It’s a girl! Yaaaaay!

My beautiful, wonderful friend L is expecting a baby. When she told me this, a few weeks ago, I surprised myself and her by how incredibly moved I was by the news, I just cried and cried. This is something I’ve been fantasizing about for a long time, L having a child. When I’ve fantasized about teaching a kid various things or taking a kid to the park, I’ve always thought about it being L’s kid, not my own for some reason.

I can’t wait to meet Mini, which is what we’ve come to call her. Yes, it’s a girl, I’m sure of it. I get to go to the next ultrasound, and I can’t wait for that either.

Mini kicked today for the first time, and L messaged me to let me know. I was hiding behind my monitor, wiping tears away and desperately hoping nobody would come into my office.

She’s due three days before my birthday, and I can’t think of a better present than to get to hold that child and welcome her into the world.

Monday night: accompanied my friend Ced to Alliance Atlantis’ star-studded party for the World Film Fest. Ced gets lots of movie passes and always gives me the ones to Québécois movies. He needed me there to tell him who all the celebrities were, and there were tons.

Tuesday night: stayed at work until three am, playing a game.

Wednesday night: Yulblog.

Thursday night: got pissed with Paul. We ended up sitting at the bar playing “Naked Spot the Difference”: a videogame where you have to find the differences between two pictures, but with pictures of pr0n. Real quality entertainment, and great fun. His account of the evening is a lot better than mine.

At work, two major deadlines and this morning, one hangover.

We are finishing up a game this week at work, the project that has taken most of my time this summer. In one of the game modes, the computer plays through the level, then the player tries to beat the computer’s time. One of the final tasks in the project is to play the game, recording ourselves in the process. In the final product, these recordings will be played back as the “computer’s performance”.

Now, we have to have a certain number of these recordings, so that the time to beat is not always the same. So we spent the day recording ourselves playing on Tuesday, until we got to the hardest level. By the end of the day, we still didn’t have a single recording of ourselves passing the damn level. End of day became evening, evening became dead of night, still with no success. At 2 am I was playing the game, always coming so close to succeeding, but failing over and over, wishing I could go home and sleep.

I kept thinking about all those nights I spent playing video games, having to go to bed, but wanting to keep playing. Here I was having to play, but wanting desperately to go home. We all finally went home at 3 am, defeated by our own game.

Wednesday came and went still without success, until we finally reduced the difficulty of the game, feeling like lame-ass cheaters.

Feedback came from the client today: it’s too hard.