Not so long now

So I resolved that run-on page thing with those handy-dandy PREV and NEXT buttons, I guess eventually i will have to come up with some kind of index or calendar, but for now while the site is small they will do.

So I have been doing some more reading from The Expectant Father and some of the stuff in there makes a lot of sense… and I was surprised to learn that I am not the first father-to-be that feels a need to journal my thoughts during the pregnancy. I was able to breathe a sigh of relief as I really understood that literally billions of men have gone through exactly what I am going through now and that it is unlikely that my reactions will be too far off the mark form the norm. As a matter of fact, all of the reactions to pregnancy may have already been done at least once–so I am not even breaking any new ground. That’s a little tough to take since a good part of my ego is invested in being an individual.

Last night, Robin and I played a game called Farkel for the first time. It is a game played with 6 dice and Robin tells me it is similar in concept to Yahtzee!, which I have never played. She beat me twice in a row, but that wasn’t so bad. We are usually a little lopsided in games, like chess. But hat is to be expected since I taught her to play. She now knows most of my moves and uses them against me (is there a lesson there?) So back to this Farkel game, it was pretty easy and all you need to play is six dice. Here’s the instructions.

One of the other things the book suggested is that we chronicle the state of the world today so that we an our child can look back to reminisce when they are older. So just for grins here are the current prices of some things in Lititz, PA as of today:

Gas, 1 gallon: $1.03
Milk, 1 gallon: $1.93
Soda, 1 can: $0.60
Bread, i loaf, sliced: $0.79
Movie, 1 ticket: $6.50
Rental Movie, 3 nights: $2.75
Coffee, 16oz. cup: $0.69 – $1.25 (depends on store…)

In the same vein, here are some recent or on-going world events…
Kosovo: NATO continues to think an air-war will make a Hitleresque dictator come to his knees while 100,000+ refugees suffer miserably.
Littleton, Colorado: 2 (maybe more) misguided teenaged boys walk into their high-school with pip bombs, assault rifles and pistols and proceed to execute 20+ students and 1 teacher before killing themselves. Biggest school massacre to date, the country and the media are still reeling with shock.
Washington DC: The Microsoft anti-trust suit continues its ridiculous and interminable course towards nothing.

So none of that stuff was very positive now was it? Well, maybe in the next 9 months I will have some more positive things to say.

On a more humorous note, we left a frozen cake out to thaw on the counter last night for dessert and Liza & Casey, our two Dalmatians, proceeded to lick the icing off of one side of it. They couldn’t get to the other three sides because it was too far back on the counter and seemed to be pretty depressed about the whole incident.

On a totally different tack, I am super-happy that we are finally going to be getting our 2 new Sony laptops from CDW, that damn 4 week back-order was driving me crazy. Now I can keep this diary form the house instead of having to do it after hours at the office.

Keeping on….

OK, it looks like I have a little bit of explaining to do here…
What’s with the big gap in the diary? Well, I had the best intention of keeping this thing up to date, but there just wasn’t ever time–and to be honest, I forgot about it. But now it is firmly in the forefront of my mind and I seem to have some more free time in the evenings as well. I am also more eager to document my life now that there is a bambino on the way, some day I would like the little guy/gal to be abel to look back at what his/her dad was like–what he was thinking. Now, this might not be great idea but I am going to pursue it anyway. (The reason it might not be a great idea is that reading a parent’s diary is like looking behind the curtain and seeing that the great and secret Oz is just a little guy working the levers.)

On another note, I haven’t told robin that I am putting these thoughts out there for all the world to see… and that might irk her a bit–she is my wife after all and does have a right to know when i am talking, or in this case writing, about her. (NOTE TO SELF: tell robin tonite.)

This whole baby thing has knocked me for a loop, it was totally unexpected–damn that .3% chance that the pill will fail. I’m not upset that we are going to have a kid, it’s just that we were planning on holding off for a year or two to get our finances in line and have moved into our first house. Now the poor little bugger is going to have to come home to a less-than-perfect apartment to say the least. Other than the obvious lack of notice, the idea of havign a kid is pretty cool… but distracting. It has been tough to keep my mind on work in the past five days. At seemingly random moments, the thoughts just pop into my head like “I am gonna be a Daddy” and “At this time next year I willbe knee-deep in diapers”. Thinking about diapers makes it somewhat difficult to code web sites and administer servers…

I just looked back over what i have written in my browser and it looks pretty good, but it also looks pretty long, I need to figure out how to code these entries so that they aren’t one run-on page, but are still easy to deal with and navigate back and forth.