Sorry about another test, but I set up a mailing list for the baby announcements, and I wanted to be sure that posts from my phone will go both to the blog and the mailing list.
The mailing list can be found at http://www.chaoslimited.com/mailman/listinfo/birth – Moderator (my) approval is required for subscrption so that I can limit the email to people I know–even if the same info will appear on the blog mere minutes later. Also, don't be too surprised if I simply add you if you're someone we want to share the details with regardless of your subscription (in)action.
Thanks to this poll plugin for wordpress I’ve created a baby name poll so that you can help us choose a girl’s name. The poll will be up in the “internal links” section of Choicy White boy. Check it out, pick a favorite and let us know. (Don’t worry, I’ll know what it is you voted for and use that one, regardless of what the rest of the poll says 😉 )
(with apologies to dave matthews)
Carolyn said I shouldn’t do it. But I did. I got “choicywhiteboy.com”. I don’t think there’s going to be a rush on the domain. It only has meaning for me. But this way blog title and address can sync up — you only have to remember one! For that matter, I took the next logical step and got the AIM ID “choicywhiteboy”. I wonder if I’m going to get as tired of this name as I did of A Life More Ordinary. I guess we’ll see.
OK, it’s lantern light, not candle light, but the idea’s pretty similar. And I’ve been doing a lot of it lately.
Maybe a couple of weeks after I penned The bk Life, bk asked me if I’d computed on the back porch again. At the time I had not. But the weather has been too beautiful here to stay in the basement. I’ve got a mouse, and I’m more-or-less used to the screen size. After all, I’ve owned computers since a 9-inch monitor was the norm, and color was an unnecessary (and unaffordable) luxury. The keyboard is still the wrong size, but at least once my fingers are settled on the home row, I do OK. It’s probably been a couple of weeks now that I’ve been typing away with the grassy berm and trees as my backdrop
This is a simple test of a plugin I just got for wordpress to hook up wordpress to gallery. If it works, there’ll be an ultrasound picture above this. If it doesn’t, then I’ll be editing it until it does work. But not until after dinner. 😉
Well, it appears that I got it working. But I’m still not sure I’m satisfied. I think I want an intermediate size for in-blog pictures. The gallery thumbnail is too small, but the “regular” size gallery picture is too large. And maybe I want to link to the gallery itself. I’m not sure. Maybe the trick is to make a blog-content gallery which has pictures the size I want in the blog, and just use this plugin to include the pictures here. Or maybe the answer is to find another plugin. For interested gallery/wordpress users (Luke), the above is the result of WP-Gallery 0.32.
There are a couple of things I’m tempted to do/start with this blog. The first is to make it my home page. I don’t think there’s any content on the home page that’s not (or couldn’t be) on this page. And why come to a mostly dead home page when the life is going on underneith?
I’m also tempted to start a section (or at least a category) called “Other people’s stories.” There are stories that have come into my life that I’ve enjoyed a great deal. In many cases, what I’ve enjoyed is the enjoyment of the storyteller. I somehow doubt that they’ll translate well to this medium, but they might. And, as I’ve said, I’ve kind of adopted them. Maybe I’ll tell them as if they were my own. Maybe I’ll seek publishing (and naming) permission from the people for whom the stories are real.
We reached the end of Farscape today. It was a fun show. I liked it and recommend it, but somehow, it never grabbed me the way I expected it to. Maybe my expectations were set too high. Maybe I’ve been jaded by the predictable pattern of hero gets into trouble through no fault of his/her own. Hero gets out of trouble through use of skill/smarts/wit/humanity/whatever, all in the course of an hour. To be sure, Farscape was better than many shows at having larger arcs. The writing was generally witty, though sometimes the cultural references were piled on too quick and heavy for what was supposed to be the other side of the galaxy. I’m left a little melancholy by the ending, and I don’t think it’s all just because it ended.
I meant to post this on the second instead of almost a week later. So, I’m going to back-date this one. Maybe you’ll see it, maybe not. Anyway, Gary Larson’s The Far Side is probably my second-favorite comic strip ever (behind Bill Waterson’sCalvin and Hobbes). During my junior year of college, I was an RA, and already pretty well acknowledged as a gamer much more than a studier. When this particular strip came out (10/15/90 apparently), some people thought it might resonate with me. Of course, at the time, I thought it was funny. I put it on my door. I forgot about it.
Carolyn and I had a perinatal day today. We had a fetal ultrasound with biophysical profile. We had an OB/GYN appointment. We had a quote “non-stress“ test. Carolyn peed in a cup. (OK, to be fair, she has to pee in a cup every time we go to the OB/GYN [at their request, not her whim], but still, it was a long-ish day of poking and prodding.)
All of this (well most of this) because she’s “measuring small.” We had a joke at the beginning that “I make big babies.” Apparently, this is not the case. Or at least not the case for babies I make with Carolyn. This is fortunate, because little Carolyn would have some real trouble with a big baby. What was particularly curious and nerve-wracking about today was that the baby’s falling behind in the curve. Every ultrasound that we had through the end of July was the same: “Baby’s doing great. I’m showing the due date as Oct. 5.” I mean, they were measuring her to the day! But out of the blue, today’s ultrasound shows her as between 2 and 3 weeks behind. Somehow baby was right on track for 30 weeks, then only grew about 2 weeks worth in the last 5.
According to “this recent article”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/31/national/31religion.html?incamp=article_popular in the New York times, I quote: “In all, 64 percent said they were open to the idea of teaching creationism in addition to evolution, while 38 percent favored replacing evolution with creationism.” I double-checked. 64+38 = 102.
I know what they meant of course. Still, it’s interesting the slant. Also not surprising, but interestingly phrased: “More of those who believe in creationism said they were “very certain” of their views (63 percent), compared with those who believe in evolution (32 percent).” I say “not surprising” because when you think about it, religion is all about faith. It’s believing something to be true in the absence of any evidence. Science, on the other hand is about doubting what you think you know. It’s about trying to make a hypothesis and prove it false.
