Breakfast was nerds candy and a flinstones vitamin, lunch is left over birthday cake and water (wow, that really sounds bad).

Anyway, not so much progress yesterday on the book - but I have an excuse.  The new budget for NASA came out and, as my wife is a rocket scientist in training, we spent the entire day (and yes, I mean ENTIRE) planning out what that new budget meant for our future. 

We watched where the money is going and the result is that we're going to have to move so that Kat can do the research she wants to do.  East coast, here we come.  An added benefit to moving is escaping my family - as they are starting to look like leeches poised to pounce upon us and never let go.  Don't get me wrong, it's not like we won't help out if we have the ability - we just don't want them living with us.  That level of drama would be so crushing I could write a book on it alone.  We're just getting started on our lives! For heaven's sake, putting that level of burden on us when we're so weak is just setting us up for failure.

On another note, we've also decided that we're too ambitious to have children.  I calmly expressed my emotional resistance to the concept and Kat accepted my feelings.  However, she also made a very good argument.

We don't want to have a baby and then have to pay someone else to raise our child because we're too busy.  And I quote, "having our child raised in daycare or by a nanny is pointless.  If you're so keen to pass on your genetic make-up then you might as well donate to a sperm bank.  The child will be raised by someone else anyway, so I don't see the difference."

I've read story after story of depressed children who hate their successful parents because they were too busy to give them the attention they deserved.  So, I relented (even though I'm still  sad about it).  We came to the decision because there's no one in our families that could really help us out.  Her parents are busy (nuclear engineer and pharmacist) and my parents aren't qualified (both clinically depressed and obese). 

We made a compromise though: when Kat reaches the age of 40-50 we'll adopt a child and spend our full retired efforts teaching and loving that child.  We won't ask to be called mom and dad, but grandpa and grandma.   So, we'll skip being parents and go straight into being grandparents.  To be truthful, this has to be one of the strangest ideas that I've ever heard of - but then again, neither one of us has ever been normal.  In fact, we've kind of rebelled against the whole concept.

*Sigh* Anyway, for having my entire plan of where my life is  headed uprooted in the course of a single day I'd say I'm handling things pretty well.   I'm still a bit shaken, but I've got work to do.  It's time to bottle things up for awhile and - Get Writing!