prayer please

we're soon off to PA for the baby shower. it's usually an 11 hour drive, but with Michelle at about 6 months pregnant, we'll be stopping to stretch our legs a bit more. her legs and feet have been hurting a lot more lately, so please pray for her health on our journey. please pray also for safe travels and good times with friends and family. with all the hoopla it'll be easy to take credit for all this ourselves, so we need to remember to be humble and thankful to God for His many blessings.

garden ready

we've got pretty much all the plants for this year in the ground. at least we're determined not to spend more money on plants this year...now comes the time and effort. we thought we were going to try less this year, but the temptation seems to get the best of us. so we've got 14 tomato plants of various kinds, 8 cukes (all the same kind), 5 peppers, 3 squash, 3 cantalope, 2 basil, a row of snow peas (that's been growing for a while now), and for color and (supposed) help with pests, a bunch of marigolds. oh and I planted some seeds of swiss chard (a celery type thing) and they're coming up. everything else was bought as a plant (mostly the $1 size). we've got a photo section on our site to track the progress of things. already it's fun to see he progress of the snow peas. now to fend off the slugs and bugs. the aphids are already on the attack, but we seem to be holding the slugs mostly at bay.

we're headed to PA soon for our baby shower with family and old friends. please pray for michelle's health and strength (and mine too for that matter) as we are driving the long journey. seems like there's going to be lots of fanfare and hoopla. fun.

chaco weather

I'm usually not big on fashion or coolness, but I certainly do love my chacos. now that the 80s are here (temps, not decade), they will seldom leave my feet, thanks to casual dresscodes at work and church. usually I couldnt afford such luxuries, but since we do rockcreek.com we got a good deal.

I love my chacos, and my chacos love me.

pretty pictures

I like flowers, birds, bugs and whatnot. I especially like good pictures of these things. So this entry is basically a bookmark for me: www.photoportfolios.net

morning routine

I wonder how much our routines of daily life will change once the kid arrives.

these days the alarm goes off at 6:30, and we snooze and snuggle until just before 7, when the wmbw guy tells us about the weather. sometimes we chuckle at his wacky banter with the traffic guy. we're easily amused.

the dog hears us stirring and does her little pogo dance, begging either to be let out or allowed on the bed. if she's relatively clean and we're feeling lazy we'll let her come up and snuggle. otherwise I get up and let her out and start the breakfast routine.

until it got warm, michelle would have oatmeal every day, but not before her morning throwup. as she gets out of bed, I get ready for her, fetching the throwup bowl and her chair (it's a wheeled office chair that's often at the computer). when the retching begins (sometimes it takes a little while to start up), it's my cue to start the oatmeal in the microwave (2 minutes, stir, 1 minute, stir, 1 minute, stir, 30 seconds, serve with salt and soy butter). while that goes, I load or unload the dishwasher as needed, pausing to let the dog in. after the oatmeal is delivered, it's time to microwave 2 pieces of bacon that I cooked earlier in the week.

then I fill my bowl with generic cheerios or raisin bran (with a couple of pieces to the dog) and we sit and eat together, sometimes chatting a little, maybe making eachother laugh with our weird sillynesses.

when the food is gone and vitamins and whatnot consumed, we read a chapter or so from the Bible, pray together a little while, and maybe sing a song or two. this part is a relatively recent addition to the routine, and it's a very good thing. somehow it starts the day out right.

my thoughts then turn to getting ready for work as Michelle takes a shower or goes on a morning walk or takes a nap (pregnancy and fibro make for good excuses for naps any time of the day). so I make my sandwich (turkey and cheese on wheat from the breadmaker) or perhaps gather leftovers, check email and the headlines, and try to be out the door by 8:45 or so with a goodbye kiss (for Michelle) and pat on the head (for the dog).

for some reason I feel guilty if I get into work after 9, but noone else seems to care as long as the work gets done.

how much of this will change when our boy is on the scene? I have no idea. hopefully at least michelle wont be throwing up.

next homestar?

check this out, thanks to steve for the link. clearly homestar inspired, but too bad they'll be shut down for copyright infringement before they get anywhere.

got the trellises up for the garden, and now it looks something like a jungle gym. I'm sure it will look nicer when there's greenery on them.

in other news, the dog has taken to peeing on the carpet, and it's, er, ticking us off. I expected this kind of behavior when the kid comes along, but before?! we're trying to figure out what the issue is...perhaps it's b/c I've been cutting back on her morning treats? we love her to death, but it's got to stop.

ultrasound video

as promised, here is the video of the 20 week ultrasound. it's about 13 minutes long, in quicktime format, and about 22mb (dont bother if you dont have broadband).

it's a little hard to tell what's going on if you've never seen one of these, but even still it's pretty amazing. I'll try to do an edited version soon, maybe with some subtitle commentary or something. meanwhile here's some highlights:

(these times are based on what my quicktime viewer says on the left of the timeline)

0:18 - the arrow points to his hand, which is over his head
0:50 - a good view of his spine
0:55 - the black spot is his stomach
1:15 - pointing out his boy parts, and thereafter outlining the "toilet bowl view"
2:05 - freezes for the profile view - his head on the left, looking up to the top right corner. the technician outlines his body
3:23 - freezes for foot view
3:39 - pauses for forearm and hand, which is in the middle of the screen
3:58 - measuring his abdomen - the view is cutting him in half at the belt, the black spot is his stomach
4:13 - skull view - the technician is adjusting the depth so his head is coming in and out of focus - she circles his eye sockets - he's looking down at us
4:49 - time for head measurements (until about 6:30)
6:40 - my favorite part! but it's hard to see on this version - on the right side of the screen is his heart, all four chambers beating in and out. super cool! then it switches to measure his heartrate
7:30 - his leg is extending out, and she points to it
7:46 - he's squished on his head now, and you can see the legs folded at the top. it freezes for an outline
9:07 - his head is at the bottom, and his arm is above it. he waves a little, and then swallows. (Michelle's favorite part)
9:19 - the technician shakes it up a bit, and he responds by moving his hand
9:40 - another good view of the spine
10:20 - he's looking at us and he yawns - his mouth is the white part, which I guess is his teeth buds?
11:15 - she circles his boy parts, comparing it with the cord
12:12 - leg bone
13:00 - see you next time!

4th and Broad

the intersection of 4th and Broad here in chattanooga has a special place in my heart, for I've been employed here more often than not. my senior year in college I worked parttime for greyfriars, which, upon graduation, turned into fulltime for the balance of the year. lots of good memories, but I did get tired of it.

then I went to work for jeff back when coptix was cross computer consulting. I will ever be thankful to him for getting me my start in web stuff.

but in a little while I was back on the block, working for 3HD. I even did double duty one summer, working for greyfriars (6am to 9am) and 3HD (9-5) to help pay off the credit cards. but that was a bit much.

6 months ago we moved offices, but it was only a few hundred feet north, closer to the intersection. and the intersection itself is looking much better: the haney building has been leveled, and 4th is two-way with trees and whatnot.

so here's a shot of the corner, as well as one of the back porch here at the new office. for the record, points of interest in the photo: creative discovery museum, bellsouth park (go lookouts!), a couple hotels, and the back of the bijou theater.

(click photos for larger)

your tax dollars at work

if you're a homeowner here in chatty, or looking to be one, you may find this interesting. all the property info you can ever want (who owns what, how much they paid), plus arial photography and all sorts of goodies.

here's a view of my house (before they moved the shed back 30 feet or so), as well as my neighbors (Kirk and Rhonda to the north, Dave and Sara to the southeast).

photoblog?

there's a request at the end of this, so skip down a bit if you'd rather.

I enjoy photography, but I havent spent much time with it for a while. I'm not sure how good I ever was, but I had fun with it in highschool and college, taking classes and lots of pictures. I even had a rudimentary darkroom in my bathroom, which was quite cool. but then my old pentax spotmatic was lent and came back broken, and all the lenses and whatnot have long been sold on ebay.

so I was condemned to a crappy digital camera for a few years, which sapped most of the artistry from the pictures I took. more acurately, I took an entirely different approach to taking pictures: it was only about documenting whatever the heck we were up to. I did take some flower shots now and then, with moderate success, but thoughts of composition, color, etc we're fleeting.

now that our first kid is on the way, we got a pretty decent snapshot digicam (sony dsc-p72 - 3.2mp). the color and contrast aren't exactly to my liking, but that's why I've got Photoshop, and I'm thankful for it. so today I tweaked some of my latest flower pics, and I was pretty happy with the result. so I'm toying with the idea of a photoblog. I'm no Monty, but I can at least try.

which brings me to my request for you: what do you think? are these pics worth looking at? should I bring more to blogland, or just keep them to myself on the family site? I do post lots of our snapshots there, but I seldom shoot for aesthetic reasons. I guess there's lots of different reasons for a photoblog? so dear readers (as the cartalk guys would say: both of you), any thoughts?

basket hunting

it's been a quiet Easter. cold and wet, and the house smells a bit like dead rat when we turn on the heat. yuck. Michelle's been devouring the Da Vinci Code (reading it for her book club), and I've been messing around with photos and videos and whatnot.

as evidence of our weirdness, I present Easter Basket Hunt 2004. Michelle's family would always hide their Easter baskets (I guess an extension of the egg hunt?) so now we do too. this year we didnt bother filling the baskets (I promised to get her a lily soon, and she said she'd get me candy on sale), but we still hid them. the video is a collage of the photos we took while we chased around the house. the image quality is pretty low to make the download small. I'll have to work on a balance.

it's also a proof-of-concept for baby-picture-videos later on this year. get ready for lots of such things come august and beyond.

crib and garden

our crib came in yesterday! we got it all assembled and it looks great. we're both surprised at how large it is (even though it's a standard size). it makes it all that much more real. we also found a good deal on a mattress at target (thanks to the Baby Bargains book). many thanks to mom and dad wiegers for springing for it all.

we also got a bunch of little plants for the garden. we got 4 different tomatoes (to join the 2 already in the ground), 2 peppers, a triad of basil, a sqash, a zuchinni, and 6 cucumbers. I got all but the cukes in the ground before sundown, and we set out more slug bait and sprayed insecticidal soap on everything (this years motto: early and often). soon we'll get 6 more cukes, 6 more tomatoes, and a few cantalopes too, and that should do us for plants. we have seeds for spinach, lettuce and some other stuff that we may try, as well as some flowers too.

we're off to Estate of Confusion (a really cool junk store on Main) to find some materials for building trellises for the tomatoes and cukes. we already have some up, but we ran out of the garden fenceposts.

oh and I almost forgot: score at least one more for the good guys against the rats. I found one drowned in a bucket under the house. but they're getting us back right now, as one has apparently died under the house, wedged somewhere in between an air duct and the insulation around it. it's not yet bad enough to motivate me to remove all the insulation, but we shall see.

quilting

Add needlework to my vast array of skills. I tried and failed knitting a few years ago, but now the need has risen for me to pitch in to finish the quilt for our baby.

michelle did all the work of cutting up the fabric and piecing it together, with help from Sarah in the early stages, and a little help from me when we put the puzzle together. she was going to machine quilt for the last step, but apparently that wasn't working, so we're doing it by hand.

since her fibro is flaring lately, she asked me to pitch in, and since it's pretty straitforward, we figured I could handle it. so I gave it a shot last night, and made some pretty good progress. to balance out the manliness factor, I watched the Braves-Mets and Astros-Giants games while I sewed. it's not perfect, but thankfully we're happy with less-than-perfect.

so I'm making a quilt for my kid, and besides the tweak in my back from doing it for 3 hours last night, I couldn't be happier.

tv turnoff week

yesterday I found an article about the evils of tv, which reminded me of the annual tv turnoff week. lots of (admittedly one-sided) info on their site.

bradley method

we're taking bradley natural childbirth classes for the next 12 weeks, and we had our first meeting last night. I've heard that some bradley instructors can be quite militant (to the point of preaching that all doctors are out to kill you), but our instructor is quite level-headed and we're very excited about the class.

check out their site for the rundown of what they teach, but bascially it comes down to learning about and trusting the process, and learning to relax through it. we are not vehemently opposed to modern medicine (like some of our classmates), although we can relate to that perspective. with all of michelle's health issues and her bad back, we want to avoid an epidural if at all possible, so we want to learn about alternative methods for dealing with pain.

so now she has excercises to do every day, and at least once a day we are to focus on intentional relaxation. basically they're saying it's a learned skill, which I think is a good perpective. and she has a measure of experience in relaxing through pain, or at least she'll be able to practice well, since her fibro has been flaring lately. and I'm a big part of all this: partly to be the memory for us when we get there, and partly to coach her through relaxation.

there are 9 couples in our class, most of them about our age, some a bit older. and we know two of the couples already (this is a small town sometimes). one from my days at the Chattanooga Outlook (Winston and Shanna), and one from a friend of a friend who went to Michelle's knit group, and they also have a photography and design studio here in town (James and Julie).

so we're looking forward to this process, and now it's officially michelle's fulltime job to get ready for labor and delivery and beyond. yet with all this focus on relaxation we know we need more than that, so we're praying for God's peace and provision.

tv

during my freshman year of college I did a research paper on how TV affects our brains -- not necessarly the content (which is bad enough), but the medium. I leaned heavily on the Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death, which I highly recommend to anyone interested.

today on the cnn site, I found this article about the link of TV and ADD in little kids. basically is says it fries their helpless little brains.

for a long time I had a disdain for the devil's box, but we've had one in the house for over a year now (thru our computer, thanks to a groovy ati video card from jake). we watched lots of home-improvement type shows for a while, as well as wheel-of-fortune, but now all we really look at is alias, baby story, and a bit of sports now and then.

but we're hoping to avoid turning to the digital babysitter when our kid comes along. it's got to be a big temptation, since it certainly mesmerizes. but at what cost?

"this is your brain...this is your brain on tv....any questions?"

karaoke

my blogging brother-in-law has changed his ways. his first foray into blogland was a steady stream of random entertaining internet tidbits. the perfect cure for boredom. but he's put that aside for something a bit more self-revelatory, and while I'll miss all the cool stuff (actually he still IMs me most of the good ones), I'm definitely glad to get to know him more.

so without further ado: phillydad. today's entry on karaoke is a particular gem.