Five Things: Little fish

1. Work/Programming
No change so far with my work situation. I’m employed through the end of the year.. and still up in the air as to what will happen next year.

Pet projects deployed. This time there were no problems. Good to see them off and running. New adopted projects took a really really long time to get the environment setup(9 days).. but as soon as it was setup I was off and running on the project. I believe the new adopted project will end by the middle of next week.

My boss is pushing me to interact more with the CTO. I’ve been at this company for 13 years.. in all that time the closest I’ve come to interacting with whoever was CTO at the time has always been by being in some big meeting where the CTO just happened to attend. It turns out that the current CTO came to us from a much small company.. and he likes having a much more in-person relationship with all the folks at the company. So .. ok.. I guess relatively soon I’ll be meeting with him to develope an in-person relationship. We’ll see how that works out.

2. Home
Sewing room is turned back into a guest bedroom. But I think that’s only for another two or three weeks.

I’m troubled by the amount of invisible piles that are accumulating in our house. I’m so so busy right now. I just can’t find the time to deal with the things that need to be sorted out. So instead of being sorted, dealt with and put away.. instead the things that need to be sorted out have been stacked in a corner.. and at this point they’ve been in that corner long enough that my eyes are starting to skip over the stack and no longer see them as clutter. This -needs- to change.. not only that, it -needs- to change before my parents arrive (“What would my mother think” keeps running through my head). So I am going to try to sort some of these things out in this next week. I think I can steal a little bit of time from my current projects in order to sort this stuff out.. it may impact the projects but it will definitely decrease my stress level if I just get it sorted out.

3. Health
This is week 16. According to the baby letters we’re getting via email, the baby is now 4.5-5″ long head to rump. He’s about the size of an avocado.

For the first time EVER this weekend I felt the baby move.

This past weekend we attended Golden Rivers Anniversary Championship. It was 97 degrees at its hottest. I don’t do well with heat.. and I think neither does the baby. At about 4pm as I was sitting in the shade grumping to myself about how horribly uncomfortably hot I was I felt.. something. If I had to describe I’d say it felt like a garbage truck was driving by and vibrating the ground.. and that vibration was travelling up my tail bone and into my belly. Or like that feeling you get if you live on the 3rd floor.. and someone on the 5th floor is having a fantastic house party.. and they have the Bass turned all the way up.. and it’s vibrating your floor.. but you can’t hear any of the music. It felt like that.. and it lasted for a good 3-5 minutes.

Now when “they” said I might feel the baby move I expected sharp prods that I would say to myself “wow.. that was sharp.. I wonder what that was.. maybe it was the baby”. I did not expect to feel like a little fish was wriggling like mad on the end of a line connected to my belly for about 5 minutes. So yea.. I think I can say with some authority that the baby does not like it when I get too hot.

We have a doctor’s appointment on Wednesday morning. Hopefully this time we get to actually meet our OB/GYN. I would have hoped that by 16 weeks we’d know our Doctor.. but obviously that’s not the way Kaiser works. I’ve been telling people that I have an OB/GYN team.. because we’ve been in to Kaiser 6 times and have yet to meet the same person twice.

I’m about half way done reading “Happiest Baby on the block”. It’s about how to successfully sooth your baby (prevent colic) from birth the 4 months. My cousin recently had a baby and she says that the book helped them immensely.

The next book on my TODO list is “Natural Childbirth the Bradley Way: Revised Edition”. I have a couple people recommend the “Bradley Method” for child birth.. but unfortunately it doesn’t look like they offer the classes up near Santa Rosa. So I plan to read the book.. and then, if necessary, see about going to classes in Berkeley or San Francisco. I’m kind of hoping the book is fairly easy to follow.. because driving 2 hours south once a week for a class for 12 weeks sounds like no fun at all.

4. SCA/Projects
Progress is progressing. I have three weeks until the knighting.. and at the moment I believe I can get everything done that I want to do.

Project list:
– Black Linen Tunic to try out new pattern for Fearghus (Due ASAP) Black is sewn together and he tried it on and likes it well enough. I’m now hand finishing the seams, hemming it and then adding a decorative seam before I hand it off to Edith who is adding some super spiff cording. We’ve decided this will be his Vigil night tunic.
– White Linen Tunic for Fearghus (Due June 22) After trying on the black Tunic Fearghus says he like the new pattern well enough.. but he’d prefer for me to use my tried-and-true pattern for the knighting tunic. He knows how the tried-and-true pattern looks and wears and really doesn’t want something untried for his nicest tunic ever. I hope to get this cut out/start on sewing this week.
– Trim for white tunic for Fearghus (Due June 22) I’m 80% done with this trim. I’ve finished 7.5 repeats of the pattern.. they may be enough but I’m going to go ahead and finish out the thread that’s on the loom just to make sure.

Time flies when you’re busy. I’m finding that I need to be mindful of this and the fact that I’m busy busy busy.. pretty much for the rest of the year and stop volunteering for things.

5.
On the way back from Cynaguan Coronet I mentioned to Fearghus that I believe we should get an “Expedition XLT Luxury Travel edition”. He gaped at me for a while and then realized (as I described it) that it was a stroller not a ginormous monster of an SUV. But as soon as he figured out what I was talking about he decided we needed it NOW.. not in a few weeks.. not shortly before the baby is born. No! We needed to get it NOW! So we stopped off at Toys R Us and went shopping.

It’s a stroller+car seat that’s highly rated. It’s a jogging stroller which has giant dirt bike-like tires. It comes with a car seat so that the car seat and stroller are usable from birth to 3 years old . Well.. ok.. the car seat is birth to 50 lbs.. and the stroller is birth to 3 years. It collapses down almost flat and seemed like a very good investment to me. It was $191 from Toys R Us online with free home delivery. It’s not a “period” looking thing.. but honestly people can look away and get over it.

We also ended up getting a new car. We had a KIA Soul. It’s a teeny tiny Tardis of a car (bigger on the inside)… but it’s not too too much bigger on the inside.. So when we started talking about hauling ourselves + baby + baby paraphernalia around we both agreed that we needed a bigger car. Add to that, our Soul was just about to come out of warranty.

In all honestly what we really need to do is to replace his truck(it’s a 1990 and not baby friendly). BUT if we do that now we end up with two car payments and although we could probably swing it.. it seemed like a better idea to upgrade the car first.

We got a KIA Sportage. In the end our new payments are about $60 more than our old payments.. and we ended up getting 10 year warranty on the new car.

So um.. the baby made us do it.

Future:
June 8 A&S Tournament (daytrip maybe)
June 14: Attending a wedding (hotel)
June 21-23: June Crown
June 29: Attending a wedding, Nevada City (hotel)
July 6: Vegas Baby!!
July 13: Cynaguan Summer Investiture (daytrip)
July 20: FREE WEEKEND!!! (We’re not attending Pennsic)
July 27: Bachelorette Party in VEGAS!
August 3: FREE WEEKEND!!!
August 10: Potential fitting someone for German dress.
August 17: FREE WEEKEND!!!
August 23-25: Purgatorio (not sure if we’re attending)
August 31, 2013 My wedding in Billings Montana (Wedding website: https://sites.google.com/site/stroudwed/)