I miss you both

It's Portland, Round II for me now. The city is nice, this whole area is so pretty. Does it rain a lot? Yeah, I guess so. Is it cloudy a lot? Sure. The alternative is to be buried under five feet of snow which then builds up in dirty piles for six months a year.

But it's nice. I've always found rain relaxing. Unfortunately, we don't seem to ever get thunderstorms here.

It's just a lot harder to be away than I expected, and it gets harder every day. It'll be worth it, though, in the end.

Look who started walking a month or so ago...


And I believe there's a little tooth coming in on that cute little jaw...

Kinderbloggen, Year 1

It's hard to believe I started writing this (garbage) blog a year ago. I know it's cliche, but it seems like it was yesterday. Really. Even harder to grasp is the fact that Lenny is now already almost seven months old. If we were in a more stable situation (i.e. I had a job and Ariane wasn't still in school) it's possible that we could be thinking about kid number 2. It'd still be way to early, and we're not insane, so we aren't, but we could conceivably be doing this.

As it is, we've been lucky. Lenny has been perfectly healthy so far, she's an absolute sweetheart; I mean, 10/10: would have baby again! I'll get to spend probably another couple months here in Austin (at least) before I have to leave for my still-hypothetical job. In its own right, this job pursuit has taken a turn for the comical. Before October, I had never been to Oregon. I had been to Alaska, California, Washington, BC, and Yukon (not technically Pacific, but whatever), but with the next upcoming trip* I will have been to Portland thrice in the span of three months. So fingers crossed for this one. (Actually, really it's two interviews in one, one job in Portland, one in Albany, NY, so we'll see what happens. If I miss out on this one these two, I'll probably just learn to farm and raise goats.) Pros and cons in both locations. That's for another day. At least this company didn't advertise its jobs by talking about how stressful it is and how everybody spends a lot of the time yelling at each other. (Note: this is actually how Intel described themself all day during my 2nd interview with them; they were proud of it. The second group also told me 1/3 of the employees quit in the first year, which I no trouble believing, and former employees have openly thrown around the term "365 day-a-year slave pit that will have no trouble calling you in on Christmas." I still would have liked the offer. Meanwhile, the next company I'm interviewing with shut down for a week at Thanksgiving and is shutting down for 2 over Xmas/New Years. Very nice.)

It's probably time to start baby-proofing the apartment. Won't be too long before Lenny is mobile one way or the other. We're going to remove the coffee table (read: junk accumulator) in the living room so she has a space to play, but we'll have to seal off the kitchen, train ourselves to keep the bathroom door closed, anchor furniture, cover corners, etc. This is one of my top priorities when we get back. The nice thing about being unemployed is that I'll have the opportunity to do whatever needs to be done. I'll get a lot of quality time with Lenny while Ariane is in class. Not sure how we're going to pull it off, exactly, but we'll figure it out. In the meantime, I present Clarence and Leonard.




*So this second opportunity has bubbled up right quick. I interviewed over the phone before Thanksgiving, never got word as to whether they wanted me to fly up despite my inquiring a couple weeks later, then got a call out of the blue a couple nights ago from the same company for a different position. This time, the interviewer said they wanted to move quickly, and at the end of the interview he told me he really liked me and would let me know the next day. So naturally he called me at 1:00 pm the next day and I was still asleep (because I am roughly on the same level as a sack of garbage right now), said he'd like me to fly up to Portland to interview for both job the Portland and Albany jobs (the Albany job doesn't exist yet, so they were going to do it in Portland regardless) on Jan. 8, and asked if I had any requests for the flight. Since I didn't want to be like "Give me a chance to wake up" at 1 pm, I just said (in my most not-just-woken-up voice possible, "No, none"), so they booked the flight for me. I leave on Jan 7 at 3:00 pm Austin time, fly through San Jose with no plane change, then arrive in Portland at 7:15 pm Pacific. Also, this. I'll be lucky to catch any of it. This is decidedly not full of win. In fact, the amount of win contained in this is quite low. Plus I'm going to miss the Mizzou game unless I can watch from Germany. At least that one is at a reasonable hour (9:30 pm Central European Time).

---

On a completely unrelated note, since I've been by my lonesome for a while now, I've had the opportunity to investigate some new music. Generally, music isn't my thing (my hobbies are 1) raging at the news and 2) sports), so I'm pretty slow on the uptake - I'm the kind of guy who when I start liking a band hipsters will then accuse them of selling out or being so mainstream... don't worry hipsters, I hate the Dirty Projectors and Animal Collective! But lemme tell you what, I just discovered Mastodon through Crack the Skye, and hoo boy is that band (and specifically that album) awesome. Of course, those pretentious dicks at Pitchfork only give it an 8.0/10.0 (album reviews to 1 decimal point, FTW, Pitchfork!).

My faith in the ability of some people to make metal that is actually good has been restored. Moreover, it's a concept album. I love concept albums, if they're well executed. What's the story? Let's take it from Wikipedia:

"There is a paraplegic and the only way that he can go anywhere is if he astral travels. He goes out of his body, into outer space and a bit like Icarus, he goes too close to the sun, burning off the golden umbilical cord that is attached to his solar plexus. So he is in outer space and he is lost, he gets sucked into a wormhole, he ends up in the spirit realm and he talks to spirits telling them that he is not really dead. So they send him to the Russian cult, they use him in a divination and they find out his problem. They decide they are going to help him. They put his soul inside Rasputin's body. Rasputin goes to usurp the czar and he is murdered. The two souls fly out of Rasputin's body through the crack in the sky(e) and Rasputin is the wise man that is trying to lead the child home to his body because his parents have discovered him by now and think that he is dead. Rasputin needs to get him back into his body before it's too late. But they end up running into the Devil along the way and the Devil tries to steal their souls and bring them down…there are some obstacles along the way."

OMFG that's awesome. And another album of theirs was based on Moby Dick. Jeebus. This is officially in my #3 favorite concept album of all time, behind Red Headed Stranger (#1) and OK Computer (#2), (look, Ma! I've got eclectic taste in music!) and now ahead of The Downward Spiral, which has been hurt by the fact that Trent Reznor no longer owns the most emotional song on the album (and maybe in the entire Nine Inch Nails catalog for that matter, this would be "Hurt," which now forever belongs to Johnny Cash; sometimes someone just comes along and Jimi Hendrixes your "All Along the Watchtower"). I haven't had time to swallow Leviathan or any of their other albums, but I am looking forward to it.

Lenny is 5 months old today

And happy early Halloween.


Poor Lenny, nothing but skin and bones.

Lenny G

Respek!

Oh, October's almost over, you say?

I really ought to post more. So much is happening with a quickly growing Lenny, who can now readily roll onto her stomach... in her crib... which is terrifying. And she roars and growls, she sings when Ariane sings. She's awesome. The days flow into one another at this point. By now I've lost all my regular readers, so I might as well write nonsensical things, like anything Tracy Jordan says. I'm at work less than I should be, that I know.

It's been so long since I posted that in the meantime I have:
Had an article published in Microelectronic Engineering (nerdy title!)
Had two (two!) more accepted (one in the Journal of the Electrochemical Society and one w/o revisions, awesome sauce, in the Journal of Vacuum Science and Technology A [super nerdy title, awesome])
Killed one before finishing
Finished my dissertation (first draft, excellent)
Been politely turned down by DuPont (your questions were ridiculous!)
Not heard back from the first interviewer (didn't want to work in the Mojave Desert)
Had another campus interview (still waiting)
Visited Oregon* for an interview (nervously waiting... very, very nervously)

(Quick aside: I left for the interview on Monday morning to return Wednesday - can you believe there are no direct AUS-PDX flights? I know!, so I sent an email to my boss, the building manager, and the other guy on my project [i.e. the guy who now owns the system since I am DONE, BUDDY] saying, and I quote: "I will be out until Wednesday, I am heading to the Oregon Country. Don't worry, I won't ford any rivers. I've lost too many oxen this way." My boss emailed back: "Don't waste too many bullets shooting buffalo along the way." I've always liked my boss.)

You might notice that "have been offered a job" is not listed. Right now, all of my eggs are in the basket for the job in Portland. Got to feed the baby some way.

So that this isn't just about me, here's some pictures (makes for an easy post). As always, click to embiggen.

Lenny's preferred sleeping position once she learned how to get up on her side and rotate her entire body. Her feet are sticking out.


Somebody got a highchair so she can join dinner conversations. She likes to talk politics, and I am trying to teach her that is a faux pas, but since she doesn't speak French she goes on and on about it. She's got interesting ideas and opinions (End Mommy's monopoly on breast milk! It violates antitrust laws!). Still no solids.


And a play thingy. Which has sounds! Loud ones! That's going to be such a regrettable decision!


Hoodies: get them started early.


Sometimes you don't have a free hand when you are walking from one room to the other...



*As obnoxiously noted earlier this week via phone, I have now defeated Zack in the race to visit all the west coast of the US and Canada. He didn't know we were competing, but you snooze you lose. That puts Alaska (Inside Passage + Denali + Fairbanks), BC (Vancouver + Fraser, which isn't a city), Washington (Seattle), Oregon (Portland... but really just Hillsboro), and California (San Diego) under my belt, with Yukon (Carcross) thrown in for good not-quite-Pacific-coastal measure. TAKE THAT, ZACK. Also, I think I'm probably beating you in airports: Fairbanks, Seattle, Portland, LAX, San Jose, San Diego, Anchorage, Dallas-DFW, Dallas-Love, Houston-IAH, Houston-Hobby, El Paso, Phoenix, Las Vegas, Harlingen, Little Rock, STL, Indianapolis, ORD, Minneapolis-St Paul, Detroit, Atlanta, Toronto, Newark, JFK, Albany, Memphis, DC-Dulles, Zurich, Stuttgart, Frankfurt, Split, Heraklion, London-Heathrow, Austin, Cincinnati, Raleigh-Durham
Oops: Forgot Vancouver, Calgary, and Cancun.

Blog neglect

I wish I were writing way more frequently, if only to record things like Lenny's first tummy-to-back roll, or our morning walks spotting all the deer. I apologize to all the regular readers (all three of you). Lenny made it to her first tailgate last weekend, though.


Hook 'em!

The walks are the best. It's amazing how close we really are to the hills, and some of them are killers. I plan to take the camera one morning to document some of the sweet views you can get here.

Alas, it appears our time in Austin (this time around?) is running short. Where to? Who knows as of yet. I've dpne one interview complete for a position in California, either Ventura County or... uh, well, the middle of the Mojave Desert. Next week we'll interview with another unnamed company (not NASCAR, on the hood...), which is on the other side of the country in Delaware, maybe elsewhere, because they do everything. Others who have indicated any level of interest are in San Jose, CA; Niskayuna, NY (essentially Albany); Portland, OR; Houston, TX; NYC exurbs; Amsterdam, Netherlands (only after years in Houston, though); here in Austin; Phoenix, AZ; San Diego, CA; Japan (no thanks!); and wherever the hell Frito-Lay is located (I'm too lazy to look it up). No one even pretended to be interested in shipping me to Dresden. Still looking anywhere.

Re-posting

Just because it is my favorite picture ever, displacing my old favorite:


Looking at that dinolasers picture again, I am convinced I had a toy like that growing up...

Fingers and feet; Head and shoulders, knees and toes

Ariane, Nina, and Anne were all in agreement that Lenny's (I almost wrote Claire - I have called Lenny "Claire" a few times; I am so clearly unprepared for this) fingers are exceptionally long for a baby. So I was going to post this to see if anyone had thoughts.


Then my Mom called a couple nights ago and said the same thing, before I had posted this, but after I decided to write it. Granted, I have slim to none experience with babies, but I am not seeing it. They look like baby fingers to me.

What's strange is that everyone was in agreement that I have long fingers. Maybe the word "thin" was also bandied about, but I don't remember, I was too shocked to hear that anyone considered my fingers long. I always considered them short, stubby, and fat. I can't palm a basketball, and I'm 6' OK, I'm 5'11 (and a half!)" tall. I would figure that I should be able to?

So she's got my fingers, I guess. And my cheeks. And my face (poor, poor baby), although it's becoming apparent that she has Ariane's eyes. I am hoping against hope that she doesn't have my big, wide, flat feet (12EEEE).


Ariane is convinced she's got the huge gap between her big toe and second toe like I do (I can fit a billiard ball in between them and crush soda cans, it's gross, I'll admit). Apparently her toes are also long? And she seems to have crazy control over them. I can cross my right pinky toe over my fourth toe and my left fourth toe over my middle toe, and my big toe over my second toe on both feet (I think everyone can do that, at least). Maybe Lenny will have this simian ability also. I just hope she has arches in her feet.

A post about fingers and toes is all the excuse I need to embed this.




If that's not actually U2 performing, someone really nailed their sound. I probably shouldn't admit this, but one semester my junior year, Scoots, Snots, and I watched Rattle & Hum four nights a week every week. And we'd sing along. Every time. Scoots made his all time best joke, "If you were on a plane with Bono, and it were about to crash land, and there was only one parachute, would you give it to Bono?"

The correct answer was, "Of course not, you use the parachute yourself, and Bono will float to earth on a cloud, because he is an angel."

That is so pathetic... yet so true. He is an angel. And so is The Edge.

Edit: Now that I've had "Head and shoulders, knees and toes" stuck in my head all day, I must say that it is way more fun to sing it as "Head and shoulder, sneezin' toes." You know, just FYI.

My two favorite people in the world

Laaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!

Updated.

Getting there before you do, Lenny and I are competing against a Chinese phonebook for "Most Chins."

I will call her... Mini-shme.

If I can paraphrase Dr. Astrohollish (Motto: Bringing wooden shoes to SPAAAAAAAAAACE!) again , Lenny is lucky enough to be graced (<- pun not intended) with 50% of my DNA, but this is a precipitous drop off from absolute perfection. Alas and alack for the nonexistence of human cloning!

But soft! What light through yonder test tube breaks? It is cloned yeast, and Lenny is the sun son daughter!*

Of course we know cloning exists. It's been featured in documentaries I have seen. They even had the technology long ago (in a galaxy far away). Just ask Boba and his "father" Jango Fett.**


And don't forget the series of films depicting the actions of British hero Austin Powers, when Dr. Evil (who was like dictator of Freedonia or something, I don't have a history book with me... just the entire internet) who cloned himself and concentrated his own evil a la Sauron or Tide Ultra.***



Well, when I was "in" "San Diego" at the "Advanced Metallization Conference"**** I had myself cloned, but to pull the wool over everyone's eyes (I shouldn't be admitting this, but my hands are operating freely of my brain) I had the Y chromosome substituted with an X. Lo and behold, my she-clone Lenny. (I mean, Luke, Lenny, you didn't think I was such a huge egomaniac to give my child a name that started with the same letter as mine... unless she was me[ish], did you? MWAHAHAHAHA!)

These are four pictures, two of me, two of her (you have to click it to actually see it). They don't do the similarities justice. Nobel Prize (or Supermax prison) here I come!*****



*This is the wittiest thing I have ever written in my life. :(

**"Father" in quotation marks because Jango's marriage was just a ruse; he was obvs ghey. I mean, a green cape and a codpiece?****** Really?

***Tide is the most evil detergent. Riptides kill uncounted people every year, and that company makes a joke of it. A freshness after the storm-smelling, stain-free, snuggleable joke. Disgusting.

****No one believed that was really the name of a conference, did they? Suckas!

*****I will settle for the happy medium of Swedish minimum security prison.

******I know that's Boba, but they're clones, peeps.

Hello, world!

Some pictures, here.

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.

She's swell

These pictures don't really do justice to the amount of swelling that Ariane's been dealing with for a while now, but I think they're worth posting. Her swelling isn't as bad as some of the women we've seen, but it's been pretty painful for her.


First, her hands have gotten swollen and her fingers hurt.




Her feet are rough. She had to buy a size up in shoes (although we had heard this was normal, I, at least, thought it doubtful). I hoped she'd get normal tennis shoes, but she bought something squeaky. Plus she can't stand for more than a couple of minutes on tile or something hard.





Oh no! There she is, in the woods!



My feet still dwarf hers, though, which makes me...



Oh yeah.

Quick update

Baby clocked in at 6#2 today and we can expect .5#/week until she's born. I am so not ready still.

What does 6 and 1/8 pounds look like? About like this:

I am... Roy Hobbs

Back in March I discovered that I am just a natural with little baby girls. Bernard Malamud should write a novel about me. I even have photographic proof now, courtesy of my mom.



There's a term for what she's feeling in that picture: unmitigated horror. Can't you just hear her screaming for help? If she only knew that word... Not to mention that this was one of at least two times I made her sob. Thank the FSM that I didn't break her in half.

If you actually click on the picture you can see her hand is blurry because of how quickly she reached away awash in terror. I'm sure she had nightmares about me.

One thing is clear as day: having this baby is going to be a cake walk.*

*May not be accurate

Will post

I will put a picture of Ariane's belly up tonight. Writing this is my reminder.

Update: Oops.

Baby or watermelon?

I don't know how a baby that is supposedly only about 2 lbs makes a belly so big.




Here is February 7 for comparison. Hard to believe there's still about three months to go. She's scoring a full Eight Bottles on the Prego Ranking scale. I think the scale might have to be revised to go to 11, a la Spinal Tap.

Additionally, we have lost a belly button. If found, please contact me via the comments. It's nice to have the second-largest belly around here for at least the next several months.

I'm becoming quite the male domestic goddess (see what I did there?)

Oh, did I tell you that I'm going to be a good dad because I can totally cook? Well I can. Perhaps you would like to try some of the delicious baked acorn squash with mushroom, onion, mascarpone, emmentaler, and parmesan stuffing? Or perhaps some fried black plantain? Well, too bad, so sad. You should have come to visit.*


Does that look good, or what? Please ignore the bottle of Tylenol, which somehow always ends up in the background of our pictures. But I must say that the recipe that I followed from Molto Mario was supposed to stuff two squash. So I halved it to stuff just one, as Ariane was unsure if she liked squash (how a vegetarian can go 25 years without knowing if she likes squash is beyond me). But after I stuffed the first I had to walk back to the grocery store and buy not one but two more squash, and I still had stuffing left over. Molto Mario: Unfamiliar with weights and measures. Trust me, it tasted better than it looks.


Plus I kind of burned a some of the plantain, but it was still good enough that I will forever be disappointed by the flavor of Cavendish bananas. As a matter of fact, I have another one ripening on my counter right now. Hopefully it'll be black in a week.

Pshaw. Who says I can't feed my baby (starting sometime next year)? If there's one thing I know about children it is that they are not picky and love vegetables, especially green ones.

*Zack

The fog is getting thicker...

And Ariane is getting laaaaaarger! (Points if you can name the movie and you aren't my brother.)





For comparison, this was about two weeks ago. I'm not sure pictures do justice to the change, really. And good gracious does this little girl kick like it's her job. (It's not, her job is to grow organs.)