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Battlestar Galactica

2008-04-05T01:47:05Z

T MINUS 14 MINUTES!

Surgery

2008-02-04T16:33:25Z

The whole description of the procedure is:
"Shoulder Arthroscopy: sob-acromial decompression, slap tear excision, distal clavicle resection"

Those words essentially translate into "surgery through small incisions, removing inflammed and scar tissue, with the removal of clavicle bone". Honestly, it sounds more painful than it really is.

Pictures (might want to pass if you are squeemish, although its hard to identify what's going on unless you are already familiar with the procedure, are available here. I think there are two movies.

Ooops, forgot to say

2008-02-03T15:44:41Z

So, the surgery I mentioned here was a hopefully successful attempt at arthroscopic subacromial decompression to repair an impingement.

More later ... still hurts to type for too long!

Two things

2008-02-02T15:58:57Z

First, the surgery was on wednesday. I'm currently on a "OnQ" pump, which means a chemical, much like lidocaine, is being pumped directly to the nerve bundle responsible for providing pain signals to my brain. My brain has no idea there recently occurred quite the intrusion. Unfortunately, there is only enough Ropivacaine in there to last 65-70 hours.

Which means I'm due to run out any minute now.

Secondly, I direct you at this religious debate.

Bananas?

2008-01-19T16:08:41Z

Kyra calls them "Babanas".

Say "buh ban nus".

:)

Kyra

2008-01-14T05:49:20Z

She surprised us the other morning by demonstrating she can count to 15 and even put her shoes on herself. On the correct feet!

All of this, and she's only 2.25 years old!

I've started using Picasa and have placed some recent pics of the family, et al on my Picasa Web Public Gallery.

Typically, our night routines go like this:
I get home from work between 5 and 6. I play with Kyra and Dylan and assist in dinner making as best as I can. This gets us to somewhere between 7 and 8. At this point, we take the kids upstairs for their baths. Currently, I assist Julie in taking her bath, too, as she's had an excavation surgery in her left breast due to an infected milk duct that formed an abscess. I take Dylan into his room, change him, and apply baby lotion. Julie will then normally walk in with Kyra (after having blow-dryed her hair) and we 'swap kids'.

Julie takes Dylan downstairs for a night-time snack. I take Kyra outside, to "look at the moon". We goof around a ilttle, pointing out stars, moons, cars, and any thing else she likes to identify. We'll walk inside, requiring she first knock on the door, then close door after ensuring Nikki, our dog, is inside. Then we bounce up the stairs and I'll read her a book (normally, its Goodnight Moon. Then we get on the rocking chair in her room, and rock for prolly 10-15 minutes.

We'll say prayers, and give hugs and kisses, and she'll crash. I'll go downstairs. Julie and I then have a couple of hours, at best, before we have to go to bed in order for me to be functional in the morning.

heh

2008-01-11T16:13:58Z

117 words

Touchtyping

Pics, finally

2007-09-28T21:03:42Z

Who would've thought having a baby would keep me so busy it would take me half a week to get pics online.

The first batch are here: http://zitz.erf.net/linpha/viewer.php?album=albums/Dylan/Dylan%20Birthday&pn=1

Be gentle ;)

Dylan has arrived!

2007-09-25T16:45:23Z

Born september 25th, 11:13am.

8lbs 5.9 oz

yay!

induced? maybe not!

2007-09-25T12:53:53Z

Well, Dylan's official due date was yesterday. No go.

We had a 'misfire' 2 saturdays ago, spent half a day or so. The entire time, we were experiencing contractions once every 8 minutes. They don't really get interested until its closer to 5 minutes (there's also a few other 'flags' they use, but this was the most obvious, prominent one).

So our obgyn scheduled us for 6am this morning to show up for inducing, presuming Dylan hadn't been delivered beforehand.

We got here this morning and she's already 5cm dilated (!) and experiencing contractions 8 minutes apart. So we may not even have to be induced.

What timing for this baby, eh? Kyra was delivered the day before she was scheduled to be induced.

3 word meme, stolen from sistrmoon

2007-09-03T15:30:21Z

I don't normally do these crazy memes ... But for some reason, I guess my brain was in a 3-word mood, so I went ahead and filled out this seemingly-nonsensical meme

Answer the following questions in three words, no more or less.
1. Where is your cell phone?
next to me
2. Your boyfriend/husband?
heterosexual, none above!
3. Your hair?
where'd it go??!?!
4. Where is your father?
around the corner
5. Your favorite thing to do?
play with Kyra
6. Your dream last night?
you'd say TMI
7. Your favorite drink?
diet lipton tea
8. Your dream car?
convertible mustang cobra
9. The room you’re in?
kitchen look alike
10. You fear?
family in pain
11. Who did you hang out with last night?
kyra and wife!
12. What aren’t you good at?
promptly healing kyra :(
13. Muffins?
no thank you
14. One of your wish list items?
a healthy family
15. The last thing you did?
Kiss kyra's booboo
16. What are you wearing?
shirt and shorts
17. Your pet?
nikki, akita-chow mix
18. Your computer?
a new laptop
19. Your life?
like a dream
20. Your mood?
happily watching kyra
21. Missing?
dylan, born soon!
22. What are you thinking about right now?
where IS kyra?
in backyard!
whew, she's safe.
23. Your car?
clean blue mustan
24. Your work?
darn good job
25. Your summer?
that was summer?
26. Your relationship status?
very happily married
27. Your favorite color(s)?
whatever wife's wearing
28. When is the last time you laughed?
writing last answer ;)
29. Last time you cried?
at kyra's birth
30. School?
restarting after dylan

3rd Anniversary

2007-06-05T16:29:29Z

Happy 3rd anniversary to my beautiful loving Wife, Julie!

Kisses!

2007-05-01T22:28:57Z

A game my daughter and I often play is 'can daddy have a kiss?'

I can't quite figure out the rules, because there's roughly a 50% chance that when I say, "can daddy have a kiss?" she'll answer by puckering up.

The other 50% she'll hold one hand out, and with a very cute voice, say "ooooh no!"

It seems one rule is that she has to be in the bath-tub for your chance to be very high. Another rule is that she has to be on our stairs, heading up, while I'm on the first floor with the railing separating us. Then I can position my head through the railing and she gets a thrill out of kissing like that.

My goal in life right now is determine those rules that will maximize the likelihood of a kiss!

Warm outside!

2007-04-29T00:06:02Z

It seemed to warm up some today, so we spent a fair amount of time outside. We tossed together the baby pool we nearly sold last year (for a dollar, no less!) and filled it with water. Now, Kyra LOVES swimming; bath-time is certainly her favourite time of the day. I knew my parents would want to see Kyra's first pool adventure of the summer, so I called them. Given that they, literally, live behind my (alright, they live one street behind me. We do not share a common fence), it took them no time to get over. I had kept the impetus of the invitation a secret -- I'm just that kind of a mean guy sometimes. Unfortunately, this meant my dad did not bring his camera. Oh well. The result of this time in our back yard is viewable here, although bear in mind these shots were taken by me.

Julie's mother (We affectionately call her Grammy) and Ronda (Julie's Cousin) was entertaining a visiting relative, as well: her brother Jeff. We're all pretty close and generally try to get together as often as possible for whatever random reason. To that end, I decided I'd grill up one of my favourite recipes: citrus shrimp and scallops. Quite yummy!

We now await the imminent arrival of Jeff and Ronda. While we wait, we're watching Happy Feet. Grammy and Kyra both seem to love penguins and Kyra absolutely loves dancing. She's been dancing nearly nonstop to this movie!

Hope everyone's weekend is going as well as ours is.

4 minutes to work

2007-04-26T14:59:42Z

I couldn't believe it.

On my drive in to work this morning, there was a change in the layout of the road. I typically would take 620 to 183 every morning. Unfortunately, the intersection of 186 and 620 is such a mess I would take various shortcuts and back roads. This was unnecessary this morning, as they had finally connected the 620/45 Toll with 183S.

That was quite exhilarating, at least for a few minutes.

Yes, I am alive!

2007-04-25T17:25:33Z

Let's see, what has happened since I last made a legitimate post... My last legitimate post was dated January 21st. Subsequent postings up to this one were test posts.

Alright, with that bit out of the way ...

I have been dealing with shoulder impingement syndrome since November of last year. I spent all of my physical therapy sessions trying to 'fix' the shoulder issue. My orthopedic doctor put me on Nabumetone (an NSAID) as well as vicodin for the pain. Even with physical therapy, I could tell things were not getting better. To add insult to injury, I was 6 sessions away from my annual physical therapy benefit. This meant after 6 more sessions, I was going to be paying full cost for physical therapy. Finally, after much discussion with my doctor, we agreed that the bone spur in my shoulder was preventing the bursa from properly healing. The only resolution now was surgery.

Thankfully, with the medical advances of our generation, sawing off a piece of my shoulderbone was performed as an outpatient surgery! This meant I went in at noon, was under the knife by about 2, and back in the recovery room around 4. After a few shots of Dilaudid, I went home with my wife. Amazing.

What was even more amazing was that our insurance paid for a pain pump as well as this contraption called an arctic pack. The pain pump pumped some form of numbing drug into my shoulder. The pump included a bolus, allowing me to temporarily double the dose. After two days, the pump was exhausted and I had to pull the catheter out of my shoulder. This caused some fair amount of queesiness. I can't believe how light headed I got at the notion of pulling this tiny tube out of my shoulder. I had to sit down to do this! The arctic pack was essentially a glorified ice pack. It consisted of three pieces: a shoulder pad, a cooler (to hold water and ice), and a pump. The pump drew water from cooler and pushed it through the shoulder pad. Pretty ingenious and it worked incredibly well. It kept my shoulder nice and cool and thus kept the swelling down quite a bit.

For the first week post-op, I "lived" in my recliner in front of my TV. For the most part, I was either too drugged or in too much pain to do much of anything but sit there and watch TV. Thankfully, a week prior I had set up my DVR to record Star Trek. I was ready to watch copious quantities of Star Trek: Enterprise, Voyager, and TNG. Unfortunately, Deep Space Nine was never on at a convenient time to be recorded (I can only record up to 2 things at a time, and my family wanted some of their own shows recorded, too ).

So, here it is 3 weeks later. I am completely off narcotics, only taking ibuprofen as necessary. I am able to toss my daughter in the air and catch her. I am continuing physical therapy and have been told I'm making great progress. Occasionally I'll find a position or action that hurts a bit, working the gearshift on my wife's car hurts, but the manual gearshift on my Mustang does not. *whew*!

~~~~

A week ago, our management called an all-hands meeting. Therein we learned that company had been acquired by a pretty huge company. There was a lot of voiced concern over the fear of the future of our company. We had been acquired by First Data. Wikipedia has a bit of information on First Data. This is slightly frightening, as I've been through this acquisition process in the past -- and not always with the best result. This time, however, it seems there's not much cause for concern: First Data acquired us to get access to our technology, not our contracts. That is, to say, they want us for our ability to enable online services for Financial Institutions. This is a feature their customer base does not currently enjoy. We've been told several times now that First Data is interested in us as a whole. To that end, I feel somewhat confident that this job is secure. Its not like First Data already had an online banking capability, after all.

Not a week had passed after that acquisition meeting before I received a shocker: Cisco offered me a job with their IPS/IDS developers here in Austin. For those of you who know me, this was pretty much a dream come true. They even approached with a fairly decent benefits package. My wife and I sat down and figured out what the benefits, bonuses, and stock options would mean annually, money-wise. We then fudged a few numbers together to figure out how best to quantify the cost benefit of remaining at FX. I took those numbers to my manager at FX, expecting him to essentially laugh me out the door.

Imagine my surprise when he didn't even bat an eye and said "no problem". I love my job here at FX. I felt pretty confident that the only company that could even remotely entice me away was Cisco. Well, after spending a weekend thinking, dreaming, and praying about the two job prospects, we finally decided there were just too many benefits by remaining at FX, even given that Cisco was offering more money outright.

~~~~

This mostly catches up with where I am now. I keep meaning to follow the bazaar model more, rather than my habitual use of the cathedral model. We'll see which I continue to follow in the future (what am I talking about? See The Cathedral and the Bazaar)

Test #2

2007-04-05T03:46:04Z

Apologies for the noise.

testing

2007-04-04T06:04:19Z

testing

Biologically ...

2007-01-21T14:43:35Z

Speaking, we are going to have a new family member in around 8 months :)

Proof

2006-12-12T06:13:46Z

Here's proof that Kyra is, indeed, my daughter:

Best of

2006-08-19T15:14:00Z

Q: Best TV show on TV?
A: Wonder Pets and The Backyardigans

Q: Best sound in the world?
A: Kyra giggling

Q: Best activity in the world?
A: Playing with Kyra, watching the aforementioned shows with Kyra

Q: Best wife in the world?
A: Julie, of course!

ugh

2006-05-25T16:37:30Z

So one of my biggest frustrations with ActiveSync in the past has been its refusal to do much of anything with multiple calendars.

I tried Chapura's PocketMirror -- but it was buggy and crashed more often than not.

I tried Intellisync's product and it seems to work pretty well, although I had to go turn OFF synching of calendar entries from ActiveSync (or else each synch ended up duplicating entries on my ipaq ... whoooeeee!)

That was a week ago.

Flash forward to today, where I am playing around with Outlook 2007. And, of course, IntelliSync seems to not like playing with Outlook 2007 much.

I guess I'll switch back to straight ActiveSync for now ... although I'm pretty surprised at this. I would've expected IntelliSync to be on top of any 2007 issues. I just can't find any information online to that end.

Finally an update?

2006-05-25T16:00:05Z

Yeah yeah, its been a while.

A few things, though:

Kyra is all but crawling ... and she's discovered how to go into stealth mode when she's doing something she probably knows she shouldn't. Generally, she makes a lot of noise when she's sitting /playing right in front of us. The moment we stop hearing from her, we know to look for any cords, etc -- as that's where she'll be heading towards. With her attraction to specifically electrical components, wonder if she's destined to be an electrical engineer ... ;)
I am very excited about playing in the might & magic world again. Between the new Dark Messiah and the new Heroes coming out,I hope I can find spare change in my house to acquire one of the two games. Come to think of it, Father's day IS coming up ... :)
I've been playing with office 2007 some. Primarily, I have a heightened need for outlook. I just don't find I use word or excel all that often. I've been pretty happy so far with outlook 2007. It now supports collapsing multiple calendars into one view. Makes it much easier to see what I've got scheduled, etc. Also, outlook now supports RSS feeds which seems to me to make much more sense than putting that information into a browser.
I've been listening to a lot of David Arkenstone again recently ...

owwwww

2005-11-04T14:18:40Z

Alright, 30 minutes the first day - check.
30 minutes the second day --- uhhh ... at the 15 minute mark I made the decision that the pain in my shins and feet were too much and I'd walk the rest of the way home.
30 minutes the third day -- I can barely walk down to my office.

So, I think I overdid it a bit, even with the walking and the stretching. I think maybe I shouldv'e started with 15 minutes. I'll take a break today, not that I want to, and start with 15 minutes tomorrow.

I had a gut feeling that 30 minutes was very aggressive that first day ... But it felt so good while I was running. Of course, I've read plenty of suggestions that assert you don't feel the real "pain" until a day later. Teach me to listen to my gut feeling!

When we took Kyra in for her checkup a week ago, she was having bad tummy aches. Our Ped suggested it might be lactose intolerance and wanted us to try some soy-bean based formula. Unfortunately, she only had something called "gentlease", which is still lactose-based, but is pre-digested or similar. She suggested we try that first. So we did and Kyra seemed to do much better. When we finally ran out of gentlease, we opted to try her on the soy bean-based product.

Mistake.

Somewhere around 1:30 last night I ended up driving to Walgreens to pick up some gentlease formula, simethicone, and some gas-reducing bottles.

Kyra and Mommy only got up a few more times after that ... but I still haven't mastered the art of the powercatnaps. It takes me forever to get back to sleep. And now I just feel pained, tired, and excessively grumpy :(

Walking and running

2005-11-02T16:20:24Z

One of my memories from my childhood was of the physical education classes which led up to a contest schoolwide in elementary school. We would practice running, passing batons, etc all to do olympic-like events for PE.

We would exercise and practice for a month leading up to this event. On the day of the event, parents would show up to urge us to do our best and we would generally have a grand ol' time ... at least as grand a time as one can have in elementary school.

My parents were always very supportive of us as children. They are still supportive today -- I don't mean to imply they aren't. But they were definitely more directly involved with our day-to-day activities when we were still very dependent upon them for support. I digress.

At most of these olympic PE events, either my mother or father or both would show up. Specifically, I have very strong memories of my dad showing up and running around with some of my schoolmates and me as we waited our turn or as we were watching friends run or do whatever it was. Regardless, I was always in awe of my dad that he could outrun me. No matter what I did, he was always faster than me. I literally was in awe of this fact.

It never dawned on me that that might have been due to the fact that he was mostly "physically fit" (he was, after all, in the Army) and I was still a growing boy. No, to me, it was because he was Daddy. He was the one that was always going to be faster, smarter, better than me. In other words, I had a great role model growing up. I had someone to aspire to.

As an aside, I can even remember us doing math contests on the computer ... and even there he always beat me. This man was a force to be reckoned with!

Which leads me to this post -- I want to be that same strong role model for Kyra. I want Kyra to have a strong parental unit to model her decisions and maturation on. This knowledge that my dad was faster than me stuck to me and always drove me forward.

To that end, I sat down with Julie and we discussed my options of returning to running.

Why running?

As a child, I used to play soccer. No surprise -- I believe it is true that the most popular sport for elementary-and-middle-grade-school kids is soccer; it beats out even football! But we had a strong German lineage and they play soccer there rather than football. There was a lot of soccer blood in me. My father even relates to me that as a child, he'd play a 'poor man' version of soccer called "kick the can". So, with all that said, I played soccer. A lot. When we moved to Germany in 1986, I wanted to play soccer at the middle school there. I was informed that the only way to play soccer at the school there was to run cross country. You see, soccer was a second-semester activity. Cross-country running was a first-semester activity.

So I started to run cross country, mostly as I wanted to have access to soccer the second semester. Come to find out, there was never any explicit requirement that cross country most occur in order for soccer to occur. Instead, it was implied merely by the fact that nearly everyone who played soccer also ran cross-country. Regardless: I made a few friends running cross country and loved running. I was pretty fit in middle school and high school, actually.

Ok, back to my posting: flash forward nearly 20 years. I have a kiddo to whom I want to be a positive role model. I have no fear intellectually and emotionally I am well prepared for this. I have no fear that if my child emulates and learns from my intellectual aspect and my emotional aspect, she'll be pretty ok. However, if she picks up any of my physical aspects, she's off to a bad start.

I've tried picking up running and working out in the past. Heck, just travel back through this journal on lj and you'll find a few attempted starts ... but I feel this desire of mine to function as a good role model for Kyra is sufficient impetus to get me going.

To that end, I went out and purchased some decent running shoes. New Balance 855s or similar. Regardless of their model or whatever, they are comfortable and seem to support me where it counts. I woke up an extra 30 minutes early this morning, put on some shorts, those shoes, some socks, a shirt, grabbed my dog, and left the house.

I spent 5 minute stretching: all the research I've done in the past week have indicated to me that forgetting to stretch before and after a "Session" is one of the biggest (if not THE biggest) mistake a noobie can make. So, I vouched to spend the first and last 5 minutes of any session stretching. Which I did. Of course, my dog had no clue what I was doing ... or even what was coming.

We fast-walked for the first 10 minutes. For the next 10 minutes, I spent one minute sprinting at a comfortable rate, then fast-walked for a minute. This pattern alternated. For the final 10 minutes, I alternated between fast-walking and regular-walking.

Now I feel great. Some friends of mine have indicated a desire to go biking. GREAT! I have bike! I just need to get it checked out and get the tires replaced (the tubing is almost certainly shot them).

So, I feel that with this new found desire ot be healthy Kyra will have a great role model, as far as physical concerns are. Plus -- I figure by doing this I'll hopefully extend the years I have left.