People Think Our Lives Are Fascinating

Cruising, Clapping and Stomach Sleeping

2010-05-01T09:54:00.000-07:00

Maddie's doing all of it. She's super solid at pulling herself up and getting to her feet. Also at cruising around the line that we set up for her; a chair, next to a box, next to a shelf. She also claps and hits high fives. It's pretty adorable. A couple nights ago I found her sleeping on her stomach several times. I haven't really seen her roll too much, though I'm confident she can do it easily still.

Maddie and our cat also have a very strange relationship to watch. Our cat will let Maddie grab chunks of fur out of her body. I've even seen her pull so hard that Stella was yanked over to her side. This, the cat that used to be pretty specific about where you would touch. She used to meow to warn you and then she'd get mad. She also has this habit of sitting down next to you and eventually deciding that you're in her space.

Last night the Draw4 crew came over for some games. There's a large change coming and it's really too bad. We'll miss them. But we do plan on visiting. (Tangent: maybe this will give me more persuasive items to help convince my honeypot to visit the NW often? Then it'd be easier for me to really decide if it's okay to eventually drag him up there. Are there other cheap places with tech jobs, because I'd like some different options?)

Maddie had a small fever last night and seemed a little run down during the day too. I ended up going down and hanging out with her pretty early.

Chirp, chirp.

Standing Up And On The Move

2010-04-13T20:04:00.000-07:00

Maddie can now pull herself up to standing from sitting. It's pretty impressive to watch. She still gets pretty excited by it. Yesterday was the first time I saw her do this and she got so excited that she fell over. It was really adorable (even though it was hard to watch her get frustrated when she realized that she wasn't standing anymore).

Today she's did this several times. She even has started sidestepping along the edge of the chair and shelf. About half the time she moves the wrong foot and tumbles down, but she's really learning the standing/balancing thing pretty fast.

I'm leaning towards thinking that she's going to walk before she crawls. Though she's made progress on the crawl front also. She'll pivot forward and land on her all fours. But she doesn't really know what to do from here and she gets really unhappy/frustrated with being in that position usually.

NY Times Article on the ridiculously high rate of Csections

2010-03-26T16:23:00.000-07:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/24/health/24birth.html?ref=health

I love this quote:

“We should do inductions for good solid medical reasons, not for convenience or the day of the week,” Dr. Macones said. “Sometimes patients push you.”

He's suggesting that it's the consumer asking for this! As if. I'm sure there are some pockets of people who want to schedule their birth, but I cannot believe that it's very much.

This is just one of many reasons why midwives should get more acceptance in mainstream medical practices. This is why midwives should attend all low risk births. It would be safer for everybody involved and they would be cheaper for health insurance companies. And most of them agree that higher risk cases should be attended by a Dr.

First Tooth for Maddie

2010-03-21T09:05:00.000-07:00

Maddie apparently broke her first tooth last night. Her night was quite a bit rougher (for me) than her usual sleeping basically 11 or 12 hours in a row. She kept waking up and I would say what I always say "It's not time to get up yet, go back to sleep Maddie." Then she'd go back to sleep for a couple hours and the whole thing would happen again.

Since the time change we don't get her up until 7am earliest. Of course later is she sleeps in later. Today, though, she was pretty adamant about getting up starting around 6am. Usually she's kind of like "ok, I'll just scrape my sheet or play with my blanket and body" and she'll not make any fuss when I tell her it's too early. Today, she wasn't having it. So we got up a bit earlier.

I noticed she was playing with her new tooth a lot by scrapping her tongue over it constantly. And she wasn't the ridiculously happy, cheery baby this morning that she usually is. This is what made me look. And she won't really let us look. Usually she wouldn't care if we would inspect her mouth but not anymore.

I'm very excited for her. I'm also really glad that this is what teething is like. Her being sick is way worst than this. I think I was pretty afraid of what teething would be like.

Day Light Savings Time/Mouth Noises

2010-03-16T06:51:00.000-07:00

In general, I think this whole day light savings thing is a big waste of everything. How many people either get more tired than normal or miss important meetings due to this clock change? And for what, exactly? For farmers, I guess. I hope for them it's something that is useful.

There is an upside that I recently discovered. It pushed Maddie's schedule back an hour. So now instead of her getting up at 6am, she's getting up at 7am. And she has no idea. Of course we "moved" her bedtime back an hour too. It's nice because it's that much more time I get to hang out with her after work (1 hour). And it might even cause her morning nap to occur after she gets to the house of the Nanny share. (We were having some issues with her going down to nap and napping through when her child care was supposed to start. I'm against waking her up when she's napping, so we would just wait until she woke up to take her over there. Certainly not a big deal, but it's easier to not have that happen.)

Maddie has pretty consistently been sleeping through from going to bed, around 7pm or later now, until the morning, which is around 7am now. And it's been really nice to not have my sleep interrupted by her anymore. Though it still gets interrupted by other things. I was also worried about night weaning her, but she's been fine with it.

She is so amazing and cute. She's becoming more and more a kid, instead of a baby. Don't get me wrong, she's still very much a baby, but how she plays with the world is becoming so much more interactive. She can crack me up and she's so fun to crack up too. I'm amazed at what she notices. She's growing up!

A while ago she discovered that if she has her mouth on a toy and moves her head side to side while making noise she'd get a cycling sound. Try it with your hand if you want to see what I'm talking about. Well, a couple days ago, I showed her how to do that with my finger going up and down on my lips. She was so excited. So then I started doing it to her, with my finger on her lips and she got it right away. It's so cute because pretty much right away she knows if my finger goes there, she'll start making sound.

On the Verge of Crawling

2010-03-10T18:44:00.000-08:00

Maddie so close to crawling. It's pretty fun to watch her progress and sometimes sad to watch her frustration. She's so close!

She reaches forward from sitting pivoting on her still somewhat folded legs pretty consistently but usually either ends up on her belly, or just comes back to sitting. Yesterday I saw her end off the ground with her arms and legs under her. Like a cat. She didn't really know what to do with herself and got really frustrated.

She can also hold herself up standing on her own relatively solidly. I think the biggest thing keeping her from doing that for very long is that she needs both hands to hold herself up and then she doesn't have any entertainment.

I'm really excited to see how her world just opens up when she can get to where she wants to go on her own. It's hard to watch her be frustrated. I wonder if she'll walk or crawl first. I'm guessing crawling, but only time will tell.

This box is full of empty Altoids containers. I was collecting them at work for a while. It's amazing how much of this stuff folks consume. I was thinking it would be an interesting starting point for a crafty project. I started making a mobile by covering these things, but havn't made too much progress on it all.

Rubber Ducky

2010-03-10T18:33:00.000-08:00

For the past couple of months I've played the rubber ducky song to Maddie while she takes a bath. I play it on my cell phone.

It's so cute because she gets so excited about it and we always sing along. She uses her voice and it seems like her pitch is getting better, though she's got quite some time to go to match the words. :)

The past couple times I've given her a bath her grabs have had to be diverted. She's getting really fast and really observant of things around her that she doesn't know yet. She has gotten lots of things off the window sill and counter. Most of it really isn't anything to worry about.

It's pretty much time to start bathing her in the bathtub because of what happened tonight though. Tonight she grabbed the hot water handle and turned it on. The faucet wasn't pouring into her tub or anything, but all she would have had to do was put her curious arm out to touch the hot water. The water was hot because I had just filled her tub. Not a good situation.

Maternal Death Rates on Rise in CA

2010-03-01T06:49:00.000-08:00

In 1996 the maternal death rate in CA was 5.6 per 100,000.
In 2006 it's 16.9.

That's a huge increase. It's a scary increase actually. One article I read said

"it’s more dangerous to give birth in California than it is in Kuwait or Bosnia"

I still get so fired up at the wrongness of hospitals pushing C-sections and inductions on patients that simply don't have any indications that anything is wrong. Dilating at 1 cm an hour, as is the currently accepted rate of progress of a hospital delivery, is ridiculous. If that rate had been applied to me, I would have had a c-section too. (I had a very normal first time birth of 20 hours.)

Although having a c-section with your first birth is slightly more dangerous than giving birth naturally (assuming you don't have any reasons to be categorized as higher risk). It's the following births that are much more dangerous. For one, many hospitals won't even let you have a natural birth after having a c-section - so that's more surgery whether you need it/want it, or not.

The main issue is that you will have scars from the previous c-sections. If you're unlucky enough to have the placenta on those scars, your body can't cap off the placenta after the child is born and you can bleed to death. Imagine having many c-sections. Your chances of having the placenta on those scars just get higher and higher.

Here's some good articles about this newly issued report that is showing that the maternal death rate is drastically on the rise here in good 'ole CA. (And here's the chart.)

I wish I could get this data for the Bay Area Counties.

Maddie and I on a Trip to Japan?!

2010-02-21T20:11:00.000-08:00

I've got the travel itch again and the only way to get rid of it is to, well, travel. But it's tough because on the one hand I can't leave Maddie behind yet. I might be able to do an overnight somewhere without her and survive, but I couldn't go much longer than that. And that's way too short to cure the itch. On the other hand, I could bring her with me and... yah! I'll just bring her with me.

So, I was thinking of going to Japan. It's the cleanest and most modern place I would like to currently travel to and I think it's the best choice for Maddie. After talking to several coworkers "in the know" on Friday all of them said "Yes, you should totally go. You won't have any problems being there and getting around with the baby."

The only thing that really scares me is the plane ride over there. It's something like 14 hours long. And that scares me. If she decided that she was unhappy it could get really bad, and I'd feel terrible being "that parent and child" on the plane. But then again, she's totally mellow and a great kid so I'm sure it'll be fine.

Am I crazy? Am I crazy enough to actually go? Would I enjoy the trip as much as I would have pre-baby days? I'm confident it will be a whole new experience.

Tikka Masala

2010-02-20T21:44:00.000-08:00

Hi, it's Rainbow. I'm too lazy to log out of my husband's account and log back in with mine to post this correctly.

I recently ran across a recipe for tikka masala that actually seemed like it could work out to be similar to my favorite paneer tikka masala dish from Biryani. I took a picture of the recipe from my friend's cookbook and made my version of it on Friday night. It turned out great!

I chopped an onion and added tomato sauce, yogurt, and paneer along with the spices from the recipe. I also added a little black pepper. We finished off the leftover's tonight for dinner.

I'm publishing this here because I'm hoping to not lose this recipe.

About half a year ago or so I found this fantastic recipe for ranchero sauce, as in huevos rancheros. I made a ton of it and put a bunch in the freezer. It's all gone now and I really would love to make more. But I can't figure out where I got the recipe. I think it was on one of my iphone recipe apps, but after spending a bunch of time trying to find it, I've finally given up. t's sad because it was so good.

My Worst Fear Realized

2010-02-14T07:46:00.000-08:00

Yesterday we went up to a friends house for their son's 5th birthday party. They just moved to this great big house in Pleasant Hills.

Maddie went down for the night while we were there and we didn't bring our monitor. We were lucky enough, or not, as it turned out, to borrow their old one. She went to sleep on the floor of the parent's room, which happened to be on the other side of the house from where we were all hanging out. My honeypot set up the monitor base and had the other end of the monitor on his pants. I think he even tested it when he was setting it up, I'm not sure though.

A couple hours later another guest at this event came into the kitchen and said that our baby was screaming. (She had gone to the bathroom which is next to the bedroom.) At first I paused because my honeypot was nearby and I could only hear static on the monitor. But then I reacted and ran in there and it was pretty clear that Maddie had been crying for a little while at least. Her neck was sweaty and she was very much worked up compared to how she usually is when she just wakes up and shouts out for some consoling. It took me a couple minutes to calm her down, poor thing. I felt and still feel so terrible.

As it turns out, when the light switch was turned off when she was left asleep in the room, it also turned off the power for the monitor base. Unfortunately that piece of crap monitor receiver doesn't do anything if it can't find the base signal. (Ours will have a red light instead of green and beep every couple of minutes.) Lesson learned: test the monitor with the room in the exact configuration that the baby will be sleeping in, or better yet, stop forgetting ours when there's a chance we'll need it. Hell, I might go buy one just for our "to-go" bag after this. I don't think I could handle having this situation happen again.

One of the things that so sucks about this is that I always have this fear when I'm depending on our monitor at home that it'll fail and our baby will be laying there screaming and nobody will know. It's terrible, and it makes me go check on her when the monitor is just a little to quiet for my comfort. In last nights situation, I was busy hanging out with folks and it was my honeypot's day to be the primary parent, so I wasn't really worrying about it.

My poor baby girl.

Helicopter Parents

2010-02-12T06:36:00.000-08:00

I found this great article recently. I think I do okay with not being one of these parents, but it's still pretty early. I do let Maddie fall over and explore her body, and play by herself. When she gets vocally frustrated enough, I'll help her. That's true for any situation all the time.

I've definitely gotten better at letting her overcome physical situations that she doesn't know how to deal with. Many many months ago I would always help her if she seemed frustrated in the slightest. And pretty much anytime she was on her tummy, she'd start grumbling. I soon enough realized that she was never going to get any quality tummy time if I always saved her from her slightest grumblings. I realized I was being a bit extreme.

In fact, just yesterday she wowed me with what she was doing and she did it all by herself. She's sitting and playing with toys and went after a toy that was out of reach. She's leaning forward (too far to get back up to sitting, I think) and ends up on her belly with her legs under her somehow. She looked at me and started whining a little. I looked back at her and told her I wasn't going to help. Then she got up on her hands and had her head up, leaned her head over, pushed her arm forward and kicked her leg up. And bam! she rolled over. And she was so excited! (So was I) This was the first time that I saw her go through this whole sequence of getting from sitting to on her back. And I doubt it would have happened if I had gotten involved.

I think it must help Maddie tons to see Sebastian, her new Nanny share friend, cruising around the house. He's a really solid crawler (and super cute to boot!) and a pretty mellow kid.

I have a game that involved lost of crawling that I started doing a couple months ago to help her see what crawling looks like. She's so freakin cute when we're playing this. I basically pretend I'm a bear or some animal and crawl in circles around her and growl at her and mock bite her arms/legs/body and push her around with my head and give her lots of kisses. It's one of the only guaranteed ways I have of getting her to laugh that hard. Sometimes I do it to her on the changing table too. (She'll always be my cub.)

(Maddie's sitting solidly; has been for a while now. She even is stable with her hands and toys above her head.)

Spicy Baby Food

2010-02-08T19:33:00.001-08:00

I've been offering non-bland food to Maddie sometimes. And she usually eats it.

The other day we were at Biryani House (my favorite Indian restaurant and cheap!) and I gave her some tastes of the dishes. She reacted a little bit, but she wasn't upset. I think she's happy to get to try what she's seeing everybody else eating. And I try and do that as much as I can.

A couple days ago I put turmeric, basil and pepper in her peas. Peas are kind of gross looking when you put them through the cuisinart. She ate tons of this combo.

It kind of makes sense to me that the whole bland food for babies thing is nonsense. It's not like they know the difference. And the only way their going to think it's normal and not fight it when they're older is if they're eating it right from the get go. I'm not suggesting that you feed them fiery hot spiced food, or that you don't adjust their food based on how they react. But I think feeding them bland food is boring, boring and it might just set up a picky eater for later. Especially in our house, where we don't normally eat much that's bland at all.

Yesterday I fed her yogurt and she had this really adorable expression. It was a little tart for her and she only ate a couple bites. I wish I had a picture of that face. So cute!

Reading

2010-02-08T19:07:00.001-08:00

Last week I finished the book Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress. It's a cute story. Tells a little bit about Chinese culture during the cultural revolution.

I'm also about to finish Julie & Julia tonight. I've only got a couple pages left. This is also a light decent read.

I'm not sure what I'm going to read next. I'd like to read Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson. I tried reading it a couple months ago, but I didn't have the amount of processing power (spare brain cycles) to devote to it. It's not a light read, and he plays around with the English language some also. Maybe I'll try it again. I'm not as tired as I was then.

There's a Dead Fish in the Office

2010-02-08T05:46:00.000-08:00

I came into work today to find a dead fish in a little fish tank and it made me really sad. Probably sadder than it should have.

One of our recently hired engineers had this beautiful blue fish on her desk at her old job. She had it on her desk here for a bit too but came to the realization that there wasn't enough natural light for it, so she put it in the common/kitchen area. (Her office was one of the darker ones.)

When that fish got moved to the common area I was already sad and worried about it. A couple years ago somebody thought it would be a good idea to have a fish there and everybody fed it and it died pretty quickly. Our office is really bad at taking care of things.

Also, a couple years ago they spent some serious money to get some really nice large plants for the main room that most employees work out of, and it didn't take more than a couple months for most of them to die or be rapidly on the path to death. And the thing is.. most folks didn't even notice the dying plants. That's what always suprised me. They're right in front of everybody, but nobody can see them. (I can. Maybe I'd be a happier person if I didn't notice things like that.)

The fish did fine for several months, then my coworker went on vacation for 3 weeks. She had a responsible coworker take care of the fish, and all was fine. Then he went on vacation and I started to worry more. There just aren't that many people here that I would entrust with not forgetting about the fish in another part of the office.

Today I walked in and the fish tank was all cloudy and the fish was floating at the top with this film around it. It's pretty sad.

I think the thing that really affects me about this is that the fish was trapped. It depended on things and people outside of itself to survive. And that task of it's survival is so casually passed around here. It probably was negelected and died from dirty water and maybe it wasn't getting fed anymore. I don't know. But it makes me think of all the kids in the world. They depend on somebody else to make sure their needs are met. And for some they aren't, but there isn't much they can do about it unless they make it to being old enough to help themselves.

Sleep Progress

2010-02-04T17:54:00.000-08:00

I've wanted to share this for a couple days now, but I also really didn't want to jinx what was happening.

Maddie has started only waking up around 5am for a feeding. She'll usually go back to sleep for a couple hours too. So she's going 10 hours or more from the time she goes to bed until she wakes up for that feeding. I'm pretty excited that she's doing this on her own. She's so close to just plain dropping that feeding and sleeping continuously throughout her nighttime.

I previously had a plan to night wean her. Then I decided I'd rather move her into her crib in our room first, and then work on nighttime food consumption. I had heard not to do these at the same time. Since we haven't had a chance to do the rearranging required to get her crib in our room, we haven't done anything at all. One feeding at night is still not that bad, and having it be that late in the night is great.

In other news, Maddie can pretty much sit on her own unsupported and not fall over. I still put a pillow or something behind her in case she does fall over. But she's become a pretty solid sitter.

These pictures are from Willard park in Berkeley. We went there this past weekend.

More Milestones

2010-02-02T19:25:00.000-08:00

Maddie's been able to stand, holding on to something, for a month or so now. She's gotten really strong and will grab my shirt collar to support herself without me holding on to her. It's pretty impressive. Lately I've been showing her how to pick up a foot and move it forward and then do the next one while supporting her.

Well, when I came home from work today she was taking steps all by herself! (I was providing support, of course) But I couldn't believe it. I was actually talking to a friend of mine when she started doing this. She ended up "walking" about a couple feet before she stopped doing it. The steps were so cute and small. And the excitement she had was contagious! I'm sure she's starting to realize the power that mobility will provide for her. She'll get to go right to the toys she wants and be able to move around.

We found a permanent family to share our Nanny with and their boy, Sebastian, is about a year old. He's a really good crawler and can get around easily. I'm hoping that he'll influence her to learn how to crawl.

What a weekend

2010-02-02T08:20:00.000-08:00

Our entire family was sick this weekend. It was no fun at all. I can't imagine what you do if you're a single parent. Especially a single parent without family or somebody to fall back on around. I slept all night on Saturday then all day on Sunday and all night on Sunday also. I really expected to be wide awake Sunday night, but I slept like a log. I've been fighting this terrible illness. My right ear has been plugged (like it's in need of popping, but unpopable) since Friday. I'm finally coming out of it now. But this has been really bad. I can only hope that we don't get anything else like this again.

Metering Lights

2010-01-29T07:23:00.000-08:00

I wonder what percentage of people partially or completely ignore the bay bridge metering lights?
Again today the car ahead of me stopped where they were supposed to, and then just went. The light hadn't turned green.

It's possible that they thought it turned green, or they were looking at the wrong lane's light. But to me both of those things indicate somebody who probably shouldn't be driving. I feel much safer thinking that they just feel entitled. But then why bother stopping at all? I think it's because to everybody else it makes them look like they're not blowing off the light. A more subtle act of entitlement in that they know they're not entitled and don't want everybody else to see that they think they are.

If only a couple people do this, it probably doesn't matter to much. It's when a higher percentage of people start doing this that it can affect the system. And there's really no way of getting caught. At least not until it becomes a large enough issue that "they" start figuring out how to enforce it.

Shoplifting

2010-01-28T18:43:00.000-08:00

The other day I was standing in line at a Pete's and a guy walked in. I noticed him with about half my attention because he asked me to move. He was looking at some pre-packaged pounds of coffee that he couldn't get to because the line wove around the coffee display.

He looked at one pound, grabbed 3 or 4 more, and walked out. I'm guessing that maybe only a couple people noticed. None of the employees noticed because they were busy taking orders for the morning rush.

I wonder what this guy was going to do with this coffee he stole? Is there a way for him to make some money with it? I didn't notice him detailed enough to notice if he seemed homeless to me or not.

Times are tough, I guess.

It Isn't Teething, It's An Ear Infection

2010-01-27T14:00:00.000-08:00

After another difficult evening, I finally took Maddie to the dr this morning. She has an ear infection and still has a really yuckie cold. Lots of congestion, her nose is like a water fountain, and occasional coughs. Her mood was much better today though.

They told me that they think she's either kicking the ear infection herself, or it's just started because it's small. They wrote me the prescription for the antibiotics, but asked that I wait a day or two and assess if I should give them at all at that time. Basically she said if Maddie seems to get worst, or has another fever give her the drugs.

I appreciate not over prescribing antibiotics, but my draw is to immediately give her to drugs to be done with this once and for all. It's the whole "best for me" over "best for society" as a whole debate. She has had a pretty decent day today. Lots of smiles and fun, and only a little fussier than normal. So I'm going to wait and see.

I have mastered hanging her car seat on the chin up bar. It's a great place to nap because she's sitting upright and she slept like that last night too. She still cries and screams when I do anything that requires her to lay down (changing clothes, changing diapers). And her naps have been good like this.

It Has To Be Teething Time

2010-01-26T19:31:00.000-08:00

If this isn't teething, I'm not sure I'll be able to handle the real deal.

Maddie is a mess. She's so unhappy and full of tears. She's so obviously miserable and my once magical comforting powers seem to have disappeared as of late. Last night she was up most of the night. She would try to sleep, and then start writhing and shouting or talking. I could just reach over and rub her tummy a little bit and she'd settle again for another 10 minutes or so. I feel her pain.

Her nose is running like a faucet and she has an infrequent cough. She's sneezing a lot, and every time she does a great big river comes out of her nose. Even in the several hours that she did sleep last night, her nose was making that noise of having stuff in it and having air move forward and back across it.

My poor baby. I pulled out some toys that were in the freezer and the wet washcloth that was in the fridge. The washcloth was a hit. It entertained her for maybe half an hour and she was definitely munching on it. I hope her teething is over soon. I can't stand to see her like this.

Routines

2010-01-24T23:33:00.000-08:00

Tonight I had an interesting experience.

We've started to sleep train, just a little bit. I'm not doing scheduled nap times, though I did think about it. I tried it once and it just didn't seem to work well. I think I'm more of the put her down for a nap when she's showing signs of being tired school of thought. From what I've read though, that's apparently too late. Oh well. I'll make a change if I think it's not working for us. What I am doing is following a consistent routine before putting her down for naps.

My husband and I take turns being the primary parent, and today was his day. It doesn't mean that I'm not around or interacting with my daughter. But it does mean that I can go out and run errands alone, or go take a nap without having to make sure he'll watch Maddie. In the same way, when it's my turn, my honeypot can go take his "monkey training classes" or do whatever he'd like without having to wonder if he'll be watching Maddie then. (He often works on the house - yeah!)

Today my honeypot was putting Maddie down for a nap and he just walked over to her crib and put her in it. I asked him to do the routine that we had set up for her naps and he did actually do it. It's an interesting issue because on the one hand I saw how tired she was and I can believe that she would have just gone straight to sleep. But on the other hand, the entire point is to create a consistent routine and have consistent cue's for her so that she knows what's going on. I feel like especially in the early days of implementing this nap routine, it's not a good idea to deviate. But I also understand that maybe the routine isn't necessary. It's hard to know what effect not being completely consistent in something like this really is. I'm pretty sure that the nap routine isn't probably being consistently implemented by our Nanny during the days, but I really don't know that.

The Stillness

2010-01-23T09:27:00.000-08:00

When my daughter was first born and younger, she would only take "cat naps" during the day (naps lasting minutes up to 20 minutes), if she would sleep at all. I believe she was around 3 months old when she migrated into sleeping longer blocks of time during the day. She's always been a great night sleeper (except for all the wakups!). And it was around the same time that she dropped down to only requesting one night feeding. It was perfect for me, because I returned to work around that same time.

After she started sleeping longer blocks during the day, it took me a while to figure out that I could actually get something done and I didn't need to just sit somewhere and wait for her to wake up. I was very sleep deprived in the early days, and I would just watch the stillness and the world around me and enjoy the break.

Now that I have these 1 hour blocks or so, I get stuff done. Laundry, dishes, picking up. You know, the normal household stuff. Well, just now Maddie shouted in her sleep (she does this - it's really weird - probably worthy of another post). It's like she's having a bad dream or something because she's completely asleep when I go look at her. Anyway, she just had a couple shouts and she's still asleep. But I was thinking that she would wake up - even though she's probably got another 40 minutes or so. So I sat down and waited. Just like I used to when she only slept for minutes at a time. And I noticed the stillness again. The sounds of the traffic passing our house, the sound of the rain, the brilliance of the sun streaming through the windows, the loud hum of our refrigerator that's probably going to die soon. It's an interesting perspective on the world.

Car Window #5 Broken

2010-01-22T07:15:00.001-08:00

I headed to my car to drive into work at the dark hour of about 6am. I unlocked the driver door and my attention was caught by my fastrack laying on the driver's seat. Surely I would have noticed sitting on that when I drove home from work yesterday? I'm usually really good at putting that back hidden away in the console. When I went to put it away, I noticed the cover to the console is missing - as is the parking meter change I kept in there. Oh crap, the stereo is gone too. How'd they get in here? Oh, the back window is smashed out. Bummer. This time it happened about half a block from our home.

When I lived in the Mission of SF I had my car window smashed out 3 times. It might have been 4. I lose track. It was a different car then. And most of the time folks had the courtesy of smashing the triangle window which is much cheaper to fix than a rolling window. Only one of those included a stereo being taken because I never replaced it in that car. Once or twice my car was actually unlocked because I stopped locking it. I didn't keep anything in it and one of the locks would sit higher than the others when it was locked. I figured that maybe somebody thought it was unlocked and then got irritated when it wasn't and smash the window. There were a fair amount of homeless folks that lived on Cesar Chavez, which is where I usually was able to park my car.

The last time I had my car window smashed out while I was parked on the street at MacArthur BART station while dating my honey pot. All the cars parked along that street had their window smashed out, so it wasn't specific to the car. Though it was still annoying. Again, no stereo.

Do you think they had any remorse when they noticed the baby car seat sitting under all the glass this time? Atleast they didn't steal that. (F**kers!)

Maddie's First Plane Trip!

2010-01-20T08:34:00.000-08:00

We just got back last night from CO. We were there a little shy of a week and it was Maddie's first plane trip. The trip went remarkably well except for one main rough spot.

On the flight there Maddie slept on the empty plane seat for some of the flight and just played with us for the rest of the time. She didn't make any negative noise. (She's still a chatter box!) On the flight back she had a couple small rough periods lasting maybe a minute or two, but otherwise had excellent behavior. Her Dad was even able to get her to lie down and take a nap on his lap. Impressive!

The only real rough spot we had was the fact that except for that extra short nap on the plane there, she didn't sleep the first day. Then she was so over tired that she was weirdly cranky even into the next day. She would scream when you would just lay her on her back (which makes it difficult to change her clothes or her diaper). So I finally reached a point, after saying several times - "I've never seen her like this" where I forced her to nap. I did the same 5 minute check in thing I had done before and she eventually went down. It was painful because it wasn't just a couple minutes of unhappy behavior. I'm sure it was much more difficult being in a new place with new smells. But she did great and once she started sleeping again, she was again the fantastic happy baby that we all love. (We love the cranky one too - we just prefer the fantastic happy one!)

Today when I put her down for her nap, she went down with no protests and fell asleep right away. It was nice. I took this time to write this post and to write out her nap winddown routine. I'm going to work with our Nanny to get her napping better with her too because she usually doesn't sleep too much with her.

Madelyn is Eating Solid Foods

2010-01-11T20:12:00.000-08:00

We start feeding Maddie solid foods at the end of December. The 28th, I believe.

She really likes eating. I guess I was expecting it to be challenging to get a baby to eat. But not with her. She's very excited to eat. And I'm impressed with how much she eats in a sitting.

So far she's eaten sweet potato, pear, rice cereal, avocado and squash.

In this picture we were eating rice cereal.

Sleep Training?

2010-01-11T15:27:00.000-08:00

It used to be that Maddie would show signs of tiredness and we would wind down some and then put her down mostly awake.

Recently, she's started resisting sleep. She cries if we put her down to sleep and sounds like we're torturing her. So of course we pick her back up and either give up if it's a nap or try again later. Also, she usually doesn't sleep much with her Nanny during the day which means she can be very fussy in the few hours each night that I get to see her. This is not ideal.

I've been reading quite a bit about sleep and about how about this age they get separation anxiety and still don't have object permanence. So they don't want to be away from you (in their crib before they fall asleep) and they don't actually know that you haven't disappeared when they can't see you. It's kind of weird reality to exist in if you think about it. One of the other things I've run across is how bad it is for kids to not really sleep enough. It affects all sorts of things, not to mention that they're kind of fussy and short fused.

A couple days ago I put Maddie down for a nap and she was clearly tired. She cried and was so upset. I tried to comfort her without picking her up and then I did pick her up and tried winding her down again. That was terrible and didn't work at all. It just made her cry more when I did put her down. My honey pot was around and he didn't like that she was upset and picked her up and basically did the same things. Then he had a class to go to and left me with her after it being an hour or so of this terrible situation. So I decided to try some of the stuff I've read in this pretty decent sleep book.

I wound her down again, explaining what we were doing. Then I put her in her crib and left the room knowing that I would check in every 5 minutes. That was a pretty terrible 5 minutes. I went to check in with her and left again and she was asleep one minute later. 6 minutes total.

Today, we also had some rough naps. I guess rough is relative when I have an associate that said their baby cried for 90 minutes the first time. I've started doing some of the things in there which basically equate to sleep training. I've only done it for naps. Basically I wind her down and then put her in her crib and just let her cry. I check in every 5 minutes. The first time I did this she sounded so upset for several minutes, but she did go to sleep within 6 minutes.

We've Been Skunked. Twice.

2010-01-09T10:18:00.000-08:00

In the past week or two Stella has had some interactions with skunks. The first time it was bad, but I rubbed her down with some anti skunk stuff and called it good. I think she got farther away before she got sprayed.

This time she got nailed. She was dripping wet all through her chest. Of course this happens in the middle of the night. Last night, I had these weird dreams about burnt food and garbage.

Last time I got this skunk smell remover and used a wash cloth and did the best that I could. She still stunk, but not as bad as she had before. I assumed it would wear off over time.

This time, it was so bad. I did what the bottle said to do. I got her super saturated with that stuff, let it dry (sort of) and then rinsed her off. She was not happy about that at all. I don't think I've ever seen her wet, this wet, in the 9 years that I've had her. She was crying and screaming. It sounded like we were torturing her. And to her, we probably were.

I wish she was smart enough to realize that if she tangos with skunks, she might get a bath. But I'm guessing it was too far after her getting sprayed to make that bath association.

Check out how small she is all wet. She's like a completely different cat.

Grow Grow Grow

2010-01-08T19:09:00.000-08:00

Maddie is growing up so fast!
She can roll over with some prompting. She can strongly stand on her feet. And in the past week or so she's gotten so that she can hold on to things (us, her locked stroller) and keep herself standing up. It's pretty amazing.

Her chicken wing has come back, this time she does it with her arm straight. So she ends up beating on whatever is in front of her with her flopping left arm. Usually she does this when she's drinking from her bottle. I haven't seen her do it with her left arm yet.

She still has a single night feeding, which we will begin weaning her from when we get back from our CO trip next week. Assuming that goes ok, we're going to start the process of moving her out of our bed and into her own crib in our room. I'm hoping that these changes go well and aren't too traumatic for her and/or us.

We started solid foods last week. So far she's eaten sweet potato, pear, avocado and rice cereal. She seems to be enjoying it.

She's such a happy baby. I would hate to spoil that. She smiles often and goes to sleep and takes naps relatively painlessly. She's getting so much smarter and she seems to understand so much more. And it takes quite a bit more effort to entertain her than it used to.

She babbles so much. I think she's really taken it up a notch in the past week or so. She's always been kind of vocal. I suppose some of that has to do with all of us talking to her all the time.

I think we really have done a good job with her, and that we got very lucky with our Nanny. I think that it's the combination of our good care that has gotten her to where she is now. Thank you Clelia!

Very Surprised

2009-10-23T19:30:00.000-07:00

I'm one of those parents that think that babies understand a lot more than we give them credit for. This is why I try to keep a near constant chatter going of what we're doing where we're going, etc.

One piece of evidence that confirms my thoughts is the "legs down" of diaper changing. Pretty much from the start of doing diaper changes I would say "legs down, please" a number of times to attempt to get Maddie to straighten her legs while I finish fastening her diaper and diaper cover. I would say it while I would gently push her legs down if she didn't do it on her own. It didn't take long, maybe under a week, before she would straighten her legs and hold them like that for a minute or so when I would say "legs down, please." She might have been a month old or less when this started. I remeber being impressed at how small she was when she started doing that. What is language besides associations between sounds and meanings?

I sing the bus song with Maddie a couple times a day and move her arms with the song. ("The wheels on the bus go round and round...) She loves it! I love it! It's fun times and it makes her so excited and happy when we do it. Maddie (and probably all babies) don't have the longest attention spans. They gaze all around and turn their heads and check out their worlds. Well, yesterday I came home from work and Maddie was in her rocker. She was checking out the world, turning her head, not really paying attention to me directly and I sang and held the first note of this song. I've never seen her move so fast. Her head turned to face me and she got this huge smile; she knew exactly what was happening. It really caught me by surprise how quickly she focused on me and became so excited.

This is why I'm really loving having Maddie in my life. It's so amazing to watch her learn and be herself.

Sleep

2009-10-22T12:53:00.001-07:00

It seems that our little munchkin has been working on sleeping through the night.

Four days ago she slept 11 hours straight, and then the past couple of nights she slept 7 or 8 hours straight. Last night was an exception; she was back to waking up twice. Once at 1:30 AM and the second time around 5 AM. But you have to take a step back to keep going forward.

I can handle waking up once. I just make sure I also go to sleep early so I can be sleeping during that longer block of time.

Also, a couple weeks ago she started really having a predictable bedtime. She goes down for the night around 7 or 8PM.

I'm looking forward to the days when she dependably will sleep through the night. Though I'm told this will disappear when she starts teething.

I also feel really fortunate that she can go to sleep pretty easily. Sometimes she'll have her "suck" on; when her sucking reflex is really strong and it's clear through attempts at feeding that she's not hungry. We'll give her a pacifier at these times in an attempt to prevent her from getting in the habit of sucking on her hands. But frequently I can put her down for the night without anything and she'll fall asleep without sucking on anything. It's pretty cool. We only put her down to sleep if she's showing signs of being tired.

Smiles and Hands

2009-10-14T06:41:00.001-07:00

Madelyn has been finding her hands recently. She actually found them a couple weeks ago now, but has been getting really good at using them. We have this rattle that I can hold in front of her and she'll actually grab it. She's also become pretty proficient at getting her fist in her mouth.

She's also so extremely smiley. I love the huge grins she gives me, pretty much anytime I see her. She makes me smile really large too. Who could help themselves? I also love the power of suggesting that I have where I can smile large at her and she'll smile back, even if she's not in the best of moods. Though she's such a happy baby most of the time.

This picture isn't even her smiling big. This is just a casual smile. If her eyes were squinted shut, then you'd know she's smiling big.

I'm going to try harder

2009-10-13T16:05:00.001-07:00

Using this blog, I've really wanted to write down my thoughts and experiences with Madelyn (12 weeks old yesterday!) as they were happening. But somehow I haven't found the time. It still amazes me how fast and yet also so slow time passes with a small baby. Will it be like this for the rest of my time watching her grow up?

I feel so fortunate to have Madelyn as our baby. She has the best temperament. She's mellow, smiley and sleeps well enough. I really can't imagine what I would do with a baby that cried a lot and was in general pretty fussy often. It just tears me up when she's unhappy.

I've had fussy moments with Madelyn, but I've figured out that mostly those were due to either her being way over tired, the huge amount of gas she was getting from most of the formulas that I was using, or a combination of the two. So I finally figured out a formula (a mix, really) that seems to do the trick and I'm much more aware of how much stimulation she gets.

I've also figured out that she's a "cat napper", and if I don't get her to a good nap space in the window before she shows strong signs of being tired, she won't sleep at all. So with that first yawn I give her a chance to catch one of her "cat naps." I've only seen her nap longer than about 20 minutes at a time once or twice.

I used to think it would be nice if she had longer naps during the day, but I've come to realize how fortunate I am that she sleeps well enough at night and has good sleeping skills. She's recently shown the pattern of going to sleep around 8pm and being awake for the day around 6am. And during that time she only feeds twice or once. She's able to put herself back to sleep by herself also, which is a huge skill to have. It means that when she's ready, she'll probably sleep through the night with little fuss.

We currently have family bed, which I think will become more important to me as I return to work and will no longer be with her during the day. It also makes the nighttime feedings really easy. I can't imagine having to actually drag myself out of bed for each night feeding.

Here's Madelyn taking a nap. We've decided to let her use the pacifier so that we would be able to take it away, as opposed to her getting into the habit of sucking on her hands.

5 weeks and 2 days ago you were born

2009-09-02T12:10:00.000-07:00

I can't believe 5 weeks have passed already and I can't believe that it's only been 5 weeks!

I feel like in the past couple weeks I've finally mostly gotten the hang of this Mom thing. I feel like most of the time I can fix whatever is making Madelyn unhappy. Most of the time. And during those times when I can't, it tears me up inside.

Madelyn is usually a pretty mellow baby. She's usually happy and when she has unhappy times, they can be solved. Usually. For the past couple days she's been having a really large amount of gas. She gets really unhappy about that, to the point of scream crying. Sometimes doing bicycle movements with her legs, or massage with help. But sometimes nothing seems to help. When that's the case it's really hard to deal with. Even though I know there's nothing I can do, it still tears me up inside. It makes me crazy, really. The hormonal reaction in me when Madelyn is crying is so intense. Wow, is all I can say. I can see why some women go nuts. I've gotten pretty close myself, but only a couple times. Luckily I do have the presence of mind to walk away and calm down.

I'm completely against leaving a crying infant alone. I think that at the very least they should have human contact and comfort especially if you can't solve their problem. I also believe that it's in everybody's interest for me to walk away for a couple minutes when I get so worked up. It's the dichotomy of parenting, I suppose.

Nada, Zilch

2009-07-26T00:43:00.000-07:00

It's been a week since I lasted posted and I was sure a week ago that we would be so busy with our new bundle of joy that I wouldn't be posting for that reason.

Well, I have not delivered yet. I'm now officially 1 week overdue from my ultrasound date of July 19th. Our daughter is firmly a Leo now (so much for being a Cancer).

I started a series of acupuncture last Thursday for inducing labor and my midwife told me to relax because my body is still showing signs of progress, even if they're not as fast as I would like.

The last day my midwife can deliver me at home is August 2nd, at which point I'll be 42 weeks. I've been told that she's never not been able to induce before that point. Castor Oil appears to be the favorite last ditch mechanism, but I think that she thinks I'll naturally go into labor before then. I guess we'll see.

All the predicted dates of delivery by various friends has passed. The only other fun date is July 26th, which is my mother-in-law's birthday. That would be quite a present, but I'm guessing I would already have to be in labor to make that mark at this point. I'm expecting labor to take many hours, 16+ or so. But I really have no idea how long it will take in it's entirety.

Weekend Fun and Due Date

2009-07-19T19:21:00.001-07:00

The best part of my weekends right now is that my honeypot is around. Otherwise he's at work.

I took it pretty slow this weekend. My energy levels are pretty low these days. Today's my due date (according to the 20 week sizing ultrasound.) My other due date was the 7th and that was based on my own information. Any day now I should be "popping." I'm completely ready and slightly desperate to have that happen. I'm really uncomfortable right now.

Yesterday I made a pair of purple yoga pants complete with a fold over top that I can wear right now, and when I'm not "big bellied" also. I only really have one other pair of pants that I can wear right now and I'm liking wearing them a lot more lately.

Earlier in the day we went down to San Leandro and hung out with my honeypot's sister while she unpacked. She moved into a house close to a new teaching job she took. It's a super cute house with a great back deck. It'll be great for parties.

Today I went to the Renegade Craft Fair and then had lunch at Plant. They both were really awesome. The craft fair had so many really creative vendors and inspiring artists. Quite a bit of the style of the crafts there remind me of Portland, OR. I bought a really cool purple coat even though it was breaking my rule. (I'm not allowed to buy clothes that I can't try on which means anything not maternity.) I couldn't pass this coat up, it's not something I would ever run across again. It's just that cool and creative.

Plant is this amazing restaurant that I'd heard about before from my honeypot. He ate there after a bike ride and loved it. I was also really impressed with the food. I had the garden burger, but the name doesn't describe how amazing it was. It was this lentil and beet patty with tons of other stuff (vegies and seeds) on really good bread with a side salad. They had lots of vegan options and everything just looked amazing. The best part is that they were still serving brunch and it was probably 2pm or so. Too bad it's not closer, we'd probably go there often. I'll have to do my best to remember it for when we're in the city and hungry.

Then we went to the park and played with juggling clubs, whips and just watched the dogs and people. Today was beautiful and sunny. I didn't last long in the park though because currently it's really hard on my body to sit without back support.

Lake Merritt

2009-07-18T07:30:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I got up really early and continued my tour of coffee shops. This time I walked to one that's on the edge of what I would call "my neighborhood." I had the best bagel and egg and mocha there. They even double toasted the bagel for me. And the best part is that they open up at 6am. This is really great for folks like me that can't sleep so well anymore.

Yesterday afternoon I decided that I wanted to go for a walk and get some exercise. Instead of doing the loop that I normally do around here, I decided to drive to the other end of town and walk around Lake Merritt. It's a really nice walk and there are always tons of joggers there also. It's 3.2 miles and I had walked it last week with my friend with no issues.

I made it about half way around when I realized that this wasn't such a good idea. I've been really achy and sore lately, probably my body getting more and more ready for birth, and doing this walk was really taking it out of me. I had also already walked several miles earlier in the day for that coffee shop visit and an errand. Anyway, finishing the loop ended up being quite a chore and I was pretty beat up the rest of the day and night. Luckily I woke up today and I feel ok. I'm still achy and sore, but that's become "normal" lately. I guess that's the great disadvantage of walking around a lake, you can't cut and make it shorter if you need to. I'll be keeping that in mind for the next week or whatever I have left when I'm taking my walks.

Pregnancy Update, Fleas and Mites

2009-07-16T11:41:00.001-07:00

I just had an appointment with my midwife and her apprentice and I was told that I'm 50% effaced and -2 engaged (which is how far down the pelvic cavity she is currently, the larger the negative, the farther down she is). She mentioned that I had about another week to go, and that the effacement was super soft and really great.

Knowing that I probably have another week has inspired me to start working on the yard a bit. We still have this open part just waiting to get planted with some food starts. It's been sitting fallow since I took out the tomatoes easily half a year ago now.

Yesterday I cleaned like a maniac again because I kept getting bitten and I'm pretty sure that it's flea bites. I treated Stella last week for fleas, but I'm guessing she had them bad enough that they just jumped cat and were lurking and waiting to bite myself and my honeypot. So I basically washed everything made of fabric in hot water, vacuumed like crazy, and I think I've got them beat. I'm so glad that we have hardwood floors and not carpet. It's so much harder to beat them when the entire house is carpeted.

Cooking and Cleaning

2009-07-14T17:00:00.001-07:00

I've been using my free time to cook a lot lately.

Yesterday, was a day where I kept myself really busy all day long. I never had a moment of down time and was on my feet most of the day. It helped me sleep really well last night.

Today, I wasn't moving quite as fast. After I had breakfast, I fell asleep on the couch for an hour, and then I got up and have been doing stuff, albeit a little slower.

Yesterday, I made kimchi, yogurt and green curry for dinner. I ate some of the yogurt this morning, and it came out pretty good. I couldn't figure out how to "cook" it though after I added the cultures because our oven doesn't go that low. Instead I put a couple candles in the oven and hoped for the best. It seemed to work ok.

The kimchi was actually a lot of fun to make because I had to pound the crap out of all that vegetable matter. It's currently sitting on my counter fermenting right now and will sit there for a couple more days.

Right now I'm making ranchero sauce. We're having huevos rancheros for dinner tonight. I've always wanted to figure out how to make a decent ranchero sauce. It's not completely done yet, but so far it tastes great! I'm hopeful that I've found my recipe.

In other news I started reading "The Red Planet" by Robert Heinlein last night. It's pretty good and I'm about half way through. I'll need to find a new book soon.

Kids Clothes

2009-07-11T00:24:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow we're celebrating the third birthday of my friend's twin girls. I had little idea of what size they actually are, but I used some pattern measurements to figure out the height and waist of size 3. I'm hoping that these sparklie skirts either fit well, or are too big. It would be a bummer if they were too small.

I got to use my newly rebuilt serger and also the ruffler foot that I'm still really excited about. Both skirts together probably took me 4 hours total, possibly less. I also used my serger to fasten in the elastic waist band, which is a first for me. I historically haven't used my serger to do things that don't require cutting, and it works pretty well.

I Am The Luckiest Person Ever!

2009-07-10T10:04:00.000-07:00

Guess what I woke up to this morning? Breakfast in bed! And not just any breakfast, but an egg sandwich complete with greens and cheese and walnuts and a perfectly toasted whole wheat english muffin and other ingredients too. My honeypot, who is working his butt off right now, made me, the "big bellied" lady who is no longer working, breakfast in bed. How special is that? Extremely special and I so appreciate the attention. He's so fantastic and for many reasons way beyond today's treat.

In not so great news, I had two leg cramps yesterday. The first one was actually in the bottom of my foot while we were watching Juno last night (a great movie). I've never had one during waking hours and that one was relatively mild. I've discovered that if I take my calcium/magnesium supplements once in a while, which has a bunch of other nutrients in it also, I don't get these. Even after the mild one, I forgot to take that supplement and it's been a couple weeks now. Oops. Well, I paid for that mistake with a pretty bad calf cramp at about 5 in the morning.

The notable thing about all this is how much better I've gotten at handling these cramps. The initial bolting upright in bed from a deep slumber to this amazing pain is still the same. It's startling and annoying. Now I immediately start to use the pain management meditation techniques we learned in our birth class and it usually doesn't last more than a minute or two. Another interesting thing is that previously I would be hobbled for the entire day because my leg would be so tight, even though I would spend lots of time rubbing it out. Well, now I'm quickly relaxing my leg in that meditation and even 20 minutes later my leg was completely normal without any pain or tightness. It's pretty exciting because, besides the lack of hobble, it reconfirms my belief in these pain management meditation techniques I've learned. Which is a darn good thing, because that's the majority of what I'm going to be using for my home birth.

For the record, I think I've had maybe 10 leg cramps throughout my pregnancy. Which isn't really that bad. Zero would be better, but 10's not so much either. I can't imagine being one of these women that have them all the time. That would be a huge bummer.

The Geography of Bliss

2009-07-08T14:32:00.000-07:00

For the past week or so I've been slowly reading this book where the author tries to quantify why certain cultures and countries appear to be happier than others according to happiness researchers.

The happiest place according to positive psychology researchers is Switzerland followed by Qatar and then Iceland. I haven't gotten to the chapters about the other countries yet.

It's pretty entertaining partly because the author has a partially jaded view on happiness (a self declared negative person) and mostly because he has a hard time trying to quantify the qualities that make these very different cultures happy.

Nourishing Traditions and the Attraction to What We Can't Have

2009-07-07T12:13:00.000-07:00

The other day I was hanging out with Krista and she mentioned this nutrition cook book whose basic angle is that whole unmodified foods are best for you. And that our society's obsession with altering food formats (by homogenizing, sterilizing, or denaturing) is seriously detrimental to our digestion and general health. This book also promotes eating fermented foods.

While I was in college I got really into this type of nutrition; and was a huge advocate of this philosophy. My philosophy is still pretty closely aligned, however I am a vegetarian and this book isn't completely on board with that. I also feel strongly about only eating foods that have a low glycemic index.

As a side, there's been studies that have linked folks who eat fermented foods with less incidence of allergies. I've been taking a probiotic recently and my honeypot took it for some days. While he was taking it he had less issues with his body reacting to certain foods. Interesting, no?

I'm going to make yogurt today, and see how it goes. Wish me luck.

On another note, my serger has been breaking needles for several weeks now when it shouldn't be. I finally brought it in to get it fixed because the timing probably is off. It'll be gone for a week and now that it's gone I've come up with all of these projects that I want to do. Why are we attracted to things we can't have? I must be patient.

Big Bellied Swimming

2009-07-06T17:19:00.000-07:00

I can't express how fantastic swimming is when you're big bellied. I only wish I had made time to do it earlier.

I went to our local pool today during their open swim and swam laps for an hour. They were slow laps. It was so nice!

I'm sure I'll go again tomorrow.

Has a Week Really Gone By Already?

2009-07-06T13:22:00.001-07:00

I'm always amazed at how fast time passes on by.

There are lots of high lights this past week. Like my in-laws visiting, going to the California Academy of Sciences night exhibit to celebrate a friend's birthday, hanging out at the Thornton's complete with a watermelon seed and cherry pitt spitting contest, visiting with my friend Krista and her daughter Molly (so cute!), sneaking up to win a game of settlers, watching The Hangover (pretty entertaining and that has a character that reminds me of somebody I know), starting to write my first iPhone webapp using iWebKit, and yesterday going to Angel Island to celebrate another friend's birthday and hiking the 5 mile perimeter trail. It felt really good to hike and hang out with friends, but I can really feel it today. Besides all that, I've been running loads of errands. They never end, it seems.

Another highlight for me has been our screen printing adventures. My honeypot and I have been hanging out a lot this past weekend and we've been exploring the world of screen printing. He's done it a couple times before, but I haven't. I've had really bad luck getting good screens to come out and am going to work at it again, possibly today. The onsies pictured are my honeypot's first two color design.

In other news my Mother had emergency surgery mid week due to a hernia in her small intestine. It sounded really painful, and they finally operated on her to solve it. She's recovering well, and sounds in good spirits. It's pretty lucky that they figured out what was wrong and were able to fix it.

And another not so great thing that happened this past week is my iPhone tweaked out .. again. Just randomly my phone was acting really weird so I rebooted it (which in the past has solved it's responsiveness issues), except this time when it came back it had no service or software it appears. There's an image above. Apparently when they die, they die hard. I've had other random issues with my phone before, and while I still like what it does and mostly how it works, I find it really annoying that it's not dependable. Thankfully it only dies infrequently, or I would have ditched it a while ago. As it turns out, I rebooted it again and presto(!) it's all back to normal, even going so far as to remember all my data. I guess it was a hiccup.

It's Vacation!

2009-06-29T14:37:00.000-07:00

Even though Friday was my last day of work, today is the first day that I didn't have to go to work! So today is the first day of my vacation. You wouldn't know it from the list I've been working through today. Half of it is probably the direct result of hormones. You don't know what I'm talking about? Well, the urge to clean my house is pretty out of control. I've been getting some pretty serious exercise cleaning my house more thoroughly than it's been in, well.... it might be forever. I spent a large portion of my weekend cleaning like a maniac, and today was the bathroom. Who knew cleaning a bathroom could be aerobic.

I think they call this "nesting."

Roomba got used in a couple rooms, but somehow it still took me hours to "prep" the room for the little robot. And our kitchen was so bad that she actually complained before she was done. Her dirt compartment was so full that she was actually dragging around this big ball of dirt. Perhaps this is more information than you wanted. (Wait until we start blogging about the bowel movements of our new baby! Kidding - I hope we never do that.) Needless to say, our home has recently gotten a "deep" cleaning thanks to the baby.

My mother-in-law is on her way here right now with her sister and her dog. Hopefully Stella will remember the dog and not be so freaked out. It'd be nice if they could just be friends, or sort of ignore each other, or something. I think Stella would prefer to be ignored and ignore, but I think Sierra really wants to be friends. If only she understood the sheer hours it sometimes takes Stella to warm up to other non-human creatures, maybe she'd just give up.

I think my two nieces are going to stay here tonight also. It's going to be a full house! It'll be fun to catch up. I fell like it's been a while. (I hope I don't go into labor tonight.)

Braxton Hicks Contractions

2009-06-26T08:06:00.000-07:00

I've had two contractions over the past couple of days. They both caught my full attention. One was a couple days ago in the kitchen while cooking, and the other was when I was almost done hauling myself up the four flights of stairs to work today (my last day for several months!). I'm not really worried or anything because it's pretty normal for bodies to have some "practice" before the final show. In a way, I appreciate the teaser, because it's giving me a glimps into what's coming down the road. I think it'll make it easier because there's just that much less unknown. (And there's still going to be quite a bit of unknown.)

They're different than anything else I've ever felt. They were really strong, but not in a painful way. They were sorta like a strong tightening of everything from above my pelvic floor up to my mid belly. But it wasn't like a cramp at all. I'm at a loss of how to really describe the sensation. And it didn't hurt. I hope labor doesn't hurt either. (haha) I really wish I could describe these better.

As a side, I really liked this article about birth, so I'm putting it here so you too can read it.

Car Seat Training

2009-06-25T19:20:00.000-07:00

Becoming familiar with the car seat is one of the remaining things we have left on the birth preparation list that my midwife has. There are some percentages of births where they will transfer you and the baby to the hospital after the baby is born. I'm guessing in those cases it's probably pretty important to be ready to leave quickly and not have to be learning this new device. They're not extremely complicated, but they're a new kind of gadget and not completely instinctual.

Last night my honeypot and I played with the car seat and got it all set up in the car. We even adjusted it for Elmo, who might be about the right size for a newborn. I suppose we'll see.

The Mindlessness of Life

2009-06-24T17:45:00.000-07:00

For a while now I've had a hard time standing on my bare feet. Mostly I think it's because of the relaxin; a hormone that relaxes pelvic ligaments and helps prepare my body for birth. I'm pretty sure that this stuff is why my feet are flat now. I've always been happier with arch supports in my shoes, but my feet were never completely flat against the ground when standing barefoot as they are now.

As a result of this, my feet and legs get really painful after standing without shoes pretty quickly. I've always kicked off my shoes as soon as I get home. I like to hang out with socks or barefoot. Well, despite how much better it is to keep my shoes on, for months I've still been kicking my shoes off as soon as I get home. It's so mindless because it's caused me to stop cooking and doing all these other things I love to do that require me to stand. All this, simply because I basically didn't notice that I was kicking my shoes off when I really should have been keeping them on. It's one of those mindless habits that was so ingrained in my life that it's consequences never really occurred to me until recently. This mindlessness has really affected my life by changing the things I would do in my free time. It's pretty incredible to me.

The best part is now that I'm thinking about it and keeping my shoes on at home, I find myself repeatedly starting to take them off. Or noticing that somehow they've disappeared from my feet again. It's so mindlessly etched in my habits.

Baby Shower for Junior

2009-06-22T08:03:00.000-07:00

My friends threw me this great baby shower this weekend. It was pretty non-traditional (I think; I haven't been to many "traditional" ones) in that we basically hung out, painted onsies and had a ceremony. And Junior got some gifts also. It was really nice! Thank you for organizing it everybody!

I'm been thinking lately about why I have an instinctual aversion to these types of gatherings (the ones where I'm the center of attention). When Christy asked me if I wanted a baby shower my gut reaction was "No." But then as I thought about it, I do actually want to celebrate my baby and I do like haning out with my friends. I like traditions and I think they're pretty important. Their importance all comes down to my spiritual/universal belief systems. I think it's important to deliberately tell the universe things. And there's more power in doing that as a group.

I've discovered that events where I become the center of attention are really uncomfortable for me. But why is that? I'm fine organizing things and I'm fine expressing myself and arguing points in meetings with upper management. I'm actually find speaking in front of groups when I know the material I'm speaking about. Somehow that's all different. I have an idea as to why this is and it all relates to how I was raised. While growing up, if I was the center of attention it meant that it was very likely that I would get criticized. When I was hiding away in the corners or just being alone I wasn't the focus and so I wasn't getting that negative attention. I can't actually think of another reason why I don't like being the center of attention.

This might also explain why I like to be alone so much. I'm definitely one of those people that "recharge" by being alone. So is this a trait that I had before growing up in the environment that I did, or did I learn it from growing up like that?

Upcoming Father's Day

2009-06-20T22:09:00.000-07:00

The other day somebody asked me what I was looking forward to with this new family addition. It's something that I've been thinking about quite a bit since then.

One thing that keeps bubbling to the surface of my mind is the excitement I have at getting to watch my honeypot turn into a Father. I've noticed pretty much ever since I've known him how drawn to kids he is and how amazing he is when playing and interacting with various aged kids. It seems to me that kids are also drawn to him too.

In some ways my honeypot is still a kid at heart. He still has the ability to play, which I think quite a few adults have lost. This ability and attraction to playing still permeates his life in many ways. It's the attraction to exploring new things, and seeking out those new experiences. It's also slowing down enough to mindfully be aware of the little things and enjoy them. In a lot of ways I think this is the source of some, if not all, of his life force. It's still a part of mine too.

I'm really looking forward to watching him help our daughter learn how to explore her world and play with it and us.

The image is the symbol for father on the left and daughter on the right in Kanji.

California Maternity Leave

2009-06-19T08:51:00.000-07:00

(Click on the image to see a large/readable version of it.)

I had the honor of attending a Mom's group of women that are going to give birth in the next couple of months using the care of my midwife. (Who is awesome, by the way! I'd like to give a shout out for her apprentice Ellah who I've been working with quite a bit also.)

Here we are, all big bellied women who are scheduled to pop in the next couple of months and there's so much confusion about maternity benefits. In the state of California there are no less than 4 various laws and acts, some federal, some state, specifying what leave you get, if or how much you get paid, and some of them overlap each other. Your leave specifics depend on the following:

your company size (50+ employees withing 75 miles)
your company classification (manufacturing vs. other)
how long you've worked for your company and how many hours you've logged
whether or not your company pays into the State Disability Insurance program (SDI). (Which is a company choice.)
what type of birth you end up having (caesarian or vaginal birth)
and of course if you're lucky enough to work for a company that has their own policy that's more than the state one; lucky you! (like Google with 18 weeks of full pay, where you can take it however you want, like coming back after 3 months and working half time at full pay for another 3 months.)

I hope this chart helps you. In all my research, I have found it to be 100% accurate at the time of this post. The gist is that for the state of California and post vaginal birth, we get 4 months off with our job and benefits protected. If your paycheck has a line item paying into SDI, then you'll get 55% of your salary up to a cap for the first 3 months of that. The last month is no pay, just job and benefits protection. This all depends on company size and other details.

Prior to birth you will get paid for 4 weeks off (55% of salary up to a cap), with the first week unpaid through California SDI (assuming your paycheck has that line item). Your company (not you) can choose to use a week of your paid time off, or sick leave, to pay you during that first week, then the next 4 weeks are paid through SDI.

If you don't use this pre birth time off, you lose it. You can not add it to your post birth leave. Also, if you end up going into labor later than expected, and end up being out of work for 6 weeks prior to giving birth, you will only get SDI pay for 4 weeks, after that first unpaid week, and then you don't get paid anything the last week. It's a tricky thing to time, because nobody really knows when you'll go into labor, assuming you're not having a scheduled caesarian.

If you end up going into labor one week after you left work, you will only get paid if your company was going to use your PTO or sick leave for that first unpaid week of SDI. You won't get any of the pre birth paid part of SDI.

It's so confusing. But count your blessings if you live here in California. We have some of the best maternity benefits in the US. Most other people get 6 weeks unpaid, except that their company can choose to bleed out all of their sick and PTO leave to pay them. Can you imagine coming back to work with a 6 week old in childcare where you no longer have any PTO or sick leave to take if your child gets sick? Most childcare places won't take a sick child, so what do you do? I suppose hope that your work is flexible. Which mine is. Ridiculously so, actually. I'm a very luck person to work where I do for a variety of reasons, one of which is how flexible and accommodating everybody is. Yeah for my company! and Yeah for working in California!

Here's another great article about CA Maternity Leave.

Ruffler Foot

2009-06-18T19:49:00.001-07:00

I've been sewing so much more than normal lately. Besides making specific maternity clothes, I've made a sundress that I can fit into and made new curtains for several rooms in our house. Most of these projects had ruffles or pleats on them and they take forever to do by hand. I've always known there's such a thing as a ruffle foot and a couple years ago I vaguely remember putting some energy into finding one that would fit my machine. But I don't remember ever getting one.

Well, again I had become focused on finding a ruffle foot for my machine and even went to a sewing store last weekend and talked to them about ordering one. Since I didn't have my machine information I wasn't able to order one at that time, which ended up being a pretty good thing.

A couple days ago I'm looking through this pile of stuff in my craft area and guess what I found?! The pictured ruffle foot! I can't believe it. I'm pretty sure I didn't buy it myself, but I do have some vague memories of asking my honeypot to get one at the sewing store near his work maybe a year or two ago. And it looks like he got me one(!!), and I stashed it and forgot about it.

Well, this thing is pretty fantastic. You can see how complicated it is by the picture, and I haven't yet figured out how to make it gather a particular amount of fabric predictably. I'm sure I just need to play with it some more because there are a lot of parts that can be adjusted and there's 4 settings to choose from. I'm so excited to have this new gadget (that will save me so much time!!)

I'm Like the Big Plane

2009-06-17T16:24:00.000-07:00

So about a week or so ago this simile came to me in response to the question "How are you feeling?"

Do you remember the combat game for the Atari 2600? I think it may have come with the game console sometime in the late 70's or early 80's. The cartridge had 30 or so games and one of them looked like the picture. It was a two player game where the big plane and the little planes would shoot at each other. The big plane maneuvered slower, but could shoot farther. The set of 3 small planes (which always flew in that same formation) could maneuver faster, but couldn't shoot as far.

Well, I think the best way to describe how I'm feeling is this:
I'm the big plane
and I used to be one of the small planes. I move slower, it's harder to get up from a sitting position and the insides of my torso are cramped. It's different to historically have been the hyper one bouncing around, and now I don't really do that. My plane is too large, it's too uncomfortable, and I don't really have the inclination or energy anyway. Hopefully, I'll get my physical spring back after birth. Maybe after we catch up on our sleep.

I'm officially 38 weeks according to my midwifery care.

Maniacal Drivers Depend on the Time

2009-06-16T20:34:00.000-07:00

Due to my large size, I've been driving to work every day.

The real reason why I drive is that sometimes I can't get a seat on the BART and it kills my feet and legs to stand for 40 minutes. I have lots of opinions about the really rude people who won't give up their seats to the pregnant lady on a subway train. Truthfully, most of the time folks would move when I asked, but there was an occasion when they would not. On that one occasion I sat on the floor, but it's pretty hard for me to get up off the floor these days, and if I stand the entire trip my feet will hurt all day long. And also pretty frequently I don't want to have to ask for a seat nor do I want to risk not getting one at this late stage. So I drive to avoid it all.

Lately, I've been going to bed around 8:30pm or so and getting up around 6am or sometimes earlier. It means I can be at work by 7:30am which has lots of cool side effects.

The first one is that people don't drive like maniacs this early in the morning. There's still tons of traffic, but it's not jammed up yet, usually.
The bridge isn't usually backed up yet, either. Or if it is, it's a small back up.
There's tons of all day street parking near my work. (I used to have a parking spot in a lot, but our company recently decided to only pay for half of those parking permits. I think they thought we would just pay the other half of it ourselves, but lots of us just street park now and move our cars during the day. Oh, the struggles of becoming profitable.)
I have hours to work without getting interrupted and asked questions. So, I actually get a lot done early in my day, before all the meetings typically start.
I get to leave work early enough that businesses are still open, and there's many hours of daylight to do my walk. (I'm still walking about 3mls every day after work. It's getting harder and harder, but I'm trying to keep it up.)

The maniac driver thing is a very large, important thing for me. It really makes the difference between being slightly on edge and jumpy while driving to and from work and being pretty chill and relaxed.

When I drive later, say more towards 8 or 9am, you will have several experiences where people will change lanes without signaling into maybe 10 feet of empty space in front of you while the person who is already in front of you is braking. This situation will leave you maybe a couple feet behind them as they slam into your lane and brake hard. It's pretty scary, and annoying.

And it's only worst if you're the kind of mellow driver that I usually am where I leave space in front of me. Then you get these types diving in front of you the entire way to work. Or my favorite is those people who tail you more and more because you do leave that couple car length in front of you and get visibly frustrated when you let somebody in in front of you (which I usually do if they signal.) Like somehow you're making them personally late to get to work or something. It's pretty entertaining to watch and think about, but it's just so weird. If people were just a little nicer and mellower, all of traffic would move better.

I really am entertained by watching traffic. It's almost as interesting as going somewhere and watching a new culture (which I love!) I think I got more into traffic after reading this really surprising book about, well, traffic.

Maternity Clothes

2009-06-14T20:06:00.001-07:00

I've been sewing quite a bit lately. Most of it has been making maternity clothes that I like and are comfortable. I had these two pairs of jeans that I was wearing almost every day for a while, but they've gotten so they're a little tight in this one place. It's like there's a tight string right at the join of the elastic top part and the "normal" looking pants part.

Regardless, I've found that the yoga pants with the stretchy knit top parts are so comfortable and great to wear. So I've just made my third skirt with that type of top part and finished it this morning. This skirt (pictured) and the last one are similar in that they're a patterned cotton weave fabric on the bottom, with a stretchy cotton knit panel on the top. I even made the stretchy knit part small enough that I'll be able to wear them when I'm no longer "big bellied." The other cool thing is that they both have pockets too!

The first skirt I made is completely made out of stretchy knit and is solid forest green. It's a little longer than the skirt in the picture, and doesn't flare as much either (because it's just cotton knit and nothing else.) It also doesn't have pockets. I made it pretty fast a couple weeks ago out of desperation of having very few options for what to wear.

This picture also shows how "big bellied" I really am. I was just told that if I went into labor now it would be okay. I guess that means I'm "fully baked" now. Statistically speaking, I probably won't go into labor for another 3 or 4 weeks though. First babies are usually late.

You can also see how much sun I've been getting in the picture. It's been so nice around here. I went on a bike ride and hike today. It will definitely be my last bike ride as I was in some pain with how squished everything was under my rib cage. There just isn't much room to work with anymore. I'm still looking forward to some more hiking, or urban hiking depending.

Learnings about Pregnancy

2009-06-14T05:12:00.000-07:00

I really have learned quite a bit about being pregnant. And what I'm about to talk about could probably be applied easily enough to health care in general.

Basically it's this: If you don't take the time to describe your experience to your provider, in detail, they will have no way of knowing if something is wrong or "different." Yes, it really is that simple. I suppose it makes perfect sense, right? They aren't mind readers after all. There's a huge amount of variations in the experience of being pregnant that are completely normal, but there's some things that indicate other potential problems.

Up until several months ago I was all consuming reading books on pregnancy (and then moved on to taking care of a newborn). In reading the details of these wide variations in being pregnant, I really had convinced myself that everything that I was experiencing was "normal."

When my care provider would ask how I was doing I always answered with "good," and that's about all I said. I don't have a need to be one of those people that talk endlessly about my health and body because I really am ok. If something isn't okay with me, and if it's bad enough, I'll say something. But that prevents finding potential issues early on, because the symptoms have to get bad enough that I'm not okay anymore and I speak up.

The issue I found isn't a big deal, but if I had been describing my experience all along I would have beem more comfortable for about the last month. The issue isn't for public consumption here, but for those of you that are worried know this: I doesn't affect the unborn baby, only me and my comfort.

Other than that, all is well. I'm still active (albeit moving slower than before). I'm still working (and will be until my last day of June 26th). I'm still crafting, having fun, and going on bike rides. I've recently rediscovered the ability to sleep through the night again (mainly because I've learned how to sleep walk to the bathroom in the middle of the night). I've been making maternity clothes because the ones I bought don't really fit me anymore and I can't justify spending money on more when I only have a month or maybe 6 weeks left. And the best news of all is that this baby is in the optimal birthing position right now. Let's just hope she stays that way.

The Signs of Genius

2009-05-23T23:31:00.000-07:00

Wow, it sure has been a long time since I last posted. There's a number of reasons for that. It began because all I was really thinking about and focusing on was being pregnant and we weren't ready for a public disclosure of that yet. I guess I got in the "habit" of not posting and time just ticked on by.

I have lots to say now and I've thought of several good posts in the past several weeks. Somehow I never made it here to post them though. I'll work on that and see how things go.

This picture is what happens when my honeypot starts to get creative with ink. It happens a couple times a year, in various rooms in our home. Pretty fun, huh?

In other news, I'm due in 8 weeks now. I feel huge but several folks have said that I'm not that big. (And I love them for that!) She's been moving so much. Sometimes it's really uncomfortable. She was head down (Left Occiput Anterior), which is the perfect birthing position, for the past several weeks. She flipped head up on Wednesday. Hopefully she'll flip again because right now she's in breech and my midwife won't deliver her at home. I've got 8 weeks to convince her to move around. Wish me luck!

Bittersweet

2009-02-07T17:55:00.001-08:00

We walked around our hood today and stopped to have a cup of the best hot chocolate in town. I also noticed two three bedroom houses for rent all within ten blocks of us. One for $3500 and another for $2950. Don't those rents seem a little high to you? In other news my honeypot's been sick the past couple of days. My poor honeypot.

Another M3 Repair

2009-01-28T23:15:00.000-08:00

Today I decided to take my M3 into work this morning, since my most recent repair on my Scion failed. The Scion is okay, but there is a part that's hanging off, and I need to do a mixture of epoxy, putty, and double-sided tape to make it good as new. So I hop in the other car and I only make it a few block before the "Check Control" light starts flashing. I take a look at the display and it says "Brake Light Circuit Error." Awesome. I figure that not having brake lights is a bit more dangerous than a cosmetic problem, so I turn around and switch cars at home. Looking around on the Internets, I find that this error is fairly common with my car (there are a disturbing large number of common problems with BMWs), and it usually means that there is a problem with the Brake Pedal Switch. I take a look at some DIY pages on how to replace the part (fortunately the switch only costs about $35), and I see that they all say that removing the switch is a bitch. Now, almost every job on the M3 has at least one task that everyone says is a goddamn pain-in-the-ass, and just about every time they're right. Well, I came close to following one of the DIYs that mentioned that breaking off a small clip at the front of the switch makes removing the part a lot easier. I broke off the clip, but instead of coming out, it just stayed wedged in there. I ended up wresting with the part with vice-grip pliers for about a half hour before it finally disintegrated enough to be removed. Hopefully putting the new part in will be easier and hopefully it will actually resolve the issue. I freakin' got to get rid of this car...

Dummies and Idiots

2009-01-09T21:30:00.000-08:00

I love these books. Well, not really. I actually think they're sort of
offensive. Though I guess people appreciate the standardized formats.

Today I went to this very fun bookstore in Manhattan and had to take
this picture. At least they're shelved all in one place so they're
easy to avoid.

Geography Quiz

2008-12-19T22:58:00.001-08:00

This is a list or random geography facts that were run into by the travel writers at sfgate.com.
A lot of them are quite obscure, which makes it even more interesting. And inevitably I get drawn in and do even more research on things I run across.

I really enjoy these kinds of random questions that get you thinking about geography.

Here's a list of 50 geography questions and their answers.

Weird Architecture

2008-12-18T20:58:00.000-08:00

My step-mother sent me this interesting website with lots of pictures of strange architecture. There's some really cool buildings out there.

Here's more if you liked what you saw.

And here's a website dedicated to unusual architecture.

Flight of the Conchords, Season 2 Episode 1 available now!

2008-12-18T19:57:00.000-08:00

http://filmdrunk.uproxx.com/?p=7538

I haven't had a chance to watch it yet.

The Flip of a Coin Might Decide MN Senate Race, Seriously

2008-12-05T19:42:00.000-08:00

I just finished reading this great article about the obscenely close Senate race in Minnesota. How close of a race is it? Well, a "few thousandths of a percent separate" the candidates. To those non-math types out there, that's the difference of 200 votes with almost 3 million votes cast. It's really freakin close.

The most interesting part of this is that according to MN electoral law, if the vote is still statistically tied after finishing their recounts, they'll decide the race with the flip of a coin. This is totally serious. It sure doesn't sound very sophisticated.

In other news, this is why you don't post embarrassing pictures of people you like on facebook or any other social networking sites. The worst part is that sometimes you can't control what your friends do. In case you don't want to click through, it was a picture of Obama's Directory of Speech Writing groping a cardboard cut out of the new Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton at a party. I think it's actually sort of funny.

Election Maps

2008-11-18T22:52:00.000-08:00

I find it really interesting to look at the election maps that are split down by county (zoom in to get the county results). The locations of pockets of blue in seas of red and vice versa are fascinating.
What makes a town primarily blue or red? Does it have to do with the industry that was originally there? Or maybe it's the landscape?
I like finding states like Idaho, where the entire state is fairly red (~72% McCain to ~26% Obama), but there's one county smack dab in the middle of the state that's pretty blue (~66% to ~32%). None of the major cities in the state are nearby, and I think the highway might be outside or on the border of this county, Blaine County. So what's the story with this place? I read a bit in wiki and the only thing of interest was the fact that the median cost of a home was about twice the state's. Why so costly?
Or how about Park County, Wyoming? Oh, this is where Jackson Hole is, and Grand Teton National Park, almost half of Yellowstone. And it has the second highest per capita income in the US at, not quite $100K a year; beaten only by Manhattan. I thought rich people loved republicans? Or is this year an exception? And why is their income so much higher?
This next one was totally unexpected. In a sea of rather hard red (65% McCain to 30% Obama) there's one hard blue county. Sioux County, North Dakota. It's 100% an Indian reservation, and it only has a population of 4,000.
If I ever decided to move randomly, this is probably partly how I'd do it. I think I like my pockets of liberalism, and I'm not quite sure I would want to give that up.

Here's another interesting map tool with tons of data to visually explore with. The interface isn't as a bit clunky though.

Worlds Craziest Data Center

2008-11-15T00:13:00.001-08:00

Looks fake, doesn't it. It's real though.

"This underground data center has greenhouses, waterfalls, German submarine engines, simulated daylight and can withstand a hit from a hydrogen bomb."

Here's the deets and more pictures.

The Sound of Harddrives Failing

2008-11-13T19:37:00.000-08:00

I couldn't help myself. I really think this is cool.

I ran across this page that is the various sounds of hard drive's failing, and the description of what's happening. Pretty cool!

http://datacent.com/hard_drive_sounds.php

As a side, apparently Google can predict flu outbreaks about two weeks before the Centers For Diesese Control can because they get a spike in people seaching for "flu symptoms" and other search phrases. They've made a website so you can know when the flu makes an outbreak near you!

My Bubble has Finally Burst

2008-11-10T22:47:00.000-08:00

I suppose I should be thankful for the over two solid months of pure and unwavering love I've experienced for my iPhone. Well, those days are over. I will probably soon be hesitantly in love/like with my iPhone for the foreseeable future, assuming we can repair our broken relationship.

Today I left work and as I was walking towards the bart I was planning on entering that cookie purchase I bought in the afternoon. (I've been tracking where I spend my money using Quickbank.) I quickly discovered that I had lost 4 pages of apps and all their data at some point during the day. I walked back to work to take a look at the iTunes there and it was empty, which was expected. I've always had the sync turned off there and only used it to recharge my battery. I didn't reconnect my phone on the off chance that somehow Apple support could help me.

I came home and went down to the Apple store only to be told that they had no appointment's open for their genius bar and instead I now have one for tomorrow. The guy I was able to talk to suggested there really wasn't anything I, or they, could do besides sync it. So I came home and reconnected it to my computer here to resync it. It has thrown a total of 7 red exclamation errors, one of which complaining about not being able to find the disk (!!). This is not a good sign. The extra odd part is that the phone works fine, and my contacts are fine too. So it is actually working, in some ways.

I can't express how sad this makes me because I really loved my iPhone, but it sure is a different thing when you know at any moment you can lose all your notes and other data you use every single day.

I hadn't been able to get my backup onto the phone or my apps that I could see in iTunes yet. But I shutdown iTunes and rebooted my phone again. Then I restarted iTunes and turned on my phone and there have been no red exclamation points yet and it's still syncing. Wish me luck.

My honeypot wanted me to mention his $300 ipod from several years ago (that's currently sitting on his desk) that lasted about a year before it died. Needless to say, he's not a fan of Apple. Or as he says he's "disappointed in their product robustness."

In other news, last night I randomly searched on "stella the cat" and this blog came up about a cat named Stella that looks startingly like my Stella. Coincidence? I think not. She must come from a long line of Stella's. Meow.

Cough, Cough

2008-11-08T17:52:00.000-08:00

I might be patting myself on the back a little but..
I'm pretty excited about how far I've made it in the updates, rebuilds and overhauls of our computer systems. The first step was getting a much faster pc, and I did back in mid Sept. It can handle so much more than my old machine. It's great. Then there was moving everything over from the old machine to the new Vista machine, getting all the backups working and tested again, and finally moving my scripts for BASH. I also took this opportunity to tidy up some of my data too which always takes time.

A perk in all this is that I figured out one of the hard drives was very loud. And all this time I though it was the power fan. I got rid of that and now I can actually sleep with the office door open. It's really nice to not have the office sounds potentially affect my sleep anymore.

In the past couple weeks I've rebuilt the old machine with Ubuntu - which I'm pretty happy with. I'm such a noob. I know how to do stuff, and I just have to look up the correct commands, but doing anything is soo freakin slow sometimes.

I got our home network switched over to a new 802.11n router. This things is freakin fast. 160Mbps+. We can stream video through it to our living room. It's awesome. No more network cable in our living room!

My last step is to put OS X on the second harddrive of the ubuntu machine so I can start playing with iPhone development. I'm pretty interested in that and I have some ideas with it. Wouldn't it be cool to make an app that everybody's willing to pay a couple dollars for and tons of people use it? That would be pretty cool.

I did get Grub installed tonight so this weekend I'll work on OSX on the second harddrive. Wish me luck.

The picture above is one my honey took in the past couple of months. I like it, so I'm sharing it.

Right-Wing Slippery Slope Fantasies

2008-11-07T13:13:00.000-08:00

I don't remember where I found this link, but it's pretty hilarious:

http://focusfamaction.edgeboss.net/download/focusfamaction/pdfs/10-22-08_2012letter.pdf

Basically, Dobson pretends that he's reporting on the state of the country in 2012 if Obama wins the election.

Where do you Stand Politically?

2008-10-31T12:24:00.001-07:00

This is something I've always wondered about. I know generally that I'm left leaning, but I also have some right leaning views on certain subjects.
A friend just sent me this great test that will put you on a chart according to your answers.

Those are my results on the left.

Go here if you'd like to take the test yourself, or just read more about it.

Hmmm Interesting...

2008-10-30T16:38:00.001-07:00

Click for a Readable Copy.

Too Close To Call

2008-10-29T13:47:00.000-07:00

Click this link to see which countries in the world support which Presidential candidate.

What the heck is Cous Cous?

2008-10-27T20:34:00.000-07:00

Well, here in the good 'ole US of A it's basically chopped up pasta. So says my food expert friend. However, in other countries it's not quite that. Wikipedia says that in other countries it's actually more like:

rolling and shaping moistened semolina wheat and then coating them with finely ground wheat flour

Oh, wait. That's pretty close to chopped up pasta, minus the labor.
I'm glad I had the opportunity to eat "authentic" couscous on my travels to Morocco (in Sept 2003). That was a fun trip. When's my next one? I'm starting to feel like I need to get another trip in while I can.

In other news, and speaking of travel. Guess where I'm flying to for $162 including all service charges, fees, and taxes? Round trip direct to NYC in mid-January!! How can they cover their costs flying a plane with fares that low cross country? I'm so excited to go and hang out with an old friend, and explore Manhattan some more.

The first picture is of my friend and I on a 3 day trip in the Sahara desert in mid Sept 2003. Actually, it may have been longer. I don't remember exactly anymore. There was nothing except sand, sun, friends, a couple camels, and what felt like endless time. The second picture is something we saw from the road at one point.

Burned by the Highway

2008-10-26T19:58:00.000-07:00

For some reason people I usually drive with prefer to use the highway to get across town, rather then using city streets. For me, I prefer the variety of scenery and the usually less aggression required to drive city streets. But every once in a while I'll think that maybe they're right. Maybe it would be faster to take the highway across town. And rarely does it turn out that way. And yet I still try. Today I took the highway from my house to here and I don't think I went over 15 mph until right at the end. The worst part of driving that slow on the highway is the view. It's other cars, random people, and concrete. Yuck.

Last night some friends mentioned these services where you have to do a math puzzle in order to send an email at certain times, or not be able to drive or call certain people if you're too drunk. I think these are great services. They should take it a step further and make you blow a breathalizer to drive a car.

Stained Glass

2008-10-23T19:55:00.000-07:00

Last week my stained glass window class ended. It was super fun and it gave me a new understanding and respect for how amazing the stained glass is that my father-in-law gave us for our wedding. You can see a picture of it in this post. The lines are super thin which means his glass pieces perfectly fit together. And I can tell you how hard that is. Very hard and very tedious.

Anyway, here's a picture of my piece from the class. I like doing stained glass, but it's filled with tedious, time consuming steps. I may do it again, but I'm not sure. Another thing to consider is the expense.

Give and Give and Give

2008-10-22T19:22:00.000-07:00

In the past couple of days I've picked almost 5 gallons of tomatoes from our plants. It had apparently been too long since the last time I picked some because there were a bunch of tomatoes that had split and fallen off the vines to become one with the ground. It's impressive to me how much food you can get from just a single plant!

I'm making more sauce to can. And this time I'm going to make some Tikka Masala that doesnt' have dairy or garlic so my honeypot can eat some too.

I really like that photo up there. It looks so country with the wood floor and bowl.

Letting it Slip

2008-10-20T17:31:00.000-07:00

My dad always used to respond to my comments about time passing faster and faster with this: "You wait until you're my age."

Several weeks ago I reconnected with an old high school friend using facebook. Yeah, I used to steer away from those social networking type of websites, but I'm starting to understand their appeal. Anyway, next thing I know, several weeks have passed and I still haven't responded.

This weekend my honey and I went to Tahoe with some friends and stayed with my mother-in-law in her new house. It's got a great view and even better decks. I like that house. The boys went mountain biking and I stayed home and read with the yummy mountain air. Pix here. I might actually get to ski on a semi-regular basis now that we can combine visiting her with skiing.

In other news, I finally bottled my experimental Ginger Beer. I was quite rushed though because I was getting picked up for the previously mentioned trip to Tahoe.

The plant starts that I started a couple weeks ago are doing great! I'm so excited to get my garden going for the next round of food.

I bought a violin a couple days ago too. My honey recently purchased a guitar and has been playing it tons. He plays in a band called Macaroni and the Cheese and wants me to join the band too. So I went out and got one. We'll see how it goes.

This past weekend we had breakfast at this new place. It's only a couple blocks from our house and it's another new breakfast spot! I love this! Our neighborhood is changing so much. It's getting better and better. If only we could afford to live there one one income..

Soldering

2008-10-13T22:56:00.000-07:00

I'm so lucky to have my honey to fix my electronics. He's soldering the sound out of my laptop right now. It's a very exciting moment.

I'm also excited about all the plants I'm starting right now. Some fava beans, spinach, asian greens, and some others. I'm working towards growing more edibles around here. I think there's something to eating food grown nearby.

Warning, the following is horribly not PC, but it's really freakin funny. Massively entertaining. http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/

Busy Day

2008-10-04T22:00:00.000-07:00

Today was an active day. Here's what I did.
-had breakfast with my honey
-clear out the walkway of overgrown plants
-swept the sidewalk on both sides of our house
-replaced my office desk with a table and got everything set up again
-made chocolate chip cookies
-cooked dinner
I also canned some red sauce last night, and canned some tikka masala as well.

My honey put our new toilet in the upstairs bathroom, played his guitar, and other things too.

My Honey Shaved Off All His Hair!

2008-10-02T22:20:00.000-07:00

I had some before pictures, but they're all blurry. I guess you'll have to wait until you see him.

He has a cute head!

My Honeypot got a guitar

2008-09-28T22:45:00.000-07:00

He's been playing and fiddling with it for days now. I think he's a fan.

I had a crafty weekend. I attempted to strip the dye out of two pairs of pants worthy of "reworking." This is the first time that I've ever not been successful. It's almost like no dye came out at all, even though the bath it was in turned dark grey, like normal. Something went wrong, but it's unclear what went wrong.

I also dyed this skirt that I love. It's purple with some tie-dye flair. (I had stripped the dye out of it several months ago.)

I also made another batch of beer. This time it's a ginger beer. I added some tea and saaz finishing hops. It's my first time making anything quite like this.

Sometimes yar comes over and we have a limited number of games that the three of us can play. We added another one to the collection. It's called Citadel.

TED Talks and Data Visualization

2008-09-26T23:00:00.000-07:00

I ran across some fantastic websites tonight. The first is TED talks. It's a collection of lectures by various intellectuals on a pretty wide variety of topics. This one was about some generalizations that we as "first world" dwellers make about "third world" dwellers. He goes through and visualizes data from the 1970s on infant mortality, life lengths and income, among others. It's pretty fascinationg. Here's the actual visualization tool for some of the data sets he references. Here's another one.

The other thing I ran into tonight is another website that offers various interactive visualizations of a variety of data sets and also appears to have some interesting data driven lectures. I only played with the data sets. And that was also very cool.

Here's another one.

Rolling on the Floor Laughing

2008-09-17T13:38:00.001-07:00

You might only get this if you're a techie, or have techie inklings, but this movie is so freakin funny. Oh My God.

2008-09-17T13:34:00.000-07:00

My office mate just pointed out this very interesting (and informative) website about the election. Complete with various scenarios and lots of statistics.

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/

Get out and vote - and help others get out and vote too!

Craft Time!

2008-09-14T19:39:00.001-07:00

I've recently been interested in working with knits in some sewing projects. I have some vague memories of having lots of problems sewing with knits. But that was a long time ago, and my skill is probably higher than it was at that time.

I purchased a couple colors of knits last week and today I finally made something.

I can see how it would be hard to work with this fabric. It doesn't really have any memory of what shape it was when it was flat and square. Also, it's stretchy in one direction but not in the other. So it's even more important to be careful how you build items.

I understand the use of starch and sizing a whole lot more.

House bound

2008-09-14T14:29:00.000-07:00

My honeypot put the toilet into our new bathroom. It's pretty exciting. He also cleaned a ton. This is also pretty exciting.

I just finished reading the book "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" I really like reading the book but it wasn't nearly as great as the other sci fi I've been reading lately. The next one for me is "Lord of Light" by Roger Zelazny.

Our tomatoes have grown so much. I really didn't think they would grow like this. We've eaten a bunch and it looks like we're going to get a bunch more.

I recently built a new computer for myself. I've been spending lots of time trying to get everything moved over. It's a long process. My new computer is so fast. I can't believe how slow my old one was. It's better that I didn't know. I wasted most of yesterday fighting with apache php5 and mysql. At the end of last night, I had gotten it all to play nice.

How many weeks old are you?

2008-09-10T16:31:00.000-07:00

I noticed a friends IM message that commented on how many weeks old he was. And it got me thinking about my age in weeks.
Months:393.5
Weeks:1,710.9
Days:11,976

Hello Kitty Laptop

2008-09-09T10:45:00.001-07:00

Only 3 grand! What a deal!

I'm all for creating a unique laptop to make yourself stand out. But this is just a little pink for me. How about a tan one - for choco cat? Then I'd be sold!

Nintendo Love

2008-09-06T12:48:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking about Mario Bros and Nintendo for weeks now. Today I finally got a hold of the ROMs and the emulator. My honeypot also found his usb controller, (and it works) so I'm in business! There really is nothing like projecting super mario bros and using an authentic anti ergonomic conroller with surround sound. Nothing.

I suppose it's nostalgia, though I don't remember being an especially happy kid. But boy were the video games fun!

In other news I just finished reading "Snow Crash". This is a great book! I reminds me a bit of the "Da Vinci Code" for all the religious history. I'm now reading "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?"
I don't really know - but I'll let you know when I figure it out.

Last, I finally moved my number over to the iPhone. I've been really happy with it and have only crashed it once. I finally bought some protection for it, instead of keep wrapping it up in a wash cloth and stuffing it into a zip lock. And no, I haven't experienced any dropped calls. (Yet - hopefully never.)

Burning Man 2008 - iPhone

2008-08-31T22:14:00.000-07:00

Our theme camp was a complete success and we couldn't have gotten a better placement! This year we were a registered theme camp (for link - search for Circus Boot Camp) with classes teaching various circus arts and we got placed on a corner lot! We offered training for slack line walking, unicycle riding, juggling, trapeze performance and hoola hooping. I'm pretty amazed at how many people showed up for these classes. We were darned busy. People really love to learn this stuff! (I'll put more pictures up when my campmates come out and I get ahold of their pictures; this was another year where I didn't take a single picture.)

The especially cool part of it all is that many people who already had some skills would often help out those who were trying to learn. So we ended up having a really good trapeze arts teacher, even though nobody in our camp had much experience with it.

My honeypot and I arrived on Saturday, Aug 23rd around 6pm or so. We were so lucky to get the placement we got because we were pretty close to the action, but not so close for it to be annoying. The weather was so perfect, except for a couple serious storms. The storm on Monday started around noon and lasted well past 8 hours or so. It was the worst storm I've ever seen in my 7 years of Burning Man. The only other storm I saw this year was also relatively bad. It started yesterday afternoon, Saturday. I left during that so I have no idea what the weather was like today. I hope it was perfectly clear for everybody that was still there.

I left on Saturday afternoon before the man burned. For me, being there for 7 days was long enough. I had an opportunity for a ride out, and I took it. My honeypot is still out there and if the temple burn hasn't started yet; it will in minutes. Even though I missed the burning of the man and the temple burn by leaving early, I don't really mind. I enjoy the earlier days of the week more, as it's more mellow and there are less "lollipop raver kids". I like the "old school" crowd a bit more. Also, the playa was very loose with deep dust, so riding a bike was very challenging out in the open playa. You'd be riding along on a bike and then hit one of these loose places and come to a screeching halt while fish tailing and struggling not to fall over. It wasn't very conducive to exploring via bike. And the distances are really large to be walking everywhere all the time.

In other news, I finally went and got my iPhone. I've wanted one for a while and agreed to wait until the second version came out so the hardware and software was a little more stable before dropping so much money. I dropped by the store today and walked out about 10 minutes later with my new iPhone. It was easy as pie. So far, I'm pretty impressed with it. Of course, I haven't really gotten deep into the software yet. I'll let you know what I think in a couple weeks or so.

17h 20 mins until we leave

2008-08-22T14:21:00.000-07:00

Last night I got my v2 prototype LED hoop done. It's a harder plastic so it was much harder to get the electronics in side.

The hooping action is much better because it's stiffer.

The downside is that because it was so much harder to split open the tube, I wasn't able to hot glue the leds inside. So basically if it has any force on the leds, they're going to pop into the tube.

Oh, well. It's what I can manage given the time left.

4 days and 13 hours

2008-08-18T20:50:00.000-07:00

Until we're on our way out to the playa. (For some reason blogger has a config issue and is failing on image uploads..)

This past weekend was a whirlwind of activity. There was the birthday dinner for Marc. And friends hanging out crafting until 3:30am in the morning. There was breakfast with Rose and her Mom and sister at the new restaurant down the street. And then so many things to prepare for Burning Man.

This is the first year that I will not have a day off before leaving for the playa. It makes it quite a bit more hectic getting everything together because I have to squeeze it in around work. Add to that the fact that I can no longer go to stores that have short open hours - like fabric stores. It's a little more planning ahead than I'm used to.

The picture is of a hat and cape I made for this year. I'm really excited about the hat (and all the other flair pieces I'll soon get to wear.) I think having the shoulder protection will really help me get out during the day. It can be so sunny out.

Erika's a human backpack!

Whirl Wind Weeks

2008-08-15T12:01:00.000-07:00

It's been a really busy couple of weeks, and it will probably continue to be until we are out on the playa. No time to blog!

My friends Mari, Nathan, Dora and Amelia arrived on Thursday the 7th and stayed through Wed the 13th. They are a really cool family! They were making the rounds visiting friends and family. They arrived early because they were passing around sickness and didn't want to infect some of the older folks at one of retirement communities that was their previous stop. It's tough being a kid and being sick, but they seemed to handle it pretty well. They're really sweet girls!

Yesterday I went to our new Colo and helped rack a bunch of our new servers. It was lots of fun. I really enjoy hands on stuff besides the programming that I do. It was also really cool and interesting to see all the parts of the Colo on the tour that I did. They have 9 generators that each generate 2.2 Mega Watts each. And there's a 50,000 gallon tank of diesel underneath the building. It's pretty crazy, indeed. I think that place could power a small city. I'll try to get some pictures up when I get them. They're trapped on a co-workers iPhone currently. Here's a tour of a Colo I found online - they're probably all the same.

Next up is trying frantically to finish up all the projects I want to do for Burning Man. We're leaving in 8 days and I'm going to be working for 5 of them. Tick Tock.

I finally got to start drinking my last brew batch last week. It's good. I'm happy with it.

sir cuss boot camp

2008-07-31T22:45:00.000-07:00

We had a casual craft night tonight and I sewed the "backdrop" of our bm theme camp. I think it came out good. The picture doesn't really do it justice, but you can tell how wide it is. And it goes up into two points, but those parts were folded back.

I'm really excited about this year's burn. I think it's going to be fun and good.

I've had these really weird ridges in both of my thumb nails and they would grow out over time. They seemed to appear in the same frequency, every couple months or so. I think I figured out what they were. I was about to push my cuticles back a couple weeks ago and it occurred to me that this would be about the time that the ridge would start. So I didn't push my cuticles back at all at that time. And the last ridges are about to grow out. It's pretty weird and shocking to me that I was hurting myself so much and not noticing.

Burn, Baby Burn

2008-07-30T21:05:00.000-07:00

My life "theme" has recently changed. It used to be "If it doesn't burn, it's not food." My current theme is "Food is a vehicle for hot sauce."

I love hot, spicy things. I eat some form of very hot spice around twice a day. I've gotten to the point where I use hot sauce like other people use oil and vinegar on salads or ketchup on eggs. Most of it's just not that hot any more.

We were in the city last weekend and we walked by a local grocery store. Why not buy some groceries here? (as opposed to getting back to the east bay and doing it.) So we did. And they had new hot sauces! So I bought four new bottles, and two of them are very hot! I love that.

I'm really enjoying learning about the various spicy peppers. Each one affects your mouth in a different way. Some will slowly ramp up to their peak of hotness, others will be very very hot quickly and fade away just as quick, others will only affect the tip of your tongue, while others still will only affect the back of your mouth. Yum.

Yesterday I finally got around to bottling my new beer. I'm very excited to drink it. I realized that I get so excited when I brew beer that I have historically felt the need to use hops in all the phases of brewing. And I think for my beer tastes now, it's not such a good fit. This might explain my lack of home brewing recently. But this beer only has finishing hops and has lots of blueberries. I'm guessing it's going to have only a slightly more complicated taste that bud, or something along those lines. And that might just be perfect for me now.

Oh, and as a side (for those of you who may be following this blog) I've lost 15 lbs since starting these CRON angled food changes during tax season. It's very exciting. (And I really haven't had a headache in many, many months too - thankfully.) 8 more to go and I'm done.

If only I'd known..

2008-07-27T22:12:00.000-07:00

We recently discovered that there is, in fact, a pretty easy way to get across the bay after bart stops running. We tried it on Saturday night, and it was an astounding success.

There's a bus that runs around every hour, on the hour. It sweeps through the downtown market street corridor and heads across the bridge. Conveniently for us, it goes down telegraph and has a stop one block from our house. It's beautiful.

In other news, I finally got to meet Molly (and catch up with Kirsta and Bill). Molly is still "minus 2 weeks old." She was born almost 2 months early. Whoa. She's so cute and she looks great!

This weekend was busy, busy in a good way. I'm starting to notice the pressure for burning man preparations. I have lots of projects that I want to complete before then, but not so much time to really work on them. In the end, the most important will get finished and I won't even care that the rest got dropped. 34 days until the man burns, and about 27 before I pack and leave. Yikes.

Crafty Weekend

2008-07-23T20:20:00.000-07:00

This past weekend I brewed a blueberry IPA with only a finishing hops. I realized during the Anchor Brewery tour that when I homebrew, I use too many hops for my tastes. That's pretty silly. So this time I refrained from using hops much and used a blueberry extract instead. I love the smell of hops, especially when I'm brewing. I don't much like to drink hoppy beer though. Perhaps the Moss Street Brewery is being resurrected?

I also started making costumes for our Circus Cafe Burning Man theme camp. I have this really fun tutu made out of a variety of colors. And I have so many more ideas of things to make.

I've had a really hard time motivating to work this week. I wonder why that is. I still love my co-workers, but I just don't really want to work much. I suppose to be more specific, you could say that I'm no longer "obsessed" with work. I'm enjoying my summer.

Oh, yeah, Yar - I have appropriated your sweatshirt. It's very warm! You better come over and visit soon if you expect to get it back.