The Cheese Stands Alone

I'm really sick of whining. So here's some cheese to soften the taste. If my parents saw me right now, they'd wonder what alien arrived on Earth in its humming disc and replaced their son with a pod person. (I always wanted to be Trumpy.) They would probably then wonder if this pod person would clean their bathroom. Why? This pod person does yard work on the weekends, cleans the house, and helps its wife plant tomato plants in the back yard. This pod person is cooking dinner on a semi-regular basis and I'm not talking about pasta.

One thing that I've really appreciated about the whole pregnancy thing is watching myself grow up just a little bit more. Having to take care of Amy and a lot of other things at once is teaching me more about responsibility than I could have learned on my own. I don't even think this is a lesson to be taught by mom and dad (sorry guys). It's just not something a stubborn teenager is really going to latch onto if you know what I mean. I knew that this experience would change me, but I'm starting to see how it can really change me for the better in ways I never imagined.

No Pictures, Please

I don't believe in karma. But I think the universe is making a good case for it. We seem to have been experiencing an inordinate amount of stress for the last three months:

1. Amy's grandfather passed away.
   
2. My grandmother passed away.
   
3. Sid was vomiting and defecating blood while we were away. (We took him to the vet and he's better now.)
   
4. The basement is leaking water like a sieve.
   
5. A raccoon made its den in our attic.
   
6. Sid now has a swollen lower lip that looks like it is infected. His lip has been slowly getting bigger over the past few days. Vet again this Saturday.
   
7. A tornado moved by our neighborhood, missing us by only a couple miles.
   
8. Amy is constantly nauseous with no end in sight.
   
9. Neither of us has had a full night's sleep in two weeks.
   
10. With all the other stuff, I can't seem to keep up with household chores beyond dishes, laundry, and meals. Except for the vacuuming I did Tuesday night at 10pm.
    

We also discovered that Amy became pregnant towards the beginning of all this. That's what has me thinking about karma. We get some absolutely wonderful news. Then our lives seem to begin to spin out of control. It's just weird. I know it will pass and we'll look back on it and be glad that we made it and it's over, just another photograph in an album of memories. But, I really would like to stop taking pictures for now.

----------------
Now playing: INXS - Tiny Daggers
via FoxyTunes

It Makes Me Want to Puke

I am not incredibly hopeful now that Amy’s nausea will subside at all, let alone disappear as the obstetrician said it would. His prediction of improvement within one week of our appointment at the end of July was laughter inducing for both of us. But despite my lack of medical training and Amy’s optimistic hopefulness, our laughter was well deserved. Three weeks later, she is still suffering with nausea and dry heaves. I took her to the fruit and vegetable market last Saturday and she could barely look at the tomatoes without her gag reflex twitching ever so slightly.

I should mention that the good doctor had prescribed Zolfran (why do drug names all sound like evil alien overlords these days?), which was supposed to control her nausea. When she started taking it, we noticed very little change in the severity of her nausea. But as time went on, it seemed that the sickness was abating. We doubted the drug somewhat. We thought it was just the passing of time and the she would lose the nausea once we reached the second trimester, which for the uninitiated is the “normal” time for it to end. Almost every book with even a whiff of professional medical influence assures the reader that it will end by this time.

But I say, “Nay nay!” Tomorrow is the official first day of the second trimester and Amy was worse than she’s been in a month this morning. Her supply of Zolfran was depleted on Friday, though. Perhaps the medication was indeed helping her. But to add to the confusion, stress and lack of sleep have a distinct and noticeable affect on pregnancy related nausea. The affect is so noticeable in fact that the morning we knew we had the raccoon in our attic, Amy’s nausea increased from an upset stomach feeling the previous day to outright gagging every few minutes.

The reason I mention this phenomenon is because we have had a lot of rain in the past four days and the downspout on the eastern corner of the house had been clogged with debris. So once the ground was saturated with water and the gutter on that side of the house was full to capacity, the water went where it wasn’t supposed to: down the side of the house right onto our basement floor. As of 2am Monday morning, I was on my hands and knees mopping up water and manually running the battery backup pump in our secondary sump tank because its sensor is broken. As one set of rags became saturated, I’d throw them in the dryer while the second set mopped up the encroaching flood. I repeated this behavior for a couple of hours until the rain subsided. The clog in the downspout is now gone, but I’ll have to wait until the next big rain to ensure that the unclogged downspout fixed the problem and to see if we have any further problems that need to be addressed. (I’m not going to worry about the pump until I have to. I have never even seen water in that tank before yesterday. If you feel that it is absolutely necessary, I will happily take donations via PayPal. Just leave a comment in this message with your intentions and I’ll set you up with the email address where you can send the money.)

Anyway, these storms and the water leakage were rather stressful on both of us and I was not surprised that Amy was suffering from the same levels of nausea and dry heaves yesterday and today that she had been experiencing over a month ago. So does the return of the gagging signify that she is stressed or that the medication was working? If she’s just stressed, will it go away soon? If it was the medication, I think we may have to get some more evil overlord pills and ride out the rest of the pregnancy like this.

It Must Be Good

I just finished watching Eraserhead, the 1977 film directed by surrealist David Lynch. Here's a little taste of it if you're unfamiliar.

Now, I'm not inherently opposed to Lynch's work, but I don't automatically label any of it as genius either. That's the thing I find so irritating about Lynch's films. I can keep up with him and what I think he's trying to say for a while, but then his images get so obtuse that any meaning that he may be trying to show is obscured. In other words, I can only take so much weirdness before I give up trying to decipher the secret code of the director's visual language. After that line is crossed, if the director still hasn't let me in on the joke, he's finished. I press the stop button.

The most frustrating part for me is reading what critics say about this film. It seems that nobody really knows what the film is about although some have pretty good guesses. But with as many good reviews as a film like this gets, it appears as though the reviewers are merely giving it a rubber stamp of quality out of fear that they'll come off as intellectually inferior to their peers. ("I don't get it, but I'm going to say I love it so I don't look stupid.")

In case it's not obvious, I didn't really like this film very much. But that's just my opinion. If you've seen this movie, can you enlighten me?

Precious Little

Though we might have precious little, it’s still precious. – lyric from Bravest Face, Neil Peart

What do I have? Do I have a house? A car? A wife? A child? That’s a tricky word, “have.” It first defines ownership, possession. Even the legal vows at weddings use the phrase “to have and to hold.” Do spouses own each other? I suppose in the context of law, where every nuance of language must be clearly defined, using the word in that way makes a good deal of sense. It follows then that in a strictly denotative, legal sense, I do have many things. But I continue to read that simple lyric and interpret it differently, from a perspective that delays the concept of ownership.

Viewed from that perspective, I only truly have what comprises my self, nothing more. The car could be stolen. My house can burn down with everything in it. Amy could fall out of love with me and simply leave. We could lose our child to many different worldly perils. I say these things not out of fear that they would become real but merely out of a sense of possibility. When viewed over time, when chance becomes a factor, ownership becomes a tenuous proposition. It can disappear in the blink of an eye.

But something else becomes evident as I examine those previous examples and it only becomes clearer as I consider my own attitudes toward those things I have. Why doesn’t Amy leave me? I cannot speak for her but I assume that it is because she shares the same feelings for me that I have nurtured for her. I made a choice long ago to treat her with respect, with trust, with empathy. Once she returned her feelings for me in the same way, we were able to foster a friendship, a love for one another that nourishes and grows the relationship that we share. That is truly what we have, what we own. We own the relationship that we have with a person, not the person herself.

From that conclusion, it follows that I have relationships with the other material things I mentioned, but the material objects will never return anything like the love I receive from Amy. But I should not and do not value those material goods in the same way. My car will never trust me. It will never care about my well-being. Therefore, my relationship with those objects should never reach the same levels of esteem in which I hold my wife, my child, my family.

So, in the sense that I can only take true ownership in my relationships, it definitively demonstrates that I do have precious little. And that little is very precious, indeed.

Practice Makesss... zzzzzzz

I don't think I've slept past 4am during the past week. I'm complaining about it less and less, though. It's probably good prep work for what's to come after all. At least for now I'm merely waking up to Amy's tossing or munching rather than someone screaming for my attention. But, I will admit that her mastication of crispity, crunchity food items has earned a special place in my ear as a sound to avoid. It's surprisingly loud in stiller nacht, as it were.

There have been other reasons we've been awake at these dark hours, though. Last night in particular was perilous to my poor stomach acids. Severe thunderstorms were rolling through our area and the thunder never quite abated. This kept both Amy and I awake until I retreated to the basement couch. However, I'd only begun to reach a state of true rest when she woke me up again for a worthy reason: the raccoon, or perhaps raccoons, that have taunted us for so long had penetrated our borders and were wreaking havoc in the attic.

So, when proper business hours rolled into view, we called a local service. They came yesterday morning, determined the point of entry, and placed a trap. I am almost certain that as I type, the furry squatter is struggling for freedom because I have heard thumping on the roof since around 3:30am. Yes, I am awake this morning, too. From the sounds I've heard over the night as well as raccoons' maturation and behavior patterns (from what I have read and been told), this may be the only one, but I would not be surprised if there were two. We'll have to see what happens after today to find out.

Also, I mentioned before that heavy rains were the initial cause of our sleeplessness. It takes the heaviest of rains to overflow our gutters. The event is rare, but when they do, we get water on the eastern part of the basement. It has only happened once in the past three years so until yesterday I was unclear where exactly the water was coming from. Now I know. When the water overflows the gutters, it splashes out directly above one of our basement window wells which is covered by a solid plastic guard. But the cover is old and needs to be replaced. Once that is done, I'll see if I can look at the gutter without killing myself. It's in a very difficult spot for ladder access.

----------------
Now playing: Red Hot Chili Peppers - If You Want Me To Stay
via FoxyTunes

10 1/2 Weeks

Our visit with the obstetrician yesterday went very well. Amy is doing fine and everything is progressing as normal. She is still rather worried about a miscarriage. Her worries have probably returned a little because we have heard that a couple we know has recently and unfortunately had one. However, as both the doctor and I have now both told her, her chances for a miscarriage are dropping steadily at this point and in another couple of weeks those chances will drop very sharply with the onset of her second trimester.

We had another ultrasound at the office and again, things are looking quite normal. There are limb stubs that have now formed and we were also able to see its heart beating. It was pretty active, too, which was interesting to see. Unfortunately, I do not have a new picture, but maybe in another month or so.

Amy is still very nauseous all the time, too. The doctor assured her that it would subside in another week or so. I'll be happy with two or three weeks, but one would be just super. Just in case, the doc gave us a prescription for some medicine (not sure what the name is) that will ease her nausea. But he warned us to check to make sure that our insurance will cover it before we buy it. All he said was that, "It's expensive." I'm inclined to believe him.

As for myself, I've now known about the baby for over a month and I go back and forth between genuine excitement and abject terror. I get excited when I think about holding my son or daughter in my arms for the first time. The terror begins when I think about all the things I have to do before that moment. And then all the stuff after that, too. :)

Oh, look, how appropriate...

----------------
Now playing: R.E.M. - It's The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)
via FoxyTunes

The Else

I picked up the new They Might Be Giants album, The Else, yesterday. It's pretty good, but definitely not one to start with if one is a new listener. If that's the case, start with Lincoln, their finest effort in my opinion. Anyway, there's a full-length bonus disc included with The Else entitled Cast Your Pod to the Wind. I actually preferred that disc to The Else just a little. The songs on Cast Your Pod are collected from their older podcasts. They're quick, they're quirky, sometimes they're about something, sometimes they're not. For me, just what the doctor ordered.

----------------
Now playing: Rush - Freewill
via FoxyTunes