Fellow blogger (and fellow Dad x 2!) Brett has posted a great list of the 10 Ways You Will Change When You Become a Parent. My personal favs:

2. Keen awareness of the location of potentially dangerous items.
5. All of a Sudden, Everybody Driving Faster than You is a Fricking Maniac.
8. Sleeping In? HAH!

I’ve been a loyal GMail user for almost 3 years. And today I get this:

Essentially, it says I’ve done something wrong and as such I’m being barred from access to my email for “up to” 24 hours. I’ve done nothing wrong — I’m not running Gspace or anything like that. Other than leaving a Gmail tab open in Firefox all day, I’m a pretty low-volume Gmail user.

The trouble is, I have evidently become too dependent on all things Google to run my life. I use Gmail for my non-work email (in fact, that’s what precipitated this whole thing – I ordered some jackets for the administrative team and needed to go into my account and find the receipt so I could be reimbursed…), I use Google Docs for a lot of basic scratch-pad stuff to flesh out ideas and such before I bring them into Pages or Word (if necessary) to apply formatting, and I use Google Calendar to keep my life in order.

I guess it just never hit me that losing access to that stuff for a significant length of time could leave me blowing in the wind. Today’s Gmail “lockdown” is only affecting one piece of this, but I had a moment of panic as I went to refresh my calendar and my Google Docs to see if they’d been affected.

Has anyone else been a victim of this? How long did your “time-out” last? I’ve read some anecdotal evidence on the web of people being allowed back in after 5 or 10 minutes, but I’ve been down over an hour now. Strangely, though, my Google Notifier is working. That’s just odd.

So why are you still here? Go download it!

Melinda and I had a great discussion with Julie Germann of the MO Association of Elementary Schools about how newer administrators can involve themselves in educational politics. Pretty good stuff!

Plus, I also spend a few minutes touting the virtues of my new iPod touch… You know you want one….