Where for art thou, cannoli??

As some of you know, today is the first of three targets for the cannoli deliverable. The next is tomorrow, and the third (most recent) is Saturday, this from our midwife just Monday. Mama-to-be is confident that it will happen this week. I second that, as his activity level is up (he punted me in the side yesterday and I mused that if he had a little egg tooth like lizards do, he'd have worked his way through her belly by now), LK is 50% effaced, and most important we're on a schedule here, people. I'm not sure what version of Outlook he's using in there, but I have had the invitation to this particular meeting on my calendar for quite some time and although his acceptance was "tentative" it would be a career-limiting move for him to miss this one.

We've been getting interesting advice on how to speed things up. (Nobody seems to care that we aren't technically late yet...I can only imagine the suggestions that are going to come along once he actually arrives.) Some of them sound like fun at least:

Mexican food

Chinese food

riding over the train tracks

a trampoline

"scrubbing the floors" which has nothing at all to do with housework [come on, use your imagination].

And so on. I'm eager to hear what else women have turned to over the years.

I'll keep updating as we move along.

You're all invited to my coronation...

Well, other good news has come my way in the last few days; MyCompanyInc saw fit to promote your humble narrator -- I'm now an Associate Vice President of paper shuffling and general silliness. Nice raise, bigger bonus, and the key to the executive washroom (which is kind of like the officer's club in M*A*S*H, fully accessible to all, but I now know the secret to making the urinals flush according to the fibonacci sequence, which is way cool.)

I'm sure these perks are just the beginning. Stay tuned.

posted by MT at 12:14 PM |

Gotta love those kids.

I have lots to say about this recent Senate bill regarding indecency, but my thoughts haven't congealed just yet. So I bring you fluff: all of this from FARK which is the best way to utterly send your daily productivity into the crapper I've ever seen. (that was some interesting grammar).

Here's the headline:
How can the second D&D movie be worse than the first? Make Paris Hilton star (link to story).

Once you're finished there, go to the comments section and buckle your seatbelt (it helps if you have taken conversational D&D Geek 101, which I audited once and later took pass/fail just to fill out the term) Some of my favorites below:

Paris Hilton
Level 4 Ho-Bag/Level 4 Amateur Porn Star
HP: 69

Strength: 8
Intelligence: 3
Wisdom: 3
Constitution: 12
Dexterity: 13
Charisma: 4

Magic Items:

Slackjawed Half-lidded Idiot's Gaze +4
Boobies +1 (automatically increase charisma score by 10 when dealing with any man unless they save vs. Bad Taste)
---------------------

I hear her character has a dangerous "+4 nightvision handjob" attack.

---------------------

That movie definitely missed its saving throw vs sucking ass.

---------------------

Roll a sanity check......DEAR GOD IN HEAVEN WHY?

Fun.
posted by MT at 5:08 PM |

Down came the rain and washed the spider out, and all his dirty sooty friends up there in the chimney and smeared shit all over our brand new fucking basement...

Don't you hate it when nursery rhymes and fairy tales take a turn for the worst?

So last night I come home after a grueling day, to Gail and family helping us two cook some dinner, hopeful that the evening would be relaxing. Going to enjoy the storm. I loves me a good storm, although Evil Newton has other opinions about things that crash and flash randomly in the night.

And I wandered down to the basement -- our newly finished, fucking expensive basement, completely watertight and equipped with the snazziest of new French drains. (For the unintiated, like me just a few short months ago, a French drain is basicallly a one-inch wide ditch they dig around the perimeter of your basement. They fill with gravel and a PVC drain with holes in it that runs all accumulated water into the runoff for the house. That, plus the watersealed walls and floors, was to become the answer to our old leaky house problems.)

Fucking French drains. They surrendered.


Here's where it all started. We clearly have a leak in the chimney. This is the soot and charred wood that blocked up the drains.


Here's the big toilet flush as it crawls across the floor. I initially thought with horror that sewage had somehow backed up into the house. Easy mistake.


Swell...

Ah the delights of homeownership are too numerous to recount just now. At least we learned that the drains themselves are fully functional -- once the wet/dry vac cleared away the coagulated mess from the lowest drain, the water receded fairly rapidly. But now we clearly need to repair the chimney.

And now for something completely different:

Here's Newton in the cannoli's room. Is he in for a surprise in about two weeks...




"What the hell is that noise?"

posted by MT at 11:14 AM |

No coincidences here.

As John Scalzi noted, it is not a surprise that the Supreme Court indecision about the "under God" phrase in the pledge came down today. Nicely done, you guys. Way to skirt the issue. But it is an election year, and nothing more could have reasonably been expected.

What I find interesting is the play it has already gotten. Early headlines, e.g., from CNN: Court Dismisses Pledge Case. Okay, fairly objective.

More recent headline, from AP: Court Preserves "God" In Pledge.. No, they didn't. They essentially tabled the conversation for another day. Ostensibly the phrase is preserved, but the implication of the headline (that they ruled that it passed constitutional muster and hence can stay) is disingenuous, seems to me. Anyway.

A cookie if you figure out what we were talking about

We had a lunch meeting here at MyCompanyInc, and being a good and stable employee I took copious notes. Here's what's on my little tablet after an hour and a half.

shelf life.

Ed-in-the-box [Ed gave the presentation on video]

different ends

Thurstone is live on your computers

bifurcate yourself

infeasible

pastiche

quant augmentations

I'm sure I'll refer to these notes again and again. I'm feeling augmented already.


posted by MT at 2:09 PM |

Lest we forget...

I was listening raptly to the NPR reports of Reagan's death this weekend. It's interesting to remember (as LK pointed out) that at the time, he never struck me as a particularly articulate communicator, despite that moniker given to him by the media. And yet, listening to the ten minute clip of his greater moments (and those not so great, remember "We begin bombing in ten minutes?") it certainly seems now, through the "gauzy haze" (as Tom Tomorrow said) that he may have had more on the ball. ESPECIALLY considering the inarticulate homespun mess that stumbles out of Dubya's mouth any time he speaks without a script.

But let's not forget the real Reagan legacy. He's responsible for a lot. Good to remember it all.

But the only hot war waged during the Reagan administration was to remove a comic-opera Marxist government from the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada. The United States retreated from Lebanon after a suicide bomber killed more than 200 American soldiers. It is seldom observed that Saddam's gassing of the Kurds, which George W. Bush rightly denounced prior to the Iraq war, occurred on Reagan's watch. In 1984, when the Reagan administration got its first inkling that Iraq was engaged in chemical warfare, it chose not to make a fuss. The most ambitious foreign intervention during the Reagan administration--the funnelling of aid to the Nicaraguan contras--was done illegally, and, after it was discovered, embroiled Reagan's second term in a scandal from which it never recovered.
Reagan can probably claim some credit for ending the Cold War, but his principal weapon, characteristically, was spending—the Soviets bankrupted themselves trying to keep up with the Pentagon's weapons-buying binge through the 1980s. Reagan's greatest achievement in foreign affairs was therefore linked to his greatest achievement in domestic affairs. He taught Republicans that they could be even less responsible than Democrats.

--snip--

...The deficit, which stood at $74 billion in Carter's final year, ballooned to $155 billion in Reagan's final year. In the words of Vice President Dick Cheney, "Reagan taught us deficits don't matter."

Today, what does it mean to be a Republican? It means you can cut taxes indiscriminately and needn't worry about the debt you're piling up. It certainly doesn't mean that you want to shrink the federal government. Indeed, government spending under George W. Bush has increased faster than it did under Bill Clinton. Before Reagan, pandering was principally a Democratic vice. Today, it's principally a Republican vice. Ronald Reagan performed that transformation, and it remains his most enduring legacy.

posted by MT at 6:04 PM |

"You will make many changes before settling satisfactorily"

This from a fortune cookie on Saturday night, day one in the new home.

I do not think we have settled satisfactorily just yet, as we are still in the "many changes" phase of the prediction, but well on the way.

Just getting over the jet lag too, thanks for all of your well wishes everyone.

Let's see, in the last couple of months, the cannoli has begun Tai-Bo in earnest (and apparently he holds guest classes on Tuesday and Thursday around 5:40 am, if anyone is interested.) Settle down in there, young man. The whole thing has become much more "Alien" like lately; we half expect his little foot or tushie to come poking through.

On the baby front, we attended a couple of birthing classes where they [surprise surprise] teach you how to breathe. Can't believe I've been winging it all these years. Well, you'll be happy to know I've lost my amateur status. And the HE-HE-HE breathing found in nearly every sitcom and television drama where a birth takes place is wrong wrong wrong. Good way to hyperventilate, but not much else. The RN Stepford Wife who ran the show had some interesting things to say about pain medication, which diminished our respect for her considerably: When asked "at what point in the delivery are various pain options available?" (since most of the moms-to-be it seems were expressing at least a passing interest in going the natural route) she replied, with a maddening hand-waving dismissiveness, "Oh, honey don't worry about that. When the time comes, the doctor will handle it. That's why he gets paid the big bucks."

Um. No.

Happily, the rest of the room seemed as horrified as we were. Luckily, much of her other advice was not similarly post-WWII-era in its banality and misogynistic tone.

So the prince is due to arrive in about three weeks, give or take. We were showered with baby loot over Memorial day weekend, to an astonishing degree. This kid will be well appointed. Dr. Wendy knitted the most beautiful little outfit I've ever seen. Little yarny booties with buttons and everything! Quite spectacular. Everyone has been very generous.

And, on Friday last we finally moved into the new house. I have some great before-and-after pictures that will be posted here in short order. [Found a quick and easy way to craft photo web pages that will take the hard work out of it.] Some fairly complete renovations before it was all through, and it still retains the old-home charm without being old-home inconvenient.

So now the nesting begins in earnest. More news is forthcoming, but just wanted to poke my head in here and scrootch some lemur-heads affectionately before heading back to work.
It helps that they replaced my old computer so internet access is now possible once again.

In other news, productivity hits an all-time low...



posted by MT at 12:08 PM |