marksmith

New baby!

Blog Posted by kitt at 20:24 on 2 December 2007

When Mark and Megan were over last night, Megan realized she was going into labor. She had had contractions yesterday morning, but they subsided. She wasn't getting a repeat tonight.

Around 8:30, after an hour of contractions spaced by five minutes, she called her parents to let them know they should head down to take care of Mirabelle when Mark and Megan went to the hospital. Around 9:30, Mark, Megan, Mirabelle and I drove back to their place for Megan to shower before heading to the hospital. The plan was I'd watch Mirabelle until Megan's parents arrived, Mark and Megan would head to the hospital.

Megan's parents arrived around 10:30, before Megan had left for the hospital, so my work there was light.

This morning at 7:30, Megan left me a message on my cell phone. Mayanna Kathleen Smith was born at 6:31 AM, 10 fingers, 10 toes and a shock of blonde hair.

I'm never sure when hospital visits are okay. I know when Kris is in the hospital, he doesn't want visitors. When I'm with him, I don't want visitors, because I don't like having to explain what's going on with him. We try to skip that whole thing by just not telling anyone he's gone into the hospital unless we really need to tell them.

Kris' hospital stays aren't the joyous occassions births are. So, I called Mark to explain my hesitation in visiting, that I didn't want to add to the cacophany of visitors. He laughed, said he understood, and hung up. He called back a couple hours later to tell me visiting would be good now, so I left a delicious dinner at Andy's and dashed over.

Megan and I talked for a while. She told me about her day, which made me happy I hadn't come over earlier - lots of people, not so much sleep. But I'm very glad they invited me over when they did.

For future reference: when a hospital says visiting hours are over, visiting hours are over. Waiting two hours to leave means the hospital is locked down, and you'll have to walk 3/4 of a mile through and around the hospital, looking for the approved (and un-alarmed) exit back to your car.

Grandma's stuff

Blog Yeah, kitt finished writing this at 20:13 on 17 November 2007

Beth hosted today's multi-family garage/estate sale at her grandmother's house today. Martha, Chookie, Brynne, Megan, Mark, Steffi and I all contributed stuff (gah, I so want to write "crap") to the furniture, knick-knacks, memories and crap piles of Beth's grandmother. I arrived at 8:30 in the morning to find Beth coordinating the sale with a half dozen early buyers rushing in to get the best selection on the garage sale deals. Little did they know that all the good stuff was buried in the bottom of the boxes scattered around the house, garage and driveway, to be pulled out at various times during the day to refill the stashes. We're sneaky like that.

Steffi had by far the best crap. She managed to sell 80% of her stuff by noon, including still-fashionable clothes and many useful household times. Martha had the best sell today with the sale of a bridesmaid dress with matching shoes. Mark and Megan freed themselves from various pieces of garage-sale-bought furniture, some of the items selling for as much as they bought them for. Brynne and her mother brought stuff over for the sale, but didn't stay to watch the items disappear.

When I arrived in the morning, there was a woman who had started piling items to buy. For the next hour, she would walk to the back of driveway, pick through a pile or two, walk back to her pile near the front, and repeat the process, her pile growing by the minute. After buying all of her piled stuff, she left, only to return a half hour later to begin the piling process again. She wouldn't move more than about 10 feet without finding something else to buy.

One woman I tried to help in the morning had just bought a partial set of dishes. They were cute dishes, 4 plates, 4 saucers and a couple cups, but nothing spectacular. I brought her newsprint to wrap her new dishes in, handing her a sheet before pulling another out of the pile and reaching for a plate to wrap.

You would have thought I was stealing the woman's child. She grabbed the dishes and made to slap my hand away, as she snatched the paper from my hand to wrap the dishes herself. Uh, okay, I thought, backing away slowly. I hadn't realized you were so attached to your new $5 set of dishes. Uh, enjoy!

Other people were also of note in an odd sort of way: the guy who sat staring at a box of 100 manilla folders, debating if they were were worth the 50¢ asking price; the old lady who sat in the back corner for hours looking through four giant sewing boxes for that one particular button; the man with his eight year old son buying a pile of items hand selected by the child; the young girl letting me know the items on the table marked "GOOD OLD STUFF: MAKE OFFER" were not for sale; the guy who refused to buy the trash can I had for sale because I said it was $3 instead of $1 (because $3 was sure to break the bank, you know).

I did find a number of interesting maps that might make fun buttons. I'll try them out and see.

Part of the excitement of the day was the indoor cat which had escaped the confines of its house, only to spend the next six hours stuck between the exhaust manifold and the engine compartment firewall. Neither car owner, nor the cat owner, nor animal control could extract the cat from the hole he had wedged itself into. After hearing the cat howl for hours, Mark went to save the day, pushing the cat forward through the engine compartment instead of pulling it backwards from its wedged spot.

Shame no one told him to CATCH the cat once it was released. Cheers went up after Mark extracted the cat, and disappointment followed when the cat ran off. Again.

I spent much of the day with Mirabelle. We opened and closed doors. We opened and closed water sprinklers. We opened and closed more doors. We went up stairs, and down stairs. We went inside and outside. Mirabelle went up and down, depending on her placement relative to my head. We had a good time.

In the end, I made about $5. Mark and Megan made a couple hundred dollars. Beth maybe three times that. More importantly, all of us have less crap than we did before.

And that's a good thing.

Horcrux

Blog kitt decided around 18:18 on 20 August 2007 to publish this: 
Mark Smith
2:25
what would happen if you threw a horcrux through the death curtain in the department of mysteries?

Kitt Hodsden
2:25
It would die.
Because only magical things can kill it.
and the death curtain is magical.
Alternately, it would live forever, because you wouldn't be able to go in and kill it.

Mark Smith
2:25
exactly!

Kitt Hodsden
2:26
heh.

Mark Smith
2:26
If I was Voldemort, I would have stashed one in there. Seems a good hiding place, just in case the latter is true.
Alternatively, if I were Harry, I would have been thinking about trying to use that to destroy them.

Kitt Hodsden
2:26
I don't know.  Storing on in Harry was pretty smart, too.
storing one in Harry,  I meant to type

Mark Smith
2:26
I figured.
bah.
short sighted
both the snake and harry were poor choices. they were eventually going to die anyway!
I was thinking while reading the book that once the diadem was destroyed everything was cool regardless of what happened next.

Kitt Hodsden
2:27
Could you keep one in suspended animation forever?

Mark Smith
2:27
it seems like if you could keep somebody alive forever, that the horcrux thing would be moot.

Kitt Hodsden
2:28
:\  good point.

Mark Smith
2:28
anyway, just a brain teaser.

Kitt Hodsden
2:29
a very good one.

Toil of Tears to tears

Blog Instead of being asleep at 21:02 on 26 August 2006, kitt created this:

After fighting with the DSL for a couple hours, and spending another half hour on the phone with the DSL company (most of which I spent telling them, this isn't going to help - shock, I was right), I drove up to Bay Leaf Lodge to help Mark and Megan around the house.

The interesting thing about these Toil of Tears is that, as the house owner and sponsor of this work, you have to describe as best you can what you want done and how you would do the task, then let go. Let go, and hope the person doing the work will do it as well as you would, that they care as much as you do.

It's hard. I'm not very good at it. At the Worlds Fundraising at Krikitt Wol, I cringed through most of the day, and, as Doyle can attest, micromanaged much too much.

Mark does a much better job (or, at least, projects doing a better job) of letting go, and let us do our assigned tasks.

I was caulking his windows when I had to stop. I was amazed at how much more difficult caulking windows is, compared to caulking trim in a bathroom. I managed to do well in the bathroom after all of 10 feet. I never managed to do well on his windows, trying freeform, with tape, with adjusted tape, using too much caulk with wiping off, and using too little caulk with backfill. Nothing seemed to help: I sucked at it the whole time.

I managed to finish two windows and was working on the third, having forgotten to do the door, when I realized the end of the caulk looked very sparkly, shiny, and, aw crap, iridescent. One look to the horizon and I realized I had 20 minutes before I went blind. Again.

Megan handed me four Advil, the latest in the tests of which OTC drugs I can take to ward off the worst of this migraine that's about to hit me over the head with a sixteen pound sledgehammer. Or was it the twenty pounder? I forget.

I read recently (in the grand scheme of things), that Tylenol (yeah, yeah, acetaminophen) actually has no affect on suppressing migraine pain, because of the pain relief process. Essentially, a migraine headache is so bad because it's caused by the sudden dialation of severely constricted blood vessels. The rush of blood (hence, increased blood pressure) to the head causes the pounding that is felt with each heartbeat.

Ignoring the fact that the body is ridiculously good at balancing itself, and that pressure should release immediately. It doesn't.

Advil (yeah, yeah, ibuprofin) is an anti-inflammatory. The thought is that this property will reduce the blood pressure in the whole body, causing less severe headaches.

For me, however, it's less the severe headache and more the blindness, numbness and nausea that sucks. Hate it.

The Advil helped, because my vision cleared up in about thirty minutes and I was semi-functional the rest of the day.

Heather came over with dinner in the early evening, and we spent four hours watching the first three discs of Veronica Mars, Season One. I had most of the day planned with various house tasks, mostly clean up work, and managed to get none of it done today.

There are times when life decides something else is more important than that to-do list. Sometimes it just likes to tell you it's time to stop stressing about everything and just let go.

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