes, and whether he rehides the one that I’ve found whilst I look for for the other one.
• 10:20am - We leave the house and wander up to my wife’s work to ask her what she wants for dinner, this determines my route for the next 45 minutes. I don’t use a pushchair, but carry Arthur around in a Freedom Sling which is alot more convenient than a pushchair and leaves my hands free for carrying things and reading magazines etc. The pictures on that site are of very small babies and I can assure you that Arthur is no longer that small, butI can still carry him comfortably in the sling.
• 11:15am -We return home and I drink my Mocha and eat my cake whilst Arthur does his thing. I use this coffee time to continue sifting feeds for stories.
• 11:30am - I put Arthur down for a nap, and when he’s asleep on the sheepskin, I go for another dose of nicotine.
• 11:45am - I return to sifting feeds and start planning posts, I check YouTube to see if any trailers I’ve found have been posted there yet, YouTube videos are so much easier to post than those from places like IGN or GameTrailers. If I turn any up I put those I’ve going to post about with the rest of the information I’ve found regarding the game in question. Any that I find interesting but not really worth posting about I put in a separate window to be added to the sites FeedBeat channel.
• 12:15pm - Arthur wakes up and I go and prepare his lunch while he watches Pocoyo and Paz. After his lunch I change him. and go back to my work.
• 1:00pm - On most days by this point I can start writing in earnest. I write the text of the post first then go on the hunt for screenshots or other images related to the subject. Google Image Search is a great tool for this. If the post relates to something I’ve posted about before I’ll link to the previous post, though I should really talk to the tech guy about adding a related posts plugin.
• 1:45pm - The wife comes home for her lunch break and we go for a cigarette and a cup of tea whilst Arthur amuses himself in his room (He can’t be trusted in the living room on his own, he gets into everything at the moment.) His bedroom door is left open and he has the run of his room and the hall while we are upstairs in our room. We can hear everything he does and says with out bedroom door open and have gotten pretty good at being able to tell what he’s getting up to from the noises he’s making.
• 2:00pm we return downstairs and sit chatting in the living room for half an hour I’m usually at my computer whilst the wife interacts with Arthur and he tells her about his morning (he could be expounding on the merits free market economics for all we know, but I doubt it).
• 2:30pm - The wife bids her farewells to Arthur and goes back to work, Arthur returns to his ground state of babbling, eating one of his books, or talking to one of his many bears. I go back to writing, occasionally interrupted by Arthur bringing me a gift of a sock or a shoe.
• 3:00pm - I take a break and spend some time interacting with Arthur. I prepare his snack and afternoon bottle, he eats one and drinks the other and is ready for his afternoon nap. I doze on the couch with him in my arms as he slowly drifts off to sleep and once he’s asleep I take him through to his room and put him in his cot. I then go and have another cigarette and depending on how much work I’ve got left to do I either do it or have a nap myself.
• 5:00pm - The wife returns from work and either wakes me up with a cup of tea or brings me one whilst I work. She tells me about her day and the daft things her customer’s have been doing to their computers.
• 5:30pm - Arthur usually wakes up around this time. and I go off to make the dinner. We sit down in front of the Simpsons at 6:00pm to eat, or in Arthur’s case, spread dinner around his table, face, hair and the floor.
• 6:30pm - The baby is now the wife’s responsibility and I tie up any loose ends that I have left over from the day’s writing. I then move on to read my other feeds, catching up with the other blogs that I read and comment on. after doing that I generally have an hour to myself before I have to bath the baby and spend it playing a game, looking at a website that has been suggested by a trusted source, or writing for this blog.
• 8:00pm - Bath the baby and get him ready for bed.
• 8:30pm - Baby bedded, my wife and I have a cigarette and a cuppa.
• 9:00pm - The rest of the evening (about three hours of it) is ours to do with as we please. I generally get a couple of hours gaming in whilst the wife watches TV, or we may get a DVD out.
• 12:00am -Bed.

That’s my day, I’m sure any time management experts out there could suggest ways of streamlining it so that it’s more efficient but let me tell you its quite hard to be efficient whilst taking care of a one year old. The above is by no means a hard and fast schedule, again the presence of Arthur requires quite a large degree of flexibility.#

So back to the subject at hand, I’ve not been posting much on this blog because my days are pretty full as it is, by the time I have a moment to post something I find I’m all written out. The words no longer flow and I find myself with nothing to say. Maybe I should start planning time for this blog into my schedule. Maybe post something once a week, I’ve got a few drafts on the go at the moment and could quite easily stretch those out over a few weeks.

Anyway, thats why posts have been sparse, I promise I’ll try harder in future.

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Other news: I can heartily reccommend Company of Heroes, Its really rather good. If you played and liked Dawn of War then this is the next logical step. With slightly more depth and tactical options you really have to think quite fast to get the missions completed.

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