I love bikes. I like riding bike but I love bikes. There have been times when I have ridden every day and commuted to work on a bike and there have been times lately that I have gone months without getting on one. Anyway I have long had a dream of having a wife and kids in a long train of bike starting with the wife and I on a tandem followed by as many trail-a-bike's and/or kid trailers as it takes to have the entire family on what amounts to one bike. This weekend I took two steps forward and one step back in seeing that dream become a reality. After haunting craigslist for months to no avail, Kelly and I invested in family togetherness in a big way by purchasing a brand shiny new, blue 2008 Raleigh Companion tandem. It is a the cheapest of the “nice bikes” on the market. I actually did seriously consider a $279 one from Wal-Mart but in the end I was just afraid that it would be such a maintenance problem and such a heavy pig that it would just collect dust in the garage. I expect this bike to be a part of my kids memories of childhood and I expect that I will pass it on to one of them some day as a family heirloom. The step back was that my sister Angela sent me a link to a web site that made the case fairly passionately that kids under the age of one are still just too small and immature to ride even in a trailer. I was really looking forward to Roko riding behind us in gleeful style. Angela recounted her experience with her kids bobbling heads in bike trailers though, and when I'm honest the reality of the bumpy ride combined with the fact that nobody even makes helmets for kids that small got me to put off plans for Roko to get in on the fun until next spring. We ended up leaving the bike at Kelly's folks house so we could ride it in their nicely paved neighborhood and with a built in baby sitting service. We took it for some nice short rides around the neighborhood and we both agree that we like it. Commence the family train. At least we now have the locomotive!
I have been a 1&1 customer as long as they have been doing business in the US. I understand they started in Europe before opening their doors in the US. As a promotion they offered a very nice shared hosing package for free for 3 years. I signed up for one for personal use and one for a small company I work for. At free ninety nine there was clearly nothing to complain about but even at a premium price it would have been a good deal. In those three years I never had one single outage, not one problem with server performance. There was one small problem with the billing (for extra usage) that took a few calls to get resolved but I was sold. I sung the praises of 1&1 to everyone I could. I know for a face that at least three other accounts were bought on my recommendation. When the three years expired they rolled me over to a paying account that was about $5 a month. I was so happy with them I upgraded both accounts to the $9.99 business account. Things were smooth with the rollover and by the next year or so I had several professional sites running on the two packages. I'm only using a small fraction of the resources that come with the package. Two months ago I would still have told you that 1and1 is the world's best. Then one day I get an email for one of my site owners that the site is acting up. I take a look and sure enough it is loading pages really slow or not at all. I can't reach the FTP side either. So I call tech support. After explaining the problem to them they put me on hold for a few minutes then come back and tell me that they talked with the guys who run the server and that they are aware of the problem and should have it fixed within one hour. He also said that he would have them email me if anything changed or when the problem was resolved. I hung up that phone still feeling I had the best hosting provider in the world. After five years of prefect server performance I do finally have a problem but it is handled very quickly and in a professional way.
That was the last time I felt that way.
An hour went by and the site was still down and no email. Two hours. Four… The next morning it was still down and I had never gotten as email. So I call them back. Why is my site still down? Again, she this time, putts me on hold and then comes back and tells me she has talked with the server guys and they know about the problem and should have it back up in less than an hour. I ask why I didn't get the email? She said the request was still on my account and that I would get an email when the server was back up. I told her that would be fine but what I needed was an email if the site was not going to be back up, "if anything changed", like the first tech support person had promised. She confirmed that I would get one if anything changed. I ask why I didn't get one about the extended delay for the first estimate of 1 hour. All she could tell me was the request was on my account. An hour later the site was still not up. About two hours later it finally was after about 18 hours but I never did get an email.
At this point I'm thinking well computer problems do happen I've been doing this with them for a long time an 18 hr outage is crap but not worth a switch. The tech support was a joke but if the next problem is in five years I am still going to stay here. Not two week later this whole story repeats. The site goes down and I get almost word for word the same BS for the guy who answers the phone. I increasingly suspect that the tech support office in somewhere far way has no real connection with the technicians who either are or are not working on the problem with my server. I wonder if the two minutes they put me on hold for is really used to answer another call or go get a donut? After all if the guy who is working on the server has to answer the phone from the call center calling him every time I call the call center, why not cut cost and just let me talk to the guy who fixes servers. What seems more likely given the disconnect between the call centers story and the reality is that the call center is just a farce that is there to give me the feeling I had the first time I hung up with them.
Anyway this time it's ONLY down for a few hours. I am convinced that I should be moving my stuff to a better host but I don't know who. If 1and1 the biggest and best regarded web host in the world can't do better than this, where can I turn?
Now it's four week later and again yesterday the site goes down again sometime before 2:30. I call. Same BS. It will be back up in an hour, we will email you if anything changes. Now I have two accounts with them if you recall so I ask the call center guy why I only have problems with this one and I never have problems with the other one. He takes both my customer number and says he will look into it and see if there is anything I am doing that could be the problem or if there is any difference in how the two servers are set up. 5:30 it comes back up and I don't get any email.
This morning I call them just to see what they will say when challenged on the face that they told me something and it never happened. All I can get from them is some explanation about how port 80 was not working and now it's fixed and how I should have received an email because it was listed on my account. He promised to email me like was promised yesterday. I ask when? Within the next 20 minutes? and he says within 5 minutes. 15 minutes later I get an email from him. My first ever from a tech support person from 1and1 and all it says is the same crap about port 80.
It's official I'm in the market for a better hosting provider. If you know of one please let me know.
There is this local 4x4 club called the Gold Hills Posse. I have wheeled with them a few times and they are good guys. I haunt their forum from time to time to see what they are up to. One of the cool things about them is that they work with the forest service to take care of one of my favorite trails. The trail is called Strawberry, or maybe Strawberry Creek. I took Kelly on it on our second date. Anyway when I read their forum I always read up on the trail and I caught a post about how there was a really big tree blocking part of the trail and causing users to have to go around it. Now you may not think that would be a big deal but there is wilderness area on both sides of the trail and there are certain groups that would like nothing more than to have a reason to close the trail all together. So I have this buddy who is into chain saws (and jeeps) and I figured he would jump at the chance to go clear this big tree. I figured right and so we set out this morning to go take care of it. It was a fun day of wheeling and nice to get a chance to put some work into protecting a trail I love. Scroll through these pics and if you want to see more click here. Sorry Roko spotters, he stayed home with mom on this one.
When I was a youngster, maybe 6 or so, I remember in that funny snapshot way of distant memories, accompanying my dad into some thick woods to capture some wild bees. I remember him lighting his smoker, and explaining why he would smoke the bees. I remember him breaking large chunks of the tree trunk out to get to the bees inside. I remember thinking about the Berenstain Bears. I guess bees = honey = Berenstain Bears? I also remember being back home and him having a big white styrofoam cooler full of honey comb and giving me a piece to eat . Latter when I was a teenager a guy down the street had some bees and my Dad got into helping him some. I'm not really sure how good any of these memories are. But as memories they are real and therefore a part of who I am and part of my Fathers imprint on me.
My Dad grew up in a community where farming was common. His dad while he did a lot of things to make a living I believe would call himself a farmer. My Dad also got a degree in entomology and as far as I can tell that was what he wanted to do “when he grew up”. Anyone can tell you that even getting the degree is no guarantee you will do what you wanted to when you were a kid. He ended up as a programmer.
A few years ago Dad started Keeping bees again. He had picked up woodworking along the way and sort of parlayed that into experimenting with unconventional beehive designs. Mostly out of admiration for him I think, I expressed a some desire to have a hive of my own. Now, he lives in Texas and I'm out here in California but we met up in Utah at Angela's house for a family reunion I think and he brought me one of his Top Bar Hive boxes. Even after that it sat around for at least a year. Last year I hooked up with Lenny Taylor, who is my Mom's, brother's, Wife's, brother, or if you prefer my dad's beekeeping and general mayhem friend's brother. At any rate Lenny lives out here in Sacramento and at some point offered me a box of bees that came from a captured swarm. He already had them in conventional Langstroth frames and so they would not fit in the box my Dad had made without really tearing into them. A few weeks later he gave me another one. Then a few weeks later he and I met up to remove a swarm that had settled into someones front tree. On that one I finally got to use the Top Bar Hive. So by the end of last spring I had Three small hives going. Two in conventional Langstroth equipment and the third in my Dad's hive.
I found keeping bees very rewarding. It filled my mind for weeks last spring. I made a lot of mistakes though being new. It turned out that those weak little hives needed a bit more care from me and by the end of the summer I had lost one hive to absconding and the other I think starved because of relentless ant raids and the loss of a Queen mid summer for some reason. The colony in the Top Bar Hive was the lone surviver going into the winter. This spring it's numbers were down to only a ball about the size of a grapefruit, but I figured it was spring so they would be okay. But rather than take off they continued to dwindle again plagued by ant raids as the weather warmed and the plants began to bloom. My first Son was born this spring so it's possible that if I had been paying a bit more attention to them I could have kept the ants out and got them to take some sugar water thereby keeping them alive. Anyway my Dad came out for Roko's blessing when he was about three week old and that weekend we saw that queen alive for the last time. She only had about ten or fifteen worker left and we found her cold and alone in one corner of the box. A year after I began keeping bees and I was back to where I began. An empty box.
That was two weeks ago. This morning I picked up my second swarm of the year. I have decided to leave the Top Bar empty for now and perhaps even rework it into a Langstroth. I got my self on the list of a local beekeeping supply store where people often call if they have a swarm land in there yard. I have had four calls but my schedule is fairly full so I haven't been fast enough to get to two of them before they moved on. The two I have done have been really cool. My plan this year is to get up to six swarms and then toward the end of the summer or as needed combine weak ones with strong ones so as to keep them building up all summer.
Roko will be a month old tomorrow. It has been a fun month with visitors from Kelly's family and mine. He has grown into his body and put on a good layer of body fat. I have spent countless hours just holding him and grazing into his perfect face. We love him.
A conflict is circling in my mind about him thought. At my age I am well older than my parent were when they began having their six kids. The time for me to have a big family like that may have passed forever from posibility. It seems the family I will have will be a smaller one. Though Roko's past month has been filled with firsts I am so exited for the firsts that are yet to come. I can't wait for him to grow up. I can't wait to come home and see his face light up at the site of dady. I can't wait for our first camping trip together. I can't wait for him to learn to ride a bike and follow me around the neighborhood. From his first time rolling over by himself to his first day of school, to his first drivers licence, to his first child. I know I need to savor each moment of his life and I plan to. But life is also long .I will be an old man when he has his family. His life will be a big part of my life from now on. I look forward to all the times to come.
The last few days have been a roller coaster but we have ended on a way high. Thursday morning I took off work to go with Kelly to what we thought might be her last prenatal appointment, or at least a significant one where they might decide when to schedule and induction. When they took her blood pressure they were very concerned at how high it was and at the end of the appointment they told us we needed to go to the hospital and labor and delivery. The appointment was at a building about five miles from the hospital. Kelly's mom had come to the appointment as well, so she wanted to take us out to lunch before going the hospital. They said that was okay so we went to the Cheesecake Factory and had a really good lunch. For the first time in a year and a half Kelly bent the rules of her diet and had a bit of cheesecake. When we got to the hospital we went through admitting and they put us in an observation room. Kelly's blood pressure was going up, not down, so it was looking more and more like they would induce her. I decided to run back home and get a few things and take care of my Jeep that was parked at work with the windows down. After I got back, the doctor decided that they needed to start an induction because of an unacceptable risk of eclampsia. Kelly didn't have all the symptoms of preeclampsia but the blood pressure was a big concern. I gave her a blessing there in the observation room and we walked her down the hall to a labor room.
The room was very very small. Only about three feet around the bed on a side. They gave her a medication called Misoprostol that would start to soften her cervix and help strengthen the contractions. Shortly after that, as the blood pressure continued to rise and be too high they started her on an IV of magnesium sulfate. This brought the BP down quite a bit and would prevent a seizure. The side effects of the “mag” was that Kelly felt very hot and kind of flu like. At the same time it made them have to put her on fluid restriction. So she could not drink. The restriction would end up lasting until late Saturday. The Misoprostol started to work slowly and the “mag” started to lower her blood pressure. As her BP came down there was no reason to rush things, so they were not giving her Pitocin yet. The Misoprostol was getting nice results in opening up her cervix. This stage was fairly static and continued for quite a long time with mild painless contractions at 1 to 3 minute intervals. About 5:00 pm on Friday during one of her examinations to find out how far along her cervix was her water broke. Within about a half hour they decided it was time to give the Pitocin. During the next hour not too much seemed to change. Kelly's Dad and I gave her another blessing. They had been asking her about her pain the whole time by getting her to tell them what it was on a scale of one to ten, or zero to ten. She had always said zero but after about a hour of the Pitocin she said one for the first time. The next hours were the hardest. Kelly started to become very uncomfortable during each contraction. She asked that no one talk during the contractions and everyone was just trying to make her as comfortable as possible. They were telling her not to push but just to breath. We could see the contractions coming on a monitor on the wall as well as Kelly and Roko's hart rates. At one point the nurse was standing by the side of the bed kind of between me and Kelly and as one of the contractions started we saw Roko's hart rate just drop off the bottom of the scale. The nurse went from “It's all about Kelly's comfort” to action in a split second. She grabbed the bedding and pulled up to roll Kelly to her side and told Kelly to roll over. Kelly who was not seeing the monitor was confused, and angrily told the nurse she didn't want to roll over. The nurse and Kelly's mom repeated forcefully that she had to roll over. This all happened very fast and Roko came back on the monitor right away. Things returned to the tense calm for all of us but Kelly who by now was in real pain during each contraction. Her pain now, she would say was a seven. At each contraction now though, Roko's heart rate would drop just a bit. They replaced the external baby heart rate monitor with one that stuck right to Roko's head to be sure they had a good watch on him. On her side Kelly really seemed to be hurting a lot with each contraction. I think this was the hardest period for her. She started to cry a bit with each contraction not knowing how long this would go on. Throughout this whole thing one of the hardest things was how no one wanted to talk about time. Of course no one could give us a hard time line but having never done this, nether Kelly nor I had any idea what to expect. I once pressed the doctor and she told us between four and twenty hours. She seemed to insinuate that this was too broad a range to be useful, but for us it changed our prospective from 45 minutes to 3 days. It was really helpful to us. As labor started to give way to child birth, it seemed to me that Kelly got stronger because she could see the end would come. At about 9:30 still in the labor room, with me holding one leg and a nurse holding the other they told her to push for the first time. As she did I saw Roko for the first time. A purple fuzzy head just started to show. At that moment I was overcome with the emotion of Kelly's pain, the joy of seeing Roko and the joy of knowing that the dreaded C section was off the table.
Doctor Wong came in and told us it was time to move to the delivery room. It took a few minutes to make the move. By this point Kelly had two IV poles with a combined total of five drip lines. The move was a real parade with people joining in as we would pass. With everything set up in the other room the doctor had Kelly start pushing again. Each time Kelly would push Roko would come a bit farther before sliding back in. After only a few pushes though, it seemed like he should be far enough to come out but wasn't coming any farther. Dr Wong had Kelly stop pushing and he slid a finger in gently then suddenly he tugged a bit and removed his finger and told her to push. This time his head came out. Face down. His head was long and purple and fuzzy. Holding Roko's head with his palms, Dr Wong again reached in and turned Roko a bit and then on the next push Roko slid out, the Doctor struggling to catch him. The doctor clamped the cord and I cut it. It was tough and leathery white. Roko's cord had a knot in it. With all his in-utero squirminess he must have swam in a loop when he was still small.
Two nurses then took Roko over to the corner to a table with a heat lamp. I was not ready to leave Kelly. I was holding one of her legs up still and I guess I was waiting for her to signal to me she was okay. Finally the doctor told me to put her foot in the little indent in the table and go see Roko. So I did. The nurses had already wiped him down and were working him over pretty good. They were both eastern European. One of them, it turns out was Bosnian and lit up when we told her his name was Roko. “R-O-K-O?” she asked, and then just kept repeating “Roko” “oh Roko” with a very enthusiastic and ethnic rolled R. I went back and forth between Kelly's bedside and where they were working on Roko. I was with Kelly as she delivered the placenta. I wanted to feel it and the doctor told me I could. I remember thinking it was beautiful. It was a monocolor deep rich purple with veins of exactly the same color, yet clearly defined by shape coming out of it from all over and collecting toward the cord. It looked like it was the consistency of jello but was surprisingly firm and even hard to the touch. I guess there were people in the room who though it was gross to touch it. The Bosnian nurse asked if there was some cultural or religious reason. “Just curiosity” I responded.
I regret the pace that things happened after the birth and the fact that Roko and Kelly were separated and that that meant I could not be with them both. I missed them wiping Roko off. I didn't get a picture of the knot in the cord. I don't really remember Kelly's reaction to the moment of delivery. At the time we did not know that Roko was okay, so it made sense not to mess around with letting Kelly hold him right away, but in retrospect I wish we had.
I spent a little time with Kelly and Roko in the recovery room and then left them to run home. I wanted to upload pictures of Roko to all the family that was waiting and I needed a shower and Kelly wanted a few things that she had forgotten. I got back late at about 2am Saturday, and found Kelly awake with Roko. She had a big smile. I snuggled into bed with them and slept like a rock till morning.
By mid day Sunday we were on our way home with our perfect child.
After months of worry and fear everything had turned out perfect. We were home with a perfect child and Kelly seemed to be so healthy it was like nothing had happened at all. There are no words for the feeling I have about the event as a whole. The only thing that comes close is gratitude.
Born 3/7/08 2200hr 5Lb 15Oz 19" so he is long and small at the same time. He has Big feet like Kellys dad and brothers.
For all the pics look here. It's kind of ugly now and you will need to work for your pic but there are some good ones and I will work on it later to make it easy to browse. New pics will just be dumped in for now.
Kelly is off the Magnesium so she will be more comfortable and we are hoping they will send her home tomorrow night but prepared to spend Sunday night too if they feel like it's the thing to do. Roko and Kelly have really figured out the nursing thing and he seems to be eating really well. From the low point where a doctors appointment turned into a "we are going to have to induce now" because of preeclampsia, everything has gone to the best case scenario side. We didn't even dare to hope that things would go this well. Thank you all for your prayers and calls and concerns. I'm sorry we have not had as much time as you may have wanted to talk to each of you as cell battery and hospital rules make it hard but we rally feel your love and are grateful for you. He is even cuter by the hour.
Kelly is going the Docs several times a week now to make sure Roko is doing everything he should be. So far he is a top performer. His weight seems to be right on, not too big or too small, and he excels in moving around. For the tests that they run twice a week they watch for correlation between his movement and his hart rate. If the baby wont move around they can't get a good test, and it can drag out for hours if the kid won't wake up and play. Roko does not have that problem! He loves to play. Kelly is also doing a home test every night where she has to lie down in a certain way and see how long it takes for him to move 10 times. It can take between 5 and 20 minutes they say. But I guess Roko is still learning to understand talking because he just does it in 3 minutes. Cheeky little guy. And speaking of Cheeks these picture are from the ultrasound today and those bulges are in fact his big cheeks. He's a good boy!
In other news we have pretty much decided to name him Roko David Teller Ashurst. Roko after his great great grandfather. David after his great grandfather as well as after his uncle David and his uncle Joesph David. And lastly, Teller after another great great grandfather. We reason that this will give him lots of choices about what to go by. Roko may be kind of edgy but David is safe and Teller is something in between maybe. So take your pick Roko but I think I will just call you Rocky.
Kelly and I have made our way to Texas. After work Friday we drove down to Kelly's parents in Riverbank to see them and start our Christmas holiday. Saturday night we gave our presents to them and and opened the things they gave us. Sunday morning Kelly's Dad gave us a ride to the Sacramento airport. We got though security without any delay and arrived at our gate with tons of time to spare. Kelly was working on her last of a long list of knitted gifts. We watched about half of The Terminal on my laptop before they started boarding the plain. The flight was uneventful which is the best kind and landed at DFW about 25 minutes late. Jessica and Ruthie where waiting for us at the baggage pickup and drove us to my parents house. We have been having a great time ever since. Yesterday there was a big party with all of moms family. Last night we acted out he nativity with Kelly as Mary me as a wish man and winter as a sheep. This morning we opened even more presents. Through out this whole time we have eaten our selves silly and squeezed in a daily nap.
| 1 | Roko Teller Ashurst |
| 2 | Roko David Ashurst |
| 3 | Roko Stevens Ashurst |
| 4 | Roko Thomas Ashurst |
| 5 | Roko Peter Ashurst |
| 6 | Roko David Teller Ashurst |
| 7 | Roko Peter Thomas Ashurst |
| 8 | Roko Hiram Teller Ashurst |
| 9 | Roko Hiram Thomas Ashurst |
Third and final trimester! Roko as he will be named, is a boy if you don't yet know, and he is doing very well by all indications. He is right on average for his age, size wise. He kicks his mother all day and night. Kelly is about the cutest pregnant girl you ever saw and I'm am getting very anxious for him to come. I don't know what ells to say about it but that we are excited. This is the list of our top 10 favorite names in no particular order. Feel free to weigh in. (I know we only got 9)
Wednesday night I couldn't get to sleep. (maybe that contributed to the jeep door melee) When that happens I often find I better get up and do something useful rather than lie there not sleeping, or doing anything. The problem is what to do at 12:30? You can't make any noise. Anyway I ended up redoing the banner you see at the top of the screen. The old one has been up almost since I opened this site three years ago. So a fresh look seemed over due. The picture is from a trip I took with the scouts from our ward back in September. I like it a lot. The scene reminds me of a happy day just like the last one and I think it looks nice.
My jeep is an 87. Twenty years old this year. It has had a hard life for the last few years. Actually it had a really soft life before I bought it. I moved to California in April of 02 and bought the jeep shortly after. The guy I had bought it from got it just out of college as his first new car, and had taken really good care of it. It had been kept in the garage and the paint was immaculate. There was not so much as a door ding in it. The interior was no different, clean and spotless. In those first few years after I got it I lifted it about 5 inches and put big tires on it. I geared down the axles and put lockers in it. Then I proceed to wheel it on some of the sierras legendary trails. It was fun times. But it was hard on the jeep. As a unibody the Cherokee is light and wheels well but it also twists and flexes as you wheel it. Over time this starts to show in all the welds and joints and in the doors. My jeep is a two door and so it has longer doors and they just haven't closed all that well since I bounced the jeep down some ledges in Moab with my dad. I haven't really wheeled it hard since I got married. Though I still use it to get up in the mountains several times a year. So for a long time my plan has been to buy a newer 99-01 and move all my modified stuff over to the new rig thereby essentially replacing the body.
Anyway I told you all that as background to what I am about to tell you now. Wednesday night I was looking through the jeeps for sale on craigslist and sort of wishing I was ready to get a new one, but knowing that it wasn't going to happen for a while. It's a perennial pastime. Thursday I worked late and was driving home in the dark. As I turned onto the washed out dirt road thats the back way to our house, my jeep bounced over some ruts and I thought to my self... though it would be nice to get a newer jeep I don't need one to be happy. Life is great and it makes no difference what I drive. I have Kelly I don't need anything. I pulled into the driveway not two minutes later happy and full of gratitude. I jumped out of the jeep and took my foot off the brake at the same time. The door caught on the chain link fence as the jeep started to roll back. I tried to pull the door closed but the jeep kept rolling back. Finally I jumped in and hit the break. I restarted the jeep and pulled forward. The door had bent way forward and now would not close at all. I tried to close the door but it was not happening. Even if I bent it closed the latch no longer lined up with the frame catch. The hinges were partially ripped out of the sheet metal. It was a mess. I was an idiot.
I thought a lot about getting a new jeep that night. I looked at many of the same jeep online I had looked at the night before, but this time with a new sense of reality. I could just give up on this one. I even emailed a few of them. I could just take the door off all together and drive it like that for a bit. No option seemed like a good option. The next morning. I strapped the door to the passenger seat and drove it to work gaping open about 4 inches. It seemed like every car that drove past was thinking what an idiot. I left it sitting at work with the door hanging open. At lunch I stopped at a body shop that is in the same business park that I work in. The guy there said it would be no big deal to make it work as long as it didn't need to be pretty. He quoted me $306. I had Kelly pick me up and by Friday at lunch when I went to pick it up the door was closing beter than it had for years.
A cautionary tail about parking next to chain link fences on slopes indeed but also about how the things you have are great and how you shouldn't give up on them... not yet.
I don't read a lot. But when I do I like a book with meat. To qualify as a good book to me it must change the way I see the world. George Orwell's 1984 written just after world war two in 1948 meets this criteria more than any book or story I have ever heard. The term mind bending is an understatement. The story is very unpleasant at times as it describes how this future government controls every aspect of it's subjects lives and indeed their very thought. It is horrifying in it's near plausibility. For those of you who have not read it or phoned it in as a high school assignment it is a must read. The adjective "Orwellian" and the notion of “Big Brother” as government surveillance system overreaching it's boundary come from it pages. I don't know that I have ever read a more powerful book.
Last week Kelly and I went up to Seattle. I had to go to a trade show for work. We stayed with cousin Johnny and his lovely family in there new home. On the way up we took a detour to Battle Ground where my family lived for most of my high school years. It was interesting to see what had changed and what was the same. The town had grown up quite a bit. There were a lot of new businesses on the west end of town. The high school had added a lot of new structure though interestingly it seemed mostly to be covered hallways and a new gym. Pulse a bunch of portables where the tennis courts were. The Burgerville was still there but with a McDonalds next door. We got there just at dark and as a light drizzle started to fall. I remember after we moved the Texas being amazed at how, with a clap of thunder it would commence a downpour that would last from twenty minutes to an hour and then cease just as suddenly as it began. In Washington apparently I had never experienced such an event. In deed the rain in Washington is a completely different kind of a thing. It starts almost imperceptibly as the water in the air starts to get wet. In deed there is no bright line between the thick fog and the light drizzle. At it's most heavy Washington rain might reach the level of an average California spring rain but as if the level of exertion were just impossible to sustain that kind of rain just never last more that a few minutes, unlike the days of it we get here in the spring. Anyway Battle Ground had plenty to remind me of why we called it a hick town. It seemed that every corner ether had a chain saw shop or a tractor dealer. We got to John and Mamie's at about 8:00 having made better time on the trip than we expected owing to Oregon having lifted the 55 mph statewide speed limit that they had last time I passes through. We had a very nice evening getting to know Mamie and getting to spend some rare time chatting with Johnny. Baby Lucy having gone to bed before we got there didn't give us our fist glimpse of her till the next morning. Friday morning we all broke up to do our thing. Me to the show, Johnny to work at Boeing's 737 assembly line, and Mamie and Kelly to Seattle to see the sites. The show was interesting but small. By afternoon I was about ready to go. Johnny picked me up after work and we met up with the girls at the ferry dock to ride over to Bainbridge Island and then go see Poulsbo. Poor Little Lucy was being a real trooper, having forgone her afternoon nap. She remained pleasant throughout the trip that included enough car time to drive even us adults nutty. The ferry ride was very fun. It was just like my childhood memory. The boat hadn't changed one bit except that I remember them having more of a restaurant on them and this one only had a very basic kind of snack bar. Kelly was already half past eating time on her very regimented diabetic pregnancy diet and so not having a good dinner option on the ferry added to our stress a bit. We finally ate at a Mexican place in Poulsbo that I think was there when we lived there. It was in a strip mall kind of affair where my sisters cool friends all hung out at a skate shop. Washington was very much like I remembered. There was a good deal of grey, some with and some without drizzle and a few times of bright sun peaking through clouds. Perhaps the thing I like about it, is that it makes you want to wrap up in a sweater but really you could get away with a T shirt in a pinch.
So there is this web site that those of you who live with a 14 year old may know called homestarrunner. It's good times if you have an extra half hour to waist on adolescent nonsense. It's all about these flash animated ?guys? Including the rare poopsmith and “the cheat” It is perhaps from this last character name that I have adopted my latest in a long line of non cuss words. I find that I need at least one or... well the alternative to not having one handy is even more unseemly. I'm not proud of it but at least I try. Anyway it started out somehow as “cheater bot” thought I'm not sure why or how and kind of got shortened back to just cheat. My brother and I have always had a tendency to sort of develop our own phrases and meanings. I suppose that custom phrases are some kind of a sociological device that help to define the boundaries of a group or something. I also like to quote from movies. I think it is for the same reasons. If people have seen the movie and recognize the line it creates some kind of connection. Like one time when I was maybe 12 or 13 my older and much cooler sister was having a party at our house. I was in the kitchen somehow and one of Angela's cool friends came in looking for chips and asked if it was okay with me if he took this bowl. Now before I go on I must first tell you that at the time there was this Doritos commercial running where Jay Leno said “crunch all you want we'll make more”. And that was my reply to the hungry party goer. To this day I consider it one of my wittiest moments. He laughed and it made me feel cool.
Last night Kelly and I Rocked the bumpin' Trunk or Treat at the ward house. I was complacently in the "no I'm not dressing up this year" camp until Monday night when Kelly made the key suggestion that I could wear the black watch cap and sweater my bro in the navy gave me and be a spy. Somehow by Wednesday that ended up the classic bank robber you see here. I just love that girl!
Kelly and I went to the doctor today and they did the big ultrasound, The baby appeared healthy and happy. It was squirming around like a dancing fool. It is normal size for it's age and there didn't seem to be anything that worried the tech. To find out if it's a boy or a girl you will have to play our little game. Our favorite pic is the baby waving! My 2nd favorite is the spine picture with the baby's arm up over it's head. It looks like it's stretching. Kelly also likes the one with the baby sucking it's thumb. Although everyone thinks it maybe picking it's nose. The last three are the baby's scary Halloween face! Looks like it's gonna like the holiday as much as it's mom!
As I lay in bed in the morning before getting up I often set goals for my day. This morning I wanted to really dig into a job I have had on my plate for a week or so and get this piece of machine fixture designed and cut. Making it is the easy part. The hold up has been that there are no models for the part the fixture holds. The engineer did all his work in excel and the end result was 4 complex curves, a list of critical dimensions and a part list. From that I needed to make the parts. So the first step for me was to do all the models. Now this is actually 4 separate pumps but they share most of their geometry and in fact most of their parts in common, with only dimensional differences between them for the most part. So in order to make them most efficiently the thing to do is make one computer assembly model with a configuration for each pump. In order to do this I first needed to make configurations of the parts that were different between the different pumps. Anyway I'm getting a bit technical here... There are no short cuts and even thought we all had a good understanding of what the four pumps needed to be. The modeling had to get done before we could be sure the fixture that I needed to make would work. One thing led to another but I just never got enough done today to feel like I could make the dang fixture. At the end of the day it felt like nothing had happened all day even though work had taken place and progress made. I guess what I'm saying is that even if you have a clear idea of where you want to go you still have to cover the ground that lies between where you are and where you want to be.
Hee Hee Hee... Click Here to listen. We rented a Baby dopler like the ones they use when you go to the OBGYN. For a mere dollar a day we can hear and record our baby's swishy hart doing it's cute little thing. My nephews think it sounds like a crazy puma. That first one is the best as far as quality beat. This one is a longer session where it comes and goes a bit. This last one is another good short one.
