11 Days to Baby Day! (38 Weeks and Three Days Pregnant)
“When someone asks you ‘think about what Jesus would do’, remember that a valid option is to freak out and turn over tables” – Anonymous, Thanks to Catholic Pillowfight
Eleven days to go. It is starting to feel pretty real at this point. We are really into the home stretch. We could be having this baby absolutely any day now. Dad is planning on coming down to Peekskill on Thursday, I believe, to begin his “baby vigil”. He will be bringing down another massive carload of our stuff as well. He thinks that he can fit the majority of the remaining furniture such as the other two dining room chairs and Dominica’s really nice recliner that we got from our wedding funds five years ago. We love that chair but have not been able to use it for years now. Dominica and I will be working really hard to have the unpacking completed by the time that dad makes it down on Thursday so that we are ready for the new stuff that will be arriving then.
I found out today that tomorrow is a holiday so I am off from work! Good deal. I am going to be covering in the morning some from home but it will be pretty relaxed overall. I don’t have to really stay glued to the computer and half of my day will be over by the time that Dominica and Oreo decide to get up. The most important thing is that they get to really sleep in tomorrow and get some rest.
Dominica says that Oreo’s leg is looking a little better today and that he is starting to put some additional weight onto it. He was still limping pretty badly this morning.
The Pop!Tech conference in Maine, this year, produced some great new language recommendations. These are new words that seem to be useful in our current lexicon in English. That’s to Erin at Dictionary Eangelist for turning me on to these. (Yes, I really read things like Dictionary Evangelist.) There are my favourites:
polydundant — of a phrase that is redundant through the use of words from two or more languages that have the same meaning, e.g., Panera Bread Company. (from Annaliese Hoehling)
attachmeant — the file you have to resend because you forgot to attach it the first time. (from Julie Meyer)
forblogen — unsuitable or unavailable to be blogged about, “don’t post about our new beta, it’s still forblogen.” (Also Julie. :-)) [Personally, I think that verblogen is better using the verboten as the source rather than forbidden. Verblogen sounds better for German speakers as well rather than being English only. – Scott]
techumanitarian — someone who uses technology to promote social good. (from Michelle Riggen-Ransom, a Pop!Tech blogger — she should know, right?)
After turning in my final paper for RIT on Friday night, I still have no real sense of how I am doing in the class. The class wrapped up three days ago and the only grades that I have, of any sort at all, for the entire class are the two grades that I have on the drafts of my final. No grade on the final (not yet expected) nor any grade at all on any homework or class participation all semester. I am totally in the dark. The class has been over for half of a week and I only know about ten percent of my grade. I could literally have a 99% or a 9% at this point depending on the grading. That is a pretty big margin within which to be wondering about your grade. I have no doubt that I have passed but I worked pretty hard in that class and would like to know how I did.
To make things even more frustrating, after working really hard to get my paper turned in on time on Friday night, foregoing sleep and making myself almost ill and making Dominica proofread it on Friday when she needed sleep as well, there were people turning in their papers over the weekend and at least one turned in today 🙁
Joel Spolsky, who wrote the famous 12 Laws of Software Development, wrote an article in Inc. that was published recently discussing how he broke seven of the laws on his latest project and nothing bad happened. In fact, things went really well. Much of this was exactly the topic of my final paper for my class. All throughout the class people kept quoting Joel’s twelve laws but, in my experience, almost no one uses those laws. Many of them are great ideas but they are just “nice” to have and the really important thing is having great developers and not making processes that make them unable to work. The one law, which he also broke, I believe is a detriment to companies who follow it.
Joel generally hires the exact opposite developers from whom I would want to hire. He likes people who can do collegiate style computer science curriculum work in an interview over anyone else (preferably in C) while I prefer passion and dedication to the field over all else and figure that the skills that Joel tests are so inconsequential that if I am hiring people who can’t learn them in an hour that I am screwed anyway.
The alarm went off at six this morning and it didn’t even wake me up. I am going to need a few days to recover from the past week. Dominica woke me up because the alarm was annoying her.
I decided quickly that I was not going to have what it took to get moving quickly enough to be able to make the 7:08 train so I just relaxed and took my time. Dominica got up and made eggs and toast for breakfast and then we went out to get me on to the 7:37 train. We were running a little late but the train was about five minutes late so I was there in plenty of time. It worked out well.
It was a beautiful, crisp morning. Standing on the platform in the early morning light with the leaves changing on the hills over Jones Point, the water breaking on the shore, seagulls flying by making the ubiquitous sound of the sea while the Metro North train winds its way over Annsville Creek coming around the mount from Putnam County as it enters Cortlandt and Peekskill – it’s a great way to start the morning.
Lunch today was a small cheese sandwich and a leek and potato pie from a place at 60 Wall Street. I had no idea that there were restaurants inside of the Deutsche Bank building. I have never been in there before. What a nice building.
This afternoon when we went out for coffee, Shreyash and I suddenly decided that we just had to get cupcakes. So we went on a hunt for cupcakes. We knew that the rather famous Crumbs Bake Shop was somewhere nearby but we were not sure exactly where so we wandered around for a bit before finding it hidden on a back street. I had walked by it once before so I knew roughly where it was but it has been quite a while and I didn’t know the address.
We picked up cupcakes for the office getting a large assorted box of them. I also picked up a stack of halfmoon cookies (black and whites as they call them in New York City, halfmoons in Utica) for Dominica. They are her favourite type of cookey and she is unable to ever find good ones down here so I am interested to see if she likes these. These look a lot more like the ones that I really like.
The cupcakes were awesome. Best cupcakes that I have ever had.
Things were just busy enough today around lunch time that I had to skip my swim. I don’t like skipping my swim (partially because I have to pay so much for it) so my plan is to run out of the office a little early and to go down, swim and hope the train from Bowling Green instead of from Wall. It will save a little bit of time.
I am hoping to be able to play some Oblivion tonight while at home. We will see how much Dominica has planned for the evening.
At a quarter till six the office had been almost completely dead for about half an hour and people were all heading home early. The market closed early today so a lot of people are not hanging around. I am so glad to have a surprise day off. This means that of the two days that we were worried about Dominica being “ready to go” at any second that I will be home for one of them. And since I am working part of the holiday I will probably shorted Wednesday a little bit and go in a little bit late so that she can sleep in a little more as well. It eliminates almost all of the time in which she was stuck without either dad or I being there.
I discovered recently that I have a lot of readers coming in from the Dallas, Texas area. I had no idea until we were visiting with Dominica’s family this weekend and a few people mentioned how they read SGL. So I checked the stats today and Dallas is far outstripping Houston as our largest readership in Texas. In fact, Austin has far passed Houston and San Antonio is right up there with it. California is actually beating Texas, though, with a good number of readers from all of the big metro areas but Santa Clara is the major one. There are a surprising number of readers from England and Scotland. You would think that we would have more representation from Northern Ireland considering how many people that I know there but it is the English Midlands who really represent for the UK. Australia actually has more readers than Canada followed by Germany, the Netherlands, India, France and Greece, in that order.
I left the office a little after six thirty and walked down to Whitehall to hit the gym. I am all alone today for my workout which makes it harder to do. I swam for thirty to forty five minutes and then took the Lexington Avenue Express from Bowling Green to Grand Central. Luckily, I made it for the 8:29 train to Peekskill so it wasn’t so late.
Dominica picked me up at 9:32 (the train was running quite late today) and we went home where she made hot veggie-meatball subs which were really tasty. Reminiscent of sandwiches from hot truck in Ithaca. They were very good.
After dinner we watched the last few minutes of an episode of American Dad that Dominica was in the midst of when she had to leave to pick me up and then we watched an episode of Mary Tyler Moore from the first season of which I am about a third of the way through from Hulu. We also got the PS3 “BluRay” remote hooked up and working so that the PS3 works a lot more like a normal media device than like a video game machine. That will make it much friendlier for people to use. People like our parents who are all going to be spending a lot of time here very soon.
Before we knew it, it was eleven thirty and time for bed. We are very excited to both get to be home tomorrow. This will really give us a chance to get some work done around the house as well as to just catch up on some sleep. Our busy week(s) is now over but we are still behind on sleep a bit so this is perfect. We really need a surprise day at home to spend getting things into order. We have made good progress but there is so much still to do. The dining room is still a pile of boxes as is our bedroom. The basement cannot be helped until the bookshelves are attached to the walls.
Dominica is having Braxton-Hicks contractions pretty frequently now. That is a pretty good sign that the baby is preparing to make a break for it. Braxton-Hicks are contractions that strengthen muscles to prepare the mother for the birthing process. Dominica is starting to get them anytime that she is not just sitting and relaxing.