Bonehead

You know how you have those bonehead moments where you can’t belive you just did something? Like in 9th grade when I went to a school band concert and forgot to bring my flute. Well, I had one of those a couple days ago when I went flying.

I was chatting with my instructor while pre-flighting the airplane. One of the steps is that you get up on the wing and measure the fuel remaining by dipping a ~14" long plastic stick into the tank. I stuck the stick in upside down first, and had to pull it out and turn it over to read it correctly. Thus the part of the stick in my hand was wet with av gas when I stuck it in the second time.

Me: "Yeah, I was a little worried when I called earlier and the wind was gusting to 18... Oh, shit."

Instructor: "What?"

Me: "Um..."

Instructor: "Did you drop it in there?"

Me: "Uh, yeah." ... blushing ... "Can you get it out?"

Instructor: "I’m not sure I have anything here..."

As it turned out, we did fish it out. Or rather, he and another pilot did. My pregnant belly wouldn’t even let me get up there enough to look in the hole. It took pushing the plane up onto a little hill to get the probe to roll to the front of the tank, my instructor lying on his belly on top of the cabin, and ther other guy on a ladder holding the flashlight and one gripper. And 20 minutes. But, we got it out.

I was very careful when I measured the fuel in the other tank to hold on to the stick.

Anyway, I’m sure it wasn’t the first time it’s ever happened in the history of aviation. But, it was the first time for my instructor, and when you’ve flown as many hours and instructed as many students as he has, that’s saying something.

Snow Angels

So I haven’t had much to write about this week. I’ve gone to work, gone home, eaten dinner, watched TV, gone to bed. Not very exciting. No blog fodder. So...

BISMARCK, N.D. — Legislators waved their arms in a snow-angel salute Wednesday to celebrate North Dakota recapturing a world record for those whimsical works of winter.

Guinness World Records has confirmed that the state holds the world record for the most snow angels made simultaneously in one place, said Marilyn Snyder, the education curator for the State Historical Society of North Dakota.

That's 8,962 snow angels, created Feb. 17 by people waving their arms while lying in the snow covering the Capitol grounds.

North Dakota's snow figure turnout bested the earlier record of 3,784, set at Michigan Technological University on Feb. 10, 2006.

North Dakota set the first record in the category in 2002, with 1,791.

"If anybody wants to challenge (the snow angel record), bring 'em on." said state Sen. Dick Dever, who sponsored a resolution celebrating the achievement that the Senate approved Wednesday. It now goes to the state House.

At Dever's request, senators waved their arms in snow-angel fashion as they approved the resolution. The Senate's presiding officer, Lt. Gov. Jack Dalrymple, called the display "a bizarre thing to see."

It’s nice to see something fun in the news every once in a while.

Bubbles or Alien?

I realized today that I never wrote about the experience of feeling the baby move for the first time. I first felt movement in my 18th week. I was sitting in a very long meeting at work when I first realized what I was feeling. Of all the common descriptions of how that first movement feels (butterfly wings, a finger flicking your stomach, bubbles), I suppose that the bubbles description comes closest to what I felt. I actually kind of felt like I had one tiny muscle spasm in my stomach. And then another one in a different location. Other people don’t seem to agree with my description, but that’s what it felt like to me.

In all, those first few movements felt very, very natural. I was expecting it to be very strange feeling something move around inside my body. But, it really was almost difficult to believe that those sensations were the baby and not just feelings from my own body.

It’s a good thing, probably some result of natural selection, that the movements gain strength naturally. Because, if I’d felt at first the kind of movement I feel now, I’m sure I would have freaked out! I expected the kicks and jabs. Those feel pretty much like you would expect. More uncomfortable is the “stretch”. Sometimes it feels like the baby is trying to make more room in there by pushing out with all its limbs at once. The movement that always makes me jump, though, is the “roll”.

I’m not sure exactly what causes it - maybe a knee or elbow? Imagine this: take a knuckle on your hand and rub it in a 3” circle around your belly button. Now imagine that sensation being on the inside and that you’re pressing hard enough that you can see the skin bulging out about an inch where the knuckle is. It’s weird.

I was sitting in a boring meeting this morning, watching my belly bulge out in different places as the baby moved around. I’m telling you, if a primitive human felt this as the first signal of pregnancy, they’d probably assume that they were inhabited by a deamon of some sort.

The Mouse in the House

We caught a mouse this morning. Gavin took care of disposing of it (luckily), but he said that the carnage wasn’t too bad. I think part of my mouse revulsion is due to the fact that the ones we had in Wyoming were mostly naked and slimy. That and the time one ran across the floor, and my dad stepped on it to kill it. It squeaked. Very traumatic.

We caught the mouse under the kitchen sink, and it’s pretty obvious from the placement of the trap that it was coming from the area behind the dish washer. I suppose an obvious next step would be to pull the dish washer out from under the counter and see if there’s a nest back there or a hole in the wall. I’m not sure how one would pull a dishwasher out, though. I assume there’s disconnection of plumming involved.

I’ve been having trouble adjusting to daylight savings time. I’m wanting to stay up and get up about an hour late. And what’s up with it being dark when my alarm clock rings? I hate that.

Guess What I Did Yesterday

I SOLOED!!!! I wasn’t sure it was going to happen. I had a rough lesson on Saturday, and then even though we rescheduled to evening to have a better chance of light winds, they were still blowing 11 kts. (But, mainly down the runway.) I was flying really well last night, though, even though my instructor did the “pull out the throttle without announcing his intentions to simulate an engine failure” thing twice. (That was the first and second time ever.)

So, after 5 landings he told me to pull off by the fueling station. “How do you feel about going yourself? Does it make you nervous?”

“Well, yes, but I don’t think that’s going to go away until I do it.”

So, I went. The first landing was brilliant. I really nailed it. The second one was good, but the nose gear started vibrating, which had never happened before. Luckily, he just talked me through it, and I did one more.

:)

Sensitive

I'm getting sensitive about sad things relating to babies. Gavin went to see 300 for the SECOND time tonight. I wasn't much interested, so I came home. Since we currently have no sofa in the living room (we think the sofa is mouse-infested, so we moved it to the garage), I decided to come upstairs and watch a movie on the old TV. I chose Fever Pitch, which I have never seen before. There's a scene where they think that Drew Barrymore's character is pregnant, and then find out she isn't. I almost cried. Then I told the baby to take care of itself and get here safely.

Considering how much I'm enjoying flying, you'd think I'd be doing better about studying. I'm not, though. I really need to make sure that I know the pre-solo questions well enough that if Jeff decides to give me the test this weekend, I can pass. That shouldn't be too hard, but it does require some review. Better go do that now.

Go With It

I was looking back over the last couple months of posts, and the tags are overwhelmingly about the baby. I guess that’s inevitable. This blog is about our life, and the biggest thing going on right now is the incubation of a new human. Still, it’s a good thing that I started flying and that we went to Colorado last month or this page would be all baby all the time. That topic is terribly interesting to me, but maybe not so much to everyone else.

I’ve got two lessons scheduled for this weekend - Saturday and Sunday. I hope the weather will be good for both. When I went to the airport with Becca last weekend, there was a nice steady crosswind across the runway. My only crosswind landing lesson so far was on a very gusty day, and I wouldn’t mind seeing one where I could plan ahead a bit and didn’t have to “go with it” quite so much on every landing.

There was an interesting post a few days ago on a blog I like to read, Flight Level 390. He describes the mental calculations necessary to shorten the descent into Las Vegas on an Airbus flight. I wonder how long it takes to get comfortable enough with flying the airplane to be able to do math like that in your head on approach. I don’t have enough spare mental capacity to add 2+2 when I’m in the pattern.

Baby M Has a Face

It's official - I'm in the third trimester as of today. We went to the doctor yesterday and got another ultrasound. I guess the placenta is attached a bit lower than normal, and he wanted to make sure it wasn't overlapping my cervix at all. Not sure why that's bad, but there you go. Anyway it wasn't, so we're still all in the clear. The size of the baby in this ultrasound puts my due date on June 4, which isn't statistically different than the date June 6 that we've been working with until now.

This picture was really cool, because you can actually see the baby's face. Things I feel the need to point out...

1) The baby has Gavin's nose :)

2) I think I can see eyelashes

3) I believe Baby has his/her hand in his/her mouth - not fangs as some people seem to see

Missing my Waistline

I'm starting to forget what it was like to have a waist. I'm constantly looking at my old clothing thinking, how would that ever button? A picture came up on my computer wallpaper of me on a hiking trip in 2003, and I thought to myself how my legs looked very skinny sticking out of my shorts. I guess it's all relative. And yet, it's pretty tough to motivate myself to get off my butt these days. I had considered going for a walk yesterday afternoon, but instead I slept for 2 hours. Bad Jen.

Slug

I've been a slug this weekend. I've taken naps every day since Friday. Today I didn't even do anything to need a nap. I got up, took a bath, and took a nap. I wonder if I'm going to get pregnant-tired again now that I'm getting into my third trimester.

Yesterday, I went to the airport with Becca to keep her cousins company while waiting for their turn in the plane. I stood out on the ramp for a while, and then went up in the plane the second time. It was about 80 deg outside yesterday, so that was all pretty warm. After I went to lunch with them and to the grocery store. By the time I got home I was absolutely dead. I'm going to melt once it gets to be really summer.

I put in Toy Story tonight while I was cleaning. The three-headed sheep that follows Bo around kind of freaks me out. They could have at least made the body with three lumps.

Sunbeams and 300 and my GeForce 7600gs

This morning Jen and I were eating our cereal while watching the Daily Show. It wasn't 9am yet, which is unusual for both of us to be up. The sun was shining in between the blinds and painting the wall next to the fireplace a brilliant cream. Roxy eventually wandered up to the sunbeam on the wall, sniffed at it, looked at the floor, looked back at the wall, and then sat in front of the wall so she would be in the sunbeam. You could tell she was trying to complain to the sunbeam that its supposed to be on the floor! That's what sunbeams do. As the hour passed and the sunbeam slide down to the floor, so did Roxy.

I took a long lunch yesterday to go watch 300 with Troy and Jason. It was a fun movie, I liked several parts of it. Much of it was CG with some actors tossed on top of it, and you could definitely identify some of the comic book influence in some of the scenes. Lots of eye candy, for both the guys and the girls as some of the film reviewers point out. While there was a lot of blood in the fight scenes, it was curiously blurred as it flew through the air in slow motion. Again, like a comic book where a frame is trying to illustrate the motion. It helped to remind the audience that they were watching a comic book movie, not a historical docudrama. Storywise, nothing special. There were some funny scenes. There were also some disturbing scenes, which I also attribute to the comic book influence. I'd probably see it again.

Yesterday after work we drove over to CompUSA to check out the sales. I picked up a new video card to replace my 2-year-old one. It looks pretty nice. I tried boosting up the resolution to 1600x1200 to see what it would do... and my monitor couldn't handle it! Black screen, frequency too high, etc. I suppose I'll need to get a new monitor eventually.

I also picked up Jade Empire, which I was excited about 3 years ago when it came out. I was bummed when I realized it was out for the X-Box, not the PC. I guess a year or so ago they releeased it for the PC, it comes on a DVD. So with much anticipation I put in the DVD to install it... but my DVD player couldn't read it! I remember having a similar problem with the Legos Star Wars game I got a year ago. Looking around on the internet didn't provide any quick easy fixes: everyone said the player wasn't good.

Fifteen minutes ago I returned from Walmart with a new CD/DVD reader and it's now happily installing Jade Empire. And maybe later today I'll install the legos game, and I'll have two to play! In 1280x1024 resolution, with all of the graphic options turned to max!

(Can you tell Jen isn't at home today?)

Yuk

Tracy gave me a bunch of Eva’s old bedding (Thanks, Tracy!), which matches the green in the room perfectly. That really helps as I didn’t know what I was going to do about the crib bedding. I finally decided that I wasn’t going to find any “theme” bedding that I liked and that also matched.

I got a burst of energy last night and decided to clean out all the junk from the nursery closet. This basically meant that I moved junk from that room into the spare room, which is already pretty overflowing with junk. As in you can’t walk to the back of the room. I need to tackle that one of these days, too. Anyhow, it’s ready and waiting for baby furniture, clothing, and the rest.

Gross thing about living in Houston: If you clean out a closet that hasn’t been cleaned in a while, you always find bug parts under all the junk. Yuk!

And we have mice. I thought we did, because we found the droppings under the kitchen sink. I wasn’t sure though until we got back from Colorado and I found teeth marks in some old Halloween candy. I bought traps, but we haven’t caught anything yet. We may have to upgrade to poison.

Go-Around

I went flying yesterday, even though the winds were about 12 kt gusting to 20 kt and coming from every which way. Basically, that meant that I had to work really, really hard for my 7 landings. I even got in a go-around when a gust caught me about 15 feet off the runway, and I pulled back too much while correcting and ended up 30 or 40 feet off. I guess it’s a good thing to know when to call it quits. I never had the same winds more than once in a row, as the crosswind component kept changing. Mostly I did OK, though, and I had probably my two best landings ever on approaches where the winds stayed relatively steady for the last 50 feet or so.

Other than that, this weekend was an exercise in laziness. I read Uglies, which Becca loaned me on the ski trip. I liked it so much I went out and bought the entire series so I’d have it to read again. I polished off Pretties and most of Specials yesterday. I took a nap last night that made me not tired until 1:00 AM, which probaby explains my 9:30 AM arrival at work this morning. That and that when I finally did try to go to sleep, the baby demonstrated that it’s finally getting strong enough to be a real distraction when it’s active. He/she kept kicking the same place on my belly over and over. Really hard. And then alternating that with periods where it felt like it was stretching, pushing outward on both sides of my belly. And then it kicked my stomach and gave me heartburn. I guess I’m getting out of the 2nd trimester “honeymoon” period, and into the 3rd trimester “how long is this going to last” period.

Patagonia!

At long last, I finished another trip report! Patagonia is available merely a year after return!

Happy Place

I woke up feeling very lazy today. I guess it's the first week back from vacation and 3 days of work is what I was able to do without getting tired. At least tomorow will be Friday, and then we have a weekend.

We had our first Lamaze class last night. One of the interesting things they had was a diagram of where all your organs go to make room for the baby. All I have to say is, no wonder I have heartburn! Gavin got to have 30 lbs of baby weight added into a "pregnant belly" and then tried to tie his shoe. :) He deserves it for all the laughing at me he's been doing.

The only breathing we practiced was basically just a relaxing technique where you breathe deeply and relax all your muscles. It also involved going to your "comfortable place". I imagined napping on my couch with Gavin. Then she told us to look around and remember all the things, people, and sounds that make it comfortable. When she said "sounds" all of a sudden I heard Roxy snoring! And I kept hearing it for the rest of the session. How strange is it that my happy sound is a dog snoring?!

Of course Gavin wasn't helping the relaxation at the time. When asked to go to his comfortable place, he whispers in my ear "I'm in a Zeppelin..."

Lamaze, Episode I

Jen and I went to our first Lamaze class last night. There were about a dozen couples, wearing colored name tags. Blue if you know you're having a boy, pink if you're having a girl, and yellow if you're not finding out. We were the only yellow cards which our nurse instructor was happy to congratulate us on.

While Jen filled out the paper work, I grabbed our pillows and a floor pad and made our 'nest'. At least that's what our teacher called it. I suppose it's a stork reference. Do storks make nests? We chatted with a few of the other students while we waited for the class to begin.

First our instructor asked for a volunteer from the guys, so I stepped up. I warily approached as I realized she was holding a knapsack that could hold a lot of things. Such as beans, water bottles, and other things that add up to the average 35 pounds of extra weight that expecting mothers eventually carry. After hanging the knapsack over my belly and loading it up, to the amusement of all watching, I was instructed to untie my shoe. It wasn't my most graceful moment but using the nearby yoga ball was a flash of brilliance.

Later on as the teacher was going through the relaxation exercises, she turned down the lights and asked us all to close our eyes and think of a happy, safe place. I whispered to Jen, "Zeppelin." She started laughing, which was a little distracting to the class, so I didn't tell her my follow-up, "No, wait, a helium-filled zeppelin." On the ride home she told me her happy place was napping on the couch and that every time she concentrated on that, suddenly, in her mind, she would hear one of our dogs snoring loudly.