Birthday Girl

Today was Jen's birthday, and she got an amazing present. We went in for an ultrasound of the baby and got to see our little girl. That's right! We're having a girl. She'll be making an appearance sometime around April 16th, falling between the undesirable dates of April 15th (tax day) and April 20th (lots of bad things: pot smoking, Columbine, and Hitler's birthday).

It was so awesome to get to see her heartbeat and her wiggling around. It's surprising that with all that movement Jen can't feel too much going on in there. It's also reassuring to see how much the baby is moving, as Jen gets a bit nervous not feeling anything.

The ultrasound technology really seems to have come a long way. The images were not so blobby. We could clearly see the spine and ribs, as well as the feet and profile. We even could see her skin as a layer in the ultrasound. The tech said everything looks great to her. I'm happy that our child isn't looking quite as alien as other ultrasounds I've seen, too.

What a moment of realization this is! For most of the pregnancy, it has been pretty intellectual. Jen hasn't really been showing until just recently, so this was finally when things are hitting home. Seeing that fluttering little heart made me realize that I'm going to be dad. We're going to have a daughter! Craziness.

We're so excited!

Leaves: The Aftermath

This weekend was, in my mind, all about getting the yard work done. Mainly it was the leaves that needed to be taken to the drop off center, but then there were gutters to be cleaned, lights to be hung, massive tree chunks to be sawed, leaves to be mulched, and lawns to be winterized. Well, at least the first thing got done.

We had 64 bags of leaves this year. 64! 15 of those were 39-gallon trash bags, and the rest were 30-gallon bags. Between Jen being sick and pregnant, she wasn't able to help much. She deadheaded and raked a bit, but most of it was me and the leaves; first on the weekend, and then each weekday morning. This is not my favorite aspect of being a homeowner. Last year our neighbors had offered to let us use their truck to get the leaves to the city's drop off center. This year, we thought we'd take them up on the offer, as well as help them with their leaves. Between their Avalanche, Jen's Maxima, and my Mazda 3, it took 3 convoy trips to drop off all the leaves. I had already been feeling a bit sick, but by the end of that, I was shot. I consigned the rest of my yardwork to the upcoming long weekend and played Batman and worked on my cookbook for the rest of the day.

Part of last weekend's yard festivities was dealing with the massive chunk of one of our cottonwoods that broke during the heavy snows we had recently. It was hanging up in the tree like a widowmaker, and I was going to have to rake underneath it in heavy winds. So Jen and I set about bringing the big boy down. We took one of Jen's 3-pound hand weights, tied a long rope to it and fruitlessly hurled it at the branch trying to hook it. After a break and some restrategizing, we finally got the limb hooked and we stood a long ways away and furiously tried to get the limb to fall. Seems like it would have taken more than a stiff wind to fell this puppy. Jen and I hauled away on it and finally got it to fall. It came down with many other chunks of tree that I now have to figure out what to do with. Supposedly cottonwood makes for lousy firewood. It doesn't cure well and puts out a lot of smoke. Great.

So next weekend starts with turkey and then dives into a steady amount of work: decorating, cookbookery, and daunting piles of yardwork. I will need a vacation from this vacation.

Raking, Baking and Aching

I'm feeling old. I went out to do all the raking yesterday. Jen was sick, so she helped out with deadheading plants, but didn't help with the raking and bagging. So I got to tackle all the leaves on a very windy day. Because of the wind, I had to bag a pile as soon as I had it together, so my back got to start aching earlier. I got the front yard done and about half of the back yard done after raking the from 9 to 4:30. Afterwards, I had a difficult time just laying down on the floor to realign my back. Jen and I both were feeling very decrepit as we hobbled around and moaned.

One place we hobbled to was Smashburger to use up a Groupon I had and reward our hard work with burgers. The burgers and fried pickles were good. Not so good was a fight we witnessed there. I won't go into details, as the police officer who responded said we would likely be called on as witnesses if there's a trial, but two guys started talking trash and one guy threw two milkshakes on the other. Thankfully no punches were thrown. I'm especially grateful, for as aching as I was I was even less inclined to intervene than usual (which is not really at all).

Then I went home and baked two pies (avocado and pumpkin) for our house church today. Now I am up after a night of wind that shook the house, yet somehow managed to not overturn the trash cans I used to bag leaves. And I will be out there later. I need to rake and bag the remaining half of the yard, bring down part of one of our cottonwoods that snapped in the heavy snow, and refill our crawl space now that it is getting its radon abated. Relaxation will have to happen next weekend.

Adventures in Hantavirus Land

This Wednesday we got our second major snow storm of the season. This and we're barely into November! We got 8 to 10 inches of very sticky snow, so I got to go out and shovel the walk and shake snow off the trees. Unfortunately, the snow put the kibosh on our attempts at radon abatement.

Colorado has a plentiful amount of radon stored in suburban basements and crawlspaces such as ours. When we bought the house 2 years ago, the radon levels were a bit above what the US tolerates, but still beneath what they allow in Canada and parts of Western Europe, so we weren't too scared. Our realtor recommended that we get a long term test and see if the levels changed when we were actually living here. It took us a while to get around to it, but we did it and the levels are still high. Since we'll be welcome a little one into this house soon, and since we're planning on living here long term, we decided to get someone to seal our crawlspace and put in a fan to blow carcinogenic gases out onto our lawn.

The abatement guys were supposed to come on Wednesday, so on Sunday Jen and I took on the odious task of emptying our crawlspace. We hauled out a bunch of boxes and flattened a lot of them, an action that somewhat reminds me of early settlers in North America burning their boats to encourage people to stick around. We also had to haul out sheetrock, flooring, carpet and insulation that had been left there by the previous owners. It was when I started moving around the rolls of carpet that I noticed the copious amount of mouse poop on them. This always brings to mind happy thoughts of hantavirus, and made me consider stopping work to grab some surgical masks. A family friend of ours back in Oregon actually died from a hantavirus-like ailment after mice infiltrated his hunting camp, so it's definitely a specter that quickly arises.

We decided to bring one of the bigger boxes back into the crawlspace and fill it up with the feces-laden remnants. We then brought it out and set a tire on top to keep the lid closed. And then we vacumned and washed all our clothes and showered. Ick ick ick.

So we were none too happy when the abatement guys announced that due to the near foot of snow on the ground they wouldn't be coming to abate our radon. So this means we've had flooring and sheetrock and tires and boxes of crap sitting around our house for the past week. The radon abaters will be here on Friday, barring any snow, of course. Please God, don't let there be snow then.

Reamde

I finished up Neal Stephenson's new book Reamde this week. I had been feeling the pressure to finish it as it is 1,044 pages long and I had two weeks to read it before I had to return it to the library. My normal reading session of 45 minutes on the exercise bike 3 times a week wasn't going to cut it. So last weekend I took a whole day pretty much to read, which felt really nice. I still hadn't finished it, so on Halloween, when Jen was gone to Bible study, I sat at the dining room table with the book and a bowl full of candy. I'd read along and every once in a while get up to pass out some miniature candy bars. We only had around 20 trick or treaters, so I got a lot of good reading time in and finished the book.

Overall, it was quite enjoyable. It just wasn't quite Neal Stephenson good. One of the things I really like about his books is he gets into nerdy ideas and really goes deep into them, looking at real world applications and explaining complex concepts in a good narrative. Reamde is much more a spy thriller. There are a handful of concepts explored, such as using real world geological patterns to create a World of Warcraft style game, using those types of games as money transfer systems, and great circle flight pattern considerations. However, mostly it's a cat and mouse game between people trying to rescue a very unfortunate girl and the people who have kidnapped her.

My biggest bones with the book are 1. there is a highly improbable coincidence in the middle of the book that the book hinges on, and 2. right after that coincidence one of the characters makes a decision that makes no sense to me. Still, the book is very good. I especially enjoyed the character of Sokolov, who lets us step into his mind and see its highly cautious, calculating workings as they take on an array of situations ranging from spycraft, firefights, and managing a mentally unstable Russian crime boss. I appreciate how deeply Stephenson goes into his mind and works on his perception of the world.

Anyway, if you're a Stephenson fan, you'll want to read this book, but it doesn't get up to the level of his better works such as Snow Crash, Diamond Age, and Cryptonomicon. It does however, have a much better ending than Anathem, the book he wrote before Reamde. A satisfactory ending means a lot.