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8:51PM - Battlestar Galactica

T MINUS 14 MINUTES!

10:35AM - Surgery

The whole description of the procedure is:
"Shoulder Arthroscopy: sob-acromial decompression, slap tear excision, distal clavicle resection"

Those words essentially translate into "surgery through small incisions, removing inflammed and scar tissue, with the removal of clavicle bone". Honestly, it sounds more painful than it really is.

Pictures (might want to pass if you are squeemish, although its hard to identify what's going on unless you are already familiar with the procedure, are available here. I think there are two movies.

9:46AM - Ooops, forgot to say

So, the surgery I mentioned here was a hopefully successful attempt at arthroscopic subacromial decompression to repair an impingement.

More later ... still hurts to type for too long!

10:00AM - Two things

First, the surgery was on wednesday. I'm currently on a "OnQ" pump, which means a chemical, much like lidocaine, is being pumped directly to the nerve bundle responsible for providing pain signals to my brain. My brain has no idea there recently occurred quite the intrusion. Unfortunately, there is only enough Ropivacaine in there to last 65-70 hours.

Which means I'm due to run out any minute now.

Secondly, I direct you at this religious debate.

10:09AM - Bananas?

Kyra calls them "Babanas".

Say "buh ban nus".

:)

11:50PM - Kyra

She surprised us the other morning by demonstrating she can count to 15 and even put her shoes on herself. On the correct feet!

All of this, and she's only 2.25 years old!

I've started using Picasa and have placed some recent pics of the family, et al on my Picasa Web Public Gallery.

Typically, our night routines go like this:
I get home from work between 5 and 6. I play with Kyra and Dylan and assist in dinner making as best as I can. This gets us to somewhere between 7 and 8. At this point, we take the kids upstairs for their baths. Currently, I assist Julie in taking her bath, too, as she's had an excavation surgery in her left breast due to an infected milk duct that formed an abscess. I take Dylan into his room, change him, and apply baby lotion. Julie will then normally walk in with Kyra (after having blow-dryed her hair) and we 'swap kids'.

Julie takes Dylan downstairs for a night-time snack. I take Kyra outside, to "look at the moon". We goof around a ilttle, pointing out stars, moons, cars, and any thing else she likes to identify. We'll walk inside, requiring she first knock on the door, then close door after ensuring Nikki, our dog, is inside. Then we bounce up the stairs and I'll read her a book (normally, its Goodnight Moon. Then we get on the rocking chair in her room, and rock for prolly 10-15 minutes.

We'll say prayers, and give hugs and kisses, and she'll crash. I'll go downstairs. Julie and I then have a couple of hours, at best, before we have to go to bed in order for me to be functional in the morning.

10:13AM - heh

117 words

Touchtyping

4:03PM - Pics, finally

Who would've thought having a baby would keep me so busy it would take me half a week to get pics online.

The first batch are here: http://zitz.erf.net/linpha/viewer.php?album=albums/Dylan/Dylan%20Birthday&pn=1

Be gentle ;)

Current mood: tired

11:45AM - Dylan has arrived!

Born september 25th, 11:13am.

8lbs 5.9 oz

yay!

Current mood: ecstatic

7:53AM - induced? maybe not!

Well, Dylan's official due date was yesterday. No go.

We had a 'misfire' 2 saturdays ago, spent half a day or so. The entire time, we were experiencing contractions once every 8 minutes. They don't really get interested until its closer to 5 minutes (there's also a few other 'flags' they use, but this was the most obvious, prominent one).

So our obgyn scheduled us for 6am this morning to show up for inducing, presuming Dylan hadn't been delivered beforehand.

We got here this morning and she's already 5cm dilated (!) and experiencing contractions 8 minutes apart. So we may not even have to be induced.

What timing for this baby, eh? Kyra was delivered the day before she was scheduled to be induced.

Current mood: anxious

10:29AM - 3 word meme, stolen from sistrmoon

I don't normally do these crazy memes ... But for some reason, I guess my brain was in a 3-word mood, so I went ahead and filled out this seemingly-nonsensical meme

Answer the following questions in three words, no more or less.
1. Where is your cell phone?
next to me
2. Your boyfriend/husband?
heterosexual, none above!
3. Your hair?
where'd it go??!?!
4. Where is your father?
around the corner
5. Your favorite thing to do?
play with Kyra
6. Your dream last night?
you'd say TMI
7. Your favorite drink?
diet lipton tea
8. Your dream car?
convertible mustang cobra
9. The room you’re in?
kitchen look alike
10. You fear?
family in pain
11. Who did you hang out with last night?
kyra and wife!
12. What aren’t you good at?
promptly healing kyra :(
13. Muffins?
no thank you
14. One of your wish list items?
a healthy family
15. The last thing you did?
Kiss kyra's booboo
16. What are you wearing?
shirt and shorts
17. Your pet?
nikki, akita-chow mix
18. Your computer?
a new laptop
19. Your life?
like a dream
20. Your mood?
happily watching kyra
21. Missing?
dylan, born soon!
22. What are you thinking about right now?
where IS kyra?    
in backyard!
whew, she's safe.
23. Your car?
clean blue mustan
24. Your work?
darn good job
25. Your summer?
that was summer?
26. Your relationship status?
very happily married
27. Your favorite color(s)?
whatever wife's wearing
28. When is the last time you laughed?
writing last answer ;)
29. Last time you cried?
at kyra's birth
30. School?
restarting after dylan

11:29AM - 3rd Anniversary

Happy 3rd anniversary to my beautiful loving Wife, Julie!

5:28PM - Kisses!

A game my daughter and I often play is 'can daddy have a kiss?'

I can't quite figure out the rules, because there's roughly a 50% chance that when I say, "can daddy have a kiss?" she'll answer by puckering up.

The other 50% she'll hold one hand out, and with a very cute voice, say "ooooh no!"

It seems one rule is that she has to be in the bath-tub for your chance to be very high.  Another rule is that she has to be on our stairs, heading up, while I'm on the first floor with the railing separating us.  Then I can position my head through the railing and she gets a thrill out of kissing like that.

My goal in life right now is determine those rules that will maximize the likelihood of a kiss!

7:06PM - Warm outside!

It seemed to warm up some today, so we spent a fair amount of time outside.  We tossed together the baby pool we nearly sold last year (for a dollar, no less!) and filled it with water.  Now, Kyra LOVES swimming; bath-time is certainly her favourite time of the day.  I knew my parents would want to see Kyra's first pool adventure of the summer, so I called them.  Given that they, literally, live behind my (alright, they live one street behind me.  We do not share a common fence), it took them no time to get over.  I had kept the impetus of the invitation a secret -- I'm just that kind of a mean guy sometimes.  Unfortunately, this meant my dad did not bring his camera.  Oh well. The result of this time in our back yard is viewable here, although bear in mind these shots were taken by me.

Julie's mother (We affectionately call her Grammy) and Ronda (Julie's Cousin) was entertaining a visiting relative, as well: her brother Jeff.  We're all pretty close and generally try to get together as often as possible for whatever random reason.  To that end, I decided I'd grill up one of my favourite recipes: citrus shrimp and scallops.  Quite yummy!

We now await the imminent arrival of Jeff and Ronda.  While we wait, we're watching Happy Feet.  Grammy and Kyra both seem to love penguins and Kyra absolutely loves dancing.  She's been dancing nearly nonstop to this movie!

Hope everyone's weekend is going as well as ours is.

9:59AM - 4 minutes to work

I couldn't believe it.

On my drive in to work this morning, there was a change in the layout of the road.  I typically would take 620 to 183 every morning.  Unfortunately, the intersection of 186 and 620 is such a mess I would take various shortcuts and back roads.  This was unnecessary this morning, as they had finally connected the 620/45 Toll with 183S.

That was quite exhilarating, at least for a few minutes.

12:25PM - Yes, I am alive!

Let's see, what has happened since I last made a legitimate post...  My last legitimate post was dated January 21st.  Subsequent postings up to this one were test posts.

Alright, with that bit out of the way ...

I have been dealing with shoulder impingement syndrome since November of last year.  I spent all of my physical therapy sessions trying to 'fix' the shoulder issue.  My orthopedic doctor put me on Nabumetone (an NSAID) as well as vicodin for the pain.  Even with physical therapy, I could tell things were not getting better.  To add insult to injury, I was 6 sessions away from my annual physical therapy benefit.  This meant after 6 more sessions, I was going to be paying full cost for physical  therapy. Finally, after much discussion with my doctor, we agreed that the bone spur in my shoulder was preventing the bursa from properly healing.  The only resolution now was surgery.

Thankfully, with the medical advances of our generation, sawing off a piece of my shoulderbone was performed as an outpatient surgery!  This meant I went in at noon, was under the knife by about 2, and back in the recovery room around 4.  After a few shots of Dilaudid, I went home with my wife.  Amazing.  

What was even more amazing was that our insurance paid for a pain pump as well as this contraption called an arctic pack.  The pain pump pumped some form of numbing drug into my shoulder.  The pump included a bolus, allowing me to temporarily double the dose.  After two days, the pump was exhausted and I had to pull the catheter out of my shoulder.  This caused some fair amount of queesiness.  I can't believe how light headed I got at the notion of pulling this tiny tube out of my shoulder.  I had to sit down to do this!  The arctic pack was essentially a glorified ice pack.  It consisted of three pieces: a shoulder pad, a cooler (to hold water and ice), and a pump.  The pump drew water from cooler and pushed it through the shoulder pad.  Pretty ingenious and it worked incredibly well.  It kept my shoulder nice and cool and thus kept the swelling down quite a bit.

For the first week post-op, I "lived" in my recliner in front of my TV.  For the most part, I was either too drugged or in too much pain to do much of anything but sit there and watch TV.  Thankfully, a week prior I had set up my DVR to record Star Trek.  I was ready to watch copious quantities of Star Trek: Enterprise, Voyager, and TNG.  Unfortunately, Deep Space Nine was never on at a convenient time to be recorded (I can only record up to 2 things at a time, and my family wanted some of their own shows recorded, too ).

So, here it is 3 weeks later.  I am completely off narcotics, only taking ibuprofen as necessary.  I am able to toss my daughter in the air and catch her.  I am continuing physical therapy and have been told I'm making great progress.  Occasionally I'll find a position or action that hurts a bit, working the gearshift on my wife's car hurts, but the manual gearshift on my Mustang does not.  *whew*!

~~~~

A week ago, our management called an all-hands meeting.  Therein we learned that company had been acquired by a pretty huge company.  There was a lot of voiced concern over the fear of the future of our company.  We had been acquired by First Data.  Wikipedia has a bit of information on First Data.  This is slightly frightening, as I've been through this acquisition process in the past -- and not always with the best result.  This time, however, it seems there's not much cause for concern: First Data acquired us to get access to our technology, not our contracts.  That is, to say, they want us for our ability to enable online services for Financial Institutions.  This is a feature their customer base does not currently enjoy.  We've been told several times now that First Data is interested in us as a whole.  To that end, I feel somewhat confident that this job is secure.  Its not like First Data already had an online banking capability, after all.

Not a week had passed after that acquisition meeting before I received a shocker: Cisco offered me a job with their IPS/IDS developers here in Austin.  For those of you who know me, this was pretty much a dream come true.  They even approached with a fairly decent benefits package.  My wife and I sat down and figured out what the benefits, bonuses, and stock options would mean annually, money-wise.  We then fudged a few numbers together to figure out how best to quantify the cost benefit of remaining at FX.  I took those numbers to my manager at FX, expecting him to essentially laugh me out the door.

Imagine my surprise when he didn't even bat an eye and said "no problem".  I love my job here at FX.  I felt pretty confident that the only company that could even remotely entice me away was Cisco.  Well, after spending a weekend thinking, dreaming, and praying about the two job prospects, we finally decided there were just too many benefits by remaining at FX, even given that Cisco was offering more money outright.  

~~~~

This mostly catches up with where I am now.  I keep meaning to follow the bazaar model more, rather than my habitual use of the cathedral model.  We'll see which I continue to follow in the future (what am I talking about?  See The Cathedral and the Bazaar)

10:46PM - Test #2

Apologies for the noise.

12:04AM - testing

testing

8:43AM - Biologically ...

Speaking, we are going to have a new family member in around 8 months :)

Current mood: excited

12:13AM - Proof

Here's proof that Kyra is, indeed, my daughter:

( Read more... )