ragesoss

UPDATE: more photos are now up on Flickr, along with a video of Brighton with hiccups!

4:15 am. Faith and I are on a brisk walk before our planned 6:00 am check-in at the hospital.

6:14 am. Check-in was quick. We’re in our big room, the baby’s heartbeat is on speaker, and the nurse is taking a focused history and asking about birth plan stuff.

7:43 am. Three different nurses tried to start IVs but hit valves. Our main nurse, the mother of a blogger I met at the West Hartford townhall meeting, is very nice. She started the IV successfully on a second try.

8:20 am. The oxytocin drip is going now. Amazing how the same chemical that makes you feel good after you donate to NPR (or so Ira Flatow tells me) also brings babies out quicker.

9:34 am. Faith is bored so she’s doing work: scheduling residency interviews, checking icanhascheezburger, etc.

9:55 am. Our nurse is setting things up so the doctor can break the water. I’m not allowed to post anything specific about the labor after this. Faith and the nurse are bitching about private insurance and their profiteering ways; it’s a good thing Faith qualified for Husky (Medicaid) when she got pregnant, since there were important things that her primary insurance didn’t cover.

10:15 am. Faith reports that the contractions are “starting to not feel so good any more.”

11:37 am. Things are getting more exciting. We’re watching the BBC show Merlin as a distraction. This is the apparatus the baby goes in for his exam after he’s born:

12:55 pm. I just got kicked out of the room. It’s hospital policy that family aren’t allowed to be there when they administer an epidural; fathers tend to faint and injure themselves. Our nurse says she’s had to drag fathers out by the feet. Here’s the medicine, ready to be hooked up:

1:41 pm. Nap time.

3:10 pm. Our nurse was going to leave us for a while, but then she realized that it’s almost BABY TIME! We start pushing as soon as our doctor is available, it looks like. The nurse estimates half an hour until then.

4:23 pm. He’s here!!!

5:46 pm. He’s 8 pounds 1 ounce. He’s already fed once and he’s very good-natured. We’ve been testing his reflexes; one pic is the Moro reflex (startle reflex), one is the palmomental reflex, and one is just cute.

6:48 pm. Brighton is 19.5 inches long.

9:22 pm. Brighton has been snoozing for a while. It’s my objective assessment that he is, in fact, the cutest baby ever. Thanks so much to everyone who offered congratulations and kind words. To those scheming to steal and/or eat him: we’re on to your shenanigans, and we’ll have none of it.

I finally decided to get my own domain and switch to WordPress. Please update your links, if you get a chance.

It’s been a while since I’ve post anything personal. The most interesting news is probably the trip to Europe Faith and I took with her Dad. There are lots of pictures on Flickr, but I’ll put up some of my favorites here:

“Cogwheel train to Rigi Kulm“

“Luzern swan moves closer”

“Luzern water tower”

“Historical re-enactment”

These pictures are all the results of my new camera, a Canon PowerShot S2. Unfortunately, I didn’t have it for Thanksgiving vacation (in Orlando with my family, including the cousins), which was also a great time.

Preview

Report: Iranian Science Teachers May Be Enriching Students

WASHINGTON, DC—High levels of student concentration suggest that Iran may be a mere five to eight years from developing a nuclear scientist, according to a Pentagon report.

Does anyone one else suspect that europeangoldfinch.net is the portal into a Prison Break related alternate reality game? It’s a seemingly fake forum, supposedly about the European Goldfinch, but the comments are unrealistic and there isn’t actually a way to sign in, post, or anything else.

Maybe it will become active later in the season, when the characters actually begin using it on the show.

I guess the Prison Break message boards will be the place to hash it out…

About a year ago, I dug up a skinny maple sapling, stuck it in a flower pot, and decided to learn the art of bonsai. Since then I’ve dug up a lot of other small trees and shrubs, killed a fair number of them, bought some others from places like home depot, and spent a lot of time taking flak from my family (especially Faith) about what a lame hobby I have.

Since we moved to West Hartford a few months ago, I’ve gone to several events with the Greater Hartford Bonsai Society, and it’s been really great. They had their annual bonsai show recently, and I showed one of my plants, a sagebrush I dug up in Reno over Christmas. I also traded away the other two surviving sagebrush for plants from other people.

You can see some pictures from the show, and other excerpts from by adventures in bonsai, in my flickr set, Miscellaneous Lifeforms.

We got a new kitten, Halley, last week:

And Melinda’s wedding was a great success; all the assorted parts of the family behaved and got along well, and it was beautiful. My dad let me use his camera for some shots; it has a great telephoto lens and made me want to get serious about photography. You can see some of the results on flickr. Unfortunately, I probably won’t be able to get a nice camera for a while, but it’s something to look forward to.

Reading: The System of the World

Watching: The Colbert Report

Listening: NPR, Blindside – Silence

UPDATE: This picture of Halley has been making the rounds on the internets; it even found its way, randomly, onto a video podcast called “Ask Mind Candy“.

My sister Melinda is getting married on Friday. Tomorrow morning we’re driving up to Hanover (again, since she graduated from Dartmouth last weekend).

Faith and I live in West Hartford. Lots of other stuff has happened that maybe I’ll write about later.

I found something super awesome while browsing Wikipedia today: check it. Stan Kenton playing Malagueña live.

I’ve been in Reno visiting my dad and his family since the beginning of last week. Hanging out with the kids is fun (I posted some pictures of them on Flickr, along with some miscellaneous photos), and I dug up some sagebrush for bonsai, too.

Dad’s website is finally is half-way decent shape, and I convinced him to start a blog, too: Renotes. I don’t know how much he’ll use it, but he’s still enthusiastic at this point. I also set him up with a myspace page, so he can develop a 15-year-old fanbase (and so he has free hosting for a couple songs).

Even though dad’s dogs are really a bunch of bad dogs (Aria and Basie are actually good dogs, but as a group, they’re all bad), it’s nice having them around. I’m looking forward to when Faith and I can get a dog, once we live somewhere stable.

I miss Faith and Curie and Tesla and Euler and Poisson and d’Alembert and the rest, though.

I decided a little while ago that I would try to start eating fish; inspired by Laura’s rareness enthusiasm, I figured I’d start with raw fish. I got some tuna and salmon sushi from the Whole Foods we found in Hartford. It actually wasn’t bad. I’m sure some of my friends will be proud.

Those same friends might appreciate this:

I was cleaning up my room and hanging up all the pearl snap shirts that littered the floor, and I thought of high school. Actually, I thought of reminiscing about high school in college, but whatever. What I thought of was how I used to wear 2 and sometimes 3 button-up shirst together; usually a short-sleeve and a flannel. So I put on 8 of my best shirts and took a few pictures.

In other news, raw honey. It’s the best foodstuff ever, except for cinnamon raisin cookies from Trader Joe’s. If you’ve never had it, go buy some.

Reading: Quicksilver

Watching: The Best Years of Our Lives, Serenity, 24, House, Quantum Leap

Listening: Jimi Hendrix – Electric Ladyland, Jimmy Eat World – Futures

Wikipedia is 5 years old , and in a month or two it will have 1,000,000 articles. It was also the 19th most visited site on the internet over the last week, and has been rising steadily. Hooray!