Hameno

his feet look like mine

The first question that people asked, it seemed, beyond weight and time of birth, was “Who does he look like?” Even after a few hours of life, I had to admit to my mom and dad that the child looks like his dad, the Mr. I was thinking at the time that it was a little more than half - a little more than half is over on the Mr. side, and we’d find SOMETHING that looks like me.

Hm. Pretty much the whole face looks like his dad. His hair is black, which cannot have come from me. His eyebrows are totally his dad’s, down to this little eyebrow thing that he does, just like his dad. The nose never looks like anyone’s early, but the mouth is also his dad’s. I fear that we will have a little Mr. running around in a very short time.

I thought that there would eventually be something that looks like me, until I was reviewing his various body parts (as moms are wont to do). I noticed his little pinky finger:

which, for those of you who don’t know the Mr, looks like the pinky finger of his dad:

He looks so much like his dad, I’ve taken to telling the Mr. that I like him (the Mr) so much because he looks like my son.

Looks like his legs are a little bit more like the Mr’s than mine, but I have determined that the Feet look like mine! There’s at least one thing on his body that looks like his mother, at least I can prove he’s my son.

Boy, does he have nice looking feet.

Posted by on August 27th, 2008 under Uncategorized | Comment now »

pictures on flickr

Putting pictures up here is a little difficult, so I’m going to try out Flickr. Have a look at some new pictures of the child at

http://www.flickr.com/photos/29882902@N04/

Blog entries coming soon

Posted by on August 24th, 2008 under Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

new baby in the house

We have a new baby in the house! He was born on on August 5, but came home on Monday. He was a little bit early and had a bit of jaundice, so they kept him in the hospital nursery a few extra days. But he’s home now! He’s such a cutie.

Click on the image to see a larger version.

Here’s the Mr. burping the child

The child’s first bath

The child’s first walk

And of course, the Mr. supervising the child

Posted by on August 13th, 2008 under Uncategorized | 3 Comments »

We just joined the “buy more sh&t” club

I am so lucky that the Mr. doesn’t like having a lot of crap around. He’s a little on the freakish side about it, but this is good because it keeps me from buying more crap. The Onion had a very nice article about the consumer culture this week: New Linens-N-Shit opens.

So we’re expecting a baby, you know this about us. All of our friends said, if you’re buying disposable diapers, Costco is the way to go. Sigh. I’ve avoided places like Costco for most of my adult life - I try to buy things just before I need them, and a cleaned out cupboard/refrigerator give me a little burst of joy. Somehow seeing evidence (in an empty cupboard or something) that I don’t have a lot of crap in my house makes me happy. Places like Costco, with its cheaper-by-the-bulk marketing, seem to go against this basic philosophy of ours.

However, the “I don’t want to be encouraged to buy more crap” urge is being overtaken by the “We need to be frugal” urge, and we caved in. My mom said she would get us a Costco membership for my birthday, and we took her up on the offer. So this morning we drove over, signed up, and walked around the store just to see what was there. We found the huge boxes of diapers and the enormo-packs of baby wipes, which is what we will buy when we need to, but we also saw the bulk food, alcohol, snacks, etc etc etc.

I’ll keep you updated on how we do on not buying a bunch of crap. The Mr. is likely going to be doing most of the diaper runs so I think we’re pretty safe.

Posted by on August 3rd, 2008 under Uncategorized | Comment now »

tomato sandwiches

When I was growing up we had a garden every summer, and without fail we had TONS of tomatoes, along with corn, peas, leaf lettuce, cauliflower, carrots, radishes, etc. But what I liked best was tomatoes. My mom says I started eating them as a preschooler, I KNOW that in early elementary school I was eating them like apples, she used to have to limit my tomato intake.

I have three older brothers, but I can only remember one of them liking tomatoes anywhere near how much I liked them. In our teen years, when we were left alone to find our own lunches, Brian and I would go out to the garden, pick some leaf lettuce and a fresh tomato or two from the vine, and make a BLT without the B. This was the best meal ever. A few times when I went to visit him at his house in the summer, we’d relive those days and have a fresh lettuce and tomato sandwich in his adult kitchen.

I continued to eat tomato sandwiches (BLT without the BL) as I grew up, and eat them with WAY too much regularity these days. I think this might be my pregnancy craving food — last week alone I had three dinners of tomato sandwiches. I eat other things too in this pregnancy, don’t get me wrong. I snack on vegetables, cheese, nuts, and I always have a nice lunch of meat, starch and greens.

I told the Mr. the other day that I don’t know what I’ll do when we have to start eating as a family and I can’t have tomato sandwiches every other day.

The Mr., by the way, likes radishes. My dad is a radish man, having a snack of a radish sandwich about as many times a week during radish season as I have tomato sandwiches. No wonder where I learned it.

Posted by on August 3rd, 2008 under Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

all of the sudden … I’m publicly pregnant

So it appears that I am SO MUCH past the “is she pregnant? or just fat?” stage, that I appear so pregnant that people in public acknowledge my pregnancy. And it really just started over the weekend (happy birthday to me, I guess). My friend and I went to a movie on Saturday night, and after I bought my ticket the ticket lady said, “And by the way, congratulations!” I was confused for a minute, and then said “Uh, thanks.” As if I just found out I was pregnant yesterday or something. And then when I was buying popcorn, I couldn’t decide between the medium and the large, and deciding that since Kramer isn’t buying anything, to get the large, the guy behind the counter said “Did the baby help you decide?” I was flabbergasted - two people in one night commenting on my belly! I was wearing the red “I’m really pregnant” shirt, I have to admit, but still. And then I was shopping at the mall the next day, and people were holding doors for me, commenting that it’s hot, getting out of my way in a very deferential manner.

I guess I’ll live it up while I can. I don’t like being helpless much, but it’s not for very much longer.

Posted by on July 28th, 2008 under Uncategorized | Comment now »

thirty-nine

I turned thirty nine today. It was a pretty good year, and I think the next year is going to get better. Thirty-nine is a fairly good number - not like the number 36, that was a good number, but thirty-nine will do. Thirty-nine is probably more pleasant if you like the number three. I’m more of a four kind of person myself, threes turn me off. They’re all so odd, three doesn’t make nice squares, when three people are together, all too often two get paired up and the third is by themselves. I’ve just never liked three very much. So thirty-nine is a pretty good age, but the number not so much.

So ever since I was thirty-eight I’ve been thinking of myself as almost 40. I even said I was 40 this year in front of a few older friends. You know, as in “Well, I’m 40 so I have to …” about something, and one of the women said “YOU’RE NOT FORTY! Hang on to your thirties as long as you can!” Well, I was almost 39, and 39 is pretty near 40, I think it’s good for a person to prepare themselves early for these large birthdays. If I convince myself I’m 40 before I actually get there, I think the actual day won’t be so bad. This woman who cautioned me to hang on to 39 as long as possible had a TERRIBLE time with 40 and then 50 (which was last year). She was down for months surrounding her birthday.

So, thirty-nine, sure, but almost 40. Which is four times 10 — I think THAT’s going to be a great year.

Posted by on July 28th, 2008 under Uncategorized | Comment now »

back to the dark ages

The Mr. and I subscribed to Netflix recently, and one of the nice things about it is that you can watch a movie instantly from their website. I’ve hooked up the laptop to our HD tv (it has a PC monitor input) so it’s like watching it on DVD.

The other day he made me watch Inherit the Wind, about the Scopes Monkey Trial. He Made Me, in that he chose it this time, but it’s certainly something I’m interested in. Briefly, it’s a fictional retelling of the true story of a man who was prosecuted for daring to teach evolution in his biology classroom, when a Tennessee law strictly forbade it. The movie had shades of McCarthyism in it, with themes such as “how can you tell me what I’m supposed to be thinking?” Seriously, believe in the Bible if you like, I’m not concerned that you do, but don’t tell me that I have to believe in it. In the Scopes Monkey Trial, the prosecutor was not allowed to bring Science into the picture, since the trial was about whether or not Scopes broke an existing law forbidding anyone to teach anything but Creationism as it was taught in the Bible. So Darrow started questioning the scientific truth (as it were) of the Bible, which makes for the movie’s most interesting scenes (Where did Cain get his wife? If the very first day of the world was October 24, then did that day have day and night? Really? God didn’t create light until the fourth day.) Scopes lost since he clearly violated the existing law, but only had to pay $100. This law and others like it were subsequently declared unconstitutional.
So this of course gets me going. My carpoolmate had just read a book about the Dover trial on Intelligent Design, so I went looking on Wikipedia for that and found a nice long article with a link at the bottom for the PBS documentary on the trial. Sure enough, it was available on Netflix, so I made the Mr. watch it with me last week.

This case actually allowed the science of “intelligent design” and evolution to be debated in court, which made for interesting dialogue as well. But the two important points that I took out of the documentary/trial were: the re-introduction of a supernatural being into science, and the proof that there was a concerted effort to re-name Creationism as Intelligent Design so that ID looked like a science and not like a religion.

Second point first. For those of you still following along, our constitution demands the separation of church and state, so you cannot teach religion (i.e. creationism) in schools. Since the days of the Scopes trial, this constitutional tenet had been upheld. So a number of leading thinkers in the Christian arena came up with their “science” of Intelligent Design, where something similar to evolution happens but it is guided/performed by a supernatural designer. They were careful to not use the words Creationism, God, or the Bible, so as to make it seem like ID was a science, not a religion. The proof in the trial that ID was deliberately created to be a science and not a religion but with religion as the push was provided by testimony by Barbara Forrest (I gotta read me one of her books or articles…).

But the point that leaves me the most disturbed was smaller, when the prosecutor pointed out that if you define Intelligent Design as a science, complete with the unknown supernatural Designer (i.e. God), then astrology would also be considered a science. And, as we all know, when science finally became a science out of the dark ages, a basic tenet was that supernatural forces were not allowed to be considered in scientific theory. If we allowed ID to be a science, we would be essentially putting us all back in the dark ages. Thank God the Creationists lost that trial.

Posted by on July 26th, 2008 under Uncategorized | Comment now »

marrying libraries

Even though I have said in a previous post that I’m getting so large I can hardly do anything anymore, believe you me I’m doing things.

You might well recall our timeline since the beginning of the year:

December: engaged

January: begin planning wedding, go to doctor’s appointments

February-March: the Mr. moves in, continue planning wedding

March: get married

End of April: the stepdaughter moves in

End of June: the stepdaughter moves out

So … not only did we combine households, we had to clear out a room for the stepdaughter. The room that was my spare, catch-all-store-my crap room. Needless to say, we have a lot of stuff in the storage area. The Mr. is the storage area keeper, I just make boxes for him to bring there, so I don’t even know how much is there (nor do I really want to know, frankly).

So now it is mid-July, and I have the second room back, preparing it for baby. One thing we didn’t do before the stepdaughter moved in was weed books. I’m a reader, and the Mr. is also a reader. We like to buy books — although we do much less of that lately with the new frugality.

There was a large bookshelf in the second room of books that had to go. However, I didn’t want to just put them in storage because they were all MY books. The Mr’s books were in the living room and the bedroom! Over the last three weekends, I’ve taken the task of integrating our books and putting five more boxes of them in storage, who knows when we’ll see them again.

The final result is that they are now all interfiled. My Jane Austen next to his Samuel Beckett. My “Theodore Rex” next to his “The Origins of the Inquisition”. The Mr. has become amazingly relaxed about what is kept and what is not — mostly he just says I can make any decision I like about the books, it will be fine. He joked with his brother about how he can’t really picture himself getting angry about not having immediate access to the Memoirs of Elias Cannetti (he tends to like the obscure) or not being able to refer to Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams. I imagine he’ll get by without them. I mostly saved things of his that I thought I would like to read someday, and discard things of mine that I was tired of.

The title of this post is from an essay in Anne Fadiman’s book, “Ex Libris” called “Marrying Libraries”, which I highly recommend reading. She is bookish, and so is her husband, and it took them ten years to finally intermingle their books into one shelf, as it were. It was a heartwrenching process, deciding on whose copy of Shakespeare to keep, and how to arrange. We didn’t really have the luxury to wait that long.

Posted by on July 20th, 2008 under Uncategorized | Comment now »

zimbabwe just printed a $100 billion dollar note

And that won’t even buy a loaf of bread. See the story here, on the BBC web site.

I don’t write about Zimbabwe much, although I do follow it with much interest. Just after the fake re-vote at the end of June, Mugabe went to visit the other African countries’ leaders. He said to them, “I haven’t done any worse than other African leaders have done”. All I could think of was perhaps a follow up statement like “Well … at least I’m not as bad as Idi Amin.”

Joking aside, however, he pretty much has done what other African leaders have done, terrible as it is.