it’s not about you

I’ve decided to take a blog fast during my trip. I will not be posting, except possibly for Killian’s ten and eleven week posts. I still will be reading blogs and moderating comments, so feel free to gush over his pictures as much as you want.

This was an idea I had entertained a week or so ago - imagine that - and since I decided today that I’m not going to be taking my laptop with me on the trip (it’s one more thing I don’t want to haul around with two kids), it seemed fitting. I’m going to take a real vacation. And after posting my itinerary, come on, really, when am I gonna have time? And if you’d still like to fill in one of the empty slots, by all means, leave a comment, email me or call me.

We leave at five a.m. for the airport. I’m so afraid I’ll oversleep and be late and miss my flight and I don’t do going to the airport real well. It makes me nervous. I don’t mind flying, it’s the getting there that makes me crazy. Deep breath. Aaahhhhh….

So, until I come back home, I leave you with this:

Killian is nine weeks old today. I keep being told he looks like my brother Kyle. And it’s true. He kind of does. His nose is all his daddy, though.

He totally hit a growth spurt this past weekend, which explains all the nursing on the hour he was doing. The past couple of days he has considerably slowed down his eating habits and is now sleeping constantly - I guess he’s been storing up all the energy so he can sleep it off while he grows.

Which means I’ve been getting a lot done, more than usual, and also means my milk supply is freaking out and I’m now gigantic and engorged and am in the plugged-duct-on-the-way-to-mastitis stage. It hurts. I can’t lift my arm over my head. Luckily, I’ve been down this well-worn road before and am on top of it.

Tomorrow, he will get on a plane for the first time and will go to Texas to see his Granddad, Nana, and Papa, and meet his aunts and uncles and cousin for the first time, and the rest of his family as well. Many, many firsts starting tomorrow.

We’re pretty excited.

Our highly anticipated trip to Texas begins tomorrow. Judah, Killian and I have a 6:35 a.m. flight out of SFO to DFW, direct, praise God, that should arrive around noon. We plan to take it easy that day and recuperate from the flight, the lack of sleep, the time difference, and for me to take a few Valium after having just flown with two small children by myself. Just kidding about the Valium thing. Well. Kind of.

Here’s our rough itinerary. Let me know if you’d like me to fit you in.

Friday - Dallas area. Dinner at my dad’s.
Saturday - Oklahoma. Camping in Turner Falls with LGBC (woo hoo!) — all day and night.
Sunday - Dallas area. Come back from camping in time for lunch with Nana and Papa at Dad’s house. Mom’s group get-together in the afternoon, and early evening, late evening is free, but will be in McKinney.
Monday - Dallas area. Morning is free, hang with Carissa, probably in the afternoon, evening is free.
Tuesday - Dallas area/Greenville. Morning is free, afternoon and evening in Greenville with the Fields and Treadwells.
Wednesday - Dallas area. Morning is free, afternoon at St. Aidan’s Abbey with the Nygrens, evening at the Burley’s.
Thursday - Denton County. Morning with Janiece and the boys, afternoon with the Kendalls, evening with the McKinneys.
Friday - Leave for Houston. High school Homecoming game that evening.
Saturday - Houston. See Muttsy (my grandmother) in the morning, I’m hoping Erica will cut my hair sometime that day, afternoon with Karen, high school reunion at swanky hotel in the evening.
Sunday - Houston. Morning is free, afternoon at my aunt’s house so Houston-area family can come see us, evening is free.
Monday - Houston/Austin/Waco. Morning is free. Leave for Waco. Midday lunch stopover in Austin. If you’re in Austin, we’d like to see you, so we’re planning to hang for a couple of hours over lunchtime so people can hopefully come eat with us on their breaks. Let me know if you want to see us. Evening in Waco.
Tuesday - Waco. Morning and afternoon free. Evening with Nana and Papa.
Wednesday - Waco. Free all day. Donaldson’s?.
Thursday - Leave for Dallas in the morning. Afternoon and evening free.
Friday - Dallas area. Free all day.
Saturday - Dallas area. Morning and afternoon are free, evening is FallFest at LGBC.
Sunday - Dallas area. Morning is free. Noon brunch at the Meridian Room, for those who want to come. Afternoon is free. Dinner at my dad’s for Dallas-area family that evening.
Monday - Leave for San Francisco.

Now that the housing prices have slipped, rentals, of course, are going up. Looks like we got in at a good time when we did. Our family of four might be in this one-bedroom longer than we planned. Hope our “milk pennies” make a difference.

That sizzling demand is driving up prices, experts said. The average asking rent for a Bay Area apartment jumped 8.2 percent to $1,415 in the third quarter compared with $1,378 for the same period a year earlier, according to an analysis by Novato research firm RealFacts that included apartments of all sizes from studios to three bedrooms. The occupancy rate rose 1.2 percent, to 96.2 percent.

Average price for a one-bedroom in San Francisco, according to one survey? $1,268. Ca-razy.

Wow. There are just so many things wrong with this, I don’t know where to start.

How about with the fact that over half of them are in the exact same pose? Check. If they’re gonna shoot a calendar, at least vary it up. They couldn’t come up with 12 different poses?

Say what you will, but the men and boys fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan are NOT fighting for our freedom. Our freedom was already fought for, back in what was called “The Revolutionary War.” They’re fighting, being wounded by the thousands, and dying, along with tens of thousands of innocent civilians, for someone’s ego, bully status, and God-complex. You can couch it in freedom terms all you want and sell your freedom fries and try to boycott luxury products that most Americans can’t even afford anyway and get everyone all amped up and patriotic, rah, rah, rah, but it reeks of trying to sell mayo for the same price in a smaller jar - something just doesn’t feel right about it.

I’m sorry, having Saddam Hussein out of power is the lesser of two evils? Really? I honestly don’t know which is worse. What’s the saying, “two wrongs don’t make a right?” Anyway, I digress. That’s a different blog post.

Now I think what the non-profit is for is great, aiding the wounded and their families, and the families of people killed in combat. That’s a noble goal. It’s just too bad that we wouldn’t need so much aid if this war had never been pre-emptively started in the first place.

It’s also too bad that the calendar itself that is raising money for support for wounded and killed troops isn’t bringing much awareness to those troops in the first place. Something tells me none of the wounded are going to make it into a beefcake calendar. Cause, you know, nobody wants to see that hanging on their wall, now do they? It might just cause them to be uncomfortable. And we can’t have that. We can’t have the reality.

No to mention the exploitation of the human body (and the military, good Lord). Just cause it’s men and not women doesn’t make it right. Yes, they can wear short shorts and they can rappel and they can tow inflatable rafts by hand and hold their big guns and pump iron and hold up their cammo tents and wear fatigues and face paint and puff up their shoulders and suck in their tummies with the best of them, but that doesn’t make them men. Or soldiers.

It makes them models.

I think I just threw up a little.

And the finished product, being worn today:

However elusive you may be. Via the SF Chronicle.

Bay Area housing prices are finally falling, declining last month for the first time in more than four years.

The median price of a home in the nine Bay Area counties slipped .8 percent to $611,000 in September from a year earlier in the nine-county region, according to the DataQuick real estate information service. That figure includes both single-family houses and condos.

A build up of inventory and an increase in the supply of low-priced condos in the East Bay dragged down prices, said John Karevoll, an analyst at DataQuick. The price of new homes fell 12.3 percent in September, which pulled down the Bay Area median.

“It doesn’t mean that they’ve lost value — it means that there’s a bunch of cheap stuff selling, ” Karevoll said. “There’s a big chunk of condo conversion units in the East Bay and those are generally cheaper than most other properties.”

Single family home prices rose moderately in September, ticking up 1.1 percent to $653,000 in the nine-county region. In the San Francisco, the median home price climbed 5.5 percent to $800,000.

Bold is mine. A median home price of $800,000. Wow. You think if maybe I buy regular milk instead of organic, we could save our pennies and afford to own a home here someday?

Here’s one. I however, cannot give up cheese.

Three years after the Food and Drug Administration first hinted that it might permit the sale of milk and meat from cloned animals, prompting public reactions that ranged from curiosity to disgust, the agency is poised to endorse marketing of the mass-produced animals for public consumption.

The decision, expected by the end of this year, is based largely on new data indicating that milk and meat from cloned livestock and their offspring pose no unique risks to consumers.

Just because you can, does it mean you should? Sixty percent of the public doesn’t want cloned meat and dairy on the market. I don’t want cloned meat or cloned milk. I also don’t want my food irradiated, either. Whatever happened to REAL FOOD?

This just makes me want to go live out in the country somewhere and raise my own food. So long as I had WiFi, of course. If I only knew how to farm….

I had my post-partum visit last week with my midwife. It went pretty well. I have another follow-up when we get back from Texas, to get fitted for a diaphragm (I’m sorry, was that too much? we have to do something in the meantime before the vasectomy) and to see how I’m dealing with the semi-brutal postpartum depression I’ve been going through.

Partly due to the pp depression, partly due to my habit of not being a breakfast eater (why eat when you can sleep in that much longer?), and partly due to forgetting, I haven’t been eating as well, or as much, as I should. While this is good for dropping the baby weight, it’s not all that good for my health. My midwife wants me to take a prenatal vitamin or its equivalent, a calcium supplement, and due to my low hemoglobin levels, an iron supplement, every day.

I went to bed last night with a little scratchy spot on my throat and woke up with it this morning. I had a cold a couple of weeks ago that lasted for only a couple of days, and Joshua’s not been feeling well the last few days. The scratchy throat, as I’ve learned, is an early precursor to a cold or a full-blown sinus or respiratory infection, depending on how aggressive I am in taking care of myself after the onset of scratchy throat. Considering I’m getting on a plane, by myself, with two small children, at 6:30 on Friday morning, I’m going to kick this thing’s ass, NOW.

I told Joshua about scratchy throat, and he pulled together a little cup with my vitamins and supplements, including vitamin C and garlic and echinacea and God knows what else, for me while I got showered and dressed this morning. I also have an aversion to swallowing pills. I’m talking, an aversion. As a matter of fact, i chose a liquid iron supplement and a chewable multi-vitamin (okay, I’m sharing Judah’s Flintstones, I’ll admit). But the rest - oh, the rest - are your health store horse pills.

So imagine my fear this morning when I looked into my little ramekin with my plethora of exciting shapes and sizes. I did it though - only thought I was going to have to call 911 for choking twice. And now, every time I burp, it tastes kind of like I had Italian food for breakfast. That’s gross.

A good friend of mine learned something about the vulnerability of technology this week when her cell phone died after she cried into it.

“You’re kidding?!” I said incredulously as my friend Amy told me the reason I couldn’t reach her on the phone most of the week. Unlike some of her more effusive phone conversations, the call in question had lasted only around 10 minutes, with maybe five minutes of actual water flow, she said.

Amy knew something was wrong almost immediately–and this time it wasn’t her relationship.

“The keypad started to malfunction. I couldn’t hit the ’send’ button, and that was very sad,” she said. The next day the Sprint customer support people told her the phone had water corrosion.

“I was told I had one to two days to get my phone numbers off the (old) phone,” said Amy, who hurriedly transferred the data before it was lost. But she wasn’t able to save the 150-plus “supersweet” text messages from her boyfriend. That was “truly the worst thing” about the whole ordeal, Amy said.

The phone meltdown “was a big deal,” she said, with no small amount of anguish. “It affected several of my jobs and affected my relationship.”

But later her boyfriend laughed it off, even joking that he should get her a waterproof cover for her new cell phone.

via CNET.