Camping with a Nauseous Pregant Girl

This marks the end of week 7 for the Beanie, and according to our books, means its doubled in size this week. I don't find this at all hard to believe given whats going on with my poor Sarah-saurus!!!! She's been so sick, mostly in the mornings and then again in the evening. I'm so proud of her though, she really is handling it well! She says she complains too much, but since its my job to listen to her, I tell her it doesn't count.

We went camping this week at the North Fork Campground up around Emigrant Gap, just west of Donner Lake. It was SO nice to get the heck out of Sacramento for a few of the 100+ degree days. The campground is really strange, as its located about 7 miles from the freeway down near the bottom the canyon, with NO signage what so ever. How any one ever finds it with out someone showing them first I'll never understand. The nice part is that no one is ever there. This is probably the 5th time I've been there in the past 6 years and I have yet to see more than 3 or 4 of the 16 sites occupied!

One of my favorite things about Sarah is that she's such an outdoorsy kind of girl! She loves just being outside the same way I do. Even with her poor stomache doing somersaults she was just pleased as punch to be up there with me. Shopping for food prior to the trip was kind of fun, as I had to pick up three options for each meal since there was no way of telling what she's be feeling like! *laughs* I must have done good cause there was something for her to eat and snack on that she liked at all times... hows that for the supportive father-to-be????

The campground is especially nice because of its proximity to what might be the greatest swimming hole ever. There is a large pool at the base of a waterfall that is probably 30 feet deep, with all sorts of ledges to jump off. Above that is another, deeper pool with a much larger waterfall. All sort of insane people are hurling their bodies off the surrounding cliffs into this thing... CUCKOOOOOOOO. Sarah and I did climb up to the second fool and swim under the waterfall, a total pre-requisite for this trip. :) We sunned ourselves and relaxed. Much of the time Sarah slept in the tent, recharging her batteries and letting the Beanie suck the life force from her.

I'll post a couple of pictures soon from the trip. We're also taking weekly pictures... wont be very interesting until she starts to show.. unless you're me, cause I think she's beautiful.

CHEERS!!

Beanie Ahoy!

Hooray! Today Sarah had her first ultrasound! We have been pretty nervous about not knowing exactly how far along we are (excepting we knew the LONGEST time possible....) and we were quite eager to get this done! Apparently the little blip on the screen, floating in the ether, is our little beanie! The length of pregnancy can be determined by the crown to rump length (who thinks this crap up?). The resolution of this ultrasound is pretty amazing, as the beanie is only 3 MM long! That puts us at 5 weeks, 6 days, with a due date of March 15th 2008. This also means that I will be 49 years old when this kid is singing the Windham High fight song at graduation. Cripes.
We've made a trip to Borders and picked up a couple books on the whole crazy adventure. I got one all about us poor marginalized fathers and how the woman is trying to keep us down. I'm totally going to fight the power. Unlike women who fight the power with brains and savvy, I plan on fighting it with BBQ, monster trucks and screaming guitar solo's lifted from Turbonegro records. "Ain't no one gonna take stride, ain't nobody going to slow me down, oh no! I've got to keep on moving!"

The Real Deal

Here's the real test! From what Sarah tells me this is scrapbook gold.

She's going down to southern California for Scrapfest 2007 in November. She's designated scrapper this year... the sober person responsible for proofing other peoples "scraps?" There may also be some midget strippers.

You, me and baby make three!

Well the word is out, Sarah is pregnant! She told her mom this week, I told my mother shortly there after, and all is well! It was an incredible weight of Sarah's shoulders to have told her mother, and more importantly that she was so happy for us!

My mother was ECSTATIC! She's wanted grandchildren so long I stopped paying attention to that odd baying noise in the background. My brother called me about 15 minutes after I spoke with my mother and said that I had just made her decade. He also called to concede Golden Boy to me. He thinks there is no way he could win now and wanted let me have the victory with dignity.

I had very good intentions of posting a picture of our positive pregnancy test here, but I don't have my card reader here at work, so that will have to wait till I get home this week. But I think this nice generic picture I lifted from the EPT site looks pretty sharp. Sarah is so fun because she tells me all her little neurosis.... like how she felt like a tool for being the total spaz monkey and taking 3 tests. As a man, you just figure those things are clear as day, but she shared with me one that was totally ambiguous. Manufacturing that sort of product ought warrant a speedy beheading. (see China) However the deal was pretty much sealed with the digital read out that said PREGNANT, and didn't have the the NOT in front of it.

We go to the OB/GYN office this week get two buckets of blood drawn, well when I say we, I mean Sarah. I'll be sure to feed her lots of iron and maybe a few illicit epoeiten shots when she's not looking. Apparently by quantifying the hormones in the blood you can pretty reliably nail down how far along she is and we'll be able to give everyone some sort of due date. Per her "Wheel of the End of Your Life" we think we're due for touch down in Adulthood during March.

This week Sarah and I spent a lot of quality time with her sisters kids Kevin and Kayla. Her parents had dropped them of at grandma's house and were in up Tahoe for a couple of days. Her brother-in-law seemed to enjoy making the point to me that this was the first time they'd been away like that since Kevin was born..... FIVE YEARS AGO. Way to help a brother out!! It was a good peek into really good parenting and I'll definitely reference their example when pulling my own hair out. We spent most of Thursday afternoon swimming, man can these kids go-go-go. Reminds me of being a kid on the lake... we NEVER got out of the water. Kayla is completely fearless, which instills fear in anyone else who has to watch her doing flips in the water and determined not to come up for breath until she's done one!! Kevin is more cautious, but very deliberate, as he's thought things through, run some thought experiments and settled on the best method still not quite sure if it will work. You can almost see the wheels turning in his head.

Tell me something good....

What an incredible day this has been. I can't really tell anyone why. Not like its a matter of national security or anything, just being ever so cooooool man. Really though, it is one of those life changing things. I AM SO HAPPY!!

On another note, what the hell is wrong with people? This time I am refering to the inability to merge into traffic. What would you say if I told you that driving 20 mph down the on ramp into 70 mph traffic was a smart and safe thing to do, you'd shoot me, right? WELL THATS EXACTLY WHAT ALL YOU RETARDS ARE DOING!! ITS THE PEDAL ON THE RIGHT!!! GO GO GO GO GO. Eesh.

"Where do we go from here?" ~Filter

Oak Park, How I love Thee

This morning I completed my Tuesday AM ritual of picking up all the trash that has blown into my pre-yard over the weekend. Pre-yard, you see, is the term I use for the part of my front lawn that is adjacent to the street, and separated from the FRONT yard by a fence and juniper bushes. At any rate, like every Teusday morning, the whole thing was littered with the detritus of my fellow Oak Park dwellers. The Food Ghetto is across the way, and lots of foot traffic goes by each day from the heart of the neighborhood. These folks must be allergic to garbage cans, or mortally afraid of them, or something. You can track the season pretty well by the type of wrapper I am picking up in my yard you see. This time of year there are lots of ice cream and Popsicle packages. In the fall you switch to your Mars Bars and Grandmas Cookies. There are some favorites through out the year: the plastic covering of cigarette boxes, Slim Jim wrappers and of course, little baggies that previously held crack or meth. AWESOME.

Peruvian Princess

This morning I almost rear ended a white Toyota Carolla while reaching for my cellphone to call my girlfriend. God bless the Subaru (or Les-baru as I've come to learn....thats another post) When I came to my senses and put the cellphone down I noticed something funny. The man driving the car was a burly looking older fellow, clearly of some sort of south american decent. As I was scanning the rearview mirror for any evidence he noticed just how many microns I came away from screwing up each others mornings, I noticed the most incongruous sticker across his back window.

PERUVIAN PRINCESS

WHAT? Are you for real. I reach for the phone again, and called my girlfriend, a Polish Princess. And I found the sticker babe, so its getting plastered on YOUR Corolla.

Global Warming, Pirates and Pasta

Let me ask you this. Is it getting hotter where you are? Feeling the heat? Is your tiny Pacific island slowly disappearing beneath the rising seas?

We're all blaming carbon emissions, Arizona size holes in the ozone layer and bovine flatulence. Did you ever stop to think that this all might be due to the stunning decline in the number of pirates? Of course not. You're all blinded by Big Media and Al Gore's comb over.

This graph clearly establishes the correlation between the rapid decline in pirate population and rise in global temperature. Never mind that every non-retarded person knows correlation does not make implicit cause. Just roll with it here, ok genius?

Now please think hard. When was the last time you saw a pirate? Johnny Depp and his oh-so-ambiguous Jack Swallows with his GUY-LINER doesn't count. Nor do those marauding morons off the coast of Somalia. It's clearly understood that REAL pirates use swords and cannons, and to a lesser degree trained attack monkeys. They do not use machine guns and RPGs. Also, no pirate worth his salt would be caught with his scurvy ass in a powered monstrosity. No, pirates only ship on sail powered conveyances.

I'd very much suggest you checking out this FANTASTIC website: http://www.venganza.org/

All I am saying is this. If you think this is ridiculous, try reading Genesis. Or listening to Genesis.

Either way, you'll get a good laugh.

Hello! Welcome to what might just be the most awesome blog ever. What else would you expect from Captain Awesome?

Who is Captain Awesome you might ask? Captain Awesome, like beer, is the cause of and solution to all of lifes little problems.

He's a world traveller. He's a healthcare professional. He's a snowboarder. He's the Embassador to the US for Transnistria (google it). He lives on a boat half the week. Interested? Then please, come back often!