You can’t scare me, Seneca: I’m making good use of my time.

Kate and my first date was a true stay-up-all-night metropolitan extravaganza: the Rainbow Room for cosmopolitans and dancing on the revolving floor, then Pravda (this was before they had a sign on the street, mind you), then a hole-in-the sidewalk Chinatown hipster dive called Double Happiness, then watching the sun come up on the roof of my building.

So now we have a house, a baby, and a cat, and the all-night revels are continuing unabated. Lydia’s had, by a conservative estimate, about four hundred diaper changes; I’m now better at changing diapers than at playing the banjo or riding a motorcycle. Soon, I will be better at changing diapers than driving a car, and finally I will be better at changing diapers than at typing, or looking at things, or breathing.

There’s plenty of other stuff to do in the small hours, too: once or twice a year, there’s a frantic scrabbling noise from the kitchen that means Squeaky the cat has caught a mouse. Squeaky isn’t really a mouser, he’s more of a dilettante catch-and-chaser, so my job is to nab the mouse when Squeaky releases it, perform triage, and either (prognosis:good) release it into the wild, or (prognosis:bad) perform last rites and dispatch the victim. All this in my underwear, on my hands and knees in the hallway.

So I’m continuing to stay up late and learn new skills. Changer of the wet! Defender of the furry! Patroller of the midnight hours! Pantsless roamer of the hallways!