4.10

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I started working on an alternate work schedule, 10 hours a day 4 days a week.  This gives me a day off to watch Charlie.  Gina works three days a week: we have a friend watch Charlie two days a week, and I take the third.

Mundane stuff.  But it's a fascinating change of pace for me.  This is the first day I have off, and I'm nearly going nuts.  So far, I've cleaned the kitchen, basement, living room, vacuumed, taken Charlie grocery shopping and out on a walk, given him a bath--and it's a quarter past 2.  He's sleeping now and I'm about to work on the box images for one of my games.

Also interesting, for me, is that each working day, I'm one of the first to arrive at work and almost always the last to leave.  As it should be, of course--I'm working 10 hours with an additional mandatory unpaid lunch half-hour, and with a few minutes on either side, that's almost 11 hours at work each day.  With the shorter days, I usually get there just as the sun is coming up (but a little before), and leave after it's gone back down.  Perhaps one reason today is so energetic for me is that I feel like it's been dark since Sunday evening, and suddenly I'm surrounded by daylight.

Every evening at work, as I'm leaving for the darkened parking lot, I feel a strange camaraderie with those few people lingering in that building.  There's something strange and exciting for me about being in office buildings after dark--some sense of being backstage, if you will.  It's idiotic, of course (grown men don't think these things, I've been told), but there it is.  I like it.

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