Not a Potted Plant

I needed to take my computer to court today so as to present evidence for a client who had figured out how to make a movie of their phone playing voice mail but not how to transmit this to a portable audio device. So they sent me the mp4 of their phone and said “Yeah, that’s our evidence.” On the way to court the pins on the connector between the laptop body and its monitor snapped and the thing bent and locked in place.

The things I do for my clients, I tell ya. Are they grateful? No, they don’t care at all.

So I’m working off my Kindle Fire right now. Inferior computing power and inferior utility for much more than playing games. Blogging is MURDER on my CTS. Money is a bit tight at the moment so it’ll be a while until I can replace the computer. What I want to know is whether the Surface Tablet, the one that will run Office and Windows 8, will meet my needs.

Until then, it’s a lot of one finger tapping.

I saw at lunch that Bob Schieffer has made public the questions he intends to ask in tonight’s foreign policy debate. This makes it something of an exercised in prompted speechification, if you ask me. So I figured that since I’ll be stuck teaching class all night, I’d just post some of the questions I’d ask if I were Schieffer. Continue Reading →

My wife’s fondest colleague is Dr. Kaye. Though they don’t work precisely in the same area of medicine, they both have similarly off-beat personalities. They look a little bit alike, too, in a basic or superficial sort of way. They’re both tall-ish (5’8-5’10”), both have dark hair, and both wear glasses.

A while back, my wife went into work on a Saturday to get some notes there. She was wearing Birkenstocks and a tie-dyed shirt. Dr. Kaye was also there, wearing… a tie-dyed shirt and Birkenstocks. Dr. Kaye’s daughter insisted that a picture be taken.

I tell that story to show this picture, of our little one wearing her first baby gift (From Dr. Kaye, of course):

Her fancy pseudonym is Helena Clancy Truman, but we’re going with Lain.

The cable in the hotel room only has a few channels for cable. I was flipping through looking for ESPN to watch the LSU/A&M game. Alas, it doesn’t look like ESPN is carried. Due to high carriage fees, I’d imagine. This honestly strikes as an anti-family policy, though. ABC/ESPN should give them a break. After all, we want dads to stick around and accompany the baby for the first couple days, it’s helpful that he’s not missing games. Note, I would not actually let this come between me and time with Baby. But I’m not that hard core of a fan!

Anyhow, they lack ESPN but have a lot of family-friendly channels (Hallmark, Cooking Channel, etc.), which makes sense.

There is one that only makes sense where I live, though. They have a home shopping network… for livestock. Welcome to Arapaho!

Arapaho is indeed in love with its cowboy mythology. All along the walls of the hallway of this place are artful pictures and paintings of the beautiful scenery and, whenever people appear, it’s almost always in cowboy hats. I have difficulty imagining that people are really going to be buying livestock from a hospital. But the channel is free (I’m sure), and I wouldn’t be surprised if admin got a kick out of it.

On Wednesday night, I was up to about three in the morning. I’d already informed the Redstone school district to deactivate me from their call rolls in the off-chance that Clancy went into labor. It seemed pretty unlikely, but I went with it. That turned out to be a good thing. I also had several days to adjust my schedule to get up at six in the morning for the Monday morning planned c-section.

When Clancy got up, she informed me that there appeared to be some liquid discharge. This could be broken water, or it could be something else. She was headed to a scheduled appointment before starting her morning clinic. I was awake enough to file this away, but not awake enough to freak out or get anxious. I woke up about an hour later, and she called me about an hour after that, roughly 10:00.

Her water had broken and she was in labor. Due to various factors, we were a couple hours away from surgery at least. Probably three hours. That gave me time to start gathering some things, take a shower, and mentally prepare for everything deviating from the agreed-upon plan.

I arrived at about 11:45. She’d messaged me in the interim that it would indeed be 1 before they could take the baby out. Dr. Lang, who was supposed to deliver little Jumping Bean was in a conference on the East Coast. Filling in is a retired doctor with an impressive resume, Dr. Haskill. Haskill is retired and works part time until he hits a certain tax bracket. He’s working extra this year due to Clancy’s pregnancy. Haskill tends to be pro-cesaerean, which ordinarily might be a problem, but since she was going in for a c-section anyway, it worked out. When it comes to c’s, he knows what he’s doing.

I got to see her for a little bit prior to being taken to the delivery room. We were separated while they set her up and applied the anesthesia. A little while later, they started. I was positioned with her behind the curtain, though they said that I could stand up and watch if I so chose. Curiosity got the better of me, and I did. Due to most of the cutting being below the bump, I actually couldn’t see much until they started to push the bump out the hole. The bump, of course, being the baby.

When they first started to pull her out, I only knew it was her by process of elinmination. There was this big chalky white thing that was big enough that there wasn’t room for that and the baby, so… oh, hey, there’s its bum! Then a leg popped out, then the other leg, then an arm, the other arm, and lastly the head in a smooth motion. The gender was then announced.

I should say that the gender was not a complete surprise. Nobody told us, but we noticed a shift among the medical personnel using the male pronouns about 2/3 of the time to using the female pronouns about 3/4 of the time.

Baby was immediately taken to a station on the side of the room where nurses tended after her. From there, things went downhill.

Now, during all of this, nobody is talking to me. Nobody is talking to Clancy. Everybody has a job to do and is doing it. But when they’re urgently requesting a doctor at the station, that’s not a good sign. When they’re putting things over his mouth, that’s not a good sign. Clancy and I were looking at one another, neither of us wanting to be the one that was freaking out. It hung like there in the air.

Then Baby recovered. Now, no one had actually told us that Baby recovered for a few minutes after that. They were talking to us about other things. Trying to distract us? We didn’t know. Eventually one of them picked up on our tension and said that everything was fine. They then filled Clancy in on the specifics. Breathing. Heart rate. They scale babies from 1 to 10 by an index. Baby was just outside of the Critically Low range. It’s for the best that she didn’t know the score until afterwards. Once that was settled, Clancy got to look at the baby and confirm the name that we had already chosen.

I got to hold the baby while they moved Clancy to the recovery “room.” From there, we came up to our home for the next few days. The only lingering concern we had at that point was a lack of vocalization. She never cried throughout the delivery. This is apparently not uncommon for breech c-section babies as they are often too stunned to cry. For better and worse, she has discovered her voice. And how.

Another side effect of her being breech is that she prefers the breech position. She regularly extends her legs the same way that she did in the womb. It was also comedic how, in the ultrasounds, her hands were always up at her face like she was boxing. She tends to like that, too.

We get 2 or 3 days in the hospital. Since we’re already in the insurance’s dime (for the most part), we’re opting for the three (though we may change our mind tomorrow). The hospital has been great and is just full of super helpful people. I knew that “lactation specialists” existed, but I didn’t know that they were a part of a hospital’s staff. The food leaves a bit to be desired.

There will be a picture and an introduction later. One post at a time. This one required a word here and a word there, taking up almost a day.

The Federal Defense of Marriage Act has already been held unconstitutional by a Federal Circuit Court of Appeals. Today’s decision from the Second Circuit following suit and consciously anticipating SCOTUS review applies the “intermediate scrutiny” standard and was authored by a judge usually thought to be very much on the conservative side.

It also presents an obviously tangible standing claim on emotionally compelling facts: eligibility for over $360,000 in tax refunds based on life insurance proceeds from the plaintiff’s wife. And it disposes with the troublesome Baker v. Carr question head-on, on federalism grounds, and proceeds to offer substantial dicta about substantial changes in doctrine underlying equal protections jurisprudence between 1971 and today.

For SSM junkies, this is worth a read. SCOTUS could in theory grant certiorari for this term, but that strikes me as unlikely to occur. Next term, however, seems like a pretty good bet.

With the discovery of a rocky, roughly earth-sized planet orbiting Alpha Centauri B, not only are we that much closer to video games coming to life, we may be faced with a question of what name we might assign to a planet roughly like our own. To date, largely only science fiction authors have had to confront this creative dilemma.

Being part of the Centauri system suggests naming the planets after mythological centaurs. The Penguin Dictionary of Classical Mythology names the following centaurs: Agrius, Amphion, Anchius, Argeius, Chiron, Daphnis, Doupon, Elatus, Eurytion, Hippotion, Homadus, Ispoples, Melanchaetes, Nephele, Oreius, Pholus, Phrixus, Silenus, and Thereus. All nice and Greek-sounding. Chiron, Daphnis, and Pholus are probably the most well-known of these. Many centaurs appear in myths about the labors of Hercules, as well.  Continue Reading →

We’ve got our checklists of the things that everybody knows every baby needs. For you parents out there, however, what’s missing from our checklist? What is the one thing that you had never heard about that you discovered after being a parent that you wish you’d known about. Anything?

One of the things we lack is a carrier thinger. Like, the sort that you wear so that you can wear your baby on you. Does anyone have any recommendations for what to get?

We’re going to start off with disposable, but hope to transition to cloth diapers. We’ll see if it happens. Any recommendations on cloth diaper contraptions would be cool, too.

I thank Burt for bringing this up:

It’s worth bearing mind when we talk about things like “momentum” and “changing the dynamic” that since well before the conventions, Romney has never been projected to actually win. Very recently there have been a few isolated polls showing him with very narrow leads in the popular vote. But just as many recent polls give Obama narrow leads, too. And as we all know, where those voters are matters a lot. Not once have weighted polling averages put Obama behind in popular vote projections and not once has Romney been forecast to get a majority of votes in the electoral college.

I actually think that hinging predictions based on the state-by-state polls is a mistake. I’ve been meaning to write on this since Kazzy asked why we were even paying attention to the national polls. The answer to that question is that because the national polls get us the best look into the mood of the nation, and that mood most definitely filters down to the swing states.

After Romney had his bounce from the first debate, there was quite a bit of talk about how Obama was still winning the swing states and so it didn’t really matter. The swing states, however came around and it became a closer race there, too. According to Nate Silver, as of 10/12, the widest diversion between the Electoral College and National Popular vote totals was less than four percent. Memories of 2000 aside, crossed votes are an anomaly.

The state-by-state vote is worth keeping an eye on in the event of a really close election, but on the whole I would give them less reliability when gauging the dynamics and direction of the race. The national polls are ongoing by several organizations. Mood shifts are picked up more quickly there and we have more data with which to look from to see the changing dynamics. The state polls are more likely to be conducted by local news outfits and not on an ongoing basis. That’s one of the reasons that there is a lag.

In the history of voting, it’s just rare that you see national movement without seeing movement in the individual states. If you pick up voters nationally, you’re going to be picking them up in swing states. If the national popular vote is outside of 2% difference*, it becomes almost statistically impossible for the NPV loser to win. If Obama or Romney is ahead by less than 2%, as is often the case, it really becomes anybody’s guess in my view. Again, it’s worthwhile to look at the state polls, but I would definitely not be making any predictions based on them. The polls that have Obama up or down have margin of errors that usually extend beyond the 2% threshold.

Right this second, with most polls showing Romney or Obama ahead by a point or two, it’s anybody’s guess. But mostly for that reason, in my view, and not because of the state polls. If Obama pulls back some of that vote, it’ll still be his election to lose. But either way, I’d bet pretty good money that if Obama wins the EV, he will also have won the NPV (and vice-versa).

* – This is according to Silver and a college professor who more specifically said 2.2%. Had John Kerry pulled off Ohio, it would have been a far, far more remarkable event than 2000.