MichaelandChrissy.com

Aiden and I were in the local Target, looking for new Transformers, when I noticed the new lightsabers in the same aisle.  Hasbro released the new Clone Wars toys on July 26th, and along with tons of new Star Wars action figures, the new lightsabers were on display.  Aiden had played with a lightsaber at his cousins’ house last weekend, so he knew how they worked. 

I let Aiden play with one for a few minutes in Target, and he loved sliding the “blade” in and out of the handle.  I was sure that he would end up beating us with it about the head and shoulders, but he didn’t want to part with it.  I gave him the choice of the blue, green, or red sabers (the red one had a Darth Vader handle), and he eventually chose the green one to take home.

Now he carries it everywhere. He’s not quite able to deploy the blade with a fast wrist movement, but he quickly figured out that it would shoot out if he swung the handle like a bat.  He hasn’t smacked any of us with it yet, so that’s a good sign.  When Aiden gets a little older, we’ll formally introduce him to Star Wars and see how that goes.  I was five years old when “A New Hope” came out, and I had a ton of the toys.

I just finished Mass Effect, playing as a “Vanguard” on the “normal” difficulty setting.  I went the “Renegade” route, which means that I chose the “evil” responses in most of the conversation trees.  This would often make the game more difficult, since Renegades tend to end conversations with battles (“Oh yeah! Well take that!”) rather than negotiation (“Maybe we can work this out amicably?”).  I’m not sure how this affected the ending cinematics, but I’m interested in playing it again to see the alternative ending.

You get the other ending if you play as a “Paragon”, a good guy.  I’d like to try again as an “Engineer” and build up my “Charm” skill.  As a renegade, I worked on my “Intimidation” skill instead.  This made it easier to persuade some people, but I definitely came across as a badass.  As an evil character, I made some unsavory decisions that had consequences in the game, such as allowing the Galactic Council members to die rather than assign resources to protect them in the final battle.  I’m sure that the ending would be much different if my team had saved them from the Geth main assault.

I also found out that Bioware has released some downloadable content for free.  ”Bring Down The Sky” seems to be a short side quest, but it’s nice that Bioware is still supporting the game.  I think that I’ll try this out when I play the second time. I hope they bring out more downloadable content; the game needs more beef since the main storyline was pretty short. However, Mass Effect is only the first in a planned trilogy of games.  I’m looking forward to the sequel, but I hope that they add more planetary exploration (one planet per system doesn’t quite cut it, I’m afraid).

Gavin was born a little jaundiced, which means that his skin has a yellow color to it.  Gavin seems to be a bit on the orange side though, a good look for him, since his head is about the size of an orange.  You can see it clearly when compared to the pasty white of my arm in the photo below.  Jaundice is fairly common in new babies, and it’s supposed to go away on its own after a week or so.   

The nurse suggested that we put him in direct sunlight for an hour a day to help clear out the bilirubin in the skin that causes the color abnormality.  We’ve been putting him in a sunny spot by our kitchen window, being careful that he doesn’t get too warm.  The pediatrician said that the color will leave his eyes last, but to keep an eye on him as his kidneys filter out the excess bilirubin.

I really like to write for the family web site, but the last week has been a whirlwind of new-baby activity.  We’ve done this before, being second-time parents, but it’s still taking a bit of time for everyone to get acclimated to caring for a new life again (or for the first time, in Aiden’s case).  Maybe I’ve been too busy to compose anything or possibly too tired to think straight, but it’s been difficult to come up with an adequate description of how I feel right now. So, let’s get analytical.

Gavin James Wilson was born on Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008.  He was six pounds and fifteen ounces, and twenty and one-quarter inches in length, just a tad smaller than Aiden was.  Chrissy and I went to Community Hospital in Munster to try out their new single-occupancy post partum rooms (they didn’t have these last time we were there).  We showed up at 5 AM, got into our room by 5:30AM, and then prepped for surgery at 7:30AM.  After a short wait, Gavin was born via c-section at 9:09AM.

I accompanied Gavin to the nursery to be weighed and warmed up while Chrissy rested up in the recovery room.  Chrissy’s mom was there waiting for us, and she got to watch through the window.  I’ve got some video of the nurse checking Gavin out, so I might be able to post that some time.  Chrissy spent the next few days in the hospital, and we were able to bring Gavin home for the first time on Friday, July 25th.  Which brings us to the present, home again with a new baby in tow.

Thanks to everyone who came to see us at the hospital!  We got visits from Chrissy’s parents, her three sisters, Aunt Linda and Uncle Marve, Aunt Paula and Grandpa, and Felice and her mom, Pam.  My Dad and Diane stopped by as well, which was a very pleasant surprise.  We appreciate being in your thoughts!  Keep watching this space, as we’ll be updating with new baby pictures as often as we can.

I’m not sure where the idea for a “push prize” came from, but I’m sure it came from a pregnant woman. This is where you buy a present for your wife as a reward for making it through labor and delivery.  I’m thinking that labor and delivery is expensive enough without additional costs adding to the total.  But I understand the principle of the matter, so I set out to get something shiny for Chrissy (jewelry being the predominant gift for this sort of thing).

When Aiden was born, I gave Chrissy a ruby and diamond three-stone pendant.  She saw it at Jared Jewelers while we were shopping for wedding rings and loved it.  However, aside from her wedding ring and that pendant, she doesn’t wear much jewelry.  I’ve gotten her plenty of sparkly things, but she only wears them on special occasions.  So, I decided to try something else.  What does Chrissy love most (besides me and Aiden)?  Scrapbooking!

Chrissy had mentioned that she would like a printer that can handle 12×12 scrapbook paper.  “Well, there’s no such thing,” I told her.  It turns out that HP, Epson, and Canon all make printers capable of printing on 13×19 paper.  However, only one of them, the Epson Stylus 1400, can feed 12×12 paper directly; the others make you print on 13×19 paper and then trim it back to 12×12 with scissors.  I think that Chrissy would want to print directly on 12×12 scrapbooking paper (that she has in a variety of colors).

After checking around a little bit on the internet, I found the best price for the Epson 1440 on buydig.com. I’ve never used them before, but they offer free shipping and the printer weighs 25 pounds, so I went with them.  As an added bonus, they let you pay via PayPal.  That was my downfall, since Chrissy monitors my PayPal transactions (to make sure that I’m not buying another Fort Max on eBay), and discovered the purchase well ahead of time.

It didn’t help at all that buydig.com shipped the printer without so much as wrapping it in brown paper.  Federal Express made Chrissy sign for a huge box that said “Epson 1400 Wide Format Printer” all over it.  Apparently, the universe conspires against my secrets and forces them into the light!  On the bright side, Chrissy should theoretically be able to start scrapbooking again as soon as we get home from the hospital.  When she’s not feeding small children, at least.

Things are getting exciting here, with only seven more days before the arrival of our new son, Gavin James Wilson.  Since Aiden was born by an emergency C-section, Chrissy opted to deliver Gavin the same way.  The hospital has asked that Chrissy arrive at 5:15AM on July 22nd to “prep” for the surgery, as the doctors are scheduled to begin cutting at 7:30AM.  We are not thrilled about doing this first thing in the morning, but that is when they told us to be there.

Aiden was born around 4:30PM, the late afternoon being perfect timing for Chrissy. She was in the recovery room until about 6:30PM and then got to visit with family until the end of visiting hours at 8PM.  It was nice to see Aiden and visit with Chrissy’s family before going to bed.  After forty-eight hours of back labor, Chrissy was happy to sleep the night away, heavily medicated.  Everyone was shocked at how quickly she recovered and was soon up and moving with little pain.

Since Gavin will be born so early in the morning, Chrissy will unfortunately spend the entire day in a drugged stupor as family and friends come in and out.  She would rather sleep off the anesthetic overnight like she did last time.  We have already requested that visitors wait until the next day, but that, of course, doesn’t include our immediate family (who will probably be there before she gets out of recovery).  If only we could reschedule until later in the day.

I will still be calling everyone to propagate the good news though.  And although the birth won’t be simulcast on Twitter, I will definitely be posting timely information on our web site.  And photos, possibly movies this time too.  Watch this space for details!

Today is our wedding anniversary, and Chrissy and I have been married for four years! We had mutually decided to not do anything for our anniversary, since we now concentrate our resources on raising Aiden properly instead.  I take that to mean “don’t go nuts” as opposed to “don’t do anything”.  We often mark significant occasions with gifts or outings, and Chrissy likes to be surprised (which is hard to do, since I have a hard time keeping a secret).

To celebrate our anniversary modestly, I bought two bottles of Inniskillin Vidal Icewine (2006) from “winebuyer.com“. We first tried “ice wine” during our trip to Niagara Falls, one of our first vacations together. There is a small village there called “Niagara On The Lake” with plenty of wine shops. We stopped for a couple of wine tastings at one of their festivals, and ended up bringing several bottles of Inniskillin home.  We’ve even given a bottle away as a wedding present (it’s that good).

Ice wine is interesting because it is harvested from frozen Vidal grapes.  It gets cold enough in Canada that the grapes will freeze on the vine in the first frost of the year.  They only sell it in skinny 375 ml bottles because the batches are so small.  The wine that is made from frozen grapes is different from anything that you’ve ever tasted.  It’s sweet and syrupy, like a desert wine, but it’s also rich with a little acidic.  The last one we tried, the 2004, had undertones of apple and pear.

We might not be able to enjoy our wine for a couple of weeks, though, since Chrissy is very pregnant.  Maybe just a sip?  She already has plans to restock our nine-months-depleted wine rack as soon as Gavin is born.  We really like Reislings, and usually have a selection of sweet white wines in the kitchen.  In the meantime, congratulate us on four great years!

I’ve been using Twitter for about nine months, and I probably send out about five tweets a day. Twitter is an interesting animal, in that different people use it in different ways. I think that it was originally meant to be a list of your current doings (“eating breakfast”, “feeding baby”, “out to lunch”), but reading grocery lists like that is like watching grass grow. And I prefer to watch paint drying. Twitter has evolved, though, to be many things to many people.

Personally, I tend to use it as a stream of thought collector. I think of it as supplemental content for my web site, so I don’t reply to others much on it (unless the reply might be interesting to read on the site). I do keep up with a lot of people, however, I just do it via direct message. These do not show up on the public record, but the other person receives them via email or through third-party interfaces like “Twhirl“. I also try to include any links or contextual information from the original tweet in my responses. This ensures that each of my tweets is a stand-alone thought.

I’ve seen some news organizations (including my local paper, “The Northwest Indiana Times“) just post links back to their content. They’re not there to be social, as the term “social media” might imply, but rather to disseminate their products to anyone on Twitter who may be interested. Just don’t expect them to follow you back, since these are often automated bots. The more successful ones have a live person behind them that does follow and engage other users.

Other people may use Twitter as a chat room, sending a series of fragmented replies to several conversations at once.  The problem with this is that Twitter has no threaded discussions.  That’s not a criticism of the way Twitter works, it’s just a fact.  When I read someone’s archive of tweets, I like to be able to understand each one and get a feel for what that person is about.  There is no right way or wrong way to use Twitter, but I still have an opinion on what makes the most sense.  I usually only “follow” people who use the same tweet etiquette I do.

There’s nothing worse than a tweet that reads, “OMG! ME TOO!” What does that even mean? I guess I could go back into the timeline of whoever they were responding to, but if their tweets are just as indecipherable, then it would do little good. How about something like, “You thought that last night’s Doctor Who episode was great? I loved it too! Here’s a link to my thoughts on it: http://is.gd/zIy“. That is easily within Twitter’s 140 character limit, tells everyone what you’re talking about, and provides a link to more information than your short tweet can convey.

The nice thing about Twitter is that the architecture is so open that all of these uses are possible.  Businesses send out links to products via the web interface.  Spammers send out spam through the Twitter API.  Podcasters send out notices of the latest releases with Twhirl.  People talk about their day by cell phone text message.  Short messages, long messages, and bot messages.  It’s all good with Twitter, in whichever way people want to do it.  It’s a very flexible, if sometimes unreliable, system.

Chrissy and I go to “Cirque Du Soleil” every time they come to Chicago.  They set up a Big Top Tent outside the United Center.  The last time we went, two summers ago, Chrissy was pregnant with Aiden.  This time, she’s pregnant with Gavin.  Luckily, we got VIP parking because we pointed out to the attendant that Chrissy was extraordinarily pregnant.  We parked literally twenty feet from the main entrance, but it cost us twenty bucks (well worth it, says the impaired mommy).

The ticket-takers are positioned strategically right in front of the concession and souvenir stands. Both were painfully overpriced, but we indulged anyway.  We get a refrigerator magnet and a Christmas ornament every time we see Cirque, but I don’t remember them being $45 before.  An additional $21 bought us a medium popcorn, two Cokes and a bag of M&Ms.  Sticker shock, considering that the tickets to get in were fairly pricey to begin with.

The show, “Kooza,” was worth the expenditures.  We had a very good time.  The seats, as usual, were way too small, but I understand the need to cram as many people under the tent as possible.  The music was awesome, and the acts were excellent.  A few of them we had already seen, like the juggler and the trapeze artist.  I’m sure that we’ve seen the contortionists before too, but the new costumes were outstanding, and you can never really get used to seeing people bend like that. The “Wheel of Death” was perhaps the best of the lot, perhaps because one performer almost fell off (scary!).

Chrissy got us excellent seats: positioned in front of the middle of the stage, towards the back so that we could see everything, even with the sound director’s pit, with no tent poles in the way, and along the main aisle (in case she had to get up).  Since our parking spot was so good, we were able to get out and into the street before the rush of people poured into the parking lot.  We talked about the show all the way home. Next time, we might try to bring Aiden, since he may be old enough to appreciate it by then.

I beat the Titan Quest expansion pack last night.  The big villain of the game, “Hades”, was kicking my butt repeatedly, but I came back fresh and took him out.  I didn’t want to stop playing on Saturday night, since I would have to clear a path back to his throne room again if I did, but it was 2AM and I couldn’t stay up any longer. Besides, I love the loot, and getting there is like strolling a path strewn with Gigantes armor.

Hades has three separate forms, which threw me for a loop because I wasn’t expecting him to upgrade.  Only one other enemy, Charon, had ever upgraded before.  Hades’ first form is like a very tall and scary humanoid, kind of like Dracula.  Once you bring him to about half of his life bar, he turns into what I call his “Resident Evil” form, taller and uglier with a huge tentacled arm.  Once that version is defeated, he turns into a huge blue cloud monster with very powerful attacks.

Once I had 32 skill points in Warfare (fighter skills), I moved about ten points from the “Battle Rage” tree into the “Ancestral Horn” skill.  This allows you to summon three ghostly figures to fight by your side.  It starts off fairly weak, but at tenth level I had five very beefy fighters on my side.  The downside is that they only last for 24 seconds, and there is a pretty long cooldown period. This spell is integral to my patented “Ride the Lightning” technique.

This technique involves a “Sky’s Rage” scroll, which summons a huge lightning storm that deals massive amounts of damage for fifteen seconds and, in most cases, paralyzes your enemy.  They’re pricey at 300,000 gold, but well worth it.  Employ the scroll, summon your Ancestral Horn buddies, and commence to whaling on your boss enemy with melee attacks.  I used this method on all of the Machae Generals and Vault Stone Empusas without fail.

I was surprised at how easy Hades’ first two forms were, since his gatekeeper, “Night’s Mistress” (the Empusa with the Soul Stone), was harder to kill than his first and second forms.  I just whaled on those in melee.  His third form was tougher, and that was what I got stuck on last night.  I gave him the old “Ride the Lightning” technique and he went down pretty quickly.  He actually lasted a few seconds longer than the scroll, which was impressive, but I only had a few more hits to kill him.

The credits were pretty cool too.  I watched through two cycles, since the monster models randomly appeared to the left until you cut out.  I didn’t recognize most of them, since I hadn’t been fighting them close up like that.  They’re pretty ugly; the developers did a good job with them.  The “epic” difficulty level was also unlocked.  I might have to pass on that though, since I’ve got other games to get to now.