ben.parmeter

We’re so excited! We think that the day may finally be here! C will hopefully be making her début into the world soon and we’d like you to share in the moment(s). As mentioned in previous posts, I’ll be live-blogging the experience via Twitter here. So what are you waiting for? Get on over to twitter and read my blow-by-blow, sportscaster-like, coverage of the labor and delivery of our little girl. Just click here.

For the uninitiated, you may not need a Twitter account to read my twitter-feed, but it’s not a bad idea to sign up anyway. You don’t want to be left behind in the technical dust. When reading my feed (http://twitter.com/nebhead) you may want to refresh the page every so often to get the latest updates (on a PC press “F5″, on a Mac press “command+r”).

Away we go!

Well, it certainly is; until tomorrow when a crew of tree removal experts descend upon my yard to turn that tree into a heap of firewood.  That’s revenge for ya!  So sit back, and let me tell you a little story about our Tuesday evening at home.  I suppose I should start from the beginning.

Tuesday was a particularly unseasonably windy and rainy day.  The remnants of the so called “super-typhoon” squarely walloped the northern part of California with 35mph winds, gusting up to 50mph.   Most of the morning was relatively un-eventful.  Suzy had left work at lunch time, because they were repainting her office.  The fumes were starting to really bother her, and that combined with the fact that she is trying her best to not breathe in any fetus-unfriendly toxins, she headed home.   Not too long after she got home, she called me at work to let me know that there was about a 20 foot section of branch that had fallen from one of the trees in our backyard, onto the neighbors fence.  She braved the wind and the rain in the backyard to investigate and found that the fence was actually damaged – and could sustain more damage if we didn’t get this off soon.

Needless to say, I quickly drove home to investigate myself.  I dropped an e-mail to my team, letting them know I’d be working remotely and dashed home.  When I got home, I confirmed the 20 foot branch leaning up against the fence.  Much bigger than I expected, and definitely not something I could move with sheer man-power.  It was big.  Using my mastery of physics, I acquired a rope from the garage and tied it to the highest point I could reach.  Meanwhile, the rain and winds were still raging, and looking up at the looming trees, I was a bit afraid that they would start to jettison more branches this size onto me.  But I carried on.  Having fixed the rope to the branch above the mid way point, I pulled as hard as I could and managed to get the tree off the fence and back into our yard.  A job well done.  And I fully intended to start cutting that branch into smaller sections, but Suzy convinced me that it wasn’t wise to do that now, so I packed up my things and headed inside.

I was pretty well soaked from the pelting rain, so I put on some fresh clothes and went back into the living room to sit on the couch and enjoy the sounds of the typhoon outside.  And this was when we heard one of the most gut wrenching sounds a person can hear.  Crrraaaaaaccckkkkk, swoooooooshhh, THUD!!!  Suzy and I were frozen in place, staring in horrified silence.  The large 50 foot tree closest to our house had just snapped at the base and fallen parallel to our house, filling our backyard completely with tree.

Seemingly, the tree had missed the house, or so we thought.  But as we got to the rear sliding door, we could see that the eaves of the house were damaged.  It was Armageddon back there.  My gas grill was squashed and there were branches and leaves everywhere.  Amazingly, it seemed to have fallen squarely within the confines of my yard, grazing the house ever so slightly.  We stood, staring at the mess before us for a few minutes discussing how lucky we were and how I was just out in the backyard and that could have been me squashed underneath that giant tree.

As we turned around, Suzy noticed one of the vent registers had partially popped out of the ceiling… and leaves and bark appeared to be coming out of the hole.  And then, water started to drip from the vent.  We quickly examined the rest of the ceiling in the back room.  We’d eventually discover the leak was spreading across the room to a light fixture and to seam in the dry-wall.

Suzy also discovered, when going into the master bathroom that a branch had breached the dry-wall and was sticking out out over the sink.  Strangely enough, no water was leaking in from this portion of the ceiling.

And so I braved the wind and the rain one more time to climb up onto the roof (never do this in a storm, I know), and attempted to assess the damage.  Using the pruning saw that I got from my parents in law last winter, I started to hack away at the branches to try to get closer to the roof puncture.  My neighbor, an extremely kind man indeed, ventured up onto the roof with me with a small hand saw.  Together managed to wrap a tarp around the branch and the puncture, hoping to stem the torrential flood of water coming into the roof.  After a good amount of time we decided it just wasn’t safe to be up there any longer and we headed back indoors.

After calling my insurance company, they got me in touch with an emergency contractor who was able to come out to my house in the same evening, saw back the branches on the roof, remove the giant branch protruding into the house and seal up the hole with plywood and plastic.  This would allow us to limp through the remainder of the storm and stop the water damage from getting any worse than it was.

Needless to say, we were both pretty shaken up by the whole event.  That night, we chose not to sleep in the bedroom, for fear that the tree might somehow shift in the wind, dislodge and roll into the house again.  And if that happened, we didn’t want to be anywhere near it.  So we slept on the couches in the living room that night, waking at every little sound.  Luckily, the weather gave us a break, the wind calmed down and the rain slowed to a trickle that very night.

Without further delay, here are some pictures that capture the moment both right after it occured and the next day.  Enjoy.

One might think that over the last month or so, nothing has happened of note in my life.  But alas, that is not the case.  For some reason, after sitting down in front of the keyboard, I’ve been struck with a terrible case of the writers block.  I just haven’t been motivated to write about things lately.  So instead of writing a well thought out post, chronicling the goings-on, I’m going to make a list of random things I’ve been up to with photos.  Ben’s month in lists…

Things I’ve been doing lately:

• Celebrated Suzy’s Birthday, Twice (Once at Ruby Tuesday – Shameful, Once at The Melting Pot – Delicious)
• Brewed an Oatmeal Stout for annual competition with one of my co-workers
• Purchased a PlayStation 3 (Mostly for Blu-Ray support, but also for games and media center)
• Got the Santa Fe fixed
• Read “Happiest baby on the Block”
• Visited like-minded friends on the Central Coast of California, made friends with their dog Parker

• Saw this drooling bird on the pier at the beach

• Went to a good old fashioned Melodrama (my first time… and a great experience)
• Visited Taipei, Taiwan for work

• Read “Baby Wise”
• Ate great Asian food in Taipei, Taiwan
• Worked in Taipei, Taiwan
• Took pictures in bathrooms in Taipei, Taiwan (“Keeping a Clean and Pleasant Environment Makes Everyone Delighted Thank You”)

• Played Beatles RockBand (Thanks Chris!)
• Traveled to Oregon for work, visited my parents
• Met Nico Edan Ferguson for the very first time.

• Said goodbye to my long time friends Pat & Cynthia – Have a great time in Taiwan my friends… see you in two years!
• Baby Shower plus BBQ with the family in Stockton
• Obtained a flash for my fancy camera – subsequently super impressed with results
• Took second place at the Oktoberfest for our Oatmeal Stout (See Above)

• Brewed Scottish Ale from a kit (I know… I was too lazy to do my own all-grain recipe)
• Toyed with the idea of brewing a blueberry wheat beer for my second keg
• Spent time with the fellas at one of my best buds houses while Suzy had another baby shower in Sacramento – More Rock Band
• Worked A Bunch

And that folks, is just a tiny portion, of the things that I’ve been up to lately.  More to come…

I’ve finally posted the video in all it’s glorious distorted choppiness.  And I kept the audio, because let’s face it, YouTube is just going to make me take down any copyrighted music content.   It’s embedded below, or you can go straight to the YouTube here.

This weekend, we went back to the same Ultrasound clinic that we went to several weeks back, and splurged a little because we just can’t wait to see our little daughter’s face.  Thanks to some serious mathematics, processing power, and of course pure awesome physics, we can take a glimpse under our skin with a simple sound wave.  (If you seriously want to know more about the real-time rendering of the 3-D images for ultra sound, take a gander at this website.  Prepare to get your geek on.  You’ve been warned.)

I have to say I never expected the kind of emotional response that this experience elicited from me.  It’s as if I got to meet my daughter for the first time.  And I’ll be darned if that didn’t bring a tear to my eye.  I may be a little biased, but even looking at these distorted yellow images, I think she’s the most adorable thing I’ve ever seen.

Without further delay, click here, to go straight to the gallery.

Personally, I think she is a spitting image of Suzy.  Her eyes and nose for sure.  Suzy seems to think she resembles me from the lower lip down.  You be the judge:

I’ll post the video’s later when I can get them compressed and posted to YouTube.  Instead of the lullaby’s that were recorded with the original, I’m thinking of re-dubbing it (like a Kung-Fu movie).  I’ll taking requests for potential tunes.

Until next time, I love you all.

Sorry for neglecting the blog lately.  It seems like things have been really busy recently. However we did find some time to get away from it all for four days last weekend.  It was nice to get out of the oppressive heat of the valley and head out to the cool weather of the coastline.  We toured the north coast of California and into the southern coast of Oregon.  It was a great trip, topped off with a visit to Ashland, OR, where I think I had the best breakfast of my lifetime (and that’s saying alot because I love a good breakfast), at a little eclectic breakfast place called Morning Glory.  Highly recommend.  The camping road-trip, it’s just what we needed to cleanse the soul.

Check out some of the pictures from our adventure here.

It’s official, I am back on the bleeding edge of the internet.  Yes indeed.  I have officially signed up for a twitter account.  You’ve been hearing about it for a while.  Everyone is doing it… apparently.  Tweeting.  I’ve resisted for a good long time.  But I’ve finally succumb to the big’ol internet and it’s new-fangled technology.

I have a plan though, so it’s not without good reason that I have signed up.  You see, I have it in the plan to ‘Live-Blog’ the birth of my child.  Come November, prior to Suzy going into labor, I plan to start the countdown on this very blog.  And when we get to the actual event, the day (or days) of actual labor, I really want to post real-time updates replete with pictures to the internet so that friends and family can share in the experience from afar.

Here comes the technical rub.  I’ve looked into the ‘live-blogging’ plug-ins for WordPress (the software that this blog runs on) and I was a bit overwhelmed with the complexity that I’d face setting up such a system.  And, with people re-loading the page frequently, the site might actually buckle under the bandwidth pressure (that might be an overstatement, but it’s possible!).  So instead, I’ve come up with another third-party and entirely free solution.  Twitter.

Twitter allows me to update the world, very easily, in real-time, from my iphone in chunks of 140 characters or less.  It allows me to post pictures directly from my iPhone.  It’s nearly perfect for my plans.  It’s not quite as fancy as the Live-Blogging that Gizmodo or Engadget does for big tech announcements (like WWDC).   But it’ll do the trick.

So folks, come November, when we hit the big day, look for my link to twitter where I will be giving the blow-by-blow updates of what’s going on in our delivery room.  I am soooo bleeding edge.

I’m not sure if it was that we were inspired by Anne or some of our other friends who compost regularly but we’ve finally given in.  Suzy sort of talked me into it, but anything involving worms and decomposing organic matter and I’m hooked.  Actually, it took a steady campaign by Suzy to even get me to allow the purchase of the materials.  But it all finally came together this week.   We’ve had the plastic bin for several weeks now, which I promptly drilled many small holes into with my cordless drill.   It was wildly fun to poke holes in a perfectly good plastic bin.  I relished it with childlike abandon.  But after the the drilling was done, I lost interest for a couple of weeks.

Suzy had started using one of the small buckets that some of my beer making supplies come in for storing up food waste.  It was rapidly filled and eventually exceeded capacity.  This was the breaking point, we needed to get this project underway.  And so, as you’ll see in the photos below, we made good on our plans to get this thing going.  Read the captions to see just exactly what the heck we’re doing.

I really hope it works out.  I have no idea how to tell if it’s working.  I’m sure the little worms have retreated into the bedding, and will not be seen again for a long time to come.  I just hope they’re OK in there.  In this hot California heat, they may have been cooked in their little plastic oven.

Welcome back from vacation, internet.  I hope you all had a great weekend.  Suzy and I just came back from a fun-packed, all-American weekend.  We stayed in a cabin out on the Owens River, near Bishop, CA.  Our friends family owns the cabin and the amazing ranch that it sits on.  And they were super-kind to invite us and quite a few other friends to crash their ranch over the fourth of July weekend, free of charge.  It truly was an uniquely American event with high desert fun including horse shoes, skeet shooting, barbecues, fireworks, beer, fly-fishing, etc…

Photo’s of the festivities can be found in the gallery as usual, or simply click this link.

Erik and Kristi, Howard and Linda – Thanks for giving us an unforgettable fourth of July!

Internet folks.  It’s hot out here in California.  I’m so lethargic, I can barely type out these words.  I know it said 108, but my little digital thermometer said 110 around 7PM last night.  That’s hot by my standards.  Fortunately, it’s a dry heat, meaning the humidity is low.  So at least we can breath.  Thank you science, for bringing me my air conditioner and my refrigerator.

Suzy and I are surviving.  There is hope on the horizon.  I see a cool, breezy 98 degree day is forecast on Friday.