Because I can...

The Charlie Brown and Lucy Game

2009-04-11T08:38:00.000-07:00

During bath time last night I realized the deadly duo have a new game. Leia would hold out two fistfulls of bath toys toward her brother, while he looked shyly on. As soon as he reached for one, she jerked them back and laughed uproariously. And it kept going on for a long time. It started reminding me of the old Peanuts gag where Charlie Brown tries to kick the football and Lucy always pulls it away at the last second. And every time she convinces Charlie that this time she won't pull it away.

At first it looked more like tormenting than playing a game, but it turned out Luke was up for the situation. He laughed right along with her. He started making more effort to get the toys, so she had to start crawling farther away in the tub. Which just made them both laugh more. We ended up with water all over the three of us and the bathroom floor, but it was worth it. If there's a cure for a rotten day at work, it definitely involves two toddlers laughing.

Stealing toys is old hat in any house with twins toddlers, or even twin babies. It's been going on since they got old enough to realize they could use their hands to actually pick up all that shiny noisy stuff. Leia has always been ahead of Luke on the fine motor skills so she was pincering Cheerios while he was still swiping at toys and like mittens were permanently attached to his hands. So she's been taking his toys since the very first time he picked up a block.

The times have changed a little though. These days he's catching up so he holds on to a lot more toys. Much to Leia's chagrin. Luke rarely cries when his toys dissapear into his sister's hand. Ironicly though, most of the crying occurs when he holds on to a toy. Leia does not take kindly at all to being thwarted. And it gets epicly bad when he takes one of her toys.
I haven't figured out how to handle it yet. Most of the time I take the toy away from the thief and give it back to the victim. Then the thief shakes a fist in my face while the victim decides to play with something else instead. I'm sorely tempted to stay out of it and let them resolve it between the two of them, but that turns Lord of the Flies in the blink of an eye. A slap fight between one year olds is a strange blend of hilarious and epicly sad all rolled into one.

Hatin' On The Garden State

2009-04-08T17:25:00.000-07:00

The show Jersey Boys finished its' run TPAC last week so I've been walking past their merch and signs in the lobby every morning as I trudge off to my cubicle. Every day I walked by this particular warning sign at the entrance to the performance hall. Profanity warnings I'm used to, and I suppose I can understand. But this is just hilarious. If I was from New Jersey I'd probably be annoyed by how it plays to some overly simple stereotypes.

Not just profane vocabulary. Not authentic Jersey vocabulary, which I would assume meant accents. But authentic, profane, Jersey vocabulary.

Now couple that with this post that I saw recently at Looky Daddy! (a transplanted Texan who lives in New Jersey). Awesome.

A Canine Induced Haze

2009-04-08T17:08:00.000-07:00

Turns out that Newscoma isn't the only one to have canine related problems. Except here at the W household our new canines are enamel instead of fuzzy. Yes, I realize that's a lame intro, but I'm somewhat short tempered at the moment since I live with two teething babies so I suggest you keep that opinion to yourself.

Fifteen months old and already the deadly duo are over achievers. (In the past I called them the dynamic duo, but deadly duo seems more appropriate for now.) Luke has 18 of his 22 baby teeth already, and Leia is close behind. Teething isn't an exact science, but most babies start getting their first ones around six months and rates vary wildly from one baby to the next. Not my ever rebellious kiddos. They started at 4 months and have pretty much been working concurrently. Leia is slightly behind Luke. She seems to have chosen to start up just as Luke is finishing so she can draw out the length of time her mother and I have to deal with a crying, angry baby for as long as possible rather than letting us have a few days to regain our sanity between rounds. The timing is really uncanny, with each cycle of teeth just about the time you can see the tops of Luke's new teeth poking out his gums Leia's gums start to swell as hers get closer to the surface.

These days they've both got more teeth than babies I know who are 6-8 months older than them. The canines have been the hardest ones by far. If you aren't familiar with types of teeth, the canines are the ones that come to the sharp point in the front of your mouth. They're the ones at the corners where the teeth start to curve back deeper into your mouth. From what little I remember of my wisdom teeth experience, I can't blame them for acting up while those things are coming in, but it isn't conducive to relaxation for their parents. They're very unpredictable at the moment. Saturday they were both clingy, tearful wrecks who picked fights with each other every time we put them down, but Sunday they were as pleasant as could be as they played on their own, and all the fights were accidental rather than intentional.

Such is life with babies in general and twins in particular. I think we're due for a teething break soon, but I fully expect the two year molars to arrive at least six months early. On the bright side maybe we can distract them by taking them outside rather than being cooped up like this long winter has had us.

Serendipitous

2009-03-05T17:29:00.000-08:00

I noticed a billboard on the way home from work this afternoon. Turns out that the Nashville Lawn and Garden Show is being held the very same weekend that my parents are coming into town to visit the deadly duo.

Pimp My Rain Barrel

2009-03-05T17:05:00.000-08:00

The topic of rain barrels came up in the comments over at Aunt B's yesterday, and it got me started thinking about my own grandiose rain barrel plans again. Before we go down this road I'm just going to remind everyone that I'm an engineer, and water is my specialty area. So things can and will get out of hand with this post. I'm also used to working on a grander scale than my 1/5 acre back yard and with a higher budget. Most of my plans will just be me brainstorming and probably aren't feasible unless you have a much larger operation than the average suburb dweller.

If you aren't familiar with the concept, a rain barrel is a storage device used to collect rainfall runoff, generally from the roof of a building, and store it for later use. Just to illustrate the concept, let's assume a 1000 square foot house with a roof that peaks in the middle and down spouts at each of the four corners. Say that you get a one inch rainfall over the course of a day (a respectable storm in middle TN, but not that unlikely). You end up with about 83 cubic feet of water. Enough water to fill up my 10 ft x 10 ft guest bedroom eight feet deep with water. That translates to 623 gallons of water for one inch of rainfall. Consider that the average annual rainfall for Nashville is about 47 inches, and the monthly average varies from 2-4 inches. That's a lot of water that doesn't get used. (This is a great source for historic rainfall monthly and annual averages if you want to check other cities/regions.) Just position the rain barrels under your gutter down spouts and get to saving money on your water bill.

There's a lot of variability in rain barrels use. I was doing some internet research to figure out how to build one to water my yard, and I ran across quite a few ways of caputuring rainwater and using it. It's probably not a good idea to drink rainwater without purifying it, but you can use it for just about anything else. Most common by far is watering yard/garden/landscaping but I ran across one 'how-to' for using rainwater to flush your toilets. The main limitations are the size of your roof and how much water pressure you need.

There's also a lot of variability in the barrels themselves. If you're feeling like a big spender you can get some nice decorative ones all over the internet. My personal plan was to build them myself. Nashville's Department of Water Services has a good primer on how to build your own. A key cost saving tip... get some of the large 55 gallon barrels used by bottling companies like Coca Cola. I haven't investigated this for myself, but rumor has it that you can usually get used ones for free if you call the local bottler. They aren't pretty, but the price is right.

You do have to consider whether rain barrels are illegal in your area. I'm not going to go into the reasons why, but in some of the more arid climates local governments have outlawed rain barrel use.

Elevation is the enemy of rain barrels. All the water pressure you get is going to be from the height of the water. You need to have downhill flow in order to get the water from the barrel to the place it's needed. It's also a general rule of thumb that the longer the hose the lower the pressure at the end of the hose. If your garden is a long way from the rain barrels, or up a hill, then you're probably out of luck but if the distance and elevation changes are small, then you might be able to get around it. The solution is to build elevation into your system. If you put your rain barrel on a pedestal you can get a little extra pressure. You have to be careful how high you put it though because water is heavy and you really don't want your barrel falling on the dog.

So let's assume you have a three foot tall barrel and you put it on a three foot tall pedestal. That means when the barrel is full you have six feet of pressure in your system. So if your garden is five feet higher than the ground where your barrel is, then the first foot of water in the barrel can be used in the garden. If your garden is three feet higher then you should be able to empty the barrel into the garden.

If your garden is too far uphill, all isn't lost. You can pressurize your system using the same methods that drinkable water is delivered to your house. Put in a pump. But, this is when you start having to spend money when the whole point of the rain barrel is to save you money. If your garden is too far uphill for the pedestal to work, you're probably better off just hooking up the hose to the back yard spigot and paying the water company.

I'm getting all stary eyed now that I'm to the part where I talk about my own plans for a rain barrel system. Notice I said 'system'? That's where it gets bad that I'm an engineer. My lot slopes up from the front to the back, with my house about half way up. So rain barrels for the front of the house are no problem. The barrels will be at the top of the hill and I can water my front yard with gravity flow. Unfortunately the garden is going to be in the back yard. The area I have picked out is about halfway up the slope so I need to build a little elevation into my barrels.

My ideal solution requires a pump. My rain barrels would be at the corners of the house and both would be hooked up to a single pump. The pump would lead to a small reservoir consisting of extra barrels along the back fence. The reservoir barrels would be connected together and a soaker hose would be hooked to the outlet. So whenever my barrels at the house get full I would just turn on the pump for a couple of minutes and all the water would go up into the reservoir barrels to be saved until I needed it. Then I just turn the valve on the soaker hose and let gravity do the work. This way I don't use the pump very much, but still get plenty of water pressure. Pump it to the top and let gravity do the rest. It's a variation on the same principle used with all those water towers you see built so high in the air.

Unfortunately, that system probably isn't very feasible, what with a pump and all that piping to be laid in the back yard. So I'll probably just let the water company provide the water pressure.

The Commute Part 1 - The 'Sign' of Good Service

2009-03-02T17:00:00.000-08:00

My new commute from the east side has been so much more entertaining than the commute from Antioch that I drove for so very long, and my drive from Old Hickory was down right boring compared to the entertainment these days.

The highlight of my morning is reading the giant electronic Interstate AC sign on I-40 west at Briley Parkway. The owner has been using it as a bully pulpit for a good long while now. I've seen 'Drill here, drill now. Drill baby drill' and last week it was 'Now playing: The Wizard of Oz ,staring Congress as the Scarecrow.' I assume that one was a comment on how he thinks the vote on the stimulus bill should have went.

All other fun stuff aside, his pet issue seems to be immigration policy. Last week I noticed '12 million illegals in the US, 11 million Americans out of work. Anyone see a solution here?'. The exact wording might be slightly different, but I think I captured the spirit of it. And apparently it's important to the owner, because I first saw it last Wednesday, and it was still there this morning (Monday).

In some worlds it's as simple as that. Kick out all those illegal types and let the suffering Americans get back to work. I'm sure the out of work bankers and highly trained folks who worked in car factories would be happy to do the low level back breaking work available to someone in the country illegally. I'm not trying to impugn the skills and abilities of anyone, but your career choices are pretty limited if you don't have proof you're in the country legally. You're probably going to end up doing something hard. The whole reason an employer takes the risk of giving a job to an illegal immigrant is because they're more willing to do it than someone with more options.

Now it's going to sound like I'm contradicting what I just said, but the other issue here is can the out of work Americans reasonably do the jobs done by illegal immigrants? Maybe I'm exhibiting some racism myself, but I'm going to use landscaping and construction as examples. Those are pretty highly visible in my neighborhood where new houses are constantly being built, and the gentlemen doing the jobs mostly look like they're from the same part of the world that anti-immigration folks seem to be the most worried about. Construction and landscaping are back-breaking hard work, but they also require a fair amount of skill. You can't just throw a tree in the hole and expect it to live, or put the nail in the wood and expect it to stand up. You have to know a little about what you're doing in order to get it right. At the very least there would be a huge learning curve and nothing would get done for awhile until all those hard working Americans figured out what the hell they were doing.

It makes me a little sad. The first thought I had when I first saw one of his more unkind captions was "I suppose he can stand to lose the business from that." But then I realized he probably actually gets extra business because of things like that.

I poked around online because I know I've seen video of the sign before, this 'best of' video kept popping up. I don't care for the guy's thoughts on immigration, but he does write a good tag line.

You Stay Classy WKRN

2009-02-26T17:39:00.000-08:00

I was checking on traffic this morning on WKRN while getting ready for work. They had a very nice story about some pretty big problems with the playground of a Nashville elementary school. It's rickety, floods, and a hole in the fence lets in all kinds of after hours evil doers so they're finding liquor, smokes, and condoms around.

Turns out a couple of Vanderbilt students who volunteer at the school have a project in mind to fix up the playground so the kids can actually use it again. It looks like a very worthwhile project, and they have a website raising money to pay for the work.

It was a good story, and I'm glad to see the way too rare story about someone trying to do something good, but their was one thing that jumped out at me. Both the reporter and the desk anchor mentioned the fundraising website, but neither actually gave the address. So how do you find the website? Go to our website wkrn.com for more details......

Would it have killed ya to flash it on the bottom of the screen instead of manufacturing traffic to your own page? I've noticed that policy seems to be common to most of the local news casts. They won't give an url other than their own on screen.

The Blog Is Back

2009-02-26T17:37:00.000-08:00

Okay, so it's been awhile since I stopped by. My little cubicle of the internet is getting kinda dusty. I could say I'm too busy to write, but that's a partial truth at best. I have some free time now that the deadly duo do more than poop and eat. But it's still a premium and I've been having trouble motivating myself to use the smallish amount of time I actually have to do something cereberal like writing.

I'm a blogger in my head though. I keep running across things that would be good to write about, and even composing the entries in my head. Occasionally I've even written a post on my lunch break at work, but never gotten around to taking it home and posting it. My brain has been getting backed up by all these potential posts, so here I am back again to relieve the logjam. I think I just made blogging the intellectual equivalent of a laxative.

I've been rethinking my writing style and posting philosophy. In the past I've been holding back a little on talking about some things in my life for fear you anonymous internet hordes that pass through would think I was a geek or get tired of hearing about my kids. But I'm a geek who likes to talk about his kids, and I'm going to just roll with that from now on.

Ever since I started a blog I've noticed that I seem to always sound pretentious and/or stuffy. I can't really pinpoint why this happens on my blog because it certainly isn't the way I usually write. But put me in front of a potential roomfull of anonymous strangers and I revert to writing like it's an old school engineering report and I have a stick up my ass.... I'm going to try and correct that, so hopefully posts will start sounding more conversational, except for the stuff about science, the stick will be firmly in place for those posts.

I'm also toying with the idea of Twitter. I've never tried it, but it seems pretty suited to my current situation. Most of the comments and ideas I feel the need to send out into the internets don't seem worth a post on the ole blog, but are too involved for the status bar on my Facebook page.

Real Estate Karma

2008-10-28T15:47:00.000-07:00

I've come to the conclusion that Jesus must have a twin sister that never made it into the Bible. The only explanation I can think of for the luck I've had with real estate ventures is that God or Lady Luck was looking out for me because I'm the parent of multiples.

Caution: Don't read the rest of this post if you're having trouble selling your house.

It became apparent fairly quickly that our little house wasn't going to be good enough for our new family. In the end we decided to build a new house in Wilson County and rent a house while we tried to sell our old place. So we moved out of the old house and spent a few weeks fixing up the old house and getting things ready to sell.

After the house was ready to go, we met with our realtor and put a sign in the yard on a Monday evening. We agreed that the listing would go up on Realtracs Tuesday afternoon. We were definitely shooting for a single person or a young couple hoping that the small size and historic neighborhood would be our hooks. We ended up compromising on the listing price with me wanting to go lower and The Mrs. wanting to go higher. Our realtor very carefully stayed out of that.

So the for sale sign went up Monday evening. Tuesday afternoon the realtor calls to tell me that the listing has just gone live on Realtracs, but he already has a tour set up for someone who just saw the yard sign. Wednesday morning I was on the way to work and I noticed my engine temperature redlining and steam coming out from under the hood of my car. Two hours later I'm in line at the mechanic and the realtor calls me again. He has an actual valid offer in his hand. For our full asking price.

I had to stop for a minute to let that sink in. The listing was online for less than 2 hours before he had a full price offer for the house. I very nearly needed a change of pants when he told me. After a couple of rounds of negotiation we ended up with a offer everyone was willing to accept. It was actually for more than full price, but they asked for several concessions so we negotiated the sales price higher but ended up making a little less than our original asking price.

The deal wasn't without its ups and downs. The buyers were first timers in their early twenties, and relocating from out of state. My realtor gave me the impression that we were really negotiating with their parents, and their parents wanted to play hard ball. We were definitely sweating the home inspection. There was nothing wrong that we knew of, but you never know what might happen with a house that old. Their inspector didn't find any major problems, but he wasn't very professional in what he wanted us to do. He included things like trimming the trees next to the house, changing out the locks (common sense says that the buyers themselves should do that just to make sure we don't have a spare key), and removing a couple of things from the cellar. The things to remove from the cellar included the old furnace which was way to big fit through the cellar door. Apparently the house was built over the top of it eighty years ago, but it was a menace to the new owners.

So we ended up spending some money doing things that really weren't necessary, but once again we lucked up. Turned out that they needed to be in town immediately for work, and rather than try and find a temporary rental they wanted to rent our house until they could buy it. Their loan took extra long to process because they were so young and newly out of college, so I actually paid for most of the unnecessary things they asked for by charging them rent for six weeks.

So we were basically lucky as hell that everything worked out so well and so quickly. I think everyone walked away from that deal happy. The only bad part of the situation was dealing with their unsavory realtor.

So now you have the evidence for my theory that Jesus was a twin. Between this experience and the ease that my bachelor pad got sold I think I make a pretty strong case.

Parental War Story #2

2008-10-28T15:45:00.000-07:00

Every parent has their war stories. A colleague, and my oldest friend both had singleton boys a few months before the wonder twins were born. They've been telling their war stories to me for the past few months. Both suffered through several ear infections and various other ailments. Up until last month I just nodded and said 'Glad we haven't had that happen yet.' Not any more though.

Last month we had our own trial by fire. Saturday night as Luke was going to bed The Mrs. commented that he was sounding a little hoarse. That was the first sign of any ill health from either baby. Four hours later Luke was a wailing croupy mess, hacking like a 3 pack a day smoker and refusing to sleep for more than half an hour at a time. I won't tell the whole sordid story, but suffice to say Leia didn't escape unscathed herself. Several days later Luke was on the mend and we thought we'd dodged the bullet with Leia. And then she got hoarse. She didn't end up getting the croup like her brother, but she did end up with an infection in both ears and an antibiotic that has to be take twice a day for 10 days. Anyone ever try to give an unwilling infant medication? Not recommended.

Here's the highlights of the week:

- Two doctor's office visits.
- Four after hours calls to the doctor's office. (My favorite was at 4 AM.)
- Three sleepless nights. (The Mrs. handled this a lot more than I did. Props and monetary donations go to her.)
- Approximately 523 doses of medicine administered to unwilling babies with sharp teeth and flailing arms.
- Eleventy billion hours of pacing while holding a twenty pound baby. (My left bicep is HUGE.)
- Two new dehumidifiers at a combined cost of $100 at Target.
- One episode in which Leia produced a Linda Blair style projectile vomit.
- Two different grandmothers dropping in to help at different times.
- One late night visit to the 24 hour pharmacy.
- One sick wife.
- Five sick days used by me.

Just Who's Watching Who?

2008-09-28T09:08:00.000-07:00

They say when you have kids your house becomes a zoo. I always assumed that was a figure of speech meaning kids introduce a lot of chaos to your life. Turns out I was wrong.

Having kids has turned my house into a zoo literally. We've got our very own fence up to keep two rampaging 9 month olds from eating the clorox and washing it down with the contents of the dog's water bowl. They're generally allowed free reign in the den, but the fence goes up across the door.

It's been a problem for the dog. He and The Mrs. spent a lot of years together and he follows her around like a puppy (Sorry, couldn't resist the lame joke.) when she's home. So he ends up sitting on the opposite side of the baby fence looking in a lot. And of course the babies are fascinated with him so whenever they see him on the other side they congregate right at the fence so they can watch him. So their's lots of staring and drooling on both sides of the fence.

It almost feels like the anti-zoo. We're the ones confined in the small area, and he's the one on the other side observing every day family life. Okay, so I've spent too much time thinking about this, but it's always good for a laugh to see the three of them eyeing each other through the fence.

Today's post is for the Parent Blogger Network. This week they're promoting the new learning product iKnow Animals Letters & Sounds by asking parents to talk about how their life is like a zoo.

Parental War Story #2

2008-09-25T15:13:00.000-07:00

Every parent has their war stories about sick kids, missed sleep, pulling weird things out of the toilet, unusual objects stuffed into the DVD player. You get the idea.

A colleague, and my oldest friend both had singleton boys a few months before the wonder twins were born. They've been telling their war stories to me for the past few months. Both suffered through several ear infections and various other ailments. Up until last week I just nodded and said 'Glad we haven't had that happen yet.' Not any more though.

Last week we had our own trial by fire. Saturday night as Luke was going to bed The Mrs. commented that he was sounding a little hoarse. That was the first sign of any ill health from either baby. Four hours later Luke was a wailing croupy mess, hacking like a 3 pack a day smoker and refusing to sleep for more than half an hour at a time. I won't tell the whole sordid story, but suffice to say Leia didn't escape unscathed herself. Several days later Luke was on the mend and we thought we'd dodged the bullet with Leia. And then she got hoarse. She didn't end up getting the croup like her brother, but she did end up with an infection in both ears and an antibiotic that has to be take twice a day for 10 days. Anyone ever try to give an unwilling infant medication? Not recommended.

Here's the highlights of the week:

- Two doctor's office visits.
- Four after hours calls to the doctor's office. (My favorite was at 4 AM.)
- Three sleepless nights. (The Mrs. handled this a lot more than I did. Props and monetary donations go to her.)
- Approximately 523 doses of medicine administered to unwilling babies with sharp teeth and flailing arms.
- Eleventy billion hours of pacing while holding a twenty pound baby. (My left bicep is HUGE.)
- Two new dehumidifiers at a combined cost of $100 at Target.
- One episode in which Leia produced a Linda Blair style projectile vomit.
- Two different grandmothers dropping in to help at different times.
- One late night visit to the 24 hour pharmacy.
- One sick wife.
- Five sick days used by me.

On the plus side, I didn't have to use any scarce gas to drive to work, and the late night pharmacy visit was an ideal time to get gas without waiting in line.

* In case you were wondering, Parental War Story #1 was just living with twin newborns for that first month.

It's All Fun And Games Until Someone Gets Poked In The Eye

2008-09-25T15:00:00.001-07:00

Let me enlighten you all about the conversation at the moment this picture was taken.

Leia: I'm going to poke you in the eye with this stick now Luke.
Luke: I know Leia.
Leia: It's for your own good baby brother. It will encourage you to get better at using your hands so you can keep me from doing things like this to you in the future.
Luke: You're only a minute older than me, quit calling me baby bro....
Leia: (poke)

Notice how Luke is holding a limp dandelion stem? I've got to teach that boy not to bring a knife to a gunfight.

In fairness to Leia, she didn't actually poke him with the flower she's holding in that picture. But the picture and dialogue just encapsulate the relationship between the two of them so very well. These days she's much more mobile than him, and she has more hand control. So she can swipe his stuff and make her get away. He's closing the gap, so the playing field becomes more level every day. The Mrs. told me about a little war between the two of them while she was rocking them both. Luke had a pacifier in his mouth and Leia decided she wanted it. So she swiped it out of his mouth. And he swiped it back. Apparently this went on for several minutes before The Mrs. managed to free an arm to grab another pacifier off the table. Unfortunately, this one was attached to one of those tethers that you clip onto the baby's clothing so it was new and exotic. And another war began...

Watching the two of them together never fails to entertain me, at least until someone starts to cry. (Thus we see the origin of the time honored phrase this post uses as a title.) Leia always gravitates toward her brother. Back before they could crawl we'd sit them up in front of each other and watch as her arms started waving as she tried to reach him. If she did reach him she would always poke him in the eye or scratch his cheek. He was pretty stoic about it, just putting up with it as he gave us an anguished look of 'Why?!?'.

Now that they can move...... the tradition continues. I'll look over at them to see him laying on his stomach playing with some toy while she's laying with her head on his back watching the ceiling fan go by above them. She also has this weird happen of trying to put her lips on him. Our best theory is that she's trying to copy the raspberries and kisses their mother and I give them.

The Tiny Dishwasher

2008-08-19T17:11:00.000-07:00

This post is a Public Service Announcement for all you folks with small kitchens.

I promised Rachel (sorry it took so long) to find out where baby dishwashers come from. Contrary to popular belief, it's not when two adult dishwashers drink too much vodka. The Mrs. tells me she got ours at Lowes, but had to special order it. I admit, back when I first saw it I wondered if it was worth the trouble of using it considering what you could fit in there. But it has definitely won me over. Even a small dishwasher is better than no dishwasher. And despite its size, you could still cram a days worth of baby bottles into the top shelf and still have room for a basket full of nipples and miscellaneous crap. We did have to run it twice whenever we had company over, but I think it earned its keep.

Our baby dishwasher is 17.5 inches wide on the outside. According to a quick check at Lowes and Home Depot websites the standard seems to be 24 inches. I managed to find a few 18 inch washers at those websites but they seem to be pretty scarce. All the entries actually seem to be the same washer in different colors. Since they're so uncommon, they probably aren't cheap. And you have to consider the ease of plumbing and wiring. Ours was put in right next to the sink so the water supply and drain pipes didn't have far to go. I'd also recommend getting one with a utensil basket that is easy to remove so you can squeeze a couple more plates in if you need to.

I can only hope my dishwasher PSA leads to less dishpan hands.

Visit the Village

2008-05-14T15:56:00.000-07:00

Now that we have kiddos, The Mrs has decreed that we're moving out of Davidson County so they don't have to go to school here. As a consequence, we decided to move out to Mount Juliet. I'm excited about living out there, but I'm going to miss Old Hickory Village. It's a pretty neat little place with a lot of history. Our house was built around the end of World War I and is on the National Register of Historic places. It'll be nice to have more space. Babies have a lot of stuff and we have it crammed everywhere in this place. It was cozy when the two of us lived here, now it's just cramped.

One of my early posts on this blog was about the Village, and the home tour in 2006. Some of the links in that old post are out-dated, but you can go here to read more about the history of the Village. Now I'm going to give a little (a very little) free advertising for the 2008 home tour, which is this Saturday.

Free the Mississippi River!

2008-05-13T17:12:00.000-07:00

So Aunt B has thrown down the gauntlet to all her engineer friends and asked:

Could New Orleans have a safer life, granted, as a smaller city, if the main
branch of the Mississippi didn’t run through it?

First off...... I haven't heard that. And I doubt it's as clear as your average news article claims that it is.

I'm not that familiar with NO or the Atchafalaya River, but I'll take a stab at it based on what I've seen on the news, read in the trade journals, and my general knowledge. And we'll leave aside the enormous political and social impacts of blowing out that many towns and drying up the lifeblood of NO.

To really answer the question, you have to know a little about the reasons New Orleans floods. The most basic fact....... NO is below sea level. So the only thing keeping the water out is the levees. If you look at the FEMA floodmaps for the area, nearly the entire city is in the 100 year flood plain. It has quite a few flooding sources. The Mississippi runs through the center of the city, and Lake Pontchatrain is immediately to the north. There are lowland swamps all around. So there's really no where else for the water to go once it gets to NO.

The main cause of flooding during Katrina, and any hurricane of size, was storm surge. Simply put, that's a giant wind induced wave. The wind blows across flat surface of the ocean and pushes the water ahead of it. Sometimes it works with the tidal effect. So the wind was working on all that open water around NO and pushing the water right over the top of the levees. It probably blew some waves from the Gulf straight up the MRGO and the river, and even off the lake. There's some noise in environmental circles that the swampland between NO and the Gulf has been eroding away for many years. That means the ocean creeps closer to the city, and removes some of the buffer area that would absorb the storm surge before it gets to the city.

Removing the river itself from the situation would take away one flood source, but you still have plenty of other water around the city. It would lessen the chance of flooding caused by a hard rain or a wet spring in the Midwest (which drains down through the Mississippi), but wouldn't appreciably change the flooding potential during a hurricane. And hurricanes are the most dangerous form of flooding in a coastal city.

The second question Aunt B asks:

But I’m just curious as to why we don’t let the river do what rivers do, especially since artificially keeping it from doing that seems to be exacerbating a problem.

True enough. Trying to keep the river in place does probably exacerbate the problem at NO, but we've been doing it too long now to quit.

It's important to note, there's always going to be a Mississippi River flowing through NO. Even if the river diverts into the Atchafalaya there's still going to be water in it at NO. The only Atchafalaya River I found was waaaay up above the state line into Mississippi, and lots more water enters the river downstream of that, so it will still be flowing in the riverbed. Plus, there's almost no chance that the entire Mississippi would divert. A large portion of it might, but there will still be plenty going down the old river channel. Letting it flow down the Atchafalaya would relieve the river levees at NO (but not Lake Pontchatrain), but it will still be there.

I think the primary reason you can't just let it blast down the Atchafalaya is all the new damage it would do. The Mississippi River drains the entire interior of the state from the Appalachians up into the Pacific Northwest. It's huge. I'm not familiar with the Atchafalaya, but I know it doesn't approach the size of the Mississippi. So if the Mississippi were allowed to flow unchecked down the Atchafalaya it would have to blast a much bigger channel. Think along the lines of a hose (one of those that takes two guys to hold it) being directed into a kid's sand box.

The environmental impacts would be astronomical. It would wash a huge amount of dirt out into the bay killing all kinds of plant and animal life around the estuary, and scour the banks clean for the entire length. You'd have monster trees washing out and floating down the river. Probably clogging the channel and causing the river to divert even more. The lower water levels in the Mississippi would drain wetlands throughout lower Louisianna. There's no doubt that sort of catastrophic adjustment has happened in the past. Mother Nature is pretty good at adjusting, but it takes a long time.

Rivers are tricksy. Once they get out of control, they want to stay out of control and you can't be sure what it will want to do. Reelfoot Lake was caused by an earthquake changing the path of the Mississippi River flooding hundreds of acres, and it's much smaller at Reelfoot than it is down at NO. It's like letting Mrs. Wigglebottom off her leash. Sure she'll probably go eat cat poo and come back to you, but she may decide to run off to the park on her own instead.

We haven't even mentioned the economic losses. A lot of cargo ships into NO and then up the Mississippi. The Corps of Engineers spends a lot of money dredging the river, but it's not as much money as they'd have to spend starting over in some new riverbed. And it's not as much as it would cost to truck all that cargo into the interior parts of the country.

Those are my off the cuff thoughts on it. The answer to B's question is, controlling it is better than letting it run loose. Better the devil you know.

Solidarity Sister

2008-04-16T18:16:00.000-07:00

I feel a little closer to all the ladies of the world today. The reason ? The Mrs. and I took a weekend shopping trip to Target and persons of the opposite sex were constantly staring at my chest and talking to my chest. Girls of all ages including a 4 year old in pig tails and a group of octogenarians would see my chest and a friendly grin would appear on their faces. Even the occasional man took a peek.

Okay, so it wasn't quite the same as the typical female experience. My audience at Target was actually staring at the baby strapped to my chest. You hear a lot of hype about baby carriers, and that hype is totally true. We heard good things about the Baby Bjorn carriers before the terrible twosome came, but we weren't quite ready to spend $90 each for two of them. Fortunately The Mrs. went to a consignment sale in Franklin back in February and managed to find two of them on the cheap. At the time I was pretty ambivalent about it, but I've discovered how much the babies like them.

The first several times we used the carriers, the wonder twins faced inward toward the person wearing them. But Saturday we decided they had enough head control to be able to turn around and face the world. When they were inward facing they mostly just slept, but now that they're turned around they enjoy scoping things out. Luke likes to check out the ladies and give them his biggest smile and a wink. My son is quite the lady killer apparently. Unfortunately he'll probably grow out of it if genetics are any indicator. Leia just enjoyed the show. Every time something interesting came into view I would hear a little exclamation out of her and see those arms start waving. The breeze as we walked through the parking lot was a realy eye opener.

It was our first time taking them out in public together, and it was quite an eye opener. You could watch the smiles ripple out as we walked through the store. I'm positive that the effect was much greater just because we had twins. Most people just looked and smiled, there weren't as many people stopping to talk to us as I expected.

It was pretty weird on several levels. I'm not used to having so many women, young and old, smile at me. And whenever one of them came over to talk to us, they either looked at my chest or spoke to The Mrs. I was just the conveyance. But I did enjoy the chance to show off my kids.

When Mommy Ain't Around Part 1

2008-04-15T18:15:00.000-07:00

Today I'm starting what I expect to be a recurring feature around this ole blog. I call it 'When Mommy Ain't Around'. It's what happens when you bring together the combination of two helpless models to exploit, a digital camera, my bored brain, and a lack of motherly supervision. So without further explanation......

We have so many babies around here we have to stack them.

Leia shows Luke that sometimes fifth wave feminism means a boy has to take a knuckle sandwich.

Not entirely true since certain babies were born IN JANUARY.

A solid 22 hours of sleep is elusive when you live with babies.

The Feeling of Impending Doom

2008-04-08T15:25:00.000-07:00

For the first three months of being parents, neither The Mrs. or I were actually alone with both of them at the same time. Sure one or the other of us would be alone in the room with them, but there was always backup downstairs or at the other end of the baby monitor just in case things got out of hand. We have both proved we can take care of them on our own one at a time. Several times she would take one with her to run errands while I stayed home with other, but neither of us stepped up for the double team.

Last week that changed. The safety net went away and The Mrs. was solo parent all day while I was at work. She's been handling it pretty well. When I get home from work their's dirty laundry and bottles everywhere, and she is itching to get out of the house for awhile, but the terrible twosome are fed, clean, and reasonably happy. A definite success story.

But now it's my turn. The Mrs. has an appointment to keep this afternoon and I have to step up to the plate. The terrible twosome aren't mobile yet, so I don't expect it to be quite as exciting as Sarcastro's experience, but I do expect lots of crying and cursing. On the plus side, no one will be there to stop me from taking the kind of pictures I can use to embarrass the wonder twins during their teen years. (I like to plan ahead.)

The neighbors must be watching Jaws, because that music is really loud.......

Orange You Glad I Didn't Say Bananna?

2008-04-07T15:55:00.000-07:00

Today's post title is an homage to Hutch. Both for his awesome post titles and feelings about orange.

Every Friday everyone at TDOT gets an email from the Commissioner. They're written by different people on the executive staff and they're meant to inform us about what some portion of TDOT does, or current events related to the department. Last Friday's was about safety in highway work zones. Apparently this week is Work Zone Awareness Week. Lots of states are banding together to remind all you customers not to run over highway workers. There were a few interesting statistics included, but I found one thing especially interesting.

The Capital building is going to be lit in orange every night this week just like all those lovely orange barrels you see on a construction site. I seriously wonder if any of the other states observing Work Zone Awareness week are doing something like that, or if it only got approved here because construction barrels share a common color with a certain particular university that shall go un-named.

I'd love to see this myself, but I don't think I'll be making it back downtown while it's dark. So someone please ask Chris Wage and his trusty camera to drop by for me.

We Need More Power Captain

2008-03-24T17:03:00.000-07:00

I've always had my doubts about electric cars being 'greener' than gas cars. To me it seems all you are doing is changing where the dirty work gets done. The power you need to drive to work is the same whether it comes from an internal combustion engine or from a nice compact cord in your garage wall. The electricity flowing from that cord comes from a coal fired power plant, or a nuclear plant, or some other source. You just get to feel better because you can't see the pollution coming out of the tail pipe. You also have all those nasty chemicals in the batteries. Those batteries are going end up leaking in some landfill eventually. (Maybe the battery acids could take care of all that garbage.) Hybrids are probably actually a good compromise because my understanding is that the batteries for the electrical motor get their energy from the gas motor and the turning of the wheels.

This came up because I ran across this opinion piece which mentions the same sort of thing. The writer makes the case that if electric cars become widespread energy demand from the municipal power grid will go up as people quit getting energy from their car's internal combustion engine. The major issue here is that generation at most power plans is pretty water intensive. According to some research done at the University of Texas, electric powered cars would consume approximately three times as much water as gasoline powered vehicles. That's water that is lost for other uses. If you look at the amount of water used and put back, then electric cars will use about 17 times as much. That's not good these days when water is becoming a premium commodity in a lot of places. Georgia may be in a real bind due to their combination of low water supply and high commuter supply.

Of course their is a ray of light in all this. The next article I read brings up the point that clean energy is getting more efficient and, as a consequence, cheaper. (Though the commenters do dispute the numbers used in the article.) So as the energy supply grid gets greener, so will our electric cars.

Personally, I think solar power is on so early 00's. Lunar power is the wave of the future. At least until we discover dilithium crystals.

What's A Growing Family To Do?

2008-03-13T09:51:00.000-07:00

This post by Kathy reminds me of my current real estate situation. When we got married, I moved into the small house that The Mrs. already owned. 1100 square feet seems like a lot until you put two adults who've been on their own for a decade into it together with a giant dog that constantly sheds. I think we adjusted pretty well, but it definitely resulted in a cluttered house. The spare bedroom became just a really big combination closet and junk drawer. The curve ball really came when we had to convert our spare bedroom for a new use. 1100 square feet was small for two adults and a giant dog, but it's absolutely tiny for two adults, two infants, and a giant dog. Babies take up a lot of space.

So now we're looking to trade up and have a similar dilemma to most people looking to buy their second home. Back when I was buying my first one it was easy. Just save up a down payment and write a check at closing. Now though, most of our cash is tied up in our house. We can pay for closing, but very little beyond that without selling our house.

So we should sell our house, right? I'm naive enough to think our little house might do okay on the depressed market. I'm hoping the small size will be an asset and the price tag will look appealing when people might be afraid to take on a bigger mortgage. It's definitely a starter house, perfect for a single person, or maybe a couple starting out. But one thing I remember clearly from when I sold my bachelor pad.... buyers are picky. If you're trying to sell a house it has got to be sparkling clean. Anybody want to speculate on how hard it would be to keep a house clean enough to show when it has two infants and a giant shedding dog that live in it? I even considered renting it for awhile until the real estate market improves, but then we run into the speed bump of not having a down payment unless we sell the old house.

The Mrs. and I have just resigned ourselves to buying a new house before selling our old. Now my research passion is figuring out how to make that happen with great credit, but little cash on hand. So far the only options to present themselves are to stick it out and try to save (very slow since we have one income and four mouths to feed) or finance 100% on the new place and pay a huge amount monthly until we can sell the old and refinance. Anybody know of a middle ground?

Dog Pile On China

2008-03-06T16:46:00.000-08:00

On the heels of the toys with lead paint scandal, China is getting a bad rap for another unhealthy export.

Turns out that a newly emerging area of study has been enabled by all our satellites. These days the scientific rage is tracking intercontinental clouds. There's a lot of research being done on dust clouds that blow up in various far flung parts of the world and where they end up. Apparently they're finding out that the clouds can have industrial pollution on top of all sorts of living micro-organisms and may be potential disease vectors.

According to this WaPo article, dust from the Sahara desert is ending up in the Amazon rain forests, the Caribbean, and the southeast US. The Gobi desert regularly dumps on the US northwest, and Japan and Korea regularly get noxious clouds out of China. The funnest part... perennially smoggy Los Angeles has finally found a new scapegoat.

Authorities in Los Angeles estimate that on some days, one-quarter
of the city's smog comes from China

Back when I was in grad school in those hallowed orange halls of Knoxville a lot of grad students were basing their theses on the idea that the Smokies were being degraded by pollution blowing in from western North Carolina. I found it plausible enough at the time, though it seemed like a blaming your neighbor to get out of fixing your own problems. This new dust cloud tracking is an extension of that to a world wide scale.

The article didn't mention where our dust and crap end up. I'm thinking we should apply the 'whoever smelt it dealt it' rule that every junior high age boy knows well. For all you folks that weren't teenage boys... this rule states that the first person to complain about noxious air is automatically awarded blame for said noxious air.

Since I couldn't decide between my two ending jokes, you pick the one you prefer.

Joke 1 - This is great news for Nashville. It means that the brown ring of pollution that always shows up in the summer can now be legitimately blamed on Memphis. Stacey Campfield will be filing a bill anytime now to offically blame Memphis, GA.

Joke 2 - The SciFi channel is in talks to option this as their next disaster of the week movie.

A Babies Story - Part 3

2008-02-28T13:30:00.000-08:00

Sorry for the delay in the conclusion of this thrilling and suspenseful tale, but everyone already knows how it ended so I don't feel too bad. If you're new here, see part 1 and part 2.

The whole experience was a surreal mixture of worry and comfort for me. They were ready to operate, but waiting to get her blood pressure down a little. So as I worried a little more every time the resident gave her a bigger dose of something because the last one wasn't working, but on the other hand I was also comforted that at least things weren't dire enough for an emergency operation just yet. That comfort level bottomed out when they moved her out of a regular labor room and into another where they could install a central arterial line to monitor her BP better and get drugs into her bloodstream more quickly. The resident anesthesiologist didn't handle it well when I asked her just how serious the situation was. (Mostly she just stuttered until she was saved by the attending showing up.)

By this time I was a basket case, at least on the inside. The Mrs. was awake, but very out of it from all the drugs. The anti-seizure medication was causing one really long her hot flash, and she was hooked up to so much monitoring equipment she could barely move. She hates confinement and was fidgeting like a toddler at a pet store. When she doesn't feel well she hates to be touched, and that was doubly true by this point. So I'm just standing in the corner out of the way of the doctors, but staying in her sight line so she knew I was there for emotional support or to fetch ice chips.

Now I have to take time out to thank the labor and delivery nursing staff at Vanderbilt. The OB (the on-call one, not her usual doctor) dropped in occasionally oozing a 'Pfft. Die or have babies, whatever.' vibe, but the nurses were very understanding of our situation and worked hard to comfort my wife. They had read our birth plan so they were aware of her strong feelings about a natural birth. Several came to talk to her and help her deal with the fact that this probably couldn't happen. One who wasn't even assigned to us but remembered us from a previous visit took the time to come by and give The Mrs. a pep talk. It was a small thing, but it made us both feel a lot better. And nearly two months later The Mrs. says she has no regrets about a Casarean instead of vaginal birth because she knows every option was exhausted.

Finally the tide turned, her pressure went down, and they whisked her off to the operating room. They left me with some semi-sterile robes and booties and said they'd send somebody for me. I was doing marginally better since I'd seen her pressure go down before she left, but as the promised 20 minutes stretched into 30 my imagination started to work on all sorts of vicious scenarios. By now it had graduated from everyone dieing and moved on to The Mrs dieing and the babies being okay.

Eventually my imagination got distracted by a nurse fetching me to head into the OR. First impression..... very small and very crowded. There was the OB and anesthestiologist attendings with their residents, the surgery nurses, and a team of nurses and pediatrican for each baby. Plus me. The Mrs. was laid out on a table with both arms strapped down and a curtain across her neck so I couldn't see what the surgical team was up to. (Thankfully.) And she was constantly shivering because she was the only person in the room not wearing multiple layers of clothing.

They pulled Leia out and she was very quiet. The Mrs. kept asking 'Why isn't she crying?' and I was occupied trying to actually see her. The warmer they had put her in was in plain view 5 ft away, but I could barely see her because of all the people around her. Apparently they had to tug on Luke pretty hard to get him out because I could see the OB from the shoulders up and The Mrs.' shaking got worse. I remember having a tight focus on the pile of bloody cloths that were next to the gurney. I have no idea why I was studying them, I guess it was some sort of mental thing that kept me from worrying about the things out of my control too much. Then they pulled Luke out and everything came back into my head. (Mentally it was a lot like the flashbacks in Lost, a giant whooshing sound and then WHAM a new situation.)

Luke was being a lot more noisy. We could hear him snuffling and grunting, but Leia was quiet. After the longest silence of my life we finally heard her cry. The nurses brought them over for me to hold and show The Mrs. after they were cleaned up. We did find out that Leia's Apgar score at birth was 0. Which means no breathing, no heart beat, no movement, but they managed to get her started. For the first few hours she sounded like she had some fluid in her lungs (the nurse called it 'crunchy') but two months later her lungs are in great shape if volume of crying is a good indicator.

Lots of the pregnancy books say that mothering hormones help women forget the more painful parts of pregnancy and childbirth, and I can believe it considering how many women have at least two kids. (I'd love to see some statistics on how many couples only have one child.) One good friend of mine recently told me his wife was ready to green light child number 2 now that their first born is 5 months old. Apparently she's counting on it taking a lot of trying before it takes. That's what I thought when I got married, but Murphy's Law caught up with me. With two months to look back on it, The Mrs. says that she's not purposely getting knocked up ever again. I'm not sure what she'd say if she had been through all that and only got one baby, but this way we have the two she wanted and we're done.

So there you have the birth story for my twins. The main point I wanted to make is that any father to be better prepare himself for feeling totally helpless while watching the love of his life go through some trying times.

A Babies' Story - Part 2

2008-02-21T17:42:00.000-08:00

See here for part 1.

At week 38 the monitoring was going well. The babies were like bad renters. Causing problems to everyone around them, but thriving and not willing to leave until someone made them. The Mrs didn't have great blood pressure, but it was under control thanks to not having to spend eight hours a day in the fight club called Hunter's Lane High School. (Her blood pressure took a steep drop as soon as she quit going to work.) During the weeks after she quit working it started to creep up again, but nothing dangerous.

Then the contraction started. Notice I said 'the contraction', singular not plural. One continuous contraction. Not as bad as real labor, but still pretty nasty after about an hour in. So another emergency trip to labor and delivery and we have the verdict. An infection is causing a 'cranky uterus'. That's the doctor's term, not mine. (To be fair, she did use several other more technical terms, but cranky uterus is the one that made the most impression.) Soon we're back home again with some antibiotics.

All this was happening during late December, and we were both hoping the babies would show themselves while I was on vacation for the holidays. But alas, they were already rebelling against parental authority and I had to go back to work on January 2 after nearly two weeks at home. The Mrs. was stoic about being left home alone, but I was pretty concerned.

By the morning I went back to work, the continuous contraction had been gone for a day or two, but cranky uterus was showing signs of returning. When I got home that evening it was back in full force. So once again we made the run to labor and delivery. This time we were feeling cynical and didn't bring most of our hospital kit of clothes and comfort items. That's your first clue that this trip to the hospital is different.

When we got to the hospital and got The Mrs. settled under all the monitoring equipment, concerns over the cranky uterus were immediately forgotten. Turns out her blood pressure was dangerously high and climbing fast. But the babies were still doing great. They were happy in the womb playing loud music, stomping around at all hours, and not picking up after their dog. No labor imminent, but the landlord couldn't take it any more. The doctor recommended immediate, but not quite emergency, Ceasarean. We dithered briefly, but the blood pressure monitor wouldn't allow much room for doubt. The pre-eclampsia was threatening to turn into full blown eclampsia. The numbers broke 200/130 and everyone got real quiet. My worry level went up about a dozen notches when the doctor prescribed an IV to combat seizures and told us at that BP level a 'cardiac event is imminent'.

So no more dithering. The decision to cut was made. Just as soon as they could get her pressure down enough to operate.

To be concluded next time.

A Babies Story

2008-02-20T14:28:00.000-08:00

Some of the best things I read throughout my wife's pregnancy were birth stories. Not that silly TV show, but good first hand accounts of different pregnancies and births. So I sort of felt obligated to put ours out there. Most birth stories are written by mothers and are a a lot more emotional than mine. Blame it on the Y chromosome, the engineering training, or my mother if you must, but I've tried to put a little of myself into it so other dads to be can get some of idea what it's like. I'm intending it to be three parts because I'm just that verbose. So come back in a day or two for the next part.

Complete uselessness flavored by varying degrees of worry and occasionally interrupted by fetching things. That's how I'd summarize the third trimester and birth. It's also a fair description of the more negative parts of being a parent of newborn twins.

Pregnancy is a natural process and generally not especially dangerous. But there is always the what-if factor. You'd have to be crazy or extremely oblivious to not worry. I suspect that a lot of pregnant women indulge in denial or deliberate ignoring of the problems, and I don't begrudge them of that at all since they are the ones that have to go through the process. But since I'm the male half of the team, I didn't have any good excuse to ignore the more dangerous parts. So I worried about my pregnant wife and the growing baby from the beginning. The very first worry was about all that champagne we drank in that short gap between conception and when she figured out she was pregnant. Toward the end it progressed to worrying that one twin was moving too much and the other wasn't moving enough.

It's bad enough with just a singleton, but when you find out you're going to be the parent of twins you're constantly bombarded by potential disasters. Doctors, baby book authors, and pundits all agree.... twins often come dangerously early and mother and babies are a lot more likely to have complications. It's ground into you pretty much constantly. The first thing we found out was that her midwife would no longer see her because twins are automatically high risk. That was a hard hit to the mother to be who chose midwife care over doctor because of worries of medical intervention. In the end, the pundits were half right. Our twins weren't born dangerously early, but there was a pretty serious complication for their mother.

The last few weeks and months of a pregnancy are pretty miserable according to all reports. And even more so for multiple fetus pregnancies. I've read a lot of blog accounts from women who say they 'begged' their doctor to induce. That's a pretty dangerous game to play, but the human body, even the female version, can only take so much punishment. By the time The Mrs got to 38 weeks the list of indignities was long. (I was going to mention a few, but in the interests of my own well being I think I'll forgo that.)

Around week 30 I came home to find her sitting on the couch talking on her cell phone. I'm either empathic or good at reading her body language because I knew there was a problem before I even heard her speak. Turns out she was in the shower and suddenly all vision in her right eye was blocked by an intense light. The doctor said to immediately report to the labor and delivery ward at the hospital since their office was closed for the day. After several hours of monitoring the verdict was pre-eclampsia. For the less medically inclined of you, that is essentially pregnancy induced high blood pressure. Nobody has figured out what causes it, but the leading theory is some sort of interaction between the fetus' blood and the mothers. The only cure is giving birth.

This is when everything kicked into high gear for us. Fetal monitoring showed the babies were rock stars in there. No problems with them. Had the blood pressure of a 48 year old day-trader, but it wasn't bad enough to try and get the 30 week old fetuses out. So we settled for a wait and see approach. This basically translated to monitoring the hell out of my wife. She was in the doctors offices twice a week. She knew the nurses and office staff by first name. The doctors still only checked her once every few weeks, so that gave us hope that nothing too terrible would happen. But the monitoring consisted of a weekly non-stress test which meant the nurses hooked her up to a couple of microphones that listened to the babies heart rate for 15 minutes or so. (I was there for several, and that's a lot harder than it sounds.) The other weekly visit meant going to the imaging center for an ultra-sound scan, and then off to the doctor's office to review the results. I found the ultrasound trips very reassuring, but The Mrs found them extremely annoying. They were scanning the fetal anatomy to make sure everything was growing, and that everyone was practicing breathing. That can take a pretty long while with two of them in there.

The Wife

2008-02-14T10:37:00.000-08:00

My wife is teh roxxor. And here's my clumsy attempt to tell you why.

I like to compare her to a peep, hard and crusty on the outside but soft and gooey on the inside (and also one of her favorite delicacies). We met on a blind date, and that night I met a sarcastic, wise-cracking, and very cute woman. That hard, sarcastic outer shell kept me from figuring out what she really thought about me so I kept calling, just in case. It took awhile, but ever so slowly I got past that outer shell.

The key to the continued good health of our relationship is her easy going nature. This was a definite surprise to me when I finally figured it out because it's at such odds with the gruff exterior. I'm moody, defensive, and not very good at accepting criticism from those close to me. Those 'qualities' have torpedoed many a relationship for me. But not this time, she just takes it all in stride and isn't bothered by it.

I think I've finally discovered the key. There is a line. On one side is her inner circle, and on the other side is everyone else. If you're outside that line and you do something stupid or destructive, you're going to catch some hell. If you're inside that line then you get the benefit of all her patience and forgiveness.

Watching her become a mother has just heightened my opinion of her. You really have to have the patience of a saint to be the mother of infant twins or even to be pregnant with twins. The doctors commented to her many times that she was unusually cheerful for a woman that pregnant with twins. Through all the weight gain, the morning sickness, the swollen feet, and even the lack of sleep she never got mean. That's more than I could have said if it were me. These days when they both start crying in the wee hours of the morning and we're both exhausted, I'm feeling some mix of rage and self-pity she calmly reminds me that they're just very small and it will get better. (Let's hope she keeps that attitude when they hit the teen years because someone will have to talk me out of killing them.)

I'm glad she's my wife and the mother of my children. I just wish I had the writing ability to do her justice.

The Wonder Twins

2008-02-05T12:11:00.000-08:00

The wonder twins finally arrived on January 2 at 11:39 and 11:40 PM. Their were some complications so the birth had to be done by Caesarean at 38 weeks. Our guys were happy in there and perfectly willing to stay for awhile longer. Unfortunately, their mom's body couldn't take it anymore.

First up was Leia weighing in at 5 lb 11 oz and 18.5 inches long. Her brother came a minute later. Luke weighed in at 6 lb 2 oz and was 17 3/4 inches long. Dealing with just the two of them you tend to forget how small that really is. Then I went into the hospital nursery and saw an eight pound newborn who looked giant compared to our guys. We won't even talk about when some friends visited us with their 4 month old baby.

Consensus so far is that they both look a lot like their parents of the same gender, or at least our baby pictures. Leia has very delicate feminine features and Luke tends to be very expressive. He especially likes to frown and look very worried. In the above picture, Luke is the one trying to look around.

Interestingly enough, they act just like they did before they were born. Luke is squirmy and likes to wave his hands around (and poke himself in the eye), and Leia sleeps like a rock. They slept well together in the small crib at the hospital, and shared at home too until Luke decided he needed to snuggle with his mother in order to sleep.

I managed to take four weeks of paternity leave, which was a very good decision. Feeding twins is a two person operation. Even though we're trying to only breast feed I still have to step in to help the second baby get in the right place. And lemme just tell you, newborns eat slow. Even back in the early days it took at least an hour to get them both properly fed and back into bed. Now that they're four weeks old they can eat for two hours at a time.

Now, all you dads to be listen carefully. I'm going to impart some advice that will be handy even if you aren't man enough to handle your babies two at a time. Even a five pound baby has a strong enough grip to grab a good size handful of chest hair. So in less you enjoy intense pain and waking up the neighbors at 3 AM, wear a shirt to those late night feedings.

Stay tuned in a day or two for the birth story, because there just aren't enough birth stories by dads.

Getting Snippy

2008-01-01T14:15:00.000-08:00

Back around this time last year I followed the comments of a particular post from Suburban Turmoil with amused disinterest. Of course, life being what it is, a year later I'm deeply into research on the very same subject.

If you didn't bother to click the link above, I'm talking circumcision. When The Mrs. got knocked up, we briefly debated it and then tabled the discussion until we found whether or not it was necessary. Early on we both got the feeling our first born would be a girl, little did we suspect the truth......

Of course now we know that our first born will be a girl, but she will be quickly followed by a brother. So I'm back to the circumcision question. Once the ultrasound tech discovered those dangly bits it got real interesting. I was told that as the boy parent I could make the decision. My immediate response was "I don't really feel one way or another." That's when The Mrs's true opinion came out. I was told that her defference to me only applied if I had strong feelings. Since I didn't seem to have strong feelings, she was stepping in to make the call herself.

I have to admit, five months after that conversation my strongest feelings on the subject are still focused on my wife's spectacular reversal of behavior. But, I've done a lot of research since then so while I don't have strong feelings about circumcising my son, I do have more informed ones.

I asked a few close friends and indifference seems to be the main response. A very close friend had a son back in September and they had him snipped. When I asked why the only response I got was, "Because I am." The arguments for circumcision fall into two main categories. Medical, and aesthetic. (Of course there are religious arguments as well, but religion isn't a factor in this case.)

Everyone both in real life and on the net have a story about some distant family member who had to be circumcised later in life due to some obscure penile problem. So the argument that follows is of course you should have it done when they're an infant so it won't hurt as much. Folks, I call bunk. An infant feels too. I've read the research. The only difference between having it done as an infant versus an older child or adult is that infants don't remember it. Having it done when you're older actually seems a lot better. Because when you're older a new surgical scar won't be residing in a diaper right next to where bodily wastes collect.

The medical profession has decided to take a powder on this one. All the pediatricians we interviewed, and the obstetrican, said that there's no conclusive medical evidence one way or another. You'd think that if there was no conclusive medical reason to do a procedure, then your doctor should recommend against it. My conclusion from that is that they don't think it's a good idea, but they don't want to stir up controversy by recommending against it.

The aesthetic argument is a little more nebulous. From what I can tell, it boils down to two main things. #1) The other boys will make fun of him in the locker room. #2) Potential sexual partners will change their mind when they find out. What can you say to something like that? Boys are going to make fun of each other for one reason or another, so if it isn't an uncircumcised penis, then it'll be something else. Personally, I never really noticed penises much in the locker room and I don't recall any one getting any flack about it when I was a youngster. (Except for the guy with only one testicle, but that's a whole nother issue.) As for impeding his sex life.... that would be a pretty shallow reason for a woman to bail. And apparently circumcision makes sex a lot less enjoyable.

So at the moment I think I've pretty well talked myself out of having Luke circumcised. There needs to be a really good reason to put him through painful surgery, and it just isn't there right now. Besides, it can always be done later in life, but it can never be undone.

I'd be curious to hear if anyone out there has experience to share on the subject, but let's be up front about one thing. I'm not interested in hearing about how you think it's a human rights violation or mutilation or any other fuzzy stuff. Any comparisons to female genital mutilation will be summarily deleted. I want to know if anyone knows of a medical reason to have it done (preferably with links) or any emotional trauma that you went through because of it.

This article is what really did it for me. Be warned, it's very explicit and cringe inducing. Not safe for work.

More Birth Controversy

2007-12-08T16:07:00.001-08:00

You've seen the hype about 'The Business of Being Born'. Rachel, Aunt B, and I all went to see it. This is an interesting post about the scientific background. The blogger that wrote it is actually our doulla. In addition to being an extremely sharp labor doulla and child birth educator, she's the mother of 5 kids, including one set of twins. Seems like a good investment to us.

Dos Bambinos Update

2007-12-08T15:33:00.001-08:00

Yesterday marks the end of week 34 of The Mrs's pregnancy. In case you don't know, the weeks are counted from a woman's last cycle, and 40 weeks is considered full term. Anything prior to week 36 is considered premature birth, at least for a singleton baby. 36 weeks is actually the average time for twin gestation, and twins do mature slightly faster than a single baby in the womb.

Luke and Leia are looking good. We saw them on the ultrasound and their little four chambered hearts are pumping just right. Everyone is practicing their breathing and has arms and legs in the right places. My secret fear of them being Siamese twins is apparently not going to come true because we saw the membrane between them. Luke is quite a bit bigger than Leia, but not enough to cause worry at the moment.

The doctor told us that we have 'won'. We've dodged the pre-term birth bullet that a lot of twins and their parents have to deal with and our kiddos should be grown enough to survive just fine if they were to be born today. He expects them to be here in about another two weeks, which happens to coincide with their mother's birthday.

The only bad news is how they are facing, and even that is a good news/bad news kind of thing. They've both been breech since very early on. Breech isn't good for vaginal birth, so we've been trying to convince them to turn over for a long time now. Apparently they get regular pep talks during the day while I'm at work and unavailable to ridicule or otherwise interfere. But the two of them are getting pretty big for one uterus so we have been worried that they don't have enough room to turn over and face head down. Yesterday's ultrasound showed that Luke has finally turned over and is facing head down.

Unfortunately, Luke is higher up and in a vaginal birth would be born second. Leia is still in position to be the older, but she is still breech. Occasionally you can find a doctor that will do a breech birth, and the doctor told us that if the first baby was born head down she could clear the path for the second to be born breech. But if the first is breech and the second is head down, there is some potential for a dangerous situation because when they're positioned that way their heads are approximately on level, and as Leia moves down to be born her chin could catch on Luke's chin and they end up locked together and unable to be born.

So the short version of all that is this: Bad news - if Leia doesn't flip over it's a for sure cesarean. Good news - Luke had room to flip over so hopefully she will too.

It was really kind of neat (for me anyway, not so much for The Mrs). Wednesday was a bad day for The Mrs. There were lots of practice contractions and she was very uncomfortable all day. We suspect that may have been caused by Luke getting turned over to his new position. Right now The Mrs. is at the doctor twice a week, so it's pretty easy to pinpoint when he turned over.

It Ain't Easy Being Born

2007-12-03T14:40:00.000-08:00

Friday night was an interesting experience for me. I attended a professional conference for a screening of a documentary. I'm not good at this kind of estimating, but there were probably more than 150 women in the room, and maybe 20 men. It was the polar opposite of most professional conferences I've been to. It was actually a conference on high risk obstetrics, and I was there to see a screening of a documentary called 'The Business of Being Born'.

This isn't a new idea for me. I've been over our difficulties trying to find the right pre-natal care for The Mrs and the twins, and the whole dilemma was represented very well in the film. There is a growing group of parents that are disillusioned with the whole idea of giving birth at the hospital. The premise is that doctors tend to meddle in a natural process and by doing so screw things up. Unnecessary and seemingly mild induction or 'encouragement' of a woman's labor (using Pitocin, and fetal monitoring to make contractions go faster) lead to more serious interventions and life threatening complications like cesarean sections, the dreaded episiotomy, or using the forceps on a baby.

Aunt B and Rachel have reviewed the film and made some excellent comments so I'm not going to try and recap the information presented. I am going to meta-comment though.

Aunt B says:

On the ride home, Rachel and I were talking about why childbirth isn't more of a feminist issue. It is a feminist issue, of course.

And Rachel agrees:

The second major strength is that the film clearly locates birth issues inside feminism and choice, noting the power disparities of the traditional hospital birth system

That's pretty interesting to me, because when the film started bringing the feminism issue into the equation I thought they were losing focus on the real problem. Their was a lot of discussion about empowering women and how they felt like after giving birth they could do anything. I get that. Birth is hard, and doing anything hard makes you feel a lot more confident about the lesser things in life. However, and you can blame my Y chromosome for this, I think that empowering women and giving them self-confidence is secondary to what is really going on.

The real issue is health. What's best for the health of the mom, and the health and potential of the baby? The doctor focuses on the worst case scenario and ignores the likely side effects, or the unknown side effects. Never mind that the worst case scenario rarely happens, and the bad side effects often do. So then you have a normal pregnancy ending in cesarean because there was a slight chance the baby was too big to fit out the regular way. Never mind that the mom has to have her intestines rearranged and runs a decent risk of infection. Never mind that autism is on the rise and all these pregnancy drugs and cesareans probably contribute to that.

In my opinion that's the point that should be focused on. Expecting the worst isn't always a good thing because you can do a lot of unnecessary damage fighting it off. We're all born and this should be important to all of us.

As a related issue, the demographics of the audience were pretty interesting. Like I said earlier, there weren't too many men in the audience. The woman that introduced the film was the head of the midwife program at Vanderbilt. At one point she asked if there were any doctors in the room. I noticed one hand. One in a room with over 150 people in it. To make it worse, this was part of a high risk obstetrics conference which I'm sure quite a few doctors attended but only one actually stayed over for the film.

Now I want to talk about the end of the film. I'm going to spoil it. You've been warned, but you have a paragraph or two before I get there.

I knew very little about childbirth before my wife got pregnant. Just the stuff I absorbed at 12 years old when my sister was born, and what Hollywood has taught me. Once I found out, a great deal of research began. My wife steered me toward a lot of the issues that I've been talking about here, and Rachel sent me toward several resources to ponder. This particular movie was pretty typical of those. But the thing you rarely hear is that emergencies really do happen. Casareans and all those other medical interventions are sometimes necessary.

I'm glad The Mrs. is thinking about all these things, but my fear all along has been that she will be so wrapped up in the idea of unnecessary interventions that she might ignore a necessary one. The doctor may come in and recommend a cesarean and she thinks it's about him getting to his golf game on time, but it really is an emergency. That's my biggest worry about the whole labor process. (Or at least the most specific one, if you discount vague worries of death, birth defects, and Siamese twins.) It bothers me enough that we discussed it with our doulla.

During the making of the film, the director, Abby Epstein found out she was pregnant with her first child. Obviously that made the whole project a lot closer to her heart. At the end of the movie they show her birthing story. This is where the spoilers start up, so leave now if you don't want to hear it.

Abby went into pre-mature labor while her baby was breech. They had to go to the hospital and her son was born by cesarean very early and with very low birth weight. They eventually showed Abby and her son eight months later, and it all worked out, but I'm very glad they included that. It had to be pretty wrenching for her to go through with a cesarean and hospital birth after all the research she had been doing on natural home births. All the pleasant, gentle home births they showed in the rest of the movie weren't anything like her own. I'm very glad she was brave enough to include that.

And finally, I present contrasting comments from the discussion at Tiny Cat Pants. Sistasmiff seems to agree with me:

Chemically aided births are sometimes necessary. There are risks with any birth. Even with a midwife or completely natural birth, with the whole family tree watching, bringing forth in a pool, you can still hemorrage and have other complications.

Kwach has a point as well. But I think she dodged a bullet. Though the fact that they could tell the fetus had a low heart rate during a home delivery says a lot about the competence of home birth midwives.

My son's birth was slightly complicated and his heart rate had slowed because his umbilical cord was wrapped around his chest. In a hospital, that would have meant an emergency c-section. In my bedroom, that meant a whole lot of lube on Janet's forearm, some dextrous manipulation in a tight space, and the arrival of a happy, healthy baby forthwith.

Fred Backlash

2007-11-23T13:44:00.000-08:00

Every office has a rabid poltical junkie or two. Ours was of the lefty variety. He liked to send around email jokes about the opposition along with the occasional praise for his candidates. He's a pretty smart guy, just a little overly passionate. He pushed the line a couple of times for work behavior, but he was pretty good at getting me to think about the issues from all sides.

He's no longer with us (at the office) but he's still true to form. He's decided the Fred Fever around town is a little hypocritical. He's got a point. It seems a bit much to extoll the virtues of Fred as a native son when you consider how a few years back a lot of people declared that Al Gore isn't a true Tennessean since he spent so much time in Washington. I doubt Fred is much different.

But this is the backlash. Plenty of comedy, but I think he forgot one design aspect. On first glance it looks like a pro-Thompson sticker. You have to look pretty closely to read the punch-line. It's too subtle.

Watching TV Like It's 1999

2007-11-23T13:41:00.000-08:00

Last week we had a very disturbing incident at the W household. The DVR went out. The DVR is my second most favorite technological innovation ever (pre-sliced breadis first) so this was extremely unfortunate. It was several days before Comcast could get to us, and we aren't doing a lot of going out these days because The Mrs. doesn't get around so well thanks to Luke and Leia. Fortunately the TV itself was fine, because we can't currently resort to the entertainment most couples use when the cable goes out.

We do occasionally watch live tv even with the DVR but it's so easy to ask The Mrs to just pause it if the show comes back on while I'm in the kitchen or if the dog needs to go outside. I think he had a tough time of it since he had to wait for commercials to go in or out for a few days. At one point I was in the other room doing something and The Mrs. yelled that the show was coming back on, so I had to hurry back. We both agreed that the whole situation was so 1990's.

On the plus side, without access to the huge reserve of shows on my DVR, I actually watched some DVDs that I've had sitting around for awhile. We watched The Godfather (my first time ever) and most of the way through season 1 of The Pretender that a friend had loaned me.

My biggest regret though, is the lost potential. The old DVR was chock full with lots of stuff for me to watch now that the writer's strike is killing original programming for awhile. All of Battlestar Galactica season 3 was in there, just waiting for the marathon I was planning just before season 4 starts. Hours of the most interesting Modern Marvels just gone. I was really looking forward to the one on Las Vegas. And my favorite South Park episodes wiped out by one little technology failure.

Naughty Bits

2007-11-16T10:05:00.000-08:00

I've been reading up on the whole 'winky' controversy this week. It's not something The Mrs. and I have thought about, but it is a bit of a dilemma. Having boy/girl twins means they're going to be doing most everything together, and of course my kids will be geniuses and notice right away that some parts are different.

I admit, at first I was with Kat Coble and thought the real words were best. But Lindsay makes a good point. I'm not sure why, but the idea of my twins shrieking 'penis' in a crowded room makes me slightly more uncomfortable than them using any of the obvious euphemisms. Granted, everyone will still know what they meant, but it's still less uncomfortable. As proof I cite some fine cinematic work by the esteemed governor of California, Kindergarten Cop. Who remembers the funniest line in the movie? Spoken by a 5 year old:

Boys have a penis, girls have a vagina.

(Okay, it may be the second funniest line in the movie. The first being "It might be a tumor." Also spoken by a 5 year old.) There's probably some good psychoanalysis in there somewhere. I find it really amusing that even two year olds have a predilection for dick and fart jokes even before they learn the sexual context. But I was actually more interested in a comment Kat made toward the end of the discussion. (Or at least it was the end the last time I looked at the thread.)

Of course, my husband insists that Grandparents be called nothing more fancy than grandma and grandpa

This has been a bigger controversy around the W household. I'm with Mr. Coble, but The Mrs. thinks we should let the grandparents in question decide. Her parents already have grandchildren, so we have to stick with precedent there, but Luke and Lea will be the first for my parents. My mom is considering all sorts of exotic titles, but I prefer to stick with grandma and grandpa. Or maybe grandma and doc, because the idea of a two year old calling my dad 'doc' just cracks me up.

So am I being selfish trying to push my opinion on to my parents?

Based On A True Story

2007-11-04T15:24:00.000-08:00

Yesterday after I braved the fog on the way into work I was sitting quietly in my little cubicle working diligently earning the money that the taxpayers lovingly pay me when a co-worker walks up.

Coworker: Hey, can you help me out? I need.... Never mind. I just remembered you're going to have twins soon and I don't want to owe you a favor. I might end up babysitting.

We'll see what happens the next time he needs a TPS cover sheet.

Trapped In The Closet

2007-11-02T04:18:00.000-07:00

Nothing covers up past sins like a fresh coat of paint. So keeping that in mind we decided the first step of converting the spare bedroom into a nursery was some paint. After all, we really didn't want any visiting grand parents seeing signs of the time we had the pygmy goats and the mini-trampoline in there. Let alone the time with the vat of jello....

So first up on the painting list was the closet. It looked like it hadn't been painted since before I was born. Now keep in mind our house was built back in the 1920's when people thought smaller. Closets in a house that old are pretty rare, and the ones that do exist are tiny. We were lucky enough to have closets, but they're so small we'll only be able to lock one misbehaving kid in them at a time even when they're toddlers.

Large man + small closet = prescription for teh funny

I went in wearing a clean black t-shirt. I came out dressed in white. Every time I turned to paint one wall I brushed against another freshly painted wall. The best comedy of all was when I did the ceiling. I had to resort to a regular roller and a full body stretch in order to get paint up there. About halfway thru the paint covered pad came off the roller and fell straight down. Into my upturned face. I looked like an actor in one of the old 'black face' minstrel shows, except the paint was white.

I knew it was bad when The Mrs. pitied me instead of laughing. Pity for funny but embarassing is very rare from her. The pity didn't last though. Fortunately, pregnancy has slowed her enough that she couldn't get photographic proof before I got rid of most of the evidence.

The Fog

2007-10-30T20:09:00.001-07:00

This morning was a day early. The fog rolled in sometime during the night and walking out to the car this morning to leave for work I caught a real Halloween vibe. Visibility was only about 30 ft and fog always has this magical way of deadening sound. Add in the deserted nature of my neighborhood at 6 AM and you've got a prescription for catching the Halloween willies.

Steven King wrote this story called simply "The Mist". (John Carpenter already had The Fog) It's one of my favorite stories. This supernatural fog rolls into a town on the heels of a major thunderstorm. Weird things were in the fog. Our hero ended up caught in a grocery store with some other intrepid survivors and they ever so slowly figured out that it wasn't safe out in the fog. They're making that one into a movie that should be out soon. If it releases before the end of the year, I like my odds of seeing it. So keep your fingers crossed, because 2008 isn't going to be a year W goes to the movies.

There's something really visceral about fog. You never know what's waiting just ahead, and it has a weird way of distorting and deadening sound. You just never know what might be lurking out there.

This morning I walked through the fog passing the construction site at 5th and Charlotte where they're building the new MTA transit center. Just as I passed by the workers dropped a 1 ton steel hopper full of wet concrete onto 5th Avenue and then picked it up and started swinging it around 50 ft up when they could barely see 20 ft. The whole thing was especially hair raising if you've seen the construction site in the light of day and you notice the other tower crane which overlaps the big one. It'd be really easy to get the two tangled up and knock them over. It does happen.

I ducked when I walked by. Because you just never know. Whether it's an interdimensional monster who lives in the fog or a good ole boy swing sitting 150 ft above the street in his tower crane that gets you.... dead is still dead and you never can tell about the fog.

Road Observations

2007-10-19T12:34:00.000-07:00

Regular readers know that The Mrs. and I are expecting two large life altering events in the December-January time frame. So we decided to get the freedom of being DINK (double income no kids) out of our system with one last vacation before things go pear shaped. For financial reasons we ended up in the Gatlinburg of South Carolina. Myrtle Beach.

Since a 9 hour road trip with an extremely pregnant woman isn't enough of a challenge, I decided to go the scenic route. That involved a tour of rural SC which added several hours to our trip. Along the way I gained a couple of pearls of wisdom I would like to share....

1.) Why is it that every small town whether it be in TN or SC has a Hardees? You see very few of them in Nashville. You also see a lot of Piggly Wiggly and Fred's. IGA used to be the big small town grocery store, but it seems to be on the decline.

2.) Lakewood, TN is like a small town tumor in the larger body of Metro Nashville. When you're inside its' limits you feel like you're in a small town. But you can only stay inside the Lakewood city limits for 2-3 minutes if you're in the car. We actually live just outside the Lakewood city limits, but I didn't come to this realization until I was pondering item 1. As further proof I offer the evidence that Lakewood Police don't have anything better to do than hassle speeders and write tickets for driving 55 in a 45 MPH at 3 AM.

3.) When you buy a new vehicle, you really should keep proof of purchase inside said vehicle until you get the registration and license plate. Police officer's don't like it when you don't do that. Seems fairly obvious in retrospect, but I really didn't think of it ahead of time.

4.) A very pregnant wife in the passenger seat can do a lot to help a police officer in a rural SC town forgive your ignorance. I'm not positive that's why we got off with a warning, but I'm pretty sure it was involved.

Dos Bambinos!

2007-10-05T09:51:00.000-07:00

Now let me set the stage on one of the more shocking moments in my life for you....

A guy doesn't have that concrete reminder of the realities of pregnancy that a woman does. So it can be a little harder to wrap your head around the idea of being a father in eight short months. It takes a lot of getting used to the idea in order to get past the very surreal nature of it. For the first several months it's almost like your wife is just fighting a really long term low grade virus. Mostly she's constantly tired, nauseous, and more cranky than usual. And she won't drink adult beverages with you any more.

For expecting parents, the ultra-sound is a really amazing thing. It's kind of like a head start on getting to know your kid. It's also a good kick in the pants to remind you that you really are going to be the parent and in complete charge of a whole 'nother human being in a few months. With good equipment you can see them fairly well and you can watch them move and do whatever it is they do in there. I was thirteen when my little sister was born, so my nine year old brother and I got to see the ultra-sound so I knew a little about what to expect.

With all that in mind, I was really excited when the first ultra-sound rolled around. It was her first natal care appointment at week eight. And back at that time we were still trying to decide between doctors and midwives so we went to her current lady parts doctor. Like I've said before, that was probably a mistake. The doctor was in too much of a hurry. Her ultra-sound equipment wasn't that good, and she wanted us out of there fast. So she took a quick look. As soon as she found the embryo she checked its heart rate and called it a day. She put The Mrs's fears to rest that it wasn't twins and shoved us out of the office. I was very disappointed because I didn't see anything but a blur. Didn't even get to hear the heart.

A month later at our first midwife appointment we decided to do a little genetic testing so they sent us to the Vanderbilt Women's Health Imaging Center for another ultra-sound. This was exciting. They have the latest and greatest equipment over there, and the test was going to take awhile so there would be lots of time to get to know my baby. Plus she (I was already thinking of the baby as a she by this point. I'm still not sure why.) had graduated from embryo to fetus and should be looking a lot more human now.

We scheduled the testing for the morning before we went on a long weekend vacation in Memphis so we were just stopping by on our way out of town.

We went in all innocent and unsuspecting. The Mrs. got up on the table and the ultra-sound tech did whatever it is that medical technicians do. She dropped the probe onto The Mrs's stomach and I was watching the screen closely. I had a better look at the screen since I was standing beside the tech, so I was already staring dumbfoundedly at the screen trying to decide if I was really seeing what I thought I was seeing when the news percolated thru to The Mrs.

My recollection is a little fragmented, but the following is my best reconstruction of the next minute or two.

Tech: "Nobody told me this was a twin pregnancy!"

The Mrs: "Shut up!!!!" (I'm not exaggerating thee exclamation points in the least.
She claims to have thought it was a weird joke.)

W: "Nobody told us either!"

Tech: "Oh!. Well surprise! And
congratulations, it's twins."

The Mrs.: (palm to forehead)

You read that right folks. We're gonna have two babies.

I've had a couple of months to get used to the idea, but it's still pretty crazy when I really think about it. When we left there we actually spent the first half of our trip to Memphis calling up various friends and families and dropping the bomb on them. Witnessing all their shock was very therapeutic for getting over our own.

I'll never be able to name them this in reality, but for blog purposes, their names are Luke and Leia.

Who Gets To Decide

2007-09-12T15:58:00.000-07:00

For previously disclosed reasons, I've learned a lot about how babies are born in the last few months. It's pretty fascinating, though I'm pretty nervous about witnessing the process myself come January. But there's a lot of controversy these days about labor and delivery.

There's a lot of concern around about how c-sections in the US are becoming more common and how that might be affecting babies and mothers. The effects on the mother are pretty easy to see. It's a surgery with cutting and stitching and removing large objects from the abdominal cavity, and all the risk that entails. There are a few people around talking about how this could be bad for the baby because they don't get the natural squeezing and the effects that has on the physical development of the skull bones and the physiological development of the brain.

The main argument you run into when researching birth methods seems to be that doctors are intervening in childbirth a lot more than they really should and that giving birth in a sterile, cold hospital isn't good for the state of mind of mother or baby.

There's both statistical and antecdotal evidence of this conclusion. It's a cold hard fact that c-sections are on the rise. It's less clear what that actually means, but there's a fair amount of support for the idea that doctors are intervening too often. Even if a c-section doesn't affect the baby, it's still a procedure worth minimizing just because of the effects on the mother. Most of the people advancing the idea that doctors need to be more hands-off are mothers. And they're mothers of multiple children. It's purely my observation, but most of the people I've heard with this point of view are mothers that had a bad hospital birth with their first baby so go to birthing centers or stay at home the next time.

Rachel did an interview with the REBIRTH blogger, who is a labor and delivery nurse. Here are some telling quotes (emphasis mine):

What are your favorite and least favorite things about your work in labor and delivery?
My favorite things… I don’t know if I could narrow it down. I
love the moment a baby emerges. I’m in awe every single time. It’s just
amazing.

My least favorite thing is seeing how many women have little to
no options in their care. Actually, that pisses me off.

If you could change one thing about modern obstetrics and hospital
delivery, what would it be?

Obviously, that most women would be cared for by midwives. And there
would be no such thing as “active management” of labor.

There are so many things in obstetrics that are not scientifically proven
to be effective, and research shows in some cases such things (interventions) can lead to worse outcomes.

The fact that these women are asking these questions makes me think that
they didn’t agree with what was recommended or done, but didn’t feel equipped to
say no or ask for alternatives.

I just snipped what I needed, but I recommend you read the entire interview.

To be fair to the doctors, it's understandable to want to be overly careful. After all, it is the lives of children we're talking about here. Not to mention their own professional liability and assets in a litigation happy society. But I've heard so many stories about doctors and nurses pressuring mothers and just riding roughshod over their wishes. It's an easy position to take when you're not the one giving birth.

From a dad's point of view, the whole process is about risk and fear. Risk to the baby and risk to the mom. Risk of a doctor doing something unnecessary but with serious consequences, versus risk of a doctor not being there when he's needed. It's also a matter of trust. Do you trust the skill and judgment of your doctor or midwife to not advise something unless it's really necessary? There are a lot of people out there that think most doctors make decisions about what is medically necessary based on personal liability or solely on the baby's health.

So, to drag this from the abstract to the personal, we had a choice to make when The Mrs. turned up pregnant. Who do we want to deliver the baby and look after her until it was born? She was torn between a homebirth, a midwife, and the ob/gyn she's been a patient of for several years. We ended up compromising by using a midwife clinic affiliated with Vanderbilt. So all her natal care would be by a midwife, and the delivery would be by a midwife. But the birth would be at Vanderbilt Medical Center, and there'd be a doctor and a Natal Intensive Care Unit close if we needed it.

We did visit the doctor, since she had history with The Mrs. And it helped us make our decision. The doctor was brusque and hurried and didn't really encourage questions. Understandable since she has a busy practice, but not really what we needed as first time parents.

So you kind of get an idea of the quandary expecting parents are in. As the father to be, there's an extra little mental adjustment because ultimately it's rightfully her decision to make. I've no doubt that I will be consulted, but in the end it is'nt my decision. And that's hard to get used to.

Thanks to Women's Health News and REBIRTH for helping me get better informed.

Poli-blogging

2007-09-07T09:47:00.000-07:00

I was driving in to work the other day, and I heard a Bob Clement commercial during my daily dose of the Bob and Tom Show. I know these have been around for awhile, but this was the first time I heard and paid attention to one since before the first election.

Bob pointed out some very important things to me during his 60 second sound bite.

#1. Since last year all property tax increases have to be approved in a general election. And that ordinance was approved by the voters.

#2. He, Bob Clement, personally guaranteed he wouldn't raise taxes.

#3. His opponent, Karl Dean, would not promise not to raise taxes. He said he would try not to, but wouldn't promise.

Now by show of hands, who can explain to me how #1 makes #2 and #3 irrelevant pandering? If the voters have to approve a tax increase, then what sort of point is Bob making here? If you parse that logically and consider the limitations he would be under, it seems to me that Bob is saying he would defy the will of a majority of voters in Davidson County by refusing to implement a property tax increase they voted on? Because that's the only way he's going to have any choice in the decision. If you're feeling generous I suppose you could interpret that to mean that as a citizen of Davidson County he won't vote for a tax increase during an election. Seems to me Bob is going for the inattentive people who won't think of that, and the knee-jerk no tax crowd. That kind of obvious pandering really bugs me.

Even leaving aside the property tax ordinance, I lose a lot of respect for any politician that promises not to raise taxes. Four years is a long time and there's no telling what sort of disasters or federal mandates might come along that the city will need funding for. So he's either going to break his promise or he's going to not be able to deal with the situation.

So in my eyes, Bob has a history of saying stupid things and attacking his opponent for doing a good job as director of the Metro legal department. That means either no one in the campaign realizes how stupid this all sounds, or they think voters are too stupid to think it through. If the Scene is to be believed, the second would be the true motivation.

I'm not sure Dean would do a good job (though he does have a bridge on his campaign signs) but he has managed to avoid insinuating Davidson County voters are stupid. That's my take on it anyway. Maybe I just read the Scene and City Paper too much.

The Hunger

2007-08-25T14:51:00.000-07:00

Food and pregnancy are an interesting combo. Two of the most famous symptoms of pregnancy are craving a particular kind of food, and morning sickness. Not two things you'd expect to go together very well.

So far we seem to be doing pretty well. I've been bracing myself for weird cravings and midnight runs to the grocery store, Taco Bell, etc... for weeks but they haven't materialized. Their was a brief run where The Mrs. was craving watermelon, but a few mushy ones as they were on their way out of season seem to have cured her of that.

She's apparently experiencing the opposite of food cravings. Well, not quiet the opposite, which would be nausea*. The hunger is there. And seems to be worse than pre-pregnancy because apparently there's less stomach space. She gets full after eating very little, and hungry very quickly.

Nah, the opposite I'm talking about is a hunger, but not for anything we have in the house. She wants something, but can't figure out what. We'll go through a list of everything in the fridge, but none of it is appealing. At first I thought that was the opposite of craving, but as I've been sitting here typing I've decided the worst kind of craving. It's a mystery craving. It could get ugly once we figure out the object of the mystery craving.

*I don't think there's much nausea, but that's subject to the opinion of The Mrs. herself.

We Got Cocky

2007-08-20T14:51:00.000-07:00

Forget the rain dances. Just wash your car and decide to leave your laundry outside on the clothes line to dry over night. Antecdotal evidence leads me to believe this is all you need to do to make it rain.

How Much Should The Media Know?

2007-08-17T16:04:00.000-07:00

Awhile back the Tennessean got a hold of a list of state employees names, titles, and how much they're paid. They posted this as a searchable database on their website. If you've ever had a job then you can probably imagine what kind of havoc this created around state offices. It's almost never good for a group of people that work together to know how much all their coworkers get paid. It never fails to foster resentment among friends.

Well they're doing it again now. The state Department of Personnel received an info request from the Tennessean again. I guess after the mayhem when the Tennessean published it last time, someone thought it was good to give us advance notice this time because I obtained a copy of the info request. The request came by email and was quiet specific in what it wanted. It laid out the desired database of info in the order they wanted, what went into each field, and how to format the data so they could import it to their own software.

Now I can understand why the Tennessean wants salary information on state employees. I still think it was irresponsible of them to publish it as a searchable database, but I can see how they might find some newsworthy things in there. What disturbs me is that this time they specifically asked for home addresses of every employee. Not just cities or zip codes so they could do some sort of geographic analysis. They asked for specific street addresses.

It has caused quite a stir in the office. The responses I've personally witnessed range from outrage to apathy. My personnel response is probably outraged apathy. I think it's a little outrageous, but there's nothing I can really do to change it. If I get bored this weekend maybe I'll email the Tennessean and my state representatives, but I'm fairly certain it would be a waste of time. Frankly I'm just glad they aren't giving out social security numbers.

That actually happened to a co-worker once. He was working on a controversial project (State Route 840) and a landowner was upset that it was taking part of his property. So the guy came downtown and requested my co-worker's personnel record. The personnel folks gave it to him everything they had and didn't block out social security numbers, addresses, or personal phone numbers. The only reason my co-worker was ever even aware of this was because the outraged landowner also made a stop at our office with the file in hand. This is also a guy that had threatened TDOT surveyors with a rifle so the whole thing was pretty ugly.

I checked the Tennessee Code. According to TCA 10-7-5.03 everything in my personnel file is public record. It doesn't even except health records or social security numbers. According to state law they could probably even get the bank account number where my paycheck is deposited. The only reason that stuff isn't giving out is because of the Feds.

So I'm curious about what non-governement employees think. Any of you think it's good for the Tennessean to have my personnel info in a searchable database on their website? How much of my info are you guys entitled to? I'm a small fish so most likely nothing will ever come of it, but there is a certain principle here.

I Feel Patronized

2007-08-09T20:46:00.000-07:00

Maybe it's just me, but as I was reading the comment war about citizen journalists versus professional journalists I noticed something interesting. If you haven't read the thread, I'll save you the trouble. Clint Brewer, editor of the Nashville City Paper, and his counterpart at the Nashville Scene, Liz Garrigan, were having a heated discussion with several local bloggers over the quality of writing in their publications versus blogs.

The thing that I noticed was that both Mr. Brewer and Ms Garrigan used the phrase, 'Sorry if I hurt your feelings.' To me that sounds like an attempt at patronizing and minimizing complainers by making them sound like whiney little kids. I was all ready to do a post about the importance of emotions and how wrong it was that people use that phrase as an argument killer because 'feelings' are an important part of the human condition. Then I realized maybe it isn't most people. Maybe it's just me that thinks that was condascending. I don't think it's just me, but I appeal to you readers to help me out.

I'm not talking about friends and family members. I'm talking about people at work, or newspaper editors in online discussions. People that don't know you. I assume it's condascending in those situations because I assume strangers really don't much care about my feelings.

So anyone want to proffer an opinion? When you're in a disagreement with someone and they say 'sorry I hurt your feelings' does it make you feel better or worse?

Demanding Quality Control

2007-08-08T15:22:00.000-07:00

I loves me some irony. And this sure seems like a good case of it. Yesterday I spent a little time reading the thread with the infamous quote from Liz Garrigan (editor of the Nashville Scene) about the high standards her publication has and how most bloggers would never be able to live up to them (see comment #2 in the thread). Then last evening I went to my weekly Citizen's Police Academy session. One of the presentations was by a Vice Sergeant. He was reliving the glory of the prostitution and adult business crack down back in 2005. As part of his presentation he shows us a copy of the Scene and mentions how they published lots of ads for prostitutes back in the day.

From what the sarge said, they had some pretty good tape on the guy. Apparently the Scene employee selling the ads helped them phrase the copy to make their point without making their point (if you get my point). To paraphrase the vice cop, "We told him our girls gave great oral sex and he advised us on how to say it in the ad."

Now that's an example of some fine quality control. (Okay fine, not quiet what Liz meant, but still....) Makes me wonder if the Scene asked for pictures before posting the ads just to make sure everything was up to standard.
Disclaimer: I make no claim to be a citizen journalist and I made no phone calls to the Scene. I did however research the story slightly on Google and using the Scene's online archives. In the process I came across this letter page. If you look closely I'm sure you can find one of Nashville's more crotchety bloggers who also happens to be a new dad.

This Post is Structurally Deficient

2007-08-03T16:34:00.000-07:00

Looks like it's time for another engineering post. Today's discussion is about structurally deficient bridges. Inspired by all the finger pointing due to I-35 falling into the Mississippi River out in Minneapolis.

Let's get the stats out of the way first. Right now, Tennessee has 1,202 bridges rated structurally deficient. That's out of 19,519. So 6% of our bridges are structurally deficient.

So what does that mean? It means that the bridge has a problem of some kind. The kind of problem that should be watched. Structurally deficient is a classification that means we watch that bridge a little more closely than the others just to make sure the problem doesn't grow. It's a way of prioritizing bridge needs. It does NOT necessarily mean that the bridge has to be immediately fixed. The ones that need to be immediately fixed are easy to see. They're the ones that you aren't allowed to drive across. And trust me, these things are watched very closely. I know the guys that do it.

So what if it was structurally deficient??? That does't necessarily mean it needs to be replaced. I'll go so far as to say Minnesota no doubt had the money to replace that bridge if they'd wanted. But they were probably spending it on bridges that had been closed for safety reasons. That's what the structurally deficient watch list is for. Prioritizing. There was just apparently something bigger wrong than anyone thought. Maybe somebody screwed up. Maybe they didn't.

Sometimes bad things happens and it's not any ones fault. Bridges are complicated. The only way to know for sure what kind of shape it's in is to take it apart. I think the problem with that method is obvious. You have to kill the patient in order to find out how healthy he is. So you have to settle for what you can find out by looking and doing things that don't hurt the patient.

I did some research on bridge failures back in 2000 when I wrote my thesis, and maybe I'll go into those a little more if I decide it's not too boring, but that's for another post. My rant today is about all this finger pointing. Save it for later. None of you have any idea yet what caused that bridge to fall down. Trust me, we'll find out. As soon as the survivors and the bodies are out of the way the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) will be there. And they'll be crawling up the nether regions of every single person involved in building that bridge, inspecting that bridge, or even thinking about that bridge. They'll tell us why it failed. In detail and in triplicate. The NTSB doesn't hesitate to point fingers. Once they have evidence.

If you only take one thing away from this post, here's what it should be. Sometimes it's just impossible to tell when a bridge will collapse. It's the bane of every bridge engineer, and I've written before about how it makes me worry. I've worked with a few guys who designed bridges that failed. It isn't something that's easy to live with. So quit blaming people until you know who to blame.

And now I'm going to reverse myself a little for those of you who still feel the need to blame someone for this tragedy. Let's talk for a minute about closing dangerous bridges. I think the Demonbreun Street bridge proves that TDOT is willing to close a bridge when it needs to be done, despite the consequences.

It's also a good case study for the pressures on bridge engineers. Everyone and their dog complained when that bridge was closed. There were cries of everything from "But how will people find my business?" to "I want the head of whoever let it get this bad!". Now, by show of hands, who thinks the whining and recriminations foster doing the right thing?

It's simple really. There are so many pressures that you just don't close a bridge until you're really absolutely sure that it's dangerous. Especially not a huge one that a hundred thousand commuters use every day. Something has got to be very wrong in order to close the bridge, and the folks in Minnesota probably just didn't see anything that looked very bad. Obviously they missed something.

If you can't take the rest of the speech to heart and still feel the need to blame someone, then point some of that blame on everyone who has a car. And remember this the next time you complain about too much road construction going on around town.

** I admit this is a little bit of rant. Lack of infrastructure funding is a pet problem of mine, and it's glad to see some non-engineers talking about it. But I hate the way things are already being oversimplified and politicized. For once, I agree with Chris Wage.

Go here for details on the lack of infrastructure funding, and here for a few facts and figures about bridges in Tennessee.

Sleeping Dogs Tell Untruths

2007-08-02T19:56:00.000-07:00

All that talk about Bobcat Goldthwait in my last post reminded me of an interesting movie that I'm going to recommend to all you adultish readers.

Bobcat wrote and directed a movie called Sleeping Dogs Lie. It's about secrets. Amy, the female lead has one. And it's a doozy. If you're the conservative type, it could very easily cause you to turn the movie off in the first five minutes. But if you roll with it, it's really an interesting movie. Though it has some scenes that pained me to watch.

The first few minutes establish Amy's (the female lead) terrible secret. I'm not going to tell you what her secret is, but let's just say the movie title refers to more than that old saying about how it's best to let sleeping dogs lie. To the movie's credit, they handle it pretty well, and throughout the movie they never imply that it's an okay thing to do. Amy never defends it.

After the big reveal the movie flashes forward to a future relationship. Her guy thinks that they're getting so close that they should tell alllllll their secrets. But she's not convinced. He proceeds to share some pretty tame 'deep, dark secrets' from his own past, and eventually she is convinced to tell him. Lots of drama and black comedy ensue, but it boils down to one thing. Some secrets should be kept that way.

According to some things I'e read, Bobcat wanted to contrast the popular conception of the American family with the darker reality. I'm not sure I'd consider the family in this movie 'reality' but it was certainly dark, and it's a good depiction of family dynamics with recriminations and reconciliation.

It's very low budget (most of the crew was hired off CraigsList), and it has its slow moments. But overall I liked it. I got two real points from it.

1) Some secrets aren't meant for anyone else.
2) Decisions you make can cause you heartache and trouble for years after.

There's some title ambiguity apparently. When I got the DVD from NetFlix it was called Sleeping Dogs Lie. But apparently it was making the rounds of the film festivals with the title Stay.

Rampant Bridge Speculation

2007-08-02T10:32:00.000-07:00

These were good enough that I decided to swing by the library and post them on my lunch break. Some very good photos of the bridge collapse in Minneapolis last night.

This is just speculation based solely on those photos and the ones I saw at CNN, but it's very interesting how the entire bridge seems to be wrenched toward one end. That gives you a pretty good idea of where the first failure happened. Judging from what I could tell in the photos it looks like one of the supports on the bank collapsed. I don't recall the exact figure, but upwards of 80% of all bridge failures are caused by water, or something that happens on the water. If this one went the way it looks to me, then it was some kind of structural failure, or something traveling the road under the bridge hit a support.

Disclaimer: This is all just my opinion based on very little evidence. I reserve the right to change my mind if better evidence comes out as time passes.

Citizen's On Patrol

2007-08-01T15:03:00.000-07:00

Our neighborhood has a very active neighborhood watch. That's both a good and bad thing when dealing with a neighborhood watch. It's good when there are suspicious people in the neighborhood, but it's bad when a man wants to take a leak in his back yard.

Contrary to what you might think at this point, this post isn't about the manifold joys of peeing outside. A few months back, our neighborhood watch coordinator forwarded us a press release about the Citizen's Police Academy. The Mrs. and I both thought it sounded pretty cool, so we both applied. We also both got in. So we've been spending one night a week at the Hermitage Precinct learning about the various parts of the Nashville Police Department.

On our first night, there was a slouchy looking fellow in a suit loitering around the parking lot by himself. Turns out that the fellow was none other than our esteemed mayor coming to give the welcoming speech along with Chief Serpas. I really thought the mayor would be taller.

The sessions have been very informative. We've had sessions on domestic violence, motorcycle patrol, DUI enforcement, terrorism, officer training, canine officers, horse officers, and of course the requisite recruiting presentation. We still have sessions on vice, prostitution, and gangs to come. Extra curricular activities include an officer ride-along, a trip to the gun range, observing court proceedings, and a trip to the communications call center. I spent an enjoyable Saturday morning at the gun range shooting a Glock service revolver, an AK-47, the shotgun all the officers keep in their car, and a Tommy gun. My very pregnant wife did a second shift ride along with an officer in the Hermitage Precinct, which surprisingly enough includes some pretty bad areas that I've always considered to be part of Antioch. She reported back that it was an interesting day with equal amounts excitement and boredom.

Some of the speakers are really good, and you can tell most of them really enjoy their jobs. They make it sound pretty glamorous. I have to keep reminding myself that these folks are higher up and they're speaking to us because they have cool jobs as detectives and such. They seem to have a lot more fun than the officers who have to deal with the tedious business of handling citizen calls, sheparding drunks, and keeping people from killing each other.

It's also been an eye opener as far as learning about my fellow Nashvillians. You can tell a lot by the questions they ask. There are certain people in the class that have some pretty specific agendas to pursue and others who like to tell us what great people good they are. It's amazing what you can work into the form of a question if you try. There's even at least one woman that I feel justified in calling a police groupie. She always sidles up to whatever male officer happens to be around and she likes to drop stories about how she's 'in' with other officers.

It's really amusing to me that they work very hard to stress that the class won't make you a police officer. From day one they keep hammering that at us. You have to wonder what has happened in the past to convince the legal department that it's necessary to push that at us.

It's a very informative class. The presentation of the topics is a little uneven depending on the skill of the presenter, but I recommend it for everybody. Anyone who works or lives in Davidson County is eligible. Just don't forget they check you for warrants and be sure to pay all your parking tickets before you apply.

*Every time I hear anyone say 'Citizen's Police Academy' I can't help but laugh. To me that phrase is forever linked to a certain Police Academy movie. You know, the one where Bobcat Goldthwait is converted from evil gang leader to upstanding police officer. It also features a pre-Basic Instinct Sharon Stone and was, sadly, the last one with Mahoney.

Library Guilt?

2007-07-29T07:42:00.000-07:00

I like to get the most out of my tax dollars by using the hell out of the library. The library has a great system if you know what you want to read. You can reserve any book in the library system from their web site and have it sent to the branch closest to you. I've had a library card since I moved to Nashville ten years ago and I've never known the limit of items you can have out at a time. Until I moved to a house two blocks from a branch library. (It's twenty-five in case you were wondering.)

Lately there have been a few books on my want list that Nashville doesn't have. Apparently Nashvillians are hard on graphic novels. So instead of paying my hard earned money I used the inter library loan feature. It's quite nice, but it takes a little while to get your book sometimes. The first books came from Memphis and I enjoyed them. The next two took awhile to get. So that brings me to the question for today.

Should I feel guilty that rather than spend $20 to buy the book myself the library had it sent all the way from Salt Lake City? I don't really feel bad, but it seems like I should since it probably takes as many resources to get it here than it would for me to just buy it myself.

Flags of Our Fathers

2007-07-25T15:12:00.000-07:00

This one is a little late, but it happens. And it has nothing to do with that movie in the post title. I just liked the sound of it and I'm not above stealing something for a totally different use.

Back on the 4th of July I was cruising through the neighborhood as I turned onto the main road I suddenly saw a giant confederate flag coming at me. It seems one of my neighbors had decided to celebrate our country's independence by flying the flag of a foreign country. Not just any foreign country, but a country that tried to break away from ours.

On the one hand I can see that. The Confederates were trying to get their own independence from a government trying to force them to do things they didn't like. Just like the original 13 colonies. On the other hand the flag is a symbol of hate for an awful lot of people.

I was originally just going to report this as a funny occurrence, but then I got to thinking about it on the mile long walk from the office (stupid downtown parking) to the state parking lot. You hear a lot about patriotism these days and some people think speaking out against the President is unpatriotic. So why do those people not think that flying the flag of another country, a country that the U.S. fought a long war against, is unpatriotic? I've heard a lot of criticisms of the Confederate flag, but never that one. It's also comparable to last year when some children of immigrants put up the Mexican flag above the U.S. one at their high schools. They were deemed unpatriotic and told to go back to Mexico, so why is no one criticizing the Confederate flag that way?

On a slightly related note, The Mrs and I watched Silkwood not too long ago. Kurt Russell played the love interest. Every shot in his bedroom and apartment had a Confederate flag hanging prominently in the background but the movie takes place in Oklahoma. I suppose it's possible that character had some confederate pride because he was from Texas, which was part of the CSA. But I think it's a lot more likely that some set designer just confused his hicks. Some people can't distingush the difference between 'country' and 'Southern'.

Save Your Breath For Blowing Up Waterwings Breeder

2007-07-23T16:47:00.001-07:00

When The Mrs. and I started talking about getting married, one of the earliest things that came up was kids. Back in my twenties I wanted kids. Preferrably two. Now that I'm in my thirties I'm less sure. I told her I wouldn't mind having kids, but I didn't want to be so old I couldn't keep up with them. And I really didn't want to be the oldest dad at the high school graduation.

The Mrs. very much wants to have children. I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that she's adopted. Once you get to know her parents it's pretty obvious that she's adopted. She's very different from them. Fortunately though, their influences on her are very obvious as well. I think their influence is why the free form artist was able to fall and love and be happy with a logical engineer who likes to plan. And vice versa.

But I digress. The point is....... The Mrs. wanted to have kids badly, and I didn't want to be old and feeble when my kids were young. Everyone told us we should be married for awhile before trying to have a baby. And we both had our reasons for not waiting too long. Conventional wisdom is that it takes at least 6-12 months to get pregnant once a couple starts trying. I had just watched some close friends of mine try for a year before being successful. So with that in mind we decided to just let nature take its course and see how long it took. After all, "It'll probably take awhile."

So has anyone figured out where this is all going yet? It took six weeks. Less than two months after our wedding my wife told me she's knocked up. Holy crap I'm going to be a dad.

*Today's post title inspired by The Simpsons.

It's All About The Baggage

2007-07-04T05:51:00.000-07:00

Today's alternate title: Blame Mom.

Disclaimer: This is a book review. I don't think I'm giving away too much of the plot, but read at your own risk.

Hannibal Lecter makes serial killing look easy, and we finally get to find out why. Turns out it was the eastern front in World War II that did the damage. Hannibal started the war as the eight year old son of Count Lecter of Lithuania living in the castle his ancestors had built 500 years ago and filled with famous works of art and literature. He ended the War as an orphan living in the same castle which had been commandeered by the Soviets as an orphanage.

Hannibal Rising is the prequel a lot of people have been waiting for. Author Thomas Harris finally gives Hannibal an Episode 1. You have to hand it to Harris. He's created one of the most compelling evil characters of the 20th Century. As near as I can tell, Harris has written five books. Four of them are about Hannibal Lecter, and all have been made into movies. One of them even got made into two movies.

Hannibal has always been an interesting contrast. On the one hand he's brilliant and civilized. He's a doctor and surrounds himself by all the refined pleasures the world has to offer. Wine, gourmet food, music, opera, literature. On the other hand he's a cannibalistic murderer. He's the ultimate villain. The deductive reasoning abilities of Sherlock Holmes with no moral or conscience what so ever. A character like that is money in the bank. Complete lack of morals and conscience are what make a truly fascinating villain.

This time around Harris gives us a look at what made Hannibal the way he is. His early childhood was as eastern European nobility with the best that money could buy. Precocious young Hannibal had a genius tutor and access to some of the greatest works of art in Europe. Until the Nazi blitzkrieg.

I won't go into details, but I don't think I'm giving anything away when I say the war treats Hannibal badly. At the end of the war he's an orphan too traumatized to speak and he lives in Hannibal Castle which has been converted into an orphanage by the Soviets. Eventually his uncle's Japanese wife brings him back to reality as he admires her beauty and refinement. And the rest of the book is about his revenge on the soldiers and war profiteers who did him wrong.
There's really no way to justify what Hannibal does in the earlier books, but this one goes a long way toward explaining it. A Russian winter spent in captivity to looters explains his cannibalistic tendencies. The fate of his little sister explains the protective feelings he has toward certain people in his life and his extreme reactions to threats toward people under his protection. So you have it all wrapped up in a neat little package. Hannibal's love of the finer things in life was instilled in him by his Japanese aunt, and the brutality and willingness to commit brutal murders came from the war.

I was actually a little disappointed to learn Hannibal's back story. It was just like Darth Vader. It just ruins a villian to find out they used to be regular folks. I feel a little cheated to find out villains are that way because of their baggage. I prefer my evil to be just for the sake of selfish evil. It's a nice writer's trick to make you feel sympathy for the villain, but it makes me feel dirty to be sympathetic toward Hannibal Lecter. The writers of The Wire use that trick to their advantage regularly. I suppose you can also see it in the way he picks his victims. They've never went into any detail about the murders that originally put him in prison prior to the novels, but most of the murders he commits while we watch are actually reprisals for slights to Lecter or someone he likes.

I also found it very interesting when I read the earlier stuff by Harris. He's written four books now which include Hannibal Lecter. In the first two Lecter was a supporting character. Harris uses A caged resource used by the FBI to find other serial killers. After the 'Silence of the Lambs' movie Hannibal suddenly blew up. He's the focus of the novels after that. I think the factor that made Hannibal big is Anthony Hopkins. He was an interesting supporting character until Hopkins made him real. 'Red Dragon', the first novel with Lecter was made into a movie called 'Manhunter' prior to 'Silence of the Lambs', but once Hopkins took over as Lecter in 'Silence' they actually did it again with Hopkins. I think it's safe to say Harris created the character, but Hopkins made him a household name. (It's also a commentary on the effects of books versus movies on our culture. Books rarely hit it big until they become a movie.)

I'm reserving judgment on the Hannibal Rising movie until I see it, but it's sitting on the coffee table right now. I was impressed that it was released almost simultaneously with the book this time.

May Does It Again

2007-06-17T20:39:00.000-07:00

If you've been around here for awhile, you've heard about how I hate the month of May. Last May was lousy because my grandfather found out he had a very rare form of cancer called angiosarcoma. (It's so rare that when they finally made the diagnosis they decided it was probably a result of him working all those years in the weapons plants in Oak Ridge.) This stuff is so nasty they don't try chemo or (more) radiation. They just amputated the leg they found it in.

As bad as that was, he fought it and seemed to get past it. He learned to live without the leg and life went on. But as cancer usually does, it came back. He lasted a year before it finally got him. And that's why May 2007 sucked harder than May 2006. I don't really have the writing ability to give him the sort of tribute he deserves, but I'm at least going to share a few of my memories of him.

My very earliest memory of him is riding in his boat. I don't think I ever rode it while it was actually in the water though. Every time we went to visit them I apparently insisted he hook up the riding mower to the trailer and he drove me and that boat around in circles in the yard. I couldn't have been more than five at the time, and I've been told I could go for hours just hooping and hollering and pretending to drive that old boat.

He was a handy guy and the ultimate back yard mechanic. He was a machinist at the Y-12 plant in Oak Ridge and carried his love of tools home with him. His basement was the ultimate adventure for a kid. Dirty and dark and full of treasure. Tools and any car or appliance parts he thought might come in handy down the line. That old basement had everything from screwdrivers to a lathe. (When they sold the house I got a treasure trove of tools.) As I got older the boat rides were phased out in favor of checking out the current project down in the basement. It started out with car parts and broken appliances and morphed into computers he was putting together. At the funeral my dad told me that all his earliest experiences with his future father-in-law involved holding the light for some repair project.

The memories of that old basement are too many to count but two really stand out. Through a very convoluted process my little brother ended up with a light fixture from the Farris Wheel at the 1980 World's Fair in Knoxville. So we took it to the basement and Granddaddy made us a lamp out of it. I was nine years old and very impressed that someone I knew could make lamps. My other great memory of that basement came when I was in college. I was invited to join the civil engineering honor society, and there was one last test. All the noobs were given a pattern and a board. The test was to somehow get the board cut into that pattern (which involved the Greek letters for C and E). Everyone else was stumped, but I just took mine to Granddaddy and after an hour in the basement we had just what we needed. And I knew a little more about woodworking.

I don't think it's unrealistic for me to say I was his favorite grandchild. I was the first of nine grandchildren, and we were kindred spirits. He was very excited when I decided to become an engineer, and a lot of the qualities that make me a good engineer I think were passed down from him. Had his financial situation been better I have no doubt he would have blazed a trail as an engineer designing whatever he wanted. When I was considering which engineering school to go to he gave me a tour of his shop at UTK. (He got a job there after retiring from the nuclear plant in Oak Ridge.) It was a measure of how much the professors valued him that I got to meet the Dean of the College of Engineering. Not many junior college transfers did that. I think he was a little dissapointed when I picked Tennessee Tech instead, but I made up for it later when I went to grad school at UTK.

But that shop was the star attraction. It was like his basement on steroids. The stand out projects were a giant mirror that he cut and polished with a laser. It was slated for a communications satellite. And a table that floated on a cushion of air that was designed to be an extra stable platform for the professors to conduct expirements.

So those are my memories of my grandfather. He was a great man who always had a kind word and a helpful opinion (and a fix-it project). I suspect I was no longer the favorite after the youngest grandchild was born, but I don't hold it against him. It's hard to resist a kid that cute, especially when he's named after you.

A Disturbing Thought

2007-05-28T13:38:00.000-07:00

When I married the Mrs. she came as part of a package deal. I don’t mean kids, but I did acquire a giant size step-dog. He’s half golden retriever and half husky. Mostly he looks like a giant size extra fluffy golden retriever. He got his warm fluffy undercoat from his husky father, as well as half of an eye. It’s very eerie. One eye is nice golden retriever brown, and the other is half brown and half pale husky blue.

He’s also an unremitant beggar. The dog weighs 100 lbs, but he acts like he has never been fed. The presence of any sort of people food immediately causes him to drool and he’ll follow food anywhere. For some reason the other day I started wondering about his behavior.

I hear that this gluttonous, always hungry attitude is pretty typical of golden retrievers. But what would he be like with that size and appetite if he hadn’t been trained not to steal food as a puppy. I know you aren’t exactly likely to see a feral golden retriever in the wilds of the Rocky Mountains, but it's fun to speculate. If he grew up wild he would have the size and the skills to hunt his own food. I could almost see him taking on a bear or a person and winning when he got hungry enough. Of course he’d also eat so much of his first kill he’d be too slow and fat to hunt anymore.

Fortunately for people, cats, bears, and kitties throughout middle Tennessee he’s way too well trained for that. The Mrs. did her job well. He can even be commanded not to eat food when you put it right down on his paw. I always feel guilty doing it, but it’s pretty amazing to watch this pitiful looking dog not eat until you give him permission.

This Sucks

2007-05-26T15:49:00.000-07:00

I have gray hair now. I'm only 33 and don't even have kids yet. The running joke is that two months worth of married life has done this to me. The Mrs. claims otherwise, but she was the first to gleefully point it out to me. (She really needs to learn that ignorance really is bliss.) I blame the real estate roller coaster for most of it.

The Real Estate Roller Coaster

2007-05-24T14:02:00.000-07:00

After we got engaged The Mrs. talked me into moving into her house. It's a little smaller than the bachelor pad, but it's a real house so we don't have to share any walls and there's a yard with a fence for the dog to frolic in. So, with a heavy heart, I put the bachelor pad in Antioch up for sale. (Honey, if you're reading this, the 'heavy heart' part was just for dramatic effect.)

The little condo community the bachelor pad is in has 96 units and 'For Sale' signs have been the landscaping of choice since I started paying attention. There have been at least 12 units for sale constantly for the last six months. By the time we listed mine in early April there were 14 already on the market. Since there was so much competition I was having visions of the place sitting empty for six months or more. And thus our real estate roller coaster starts out at the bottom.

So as I was picking my seller's agent I had worris of paying two mortgages for an extended period. The realtor I decided to hire is actually a neighbor. She lives about 200 yards down from the bachelor pad. I thought it would be handy to have her close by since no one would be living in the bachelor pad anymore. While we were signing the paperwork I found out she had never listed a property before, all her experience was as a buyer's agent. That made me seriously reconsider the whole thing. But in the end I figured she'd work extra hard to prove herself to the boss since it's her first sale, and it helped that she lived right next door.

Turns out the gamble paid off. Youthful exuberance won out and we got an offer exactly 30 days after we listed the bachelor pad. After a little negotiation we agreed to a price that was a little above what I paid for it last May. The Mrs. and I were both very excited since we had so many better things to do with the money going to pay for that mortgage. This is when our real estate roller coaster hit the top of the first hill.

So the closing date is agreed on and all is good. I'm already imagining the new computer and power tools I'll be getting with June's mortgage payment when I get a phone call from my realtor. The buyer is just out of college and needs to borrow 100% so there are finance issues. So we're 7 days from closing and the real estate roller coaster is back at the bottom.

I stressed over this for almost a week waiting to see if the deal would go through. Finally, the day before we're planning to close my realtor calls me. Financing is secured and we're a go for closing the next day. So the roller coaster is back at the top of the next hill, except I have 24 hours to get all my stuff out of the bachelor pad. Everything after that is a blur. It's a week day so all my friends have to work and can't help me move. I spent the next 24 hours moving all my stuff and explaining to the dog why he has to sleep in the back yard.

I showed up at the closing with a frazzled brain and the last car load of my stuff. Then the roller coaster took another plunge downhill. The buyer brought a cashier check from his bank in Lexington (KY) but the banker forgot to sign it. The check won't cash, and the buyer has to go all the way back to Lexington to get another. The bank won't wire the money because they want that invalid check back first and the roller coaster is down at the bottom again.

It's just as well that the buyer had problems because I learned something else interesting. I bought the bachelor pad before I was married. My name was the only one on the deed, and the Mrs. never lived in it. So I didn't think she needed to be there for the closing. Turns out I was wrong. The lawyer told me that even though she had nothing to do with the bachelor pad it became half hers the moment the minister signed our marriage license. So we couldn't finish closing until I got her to sign the deed transfer.

All is well that ends well. We went ahead and did the paperwork, the Mrs. was summoned to sign the deed, and I let the buyer park his trailer full of furniture in the bachelor pad's garage so he could head back to get the cash. The money showed up today, and I'm currently looking at the biggest check I've ever had made out to me.

I'll just summarize the important lessons learned from this experience:

1.) Don't try and flip a house you lived in for only a year unless you did a lot of fixing. You might make a little profit on the sales, but realtors are expensive. I ended up taking a sizable loss.
2.) Enough enthusiasm and hard work can sometimes make up for inexperience. At least with realtors.
3.) Real estate is stressful. And there are lots of things to sign.
4.) Community property isn't just stuff you buy together. Once you get married, half your crap belongs to someone else whether she wants it or not.

Hockey Is War

2007-04-16T15:11:00.000-07:00

I went to a hockey game Friday night and a brawl broke out. It was ugly, but it was some of the most entertaining hockey I’ve seen first hand. There were seven players thrown out of the game, 6 of them for the same big melee with a minute left on the clock. Everybody ended up with their helments and gloves on the ice, and Scott Hartnell came out of it without his jersey.

I’m talking about game 2 of the Predators versus Sharks. Every article I read on hockey this time of year says you have to “step it up for the playoffs”, and they apparently have. The Sharks were looking for payback because in game 1 Scott Hartnell made a nasty hit on one of their star players. There were skirmishes all night, but when it came down to the last minute of the game all pretext of playing hockey was gone. The Sharks were down 5-2 and knew the game was lost so one of their players just decided to go for it. He threw down his gloves (the first thing any hockey player does in a fight) and went for it.

I can’t figure out the referees. For most of the night they were in there busting up fights as soon as they started. But this time they just watched for a long time. I guess the refs either didn’t want to catch a fist themselves, or they were waiting to see how bad it got. They waited too long. It wasn’t like those big fights you see in baseball where there’s one big pile with the occasional arm or leg visibile. These guys just paired off and started swinging as they skated in all different directions. By the time the refs stepped in there were too many separate fights going on for the three refs to break up.

The Predators aren’t really a brawny team. They tend to get by on their speed and skill rather than shove people around. Despite all the fighting, game 2 was no exception. There was a lot of hustle, and the best play of the game was a break away where two guys stole the puck and got down the ice with only one defender.

I’ve been worried about Vokoun lately. He hasn’t been back up to his old goal-tending self since last year’s health scare. But Friday night he was saving more than Ben Franklin. (Sorry, it was in my head all night so I had to let it out.)

Let’s just hope the Predators don’t get caught by the Tennessee sports curse this time.

I Got Kirked

2007-04-12T14:59:00.000-07:00

I’ve been following Katherine Koble’s troubles with JL Kirk. It’s the grand topic of the moment in the local blogs. And a few not so local blogs are picking it up ever since Instapundit mentioned it.

I’ll give the short version……… Katherine’s husband was job hunting and they cold called him after seeing his resume online. Katherine and her husband were unhappy with their experience and doubtful the company could/would deliver as promised so they declined to hire them. Katherine then posted about her experience on her blog and an employee of JL Kirk felt maligned in the process and posted a rebuttal comment. Katherine responded to that comment and then received a cease and desist order from JL Kirk’s lawyers. At last reading she was trying to decide whether or not to let them bully her into taking down her post. You can see lots of local reaction at Nashville Is Talking.

In the interests of blogger solidarity I’ve decided to post about a similar experience I had. I don’t like to tell people about it because I hate to screw up and I hate when someone takes advantage of me, and both of those things happened big time. I don’t remember the company name, and it probably wasn’t JL Kirk, but my experience was similar to the Koble’s (except the lawyer part).

I got my first engineering degree in 1995. The entry level job market wasn’t so good at the time so I was jobless when I picked up my parchment. Fortunately my parents are fairly generous and let me live with them during the job hunt. After all that blood and sweat spent designing dams, parks, and sewage treatment plants it was a huge ego blow to be unemployed and living in my parents basement. I went on dozens of job interviews but for six months I earned spending money stacking wood at the local furniture factory and substitute teaching for $25 per day.

So you can probably figure out what my frame of mind was like when I got a call from a ‘placement agency’ that wanted ‘to help me find a job’. Older and wiser heads told me it was shady to pay an agency before they got me a job, but I was desperate. And I had a refund from the IRS burning a hole in my pocket. Now that Katherine has pointed it out, it was really an amazing coincidence that the fee was almost exactly what my refund was.

What can I say, I was young and desperate. After the check cleared I received a list of names and addresses for companies who were ‘definitely hiring in my field’. And I never heard from a single person on the list. I hope they enjoyed spending my money.

Thanks for Nothing Bub

2007-04-11T15:55:00.000-07:00

In the category of weird things that happen on the interstate...

Last week I had some issuses and ended up stranded during rush hour on the side of I-65 at the I-24 juncture. I didn't want to sit in the car, so I stood around for at least 1.5 hours waiting for the mechanic.

So I'm dodging traffic, obviously not by choice, and this trucker pulls up. He doesn't offer help, he just wants to know why his directions say take I-24 south, and the sign only says I-24 east or west.

Thanks for nothing Bub.

Are You Nervous Yet?

2007-04-10T19:31:00.000-07:00

I was forced to watch an episode of Sex and the City once. It was traumatic, but the payoff was mildly interesting. Sara Jessica Parker realized that there are just always going to be certain questions you get during different phases of your love life.

When you are single: So are you dating anyone?
When you are dating someone: So is it serious?
When you are dating someone seriously: So when’s the wedding?
When you are married: When are you guys going to have kids?

And one I was unaware of until just recently…….

When you are engaged: Are you nervous yet?

It’s a rite of passage I’ve participated in many times. Give the nearly married guy lots of grief about the new ball and chain, etc…. (I even attended a bachelor party where the guest of honor was forced to wear a ball and chain made from a bowling ball, some chain, and a padlock.) My brother told me that as he was standing at the altar watching his bride come down the aisle the best man leaned over and said “It’s not too late to run for it.” (This is even better when you find out that his best man was our father.)

But I’ve never experienced it from the other side before. The last few weeks before the wedding all my guy friends and family, and even several guys in the office that I barely know, delighted in giving me a hard time about the upcoming nuptials. I got advice ranging from “Run for it now!” to “Enjoy your last days of freedom.” One woman said to me “At least you’ll have someone to cook for you and do your laundry.”

By far the thing I heard the most though was, “Are you nervous yet?”. Everyone from Mrs. W’s former fifth grade teacher to my own mother asked me that. Just the annoyance itself was probably enough to keep me from actually getting nervous until right before the wedding.

I’ve speculated a lot on why everyone seemed to take such glee in trying to make me nervous and uncomfortable. The main reason I think is just your usual hazing, but you’d think that people that have been through it would be more understanding about the stress of it all. I think those folks were mostly motivated by the idea of feeling more knowledgeable and experienced than I was. I’ve noticed that tendency in myself. On our honeymoon I had a lot of fun watching other people get married and disparaging them as newlyweds when I had only been married for 3 days.

People are funny. Mrs. W says she didn’t really have that problem. I blame her femininity. I give it another month before I hear our first "So when are you going to have kids?".

Now Back To Our Regularly Scheduled Posting

2007-04-10T19:30:00.000-07:00

Well, that long silence you just read……… that’s the sound of me getting married, going on a Jamaican honeymoon, moving house, putting a house up for sale, and fighting a small war with Comcast (turns out if you have two modems you have to pay twice).

So now I’m chock full of things to blog about. I intend to be posting more as time permits.

Powerful Words

2007-03-01T05:06:00.000-08:00

We need a witness to our lives. There's a billion people on the planet... I mean, what does any one life really mean? But in a marriage, you're promising to care about everything. The good things, the bad things, the terrible things, the mundane things... all of it, all of the time, every day. You're saying 'Your life will not go unnoticed because I will notice it. Your life will not go un-witnessed because I will be your witness'.

That quote is from a speech made by Susan Sarandon’s character in the movie Shall We Dance. I don’t remember the exact context, but the idea of witnessing your spouse’s life is pretty powerful. When it came time to talk about our wedding ceremony this idea was something the Future Mrs. W wanted to work into the ceremony. She would be cross with me if I didn’t tell you all that she came to this idea independently. She has never seen the movie and was unaware of the similarity until I told her.

The man marrying us gave us license to write whatever we wanted within a particular framework. So Future Mrs. W tried her hand at it and incorporated the ‘witness’ concept into part of the pastor’s speech that he calls The Marriage Message. It’s supposed to remind us of the commitments we’re making and stress the importance of the marriage bond.

She wrote this on our guests contributes as witnesses to our vows:

They want all of you to be present with them as they express their sacred vows of commitment to one another. By your presence, they ask all of you – their families and friends – to bless their commitment. They have asked you to be with them this afternoon because through your love and friendship, guidance and encouragement, you have helped shape who they are. You have helped
them arrive at this moment, ready and able to marry one another and share their joy with us.

And later this, on our contributions to each other’s lives as witnesses:

To “witness” something is to notice it, to affirm it, to experience it. W and Mrs. W, you are here to pledge to be a witness to each other’s lives. You are promising to care about the good things, the bad things, the terrible things, the mundane things –everything. W, your life will not go un-noticed because Mrs. W will witness it. Mrs. W, your life will not go un-noticed because W will witness it.

The witness concept applies to the audience as they witness our commitment to each other, and to us as we witness each other’s lives. To me, the emphasis on having a witness implies that there is more validity to our lives and our wedding because there is someone there to see it happen. I'm not entirely sure how I feel about that, but I most definitely want someone to remember me after I'm gone, and while I'm still here for that matter.

I think she’s made an excellent start. But it needs a little more. To me, witnessing is passive. A witness is something that sees something happen. I want my wife to be more than a witness to my life, I want her to actively participate in it. I’ve always said that the perfect relationship to me having someone to cheer me up when during the bad parts of life and celebrate with me during the good parts. So I’m trying to expand on what she wrote and articulate that. I’ve decided to add this to what she has already written.

You’re also pledging to be an active and vital part of each other’s lives. To support and encourage each other during the tough times. To add your wisdom during life’s big dilemmas. To celebrate the triumphs. Because success is a lot sweeter when you have someone to share it with.

That’s where it stands right now. I feel like something more is needed, but I’m not really sure what. She reads this too, so feel free to make suggestions to both of us.

An Uncomfortable Self Truth

2007-02-16T12:46:00.000-08:00

John Amaechi is a retired NBA basketball player who recently came out with a book. When I say ‘came out’ I mean both published a book, and came out of the closet. My reaction to that was casual indifference.

Then I read an opinion piece by Randy Horick in this weeks Nashville Scene. Horick’s main point is that homosexuality is accepted enough that most people don’t care now. But I’m more interested in a topic he didn’t bring up until late in the piece. Amaechi is the first NBA player to come out, so now that the ground is broken when will active players start coming out? He thinks conventional wisdom is that coming out would be a career ender for a professional athlete. He also thinks conventional wisdom is wrong. Coming out won’t be a problem for an active professional athlete.

Horick must have written his piece before the Tim Hardaway controversy. Hardaway is another retired NBA player who also happens to be a homophobe. He admitted that he hates gay people and I definitely don’t condone that, but he also says:

I don't think he should be in the locker room while we're in the locker room.

That comment is going to be lost in all the hate of the rest of Hardaway’s rant, but I think it’s an interesting thing to consider. We have gender separated locker rooms because a lot of people are uncomfortable getting undressed in front of people of the opposite sex. I presume that’s because of the rampant heterosexuality. So is it okay to apply this same standard to gay people? Do we need to get them separate locker rooms? Should we segregate locker rooms based on sexual preferences rather than gender?

On a gut instinct level, it doesn’t sound right to have separate gay and straight locker rooms. But when I try and think about it logically, it makes a little sense. We’re willing to acknowledge that a woman may be uncomfortable undressing in front of a man who may be attracted to her, so we should be willing to acknowledge the same feeling from a man.

Personally, I’d be uncomfortable sharing a dressing room with a woman. Not because I think they’re going to be unable to control their wild attraction to me. But I do know they would be looking me over, and I know they would be judging. We all judge people on their attractiveness. I can handle that when I’m wearing clothes, but when naked I’m a little more vulnerable. I’ve heard enough candid comments from health care professionals to be confident even doctors do it. So I guess as hateful as it makes me feel, I’m going to have to acknowledge that I’d feel uncomfortable getting undressed in front of a gay man. I’m just going to be uncomfortable getting undressed in front of a stranger, male or female, with a sexual interest in men.

I’d do it in spite of the discomfort. And I don’t plan to start wondering about all the sexuality of the guys in my locker room at the gym or shunning female doctors. But I can understand why athletes have a hard time dealing with a team mate being openly gay.

* Just to be perfectly clear, I understand the discomfort, not the hate.

The Obligatory Valentine's Day Post (2nd Edition)

2007-02-14T13:23:00.000-08:00

Let me start off this year’s obligatory Valentine’s Day post by saying one thing. I read last year’s obligatory Valentine’s Day post and I’m proud of it. I can’t really add a lot to it, but I’m still going to wander around a little and see what ends up on the page.

Just the other day I was reading an introduction to a short story collection. The writer made the comment that most of our fiction revolves around two themes. War and love. I’ve had that thought before myself, but I’ve never heard it articulated as well as he did. His reasoning for the dominance of these two themes? They’re both very intense and stress the characters in interesting ways. And of course we want to read about interesting characters and interesting situations. If we want tedium we have everyday life. (In case anyone is wondering, the stories focused more on the war aspect. And the editor who wrote the words I’m interested in was Harry Turtledove.)

It always interests me that these two themes are so popular in our culture. (And most other cultures as well.) The best stories make skillful use of both. And even in every day life they’re pretty well entwined. You don’t really get one without the other in one variation or another. Watch any television or movie drama and you’ll see it.

I guess when you talk about screen dramas you have to differentiate between the ‘soap opera’ style and the more serious style. The soap opera styles make it the most obvious. I don’t watch this type a lot, but The OC, and Desperate Housewives are the ones that come to mind first. Couples are constantly getting together and splitting up because the writers know that the stable relationships just aren’t that entertaining.

A ‘serious’ style entertainment drama is usually slightly more subtle. They tease you with the chemistry between the characters, but the world always manages to keep them apart. When they do finally get together, something always breaks them up. Star Trek is a good example of that. You could always be sure that any lady who caught Captain Kirk’s eye was going to have to die. This is why I fear for Kate on Lost. They’ve got a good triangle going, so she may be safe. But there’s a new lady in the picture, and Kate did just hook up with Sawyer.

Of course this only applies to dramas. The key difference between a comedy and a drama is that the boy gets to keep the girl at the end.

Lest the Future Mrs. W read this and get ideas, I have to add one thing. What I want in my entertainment and in my actual relationships are very different. Leave the battleground love to the entertainment industry. I prefer to come home to a good stable relationship, with just a little sizzle. (That means wear heels to bed, not picking a fight.)

This totally did not end up where I thought I was going. I'm going to have to think on it some more.

Dam Blogging Part 2: Just The Facts

2007-01-30T20:04:00.000-08:00

So now you’re educated about dams. The real question is… So what?

If you’ve paid any attention to the news in the last two weeks you’ve heard about the Wolf Creek Dam up in south-central Kentucky. It’s on the Cumberland River upstream of Nashville about 120 miles as the river meanders. It’s huge. Biggest reservoir east of the Mississippi River and ninth biggest in the country. It’s so big that if it failed it could seriously flood Nashville. And it’s leaking.

Wolf Creek Dam is a combination of dam types. It’s part concrete with spillways and generators for hydro power, but it’s also over a mile long and 200 feet tall. That’s a lot of concrete, even at prices in the 1940s. So rather than build it all in concrete, an earth embankment was used. Lots and lots of clay was brought in to built the embankment portion. Clay was used because it’s semi-impermeable (water can’t flow through it very well).

It was designed in the late 1930’s, but construction was delayed by World War II, and wasn’t completed until 1952. By the late 1960’s they started seeing problems with water getting under and through the dam. This was caused by a less than ideal foundation. The dam is built on limestone and the whole area is typical karst geology. Limestone can dissolve in water and karst geology is a description of the tendency of limestone to have seams and ‘tunnels’ in it filled with dirt. You see a lot of sinkholes in karst areas and have a lot of water flowing below ground.

What was happening at Wolf Creek is pretty simple. Water was seeping into the limestone and being carried in the ‘tunnels’ and seams under and around the dam. At some points the limestone ‘tunnels’ were near the ground surface, and the flowing water eroded enough of the dirt on top of the limestone to form sinkholes. A sinkhole is a lot like a rat. When you see one there are a lot more you can’t see. And they don’t do anything but grow. Just like a crack in a window makes a window a lot weaker, sinkholes are usually just the beginning of a major problem for a dam.

So the Corps of Engineers jumped into action. They built a concrete wall through the center of the earthen portion of the dam. They drilled it into the rock under the dam to try and cut off the ‘tunnels’ in the limestone. But it was the early 1970’s and money was tight. So they built the wall shallower and shorter than it really should have been. They managed to save the dam for a time, but the problem came back.

And that brings us to today. The Corps of Engineers has been keeping an eye on the dam ever since the work in the 70’s. In the last few years they’ve noticed a lot more water flowing under the dam and the sinkholes and wet spots are starting up again. So now we have to fix it again, and try and be a little more thorough this time.

Next up we have the payoff post which describes what this dam could do to Nashville.

Dam Blogging 1: A Dam Owner's Manual

2007-01-23T13:13:00.000-08:00

This is the first in my series of posts about Wolf Creek Dam. I’m going to attempt to explain the basics of dam operations and failure methods.

I like to use a bathtub analogy to explain why a dam works. Your daily shower is a lot like a river. Imagine you’re standing at a specific place on the river. The shower head is standing in for all the water flowing toward you from up river. The tub drain is where the water ends up when it passes you. If your shower is working properly then all the water flowing out of the spigot goes down the drain. That’s how a normal river system works. If you really turn up the faucet, the water may start coming out of the faucet faster than it can get out of the drain, so it starts to puddle up in your tub. If you turn down the faucet again, the water drains out faster than it comes in, and it the puddle goes away. That’s how a river floods.

Now it gets more interesting. Imagine we’re building a dam on the river where you’re standing. We just plugged up the drain in your bathtub. The water is still coming in, but it can’t get out. So you get a puddle like a natural flood. Then the puddle starts to rise. If you don’t unblock the drain the water will just keep rising until it fills up the tub and runs off into the bathroom floor. The tub full of water represents the new reservoir we created behind the dam.

That’s dam operations in a nutshell. Barring a rain dance or a direct line to God, we can’t control the amount of water that flows into our reservoir/tub, but we can control how much drains out through our dam. When the dam is designed you have to carefully build in spillways to control how much flow gets out. If the water gets too high and is threatening to get out of the tub and into the bathroom floor you open up more drains.

Try Wikipedia for a discussion of dam types.

There are two basic failure mechanisms for a dam. They are also applicable to levees, and both were seen in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina.

The first is overtopping. Just like it sounds, the water gets to high and goes over the top of the dam. Overtopping doesn’t have to mean failure, but it can fail the dam depending on what materials were used in construction. In the case of Wolf Creek Dam, overtopping would mean failure because then you’d have a lot of fast moving water flowing over the front of the dam which is soil and grass. The fast moving water would erode the dam until it just crumbles away in the water.

The second type of dam failure is due to infiltration and seepage. Overtopping is a situation where water goes over the dam, seepage is when water finds a way through the dam. Some slight seepage is normal in an earthen dam, but if there is a lot it can become a major problem. Seepage starts very small as the water finds a path to trickle through the dam. Once the water is through it can begin to erode the material of the dam and the pathway gets larger and larger. Eventually it can get large enough that the structural integrity of the dam is compromised and large chunks start to wash away or the embankment itself starts to slump and fall over like a sand castle when the tide comes in.

Seepage is the problem at Wolf Creek, and I'll tell you about it tomorrow.

Dam Blogging

2007-01-23T13:10:00.000-08:00

I saw on the news this morning that the Corps of Engineers was forced to start an emergency drawdown of the reservoir at Wolf Creek Dam in Kentucky. Wolf Creek Dam is on the Cumberland River up in the headwaters of the Cumberland River basin in southeast Kentucky. The dam itself is over a mile long and the reservoir, Cumberland Lake, is 101 miles long. That makes it the largest reservoir east of the Mississippi River and ninth largest in the country. (Everything is bigger out west.)

But of course the dry facts and figures aren’t all that interesting. The thing that makes this important…… the dam is leaking and could quite possibly fail. Fail is a dry engineering term used to mean something might break. It can mean anything from that screw that holds your glasses together to a mile long dam or 100 story skyscraper.

Obviously, in this case we’re more interested in dams than glasses. I’m going to take a shot at explaining why you should be worried about Wolf Creek Dam as time permits over the next couple of days. I’m going to try and do it without sounding getting all boring and pompous sounding like I tend to do when I talk about technical issues.

The title of today’s post is also a tribute to the staff of the Nashville Scene whom probably have uttered some form of it from time to time.

Bugsy Seigel and Johnny Depp.

2007-01-19T10:47:00.000-08:00

How is Tim Burton's version of Las Vegas?

They're both worth taking the time to experience them just for the huge visual spectacle. Especially if you have a high definition tv in the former, and a lot of money in the latter.

Don't try and compare them on any other level though. It's just not a good idea.

Holy Crazy Ex's Batman

2007-01-16T10:44:00.000-08:00

Like I said yesterday, one of the joys of being home sick is being able to catch up on all my movie viewing. So last night the fine people of NetFlix provided me with 'My Super Ex-Girlfriend'. And now I'm here to tell you about it.

The basic plot is pretty well described in the title. Steve (Luke Wilson) is a regular schlub who meets Jenny (Uma Thurman) on the subway and asks her out. As we watch that, we also see super heroine G-Girl saving people from various disasters around town. It turns out Jenny and G-Girl are one in the same.

As movie concepts go, I really like this one. That's why I wanted to see it in spite of the reviews. It's a dream for every jilted woman, and a nightmare for every guy who likes to play the field. (Disclaimer: I'm making no larger comment about genders here, I'm just using the male POV because that was in the movie, and my experience.) You meet a girl, she's cute, she's funny, she's interesting... so you go out on a few dates with her. But then she starts getting weird. She turns possessive and jealous. Those two things will get any girl dumped in a New York minute.

But there's the twist. What if your jealous and possessive ex-girlfriend has superpowers and isn't afraid to use them? This is where the comedy comes in. There's some pretty ingenious methods of revenge available if you have superpowers. I won't give them away, but they involve heat vision and flying sharks.

Beyond the comedy there are some semi-cerebral points if you look. There's an obvious role reversal in the relationship. Jenny is the strong protector and Matt feels a little emasculated when she takes care of him in a physical way. It's really pretty similar to dating a girl who makes more than you. There's also probably some feminist commentary in the fact that one of the reasons Jenny falls for Matt is because he ' save her' from a purse snatcher.

The biggest thing I liked about this movie is the different perspective. I'm a big fan of super hero movies, and I've read a comic book or two in my day. Most superhero movies portray them as more than human. You don't really consider their dating life and what happens if they get a broken heart, so it was nice to have a look at it.

Rainn Wilson (aka Dwight Schrute) plays the sidekick. He plays this one pretty similar to Dwight, but Dwight has an innocent vulnerability. This character is just nasty and misogynistic.

All together, I'd say it's worth watching just so long as you don't have high expectations. It gets points for an original concept, but loses them because all of the characters are a little too whiney and sympathetic. And the super-heroine costumes are great.

Authoritah Followup

2007-01-16T10:39:00.000-08:00

As Exador pointed out, the expirement on Primetime that I posted about last week was based on some work done by Dr. Stanley Milgram in 1961. Milgram was apparently inspired by the trial of former nazi Adolf Eichmann who was on trial that year for his war crimes. Eichmann claimed he was only following orders (see also, Abu Graib). So Milgram started looking into authority.

If Wikipedia is to be believed, Milgram is a pretty fascinating person. He's credited with the "six degrees of seperation" concept. He created a 'small world' expirement in 1967 by sending packages to random people and asking them to forward the package to a specific person. If they didn't know that person, then they were asked to send it to someone they do know who is 'more likely than you to know the target person'.

It sounds pretty silly to me. Of course you could never get away with that these days. Anyone who got the package would assume it's drugs or a bomb and get rid of it. I suppose it could work in 1967, but it seems like a long shot. I'd really be interested to see the original paper he published on it, but according to my internet research it didn't get very far. But he is credited with creating the concept that was later mainstreamed by the popularity and prolific career of Kevin Bacon. I can only see it working in small groups or with people who are well known.

But anyway... the topic I meant to talk about is Milgram's expirements on obedience to authority. It's pretty much like the one Primetime ran. Except a little more extreme. Milgram's authority figures were more overbearing, and the 'subject' was put in a lot more pain. His results were pretty much like Primetime's, but with some interesting side effects.

It was pretty controversial due to the extreme stress that Milgram put his test subjects under. The psychiatric community was worried about the guilt and stress his subjects were under as they decided to provide an electric shock to what they thought was another person. I think that was really kind of the whole point. To see how much guilt and stress it took to over ride an authority figure.

You can question his ethics I guess, but it's some pretty useful expiremental data. The subjects caused themselves some extreme stress, but they still consented to cause pain to another person despite the fact that it could cause them serious health issues. All because they were told to do so by a guy in a white coat.

The Joys of a Good Stomach Bug

2007-01-15T12:32:00.000-08:00

#1.) Get out of the meeting with the wedding planner.
#2.) Nearly instant loss of weight.
#3.) Plenty of time to catch up on the full DVR and watch back episodes of Rome on demand.
#4.) A fever. Where else can you experience the chills while you sweat. And let's not discount the enlightment you can get only from a good feverish dream.

Sometimes I think the worst party is when I'm well enough that my brain works, but my body is a day or two behind.

Respect My Authoritah!

2007-01-11T05:59:00.000-08:00

ABC's newshow, Primtime, had an interesting story a couple of weeks ago. They were exploring the tendency of people to follow orders. The story even came with a handy dandy expirement.

They found 60 people who thought they were volunteering for a memory expirement. They were supposed to help someone else learn word pairs. So they sat these people up in different rooms and had the volunteer recite words into the microphone so the other person could give the matching word. The catch? When the second person didn't get the word right, he got zapped. Being an expirement and all, the second person was actually an actor, and wasn't really getting zapped.

The point of the expirement was to see if people would keep zapping the poor guy, even when he started shouting in pain and protesting. They set it up so every volunteer zapper heard a speech from the zapee about his heart condition. The zaps kept getting worse, and after a few wrong answers, the zapee started shouting in pain. After a few more, he started complaining about his heart problem.

The results were fascinating. Or at least the part they showed on TV were fascinating. The zappers would keep checking with the guy in charge of the expirement. And he kept saying "You have to zap him." So they did. Even after the poor guy getting zapped started complaining about his heart. They all looked worried, but they kept doing it.

Nearly every one of them later said they were just doing as they were told. I sincerely think this is the root of most grander evils committed by humanity. It only takes one person to come up with the idea and every one else can go along with it. Puts truth in that old overly dramatic chestnut, "Evil triumphs when good men do nothing."

The same principle works on a much smaller scale. If you act like you know what you are doing and are where you're supposed to be, you can get away with a lot of things. Even acting like you have authority gives you authority.

The study also presented an interesting gender gap. Only 65% of the men kept zapping the guy with the bum heart. But 73% of women kept going. The Primetime story felt the need to explain this by presenting the idea that women were more intimidated by the authority figure into continuing against their wishes. Personally, I don't think thats a big enough difference to be significant considering that they only tested 18 men and 22 women, but it's very interesting that they felt like they should explain it.

And Your Point Is Now Lost

2007-01-11T05:57:00.000-08:00

I’ve always been a firm believer in the idea that when you’re debating an issue how you say something is just as important as what you’re saying. That’s not really something a lot of people subscribe to if the things I see on the internet are true. Snark is everywhere.

As a debate tactic, snark is useless. Snark ruins your chances of convincing just about anyone of just about anything. If someone disagrees with you, are they really going to change their mind when you cleverly (or not so cleverly) dismiss their position with a quip or throw away comment? Nope. Someone with a different opinion is either going to get mad or just switch off completely. That kind of behavior is just making yourself feel smarter and grandstanding so the people who agree with you can agree how terribly smart you are.

Snark does have its uses. Sometimes you just have to do it to make yourself feel better. It’s great for relieving frustrations and retaliating when someone else fights dirty. But whenever someone gets overly snarky I just assume they’ve given up on any meaningful discussion and just want to feel better by ripping down other people.

This post is inspired by the commenters in Aunt B’s circumcision post. Auntie herself makes liberal use of snark, but hers just flavors real intellectual thinking. And she usually makes an honest response to earnest questions. Maybe it’s a personal failing on my part, but listening to Chris Wage argue a position almost always makes me want to take the opposite. His ability to make me want to disagree with him, even when I don't really care about the issue is truly amazing. And just for the record, I quit reading after my last comment. Sometimes it’s just best that way.

Maybe it’s the engineer in me, but I really think the world would be easier to live in if people would really take time to think about what other people are saying and logically debate things. But the emotional responses and tendency to ridicule are too deeply ingrained in humanity to ever abandon them.

And of course, in typical W fashion, I’ve practically changed my mind in less than a paragraph. If Spock is an example of a society ruled by logic, then the contentious nature of humanity is probably worthwhile just to keep from getting bored.

The Golden Week

2007-01-05T08:20:00.000-08:00

My favorite work week is probably pretty obvious. Vacation week of course. But my second most favorite work week is that golden time between Christmas and New Year’s Eve.

About 20% of the people in the office actually show up. With everyone sleeping in and shopping for Christmas markdowns I don’t have to deal with all the distractions that have become my lot in life since I became a supervisor. The only drawback? I was promoted last January, and apparently I’m high enough up the corporate ladder to be the most senior person from my section to actually show up. So I have to deal with the people that want to talk to the boss but can’t.

The Golden Week apparently holds true for all office workers downtown. The morning commute is awesome, there is no waiting at the restaurants downtown, and I can park closer to the building. You just have to be flexible at lunch time since about half of the restaurants close down due to lack of customers.

There’s really only one big drawback about working during The Golden Week. The Music City Bowl insures a bunch of tourist yahoos wandering around downtown. Not quite as bad as Fanfare, but this year was very traumatic due to all those Kentucky jerseys getting in my way.

I already miss the golden week. I've never much liked January and February. I loved Kat Coble's comments on it last January so much I have to end this post with her quote.

"It's society's sixty day sleep in the wet spot after the sensual abandon of the holidays."

I Need A Beach

2007-01-05T08:17:00.000-08:00

I got lucky. With all the wedding planning going on I managed to get put in charge of the honeymoon. I’m not sure I like all this pressure, but it beats having to help plan the wedding.
We’re thinking Caribbean, or maybe the Florida Keys at the moment because we’ll both need some relaxation after all the wedding/moving stress, and we’re going in March so a beach vacation sounds really appealing after a Nashville winter. I’m really interested in The Bahamas, though I’m not sure why.

I've been seriously considering Hawaii as well. I don't think it's going to happen since we only have the week of The Future Mrs. W's spring break. It just seems like too much travel time to really be able to enjoy the islands. And my suggestion of Vegas for a few days after the wedding and Hawaii this summer didn't go over that well.

We’re seriously considering an all-inclusive along the lines of Sandals. I like the all-inclusive concept so I don’t have to keep track of spending and worry about going over budget. And a couples only place might be the best way to have a beach vacation and avoid the hordes of college spring breakers.

So, anyone have advice for me? Non-Caribbean and non-beach suggestions are welcome.

Challenge

2007-01-05T08:15:00.000-08:00

After much consideration, The Librarian has decided to start her own blog. Now that she has been a blogger for two weeks she has decided to take me to task for my own blog getting ‘stale’. I forgive her for her impertinance. She is right, after all.

I’ve had lots of things to write about rattling around in my brain, but haven’t gotten around to actually sitting down and writing them. So I’m going to attempt to meet her challenge and increase my post frequency a little.

An Upgrade

2006-12-18T05:33:00.000-08:00

Well, it's official. I figured if Sarcastro can do it twice, then I can give it a shot too. The Lady Friend has offically been upgraded to Future Mrs. W. Yep, I'm getting married. The wedding bells are almost as loud as the Christmas bells. We expect the future part of her title to be taken off on St. Patricks day.

Unlike Sarcastro though, there will be no underage persons involved, at least not for the first ten months.

Christmas Spirit

2006-12-11T05:28:00.000-08:00

While I'm not quite as Scroogetastic as Mr. Roboto, I'm having trouble finding the proper holiday spirit. I like tacky spectacles this (think Opryland Hotel) time of year, but disapprove of those inflatable snow globes. Anyone know of a good neighborhood for Christmas lights? Preferably in Antioch/Brentioch or Hermitage, but I'm also accepting suggestions in Williamson County.

Too Much Reading Of Blogs

2006-12-08T12:30:00.000-08:00

This is how you know you spend too much time reading blogs…..

I was reading something by a large strangely colored local blogger recently, and out of nowhere a thought popped into my head. “He seems like just the kind of guy The Librarian is looking for.” In case it isn’t obvious, The Librarian is a female friend of mine who is currently single. And has similar taste in movies and reading among other things.

I don’t know if it’s the diamond commercials or my own current romantic situation, but it just struck me funny that I made that connection. Even stranger, it struck me even funnier that I didn’t make the connection sooner. And strangest of all…. The Librarian didn’t reject the idea out of hand when I told her the story.

So Mystery Blogger, if you read this….. call me.

Let's Take Another Shot At This

2006-12-06T15:26:00.000-08:00

Well I got some interesting comments regarding my romantic dilemma. I do appreciate them, but there are a few things I want to elaborate on.

My first comment is for Ms Auntie B. Stop being an engineer? That wouldn’t help. Being an engineer didn’t make my mind work this way. I’m an engineer because my mind works this way. The training just sharpened the thought processes a little and made me more comfortable with it. So stopping being an engineer wouldn’t work. I’d have to stop being myself.

(Editorial Interlude) I can't decide if I should be surprised at Aunt B counseling me to quit thinking and do it. On the one hand she's a liberal hippie free-love type, but reading her intellectual discussions do give the impression of a highly logical mind. I guess we just have different opinions on what to apply that logic to. (End Editorial Interlude)

So I don’t think love is the sole ingredient necessary for a successful long term relationship. It’s the foundation, and the glue that binds it all together. And it’s what makes you patient with the other person and willing to accept their little faults. But it has definite limits. That’s obvious from the number of people I know who have been divorced. (I was going to site statistics, but I don’t have time to look them up at the moment.)

This is a comment Bridgett made at Tiny Cat Pants:

These things you mention seem pretty minor. I don't know -- do I want an Xbox or love everlasting? Hmmm...is not wanting to clean up after a pet a good reason to pass on spending my life with the most wonderful woman I've ever met? So those
kinds of things seem to be bad reasons not to make the jump.

Sure they are minor but they're just the representative things that came into my mind. I'm deciding if I love her enough to live with her. You're apparently married, so you know everyone has those annoying habits that get at you in your weaker moments. The same annoying things day in and day out can make you forget why you love a person. And they’re really just offshoots of the major issue. I suppose I didn’t want to put down into writing what I’m really thinking.

My dilemma hasn’t been about love. My dilemma is whether or not we can live together and our love wouldn’t eventually be drowned out by a symphony of annoying habits that we both have. And more importantly, I was trying to figure out whether our long term goals are similar enough that we won’t grow apart. So I had to decide if I wanted to have kids, and if I was okay with her not working while they were very young.

I feel like I'm not a good enough writer to really get this into words, but that’s what I’ve been trying to get at. I know no one can predict that for sure, but I wanted to make sure my odds are decent.

How Do You Know?

2006-11-30T05:10:00.000-08:00

I apologize for the lack of posting lately. I’ve had a lot on my mind.

The Lady Friend and I have been together for a little over a year now. A few months ago we had a conversation that was a little shocking. Pretty much out of the blue she said something to the effect of “You’re the man I want to marry.”

Once she made up her mind, she saw no reason to delay. She swears the biological clock didn’t have any effect on her decision that I’m the man for her, but willingly admits that it’s partly why she wants to get married quickly. Unfortunately for her, my baggage is a lot heavier than hers. I’ve had a relationship or two go off the rails with very little warning, so I told her she was going to have to wait a little while before I was ready to pick out rings and guest towels.

Ever since then I’ve been pondering it. How do you know when the time is right to get married? It’s not just a question of love. I’ve known that I love her for a long time now. My heart is ready to go, but my head insists on being practical. Some of the things to consider……

Do I want to become a father soon? (I can’t say my biological clock is ticking, but I don’t want to be paying college tuition in my golden years. So if there are kids to be had, it’s going to be soon.)

Can I handle being broke again? (Kids are expensive, and it’s a package deal for her. She also doesn’t want to work while they’re babies, so no more Xbox or nice vacations.)

Do I want to become a dog owner? (Usually fun, but makes vacations tricky and I don’t have the stomach for picking up dog poo.)

Do I want to move to Old Hickory? (Her house has a fenced yard for the aforementioned dog but the commute is painful and selling my condo this soon is going to cost me.)

Can I get along with her family and her with mine? (That question has been answered now that Thanksgiving is past. Definite trial by fire for both of us.)

Can a practical engineer and a free thinking artist get along in the long term? (I think so. Mostly because her father was an engineer, and enough of his practicality rubbed off on her for us to understand each other.)

Am I okay with marrying a teacher? (It sucks getting up at 530 AM all summer and watching her sleep in. Not to mention going to bed at 10 PM when she’s just getting started. And I worry about her when she’s at work. Her school isn’t one of the better ones in Metro.)

In the end, I’m sure I’m going to get married. But in the mean time I feel a little dizzy. I think at some point you just have to go for it. Any of you married or divorced folk have helpful insight? I won’t turn away helpful insight from single people either.

Hunting in Public

2006-11-27T09:22:00.000-08:00

I was visiting the family for Thanksgiving last week, and I found myself on a busy rural highway on a busy Saturday morning. I noticed two guys in orange vests just off the road at the intersection with a small county road ahead of me. At first I thought they were highway maintenance workers, but then I noticed they both had rifles, and one of them had a tree stand on his back. I was traveling by at 60 mph so it took me a few more seconds to notice the deer carcass lieing on the ground between them.

I don’t hunt and really don’t see the pleasure in it, but I have no fight with hunters. At least not most hunters. But these guys on the other hand…. there was no truck handy and it wasn’t anyone’s yard, so they apparently just shot that deer right there on the side of the road with a highway 20 ft away and someone’s house not more than 50 ft from them. That gives me the chills. It wouldn’t take much of a hand tremor for them to end up shooting some poor guy on his way to visit grandma.

Don't Make A Federal Case Out Of It

2006-11-03T06:30:00.000-08:00

In the course of my early voting I downloaded the sample ballot from the Davidson County Election Commission. Unless you've been out preparing for the zombie apocolypse you've been hearing about Constitution Amendment 1 and how it defines marriage as between a man and a woman.

It's a really bad idea for any number of reasons. But morality issues aside, I'd never read the actual wording before and when I looked at the sample ballot, one particular sentence jumped out at me:

If another state or foreign jurisdiction issues a license for persons to marry and if such marriage is prohibited in this state by the provisions of this section, then the marriage shall be void and unenforceable in this state.

I disagree with this amendment, and voted against it. But I could probably live with it if it wasn't for that particular sentence. It's incredibley stupid. It potentially put a thumb in the eye of all 49 other states since we're not willing to recognize their judgement. I wouldn't go as far as Short and Fat's worry about them not recognizing TN driver's licenses, but this is not a good step for Tennessee to take. Not only does it bring us into conflict with other states, but it also forces the issue up to the federal level. New Jersey has already had a court ruling forcing them to recognize gay marriage in some version. New Jersey may end up calling them civil unions instead, but it's only a matter of time before some state starts performing gay marriages and isn't considerate enough to ban out of state couples like New Hampshire. As soon as that happens you can bet some enterprising gay couple will be off to exchange rings. And the minute the ceremony is over they'll be back in Nashville filing court papers.

With this type of conflict between states, any action would have to be in a federal court. The second that lawsuit enters federal court the homegrown supporters of Amendment 1 lose all control of the situation. I can't really imagine a federal court upholding this, and I have no idea what a conflict between the state constitution and a federal court would result in. But I can't imagine Tennessee coming out on top. They're essentially taking this from a states rights issue and making it a federal issue because there's no way the federal government can allow states to not recognize marriages performed in other states.

To me it looks like some people are getting greedy. Gay marriage is already against the law, but they want to get it into the Constitution so we can't change our mind. In the process I think they're going to make it more likely to change, not less. And it's liable to force a national policy on the topic.

I Think He Does It On Purpose

2006-11-01T11:38:00.000-08:00

I’m not sure if it’s generally true, or just reflects my choices of reading, but in my experience the Nashville blogosphere tends to lean more to the left than the right. But Channel 2 did manage to hire one of the more intelligent conservative bloggers for their political blog.

Kleinheider strikes me as a pretty sharp fellow but every couple of weeks, like clockwork, he says something totally inflammatory. Personally, I think it’s a plan on his part. For professional bloggers, readers put food on the table. So if the numbers start to get a little low, Kleinheider knows how to bring them back up. If this week’s double whammy is any indication, he must be planning ahead for his Christmas bonus. That’s the only motivation I can see for him to agree with John Kerry.

I’m not going to try and do any sort of thorough refutation of what he has said, that’s been done by people better than I at it. But I do have a couple of points that he may have overlooked when calling the U.S. Army a catchall for the stupids of the country.

A friend of mine who serves in the Army as an officer mentoring young enlisted men also has a brother who coaches football at a community college. The brother is constantly complaining about having to deal with the uncoachable wild young men of limited intelligence in his charge.

My friend could only respond to his brother that he was lucky because he was charged with leading and shaping young boys who couldn't even get in to community college. It was said jokingly, but it was funny because it was true.

You’re sort of selecting the sample that proves your point. The ‘young enlisted men’ who are well put together and staying out of trouble don’t actually need your friend as a mentor. The pool of men your friend mentors may be useful to your point in a deceptive sort of way, but they don’t necessarily represent the army as a whole.

The elite does not enlist in the military. They don't go to war. They avoid service. If they do enlist, they serve as officers.

What kind of elite are we talking about here? I assume we’re talking about the intellectual elite due to the context with Senator Kerry’s comment and all. So what makes someone intellectually elite? A college education? Native intelligence? If it’s a college education that makes you elite, then I suppose at least that sentence is mostly correct, while doing nothing to prove your overall point about stupid soldiers. I’ve known a lot of very intelligent people who could get into college but couldn’t pay for it. The U.S. military provides one of the best ways to fund college in the form of the G. I. Bill. So the ‘elite’ that can afford college don’t have to sign up, but the smarter folk from lower class families have to go get shot at before they can pay for college.

Kleinheider in the comment section:

The composition of the military in total is not what we are talking about we are talking about the people on the ground, the people who actually die.

I guess now we’re talking about infantry instead of the radar tech or mechanic or translater. That’s a finer distinction than was made by Senator Kerry or Kleinheider's original post. It sounds a little like back pedaling to get out of trouble.

Feel free to point out the gaping holes in my arguments. Any of you.

Update:
This post was pretty cynical of me, so rather than question the man's integrity I want to clarify myself. Kleinheider probably really is sincere. It's just that the incendiary posts come with such regularity it's hard to not come to the point of thinking "Oh, it's been two weeks since Kleinheider said something mean. It's about time for a new controversy."

I Found Halloween

2006-11-01T07:53:00.000-08:00

When I was a kid we lived in a fairly rural area. The houses were a good distance apart, and the road was windy, narrow, and hilly. It’s not really the kind of place you want your kids walking around after dark, so the only trick or treaters that we had were people we knew. And we always had to go into town where the neighborhoods were lit and the houses were close together for our own trick or treating.

When I moved out of the parents’ house I moved into apartments. When I was a youngster I always thought apartment complexes would be the best place for trick or treating. I had day dreams about all those doors to knock on with only a few steps between. Maximum candy for minimum effort. (Even then I had a little engineer in me.) But sadly, most apartment dwellers get surly if you knock on their door and expect something.

So I’ve never experienced Halloween from the other side of the door before. Until last night. I spent Halloween at the Lady Friend’s house. She lives in a nice quiet neighborhood in the Old Hickory area. It’s a prime trick-or-treat location. Our first costumed youngster showed up at 5:30 and we had a constant stream of them until 7:30 when we gave it up and turned off the light. The crowd was so bad I gave up trying to sit down in between knocks on the door. We ended up outside, sitting at the bottom of the stairs.

The highlights of the evening:

-While we were still inside one 10 year old came to the door. When he saw a Ford for Senate commercial playing on the television behind he gave a cynical sigh and said “I see Ford is on TV again.” At that point we had an entire conversation about politics. This ten year old was at least as cynical as me. The conversation ended with his comment, “Well, at least the battle for Washington will be over soon.” Best kid all night.

-This one guy had to be at least 15. He came to the door dressed as a gift box. When we opened the door he showed us the tag that said To: Women, From: God. Fortunately for him, I was in charge of candy, so he got extra. If the Lady Friend had been in charge he might have gotten the hose turned on him.

-A gang of 14-15 year old boys came to the door dressed as characters from Napoleon Dynamite. It was pretty surreal to see the cast of the movie coming up the sidewalk.

- Watching the Lady Friend's giant dog eat a sucker. He's part golden retriever and part husky. The husky part is only in his build. So he looks like a double size golden retreiver. Watching him try to eat a sucker was comedy gold.

The Birds and The Bees and The Lions and The Tigers

2006-10-20T12:31:00.000-07:00

Back at Valentine's Day we all heard about my fascinating trip to the zoo for the show on animal lovin'. Well, you folks with penis bones in your dresser need to pay attention. It's coming to town again in November.

I recommend it. It's very funny and very informative. Beats the hell out of the old 'birds and bees' talk.

Does the title of today's post remind anyone else of ligers?

I Like Waffles

2006-10-13T10:40:00.000-07:00

I was just listening to an interview that Jerry Springer (acclaimed liberal) did on the Bob and Tom show last Friday. Jerry thinks the election would have the same results if held today, as it will if we wait until November 7. He doesn't think anyone is undecided.

Where have you been if you're not yet decided whether you think this governement is doing a good job or not?

I'm undecided. I don't think it's quite as simple as Jerry says. It's not simply about whether or not the folks in charge are doing a good job. It's also about whether or not the other folks can do it any better. That's what they haven't convinced me of yet.

The point of the interview was to plug Jerry's stint on Dancing With The Stars even though it moved over into politics. If you haven't seen the show, Jerry ain't very good. He's moved on through all the eliminations because of audience votes, not a decision by the judges. One of the show hosts, speculated on the appeal of Jerry. His theory... Jerry is the only guy on the show that "exudes heterosexuality". So we're back to the theory that guys who get into ballroom dancing are gay. Personally, I got into ballroom dancing to meet chicks.

Confidential To Brittney

2006-10-12T10:39:00.000-07:00

I like the new categories and layout at Nashville Is Talking, but I can’t find the search button. Did you guys remove it?

Am I Snarky Enough Yet?

2006-10-12T10:30:00.000-07:00

I like the Scene's Best Of Nashville Issue. It relegates the sex issue to second most favorite because it covers all those other areas. But I do have to take a little issue with Tracy Moore and her little vendetta against bloggers.

In explaining the Scene’s pick for Best New Local Blogger, Tracy says several nice things about the winner, Nemisboy. That’s to be expected, he did win after all. But then Tracy takes the opportunity to slam a few people by saying:

And when Nemisisboy showed up at the local blogger meet-up in a Darth Vader
mask, some bloggers were miffed – proof that intelligence has nothing to do with
sense of humor.

Really Tracy? If so, I think you just proved that sense of humor has nothing to do with intelligence. The fact that Gallagher, Carrot Top, Bill Cosby, and Jerry Seinfeld are all considered successful comedians proves that there are a lot of different kinds of humor in the world.

I wasn’t at the meet-up for the Darth Vader incident. But I heard about it, and the former 12 year old boy in me thought it was pretty funny. Your attempt to make fun of people who don’t share your humor is one of the lamest things I’ve read lately. (And that means a lot because I also read my own lame post on Battlestar Galactica.)

I suppose the Buddytown comment fits the high school yearbook theme of the issue, but Brittney is right. Your article was caused all the damage. And did you really think people were going to react well to the whole ‘exclusive club’ thing? Ask the board of directors at Augusta what they know about that.

So what do you think? Am I snarky enough to write for the Scene yet? Or should I keep sharpening my knives?

We Own You Now Punk

2006-10-12T07:55:00.000-07:00

These days everyone is up in arms about the Nashville teacher’s union* declining free money. The reactions range from cynically amused Liz Garrigan, to righteously indignant Kay Brooks. Apparently a private donor wanted to give the schools some money for a pilot program which rewards teachers whose students improve.

I think it’s sad that we now are resorting to rewarding people for doing their job right. I thought that was what a paycheck was for. But I’m not going to go into the difficulties of a program like that. No one has really addressed what I consider to be the only legitimate reason for turning down the money.

The consensus seems to be “why turn away free money?”. Well my answer… there’s no such thing as free money. Ask Vanderbilt or Belmont about what happens when you take someone’s money. Money is power, and more money is more power. Both Vandy and Belmont took large donations from private entities. Now those entities want some control. And there’s no statute of limitations.

The Daughters of the Confederacy raised $50,000 for a building on the George Peabody College for Teachers campus which eventually became part of Vanderbilt. I’m unclear on the exact year it was done, but sources say it was during the great depression. For convenience sake, we’ll assume 1936. So 70 years later Vanderbilt is stuck with a building having a name that offends a lot of people. Because the grand-daughters of the original donors won’t let them change it unless they pay back the original donation, adjusted for inflation.

Belmont has been taking donations from the Tennessee Baptist Convention since 1951. The price? The Baptists get to pick the board of trustees. Honestly, I’m not sure what the board of trustees does at a college, but they’re going to have some serious influence. Recently Belmont decided they want trustees that reflect the mix of religions of their students, so they proposed changing to a board of 40% non-Baptists. The Baptist reaction? Lawsuit. They want their money back for all those years. It’s not enough to just quit giving Belmont money. They still want all their money back for the last 50 years, even though Belmont did exactly what they wanted for all those years. The message here? Well just see the title of today’s post (edited from the language I wanted to use). It seems more like punishing an upstart than anything else.

So really, this seems like a pretty good reason to turn down ‘free’ money. It ain’t free. It comes with strings. What’s the big idea putting conditions on your donation anyhow? If you want to help, help. Let the person you’re helping decide how to spend it. And why is a raise for clerical and janitorial staff in Metro schools contingent on a vote by the teachers anyhow?

Now I don’t want to be accused of supporting the teachers union. From all I’ve heard and read, they’re very cutthroat in protecting all their members, even the incompetent ones. And the plan they turned down would certainly help expose some incompetent teachers. But I think there is at least one valid reason for them to turn it down.

*Technically, it’s not a teacher’s union. It’s an association. The key difference being, teachers aren’t allowed to strike. It’s the same for most government employees.

Need A Job? (But Not A Paycheck)

2006-10-10T14:43:00.000-07:00

This afternoon I got a broadcast email for all state employees. Now I'm sharing with you....

Full disclosure: This is the text of a press release. It appears to be legit. Especially since the web link says they don't pay interns.

PLEASE DISTRIBUTE Do you know bright, motivated college juniors and seniors who want to contribute to a team atmosphere and learn more about the govermental, political process? If so, please do not delay in sharing this amazing opportunity with them! The Governors Office is currently seeking applications for our spring internship program. Governors Office interns have the opportunity to work in the heart of Tennessee politics. There are three opportunities throughout the course of the year for students to be considered for full-time internships in the Governors Office- fall semester (mid-August to December), spring semester (January to mid-May) and summer semester (mid-May to mid-August). Applications for our spring 2007 internship program are due November 1, 2006. Interns have the opportunity to work in one of the fast paced departments in the Governors Office. This allows interns to focus their experience in a specific area of the political process. Internship opportunities are available in the following departments: Boards & Commissions Communications Constituent Services First Ladys Office Governors Office/Deputy Governors Office Legislative Policy SchedulingWe regret that funds are not available to provide stipends to Governors Office interns. Our staff is willing to assist students in receiving credit for their work in the Governors Office.

Past Governors Office interns have had backgrounds in political science, communications and public relations; however, we encourage any self-motivated individual from any academic major to apply.

For more information and to apply online, please visit here.

Commuter Musing

2006-10-10T11:51:00.000-07:00

Two profound thoughts that entered my mind on my commute from Antioch to downtown this morning....

Right now sunrise in Nashville is at about 6:45 AM. And your car doesn’t glow. That means if you are driving I-24 at 6:20 AM you lose all right to complain, give me the finger, or curse me and the horse I rode in on. I cut you off because I COULDN’T SEE YOU IN THE DARK. Don't assume I'm sort of see-in-the-dark-traffic-sensing mutant just because Mom is from Oak Ridge.

Sitting in traffic on the way to work could make the Pope lose his patience. But I think it’s a special kind of hell when you work for the Agency responsible for the construction backup. Even though it’s their fault I’m sitting in traffic, I’m still in trouble if I’m late for work.

The Joys of Multi-Vector Thrust

2006-10-04T15:46:00.000-07:00

In case the title didn’t make it obvious enough, I plan to geek out a little today. The inspiration for today’s geek out….. Netflix sent me the miniseries that started the new run of Battlestar Galactica. Specifically, the starfighters used in Battlestar Galactica.

Everything has a center of gravity. Force applied to that center of gravity will cause the object to move in the direction the force is pushing. If force is applied anywhere other than the center of gravity, then the object will tend to turn. For a simple example… if a person is pushed in the center of their shoulders, they’ll move forward. If you push their right shoulder, they’ll tend to turn toward the left due to the imbalance of force. You can fix this by pushing on both shoulders at the same time. It’s a principal pilots in multiengine aircraft always have to be aware of. If you have two engines on each wing, and one on the left goes down, then you have to shut one down on the other wing, or compensate in some other way.

If I was a physics teacher, I’d be tempted to use footage from the dogfights in BG to illustrate the effects of force vectors and balancing of forces. Because BG has excellent visual representations of these principals. The starfighters actually show the maneuvering jets. The main thrust is in the back of the fighter, but in the nose they have several small jets. The key here is the vector (direction) at which the force is applied. The main thrust is along the center of gravity, so it makes the craft go straight ahead. But the maneuvering jets are all at angles to the center. So when they trigger, they make it turn.

Now if you’re still with me, all this mumbo jumbo boils down to something simple. It makes those things maneuverable as hell. It means they can be flying north, and with a quick kick of one of their maneuvering jets, they’re facing the opposite direction. It’s not that important if you’re going to the liquor store for more scotch, but it comes in handy if there’s an enemy behind you with guns blazing. And it makes a pretty visually spectacular scene to watch, especially when used in three dimensions instead of two. So I guess I went through all of that to say…… the dogfights in Battlestar Galactica ROCK.

I think one of the things that makes BG good is that it just feels more real than most science fiction. It uses principles that we use ourselves now. Vectored thrust and maneuvering jets are used in cruise ships, and the space shuttle. The spaceships don’t shoot magic, colorful lasers. They use good old fashion bullets. And the radio communication they use is scratchy in a way anyone with a cell phone understands. It makes it feel within reach from where we live now. I suspect this is one of the reasons the Cylons on the new BG are mostly human looking (and look like fashion models), rather than the boxy robot forms used in the old version. The unworldly futuristic appearance was great in the 70s, but it moves it from something real to something surreal. The new BG does a good job of portraying the technology so that it’s more in reach, and makes it easier to picture yourself in the action. I think that’s one of the reasons it has done so well this time around. But great writing and character development don’t hurt.

Just in case my clumbsy, geekish praise has convinced you to watch. Season 3 of Battlestar Galactica starts this Friday. And if you want to catch up, they have a 44 minute synopsis called “The Story So Far” available for a free download on iTunes and various other locations. ( I think I actually scooped Michael on that one.) UPDATE: Okay, so I didn't exactly scoop him, but I was a bigger geek.

Okay, I think I got the geek out of my system for now. Do me a favor and pity The Lady Friend when I make her watch with me this Friday.

A Hypothetical Question

2006-09-28T11:26:00.000-07:00

If you were a booster for a midlevel Tennessee school trying to drum up support for a big football game this weekend, do you think setting up a pep rally and blaring loud music during lunch hour in the middle of a bunch of high rise offices would help your cause?

Apparently MTSU is playing North Texas this weekend at the LP Field (the building formerly known as The Coliseum). So today they've decided to hold a pep rally downtown. The band and cheerleaders are down on Legislative Plaza at this very moment blaring loud music and giving out free ice cream.

I'm betting they make at least as many enemies as supporters out of this. I'm about 200 yards away and 20 stories up and the music is driving me nuts. It's worse than the time back in my apartment days when the trashy upstairs neighbors got into a fight at 4 AM.

I may just be a cantankerous, prematurely-old, stick in the mud, but I kinda hope MTSU loses now that they've completely disturbed my only quiet hour all day.

Bias Is Everywhere

2006-09-27T13:38:00.000-07:00

Today Kleinheider at Volunteer Voters (website doesn't want to load again, so I can't currently link it) posted a map which shows the continental U.S. covered in a pox of red dots. Kleinheider doesn't comment himself, but he links back to the source.

Apparently this pox of red dots represents the 800 right wing radio stations in the U.S. and is supposed to indicate the conservative propoganda empire. Pretty map. What of it?

It just looks like someone drew 800 red dots on the map. But the inference is that they blanket the country. But based on the uniformity of it, I'm fairly sure they just drew them on. I find it hard to believe that the major urban areas have the same coverage that the more desolate areas of Arizona and Nebraska do. It would mean a lot more if they actually put the 800 red dots in the correct place that represents their broadcast market. But I suspect they just drew them in where they think it would best make their point.

Maybe I'm wrong. The center of each of those red dots may be the city the radio station broadcasts out of. It's certainly possible. But no one is saying, so I'm forced to draw my own conclusions. What exactly constitutes a right wing radio station anyhow?

I'm not so sure the Newsweek covers prove any real bias either. Doesn't the same company own the magazine in all those geographical areas? If they were trying to hide something, all of the geographical editions would avoid mentioning Afghanistan. All it really proves is that they think they'll sell more in the US if they have a celebrity on the cover. It's a more convincing argument than the map, but all it really proves to me is the political apathy of the American people. I'm a little suspicious of the fact that the European, Asian, and Latin American covers are all in English, but it is plausable enough.

Bias is everywhere. MRDTALK is biased too.

It Ain't So Bad

2006-09-22T15:44:00.000-07:00

I did it back at the end of August. I became a NetFlix customer. I've been seeing the advertisments for years, but I was always a doubter.

I'm pretty impulsive and eclectic in my movie choices. Sometimes I want action, sometimes horror, and sometimes I'm just in the mood for a good romantic comedy. And you can't plan for those sorts of whims, so I just always stuck with my Blockbuster card. But the lady friend has been NetFlixing for a long time, and my brother just got addicted recently so I finally bowed to the peer pressure and used my two free weeks to subscribe to the three at a time package. (On a side note, what's up with a two week free trial period?? You can't exactly get a feel for how this works in two weeks because of the snail mail delays. You need at least a month.)

The verdict so far is favorable. They seem to have every DVD under the sun, so they're ready made for someone with eclectic tastes like mine. Right now my que of discs to watch is dominated by television series. Especially the stuff from the 80's and early 90's. I imagine most of it will be like all the other things I've seen and done for nostalgia purposes, not as good now as my then hormone addled teenage brain thought.

Poking around in their movie database is a lot of fun in itself. It has become a lunchtime hobby of mine following the various 'if you like that, you'll love this..' links and adding things to my que. It reminds me of the first few times I visited the public library as a child, back before I realized how very small the town we lived in really was. Or maybe the time I visited the library at the larger town next to us and realized they had a whole section devoted to just science fiction.

By now my que is up over 200 discs. It's something of an art arranging the priority and deciding what I want next. My biggest complaint is how I have to juggle the que to make sure I get successive discs from television series in the correct order and timing so I can watch them with as little delay possible.

My first choices......... Mat Hot Ballroom, Doogie Howser MD, and Dark Shadows, the Revival.

Coming soon..... Babolyn 5.

Flailing Around Isn't the Same As Debate

2006-09-14T09:37:00.000-07:00

I noticed a rash of posts today from local conservative bloggers on the subject of Walmart and the bashing thereof. Glenn Dean and Mark Rose admit to a love of Walmart, and Music City Oracle brushes by Walmart on the way to bash liberals. In the interests of clarification, Dean and Rose also bash liberals, but they actually talk about Walmart in more than passing.

The gist of all the postings as I read them was… Walmart is doing good things economically with their cheap prices and liberal criticism of Walmart proves they hate poor people. None of them address what I consider to be the chief complaint against Walmart. Walmart has been accused time and again of using their size and retail power to dictate prices to their suppliers. To me, that’s a de facto monopoly.

My understanding of this tactic is that Walmart is often in a situation where they buy a large portion of a suppliers stock, so they tell the supplier they are paying X amount (generally significantly less than what anyone else would pay), or going elsewhere. The supplier either takes a loss, or finds another buyer. The only thing is, Walmart buys such a large portion of their stock, they can’t replace them. So the supplier either sells at a loss, or doesn’t sell at all. I don't have a problem with negotiating a better price because of volume business, but my understanding is that Walmart takes it to an extreme. I've seen documentation that supports this. But I'm willing to change my mind if anyone can prove otherwise.

My axe to grind here isn’t so much with Walmart. That’s a whole post of its own. I take issue with these bloggers using the Walmart as a tool to bash liberals, while ignoring the main liberal arguments. Sure Walmart has low prices that are good for poor people. But they also make people poor by refusing to pay what a decent price for the things they sell.

It’s a common blog tactic. Mention one good thing and use that good thing to bash critics everywhere. Just totally ignore the actual arguments the critics are making.

So my question for these folks is….. By your silence on the criticisms of Walmart should I assume you think the low prices and good facets of Walmart are outweighed by the bad? Or do you think these bad things don’t exist? Or do you just not want to talk about the bad things because you don’t know what to say? Or fill in the blank. Feel free to tell me why you didn’t mention them. Praise Walmart all you want, but if you’re going to use that praise to bash others, then you have a responsibility to address their concerns.

In fairness, I did find this, where Rose addresses another major criticism of Walmart. There may be others, I didn't look at their archives.