Stomping around

For quite some time now Sara has been feeling our baby move around, and tried to get me to feel him move, but I couldn't. But just this last week while we were sitting on the couch watching TV (Lost I think, since we'd been watching seasons 3 and 4 on DVD to catch up to this season) our baby boy started kicking again and Sara showed me where to put my hand and I felt him kick it, as if telling me to stop intruding on his space. Since then I've felt him kick several more times, each time in response to something pressing lightly Sara's tummy. Our boy's quite the kicker, he's always kicking around in there, so when Sara mentioned that she wanted to refer to him as something other than baby I suggested Pele, after the great soccer star. I don't think she likes it, but as nicknames go, I think it fits perfectly for now.


Speaking of confined spaces, Sara and I went to see Stomp at the Providence Performing Arts Center. The theater was very ornate and beautiful, but the seats not all that comfortable, especially for Sara, she kept shifting around trying to find a comfortable spot, so that Pele would settle down and let her watch the show. The people next to us probably thought she had some kind of ADHD or restless everything syndrome. The show itself was awesome, the noises they get out of every day things, rubber hoses, brooms, dirt on the ground, and their ability to each keep their own rhythm to weave a wonderful musical experience was amazing. For the next couple hours I found myself drumming out little beats on whatever my hands were resting on, and of course when that happened to be Sara's tummy, little Pele kicked back.

Seattle

Dec. 13th, 2008

Upon landing in Seattle, we headed downtown to see the Space Needle and the famous fish market. The town was all lit up for the holidays, and the sun was just setting, but we quickly realized that neither of us had a camera, so there are no pictures to show from our Space Needle adventure, and the fish market was already closed so we don't have any fish tossing pictures either, but here's one from the Internet.
But some restaurants were open and so we had dinner at place called the Sound View cafe. We sat by the window, 3 or 4 stories above the street below (due to the hillside) with a view of, you guessed it, the Sound, and the first few flakes of their Seattle's first big snow of the year. The food was good and it was great to relax a bit together.

After the dinner and the Space Needle, we went to our hotel and used our GPS to pull up Best Buy to buy a suitable camera for our vacationing. We ended up getting a digital SLR, figuring if we'd ever buy one, we should buy it before going to Alaska, Hawaii, and Guam.

We ate the wonderful breakfast buffet the next day at the hotel and then I took Sara to the airport before driving around to take photos with the camera. I took this one from a big hill in a neighborhood along the freeway.


And this one I took a little closer to downtown (I'm a little blurry because I moved a smidgen while the shutter was open forever to take the shot):


The interviews on Monday were interesting, but very technical and I didn't spend any significant amount of time preparing for them due to school, so I didn't do too well and did not receive a job offer.

But the trip to Seattle was fun. Sara and I saw the space needle, we ate some good meals and spend some good time together. I also got to catch up with an old mission friend who works for Microsoft. And just about all of it was covered by Microsoft. So buy Windows and Office and stuff, yay!

Stopped the insanity

I don't really feel like blogging about the new stuff that's going on until I get you all caught up on the old stuff that's gone down, so rewind the calendar two months to Friday, December 12th.

Early last semester I tried to figure out the earliest date that I could be done with school, I emailed professors and checked the official calendars and deduced that the 12th of December would be the last day I had anything due, so when Sara had meetings in Juneau on Monday, the 15th and I was invited to interview for a job openning with Microsoft in Redmond, Washington, we decided to combine the two and fly to Seattle on Saturday the 13th.

Around the first week of December some of my classes were starting to move from being done on the 12th to not being done till a week later, in fact 4 of my 5 classes ended up pushing due dates till after we were already scheduled to leave and I found myself in a never-before-experienced situation of whining about having more time to complete stuff because I didn't actually have any more time because I was still leaving Saturday morning, at 8 a.m. for the airport.

My database final was on Monday, I finished the work for my group (of just me) distributed computing project Tuesday night (but didn't present it to the professor till Friday), fought with my Computer Vision project for most of Wednesday and Thursday before giving up and moving on to my Computational Molecular Biology final Thursday night. Friday night a little after 9 in time to go pick up Sara at the airport. I spent a couple minutes with her before returning to school to write a technical paper on how my non-functional Computer Vision project turned out through the night till I around 7 a.m. (I never did get it working correctly, but I thought that the write-up was pretty good, considering the project didn't work - one of my friends read it and asked me if I was being too pessimistic and said that I was pretty much saying "I suck, I suck, I suck" in the paper. I didn't think I wrote that or even intoned that, but I thought it was funny that he got that message from the paper.) Got home about 7:15, cleaned, showered, and got packed in time for our awesome landlord Bob, and his wife Sheila to pick us up and take us to the airport at 8 with 4 classes completed and 1 project left to go.

That last project was a group project and it hung around for an entire week as I tried to make time to work on it in Seattle and Juneau, while one group member worked from Massachusetts and the other one worked in Ankara, Turkey. The distance and the time difference definitely didn't make it any easier, but after a couple very, very, very late nights by the imitation fireplace of our bed-and-breakfast in Juneau, Alaska while Sara watched over me (read slept snorring-ly nearby) I finished my second write-up of a project that didn't fully function and my first semester at Brown was done.

Everything turned out even better than I expected, and so I'm now 5/8ths of the way through my Master's program, and it's really hard to get going this semester. Luckily, I get to spend lots of time with Sara and so far I've put in short days, but I'm sure that'll end soon.

In the end it was definately worth the extra work to be a little farther done with the baby on the way, even if several late nights at my computer had me feeling like this poor guy:

Getting rid of that spam...

So, I just told my wife that her little, comment and I'll make you something was terrible spam that offered no insight at all into who we are or what we've been doing. She responded by saying that it's better than all my posts the past month or so, and she's right, like she always is, that spam at least proves that she's alive, my zero posts do not.

So this post is to push that stupid post down the page a little bit.

Thought I'd post more? Well, ha ha, fooled you!

Mystery Gift...From Me to You!

A friend of mine posted this on her blog, and I made one of the 5, so now it's my turn. It's always fun to give and receive! :)

The first 5 people to comment on this post will receive something made by me for you....my choice...made especially for you.

Of course there are some restrictions and limitations:

1. I make no guarantees that you will like what I make!
2. What I create will be just for you.
3. It will be done sometime this year.
4. You have no clue what it will be... it may be a story; it may be poetry or an article on organizing your closet or home office. I may draw or paint something; I may bake something and mail it to you. Who knows? Not you, that's for sure.
5. I reserve the right to do something extremely strange.

The catch? Oh, the catch is that you must re-post this on your blog and offer the same to the first 5 people who do the same on their blog (only if you really want to - I will still make you something if you don't). The first 5 people to do so and leave a comment telling me they did will win a FAB-U-LOUS homemade gift by me!!

As Promised - Baby's First Pictures

Like I said in my last post, he really wanted to moon the camera, so that's what we got the most of...

(I like the label with the arrow - otherwise we might not have found it.)

And, last, but definitely not least, the profile picture that they were able to get when we went back fora second round. He was still in a "jack-knife" position and wanted his hands on his ears, but he was much more cooperative than the week before.

It's a Boy

Our ultrasound last week was really neat - it was fun to see the baby and see him move around while I was feeling it. He is definitely a boy and wanted to show us his "boy parts" as much as he could. Even if we had asked the technician not to tell us the gender, I think we would have known. It was as if he was attempting to moon the camera the first half of it (we may have our hands full). He was very cute and at first was hiding his face and basically holding on to his nose, then he decided to grab his ears instead.

Then, he began to take after his mom and be a little impatient. When the technician pushed down on him to try to get him to move around, he pushed back with his head, hard enough that she and I both saw the pushing on the outside and I definitely felt it on the inside. After that, he was not very cooperative at all so she couldn't get all the shots she needed. So, we are going back tomorrow and hopefully he'll be in a better position and a little more cooperative. The only things we have clear pictures of right now are his boy parts and I didn't really want to post those without at least a profile shot or something that shows that he does have other parts, so we'll see what we get tomorrow morning!