The same old grind...

Alas, no baby pictures this time around, as I've been forbidden by my Darling Wife from posting any more pictures where deviants and other scoundrels can see them.

However, our dog has taken to sleeping in the baby's chair whenever possible, so the baby looks pretty much just like this, only with less hair and a diaper:

Feel free to drop me an email if you want *actual* baby pictures.

Life on the home front has settled into a rather comfortably boring routine:

• We hired a nanny! Her name is Jennifer, and she is absolutely great with Blake, and as a bonus she's even taken a liking to Gruffydd, who absolutely adores her.
• Still no sleep around here, for a couple of reasons.
  Turns out, Blake is not one of those modern Super Babies that starts humming Mozart and sleeping through the night at 3 months. He's thoroughly old-school, in that he insists on the traditional 3AM feeding. And 4:30 AM. And 6AM. And, of course, we must never ever sleep in past 7AM no matter what, as there are untold wonders happening out there in the world which he must absolutely participate in.
  More significantly, my Darling Wife has gone back to work, which means that her life revolves around pumping milk. Constantly. From dawn until the wee-hours of the night. Her dedication to the task is almost super-human, actually, but it does cut into our sleep a bit. Speaking of super-human achievements:
  
• Cryptana hit 60! Now that I've beat World of Warcraft, I've moved on to other games....actually, of course I haven't. The game changes very little after 60 - it's just that your nice little "XP" bar is replaced by a "Faction" bar. Faction is just like XP, except it takes much longer to gain faction, there are multiple groups you need to gain faction with, the faction bar is "green" while the XP bar was "blue", and once you get to the top layer of faction you get some kind of little goodie (some epic armor or a recipe or what have you). Kinda monotonous, but as a wise man once said, if clicking on things and watching a progress bar go up isn't your idea of fun, you might want to think about a different hobby.
  As an idea of how long it takes to gain faction... I'm trying to get to Exalted faction with Warsong Outriders now, to get some nice bracelets. You need something on the order of 45000 faction points to get there (3000 to Friendly, 6000 to Honored, 12000 to Revered, 24000 to Exalted). You gain Faction by playing games of Capture the Flag. Each game of Capture the Flag can net you between 50 faction points (if you lose) all the way up to around 200 (if you win). So we're looking at having to play between 225 and 900 games of capture the flag, each of which takes between 10 minutes and an hour. And that's just for a single faction (there are two other PvP factions, not to count grinding PvP rank itself).
  
  If you do the math, you can see that I'm spending lots of time in my uber-leet PvP gear, pictured below in front of the Horde's precious, precious flag (that fishbowl on my head is a Goblin Rocket Helm to stun would-be flag stealers, and that handsome fellow on my right is my Felhound, to sniff out stealthy druids and rogues). And that blade, peeking out over my back, is a Scythe - the coolest looking weapon in the game. Much cooler than some dumb epic hammer from Molten Core that certain do-gooders like to carry around.
  
  Anyhow, at least grinding PvP faction is pretty fun - most other forms of grinding faction have you killing the same monsters over and over again.
  

• Half Life 2 Episode 1 comes out in 3 weeks. Maybe that'll save me from my WoW obsession...