Chrissy and I went in for her ultrasound appointment yesterday to find out the gender of “Baby 2.0″. After sitting in the waiting room for over an hour (or sleeping on my shoulder, in Chrissy’s case), we finally got in to take a look at things. This, apparently, requires half a gallon of green goo, applied liberally by the technician. She walked us through all of the baby’s body parts and internal organs, verifying that everything existed and seemed to be functioning properly. But Chrissy was only interested in one particular part (or its lack thereof).
Baby 2.0 was not being cooperative in the least. We kept getting slight glimpses of what may or may not be proof of gender, but Chrissy would stand for nothing less than concrete evidence. Even the doctor who sat in on the examination couldn’t give us a 100% certainty. He said that he would give it 70% odds on being a boy. Chrissy was not having it. So, she was rolled over on her side for fifteen minutes to cause the baby to change position. Now the technician got a clear view of the package, and the doctor then confirmed it. So, we’re officially having another boy on July 22nd, 2008.
Now we just need to decide on a name. We had chosen “Addison Riley” as a girl’s name, but now we don’t need that one. Chrissy has liked “Jacob Anthony” since before Aiden came along, but I don’t like either name. I’m currently partial to “Charles Montgomery”, but Chrissy says no to both. We both like the name “Lucas”, but Swavek has given us a multitude of reasons why we should not bestow that curse upon our child (playgrounds swirling with insults such as “Lucas Mucus,” “Lucas Puke-us,” “Luke Skywalker,” etc.). So the baby is still “Baby 2.0″ for now.
A marketing company called SeedWell created a viral video that pokes fun at BigDog, the horse-robot that I want to ride around town. It starts off mimicking the video from Boston Dynamics, but gets progressively sillier. I’m hoping to see a rebuttal from Boston Dynamics, with each set of robotic BigDog legs doing the “Running Man” into each other.
Boston Dynamics has released a new video of their walking robot, BigDog. Work on this project has come a long way, and the prototype is now able to climb steep inclines, recover lost balance and leap over short distances. I believe that it’s remote controlled by an operator, but it would be very cool if it could automatically “follow” a designated leader instead.
Some people may think that it looks creepy, the way that it bounds around on its awkward limbs, but I think it’s amazing. I would totally want to own one of these. I would ride it around like a mechanical horse. I’m sure that I’m not the only one who saw this and remembered Stridor, the robot horse from the He-Man cartoon (I was a big He-Man fan in the early 80’s, prior to starting my Transformers collection).
Boston Dynamics states that BigDog is only able to carry loads of 120 pounds so far. He would have to get a little bigger and stronger to carry me around then. But I could see this guy replacing the automobile in some locales. A beefier version could be faster than a moped and able to travel off of the confines of pavement, like a pack horse that doesn’t come with the hassle of bodily functions. Sign me up!
I signed up for Twitter a few months back, and I’m hopelessly addicted now. I find myself checking my Twitter feed about ten times a day: reading replies from friends to people I don’t know, checking those people’s feeds, adding them to my own friends list if they look interesting. I don’t mind the jones, since I enjoy it, but does anybody outside of the “Twitterverse” read my entries (“tweets”, as they’re called)?
Well, now you have to. I found a WordPress plugin that will post my tweets as a daily blog post. I’m not going to use it though, because I don’t want my blog to be filled up with Twitter digests (I saw a site like that recently, and it wasn’t pretty). However, I might post a “best of” list as I see fit. Below is the first installment. Redundant data or a poignant look into my psyche?
I’ve been trying to lose weight for the last several months, and the recumbent bike in our basement has been a big factor in my plans. I was sticking to my schedule for a while, trying to get on the bike at least two or three times a week. When I went to C# training last month, I was worried that I would have to wait a week to get on the bike again, but the hotel had an exercise room with a stationary bike. A very old, rickety stationary bike with no foot clips and loose wheels (read: deathtrap).
After my second try on the old stationary bike, my left ankle started hurting. I was limping around by the weekend and trying to stay off of it. Unfortunately, I had to stop riding at home so that my ankle could heal. After about two weeks, I felt much better and started exercising again. This would prove to be a mistake. My ankle hurt even worse after another week, so I decided to go to Dr. Bison, the podiatrist who diagnosed my foot pronation.
The problem turned out to be swelling under the bone in my ankle. Dr. Bison said that I should have stayed off of it for four weeks instead of just two. The pain had gone away after the first two weeks of being off of it, but it takes four weeks to completely heal. I also learned that foot X-rays are expensive, but we needed to make sure that I hadn’t cracked the end of my fibula, right where it meets the ankle. Luckily, the only issue was the swelling. I ended up in an ankle brace, and I can’t ride my recumbent bike until the brace comes off.
So now I’ve got a McDavid tie brace on my ankle. It’s got its own Twin Ion Engine. Kidding — it actually ties up in front (no spaceflight involved) so that the steel supports on the sides can hold your foot still. It’s just a little uncomfortable in my work shoes, so I might have justification to switch to my Nikes for the next few weeks. Interestingly enough, this is my first exercise-related injury in recent memory. At least I didn’t crash into anything.
Chrissy left on Friday for another scrapbooking retreat with a group of friends. I took a personal day from work so that she could leave early in the morning. Aiden and I were looking forward to three days together on another whirlwind “Daddy and Son Weekend”. We’ve done this before, so I wasn’t expecting anything unfortunate to happen, but this time there was a mishap.
Aiden and I were downstairs playing when he fell off of his riding zebra. He falls down about twenty times a day, so I didn’t think anything of it. He usually just gets back up and runs off to another toy. However, this time he started crying and reached out for me to hold him. I picked him up and grabbed a tissue to wipe his nose (Aiden has had a very runny nose lately, and the crying wasn’t helping matters). That’s when I saw that the tissue was covered in blood.
Aiden’s mouth was filled with blood and it was dripping down his chin. I don’t generally panic, so I fall into “crisis mode” in emergencies: assess the situation, devise a plan, and execute the plan. I calmly carried Aiden to the upstairs bathroom and cleaned up his face with a warm washrag. I cleared out his mouth and then checked his teeth and gums for damage. He bit the inside of his lower lip in the fall pretty badly, but all of his little teeth were still there.
He seemed to calm down a bit at this point. He was pretty drained, so I made us some lunch and then put him down for his nap. When he woke up, he was a swollen mess. He looked like he was in a lot of pain, so I gave him a dose of Baby Tylenol. Both of his lips were huge, so I called Chrissy’s mom to come over and take a look at him. She noticed that his top middle tooth was a little loose. She brought him a popsicle and the cold brought the swelling down so that he was once again recognizable. She said that these things happen, it wasn’t my fault, and that this wasn’t the last time that Aiden would get hurt.
Mom took Aiden off to church with her, which gave me time alone to think about all that had happened. I felt terrible, and the guilt was eating at me. He was hurt so bad. My heart was breaking for my little boy. I almost freaked out a little then, which never happens to me, but I had never seen Aiden bleed before. Aiden seemed very happy to see me when he came home. I gave him a bath, the perfect place for a popsicle since it’s a messy snack, dosed him with Baby Tylenol again and then put him down for bed. Now I’m alone again.
After weeks of unsuccessful attempts, Aiden has now managed to climb onto the couch without help. This is possibly a bad situation for us, since the couch is considered “gateway furniture”. Next, he’ll be moving on to bigger and more dangerous furniture, like the kitchen table or the entertainment center. “C’mon, all the cool kids are climbing over the staircase banister!” This is what the older, more experienced, parents warned us about.
Perhaps the worse problem here is that the couch is where we put items that we don’t want Aiden to get ahold of. Various remote controls and phones, for instance. Aiden loves to play on the laptop computer, but he didn’t have easy access to it because it was on the end table. Now he has direct access to it and anything else on that table. Who was it that said, “The price of parenthood is eternal vigilance”?
The final level of the single player game involves chasing Akasha, the Necris High Inquisitor, around a small cathedral until one of you gets twenty kills. It’s a duel to the death in a playing field designed by MC Escher. I hate to say it, but Akasha took me behind the woodshed repeatedly. I finally dropped the difficulty level from “moderate” to “casual”, which made all the difference. She seemed to stop dodging altogether at that point, so the win was almost too easy.
After being pounded so many times to begin with, I did learn a few things from her. As you close in on an opponent, be sure to switch from long-range to short-range weapons as appropriate. You can’t use the rocket launcher in every situation. Second, run away when she fires the shock rifle alternate fire, since her favorite trick is to ignite it right afterwards; anything in the vicinity will be vaporized. And lastly, find a good place to hide when she picks up the quad-damage powerup. It seemed like the only way that I knew that the U-Damage was available was when she was using it against me.
There’s some canned dialog that pops up after so many kills by either opponent, so the story still progresses during the final fight. The single player storyline was actually very interesting, and the ending was only slightly unexpected. The ending cinematic was very good (all of them were, it was like playing a Blizzard game back when they made something other than WoW). So Akasha bit the dust, but they still managed to leave the game wide open for another sequel. Roll credits.
Then the “Gears of War” credits appeared. Both games close with a series of photos of the developers and each one has a cute little quote next to it. Apparently, the two games share many of the same staff, because I had already seen a significant number of the portraits and quotes about a month ago. Many of them were even wearing their COG baseball caps. I almost felt cheated that they didn’t play the “Cole Train Remix” as did the Gears credits. I love that song.
I also posted Aiden’s 18 month photos. We try to get professional photos taken of Aiden every six months. We’ve tried a bunch of different photographers (Sears, Olan Mills, etc.), but this time Chrissy decided to try Wal-Mart. Too low brow, you say? Well, they were very professional and took some very good pictures. Aiden was very cooperative and smiled a lot. We bought the CD package with reproduction privileges, so the lower resolution samples are now in our photo gallery.
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