smacky and bucky

I got through the "extras" disc and Friday the 13th Part 2 last night while L. watched the Emmys in the other room. EIGHT days until the due date. If he doesn't come out on his own in the next week, they schedule a time to induce.

We went to the car seat inspection on Saturday, and apparently I'm an idiot because it was installed wrong 12 different ways. Now that it's in correctly, we're not removing the base ever again. Except that when the kid gets bigger he'll need a new seat. Crap. Oh, I also learned that the county just adjusted their laws and now any child under the age of TWELVE is supposed to ride in the back seat! WTF? The officer even said, "Yeah, good luck enforcing that." Indeed, as 12-year-old children don't carry ID (yet, and boy, do I hope they don't go that route. Sheesh).

I also picked this up and watched it Saturday morning. $3.99 for a sealed copy of Beyond Thunderdome? I call that a Thunderdeal! (sorry).

Did you know that today is NINE days until Laura's due date? We're down to single digits! We're basically sitting around waiting for him to decide he wants to come out and see us. I've been doing junk around the house, then went out in the early afternoon today and found a used copy of this:

Vet called me this morning with urine test results for Maddie. (Apologies for getting any terminology wrong.) The vet found triple phosphate crystals in the urine, which likely means she just needs more fluids. So I'm picking up a special wet food that is supposed to help her flush out the crystals that are likely irritating her bladder wall. (Isn't this interesting?) But I have to dole it out in small doses so only Maddie will eat it, because it is high in fat and sodium, and our "husky" boy cat does not need that!

And that's my life at the moment, until it turns to human baby pee.

Our girl cat Madeline jumped on the counter Tuesday night and peed all over it. Okay, WTF? If she was a little person, I'd think it was a plea for attention, but she's a cat (and a spoiled one, not a neglected one) so instead I figured this would be a good time to take both cats to the vet. Better to have them get a clean bill of health now than after the human baby comes and they actually do start to feel neglected. I put them both in the carrier (yep, the ride together. They hate riding in the car, but they complain about it less if they're in the same carrier, we discovered) and went to the vet's.

Buzz got called fat but happy (and healthy, if a bit pudge). He had his ears cleaned and I got some drops to use on them if they look waxy inside.

Maddie was checked out for any kidney issues, and they took blood and gave me a cat urine collection kit, consisting of small gray plastic beads, a large plastic bag, and a twist tie. The vet explained I had three choices: take the kit and isolate this cat from the other in order to get a urine sample, bring the cat back tomorrow morning and drop her off for the day, or allow them to collect the urine from her bladder with a needle (which could get contaminated with blood and/or lead to a bladder infection in the cat).

Proving how much I love this cat (and didn't want to drive to the vet's the next morning) I took the kit and headed home.

We have a second smaller litter box we put out when we'll be gone a few days so the cats have a second clean place to go. I poured in a little clean litter, covered the litter with the clear plastic bag, and poured the plastic pellets on top of that. Then I closed her in the baby's room with the box, a bowl of water, and a magazine (ha). I put a towel down outside the door to cover the small gap so she and the dog wouldn't try to talk to each other the entire time (and Laura said the cat could then smoke pot, so there's that too), and didn't disturb her for two hours.

At 4:30 I opened the door a crack and discovered my plan had worked (you can figure out what that means). I closed up that bag with the beads and urine in it, tied it off, and put that bag inside a ziploc bag so it wouldn't leak. Then I drove a bag of cat urine to back to the vet's office.

I want to avoid attributing too many human emotions to the cats, but both cats slept on the bed with us last night (usually it's one or neither), so I think Maddie is glad to have gotten this examined (or she's relieved not to be at the vet's any longer).

And, oh yeah, the due date for the baby is now 12 DAYS (if not sooner).

I have an appointment for Saturday at noon to have the county fire department confirm I installed the car seat correctly (either confirming I am a genius or an idiot).

Saturday is also Glen Beck's lame-ass rally on the mall. It's officially being touted as a nonpartisan salute to the troops, but c'mon. Sarah Palin is talking there, and the tea party is having a national conference that weekend in DC. You know what that means? Yep, my father-in-law will be in town this weekend, but we won't see him, because he doesn't want us to know he's attending that and we don't want to spend the weekend around him pointedly not talking about why he's in town, so we're all pretending we don't know he's going to be minutes from our house and he's staying in a hotel somewhere. And we're avoiding downtown DC completely.

We decided last night we are so ready for this kid to get here. There was nothing on TV.

We did about the final kid-related task we could do before he actually gets here:




Panning out, you can see one of the many animals with whom the kid will likely have to share his room!

While I basically try to keep myself busy at work today to keep my mind off the fact that we have to wait until tomorrow at 9:30 for L's next doc appointment, at which time they will test and decide if she's having the kid THAT DAY, I did the usual and checked my various e-mail accounts. In one of them WOOT sent me a coupon code for $5 off any purchase, plus free shipping. That was just the push I needed to finally make my first purchase from them and get this T-shirt:


It's going to be a long day.

Related video: Found this. It requires no introduction:



Also found this one, which I liked enough to also share on Facebook:

Watch more free documentaries


Yesterday was the 33rd anniversary of Elvis's death (in 1977), and I stumbled on this documentary that happens to be from the owner of the Washington Capitals. My worlds are colliding!

So... it turns out there's a chance it won't be in 20 days or so, but rather in TWO or so! We'll know for sure Thursday morning...

More as this story develops!

Laura has her week 37 doctor's appointment today, even though tomorrow is technically week 37 (she had to reschedule because of a conference call for work).

Holy crap, y'all. You know what week 37 means? That means it's three weeks until the actual due date. TWENTY-ONE DAYS. This is really happening!

Saturday we went to a 6-hour birthing class with 11 other couples. (Pregnant women get up to pee constantly during a 6-hour class. Seriously, there was never more than two seconds when everyone was in the room.)

The thing started with the cord blood banking rep making a pitch. Yeah... $1,900 to do it, but $125 a year forever to store it, and most likely it will only come in handy if it's used to treat whatever illness a later kid you might have might get. We're passing on that. But the rep passed out goodie bags with random junk in it, and inside the little cooler bag we got the raffle winning $25 gift card for Babies R Us. Score! Free diapers!

The class was actually very informative, if only for the need-to-know details the woman gave us about which building to go to, where to park, etc. We watched a video of four different births, and half the moms-to-be were like "Ick, I don't want to see my own birth, why do I want to watch someone else give birth?" I have a high threshold for body-type stuff (I took a pic of my arm with my cell phone the last time I gave blood) but I too will admit not having a strong desire to watch this thing come out of my wife's hoo-ha. The nurse said they have a mirror on wheels if the mom wants to watch what's happening. Laura will decline that opportunity.

I also know how to time contractions, and when to go to the hospital (and how long to put it off so you're not sitting there forever). Laura's having one of her sisters there with us in the room, to help out, and to keep their mom from trying to demand to be in there, which neither of us wanted!

We got home after the class around 3:30, both of us tired. Laura went to grab a nap and I popped in They Live, John Carpenter's great '80s flick about aliens secretly invading by keeping us sedate little consumers. About 10 minutes into it, L's sister (the one I mentioned above) called and asked if we wanted to go to dinner. We all agreed on Georgia Brown's in downtown DC. Yum!

Sunday I tried to finish the movie I had started, and got another 20 minutes into it before L got up. I'll finish it before the kid gets here. Maybe. I also finished assembling random baby things: a Pack-n-Play (a playpen that has risers on it so the kid can sleep in it when he's a baby, and it has an attached changing table); a vibrating chair that also rocks (oh man, I said more than once I wish they made these in adult sizes. The adult version is the massage chair from Sharper Image that cost about $2,000); the adapter that allows you to snap the car seat onto the stroller; the car seat base into the backseat of L's car (he won't be riding in my Beetle too often).

At week 37, the baby is considered full-term. The last organ to form (his lungs) is done, and he can come out any time in the next three weeks and not be considered early. I guess we're ready whenever he is. Laura is SO ready to have him, if only to make me take my turn carrying him!

Ebay is having a charity auction of Mad Men props, and you can buy the sette on which Pete awkwardly (and unknowingly) impregnated Peggy!

I took the day off today because Laura had her week 36 sonogram. Her last one was at 20 weeks, so it's been almost four months! What's new? He weighs more (over six pounds now!) and we saw his feet and hands.

Here's a strange pic of the kid looking right at you. As Laura said, "It's kind of creepy."

I like albums. I like the gatefolds, the back cover artwork, the lists of musicians, the lyric sheet inserts, etc. What I'm not is a hipster audio snob. I don't think vinyl sounds tons better than anything else, and I wouldn't trade my iPod with thousands of songs on it for the equivalent on vinyl (because, damn, who would have the space for that???). So I mostly like albums for the artwork, basically. Here's today's example:

The last album Elvis released before his death. At this point, he wasn't even interested in recording new material (which says a lot about how sick he was... sick and self-medicating with a lot of prescription drugs from various doctors) and half the songs on this release are live songs recorded from his recent concerts. The album art also wasn't going to win any awards, with the comic book font for his name and a pic that suggests the designer only reluctantly included the guy in the picture at all, shoving him into the bottom and cutting him off at his (ample) waste. Why am I even blogging about this if it's so unappealing? Well, look below!


As a play on the name of the album, it was pressed in blue vinyl. It's not the first colored vinyl release, but it was still a pretty rare process in 1977.

A note about album frames: I'm so glad these exist. Craft stores sell them, and they're a great way to display them. I picked up three frames on Sunday. They were originally $9.99, but on sale for 40% off. Then for some reason they rang up for $4.99, which is 50% off. Weird. Finally, I had a coupon for an additional 25% off your entire purchase (including off sale prices!), so it was an additional $1.25 off of the sale price, for a grand total of $3.74 each! Thus I've framed the blue vinyl and put the ugly cover away.

De and I went to the Found Footage Festival's showing of Computer Beach Party at the Arlington Cinema and Drafthouse Saturday night (named the #1 thing to do in DC last weekend by the Washington Post! OOOOOOOH!). A good time was had by all. But not as good as these kids in front of us:


The seats are the drafthouse are basically high-backed office chairs, which makes their public display of affection all the more impressive, as she had to contort her upper body to get into the above position (modified headlock, it appears) while keeping her butt in her own seat. I wasn't fast enough to get a "kissing" photo (though I had multiple opportunities), but it looked like this:

So Shutterfly sends e-mails every few months with a deal for 75 free 4x6 prints (just pay like $3 shipping). In a month or so, we'll be all over that deal with baby pics for the grandparents, but in the meantime, it's kind of hard to choose 75 different photos from my hard drive that deserve preservation in physical form. Here are some of the more random ones I chose...

I might need some motivation though. I randomly noticed yesterday that my middle school bully is on Facebook (we have mutual "friends"). I would friend him and antagonize him, but it might be pointless, seeing how many of his status updates mention this fellow named Jesus he apparently found. He needed something, as he was a major dick. That's all I've got today. Life is strange.

This morning I sent Kate this pic I took of my new pens (a second box of red pens [already went through the first box] and a box of blue pens!):


This is Kate's Twitter stream:

She sent my pic to the Pentel folks. Then they retweeted it:
Yeah, it would be more impressive if it was their larger, latest tweet instead of the offer of free pens to Barefoot Mama (Sheesh. How 'bout some love here, folks? I'm not at the female blogger conference, but I do go through a LOT of red pens in my job!

The movie Thursday night was fun. Going alone is a little odd, but it's not my fault I don't know any Elvis fans my age. The guy died when I was like 5!


The movie was playing at the mall a mile up the street from our house, so that was convenient. It also happens to be the home of the Kettler Complex. They built a giant building on top of the parking garage that houses two ice rinks. It's the practice rink of the Washington Capitals. Practices are open to the public and free (how cool is that?). I've been to one and posted pics somewhere on my blog. I'm taking a better camera the next time I go. Anyway, there's a three-story banner hanging in the mall that looks like a Caps jersey.

Saturday I dropped Laura off at the spa (previous post) and cleaned some at home. Tomorrow (Tuesday) is week 34, meaning about 36 days to go until the little guy arrives! Now that our bedroom has carpet and all the furniture moved back in, we're feeling a LOT more calm about it. Laura's baby shower is this coming Sunday, which means more gifts and more things for me to assemble. Saturday night Laura wanted to go to a nice dinner (since soon we won't be doing that without hiring a baby sitter first!), so we went to a steakhouse called Wildfire. Yum.

Yesterday (Sunday) was the Dunn Loring comic show, and I went to that alone too (thanks De! Just kidding, not your fault. Or was it? You went to brunch in Fredericksburg?) . I had two big scores: One guy had recently bought a huge collection and had set up a ton of boxes with comics marked 50 cents each. Inside one box I found a complete run of Jack Kirby's '70s return to Captain America! These issues are usually between $3 and $10 each. I picked up all 25 issues. Yay!

Then on the way home I stopped at Unique Thrift Store (Ignore the bad reviews. Those people are either snobs are just plain stupid). The place is HUGE. I stopped on a whim once before because it's a few blocks from the comic show, so this time I knew the layout. I went straight to where I had seen a rack of hockey jerseys last time (when all they had were weird community teams and little league jerseys). This time I stumbled on a great find:


A Washington Capitals jersey in the old style the team wore from 1997 to 2004! These things are TOUGH to find at a descent price, even on ebay (here's one for $200). This one is in like-new condition and I got it for $15! WOW!

After relaxing yesterday afternoon, I made dinner for us and went to sleep before Mad Men came on (we recorded it to watch tonight)