“She’s strummin on my six-string” - Keith Urban, lyrics to Who Wouldn’t Want to Be Me
Friday, I’m going to go have my haircut. I’ve had headaches every single night for almost two weeks, and I think it’s just because I have too damn much hair. It’s thick and heavy, and has grown beyond the “comfortable ponytail” point. At present, I have bangs that hit me at eyebrow level, and the rest of my hair is 18″ or so long (so, a couple of inches below the bottoms of my shoulder-blades). I’m not sure how I want to cut my hair this time, except I want it much shorter, and I want layers to lighten it up. I won’t dye or streak it, and I hate the current rat-chewed-on-my-hair-while-I-was-sleeping look that’s so popular these days. Anybody got any suggestions? Feel free to link to pictures in the comments. Also, is anyone interested in a before-and-after photo comparison?
One year later, and I’m still around. I’ve learned a lot about blogging over the last year, and met some very interesting people through blogging. I’ve become part of some very worthwhile projects in the past 12 months, and I don’t regret any of it for a second. Thanks to the faithful readers who’ve stuck around through ISP outages, name changes, and writer’s block.
Now, the year in review!
June 29, 2003 saw my first post (originally posted on Blogspot).
July 21, 2003 I found miniluv. Mike, one of its bloggers, has become one of my very best friends.
July 24, 2003 I moved off Blogspot and began using Movable Type.
By August 17, 2003 I had evolved from an Insignificant Microbe to a Flippery Fish. I am now a Large Mammal.
September 22, 2003 Toys for Iraqi Tots was launched. As far as I know, that project is still going strong.
September 23, 2003 I switched from my shitty ISP to my rockin ISP - cornerhost. No regrets!
September 25, 2003 Front Line Voices was launched. I helped with some of the backend/database parts of the site. Sadly, it seems to have been abandoned.
September 27, 2003 I posted who would be in my fantasy blogger harem.
October 3, 2003 I offered my boobies for charity (how’s THAT for a welfare replacement?).
October 4, 2003 I began participating in miniluv’s week-long Good News Blogging Challenge.
October 7, 2003 was the date of my first Top Ten - the Top Ten Reasons Not to Vote for Howard Dean.
November 17, 2003 - my first Linkified Lyrics, Toby Kieth’s I Love This Bar.
December 3, 2003 I launched Bloggers With Boobies. Bloggers Who Support Bloggers With Boobies followed on December 7th.
January 5, 2004 JenLars posted an interview with me, in which all of the questions were posed by readers.
January 18, 2004 I modeled a shirt from Hookwear, whose purpose is to raise money for barbeques for troops in Afghanistan.
January 29, 2004 my daughter turned 18 months old. I posted an open letter to her future spouse.
February 1, 2004 the Commissar posted his deck of most dangerous blogger cards. I was made the Queen of Spades.
March 3, 2004 I created a Lego version of myself, which Jeremy later improved upon.
April 19, 2004 SexyHusband and I became the owners of a piece of this world.
May 22, 2004 I answered the question: why do I blog?
And, of course, my son was born on June 21, 2004.
It’s been a good year. :)
I just wanted to say that, right at this moment, I am profoundly happy. I have a husband who is caring, smart, attentive, loving, and dependable. I have three healthy children who are already showing signs of compassion, hope, intelligence, and independence. I have a beautiful home in a nice part of the country, surrounded by lots of flora and fauna to engage the minds of my family. I live in the freest, greatest nation in the world. I have friends online who keep me stimulated and involved in the world, and who help get me through the rough spots. My stomach is full of healthy, yummy food that I was able to purchase and prepare myself.
Does life get any better than this?
Ya know, I’m all about Girl Power, but sometimes it just really sucks to be female.
thatisall
“I’ve never liked the phrase “homicide bomber"–it’s clunky and doesn’t really make a lot of sense–I mean, is there such a thing as a “severe injury” bomber?” - Alex Knapp, who makes another fine point about the validity of the term “suicide bomber” vs. the kludgier “homicide bomber”
For the last couple of years, I’ve been on a history kick in my choices of reading material and movies. The majority has been World War II history. Currently, I’m reading Ernie Pyle’s Here Is Your War (published in 1944), and I came across something I wanted to share - a story from the crews of the Flying Fortresses in North Africa. It’s in the extended entry, and it’s rather long, but well worth the read.
It was late afternoon at our desert airdrome. The sun was lazy, the air was warm, and a faint haze of propeller dust hung over the field, giving it softness. It was time for the planes to start coming back from their mission, and one by one they did come – big Flying Fortresses and fiery little Lightnings. Nobody paid a great deal of attention, for this returning was a daily routine thing.
Finally they were all in – all, that is, except one. Operations reported a Fortress missing. Returning pilots said it had lagged behind and lost altitude just after leaving the target. The last report said the Fortress couldn’t stay in the air more than five minutes. Hours had passed since then. So it was gone.
Ten men were in that plane. The day’s accomplishments had been great, but the thought of ten lost friends cast a pall over us. We had already seen death that afternoon. One of the returning Fortresses had released a red flare over the field, and I had stood with others beneath the great plane as they handed its dead pilot, head downward, through the escape hatch onto a stretcher.
The faces of his crew were grave, and nobody talked very loud. One man clutched a leather cap with blood on it. The pilot’s hands were very white. Everybody knew the pilot. He was so young, a couple of hours before. The war came inside us then, and we felt it deeply.
After the last report, half a dozen of us went to the high control tower. We went there every evening, for two things - to watch the sunset, and to get word on the progress of the German bombers that frequently came just after dusk to blast our airdrome.
The sunsets in the desert are truly things with souls. The violence of their color is incredible. They splatter the sky and the clouds with a surging beauty. The mountains stand dark against the horizon, and palm trees silhouette themselves dramatically against the fiery west.
As we stood on the tower looking down over this scene, the day began folding itself up. Fighter planes, which had patrolled the field all day, were coming in. All the soldiers in the tent camps had finished supper. That noiseless peace that sometimes comes just before dusk hung over the airdrome. Men talked in low tones about the dead pilot and the lost Fortress. We thought we would wait a few minutes more to see if the Germans were coming over.
And then an electric thing happened. Far off in the dusk a red flare shot into the sky. It made an arc against the dark background of the mountains and fell to the earth. It couldn’t be anything else. It had to be. The ten dead men were coming home!
“Where’s the flare gun? Gimme a green flare!” yelled an officer.
He ran to the edge of the tower, shouted, “Look out below!” and fired a green rocket into the air. Then we saw the plane - just a tiny black speck. It seemed almost on the ground, it was so low, and in the first glance we could sense that it was barely moving, barely staying in the air. Crippled and alone, two hours behind all the rest, it was dragging itself home.
I was a layman, and no longer of the fraternity that flies, but I could feel. And at that moment I felt something close to human love for that faithful, battered machine, that far dark speck struggling toward us with such pathetic slowness.
All of us stood tense, hardly remembering anyone else was there. With all our nerves we seemed to pull the plane toward us. I suspect a photograph would have shown us all leaning slightly to the left. Not one of us thought the plane would ever make the field, but on it came - so slowly that it was cruel to watch.
It reached the far end of the airdrome, still holding its pathetic little altitude. It skimmed over the tops of parked planes, and kept on, actually reaching out - it seemed to us - for the runway. A few hundred yards more now. Could it? Would it? Was it truly possible?
They cleared the last plane, they were over the runway. They settled slowly. The wheels touched softly. And as the plane rolled on down the runway the thousands of men around that vast field suddenly realized that they were weak and that they could hear their hearts pounding.
The last of the sunset died, and the sky turned into blackness, which would help the Germans if they came on schedule with their bombs. But nobody cared. Our ten dead men were miraculously back from the grave.
And what a story they had to tell! Nothing quite like it had happened before in this war.
The Tripoli airdrome, which was their target, was heavily defended, by both fighter planes and antiaircraft guns. Flying into that hailstorm, as one pilot said, was like a mouse attacking a dozen cats.
The Thunderbird - for that was the name of their Fortress - was first hit just as it dropped its bomb load. One engine went out. Then a few moments later the other engine on the same side went. When both engines went out on the same side it was usually fatal. And therein lay the difference of that feat from other instances of bringing damaged bombers home.
The Thunderbird was forced to drop below the other Fortresses. And the moment a Fortress dropped down or lagged behind, German fighters were on it like vultures. The boys didn’t know how many Germans were in the air, but they thought there must have been thirty.
Our Lightning fighters, escorting the Fortress, stuck by the Thunderbird and fought as long as they could, but finally they had to leave or they wouldn’t have had enough fuel to make it home.
The last fighter left the crippled Fortress about forty miles from Tripoli. Fortunately, the swarm of German fighters started home at the same time, for their gas was low too.
The Thunderbird flew on another twenty miles. Then a single German fighter appeared, and dived at them. Its guns did great damage to the already crippled plane, but simply couldn’t knock it out of the air.
Finally the fighter ran out of ammunition, and left. Our boys were alone with their grave troubles. Two engines were gone, most of the guns were out of commission, and they were still more than four hundred miles from home. The radio was out. They were losing altitude, five hundred feet a minute - and then they were down to two thousand.
The pilot called up his crew and held a consultation. Did they want to jump? They all said they would ride the plane as long as it was in the air. He decided to keep going.
The ship was completely out of trim, cocked over at a terrible angle. But they gradually got it trimmed so that it stopped losing altitude.
By then they were down to nine hundred feet, and a solid wall of mountains ahead barred the way homeward. They flew along parallel to those mountains for a long time, but they were then miraculously gaining some altitude. Finally they got the thing to fifteen hundred feet.
The lowest pass was sixteen hundred feet, but they came across at fifteen hundred. Explain that if you can! Maybe it was as the pilot said: “We didn’t come over the mountains, we came through them.”
The copilot said, “I was blowing on the windshield trying to push her along. Once I almost wanted to reach a foot down and sort of walk us along over the pass.”
And the navigator said, “If I had been on the wingtip, I could have touched the ground with my hand when we went through the pass.”
The air currents were bad. One wing was cocked away down. It was hard to hold. The pilots had a horrible fear that the low wing would drop clear down and they’d roll over and go into a spin. But they didn’t.
The navigator came into the cockpit, and he and the pilots navigated the plane home. Never for a second could they feel any real assurance of making it. They were practically rigid, but they talked a blue streak all the time, and cussed - as airmen do.
Everything seemed against them. The gas consumption doubled, squandering their precious supply. To top off their misery, they had a bad headwind. The gas gauge went down and down.
At last the navigator said they were only forty miles from home, but those forty miles passed as though they were driving a horse and buggy. Dusk, coming down on the sandy haze, made the vast flat desert an indefinite thing. One oasis looked exactly like another. But they knew when they were near home. Then they shot their red flare and waited for the green flare from our control tower. A minute later it came - the most beautiful sight that crew had ever seen.
When the plane touched the ground they cut the switches and let it roll. For it had no brakes. At the end of the roll the big Fortress veered off the side of the runway. It climaxed its historic homecoming by spinning madly around five times and then running backwards for fifty yards before it stopped. When they checked the gas gauges, they found one tank dry and the other down to twenty gallons.
Deep dusk enveloped the field. Five more minutes and they never would have found it. The weary, crippled Fortress had flown for the incredible time of four and one-half hours on one pair of motors. Any pilot will tell you it’s impossible.
That night, with the pilot and some of the crew, we drank a toast. One visitor raised his glass: “Here’s to your safe return.”
But the pilot raised his own glass and said instead, “Here’s to a God-damned good airplane!”
And the others of the crew raised their glasses and repeated, “Here’s to a God-damned good airplane!”
Perhaps the real climax was that during the agonizing homeward crawl that one crippled plane shot down the fantastic total of six German fighters. The score was officially confirmed.
The Fortress crew was composed of men who were already veterans of the war in the air. They had been decorated for missions over Europe. They already had two official kills and several probables to their credit. The Tripoli mission, which only by a miracle was not their last, was their twenty-second.
The skipper of the prize crew was 23-year-old Lieutenant John L. Cronkhite, of St. Petersburg, Florida. They called him Cronk. He was short, with a faint blond mustache and a very wide mouth, from which the words came in a slow drawl. His shoulders were broad, his arms husky. Usually he didn’t wear a tie. He said he wasn’t married because nobody would have him.
When the Fortress finally reached home, Cronkhite decided to go through the copilot’s window onto the wing. As he stepped onto the wing his feet hit some oil and flew out from under him, and he went plummeting off the high wing onto the hard ground. The doctors thought he had been wounded, and picked him up and put him into an ambulance.
Cronkhite didn’t want to be picked up. “I wouldn’t have given a damn if I had broken a leg when I fell off the wing, I was so glad to be on the ground again. I just felt like lying there forever.”
Cronk’s father was a St. Petersburg florist. He had three pictures of his mother and father in his room. I spent the evening with Cronk and his copilot and navigator after their return from the dead. When he walked into the room Cronk picked up something from the bed.
“Hell, I can’t be dead,” he said. “Here are my dog tags. I forgot to take them with me. I can’t be dead, for they wouldn’t know who I was.”
He and his copilot were bound by an unbreakable tie then, for together they had pulled themselves away from death.
The copilot was Lieutenant Dana F. Dudley, of Mapleton, Maine. This is a little town of eight hundred, and Dud said he was the only pilot who ever came from there. He was a tall and friendly fellow, who got married just before coming overseas. His wife was in Sarasota, Florida. Dud said one of the German fighters dived toward his side of the plane, and came on with bullets streaming until it was only a hundred feet away. At that moment, what might have been his last thought passed through Dud’s head: Gee, I’m glad I sent my wife that $225 this morning.
The navigator was Lieutenant Davey Williams, 3305 Miller Street, Fort Worth, Texas. He too had been recently married. The pilots gave Davey all the credit for getting them home. He was about the busiest man on the trip, navigating with one hand and managing two machine guns with the other. When they thought they were done for, Davey said to the pilots, “I’ll bet those guys back home have got our stuff divided up already.”
He said he thought mainly about how he was going to get word to his family that he was a German prisoner, and he felt sore that friends of his would soon get to go home to America while he’d have to spend the rest of the war in a prison camp.
Where did the expression “shit-eating grin” come from? I mean, you’d think if you’d just eaten some fecal matter, grinning wouldn’t be your first reaction, much less the kind of big grin implied by the term. Any ideas?
For those with an interest in such things, I finally got around to writing my birth story. You can also read Mike’s version.
Everybody should know by now I’m no big fan of government welfare - it’s bloated, corrupted, overused, wasteful, and lacks sufficient accountability. Plus, forced charity is just WRONG.
That said, if the government won’t do away with welfare altogether, the least they can do is look into making some improvements. I like Cap’n Ken’s plan for starters.
In order for stores to be reimbursed for the giveaway groceries, clerks would be required to announce loudly “Customer getting free groceries with your tax dollars” whenever a user of the program checks out. And the EBT cards would be bright neon green and the size of a record album. No acting like you’re using your own ATM card when you use it. Stigma? You bet. People should be ashamed to force taxpayers to buy their groceries.
And that’s just ONE of his suggestions.
Link via Espresso Sarcasm
Public schools are a peculiarly singular institution. There is no parallel, so it’s difficult to find things to compare them to.
Recently, I posted (June 13 entry) that I believed a person is not entitled to absolute freedom of speech at work. I wrote:
free speech rights do not extend to your place of employment. Employers (including - maybe even especially - schools) are well within THEIR rights, to preclude or prohibit political speech where it has the potential to offend or alienate their customers, in this case the students and teachers at the high school
I still believe this to be true. The students/customers, on the other hand, are an entirely different matter. As long as their speech is not defamatory or libelous, I believe their right to free speech ought not be impinged at school. It seems others would disagree. Bryan Henderson is the kind of kid I hope my own rugrats will grow up to be: civic-minded, intelligent, informed, and willing to speak his mind. I don’t agree with everything he has to say, but I support his right to express his opinions at his public school. Keep at it, Bryan.
Link via Todd of Ebblog
Instant messenger conversation between Mike and me today:
Mike: Toronto is paying 20M a year to landfill garbage…and they are considering sending it to the sun in a rocket?
Mike: Oy
Mike: F’n hippies
Dana: LOL
Mike: As cool as a rocket full of disposable diapers would be…I don’t think that’s gonna happen for 20M
Mike: And btw..how much would a rocket filled with garbage exploding in the sky suck?
Dana: Ew yeah
Dana: Not exactly cost-effective
Dana: Plus i don’t think you could fit a reasonable number of them on a rocket to make it worthwhile
Mike: Right
Mike: I mean, it might come to that someday
Mike: Someday
Mike: Most likely we will just figure out how to disintegrate stuff or something like that though
Dana: Or use cloth
Mike: No no no
Mike: If we use cloth…I don’t get to disintegrate things
Mike: And I’ll tell ya..I’m disintegrating something…so you better hope it’s diapers
Dana: You could still disintegrate the poop
Mike: Otherwise…it’ll be Democrats ;-)
Dana: Jinx
“One of the serious obstacles to the improvement of our race is indiscriminate charity.” - Andrew Carnegie
Huge congratulations to new Papa, Mike. Now… I know what everyone is thinking… I just had a baby… Mike just had a baby… SexyHusband is named Mike… Mike is often my quote-of-the-day… but I assure you, they are NOT the same person. :)
Anyway, miniluv Mike’s baby ____, ____, was born at ____ on ____. ___ is absolutely adorable!! :)
Well, the kid was born later than I had hoped, and was bigger than I expected, but other than that it was a great birth experience. I still need to write up my version of the birth story, but I can at least post the winners of The Baby Pool (June 8) (no re-guesses were allowed, but wouldn’t that be great if you could do that for the lottery, too?).
Date
Actual: Monday, June 21, 2004
Closest Guess: Friday, June 18, 2004
Guessed By: pev
Time
Actual: 11:53AM
Closest Guess: 11:33AM
Guessed by: Linda
Weight
Actual: 8 pounds 15 ounces
Closest Guess: A tie! We had one ounce over, and one ounce under
Guessed by: mlah and Sgt Hook, respectively
Length
Actual: 21 inches
Closest Guess: 21.5 inches
Guessed by: Harvey
Go congratulate the winners, and reward them with traffic! :)
I spent a lot of time Monday and Tuesday flipping through the TV channels at the hospital, both during and after labor. I was astonished at the number of times I saw references to the Clinton autobiography. I literally could not flip through all the channels even once without seeing his smug mug. CNN is particularly bad about creaming all over themselves, mentioning all kinds of things from the book that are not news as if they are. I mean… this is the kind of thing I expect to see on bookclub discussion boards, but not on CNN. Even on the CNN website’s homepage, they breathlessly report things like “Clinton had to sleep on the couch seven years ago, gasp!” as if we’d just had an embassy bombing or something. It was even listed as a headline story!
CNN’s not the only offender, of course. It seems as if every news commentator has been mentioning this book. The man doesn’t need a press agent; the press is handling both ends of that arrangement for him. It’s truly disgusting.
Scrappleface captures in satire my own disgust at the overblown media hype:
Mike Melvill, the world’s first private-industry astronaut, said today that as SpaceShipOne reached the zenith of its 62-mile high space flight, he caught a glimpse of the upper edge of the hype surrounding former President Bill Clinton’s new memoir, My Life.
[…]
“From what I saw,” said Mr. Melvill, “I think the Clinton book hype eventually folds in on itself, collapsing to form dense, cloudy mass.”
One can only hope it happens quickly.
Our hospital has Thomas’ official birth portrait and announcement in place. Gosh, ain’t he a cutie? :)
“I have always felt that a politician is to be judged by the animosities he excites among his opponents.” - Sir Winston Churchill
Thomas Nelson Gunderloy was born at 11:53AM yesterday morning. Hallelujah!! He weighed 8 pounds 15 ounces, and is 21 inches long. We’re back home now, and everyone is doing well. I’m swamped now with work, email, and newborn care, so blogging may be light for a few days, but there’s a picture in the extended entry for them what wants to see what Thomas looks like. Also, SexyHusband has posted his version of the birth story (including a different picture), and I’ll get mine posted as soon as I can. I’m tired, but doing really well overall. Thank you to everyone who sent or posted well-wishes and congratulations.
Update: As luck would have it, Thomas will share
a birthday (of sorts) with Harvey! Happy 1st, hon.
“Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come.” - Matt Groening
… yep. Still pregnant. I believe I’ve crossed that line from “gestating woman” to “incubator". Tomorrow will put me one week over my estimated due date. With my third baby. Allegedly, pregnancies get shorter and shorter with each child, but of course trends do not predict individual events (Mike taught me that’s called “The Gambler’s Fallacy"… mind you, he taught me that from across the room, out of arm’s reach), so it doesn’t make a Tinker’s Damn in my own case.
What does make a damn is that we’re nearing the dreaded “Overdue” period. See, an average pregnancy is 40 weeks. Most babies are born between 37 and 42 weeks. Those born before 37 weeks (some say 36) are considered “pre-term” and those born after 42 weeks are considered “post-term". Both have risks, but those risks are different.
With pre-term babies, risks are things like lung and other organ maturity, low birthweight, and difficulty nursing because of underdeveloped sucking reflex. With post-term babies, risks are things like meconium aspiration (Harv… just let it go - all others, Google it if you’re really curious), malnutrition (baby gets too big for the declining placenta to keep nourishing), inability to pass through the birth canal because of size, and lack of sufficient amniotic fluid to cushion the baby.
What all that means is that docs reallllllllly want the babies born between 37 and 42 weeks (and so do moms, for that matter). Malpractice insurance agents also realllllllly want the babies born “in-term", too. My next doctor’s appointment is scheduled for Wednesday, at which point I will either be finished with this pregnancy or will be 41 weeks, 3 days pregnant. Thus, I’m certain our doctor will mention inducing labor, probably no later than Friday.
I’ve really worked my ass off to be healthy this pregnancy, and to have it end with an induction (which I’ve been trying all along to avoid) would simply suck. Our doctor is not the type to force anyone into a treatment they don’t want, but the risks of not inducing will, at some point, outweigh the benefits. Then, I will have to decide to either agree with the induction, or remove myself from his care. I’m not willing to do the latter.
Of course, the BEST outcome would be for me to go into labor naturally, deliver easily, and move onto something OTHER than being as big as a barn. That’s what I’m hoping for.
To all who’ve offered well-intentioned advice on how to start labor, thanks. Some of those things (the ones I’m willing to try) I’ve been doing all along, to no avail. I think the uterus just decides on its own when it’s ready. So far, it’s not made that decision yet. *sigh*
A woman was in bed with her lover when she heard her husband opening the front door. “Hurry!” she said, “stand in the corner.” She quickly rubbed baby oil all over him and then she dusted him with talcum powder. “Don’t move until I tell you to,” she whispered. “Just pretend you’re a statue.”
“What’s this, honey?” the husband inquired as he entered the room.
“Oh, it’s just a statue,” she replied nonchalantly. “The Smith’s bought one for their bedroom. I liked it so much, I got one for us too.”
No more was said about the statue, not even later that night when they went to sleep. Around two in the morning the husband got out of bed, went to the kitchen and returned a while later with a sandwich and a glass of milk. “Here,” he said to the ’statue’, “eat something. I stood like an idiot at the Smiths’ for three days and nobody offered me as much as a glass of water.”
“It’s very hard to put you on a pedestal; you keep hopping off.” - SexyHusband
… down the aisle! Pauly of Heretical Ideas is getting married tomorrow. Congratulations!
Here’s wishing Blackfive a most wonderful blogiversary today! After a year, he continues to be the premier source of information about military folks, and what their lives are really like. His anniversary post is fantastic. Please keep it up, Matty!
Pam, goddess of all that is graphical, appears to also be goddess of all that is prose. She wrote an original story, linking relevant phrases from it to recent entries at some of the blogs out there (including yours truly). It’s very clever. Go check it out!
From my local paper, the Whitman County Gazette (no website):
A Vlasic pickle jar label found at the scene where windows of three vehicles were broken by thrown bottles was part of the investigation, according to a police report. Stephen Thomas Hendrickson, 20, and Aneil Michael Zubain, 22, have each been charged with first degree malicious mischief for allegedly damaging three cars when they threw the bottles.
The police report said an officer April 4 was called to an apartment area on Merman Drive where the three cars had been damaged by thrown bottles. Pickles and the Vlasic’s label were also found near the damaged cars. The officer said he looked through the fence and saw remains of a barbecue at the neighboring College Crest Apartments.
The two suspects, who were identified by neighbors as the ones who had the barbecue, later admitted throwing the bottles from the second level of the C building at College Crest. The report said Zubain, when shown the Vlasic label by an officer, said “he does have our dill pickles,” the police report alleged.
No baby yet.
Sgt Hook, a MilBlogger and one of the most decent men I know, is deployed with his Hawaiian-based aviation unit to Afghanistan. He has begun a new operation, dubbed “Shoe Fly“, to bring shoes to the kids of Afghanistan. He is looking for donations of all childrens’ sizes of shoes to distribute on his missions to Afghani villages. He didn’t specify a type of shoe, but please bear the terrain (mountainous, dry, dusty) of the country in mind. At any rate, these kids are barefoot, so anything would be a step up (pun unintended). Also, please help him spread the word, and if you’re graphically-inclined, he’s in need of a banner and/or buttons to be used for this effort.
Oh, and Sarge… thanks. You’re a good man, Charlie Brown.
SexyHusband normally hates my watching the TLC show, A Baby Story, particularly when I’m pregnant. For the uninitiated, A Baby Story is one of those early “reality” TV shows that chronicles a few of the last days of a couple’s (I’ve never seen a single parent on that show) pregnancy. They usually start off with a bit about how the couple met and married, any previous pregnancies they’d had, and how life is (always wonderful) with their existing children. *commercial break* Then they show a couple of clips of life with the couple related to their pregnancy - usually there’s a baby shower or a pregnancy class, maybe a pregnancy massage or some “quality time” spent with the spouse and/or kids before your life changes forever, that kind of thing. The next-to-last segment covers the birth, and they wrap it up with a short final segment about how terrific things are with the new baby, usually about a month or so post-partum, when the mother’s back to looking less like a DragonLady and more like a human. All of this is crammed into a 30-minute show, complete with a myriad of baby-oriented commercials (which my daughter delights in even more than the show itself).
Naturally, this show makes me weepy, particularly when I’m pregnant. Even when things go perfectly smoothly, and there are no complications, I almost ALWAYS cry at the birth. This baffles SexyHusband, since to him Crying = Bad, so he figures if something makes me cry, why watch it? He’s even gone so far as to threaten to block TLC at the satellite. I know other fathers-to-be who’ve made the same threat, for the same reason. I’ve mentioned before (February 3rd entry) how, for women, crying is not necessarily a sign of impending doom, or even of sadness; it’s just something we do sometimes.
Yesterday A Baby Story served an even more important purpose - it put my little petty bitches into perspective. In the first episode was a couple who was about to have their second baby. The mother had suffered two previous miscarriages, and her first was born by C-section. She had been under general anesthesia (knocked out), since when they began the incision, she could feel it. This, friends and neighbors, is not what one refers to as an “ideal outcome.” She was understandably anxious about her upcoming delivery - a scheduled C-section - and had set the bar relatively low: she wanted to be conscious for the delivery. She was, and she called it (paraphrased) the most wonderful birth she could imagine. That’s a pretty sad statement.
The second couple were pregnant - after years of problems with fertility, and finally seeking the help of a specialist - with triplets. The mother was diagnosed with a short cervix. Her cervix was sewn shut, and she was put on strict, hospital bedrest for the last three months of her pregnancy. I’m talking STRICT bedrest - she could only get up to use the bathroom - no showers, no walks around the hospital, no NOTHING. Her triplets were eventually born by C-section, as well, but they had to stay in the NICU for several weeks, and they were TINY.
All this helped to put my little petty complaints about awkwardness and being a couple days past due date in much better perspective. I have it EASY. My blood pressure has stayed almost embarassingly low (last visit was 110/80) for someone at my gestation and size, the baby is proving to be perfectly healthy, and my body is just BUILT for this. I’ve never had real trouble (aside from a miscarriage at about 3 weeks’ gestation) with pregnancy, labor, or delivery, and this one’s not looking to be any different. So I go over my EDD; big deal! I’m still going to have a perfectly beautiful, healthy, little boy, and be home in a day or two, with him in tow. Life is wonderful. Yay, A Baby Story!
Wishing the happiest of happy birthdays to my very dear friend, Mike of miniluv! And many, many more. *smooch*
Reason number 8,000,000 NOT to send our kids to public school:
During the minute or so [silent] observation [for President Reagan], the teacher made a series of “negative” and “inappropriate” comments about the Republican president’s policies in front of up to 16 seniors, officials said.
It’s one freaking minute. This loony teacher couldn’t keep her damn yap shut for one damn minute.
[District spokeswoman] DeFiciani would not characterize the teacher’s remarks, but Tony McCann, president of the Shenendehowa Teachers Association, did: “This teacher said she wasn’t going to participate, even if Reagan was dead. She didn’t think Reagan was the hero that everyone else thought he was.”
Of course, the wannabe ACLU’ites can’t help but put their foot in it, too.
Free speech advocates warned the school district that it was the one guilty of politicking and said any punishment would go against the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
“The school district is seeking to impose its views,” said Jeffrey Fogel, legal director for the Manhattan-based Center for Constitutional Rights. “The issue becomes, can any higher authority in the school system require people to act in lock step with their political views, and the answer is no. It’s a matter of free speech,” Fogel said.
Two points - (1) free speech rights do not extend to your place of employment. Employers (including - maybe even especially - schools) are well within THEIR rights, to preclude or prohibit political speech where it has the potential to offend or alienate their customers, in this case the students and teachers at the high school. After all, the school was not asking this twit to wear a “Gosh, Reagan was so SWELL” button, recite a haiku in his honor, or pass commemorative jelly beans; all they wanted her to do was shut up for ONE MINUTE.
(2) Why, lookie there! It’s Godwin’s Law rearing its ugly head again! “Lock step,” indeed. Dontcha just love those inappropriate, ill-applied Nazi references? If this teacher was interested in casting aspersions on the memory of a man whose body was not even in the ground yet, she should have done so on her own time, off the clock. It’s called “setting an example of respect for your chosen leaders, even when you happen to have disagreed with them.
Link via Late Final
Adam just came downstairs to ask his Dad for help with his computer. Their conversation sounded like every tech support call I’ve ever taken.
Adam: “Can you come fix my bee-puter?”
Mike: “What’s wrong with it?”
Adam: “It’s broken.”
Mike: “What’s broken?”
Adam: “My bee-puter.”
Mike: “What are you trying to do?”
Adam: “Use my bee-puter.”
Mike: “Are you trying to use the mouse?”
Adam: “Yes.”
Mike: “And what happens?”
Adam: “It’s broken.”
Ahhhh, nostalgia.
My due date is tomorrow. I am, naturally, still quite pregnant. My water has not broken, I have not had regular contractions, I have had no signs of impending delivery. This doesn’t necessarily mean anything (I could be pushing two hours from now), but it’s discouraging. Any woman who has ever reached her due date can tell you that thinking about the delivery consumes all your thoughts. I have the attention span of a gnat. Luckily, there’s nothing really pressing going on right now - I finished TheThing on June 1st, and finished editing a book last week - so I’m able to indulge myself a little bit. I’ve resorted to scrapbooking and computer games - activities that require very little commitment of time or attention, and which serve somewhat to take my mind off of being pregnant (still!) for at least a little while. I’m playing a LOT of pinochle, and have re-discovered a forgotten love for Minesweeper.
I’m not a superstitious person, except when it comes to pregnancy. I can’t help thinking that the baby is waiting for some thing to happen before he’ll deign to make an appearance. I spend a lot of time thinking about what that thing is, trying to figure it out, so I can accomplish it and let him out. I know, it’s foolish, but it’s the only way I feel even a modicum of control over the situation. I’ve considered what the thing might be, and have come up with the following possibilities:
*
He’s waiting for me to do his baby book - I haven’t even started it,
and it would take me weeks to finish at my snail’s pace. If he’s
waiting for THAT, I’m a goner.
* He’s waiting for me to put the receiving blankets in the hospital
suitcase, something I had neglected to do when I first packed. I did
this on Thursday, though, and he’s still not here.
* He’s waiting for me to give the doctor a copy of our birth plan. Again, did that on Thursday; no baby.
* He’s waiting for me to finish reading the biography of Hitler I’ve
been slogging through for the last 9 months. Hey! I told you, I know
this is completely illogical.
* He’s waiting for me to finish the quilting scrapbook. Finished this last week; no baby.
* He’s waiting for me to mow the front yard. SexyHusband
has forbidden me from using the lawnmower, so if this is the thing I’m screwed.
* He’s waiting for my doctor to go out of town next weekend. This is
such a masochistic intention to attribute to a baby that I can’t even
seriously consider it.
* He’s waiting for us to start pre-school again on Tuesday, so I’ll
have a roomful of moms to dump my older kids on for the delivery. This
is actually a somewhat pleasant thought since it would mean no extra
driving, as well as convenience for everyone else. It puts me 2 days
over my due date, but that would still be tolerable. Maybe?
Feel free to ponder what the thing might be in the comments section, but please be nice (the guess (June 8) of delivery happening in December was NOT amusing).
“The National Socialist economic policy meant a return to work for millions; for even more millions it meant the final liberation from the fear of losing tomorrow the little employment they still retained. The state now seemed able to protect its people from starvation; mankind seemed to have risen one step – that is the felling which the National Socialist revolution gave to many people. This progress had been bought with the loss of free suffrage, the renunciation of free speech, with a press dominated by lies, with concentration camps for a minority and atrocities that could not be concealed.” - From Der Fuehrer: Hitler’s Rise to Power, by Konrad Heiden
The headline to a CNN story about a Muslim woman who was barred access to a pool area because she was wearing Islamic clothing read, “City sued over barring Muslim garb.” Now, I don’t really care to get into the story itself, but I did wonder about the use of the word “garb.” I used to wear Islamic clothing myself for four years, and that was the first time I ever heard someone say that what I was wearing was “garb.” The word just sounds ugly, and I can’t recall ever having heard it applied to anything BUT a Muslim woman’s clothing. You don’t hear about, say, an Australian’s khakis as “garb", or an Indian sari as “garb", or a New Englander’s overcoat as “garb".
So what makes something “garb", anyway? Dictionary.com says garb is “A distinctive style or form of clothing; dress.” So, presumably, bikers, ballet dancers, skateboarders, even McDonald’s employees all have a garb, yet you never hear it applied to anyone but Muslims. I wonder why that is.
Note: I will not tolerate blatant, hateful Muslim-bashing on this blog. You are warned.
Update: Just to clarify one point that’s being re-asserted in the comments, I never said I was offended by the word. I do think it’s ugly, and that most of the time when it’s used it’s an attempt to distance oneself from a particular group, but the word itself does not offend me. A quick Google search shows that the first page of results are predominantly related to Renaissance costuming, and not a single reference to Muslims. So perhaps this is an instance of my own lack of exposure and/or awareness.
I tell you what, public education is at it again:
An elementary school teacher was placed on paid leave for washing a boy’s mouth out with soap after he shouted an obscenity at a classmate.
This teacher was placed on indefinite leave because she “put a drop of soap of his lower lip, washed it out immediately and told him I never wanted to hear filth like that coming out of his mouth again.” Now, what message does the teacher’s behavior send to the kid? I’ll tell you what it says. It says, "I care about you, and I care about all of my students. I have high expectations of you, and I will not tolerate rude, derogatory, filthy behavior out of you, because you are capable of much, much better." The proof?
The boy behaved for the remainder of the day and didn’t complain to his foster mother, Thomas said. The boy’s brother told district officials what had happened, she said.
The soap bit works. I’ve had it done on me before. It’s not torture. It’s not harmful. It’s not going to injure them. It’s not going to bruise their little egos. It’s not going to keep them from becoming productive members of society. It’s not going to turn them into mass-murdering freaks. It WILL get the desired result - an end to the potty-mouthing, at least in class - and it’s a lesson that will stick. Maybe if the kid’s mom had been doing the same thing at home, she wouldn’t have had a kid who was such a discipline problem to begin with.
Thomas said she didn’t want the boy, who had frequently been sent home for unruly behavior, to earn another one-week suspension.
This is a teacher who was looking out for this child’s best interests. What, pray tell, would the district have PREFERRED she do?
mlah asked me in the comments to the previous post whether anyone had started a baby pool to guess the kid’s arrival date. No one has. But, what the hell? Might as well, right? So, if you want to guess, do so in the comments to this message. You can guess date, time, weight, and length. I’ll link to whoever gets closest on each of the four (that’s four links) in a post after the baby’s born.
A few data points: The kid is a boy, due on June 13th. My previous children were Adam - born after an induction 10 days after his due date, at 11:55PM, weighing 8 pounds 4.5 ounces - and Kayla - born of her own volition 2 days after her due date, at 12:29PM, weighing 8 pounds 7 ounces. Both kids were 21.5 inches long. Good luck!
Eagle-eyed readers of this blog may notice that, as of late, I have posted very little of much substance. I haven’t sunk(en?) my teeth into politics, or Iraq, or Afghanistan, or the military, or even gay rights for quite awhile. This is because I am forcing myself to take a break from it all. There is an impending delivery to make, and I’m focusing on that instead. That’s why most of my entries have been about family and parenting (even my abortion (April 26 entry) reflections (May 28th entry) have been a result of increasing focus on my family), and have probably been a little more “sweetness and light” than I was known for a couple of months ago.
Not to worry! I will get back to it all soon enough. After my son is born and I am safely out of recovery, I will go back to thinking about things like prisoner abuse scandals, the passing of President Reagan, the upcoming election, and the war on terrorism. I promise, I will. But in the meantime, you’ll just have to take my slightly rosier view of the world. I promise you, it won’t last forever. I’m just not that much of an optimist. Of course, you WILL be subjected to gratuitous new-baby pictures before that happens. I mean, I am a Mom, after all. ;)
“A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many bad measures.” - Daniel Webster
This is a question for the parents out there… how do/did you handle imaginary friends? I realize it’s a normal part of development, and I don’t want to discourage his imagination, but I am getting so sick of “Donkey says” and “Puss-in-Boots wants” and “Can’t Shrek have a bite, too?” How can you encourage them to have their “friends", but not TALK about them incessantly, all day, every day. Or do I need to just grin and bear it?
Harvey posted some trivia about Texans that you might not have otherwise known. I actually guffawed at a few of these. Some tidbits:
The Texas state tree is the Derrick.
[…]
Although Texas is quite large, it is actually relatively sparsely populated. The entire population of Texas could theoretically be placed inside of a 20 square mile area. This is attempted every morning on the highways surrounding Dallas-Ft.Worth.
[…]
Texans subsist solely on a diet of incredibly hot things, such as chili, jalapeno peppers and the Swimsuit Issue of Sports Illustrated.
As a Texan by birth, and by right, I feel compelled to correct that last one a bit. We offset the hot stuff with huge quantities of ice tea, ice water, and ice-cold Cokes.
The Yankee/snake bit is only too true, though.
I just had some programming I did for a new business work the VERY FIRST TIME, with absolutely no debugging. Anyone who programs for a living can tell you that just plain doesn’t happen very often. It even helped me find an error in a page for an existing business. So, woohoo!
Oh, yeah… and still no baby. Due in a week.
I finally completely (well…. almost) finished a scrapbook that I intend to keep for myself! If you’re at all into that kind of thing - or into quilting, as that’s what the scrapbook is about - you might want to take a look at the little online album I did of the pages. Or not… *shrug*
“Familiarity breeds contempt - and children.” - Mark Twain
Further to my last post, I bring you an instant-message conversation I had with SexyHusband (who is sitting 5 feet behind me):
Me: do you supposed pregnancy blogging is more or less pathetic than cat blogging?
Him: pregnancy ends, cat bloggers are eternal
I warn you right now: this is a complete vanity post, nothing more than
an update on me and the baby unborn fetus I’m carrying.
I’m at 38.5 weeks. I had an OB checkup yesterday, and everything is boringly normal. Blood pressure’s at a very steady 128/74 (been right about there for months), dropped a pound this week (overall weight gain about 25 pounds), fundal measurement is exactly where it should be, fetal heart rate is 132 bps, urine’s showing a trace of protein (as it always does), and there’s no appreciable water retention issues. What this means, from the point of view of my doctor and his 3rd-year medical student (who may end up catching this kid) is that everything is just hunky-dory and “We’ll see ya next week.”
From MY point of view, however, it’s a somewhat different situation. I learned the hard way during my first son’s pregnancy that salt raises blood pressure, and blood pressure increases your risk of pre-eclampsia, which means (at best) an induced pregnancy, which (say it with me, kids) SUCKS! So, both last pregnancy and this one, I’ve cut way, way, way back on salt. I haven’t had packaged pasta (one of my staples during a non-pregnancy diet) in longer than I can remember. Six months, at least. I like salt. No… everyone “likes” salt. Salt and I go way, way back. We’re on a share-the-futon-during-the-sleepover-and-like-it basis. I grew up in Texas, where the food groups could be described as Fat, Salt, Gravy, and Coke. I miss salt.
Other than that, I’ve got achy hips, an achy (and “twingy” - meaning it will occasionally pop out of alignment thanks to the pregnancy-induced ligament “loosy-goosies") back, achy teeth, achy feet. It hurts to walk. It hurts to sit. It hurts to lie down. I can only lie on my sides, and there’s so much weight and pressure on my hips that both of them have a bit of bruising.
All of this, of course, is no comparison to women having REAL complications with their pregnancies - I’ve had no pre-eclampsia (knock on wood), no spotting, no blackouts, no cramping, and no pre-mature labor. I’ve been having Braxton-Hicks contractions for at least 3 months now, but most of them are just background noise at this point.
So, I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’m doing “fine", whatever the hell THAT means for someone who can no longer see her feet, who stumbles over unseen toys at least ten times a day (ya can’t avoid what’s out of your line of sight), who never sleeps more than an hour and a half at a stretch (gotta love that tablespoon-sized bladder), and who, right this very second, thinks a painful, drug-free delivery sounds like just about the most wonderful thing in the whole, wide world. Besides, afterwards, I get a baby!
Thanks for reading my bitch. SexyHusband needed a respite. :)
The best satire is funniest when it’s true even if you say it with no wink and nod at the end.
“A lot of folks still look at monogamous, heterosexual relationships as a weird aberration. They didn’t want us to encourage that kind of ’sexual diversity’ in Philadelphia.”
If you are, like me, a complete dork, and haven’t heard of Da Goddess‘ Memorial Day project, you should go check it out. It’s a sort of pictorial essay collection, with poems, dedications, and other thoughts about those lost in the line of duty. Great reading, and some heart-wrenching pictures.
“People everywhere confuse what they read in newspapers with news.” - A. J. Liebling