Bring on the baby

Holly is pretty desperate to get this little girl out of her. Today she was feeling pretty good so she asked if I wanted to take a walk. Little did we know that we would be walking something long like, 6 miles or something, tonight. We walked for about 2 hours and covered 6 miles, as I alluded to in the previous statement. Now she's tired, and just maybe 6 miles closer to getting this baby out of her. Aleric is not tired. He loved the long ride and the stints of baby sprinting. He got to see some ambulances and police cars whiz by on the highway tonight. They didn't seem to phase him one bit. He has become something of a car fanatic over the last few weeks. Not just cars, just anything with wheels and an engine. I was pushing him around the store and he spotted some kids playing a racing game based on the movie Cars. He was completely mesmerized by it and started to freak when we walked away. All said, it's been a pretty good day. I even got to watch a few hours of documentaries with the captions on while Holly slept.

WARNING: Geek Content Follows

Figured out how to use AJAX for some neat tricks, it's really not that hard surprisingly. Messed around a bit in PHP for the first time in about a year, it's pretty nice and really makes some things easy. Still working on Java ServerFaces and javabeans though, I think it may be awhile until I get that stuff down.

Work and Life

Lately I have been really busy at work, and having a lot of fun with it. I've also been really busy at home. Holly has been so miserable that I feel bad going to work every day. I wish I could just stay home with her and let her sleep. Neither one of us can wait for Auria to be born. So today, I'm working hard, making some good progress on my current project (a web application, lot's of fun) and I get a phone call. These days any time I get a phone call my stomach leaps up into my throat and my heart skips a few beats. It could be Holly calling to tell me that it's time. I missed this call and got an email from an AF sergeant that I work with telling me to call Holly immediately. So I run to the phone and call her and she tells me that she fell down the stairs! Inside, I panic, outside I calmly ask her some questions. I never want to freak out because I don't want to make her freak out even worse than I'm sure she already is. I can't get home for at least 45 minutes and that's if I speed. So I run back to my office, let the appropriate people know that I'm leaving and why and dash to my car. When I say dash, keep in mind that if I park as close as I can, my car is still half a mile and about 200 stair steps away from me. So I get home as quick as I can and we take her to the hospital. We were there for almost 6 hours and thank God everything was alright. Both she and Auria are healthy and unharmed by the tumble. Yesterday we went to the doctors and Holly said she was exhausted and that she could really use some sleep. The doc gave her some sleeping meds that are safe for the baby so Holly's body can rest up. I guess that this medication is what caused the problem today, or at least that's all we can figure. It had some strange effects on her. Last night at 9:45 (two hours after we went to sleep) she had to get up to use the restroom. She's halfway there when she stops, says "Whoa, I've never seen that before!" shakes her head, then continues ambling toward the restroom. I didn't find out until today what she saw for the first time last night. I read the paper with all the information on the medication right after getting it and it said that sometimes if given to children with ADD or ADHD it can cause hallucinations. I guess Holly has ADHD or something because in her eyes, everything was edged in red and blue bubbles. Kind of a weird sight, probably would have made me stop and shake my head too. It made me think of an article I read in a science journal about a year ago about how your brain composites images from about 12 different layers of imagery. Each layer contains different information on the world around you and one of those layers was edges. I just found it interesting that she was only hallucinating on a single layer of vision, not all of them. I wonder if those scientists that are into that have ever checked out hallucinations and their effects on a person's image composition process. Ok, enough geek talk. Almost, just for posterity I'm going to post what I am currently researching so that in a month I will remember to check my google journal for all the cool notes I'm entering.
Dojo (AJAX toolkit), JSP, Java ServerFaces, JavaBeans, C#, ASP.Net

Sometime in November I might even get to study my language. That will be nice, it's been awhile since I got to study that.

My Wife

I have a great wife. She is a great mother and she does everything that a wife and mother should do. I just want to put that out there for all those who might be confused. I guess if you look at the way we run our family with the mindset that a woman belongs in the home, cooking and cleaning and being subservient then you might be inclined to wonder what is going on. See, in our family, I work, she stays home. So far so good for all of you out there right? Ok, try this. I cook, she cleans. We practice something called communication and joint decision making. That sort of eliminates the need for her to be subservient. I guess what I'm getting at is that in these times, you can't expect anyone to restrict themselves to those old roles. I like to cook, she feels compelled to clean. She likes to manage bills, I like to make the money. We both have found ways of doing what we're good at to contribute to the family.

I need to explain this because there are some out there who ceaselessly make Holly feel bad for the way that our family works best. They reduce her to tears, questioning her self worth and nothing that I say seems to be able to console her. These someones are important to her, she values their opinions and it hurts when they tell her she's doing things wrong just because it's not how they do it. Really, I want to ask them if they are happy the way they do it. I don't think they are, and since they're not happy I want to ask why they must force that unhappiness into their daughters life. Holly and I are happy together and we work well as a team. In fact, there is no one else on this Earth that I would rather tackle the challenges of life with. She has determination, intelligence, resourcefulness, confidence and compassion. She loves her family more than anything else and puts her whole self into everything that she does. The next time you feel the need to question the way we run our family or challenge MY wife's worth, talk to ME.

General Military Training

The Navy has this belief that its sailors are stupid. I'd like to say that's not true but then I read things like "If abstaining from sex or practicing monogamy are not an option for you right now..." in a monthly GMT. If the brass really believes that a statement like that could possibly be necessary then it's not just our sailors that need to be educated. I challenge anyone to give me an example other than a rape where monogamy or abstinence is NOT an option! I don't think our leadership is stupid but I do think that being pc seems to have made morals something to be ashamed of and that sickens me. It's infiltrated our GMTs which are supposed to be providing guidance to the many young, impressionable minds that join the Navy straight out of high school. Something like the above sited example just implies to these kids that it just might not be an option, that they might NEED to be having sex.

Papaw Rollie

This is Holly's grandpa Rollie. They are visiting from Oregon right now. We went to the USS Missouri yesterday and the USS Arizona on Saturday. So far it's been an easy trip.

Telepathy

For the following post I ask you to suspend disbelief.

Often times I have found myself wondering how my wife's brain works. What? I would ask myself, is going through her mind. I have a pretty good handle on how my mind works and where it's weaknesses are, but my wife's mental file structure has remained a bit of a mystery. The other night, I had a breakthrough. She said, "I'm hungry." so I asked her what she wanted me to do about it. She hadn't said anything and suddenly, out of thin air, I get this mental image of a desert in the pantry's top shelf behind some other boxes in the left corner. I didn't even know we had this desert in the pantry, let alone know where it was. She started to say, "Why don't you..." I cut her off, "don't say it, let me get it and see if I'm right."
So I went into the pantry, reached blindly into the upper left hand corner behind a row of cake mix boxes and retrieved the aforementioned desert. "Huh, it was actually there." I thought to myself. "Is this what you were wanting?" I prompted Holly. "Um... Yeah, how did you know?" I told her not to worry about it, because if I told her I could read her mind then she probably would start wanting me to do it all the time. I can't have that happening now can I? So, what did I learn about my wife's thought process? A lot. This one mental image allowed me to figure out how she knows where my wallet is when I think it has been lost to a black hole somewhere in the vicinity of Orion's Belt. It's not just my wallet though. I can ask her where anything is, no matter how small and she will tell me down to the smallest detail where I will find that object. You see, her mind works a lot like a relational database. It's filled with items, each item has several fields associated with it. The first one is an image of the object's surroundings. I believe this field is updated upon each sighting of the linked object. The next field is a priority marker, this one is used to help return the most relevant results first, saving time on the scanning process. The last one and the one that I find most amazing is the geolocation data that is stored. I'm not sure what format it is using yet, I'm going to need a few more examples to crack the code, but it works well. It could be a linked path from the objects closest to the user to the sought after object, or it could be in something even more sophisticated. All I know is it works. I think Holly is not the only woman who's brain works in this fashion so I figured I would share my deductions and hope that it will help others in some way.

Holly made a cake

So my friend Adam is having a birthday party today. He doesn't know it though. He's out on a fishing boat somewhere in the pacific several miles off the northern coast of oahu. His wife, Destiny, enlisted Holly's help in making a cake for when he gets back. This is that cake. It turned out even better than the model picture we found via google.

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Red neck scrabble

Holly and I just played a game of scrabble without spelling requirements. See If you can figure out what words these are supposed to be.
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My dad made it

So after a long and arduous journey, we made it to the top. And as though we weren't breathing hard enough, the view is breathtaking by itself.
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Got something done

I'm pretty happy with the day, even though it had to start at 3am... See, last night Aleric thought sleep was just an option. Wait, let me rephrase that. Aleric made sure sleep wasn't an option. He couldn't sleep which translates directly into we couldn't sleep. He woke up at around 2am and was sort of whining, that quickly escalated into him screaming bloody murder and pounding on his door. This is a bit unusual so I ran in there to see what was going on. He was shaking and practicly climbed up me like you see those baby bears fly up trees! I have no idea what is freaking him out, but none of us like it. Ok that was just the beginning of the day. We fell back asleep around 7am and slept until 9. That was not nearly enough. Now I'll tell you why I titled this entry "Got something done" It's because while he was sleeping again (around 1pm) I went out and worked on the prelude. The belts were squealing even though I just replaced them. Perhaps it was to spite me for replacing them. See, I think the car had become comfortable with its' old crusty alternator/ac belt. They had shared many miles and developed into a sort of symbiotic relationship which I apparently had unwittingly disturbed. Trouble is, I threw the old belts out and the car is going to have to learn to cope. So I tightened those belts up and they seem to be getting along much better now. I don't have to turn off the lights and AC everytime my rpms drop below 1k. That's nice. As a strange side effect, my dashlights have begun working more frequently too! I'm sure it's unrelated but perhaps the car has seen the light and realized that some change is for the best. So the day was a good one, despite the rocky start.