So as I glossed over before, we had to put Tigger down last week. He was starting to show signs of getting worse again, and we wanted to end it on a high note for him, as opposed to waiting until he was too miserable to be a happy cat. It was very sad, but he just slipped away without much trauma, which is much, much better than what would have happened if we had just let him die of natural causes. So we know we did the right thing for all involved, but I still had to have a good cry on Jessies lap when we got home.
Nagano seems to miss his roommate. He’s much cuddlier than he has been in the past, wanting always to be around us and getting a lot of attention. Which is nice for us, but I think he misses having someone around during the day, so we’ve been thinking about getting another cat.
This, because we are responsible people, means the pound or, because it’s closer, a non-profit humane society that we went by yesterday. They actually have a pretty neat setup, where there a lot of cats in cages, as you would expect, but they also have cat rooms, where they keep the cats that get along with other cats well. And the rooms have scratching posts and litter boxes and all sorts of toys. And you can just wander in and start looking at cats.
I met a few of the contenders, all of whom were really nice. Except for the ones that were asleep, because they were too busy being sleepy to want to visit. There were several that I would have taken home in an instant, but we decided we didn’t want to decide right then, so we just went across the street to the Red Lobster for dinner with Tyler (he had some of my broccoli) and talked about cats. There was on there that I seriously was considering taking home with us, and it begs the question, what should we be waiting for? Maybe, at least, for a weekend when we can spend more time with the cat in his new home. Do I think they might have better cats next time we go back? What would a better cat even look like?
Anyway, I’m thinking about this really sweet little black cat we met there yesterday. If she’s not there when we go back it’s because someone else thought she was a sweetie, too.
Man…cats, right?
-N
Showing posts with label Noel being a dork. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Noel being a dork. Show all posts
Friday, February 24, 2012
Saturday, April 9, 2011
Conquering the Night
I like this ‘midnight blog’ thing. Could become a trend.
The last few nights have been battles between Tyler’s unpredictability and his more reasonable nature as we try to figure out what a newborn sleep schedule might actually look like. Three and two nights ago were rough, with nice, solid, 4 hour sleep blocks surrounding a stretch of 4 hours in the middle of the night when Tyler was up and crying much of the time. I blame most of it on formula experiments. Last night was great. We put him to bed at 9, fed him every four hours, and he was pretty much asleep other than that. We’re trying again tonight, but so far Tyler hasn’t seen fit to actually go to sleep yet.
Jess, too, is coming along. We use the ‘walk’ as a metric of her progress. Today we bundled up Tyler, put him in the stroller and walked down the street to the park, and then back. Last time, Jess didn’t quite make it all the way, so progress, yes? Also, we saw a good 4 or 5 neighbors, all of whom we knew, and all of whom were all excited to see Tyler. It makes us feel good to think we’ve got some roots down here, tenuous as they might be, at times.
Speaking of metrics, we have a unit of measure around here called ‘The Cat’. It’s a measure of how much stuff you have on your lap that keeps you from getting up, easily. It’s used when someone needs to go do something, the one with fewer ‘cats’ usually has to get up and do it. Here are some equivalent cat measures, just in case you feel like adopting this system as your own.
1 Cat = 1 Cat
Being a little pregnant = 1 Cat
Being a lot pregnant = 3 Cats
Holding a Baby = 2 Cats
Holding a sleeping baby = 3 Cats
Using a Laptop = 0 Cats
Eating = .5 Cats
Having a Cesarean in the past 3 days or less = All the Cats
Having a Cesarean in the past week or less = Approx 1 Cat, depending on painkiller levels
Husband modifier = Approx 1 cat
-N
The last few nights have been battles between Tyler’s unpredictability and his more reasonable nature as we try to figure out what a newborn sleep schedule might actually look like. Three and two nights ago were rough, with nice, solid, 4 hour sleep blocks surrounding a stretch of 4 hours in the middle of the night when Tyler was up and crying much of the time. I blame most of it on formula experiments. Last night was great. We put him to bed at 9, fed him every four hours, and he was pretty much asleep other than that. We’re trying again tonight, but so far Tyler hasn’t seen fit to actually go to sleep yet.
Jess, too, is coming along. We use the ‘walk’ as a metric of her progress. Today we bundled up Tyler, put him in the stroller and walked down the street to the park, and then back. Last time, Jess didn’t quite make it all the way, so progress, yes? Also, we saw a good 4 or 5 neighbors, all of whom we knew, and all of whom were all excited to see Tyler. It makes us feel good to think we’ve got some roots down here, tenuous as they might be, at times.
Speaking of metrics, we have a unit of measure around here called ‘The Cat’. It’s a measure of how much stuff you have on your lap that keeps you from getting up, easily. It’s used when someone needs to go do something, the one with fewer ‘cats’ usually has to get up and do it. Here are some equivalent cat measures, just in case you feel like adopting this system as your own.
1 Cat = 1 Cat
Being a little pregnant = 1 Cat
Being a lot pregnant = 3 Cats
Holding a Baby = 2 Cats
Holding a sleeping baby = 3 Cats
Using a Laptop = 0 Cats
Eating = .5 Cats
Having a Cesarean in the past 3 days or less = All the Cats
Having a Cesarean in the past week or less = Approx 1 Cat, depending on painkiller levels
Husband modifier = Approx 1 cat
-N
Monday, April 4, 2011
A Baby Vacation
We are so darn lucky. Tyler is just the best little baby. He’s easygoing, calm, easy to put to sleep, slow to fuss, and I’ve figured out all of his little cues for telling us how to stop him crying. It’s either food, diaper, burping (it’s usually this one), or he wants my pinky in his mouth. I’ve never met a fussy Tyler I couldn’t cure. It makes me feel like a freakin’ super-dad.
Recovery continues apace. We’re at home, now, trying to establish some routines. I try things out here and there, like different styles of formula (ready-made, super-easy to use, or the more bulk ‘concentrate’ that, evidently, I was supposed to keep in the fridge. Oops. We learn.) different bottles, different ways to play with Tyler. It’s all a big science experiment.
We went in for the first doctor appointment today, and Tyler is already gaining weight (crap, he is going to be a football player after all.) This also marked our first jaunt out of the house with Tyler, and we were able to be pretty sparse with the diaper bag, at least this time. Tyler is, for the most part, pretty calm in the car, unless the sun gets in his eyes. Clean bill of health for Tyler, also, though oddly enough they measured him at 21 inches, not the previously reported 22. So it looks like the original weight AND height were off. Suspicious...maybe we got someone else's baby! (We did not get someone else's baby.) Tyler also made a habit of protesting loudly whenever we had to undress or unwrap him followed by a nearly immediate calming when given ‘the pinkie’. Tyler doesn’t like pacifiers much, but he LOVES pinkies. Many thanks to dad on that one. I owe you a...power tool of some sort, I guess. That’s the standard currency for Grandpa Preecs, yes?
Oh, by the way, if there are any special requests for titles, get them in now. Bappy, Grams, Ba-ba, uncle, chooma-shoom, whatever you like. I make no promises that Tyler won’t auto-generate a nickname even more cute for you on his own, but we can at least plant a seed if you want.
Mom Jessie is doing pretty well for a woman with a hole in her abdomen. She continues to move better every day, and is taking fewer and fewer painkillers, though I do have to keep on her to not take ‘none’. It’s a good thing we have our little baby timer.
Have I talked about the baby timer already? You know what, I don’t care. I’ll talk about it again anyway. I’m not even going to go bother to check the blog. I’m reckless!
It’s this neat android app called ‘baby esp’. It gives you different timers for how long since baby has either started or stopped feeding, sleeping, playing, diapers, or anything else you want. There’s even a setting for mom and dad that we use to keep track of some prescriptions, pumping times, and sleep times. Not that we really need to keep track of sleep, but there’s just so much data-mining capability in this thing. You can do plots of how much feeding or sleeping, or all sorts of stuff. I’m excited for Tyler to get older just so we can have more entries. It’s neat.
I’ve started reading to Tyler. We’re starting with ‘I Shall Wear Midnight’, which is nice because I haven’t read it either. I’m working on voices. Voices are important. We’re a chapter and a half in already. He seems to really like just listening to my voice, as long as he’s not gassy, which happens unfortunately often.
Tyler has been getting up every 1.5 hours at night to feed. I didn’t realize until today’s doctor’s appointment that this was as dire a problem as it actually seems to be. I get a couple of hours of sleep before evening hits, proper, and I can stay up for hours. Then Jess relieves me after a while and we alternate as the mood strikes us. As long as one of us takes charge, we can get some pretty decent sleep, just not contiguously. Like I said, Tyler is a pretty great baby. We’re supposed to be making him sleep more (read: eat less) at night, though, and be more awake during the day, so we’ve been advised to s---t---r---e---t---c---h out the time between feedings, which probably means listening to Tyler complain for a while. Never all that pleasant to hear, but at least he doesn’t have the lung power to knock out the serious dBs...yet.
So yeah, it’s all going very well, so far. Yay!
-N
Recovery continues apace. We’re at home, now, trying to establish some routines. I try things out here and there, like different styles of formula (ready-made, super-easy to use, or the more bulk ‘concentrate’ that, evidently, I was supposed to keep in the fridge. Oops. We learn.) different bottles, different ways to play with Tyler. It’s all a big science experiment.
We went in for the first doctor appointment today, and Tyler is already gaining weight (crap, he is going to be a football player after all.) This also marked our first jaunt out of the house with Tyler, and we were able to be pretty sparse with the diaper bag, at least this time. Tyler is, for the most part, pretty calm in the car, unless the sun gets in his eyes. Clean bill of health for Tyler, also, though oddly enough they measured him at 21 inches, not the previously reported 22. So it looks like the original weight AND height were off. Suspicious...maybe we got someone else's baby! (We did not get someone else's baby.) Tyler also made a habit of protesting loudly whenever we had to undress or unwrap him followed by a nearly immediate calming when given ‘the pinkie’. Tyler doesn’t like pacifiers much, but he LOVES pinkies. Many thanks to dad on that one. I owe you a...power tool of some sort, I guess. That’s the standard currency for Grandpa Preecs, yes?
Oh, by the way, if there are any special requests for titles, get them in now. Bappy, Grams, Ba-ba, uncle, chooma-shoom, whatever you like. I make no promises that Tyler won’t auto-generate a nickname even more cute for you on his own, but we can at least plant a seed if you want.
Mom Jessie is doing pretty well for a woman with a hole in her abdomen. She continues to move better every day, and is taking fewer and fewer painkillers, though I do have to keep on her to not take ‘none’. It’s a good thing we have our little baby timer.
Have I talked about the baby timer already? You know what, I don’t care. I’ll talk about it again anyway. I’m not even going to go bother to check the blog. I’m reckless!
It’s this neat android app called ‘baby esp’. It gives you different timers for how long since baby has either started or stopped feeding, sleeping, playing, diapers, or anything else you want. There’s even a setting for mom and dad that we use to keep track of some prescriptions, pumping times, and sleep times. Not that we really need to keep track of sleep, but there’s just so much data-mining capability in this thing. You can do plots of how much feeding or sleeping, or all sorts of stuff. I’m excited for Tyler to get older just so we can have more entries. It’s neat.
I’ve started reading to Tyler. We’re starting with ‘I Shall Wear Midnight’, which is nice because I haven’t read it either. I’m working on voices. Voices are important. We’re a chapter and a half in already. He seems to really like just listening to my voice, as long as he’s not gassy, which happens unfortunately often.
Tyler has been getting up every 1.5 hours at night to feed. I didn’t realize until today’s doctor’s appointment that this was as dire a problem as it actually seems to be. I get a couple of hours of sleep before evening hits, proper, and I can stay up for hours. Then Jess relieves me after a while and we alternate as the mood strikes us. As long as one of us takes charge, we can get some pretty decent sleep, just not contiguously. Like I said, Tyler is a pretty great baby. We’re supposed to be making him sleep more (read: eat less) at night, though, and be more awake during the day, so we’ve been advised to s---t---r---e---t---c---h out the time between feedings, which probably means listening to Tyler complain for a while. Never all that pleasant to hear, but at least he doesn’t have the lung power to knock out the serious dBs...yet.
So yeah, it’s all going very well, so far. Yay!
-N
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
Things you didn’t know about balls and cups
Two years ago while I was up in Juneau, mom and dad got me, in my stocking, traditional home of small presents and cute extras, a little ball-in-cup game. I played around with it while up in Alaska and then brought it into work and left it on my desk. Well what with the flow of people into and out of the room, the ball in cup game got to be pretty popular. So we started seeing how good we could be at getting the ball in the cup. We made a table up on the whiteboard and competed to see who could get the most number of successful balls in cups in a row. The record was 46. My personal record was 12 in a row, but I held the record for the ‘mad minute’ with 18. We’d make up tricks and do all sorts of crazy stuff.
So knowing about my obsession with balls and strings and cups, Jessie got me a little stocking stuffer for christmas this year. It’s a little thing with a ball and two cups on either side, a cup on the handle, and then a spike on the end, and the ball can be tossed into either the cups, the handle or the spike. So, of course, I brought it into work and we started the BoSoC (Ball on String on Cup) Pro league. Same table and everything.
So I got a little curious, though, what was this thing called that we were using? I did a little bit of google searching and discovered that it was, in essence, a Kendama, Japanese in origin. Two cups, one extra on the handle, and a spike on the end, simple, right?
Well I did a little more searching and discovered something really weird. You know how there are Yo-yo’s? Remember how it felt when you discovered that there are people who are *really* into Yo-yo’s? Like you discovered a whole new universe that is both strange and intriguing? Well the same is true with Kendama. There are people that are really, REALLY into kendamas. How into it?
There is a Japanese Kendama Association, the JKA, that has competitions for kendama. They have a belt ranking system, just like martial arts, that can measure your progress. There is even an official specification for what an official kendama is shaped like and only a few companies are allowed to make it. The sticker at the bottom of the handle means that this is an *official* JKA kendama.
So, of course, I bought one.
After I post this I’m going to create a Google Document which will allow us to chart our collective progress through the belt ranking system as well as our various records in number of consecutive catches and whatever other tricks we can think of to name and attempt. We’re engineers, we’re crazy like that.
-N
So knowing about my obsession with balls and strings and cups, Jessie got me a little stocking stuffer for christmas this year. It’s a little thing with a ball and two cups on either side, a cup on the handle, and then a spike on the end, and the ball can be tossed into either the cups, the handle or the spike. So, of course, I brought it into work and we started the BoSoC (Ball on String on Cup) Pro league. Same table and everything.
So I got a little curious, though, what was this thing called that we were using? I did a little bit of google searching and discovered that it was, in essence, a Kendama, Japanese in origin. Two cups, one extra on the handle, and a spike on the end, simple, right?
Well I did a little more searching and discovered something really weird. You know how there are Yo-yo’s? Remember how it felt when you discovered that there are people who are *really* into Yo-yo’s? Like you discovered a whole new universe that is both strange and intriguing? Well the same is true with Kendama. There are people that are really, REALLY into kendamas. How into it?
There is a Japanese Kendama Association, the JKA, that has competitions for kendama. They have a belt ranking system, just like martial arts, that can measure your progress. There is even an official specification for what an official kendama is shaped like and only a few companies are allowed to make it. The sticker at the bottom of the handle means that this is an *official* JKA kendama.
So, of course, I bought one.
After I post this I’m going to create a Google Document which will allow us to chart our collective progress through the belt ranking system as well as our various records in number of consecutive catches and whatever other tricks we can think of to name and attempt. We’re engineers, we’re crazy like that.
-N
Friday, October 22, 2010
I’m so freakin’ tech savvy.
I’m sitting here with my laptop downstairs in Jean and Ray’s house connecting wirelessly to the internet through their router. I have configured a Virtual Private Network (VPN) that allows me to logon to my work network and then remote desktop view my computer back at work and check on it’s process in running the simulation that’s cranking on it even as we speak. My phone is connected to a 4G tower nearby and beeps at me whenever I get an e-mail or text message. Soon I will attempt to video conference with my family in Pittsburgh just to say *hi*.
We are living in the FUTURE.
-N
We are living in the FUTURE.
-N
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
Data Entry
As it turns out, a large part of my job is data entry, which, when you're working in a non-profit who often has to prove that it's doing well, can be a very important task. Being the youngest person in my department by about 30 years, easily, I am the most computer literate person, which I feel is saying something because I've never thought of myself as much of a Noel.
But now I'm actually kind of excited about it, because I have my own little project to work on. As you may or may not know, I work at a food pantry. If people qualify, they are able to come in to St Francis House once a month and take a certain amount of food according to how many people are in their household. We have the food split up into the food pyramid...basically, sort of. We have sweets, grains, vegetables, fruits, and proteins. It is sort of loose sometimes, depending on what kind of donations we receive that day/week/month.
The last few months we've had record amounts of people coming in(over 100 a day, and that's families, not individual people), and we seem to be going through food really quickly. There is talk about trying to switch up the way we do things, and make people's amount of food based on weight, instead of category. So now it's my job to go through 6 months worth of data and look at each day and average the weight for each family size, then I have to see if there would be an issue of changing the system, and then decide how much weight each family would conceivably get.
So needless to say I can only do data entry for so many hours in a day (i.e. why I'm blogging), but I like looking at the information and seeing averages already.
I can already foresee some issues with making the food distribution weight oriented. For instance, every once in a while we get meat, and some one could easily just take all the meat that their weight allows, and then there wouldn't be enough for everyone else. I may recommend weight by category. But I'm working backwards from August, and I've only gotten to June, so I have some more work to get through.
This job also seems to make me think about food a lot, which may or may not be a good thing. I have become more aware of what kinds of foods are hard for people to get, and what is more important to a diet. Fresh is also really hard to come around. I love the idea of being organic and locally grown, but there's just no way it's possible with prices the way they are, especially in a place like Alaska in the winter.
Other than that, just chugging along at work, learning more every day. Talked to mom the other day about possibly going back to school for a masters in Program Management. The more I think about it, the more appealing it gets, especially because AmeriCorps will give me a little money to go back to school. We'll see, depends on what is available after my year of service. For now though, I think I'll enjoy the fact that I don't have homework to finish up on Sunday nights.
But now I'm actually kind of excited about it, because I have my own little project to work on. As you may or may not know, I work at a food pantry. If people qualify, they are able to come in to St Francis House once a month and take a certain amount of food according to how many people are in their household. We have the food split up into the food pyramid...basically, sort of. We have sweets, grains, vegetables, fruits, and proteins. It is sort of loose sometimes, depending on what kind of donations we receive that day/week/month.
The last few months we've had record amounts of people coming in(over 100 a day, and that's families, not individual people), and we seem to be going through food really quickly. There is talk about trying to switch up the way we do things, and make people's amount of food based on weight, instead of category. So now it's my job to go through 6 months worth of data and look at each day and average the weight for each family size, then I have to see if there would be an issue of changing the system, and then decide how much weight each family would conceivably get.
So needless to say I can only do data entry for so many hours in a day (i.e. why I'm blogging), but I like looking at the information and seeing averages already.
I can already foresee some issues with making the food distribution weight oriented. For instance, every once in a while we get meat, and some one could easily just take all the meat that their weight allows, and then there wouldn't be enough for everyone else. I may recommend weight by category. But I'm working backwards from August, and I've only gotten to June, so I have some more work to get through.
This job also seems to make me think about food a lot, which may or may not be a good thing. I have become more aware of what kinds of foods are hard for people to get, and what is more important to a diet. Fresh is also really hard to come around. I love the idea of being organic and locally grown, but there's just no way it's possible with prices the way they are, especially in a place like Alaska in the winter.
Other than that, just chugging along at work, learning more every day. Talked to mom the other day about possibly going back to school for a masters in Program Management. The more I think about it, the more appealing it gets, especially because AmeriCorps will give me a little money to go back to school. We'll see, depends on what is available after my year of service. For now though, I think I'll enjoy the fact that I don't have homework to finish up on Sunday nights.
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