Friday, May 29, 2009
That was fast!
At 8:59 pm on May 28th, little Lenny Grace came into this world. Mother and daughter are both doing great. More later.
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
When you're sliding into first and you're feeling something burst... It's a baby! [Cha cha cha!]
My wife is awesome for any number of reasons. That's an established fact. Yesterday, I think she became too awesome for me to deal with though. We've known for a while that Texas was going to host an NCAA regional (a four team double-elimination pool that serves as the "first round" in baseball) and almost assuredly a super-regional (a two-team best of three series, the "second round") here in Austin. We also knew that regionals are May 29-June 1, so we couldn't possibly make it because she's had trouble sitting through nine innings, much less six or seven games in a few days, not to mention for fear that labor would start at a baseball game... and then I would look like an absolute dick: "Oh, hey, look at that guy who dragged his nine month-pregnant wife to a baseball game!"
Sure enough, Texas got the number one overall seed, and there will be a regional here this weekend. Additionally, Army is the number 4 in the region, and I'd love to see them play, since I respect the hell out of any kid that goes to one of the academies. (As an aside, one of these days I want to go to a football game at West Point. Have you ever seen their campus? It's somewhat attractive.) But it's just not to be, right?
Not until Ariane asks me yesterday evening if we should just buy tickets anyway and go. And if she doesn't feel up to it on any given day that I could take her sister and leave her at home. How awesome is that? I have the green light to go to baseball this weekend regardless of how my nine month-pregnant wife is feeling. I had no idea I had married a baseball nut (and she really is) who would risk going into labor at a baseball game. Plus, she dislikes the same players and things that I do! (You're on notice, Tant Shepherd and Singing the National Anthem Before Every Single Game)
And there is no way I am touching that offer with a ten foot pole. Think of the possibilities: she goes into labor at a baseball game, and I look like a dick, or she goes into labor while I am at a baseball game with her sister, and I look like a huge dick, or she stays home and everything is fine except, but I am essentially abandoning my wife when she could go into labor at any time to go watch baseball. No thanks.
Although, if she came with me and went into labor then and there, I think we could probably get lifetime season tickets if we named our daughter "Augie"...
Sure enough, Texas got the number one overall seed, and there will be a regional here this weekend. Additionally, Army is the number 4 in the region, and I'd love to see them play, since I respect the hell out of any kid that goes to one of the academies. (As an aside, one of these days I want to go to a football game at West Point. Have you ever seen their campus? It's somewhat attractive.) But it's just not to be, right?
Not until Ariane asks me yesterday evening if we should just buy tickets anyway and go. And if she doesn't feel up to it on any given day that I could take her sister and leave her at home. How awesome is that? I have the green light to go to baseball this weekend regardless of how my nine month-pregnant wife is feeling. I had no idea I had married a baseball nut (and she really is) who would risk going into labor at a baseball game. Plus, she dislikes the same players and things that I do! (You're on notice, Tant Shepherd and Singing the National Anthem Before Every Single Game)
And there is no way I am touching that offer with a ten foot pole. Think of the possibilities: she goes into labor at a baseball game, and I look like a dick, or she goes into labor while I am at a baseball game with her sister, and I look like a huge dick, or she stays home and everything is fine except, but I am essentially abandoning my wife when she could go into labor at any time to go watch baseball. No thanks.
Although, if she came with me and went into labor then and there, I think we could probably get lifetime season tickets if we named our daughter "Augie"...
Friday, May 22, 2009
OMFG
I've said it before, and I'll say it again, pregnancy can be yucky. Consider today. Ariane cooked a big (and delicious) meal while I was at work today (breaking things, ho hum), and she was on her feet for a couple hours on the tile floor. That was not so good. She took a couple pictures of her horrifically swollen feet afterward. For example:
Pretty swollen. That's not the grossness, though. Because I am a perfect angel, I was squeezing her feet after dinner, while doing some work on the computer with my other hand. I guess I squeezed too long and hard in one spot and, well, I completely deformed her foot.
That depression lingered for a solid minute or two before inflating again. Yuck.
Pretty swollen. That's not the grossness, though. Because I am a perfect angel, I was squeezing her feet after dinner, while doing some work on the computer with my other hand. I guess I squeezed too long and hard in one spot and, well, I completely deformed her foot.
That depression lingered for a solid minute or two before inflating again. Yuck.
An astute observation
Ariane pointed out yesterday that with her mother and sister getting in next week, today, tomorrow, and Sunday will be our last weekend together as just the two of us until... uh, well, never? 2030 or so?
I find this disconcerting.
I find this disconcerting.
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
Congrats, Dr. Hollish!
Kinderbloggen is not a place that is going to break any news outside the sphere of poop and Sesame Street, but there is breaking news out of Paris that is tangentially related, so I am going to post it here:
Ladies and gentlemen, Dr. Andreas Mogensen, Ph.D (2007, Aerospace Engineering, University of Texas at Austin) is (and this is not a joke) one of the European Space Administration's newest astronauts, despite being actually a Californian without U.S. citizenship who happens to hold a Danish passport.
To say "Congrats, Hollish!" is a wild understatement, because this is simply inconceivable. I thought knowing a guy who plays in the NFL was awesome, but that's over 200 people a year. Before today there were eight ESA astronauts. Eight.
A year ago, Ariane and I were in Konstanz, Germany, visiting Andy and his girlfriend just a day before Andy was flying to Hamburg to perform the first round of testing. The first step was some ridiculous memory test, and Andy was convinced he was going to bomb out in the first elimination because he was doing terribly on some practice tests. Yet, after a year, ESA pared down the 8,400+ applications and picked just six or so (I got news Monday - I promptly freaked out in my office and had the people next door worried that I had hurt myself - and am writing this Tuesday night, so I don't know the exact number because they wouldn't even tell Hollish himself), and wouldn't you know it, but Andy is going to space, supposedly to work on the International Space Station. Only about 500 people have ever been in space. That is some elite company, my friends.
Sorry though, Andy, I am still not sorry for laughing at you every time you said you wanted to be an astronaut and go to Mars. It was preposterously silly then, and it still is now... it's just that you might actually get a chance to (I can't believe I'm about to type this) go to Mars.
So now Andy isn't going to have time for the little people from his past nor Earthlings in general (being locked down by gravity is so April 11, 1961). I will prefer to remember him from the awesome times, like when he won (read: lost) a ~15 person, ~$300 credit card roulette game in Phoenix.
Sucka.
I can now tell my daughter that, yes, she can be anything she wants to be. And I can actually mean it.
Good luck, Hollish.
Ladies and gentlemen, Dr. Andreas Mogensen, Ph.D (2007, Aerospace Engineering, University of Texas at Austin) is (and this is not a joke) one of the European Space Administration's newest astronauts, despite being actually a Californian without U.S. citizenship who happens to hold a Danish passport.
To say "Congrats, Hollish!" is a wild understatement, because this is simply inconceivable. I thought knowing a guy who plays in the NFL was awesome, but that's over 200 people a year. Before today there were eight ESA astronauts. Eight.
A year ago, Ariane and I were in Konstanz, Germany, visiting Andy and his girlfriend just a day before Andy was flying to Hamburg to perform the first round of testing. The first step was some ridiculous memory test, and Andy was convinced he was going to bomb out in the first elimination because he was doing terribly on some practice tests. Yet, after a year, ESA pared down the 8,400+ applications and picked just six or so (I got news Monday - I promptly freaked out in my office and had the people next door worried that I had hurt myself - and am writing this Tuesday night, so I don't know the exact number because they wouldn't even tell Hollish himself), and wouldn't you know it, but Andy is going to space, supposedly to work on the International Space Station. Only about 500 people have ever been in space. That is some elite company, my friends.
Sorry though, Andy, I am still not sorry for laughing at you every time you said you wanted to be an astronaut and go to Mars. It was preposterously silly then, and it still is now... it's just that you might actually get a chance to (I can't believe I'm about to type this) go to Mars.
So now Andy isn't going to have time for the little people from his past nor Earthlings in general (being locked down by gravity is so April 11, 1961). I will prefer to remember him from the awesome times, like when he won (read: lost) a ~15 person, ~$300 credit card roulette game in Phoenix.
Sucka.
I can now tell my daughter that, yes, she can be anything she wants to be. And I can actually mean it.
Good luck, Hollish.
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
Oh, the stoopid, it hurts
I have tried to stop posting my angry rants, but this is too much now. I am going to limit myself so that I don't type a 10,000 word screed against everything that pisses me off. I'm not going to link anything, you can find it all online from reliable sources, like the Red Cross and ProPublica, but here goes nothing:
My daughter has yet to be born, yet she is already smarter and more informed than Elisabeth Hasslebeck, whom is someone I respect* for being brave enough to go on TV despite being a grade-A idiot. I made the mistake of watching the clip of her getting destroyed by Jesse Ventura on her stupid show this morning. I am not going to link it, because I (and this is the truth) actually got so frustrated and angry that I had to bite my lip and pound my desk so that I didn't scream at the computer.
How can someone be so wrapped in a cocoon of stupidity, dishonesty, and immorality? I have no misconceptions that I can raise a perfect child, but I hope to be able to raise a child who is smart enough to understand the basis of her statements, to put one and one together and make two. People like Hasselbeck can't even do that. And for this she gets rewarded with a large national audience every day. It is irresponsible, at absolute best, for ABC to continue employing someone so separated from reality and sense.
I really should just block her show and Fox "News" from my TV. The stupid, the self-contradictions, the incessant blow-hardery, the non-stop dishonesty and downright incorrectness of it all... it's too much to stand. Their current story du jour defending torture (torture!) is unbelievable. It's like watching a B-movie in terms of believability. But then they go and outdo themselves, to the point of self-parody, such as Sean Hannity almost comically tacking "And I'm a Christian!" onto his defenses of waterboarding and sleep deprivation and stress positions.
If you watch Fox News, may the FSM and his noodly appendage have mercy on your soul.
Her, Hannity, and the hosts of "Fox and Friends" should have a stupid-off and O'Reilly, Gingrich, Kristol, Barnes, Hume, Krauthammer, and Will can have an intentional-dishonesty off. Not to mention Malkin, Reynolds, Morrissey, R.S. McCain, Erickson, and the rest of the cheerleaders.
Cheney, Bush, Rumsfeld, Yoo, Bybee, Rice, Rove, and the rest of them can go to jail, already. And they should be waterboarded 183 times in a month, for good measure. After all, it's not torture and, besides, Nancy Pelosi may have known about it, which totally makes it OK.
I am hoping against hope that Obama is playing some kind of long-term game, trying to build up public support for investigations and prosecutions by denying the desire for them now, trying to preemptively eliminate the certain cries of "partisan witch hunt" that will emanate from Team Stupid, but if he's not, and he really has no intention of this ever being investigated, he'll lose a large amount of my support.
In all seriousness, if you in any amount agree with anything any of the people I have listed say about torture (TORTURE!), please never come back to this blog. I would happily - very happily - never speak to you again in my entire life. I don't want you near my child. Ever.**
*Not really
** Really
As an addendum: This makes me smile, but I don't understand what's wrong with people who go to church regularly. I understand that a large percentage of this type of people are Evangelical, and for some baffling reason (abortion, only abortion, oh and the gayz) they are married to the Republican party because the the GOP is so "Christian" [Ed. note: Ha ha ha ha ha! Good joke!], but WTF? Go read the Sermon on the Mount and tell me "WWJD?" I hate when I know more about religion than religious people.
My daughter has yet to be born, yet she is already smarter and more informed than Elisabeth Hasslebeck, whom is someone I respect* for being brave enough to go on TV despite being a grade-A idiot. I made the mistake of watching the clip of her getting destroyed by Jesse Ventura on her stupid show this morning. I am not going to link it, because I (and this is the truth) actually got so frustrated and angry that I had to bite my lip and pound my desk so that I didn't scream at the computer.
How can someone be so wrapped in a cocoon of stupidity, dishonesty, and immorality? I have no misconceptions that I can raise a perfect child, but I hope to be able to raise a child who is smart enough to understand the basis of her statements, to put one and one together and make two. People like Hasselbeck can't even do that. And for this she gets rewarded with a large national audience every day. It is irresponsible, at absolute best, for ABC to continue employing someone so separated from reality and sense.
I really should just block her show and Fox "News" from my TV. The stupid, the self-contradictions, the incessant blow-hardery, the non-stop dishonesty and downright incorrectness of it all... it's too much to stand. Their current story du jour defending torture (torture!) is unbelievable. It's like watching a B-movie in terms of believability. But then they go and outdo themselves, to the point of self-parody, such as Sean Hannity almost comically tacking "And I'm a Christian!" onto his defenses of waterboarding and sleep deprivation and stress positions.
"I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ." --Mahatma GhandiThe only reason I am thankful for people like Sean Hannity is that they have always been around and were a big reason that I stopped believing in all these superstitions (e.g. God, etc.) when I was 13 or so. And, yes, I am morally equating people like Sean Hannity to child molesters. This may be unfair to child molesters, as the cheerleading of Hannity and his ilk led to the deaths of thousands, and then to unknown numbers more who died being tortured (tortured!) in order to create a reason for the invasion of Iraq ex post facto.
If you watch Fox News, may the FSM and his noodly appendage have mercy on your soul.
Her, Hannity, and the hosts of "Fox and Friends" should have a stupid-off and O'Reilly, Gingrich, Kristol, Barnes, Hume, Krauthammer, and Will can have an intentional-dishonesty off. Not to mention Malkin, Reynolds, Morrissey, R.S. McCain, Erickson, and the rest of the cheerleaders.
Cheney, Bush, Rumsfeld, Yoo, Bybee, Rice, Rove, and the rest of them can go to jail, already. And they should be waterboarded 183 times in a month, for good measure. After all, it's not torture and, besides, Nancy Pelosi may have known about it, which totally makes it OK.
I am hoping against hope that Obama is playing some kind of long-term game, trying to build up public support for investigations and prosecutions by denying the desire for them now, trying to preemptively eliminate the certain cries of "partisan witch hunt" that will emanate from Team Stupid, but if he's not, and he really has no intention of this ever being investigated, he'll lose a large amount of my support.
In all seriousness, if you in any amount agree with anything any of the people I have listed say about torture (TORTURE!), please never come back to this blog. I would happily - very happily - never speak to you again in my entire life. I don't want you near my child. Ever.**
*Not really
** Really
As an addendum: This makes me smile, but I don't understand what's wrong with people who go to church regularly. I understand that a large percentage of this type of people are Evangelical, and for some baffling reason (abortion, only abortion, oh and the gayz) they are married to the Republican party because the the GOP is so "Christian" [Ed. note: Ha ha ha ha ha! Good joke!], but WTF? Go read the Sermon on the Mount and tell me "WWJD?" I hate when I know more about religion than religious people.
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