Cogent BCS analysis

Thanksgiving was fun. I laughed, I cried, I stuffed my face. actual blog postings, instead of "videos people emailed me," may follow soon...

Almost 17 years later...

STILL FUNNY.

an intermission

Daddy has food poisoning. I'll help him blog.

I-L-L

It's been a long time since the Illini had anything this big to be happy about on the football field.

huh?

My wife will spend a study break watching Tivo during Theo's nap. Today's show is "Heroes."

I'm sure it's a great show if you've watched it from the beginning, but boy does it sound ridiculous if you walk into the room in the middle of an episode...

Proof we're not feeding Theo enough fiber

EDIT: LOLTheo!

Where we've been

Where have we not been, more like it. Theo is quite the traveler, he's been on car trips to Mississippi, North Carolina and points in between, and two plane trips to Chicago. He's been a complete joy throughout.

Daddy went to Maine a couple weeks ago, and sadly for him he somehow suffered a partial ligament tear in a knuckle on his right middle finger. Doc says 2 more weeks in a splint and we'll see how it's doing. In the meantime, please don't take offense...

OK, enough of that

Three months away was enough. I'm going to resume posting here later today... As I expected, I've finally forgotten why I stopped, and it turns out I'm not recording my thoughts anywhere else without it, so it does serve a purpose.

Not much to say here...

... a situation that doesn't seem likely to change anytime soon. Sorry for both of you who've been reading regularly that it didn't turn out as I'd hoped but it's not worth it at the moment. Call it a hiatus, I guess...

New Photos of Theo

Posted at Shutterfly and .mac

I'm helpin' my Daddy with his blog!

This is easy! We just make fun of people for having different lifestyles and/or beliefs!

Two notes:

One, note to self. In your eagerness to accept free baby supplies whenever possible, maybe you shouldn't be too cheap to ask the giver some questions, like "Did your child outgrow these diapers, or are they just completely useless and you knew I was dense enough to take them off your hands?"

Two, note to Kimberly-Clark. For most English speakers, the word "Ultimate," used in a construction such as "Huggies Ultimate" is not interpreted to mean "will spray Gulden's down to your baby's thighs and up to their collarbone the first time they have a movement while sitting on your lap."

Being Daddy...

It's hard work.

A story for my friends who like to complain about the laziness of media folks.

I'm surprised this woman manages to get out of bed in the morning.

Agreed.

As read on a homebrew forum today...

I've long gotten over the kinds of sites which cultivate museum-quality examples of classic Internet douchebaggery.

Stranger than fiction...

I'm not quite back to a mental state where I can compose a full blog post yet. And honestly -- nothing I have to say about the first few weeks of parenthood will reflect well on me or encourage anyone to become a parent.

So it's probably best to let the fog of new parent fatigue blur my memory of the past 3 weeks before I post anything about it. Let's just say that if I ever imply that the first few weeks with a new baby aren't an order of magnitude worse than any of the existing parenting literature lets on, you should call me a f'in liar.

But, seeing as the past few weeks of our life have been dominated by trying to get food into our Theodore, this post from my buddy James is especially relevant, and hilarious, and you should be reading him every day instead of waiting for me to get my wits together enough to write regularly.

BTW -- when the lactation consultants and pediatricians say 8-12 times a day, they really mean 7, right? They're just lying when they tell you that it's possible to breastfeed a kid every two hours, when that kid takes nearly an hour to finish a feeding in the first place...

A special note...

To the anonymous honorary uncle who sent my new son a "Sex Cannon" bib...you win "best present of his life so far" award. Pictures to follow.

Home again...

Yeah, so liveblogging the birth...not my first priority. But all went well. I've added a postdated post from the day of birth, the note I sent to friends and family is replicated here and I plan to record my recollections of the 8 days in the hospital little by little as time allows.

Ruth, Theodore and I arrived home last Friday. Since then we've been trying to keep up with the boy's stomach while still getting some sleep. Little guy lost more weight than the docs were comfortable with when he was in the hospital and had a touch of jaundice, but never required any interventions more severe than extra food, which Mommy and the formula can have been able to provide. He's filling out nicely and we hope the pediatrician won't be calling DCFS on us after tomorrow's visit. :) Every day he seems to be more aware of what's going on around him.

Ruth was ecstatic to be back in the outside world after 8 nights in the hospital. Her blood pressure, after dropping initially, rose again before we left the hospital, so doc has put her on blood pressure medication and is keeping an eye on her. Otherwise she is feeling better and getting around better every day, and already thinking about schoolwork again.

Grandma and Grandpa Avelis arrived Sunday afternoon for a 2-week stay and have been absolute lifesavers for our sleep and sanity. Mom, Dad and the two of us are getting everything done I'd planned for before the baby was born, and they're getting to know their grandson.

I'm doing...OK. I've been taking on much of the late night duties (and doodies), which has been much harder than any book or well-meaning advisor could ever get across. The last week and a half have passed in a flash, but I'm trying to savor every minute, even when those minutes are very loud, messy and seem to last forever.

To answer everyone's first question: Ruth is calling our boy Theo or Teddy; I'm calling him Theodore, Theo, or Ted depending on what feels right at the time. So just pick whichever one you like. We figured when we picked a name with a million diminutives we were giving up the right to insist on one over another.

Second most common question: His name isn't John because we liked this name better. :) Not to mention that having grown up "III", I think saddling a kid with a "IV" at the end of his name would just be cruel, unless perhaps his family summers in a yacht moored off St. Tropez.

And now that I've bored you all half to death, YES, there are photos. And if a proud papa can brag for a moment -- After his recovery from a bad case of conehead at birth, we have one seriously cute kid.

First is a slideshow of our hospital pics from the first few days. 2nd is the same pictures on Shutterfly (in case you can't view the slideshow, or wanted to order prints of a 5-minute old cheese-covered conehead). Link three and link four are pics my Dad has taken since he's arrived. I already have 50 more pictures on the camera to download...just something else to fall behind on during these early weeks.

Thanks to everyone for all your good wishes and love.

Theodore Payton

It was a rough Saturday night in Newport, but it all worked out in the end and Ruth and I have a wonderful baby boy.

Theodore Payton was born via Cesarean at 4:41 AM, 5/13/2007. He weighed 5 lbs, 14.5 oz and was 19 inches long. He has short dark hair and thank goodness for him, more than one person has already said he takes after his mother.

Little guy has had a busy day of sleeping, diaper changes and visits from all the nurses in the center. He seems very healthy and so far, easygoing. He's rooming in with us in the hospital and we love having him.

I'll shorten the story somewhat -- Tuesday at an OB appointment they found Ruth had elevated blood pressure; after a couple days of labwork and tests and two days of bedrest, they decided last Thursday that she had pre-eclampsia, and after initially admitting her for observation they decided that with the baby at 37 weeks and Ruth already dilated 2 cm, they would try to induce on Friday.

Friday's induction got nowhere, so they let her sleep and tried again Saturday. They ended up breaking Ruth's water in midafternoon Saturday. By 8:30 she was ready for the epidural (which she highly recommends), then she started pushing at about 12:15am or so. After close to 3.5 hours of heroic pushing, the OB advised us that the kid just wasn't going to be delivered except by Cesarean.

Ruth lost a lot of blood during the surgery but has avoided a transfusion so far. They finally took her off all the medications for the pre-eclampsia this morning, then got her back on her feet and hopefully they have us home this Thursday.

Daddy (for those who are interested) spent a good hour with Theo that first morning while they finished the surgery and returned Ruth to our hospital room. I finally collapsed at 7something in the AM, then spent the day learning more about him and helping out my morphine-happy wife, finding enough time to buy her first Mothers Day card. I even found time for a 2nd nap.

Today is a lot of learning about feeding and getting diapers to fit and not getting peed on when changing them. Ruth feels bad that I have to do it all but given everything we went through, she's very happy with how it has all turned out.

And suddenly...

Ignore the blog for a few days, and suddenly "expectant father" takes on a whole new meaning.

Tuesday morning we dropped off my sis at the airport to fly home, and went to the OB for a regular checkup. It was a madhouse -- the usually tiny waiting room was double-packed, to where I went out and sat on the porch of the OB's office and read a 2 week old Sports Illustrated. When we finally got in, the nurse (not the usual awesome-cool nurse, but the other one) took Ruth's blood pressure, didn't tell us what it was, but asked Ruth for a urine sample.

Uh-Oh, said the worrier in my head. Our OB hasn't asked for urine since we first got there. If she's not telling us the blood pressure, and asking for urine, that sounds to me like a warning sign for Pre-eclamsia. But I'm no doctor.

The OB was in the room before Ruth could go to the bathroom. He told Ruth to relax, no biggie, he's just going to take her blood pressure again. After the reading, he said, "OK, you're done here. Go over to the hospital. The birthing center will be expecting you, they'll run some tests. Go ahead and make an appointment for here next week before you leave...but that might change."

So we go to the hospital, in a mental state of "Oh crap we so do not have it all together for this baby yet." Luckily the nurses talked me down. We did a non-stress test -- they hooked Ruth up to a fetal monitor, which watches the baby's heart rate, watches for contractions, and watches Ruth's blood pressure and heart rate also. They took blood and urine to the lab for tests.

After a couple hours, it was pretty clear that things weren't great, but not so bad that we would be staying at the hospital. They sent us home with orders for Ruth to stay off her feet (which went over not at all well) and to come back Thursday. They also set up a 24-hour urine sample, which means she saved all her urine from 8am Wednesday to 8am Thursday, which we brought back to the lab today.

So Tuesday I spent my time trying to keep Ruth sitting, if not laying down. It's not easy. She seemed to think bedrest was a synonym for "Homework, appointments, long walks...whatever you normally do, superwoman."

Wednesday I went to Providence and finally passed the hated Cisco exam, then did a bunch of baby shopping "just in case." Ruth spent the morning in bed with as stomach complaint, which was bizarre because normally her stomach only goes off when she overeats, which she definitely didn't do on Tuesday. A quick look at What to Expect... says that unexplained stomach pain is a secondary sign for...pre-eclamsia.

So this morning we got up and I had a funny feeling I should start packing a bag, which I did.

We went to the hospital, where the lab monkey forced us to "register" before we would be allowed to hand them two jugs of Ruth's urine, even though said HAD THE FUCKING ORDER TO PROCESS THE URINE IN HIS HAND, and the urine jugs clearly had the same name on them as the order, so God forbid you're missing a piece of fucking paper. I had my usual "you fucking paper pushers will all be sorry if we get single-payer healthcare and you're out of a job" outburst and we went to registration, where the bureaucrat quite unhelpfully told us we were just here on Tuesday. Really? FASCINATING.

We went to the hospital's birthing center, which is a haven of actual attentive, service-oriented people in the vast healthcare wasteland. Our OB, who gave birth to dry wit long before he delivered any babies, happened to be in the center -- "Good Morning. Do I want to know why you're here? Probably not." After a replay of Tuesday -- non-stress test, blood tests, urine tests -- the staff decided Ruth's blood pressure and lab results were worse than Tuesday and Ruth needed to stay the night for more testing. I went home to finish packing the bag while they set up Ruth in a room.

When I got back, another blood pressure test was worse than the one before; there was now clearly a pattern of her blood pressure rising, rather than falling, despite bedrest. Ruth also felt like crap, more so than the last couple days.

At about 5pm, the doctor came by to say, "Well, you have pre-eclamsia. You're 37 weeks along, so the baby is full-term. Since the only cure for pre-eclamsia is delivering the baby, we're going to do some labwork in the morning and then talk about delivery."

Then he felt up my wife (in a very medical way), stated she was 2cm dilated and effaced enough that we could go ahead tomorrow with induction and vaginal birth.

So...72 hours ago I was thinking in terms of multiple weeks of just the two of us...now, as Ruth is finally sleeping in the most uncomfortable bed in the world, I'm looking at just a few more hours before this all gets started.

After everything we've been through, it's still a shock to finally be staring parenthood in the face. I know I should be sleeping to prepare myself for tomorrow, but I can't sleep. Even after all the time we've spent thinking and preparing and talking about it, this is still too much to put my head around.

Kid, I can't wait to meet you in person instead of playing morse-code through Mommy's belly. And you're almost here.

Wish us luck...

Where I've been

I am terrible at forming new habits, especially good ones. And I'm pretty much limited to one or two new habits at a time. So I should probably be happy posting weekly for the time being, and once I'm done creating the other good habits I've been working on since I was in my teens (house cleaning, brushing my teeth, daily exercise, etc) maybe I can worry about the infrequency of my posts.

Anyway, in the past week I've attended the last (and most fun) of my three cooking classes at J&W; failed the Cisco test, again, this time just barely; and I spent four days at a male bonding event at a buddy's house in southern NH. Basically, three days/nights with some college friends, dedicated to playing cards, grilling food, abusing alcohol and enjoying the outdoors as much as the fickle New England spring would allow.

Of course, enjoying the outdoors in New England while being too inebriated to think of basic precautions means that two of the four of us ended up with ticks -- FIVE TICKS between the two of us. Because my wife is a Professional, she was able to take the one off my back fairly easily. The other one was positioned to give me a free vasectomy and had already made some progress in that direction, so I took care of him myself. Nothing like having the back end of a sesame seed with legs sticking out of your nethers.

[We'll pause for a moment so all my male readers can yell "EWWWWWW!" and jump up and down around the room.....done? Cool.]

Now I spend the next month looking for symptoms of Lyme disease and hoping that I caught the little bastards early enough for that not to be a problem. Hopefully the bacteria will die of boredom as I will probably spend most of that time reading the Cisco website.

Also, while I was gone, the fine US-based crib company sent me free replacement parts for the ones I hosed up. So with any luck we will have a changing table in the next couple days...and no hard feelings, OK?

I'm completely mystified by the mindset that judges one's moral character in life by how well you fit in some political party or other. It makes no sense to me at all.

Urge to kill rising...

This post is pretty much written in code, but anyone who has had to assemble furniture may recognize pieces of it. The last thing I want to do is run down the fine American employees of a fine US juvenile furniture manufacturer, so I'm not going to name the company I'm talking about.


I started assembling a changing table two days ago. At this point, I'm wishing I'd taken on an easier task, like maybe the Boston Marathon, or Everest. I'm not the handiest guy on Earth, but I've put together quite a bit of the furniture in our house; I'm an old hand with a screwdriver and an allen wrench, so nothing in the instructions seemed difficult.

In practice, however, I found myself dealing with instructions like "Tighten the four screws securely because you're about to cover them up, making them inaccessible forever," followed immediately by "bend outward the panels you just screwed in securely, taking care not to TEAR THE TABLE APART ENTIRELY."

There are eight connectors, called "cam locks" in the instructions, that appear to be responsible for holding together the entire apparatus. I screwed in the connectors they lock into, carefully bent the sides apart without breaking them, put the shelf in place, and turned the cam locks...and instead of locking, they spun freely. Uh....huh?

Some quick examination revealed that the connectors weren't long enough to reach into the cam locks. So I bent the sides apart again to pull the shelf out, loosened them what seemed an appropriate amount, carefully put the shelf in place to check the placement of the connectors (making sure they were unscrewed far enough for the locks to engage.

...I carefully bent the sides apart without breaking them, put the shelf in place, and turned the cam locks...and instead of locking, they spun freely. Uh....huh?

Some quick examination revealed that the connectors weren't long enough to reach into the cam locks. So I bent the sides apart again to pull the shelf out, loosened them what seemed an appropriate amount, carefully put the shelf in place to check the placement of the connectors (making sure they were unscrewed far enough for the locks to engage.

[Hey, John, you just repeated the last two paragraphs. Yes, I did, because THAT'S HOW IT FUCKING HAPPENED. If I wanted to be more accurate, I would've repeated them FOUR TIMES.]

So the fourth time I had to bend apart the sides, it started to seem that they weren't as solid as they were when I first screwed them in. No problem, I figured that when the locks finally engaged they would hold everything together.

So I went to tighten the shelf -- two of the locks engaged correctly! Huzzah! The third one tightened...and then suddenly went loose. Oh, that can't be good. The fourth was still completely loose.

So I pulled the shelf back out, yet again, to find a bent connector, a "cam lock" in two pieces, and the sides of the table looser still, after another bending. I briefly considered that having 7/8 of the connectors in place would probably be plenty...then I thought about my wife's reaction to gaps between the shelves and sides of the table...and asked myself whether I would really be happy with the idea of my kids being "7/8ths supported" by this table.

So I put everything aside to start on the crib. And as I was stacking the vast amounts of styrofoam and plastic packing material in the corner of the baby's room to make way for the crib...what should drop out of the bottom of the box, but a folded-up half-sheet of typing paper, crushed in the bottom of the box.

I unfolded the sheet, to find an "Instructional Addendum." This addendum let me know that I shouldn't screw in the cam lock connectors to the stopping point, but only to an arbitrary point on the shaft; otherwise the cam locks would not engage properly, and "breakage will occur." Huh. Good thing I didn't know this ahead of time. Good thing this fine manufacturer didn't build their threads to an idiot-proof level of precision that could've prevented the problem. And it's a good thing they didn't spend the 5 minutes to put the "Instructional addendum" in the plastic bag with the rest of the instructions.

Because if they'd done all that, I'd have a fucking changing table in the nursery by now, instead of a pile of fine wood and wood veneers.

SO today I figure I get to order new hardware, and wait 3 weeks for it to arrive, hoping the hardware gets here before the baby. The good news is the crib only involves nuts and bolts, and it's about 50% done already.

So, as I said at the beginning, I have no desire to run down the fine American employees of a fine US juvenile furniture manufacturer...but to address them, and their shoddy connectors, variably threaded screws, and shoved-in-the-bottom-of-the-box "Addendum" for one moment...do you all maybe THINK THIS SORT OF LAZY SHIT MIGHT BE A TEENSY PART OF THE REASON WHY WE'RE ALL BUYING OUR FURNITURE FROM THE SWEDES THESE DAYS?! YOU'RE GETTING YOUR ASSES KICKED BY FUCKING SOCIALISTS!

Ahhh. That's better...

Making me feel old...

All Things Considered today played a fantastic essay from a gentleman who was a student at Columbine HS during the massacre there.

He's now 26.

Quick notes...

I was watching the BoSox game on Patriots Day and saw this happen. Be sure to wait until after the advertisement to see the replays.
--

Reason interviews one of the creators of The Venture Brothers, a Cartoon Network show that needs to be on your Tivo or Netflix list.

--

Some new pictures of my baby mama.

--

The big homebrew experiment is on temporary hold, after TurboTax Online informed me that we owed Uncle Sam $1700 for last year. In an ordinary year, this would be my indication to increase our withholding; but now that my income will be variable and we have another deduction on the way, I have no idea what I should do. Grumble.

Parody?

Hilarious for sure, but a better description might be, "Vast improvement on the original."

Water into whine

Just the suggestion of an appearance by Dick Cheney can convert Mormons into hippies?

He really IS the most powerful man on Earth!

Big Sexy tells the truth

No further comment needed.

Dumpster diving

Now that I'm unemployed and have the time (if not the cash) to think about having a hobby, I've decided to take up homebrewing. I spent a short apprenticeship with a couple of our devoted brewer friends, now I'm getting ready to order equipment and ingredients.

Of course, I'm going to need beer bottles -- non-screw-top bottles.

Back when I still lived in a group home for underprivileged slackers, two of my roommates took up brewing. Like any beer lover, rather than buying boring empty bottles, they took the value-added approach, buying multiple cases of Sam Adams and bringing them home to the rest of the ambition-impaired residents with an admonition to "Drink up!"

I had no desire to become a brewer at the time, but this certainly seemed like a part of the hobby I could get behind. However, my current roommates are either too pregnant or too feline to help me empty multiple cases.

I thought I was in good shape when I stopped by the base Packy this weekend and found that they're now carrying one of my favorite beers of all time. I brought home a case, grabbed my botttle opener to start digging into the important pre-brewing task of bottle emptying, and found...a screwtop. Derrrrrrrrrr...

[Inner voice: "So, John, you think you know enough about beer to brew your own, so why don't you know that your favorite beer comes in a screwtop??" John: Shut up, that's why.]

Clearly, drastic measures were necessary. Monday morning is neighborhood trash day, so during the sweet spot of the morning, after the employed folks have started their commute but before the Waste Management guys arrived...I went surveying the neighborhood recycling bins. Reuse > Recycling, right? I'm just making sure the neighborhood doesn't end up under 20ft of seawater next summer. AlGore would approve, even as the fashionable homeowners of the area considered calling the cops.

My rules: the bottle/can bins here are uncovered, so I was only grabbing visible bottles. No opening bags or bins, or rearranging the bin unless there were good bottles in view. There is a fine line between being a cheap craft brewer and being a bum.

I obviously missed at least one good party the other night, as some folks down the block had a 2L of Absolut Citron and about a case of Red Bull in the bin -- along with the mother lode, almost two grocery bags worth of Sam Adams bottles. Screw Monday morning, I'm heading back over there Saturday night.

Overall, it was a successful trip, I hauled in close to two cases of bottles (although not all of them were ideal -- see #3 below).

Some thoughts for my little corner of Newport, based on my expedition:

1. Too many damn wine drinkers around here. Don't get me wrong, I like my wine too; but you won't find a half-dozen bottles of wine in my recycling bin Monday morning without finding a few beer bottles as well.

2. If you're drinking Bud Light, what exactly is the point, or what do you think you're proving, by buying bottles? "Sure, my favorite beverage is the fermented product of indeterminate grains of dubious quality in superindustrial setting, but by God I'm no low-class cheapass! I drink LONGNECKS."

Please. Once you've decided a cheap buzz trumps taste, just buy the cans. In fact, buy the talls. The extra beer in each container provides a clear incentive to drink faster, so as to avoid the situation where the beer at the bottom of the can has been heated to undrinkability (about 1-2 degrees above absolute zero, by my guess).

3. For the three or four homes on my block alone who put away multiple packs of Heineken and Heine Lite last week... Heineken? Seriously? When we can WALK to liquor stores that carry fine east coast brews like Dogfish Head, Long Trail or Otter Creek? When some of your neighbors are the owners-brewers of local mainstay Newport Storm? No -- not you. When given a choice, you're going to pay about the same money, for beer to drink in your own home, and make it Heineken? Please see #2 above -- most of the same ideas apply.

I'm actually somewhat comforted by the preponderance of Heineken in this 'hood, because it means no one will be trying to steal my beer, which I'm planning to name "This Ale is as much UNLIKE Heineken as I could possibly make it."

Wish me luck.

"There are few things better than Cat Thread"

So says my sister. If you're not a frequent browser of Fark, behold the cat thread and acknowledge its power.

Bevy of backlogged posts on the way. I was in a foul mood yesterday on account of failing a Cisco exam, but I'm over it now. Why is a man with no interest in holding down a full-time IT job taking Cisco exams? Good question, long answer, don't ask.

Just know that all the cycles I'd usually invest in posting all things funny and informative are going into knowing the details of Cisco WLSEs and ASAs and ISRs and BFDs and WTFs. Grrrr.

Flying Chief Stirrup of the Staff?!?!?

As found on Slog, the following paragraph from a NYT story about the British hostages being released from Iran:

Boarding two naval helicopters, they then left for their base in Devon, where they are to be debriefed and to undergo medical and psychological checkups, said Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup, chief of the defense staff.

I think this is all part of a contest among high-ranking British military and law enforcement to see who can convince the US media to publish the most Monty Python-esque name. If CNN's next interview is with Commodore Sir B. Naanna Hammack of the HMS Naughtybits, I won't be the least bit surprised...


While I'm on the subject... I don't want to talk about anything even vaguely political but since this is Navy-related, it's got me spun up. Seeing those sailors forced to make those degrading statements made me sympathetic for the first time to the "OMG GLASS PARKING LOT!!!" crowd. Infuriating. Also, anyone questioning what those British sailors did or said while in Iranian captivity, or who thinks the average US sailor would be any better trained to deal with a similar situation, should STFU and go back to enjoying the ignorance those sailors make possible. That is all.

Housekeeping

If you're visiting the site in person you've probably seen the sidebar morph every now and again; I like the idea of having some dynamic content over there I can mess with and update more-or-less transparently even when I'm not in the mood to spew words.

I just realized that there are people out there saying nice things about me and I should probably separate the links for people I know in-the-flesh from those I really only know via their electrons; so you'll see that on the right.

You'll also see online news links and links to books I'm reading. I do control what is posted in those, they're not auto-generated by Google or Amazon. Being posted over there doesn't mean it's the greatest thing I've ever read or 100% agreement with what you'll find; more likely, I just found it interesting, funny or generally worth your time. I'm also going to add links to products I've purchased or enjoyed.

And yes, I can theoretically make money on the Amazon links, although the main reason they're up is because I like the way their interface lets me post pictures and descriptions of books I've read without devoting a post to each.

If you don't have some other site/cause/etc. that you support by shopping Amazon through an associate link, then clicking that link when you buy through Amazon would be much appreciated.

Of course, all this stuff adds overhead to the site, but it's hard for me to gauge how badly it slows down because everything is slow on my ancient laptop. Let me know if things really start to crawl...

[EDIT: A new reader (hi Dad) just informed me that some piece of javascript on the page is freaking out Safari, which seems to happen on 10.3.9 or 10.4. Sorry about that...]

My favorite coffee, on sale

Through April 18, online orders at Papanicholas Coffee are 20% off with the discount code "thinkspring". Papanicholas is probably familiar to folks who have lived in Chicagoland, as it's widely available in groceries there.

I like coffee that kicks me in the junk and steals my wallet, and their dark roasts are the real deal. Plus, it always arrives fresh, it's reasonably priced compared to the beans from the store that rhymes with "TarChucks" and just as good.

Even though they no longer have the Viking Blend that got me through many hungover Sunday mornings, I still order up several pounds of French roast every time it goes on sale.

(I'm not affiliated with this company and I don't get money for pushing their products.)

My niece

Here, she's showing her thoughtful, intellectual side without losing her sense of humor.

Rockin' the '80s

I'm man enough to admit that I went 10-for-10 in this Entertainment Weekly "Name that '80s hair metal band" quiz. If you have to ask how or why I was able to pull off this achievement, just chalk it up to the fact that I will be celebrating my 12th birthday for the 24th time this September.

My wife is funny

Noted during breakfast, as ESPN was on the TV in the cafe:

"Phil Jackson is looking more and more like Colonel Sanders these days."

How will this work...

A camera phone post. My camera phone is crappy but hopefully this is recognizable as a cat.

Hi Guinness! I live in Guinness's house, he's been nice enough not to kick me out yet.

29 days, 22 hours, and boy are my arms tired

I'm leaving town for a few days, may or may not have time and material to post...so I leave you with this...

Fark readers have already seen this one, but the Google Maps directions for getting from Chicago to London deserve a link. See step 20.

Ruth's dream

So my lovely wife had a dream this morning -- In her dream, we were at one of the mansions here in town for a pool party with a bunch of our friends (most of whom are also pregnant).

Then, at a point in the party where I was inside the house (either getting another drink, or giving one back, I assume), someone stands up at a microphone and starts announcing the sex of the babies of the pregnant women in attendance (I joked to Ruth that this scene reminded me of the "Garden Party" episode of The Boondocks: "Jesus was black, Ronald Reagan was the devil, and the government is lying about 9/11.").

We don't know what we're having and don't want to know (no one knows, as the one test that could've told us was done by an anonymous tech who didn't write it down and has surely forgotten by now), but the dream speaker was apparently clairvoyant, because she told the whole crowd that we're having a boy. Ruth was quite disappointed that our surprise had been ruined, but tried to get everyone to keep quiet about it because I hadn't heard and she still wanted me to be surprised.

Of course, as she's telling everyone to shut up, I suddenly show up and say, "Wha happened?" I think as she was telling me about the dream, we started laughing too hard at that point for her to tell me if I ever found out the sex or not. Or maybe after I popped back into the party, that's when the phone rang in real life and woke us up.

So, we're not sure if this dream is just a weird hormone-inspired mash-up of anxieties, or some sort of prophesy. Of course, as I told her this morning, there's really nothing mysterious about predicting something that has a 50-60% chance of being true anyway. If our kid ends up looking like the blond, curly-haired toddler she dreamed about last week, then I'll be spooked.

Any aspiring Josephs out there want to take a stab at an interpretation?

It's kinda like...

The battle of Thermopolye, if it were a reality series on Bravo...

One more thought

This one didn't make it into the paranoia post, two posts down...

While we were talking to our OB about prenatal education during a visit this past week, he got to talking about infant CPR.

He told us, "You'll have the usual paranoia of 'is the baby breathing?' You won't want to leave it at first, just in case. That's pretty normal. And really, you'll have some paranoia about your kids until, um...[Doc looks into the middle distance, probably thinking of his own five kids, and tries to think of when he stopped being paranoid]...until death."

Our poor furry boys...

Last night we had the pleasure of hosting our friends Dan and Heather and their 16-month-old son Noah, who were passing through on a cross-country trip. We had a blast, as we always have with them; one of our other old neighbors from VA is in town for training so we had a partial reunion of sorts.

After meeting Noah, we know a few things for sure.

• Our home is a toddler death trap. I realize ours won't be running the day he or she is born, but I also realize I won't have all day to be babyproofing when June gets here.

• I have seen the future, and when we get there Guinness and Aslan will be very, very unhappy cats. We can only hope that they get used to our babies, as ours won't be running into the house and screeching "KITTY!" at jet-plane decibels. At least not until they're a few days old.

• I have never truly been tired.

• My gut has been telling me that Karma is going to punish our couch-potato ways by giving us a child who never stops moving. Now I'm sure of it.

Paranoia and car seats

So, as a soon-to-be parent, I'm supposed to be spending vast amounts of my time worrying about safety equipment like car seats and up-armored Japanese-constructed minivans and the like. Never mind that my parents just duct-taped me to the radio antenna on their 1915 Mercedes coupe for the drive home and I turned out just fine (now get off my lawn).

We looked at car seats, registered for the latest model from a brand that got high marks in Baby Bargains (Hey, look at all those registries over on the right! doesn't that put you in a buying mood?), and I basically put that out of my mind, until I have to install it.

But I couldn't miss the recent kerfuffle over flawed car seat testing in Consumer Reports.

Summary for those of you out of the infant-raising set: Consumer Reports (quite sensibly) thought it would be a good idea to test infant car seats in side impact accidents the same way new cars are tested. They released the results of these tests to much fanfare: Almost every seat tested failed, two so spectacularly that CR demanded they be recalled.

Less than two weeks later, CR retracted their report, after discovering that their independent lab hadn't tested what they wanted -- instead of testing at the 38 MPH standard, they'd tested 70 MPH side impacts. The link to CR above is their apology and analysis of what went wrong, which was admirable.

What got me to thinking, though, is that the problematic testing has brought out the worst sort of parental paranoia. I've seen Internet stories, true or not, of parents dumping their car seats for one of the two that "passed" the 70 MPH test; blog and message board posts along the lines of "so that means I should get one of those two, right?"; and I've talked with at least a couple of parents who proudly pointed at their infant seat and said, "That one passed the CR test."

I'm usually not the type to get in arguments in person, but I really wanted to tell these folks: Unless you're in the habit of having your car hoisted into the middle of an Interstate by helicopter, 70 MPH side impacts into your stationary vehicle are not a situation you're ever likely to encounter.

Not to mention, you can't test what would really happen in a 70 MPH side impact without testing the exact models of vehicles involved in the accident. CR explains that most injuries at that speed are caused by "intrusion," which is weasel-wording for "The car going 70 rips clean through the car going zero and your restraints become useless." Of course how bad the accident ends up depends on all sorts of variables; but that's exactly why it can't be accurately tested.

If you do happen to be that unlucky -- let's say you're making a left when someone blows through the light at twice the speed limit in their invisible car -- anyone who leaves the scene of the accident is going to have to be really lucky, infant seat or no.

You might as well test infant seats by dropping the Monty Python 16-ton weight on them, for how useful this information would be in the real world. And yet...people still want to put stock in these tests, still want to believe that when the one in a million shot hits, that they can do something about it.

I realize that with one of our kids still in the oven and the other probably not conceived yet, we haven't had the virtual lobotomy that overcomes parents on the subject of safety. I fully expect this to be the first post that brings me the dreaded "You'll understand when you have kids" comment. (If you considered writing that comment, consider this your preemptive "Bite Me."

But the simple fact is, this isn't a fight-or-flight, daddy-bird-defending-the-nest scenario that calls for instinctive overreaction. My kids don't need a parent who can't think clearly, who reacts mindlessly and trusts anything he reads on the Internet because it's "for the kids" or "better safe than sorry."

Aside from being far too long, this post is my reminder to myself that while a little paranoia about my kids might be good -- I won't be telling them to run out in the street just because a car wasn't there yesterday -- a lot of this life, and probably 80% of what happens to my kids over the courses of their lives, will be outside my control. The sooner I'm at peace with that, the better.

Just a warning

We just finished watching The Departed; so as I warned my wife, expect me to spend the next fucking day and half talking like a motherfucker in a Martin fucking Scorsese movie, you fucking pricks.

Some people need to be shot laughed at

While walking to our OB appointment this morning (all is well with baby and mommy), we saw a man half-heartedly jogging down our street. He looked like he could've been jogging faster, but he was also pushing a side-by-side jogging stroller with only one baby in it. While yelling into his cell phone LOUD ENOUGH FOR US TO HEAR HIM HALF A BLOCK AWAY.

Poor kid would've been better off being babysat by the TV.

Once at the OB's office, we were sitting in the waiting area. I should note the waiting room is quite small -- 7 or 8 chairs, a tableful of magazines and not a lot of manuvering space around any of them. During our wait, a woman brings in her toddler in a stroller. The woman had clearly been to this office before and the kid was quite old enough to stand and walk, although not like the huge 4-year-olds we sometimes see folded in half and stuffed into an umbrella stroller because they've got their valets (mommy and daddy) trained so well.

Despite this situation that clearly called for leaving her stroller on the porch and walking the child into the waiting room, the woman still thought it was a good idea to heft the stroller up through multiple doors and a tall step (the office is in an old house), then try to muscle the stroller around the waiting area, bumping the magazine table and chairs multiple times along the way. She might have had an easier time if he other hand wasn't involved with steadying her colossal diaper bag, which had probably just barely fit into the back of her SUV.

My first instinct was "I should help her through the door." Then the smarter, less chivalrous part of my brain took over and said, "But I shouldn't enable the stupid and self-absorbed in perpetuating their behavior." If someone enjoys making their own life more difficult, who am I to stop them?

Luckily for everyone who wanted to get out of the office sometime that morning without climbing over the baby, another patient gave the stroller lady a seat away from the rest of the room, with just enough space next to it to park the stroller. That parking spot also prevented anyone from getting within 3 feet of the pass-through window to talk to the receptionist, but that was OK; we all knew who the most important person in the room was.

Within a few seconds, the baby starts getting a little antsy; just some shaking her head, swinging her legs. I would too, if I'd just recently figured out the walking thing but some unbearable hag had imprisoned me in a stroller. Her mother responds by unbuckling the poor girl's stroller restraint, removing her jacket with a comment about how she had to be getting hot...and then buckling her back into the (immobile, not going anywhere) stroller. I guess mommy didn't want her baby messing up her UGG boots by actually standing or walking in them.

As a good friend was telling me last night -- "More and more I don't want to leave the house. People are just that stupid."

Oh holy cold

I just came in from clearing our ez-slide front porch and cleaning the snow-sleet mixture from our car so my wife could run errands.

I'm somehow still able to type with these ice cubes at the ends of my arms.

We have a lid.

Well, make that "we have a Log-In Date for our dossier with the China Center of Adoption Affairs."

March 8, 2007 -- so if current referral times somehow stay stable (Which they probably won't) we would be getting a referral in July 2008 and traveling in Fall 2008; chances are we will be moving to my wife's new job posting (Japan, we hope) in late 2008 or early 2009.

We sure love cutting it close...

Sometimes I'm funny

I don't usually laugh at my own jokes but I'm still giggling about my comment on this page (first comment, I'm JA3).


It figures that the funniest thing I've said in the past week was on someone ELSE's blog.

Less than a month,

And I've already fallen off the posting wagon. Last week it was Chicago; there is a post or two in draft waiting to be published. I will get better, now that I'm settling comfortably into unemployment.

In honor of the NCAA tourney, I should note that after four days, unemployment is definitely not overrated. Unemployment is a #1 seed, the unquestioned and undefeated champ. Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to plan what I'm doing at not-work tomorrow.