A Rough Day

When your baby is usually such a sweetheart, you really notice when she has a bad day.

This morning, she awoke at her regular time, right around 6:00 am. She was all squeaks and smiles, and took her bottle and her change very well. I rocked her a bit and she started to seem a little drowsy. I put her down and tried to go back to sleep, thinking she'd drop back off to finish up her overnight sleep, as she's been doing for weeks.

About an hour and a half later, she was still rolling around in the crib with open eyes, squeaking and generally demanding attention.

The mister took the baby downstairs and let me get some more sleep, which was much appreciated. I went back to sleep for another couple of hours, going downstairs at 10:00 am to see how they were doing. Imagine my surprise when they weren't there!

I set in to finishing the childproofing of the cabinets (a more truly horrible job, I have not seen for years) and before long, the rest of the family returned. I learned then that she'd been cranky all morning, not taking food or succumbing to her obvious fatigue to take a nap, so they went for a car trip in an attempt to lull her to sleep.

Sleep, she did not, but we did get her to take a little food and play for awhile, showing off her newly good mood, until she finally did get tired and allow me to take her upstairs, put her in a sleep sack, and then lie her down for a nap.

She slept for several hours, then we went out to the grocery store, all three of us, once she woke up. She was her usual silly self while we were out, but she started to get cranky again in the car. A general lack of her usual level of food and rest seemed to be catching up with her.

I did manage to get a little food into her once we got home, until she started to fidget and pull away. She fell lightly to sleep on my shoulder, so I took her upstairs at about 9:00 pm to put her to bed for the night.

An hour later, she was still crying and unhappy, even though she was clearly rubbing her eyes and tired. I finally really listened to her third bout of crying over the monitor, and realized it sounded like her hunger cry. Didn't make sense, really. She'd just rejected the rest of her bottle a little while before, but I was willing try anything. I went upstairs and gave her a little bit of food, and she curled right up and put herself to sleep as soon as she was done and I'd laid her in her crib.

Common sense and babies do not mix. I really didn't think she was hungry. Why would you think that, when she'd turned her nose up at food so recently. But, babies are fickle, and it was food she wanted. And now I can sleep soundly for another night.

Like, is this a Lost Cause?

Do you say 'like' when a pause would do just as well? For most of us, the answer is probably, regrettably, "yes".

I am going to resolve right now to attempt to stop doing this. I think it will be hard. This may be on the same scale as trying to stop saying, "um" or "uh", which are also lofty and worthwhile goals.

Wish me luck.

Ten Things

Okay, I'll jump on the "ten things" bus. Here are ten things that most of you will not know all of. Horrible sentence, that. What I mean is that most of you will probably know one or two of these things. There may even be some lucky (?) soul who knows most or all of these things.

1. I used to love Macs. I even sent away for a bunch of promotional literature once and I planted it at our local Best Buy back when they didn't sell any Mac stuff. Now I wouldn't touch one with a ten foot pole. Microsoft's far from perfect and I'm just not "counter-culture" enough to use Linux every day, but the waft of sanctomonious BS coming from Cupertino has completely put me off my lunch. Every single one of those new Mac vs. PC commercials features lies, exaggerations, and general slight-of-hand nonsense. Make your point, because you have one and I know that you do, but for heaven's sake, don't frickin' lie. Now that most of you have closed this browser window in disgust with me, I will divulge my next nine secrets.
   


2. I can be hooked into nearly any crappy television show or movie if there are two characters that have chemistry and you are led to wonder if they will ever become romantically involved or not. I blame Han and Leia for this.
   


3. My favorite color growing up was blue, but only because my sister's was pink and I wanted to be different from her. It took me years and years to discover that I really didn't like blue that much, and that I like green and pink much more.
   


4. All those years I said I didn't want to have any kids, I still caught myself thinking up names and how I would teach them right from wrong.
   


5. I write the first chapter or so of a book every once in a while, then I decide I hate it or the idea behind the book in general, and I shelve it and almost never look at it again. Sometimes I just trash it so I don't have to think about it. I have probably deleted enough prose to fill a Harry Potter book jacket in the past fifteen years or so. I show this stuff to no one before it gets incinerated.
   


6. Though I never did anything with it and it was a nightmare to deal with, I still kind of miss my really long hair.
   


7. If I was like a Gilmore Girls character when I was growing up, I'd like to think I was Rory. I have a secret fear that I was actually much more like Paris. I don't know if that's true or not.
   


8. I quit trying to do things way too soon if I'm not good at them right away. Among other more important things, this is why I cannot knit.
   


9. Though I would not want, nor would I be qualified, for the job as Donald Trump's 'Apprentice', I would love to compete in those challenges.
   


10. I sometimes give inaccurate answers to casual questions if the inaccurate answer is funny. I wonder sometimes, though I don't really lie in more important situations, if that makes me a compulsive liar. Maybe it makes me a compulsive comedy liar.
    

Search Terms

Here is how people have recently come across my goofy lil' blog here:

honda odyssey (Google)

I doubt my entry about buying our new car was much help to this poor soul.

kate and doug fanfiction the cutting edge (Yahoo)

Hmmmm. I am #1 for this query on Yahoo.com! I did not do this by design. For those of you tricked into coming out to my jacked-up site looking for Kate and Doug goodness (did they win that gold medal, or not?) I suggest fanfiction.net for all your fanon needs.

lyrics from the movie "The Cutting Edge 2" (Yahoo)

Wow. Just. Wow. I hope this wasn't a person who thought The Cutting Edge 2 was really bitchin'. I hope there are no people who thought The Cutting Edge 2 was really bitchin'.

piano recital practice (Google)

I can't even remember what entry would have brought someone to my joint with those search terms. Maybe me bitching about my senior recital back in college?

"david tennant" (Google)
"eccleston" (Google)

Dueling Doctors. My Doctor Who entry was up for less than 24 hours before three or four people came by via Google and those two actors's names. How many pages do you have to drill down on Google to get to my goofy DW entry?

wii (Google)

Sort of ditto for this. With all the stuff being written about the Wii, I don't have the patience to go find out how far down in the results I am.

"lite-brite lamp" (Google)

Boy, that is a cool lamp. I'm glad someone was looking for it.

"lowell the hammer stanley" (MSN)

Heh. I wonder if that person was looking for a lawyer to hammer, hammer, hammer, until they got what was coming to them?

"murlock rpg" guide (Google)

Not just the Murlock RPG. A guide for it. Heavens. Who wants to be a Murlock?

It just occurred to me that I've doubled the chances that other people will reach this space when using these search terms. That's why I've removed all the porny search terms from this list so I don't continue to disappoint people who are looking for people who don't just suck at geography, if you get my meaning.

You should be ashamed of yourselves. (ha)

I've Monopolized Mkae's Blog Enough

I figured it was about time that I wrote my own damn Doctor Who season finale blog entry, seeing as I've damn near taken over the comments area on poor Mkae's post. I kept thinking that I didn't really have anything new to add to this discussion, or that it really isn't that important in the great scheme of things. However, I can't get it out of my head, so I suppose this is my attempt to purge it so I can go back to, you know, devoting my full energy to raising the offspring and whatnot.

That being said... As you may have guessed, big fat, honking spoilers after this point for the season one finale. I may even talk a little about the half-hour or so of S2 David Tennant that I've seen courtesy of some bootlegged stuff on YouTube. You have been warned...and 3...2...1...

So, my choice of picture is symbolic. CE couldn't skate away from Doctor Who fast enough, could he?

I realize that sounds bitter on my part when I see it typed out like that without the benefit of vocal inflection, but I really don't mean it to sound that way. I honestly understand why you would leave after one season if you wanted to ever be taken seriously in another role ever again. The Doctor is iconic (which is odd, considering how much he changes in different incarnations) and it would be difficult to reach escape velocity if one were to stay in the role too long. I completely get it. Not everyone is Patrick Stewart or Ian McKellan, who seem to be able to catch on in at least one role other than the big "franchise" roles they came to be associated with.

I also really feel I'll miss that actor in the role, even more than I missed Tom Baker after Doctor 5 showed up. I suppose my disappointment that CE's run was only one season long is a compliment. I really liked his work and his chemistry with other characters, Rose especially. While I realize that people I respect have said that David Tennant is doing a bang-up job as Doctor 10, I find myself wishing that wasn't the case, so I would have an excellent excuse to stop watching the show and let it all end for me along with Doctor 9.

A side note on Christopher Eccleston, before I consider the cessation of the beating of this deceased horse. After reading his entry on Wikipedia (yes, I told you, I was pretty bummed out that he left the show, and I went looking for answers—this includes a drive-by at Wikipedia) I conclude that I could walk past him on the street and never realize it was him. He looks different in every single picture! At first I thought it was the close-cropped haircut showing off the ears that made the Doctor look different from his previous roles, but there's another picture of him in a buzz further down the wiki entry and he looks different there as well. That's actors for you, eh?

Another random factoid I read while trying to purge all this from my brain is a rumor that the part of the ninth Doctor was offered at one point to Bill Nighy. I have such mixed feelings about that. I do like Bill Nighy and I can't begin to imagine the Doctor he would make, but I wouldn't trade the CE season to see it. I did think it was interesting, though, and I thought those of you who also like Love, Actually might like to hear what we almost had, casting-wise.

Maybe this is all guilt from when I was sitting in my brother-in-law's basement/rumpus room watching Rose and I thought to myself, "Oh, come on. Tell me that goofy-looking fucker is the Doctor." I got over that quickly, before the end of the episode, in fact, and now I can truly say that I thought he was...fantastic.

(Okay, mind. Can we move on now?)

(Yeah, right. You know you can't let the 'ship go.)

(sigh)

Marriage Amendment Voted Down In the Senate...

...by a scarily small margin. Here, for your perusal, are the politicians who just failed their Turing test^[1], meaning that they voted for the amendment.

Alexander (R-TN)
Allard (R-CO)
Allen (R-VA)
Bennett (R-UT)
Bond (R-MO)
Brownback (R-KS)
Bunning (R-KY)
Burns (R-MT)
Byrd (D-WV)
Chambliss (R-GA)
Cochran (R-MS)
Coleman (R-MN)
Cornyn (R-TX)
Craig (R-ID)
Crapo (R-ID)
DeWine (R-OH)
Dole (R-NC)
Domenici (R-NM)
Ensign (R-NV)
Enzi (R-WY)
Fitzgerald (R-IL)
Frist (R-TN)
Graham (R-SC)
Grassley (R-IA)
Gregg (R-NH)
Hagel (R-NE)
Hatch (R-UT)
Hutchison (R-TX)
Inhofe (R-OK)
Kyl (R-AZ)
Lott (R-MS)
Lugar (R-IN)
McConnell (R-KY)
Miller (D-GA)
Murkowski (R-AK)
Nelson (D-NE)
Nickles (R-OK)
Roberts (R-KS)
Santorum (R-PA)
Sessions (R-AL)
Shelby (R-AL)
Smith (R-OR)
Specter (R-PA)
Stevens (R-AK)
Talent (R-MO)
Thomas (R-WY)
Voinovich (R-OH)
Warner (R-VA)

^[1] I realize I'm stretching the definition of Turing test to mean that it is a test of whether you are a human being or not. I would argue that's what the term means to most people who know vaguely what it is, and I feel quite strongly that voting for this preposterous amendment to the constitution, when there are a million other things that need our politicians's time and attention, is a big fat F on the test of humanity. If you feel remotely the same way and your representative's name is on this list, be angry. Write a letter to them listing all the things you wish they'd have spent their time doing.

Half Birthday

Brigid has reached the very important half-birthday milestone! Of course, this was two days ago, but I haven't had time to sit down and write the blog entry until now, and I even think I'll have to save this as a draft and come back and finish it later as it is.

She's started to roll over with impunity now. She managed one roll over before we went on our big tour of Virginia, but now you really can't put her down on her back and expect her to stay there. You blink and she's on her tummy, trying really hard to scoot herself forward with her legs. She'll be crawling any day now. This is simultaneously great and terrifying, as she will soon be moving around all over the place and trying to injure herself on everything in the house.

She is also becoming curious about food. She's been grabbing the bottle for nearly two months now, but she's really begun to become interested in the solid food she's eating. It started with trying to grab the spoon, but now she seems to realize that the food on the spoon is coming from the cup or the baby food container. She grabbed this cup away from me and tried to eat from it in the only way she knows how—she opened her mouth and waited for it to jump in. When that didn't work, she tried knawing on the outside of the cup. It's very cute, but I think she's just about to figure it out and start dipping her hands in to check things out, ahem, "first hand". Sorry about the pun.

Anyway, it's hard to believe, but it's been a half year since she showed up almost a month before her due date. I hope the two of us have as much fun for the many more half-years we will spend together until she leaves us to go to college. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go and teach her how to play with her new exersaucer toy.