This image fairly succinctly illustrates just how frustrating the past couple days have been…
Wondering when Abi is coming? So are we, so stop asking. Instead you can use the Poll on the right to register your guess.
Today is Abi’s due date (40 weeks pregnant baby!)
So I had my weekly doctor’s appointment. I was interested to see if I had dilated any more from last week, which was just over 1cm, and I figured I would maybe be 1.5cm to 2cm. But to my surprise when he checked me (which by the way is not very fun) he said I was 3cm dilated and 80% thinned out, or effaced. Now this is interesting to me since at about this time with Benjamin I had already been at the hospital for 8 or so hours and had an epidural.
Oh and I guess since I was progressing so well from last week he decided to do a procedure called “Stripping the Membranes” and if anyone has had this done you know how NOT fun it was (Google it if you want to find out more). So in case anyone is wondering the doctor said it could happen tonight OR it could happen next week… in other words, we are still waiting!!
As our friend Dave pointed out, we’re now sure that we’re having a girl — because she’s making everyone wait.
The official due date isn’t until Thursday… which really means that it could be another 2 weeks before she arrives (after 2 weeks past the due date, they’ll induce labor.) Nicole’s been having pretty regular bouts of contractions usually about 10-15 minutes apart — although “bouts” isn’t the right word because they last half the day, then mysteriously go away. We’ve stopped getting excited about those, but Nic still diligently writes them down, hoping for a pattern to emerge.
I’ve been working from home this week, hoping to be near-by when something starts happening. Really that just means that we’re both trapped in the house, scared to go anywhere. The cabin fever is setting in and we’re almost through every episode of Firefly and Jericho (another great show likely to be canceled before its time) so we’re starting to go a little crazy.
In short, absolutely nothing is happening, there’s nothing to read here, go about your business. We’ll post again when something happens — I already have the post saved as a Draft 
For those into Photoshop, but who don’t consider themselves geeky enough to check the other blog, I put up a little tutorial on Codepoetry on a new trick I figured out and have been using a lot lately for the photos on the site. Check it out if you happen to be sitting around… waiting for a baby to arrive… with nothing else to do…
PS: Someone from Microsoft commented on the geek blog! Its moving up in the world!
So last night we’re laying in bed watching Firefly (because as I mentioned earlier, there’s nothing else we can do right now) and I noticed Nic is keeping a spreadsheet on the craptop. This isn’t unusual (because as I mentioned earlier, she makes spreadsheets for everything) but I glanced over and figured out that she was writing down contractions, and the last 15 were almost exactly 10 minutes apart…
Around 11:00 we started getting ready to go to sleep, but not before I put the bags by the door, laid out some comfortable clothes I could quickly get into, and texted Brooke (and maybe one or two other people) to suggest she keep her cell phone handy.
I’m pretty sure we were both awake for the next 2 hours — Nic timing her contractions, and me almost bouncing with excitement. But eventually we both fell asleep, and when we woke up this morning the contractions were gone and there was still no Abi.
She’s being very stubborn. It was not like this at all with Benjamin. We told him when we were ready, and the next day he arrived. And the water broke first so we didn’t have to deal with the ambiguity of timing contractions. Maybe this kid is gonna be trouble…
Literally, we’re sitting around waiting for something to happen. We can’t plan any outings, or date nights, we can’t even travel too far from home. We just sit here, watching TV, playing with Ben, and waiting for something to break… literally.
So to pass the time, here are some geeky gadgets we’ve recently acquired or fallen in love with.
This is our new monitor: a Dell SP2008WFP. Its not an Apple monitor, although its hooked up to our Mac Mini, but that’s OK, because the equivalent Apple Studio Display is $350 more, and nowhere near as nice.
This guy has a gorgeous 20” glossy screen, wide-ratio, of course. Has a 2000:1 contrast ratio 4 USB ports, and a built-in webcam. For those of us not rich enough to have an iMac, or with employers not cool enough to spring for MacBooks, this Dell monitor is perfect. Couple it with an adjustable height stand and its ideal for video conferencing.
Speaking of which, if you don’t have Skype, get it now. It’ll probably never completely replace our other IM clients, but its unimaginably cool being able to have a video chat whenever you want, with people all around the world — regardless of what kind of computer they’re using. We use Skype to talk to my parents in Malaysia and Nic’s parents in Ontario, chat with friends in Colorado, and maybe soon, my brother and sister Alberta.
Skype lets our friends and family see Benjamin as he grows up, and eliminates the miles between us and the people we care about. And its dead simple to use.
This was my Christmas present from Nic’s parents. Its worth about $60, but in one use saved us $150. Its an ODBII code reader.
The automotive industry has almost as many acronyms as the computer industry, and honestly I have no idea what ODBII stands for. But its the standard that all modern car manufacturers are required to adhere to for diagnostic reporting. Simply put, you hook this thing up to your car and it tells you whats wrong.
Most car dealerships charge and arm and a leg to “diagnose” a problem whenever your “Service Engine” light comes on, but in most cases all they do is hook up their own ODBII computer and the car reports the problem. Couple this device with a table of car codes, and you can probably eliminate most trips to the dealership. For example, last time my light came on, the car was telling me that my emissions were 20% below top-performance standards. Since it was 0 degrees outside at the time, I figured that was OK and cleared the code myself. Had it been a more significant problem, at least we’d have the information we needed to decide if and when we wanted to take it in.
And finally a round-up of software that is the new hotness:
Plaxo has been around for a very long time, and has, at points in its history, been somewhat evil. They seem to have cleaned themselves up lately, though, and they happen to be the only game in town that will let you synchronize your address book between multiple Macs and multiple Windows PCs. They even support Thunderbird.
It can’t be that difficult to exchange vCard data, but for some reason neither Microsoft nor Apple (nor any other third party) has stepped up to the plate to make this happen (although Kerio does a good job, if you can afford to run your own server). So despite my aversion to giving anyone my contact data, Plaxo does the trick.
Mozy is one of many automatic online back-up systems. But its got a tiny footprint when running, works seamlessly on both Mac and Windows, and gives you up to 2GB of free online storage.
Mozy runs continuously on our Mac at home, and between that and a small partition for limited Time Machine use, we never have to sweat about losing our day-to-day files.
We have other solutions for backing up the bigger stuff — including our 13GB music library, and 7ish GB photo library. But for our finances, e-mail and other personal documents and correspondence, Mozy is elegant and worry-free.
FolderShare was recently bought-out by Microsoft and became Windows Live FolderShare — but not before they rolled out a decent Mac client. I’ll likely move to DropBox once they let me into their Beta, because it looks pretty sweet, but until then FolderShare does the job.
Our useage for it is pretty limited. Multiple computers end up with an assortment of files on the desktop — notes to ourselves, URLs to check out later, spreadsheets (Nicole makes a spreadsheet for everything), and we usually end up mailing them back and forth to ourselves, just to get them on the computer we wanted to use.
FolderShare eliminates that by setting up a sync folder on each of your machines. Whatever you drop onto that folder is instantly copied over to all your other computers. And when you update a file on any one of them, the updates are pushed to all the others. Its simple, its fast and its mostly invisible (save for the annoying and pointless dock icon in OS X… why?!)
Well… still no baby yet. I guess I’ll go back to watching TV.
Our new favorite show is Firefly — an old school western series… except its in space. Totally under-rated. Joss Whedon is a genius.
Since there’s no news from Abi, who apparently is being stubborn about her desire to remain in the womb, we decided instead to show off Benjamin, in some of his new accessories. He’s only recently been willing to keep things on his head — and he seems to now realise that its kind of funny when he wears these things, and the look on his face is a testament to his self-amusement…
The Beach Boy look
The jock look
The Frank Sinatra look. I told you anyone would look cool in a fedora…
More silly styles and antics in the Flickr feed.
Sorry the image is a little suggestive, but I couldn’t find this done with any other image, and you HAVE to try this.
First of all, note which direction the girl is spinning when you first get to the page. If she’s spinning clockwise you’re right brained — or at least thinking with your right brain. Can you get her to spin the other way?
One trick is to scroll down until you only see her feet, then slowly scroll back up to see the whole image. But a much cooler thing to try is to switch your thinking to the other side of your brain.
If you see the girl spinning counter-clockwise, try to think of something creative or emotional. Keep staring at the image and think of a song you like and imagine what images come to your mind as the music plays. If she changes directions, congratulations, you’re using your right brain.
If she’s spinning clockwise, try doing some math. Don’t do the multiplication tables or anything you know by rote. Try just adding random numbers together in your head. If she changes directions, you’re using your left brain.
Apparently only 14% of people can do the direction change thing, but I swear it worked for me. I tried the staring-at-her-feet trick first, but then I tried changing thinking styles and she flipped right before my eyes. Its really trippy when it happens!
Its starting to look like that whole “expect her to come early” thing isn’t really true at all. Not that it should be a surprise. Predicting due dates isn’t so much a science as it is a wild guess.
We had an ultrasound this morning, but it was mostly just a big waste of time. First of all, the baby’s legs were crossed so we were unable to confirm its gender, and we both really wanted some re-assurance that we’ve purchased the right color accessories. Secondly, the baby is big enough now that she’s really packed in there quite tight, and the two pictures they managed to get of the face show her squished up so tight that its nearly impossible to tell what’s what.
Ultrasounds are really annoying because the bulk of the work is done by a tech, who takes pictures and points out things that don’t look anything like what they say they are. Then they leave and you sit alone in a dark room for half an hour — Nicole still with her belly gelled up. In his own sweet time the doctor saunters in, spends about 60 seconds doing what the tech did, and then walks away.
This time, after his 60 second review, he turned to us and, with some disappointment on his face, announced “average.” As if he were hoping for a mutant of some kind. “Its an average-sized baby. Good bye.” And left.
Thanks doc, that was a great use of our morning. I’ve decided that Abi will, for now, be Abi/Abe, in case she turns out to be a boy. We’d never actually name anyone that, but it seems like we shouldn’t be too specific about gender until we meet them…
For as long as I’ve known my bride — even before she was my bride — one of the things we’ve most enjoyed doing together is dreaming about the future. At some point this may be a problem in our relationship — eventually we’ll be too old to have a future to plan for. But that’s a good 60 years out, and who knows, maybe we’ll enjoy planning our funerals too.
One of our first “bonding moments” was at an amusement park called Canada’s Wonderland. We were both 17, we weren’t even officially dating yet, and while our friends went on the rides, we sat together and dreamed out loud about what we wanted from life. We talked about how many kids we want (Nicole wants 4, I want 2, we’re still debating), where we wanted to travel (I wanted to take her to Europe, but I explained that we’d have to go to Asia first) , we even planned to move to the States some day.
And even now that we’re an old married couple, its a bit of a default position when we get bored: what do we want to do next?
So as we sit around biding time, waiting for the next adventure to arrive via maternity ward, I can’t help but plan for the next chapter. Its a little strange when you realise you’ve accomplished 10 years of dreaming and now you’ve got another 10 years to plan out. I guess there’s this realisation of adulthood that’s sinking in. I’ve never really thought of myself as grown-up — I always had more I wanted to accomplish before I considered myself there. But we’ve got those things all checked off the list now, and I guess I have to concede that we’ve arrived…
So what’s next? Once Abi arrives the countdown begins for the move home. We’ll settle into an apartment somewhere near where we went to school, re-connect with old friends, and… then what?
I can safely say that we’re in better shape than most. Our individual debt is well below the average and primarily made up of “good debt.” My credit rating in college was abysmal, but once I married an accountant, she began the long process of whipping me into shape. I’m proud to say that we use cash for all our purchases, have (or had, until we decided to move) a decent amount of money in savings, and have a strong credit rating in both the US and in Canada. But we’d frankly rather have zero debt.
So that’s priority number one. A house is in there, and I recognize that means more debt, but we won’t approach that decision lightly. We’ve been watching the market carefully for the past couple years and its obvious that now is not a good time to be investing in real estate. We’ll move on that when we’re good and ready.
The bottom line is that all of that means they’re likely to be home schooled for at least a few years. As they get older this is something we plan to research and plan for better and a pursuit that Nicole is exceptionally qualified for.
The number two thing I love doing is writing. I used to love poetry, I have been an avid reader since I was a little boy — I came home from Kindergarten in tears when I realised that they weren’t going to teach us how to read and write until 1st grade, and I’ve been blogging my heart out on the web for nearly 7 years.
I love literature, and although I have no proper training or shaping, I think I want to pursue it as a hobby. Do you know I haven’t really had a hobby for over a decade? You don’t have time for such things when you have ambitious dreams to chase after…
So, my goal upon our return to a country where I can work for anyone I want without the need for government issued paperwork, is to get a free-lance writing gig at a local newspaper or magazine. I know I have a lot to learn about the field, but I’m willing to be humble (I think) and start from the beginning.
I’m not sure what’s tougher about moving home: leaving behind what we worked for and lived in, or acknowledging that this chapter — the past 10 years of our story together — is over. Sitting, as we are, in this sort of purgatory between chapters, the slow flipping of the pages of the universe, we realise we’re a little bit excited about what comes next. Its 6 years. Don’t ask me where that number comes from, but I know it for sure: the next chapter is 6 years, and then all bets are off and we start fresh chasing the next story God has to tell.
Until then, maybe things might not be as exciting or as different or as adventurous as we might be used to, but I think they’ll be good anyway…
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