New Addition to the Family

My wife was scheduled for a C-section on Friday to deliver our daughter, but apparently the baby didn't agree to the timing. My wife woke me up at 4AM and told me her water had broken and that we needed to head to the emergency room. 4 hours later, Kaylee Morgan was delivered, still C-section, at 8:44 AM. 9 lbs, 5 oz, 21 inches long, and a head that is quite a bit smaller than her dad's.

My wife's fine, resting in the hospital, baby's great too. It's cliche, but it's amazing seeing a life brought into the world. I'm still stunned. Now I have to figure out how to get some gametime in around the lack of sleep. Halo 3 next week, crapton of games next month. I'm gonna be toast!

Posted by SciDad23 @ 9:02 pm EDT | Permalink | 7 Comments

Oral Surgery SUCKS

I'm a big wuss when it comes to being sick.  I just want to be left alone, my wife's pretty good at letting me, which is great for us.  It's even worse when I'm feeling perfectly healthy and my back molar breaks in 2 places, causing me to subject myself to the barbaric practices of the dental industry.  At 10:30 AM, some dental assistant/nurse knocked me out with a poorly placed IV line (It's not supposed to BURN when it's in your arm, Lady, that means you MISSED THE VEIN).  40 minutes later I'm waking up in the office sitting next to my wife, not remembering putting on my sweater or walking to the room I'm currently residing in.  After checking to make sure my pants were still buckled and my zipper was still up (don't trust those dentists, I've seen the Corben Bernson movie), I apparently began repeating questions to my wife, I was stuck in some kind of loop.  Here's how the conversation went (according to her, as I was pretty much still out of it at this time)

Me:  What time is it?
Her:  11:25

Me:  Did they give me my tooth?  (I had apparently asked for it when I was still in the surgery room, even drugged up I'm curious)
Her:  Yes, I have it

Me:  How many Vicodin did they give me in the perscription?
Her:  20
Me:  Good, I can sell the rest for 10 bucks a pop at work, HAHHAAHAHAH (I thought this was hilarious, she......not so much)

Me:  What time is it?
Her:  11:26

You get the picture.....

Now I've got a nice hole in my gum, I can only eat "soft" foods for 24 hours, which means jello, pudding, and milkshakes to me!  My wife's pushing me to eat mashed potatoes, pasta, etc.  To her I say "Good Luck!"

Gotta go, Vicodin buzz is wearing off.  Never played online under the influence of legal narcotics, should be fun tonight!

Posted by SciDad23 @ 6:43 pm EDT | Permalink | 3 Comments

Podiobooks

Not sure how many of you elderly guys and gals are podcast fans, but I’m hooked on them.  The radio reception sucks at my office, and I like listening to talk radio, so the podcast thing is a pretty good substitute.  I usually listen to half a dozen or so pretty regularly, Diggnation (video podcast), TWIT, Preston and Steve (local Philly radio guys – they drop the music and commercials out of their radio show and release the rest, very VERY funny), Ask a Ninja (video podcast), and of course, 2old2type (whenever they actually release a new one).

 

I recently found something new in the podcast world, “podiobooks”.  Think of a book on tape/CD.  Now, imagine that the author himself reads it to you, and instead of releasing the entire book at once, he/she releases a chapter a week, episodically, like a podcast.  I’ve been listening to “The Rookie” by Scott Sigler.  It’s a combination of sci-fi and sports, football in the future, aliens and humans playing together.  Sounds cheesy, but it’s pretty good.  The production quality is excellent, and the story is very well developed and well written.  Sigler has a few other podiopooks, “Ancestor” and “Earthcore”.

 

If you like listening to audiobooks, try these out.  They’re free, and you don’t need an iPod or iTunes to listen to a podcast, they’re recorded as mp3’s, so all you need is a media player.  If anyone wants any help getting started, just send me a PM, I’d be happy to help.

Posted by SciDad23 @ 10:16 pm EDT | Permalink | 0 Comments

Travelling Sucks

At the risk of sounding like a hokey stand-up comic, I’ve gotta rant about airline travel.

 

Travelling for work sucks.  This past year my job “description” changed, requiring me to travel twice a month to customers’ sites for my company.  I’m a Research and Development Manager for one of the world’s largest chocolate manufacturing companies.  And by “largest” I mean we make so much chocolate that if you’ve eaten chocolate in some form in the past week, there’s a better than 40% chance that you’ve eaten our chocolate.  The odd thing is, nobody outside the industry knows who we are, because we don’t have a retail line in the US.  So when I tell people what I do for a living, I also get to explain about the “who” as well as the “what”.  But I digress, back to the travel thing.

 

I’m not a tiny fella, I’m 6’5”, 350 lbs, built like a linebacker, cuddly like a teddy bear.  My wife loves me, my son loves me, my parents, brother, sister-in-law, nieces and nephew all love me.  The airlines, however, most decidedly do NOT love me.  What jack-a-ninny designed an airline seat assuming that every rear end that sits in it is going to be 19 ½” wide?  Every time I get on a plane, it’s like playing Russian roulette.  I squeeze into a seat, aisle preferably, so I’m not crammed against the bulkhead for the duration of the flight.  Now comes the fun part, watching everyone pass down the aisle, chanting “don’t stop here, keep on moving” in my head, hoping beyond hope that nobody has to sit next to me and I can actually breathe during the flight. 

 

Once the cabin door is closed and nobody’s had the unfortunate luck to be placed in the seat next to me, I can relax a little.  At this point I usually reach for the in-flight magazine that I’ve read 10 times in the past few weeks.  What I’m really doing is killing time until the flight crew decides it’s safe enough for me to risk turning on my video ipod without causing us to burst into flames or simply vanish into some space-time vortex that is obviously created every time someone uses an “approved portable electronic device” prior to the “ding” at 10,000 feet.  What could possibly happen if I decide to listen to my audio book or watch and episode of Brisco County Jr. at 9,000 feet? 

 

Then the hotel fun begins.  The only thing that bugs me about sleeping in hotels is the sleeping part.  I swear if I have to sleep on another 12 dollar queen sized mattress with marshmallow box springs and sheets that wouldn’t stay on the mattress if you stapled them there, I’m going to set fire to the building and run away into the night, giggling like a schoolgirl on an all-night milkshake and French fry bender. 

 

Eating alone in restaurants is fun too, conversations going all around you while you sit in the corner like a mob boss, scarfing down your steak so you can get back to your crappy mattress in your non-descript hotel room and sleep for 2 hours at a clip before getting up before the sun rises to visit some dairy in the middle of Indiana.  I do like eating for free though, but now my company has set a 50 dollar per day limit on meals.  50 bucks a day to eat sounds like a lot, and it is, depending on where you’re trying to eat.  I can eat for 20-30 bucks a day in the states, small town, fast food stuff.  However, if I’m staying in Paris, Zurich, or New York City for example, dinner alone will run you 30-40 bucks.  This leaves 10 bucks for breakfast and lunch.  The best part is that my company decided that they shouldn’t have to reimburse us for lunch, as they don’t pay for our lunch when we work at home.  My argument to that brilliant piece of deductive reasoning is that it’s fairly hard for me to pack my lunch and bring it to work when I’m 2,500 miles from my kitchen. 

 

Having said all this, I do like visiting customers.  I’m not in sales, so I couldn’t care less if they’re buying a lot or a little.  They usually have a lot of interesting questions for me, so the visits aren’t boring.  I like solving problems, and when I do, the customers are normally really appreciative.  Not “here’s a 100 gift card to Best Buy for flying out here and saving us $50,000 a month on our process” appreciative, but appreciative nonetheless. 

 

The major downside to all of this is two-fold.  I’m away from home, which means I’m away from my family (wife – gestating a second kid, and my 18 month old son, slowly and methodically destroying my house).  The other problem with being away from home is being away from gaming.  I have a DS, which is fine for killing time in the airport, but I can’t play that for long stretches without splitting headaches and hand cramps.  I also miss out on launch day goodness with my clanmates, GRAW 2 most recently, as I usually travel Tuesday-Thursday.  

 

Well enough of my whining.  The “blogging” thing is cathartic, but I’m not sure if it’s entertaining to read on your part.  If you made it this far, I leave you with a brilliant statement by Groucho Marx:

 

“Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend.  Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read”.  

Posted by SciDad23 @ 6:42 pm EDT | Permalink | 3 Comments

Bored at Work

Normally I’m running all over my office and out into the plant juggling 15 different projects and trying to maintain some semblance of sanity in an otherwise looney environment.  Today I found myself sitting at my desk, staring at my monitor and wondering how early I can sneak out of here since my boss just left for a 3 day trip to the great white north, meetings with our French Canadian brothers and sisters in Quebec.  It’s not that I don’t have anything to do, but it’s just that I don’t really want to start one any of the projects looming on the horizon.  We just found out that we’re losing our site Engineer, he’s being relocated to another site next week.  This basically means that in addition to being the Research and Development Manager/Process Improvement Manager, I also get to pick up his slack and handle the site Engineering (ordering equipment, overseeing contractors, new equipment installation, etc.)  It’s a logical progression to my job, I’m the one that comes up with the recommendations to equipment modifications and feasibility studies for new processing lines, but now I get to handle the installation and implementation of the lines as well.  Know what the best part of all this is?  I get to do it for the EXACT SAME SALARY that I currently bring home.  Aren’t I lucky?

 

Ahh, enough of my slack-jawed yammering about my job.

 

On the gaming front, I’m patiently wading my way through the desolate wasteland that post-holiday gaming usually is.  No new releases to speak of for months.    I’ve played most of the way through Marvel Ultimate Alliance.  I’m not really thrilled about COD3’s single player.  Rainbow 6 seems to be taking up my online shooter time, so multiplayer COD3 isn’t really exciting me either.  I played through Rainbow 6 on Normal, I’m working my way through on Realistic now.  I unlocked all the micro-games in WarioWare for the Wii.  I think I’ll get back into Zelda on the Wii, I was playing a bit of that before Christmas, maybe I’ll give it some more time. 

 

In the upcoming game list, I’m really just waiting for Guitar Hero 2, NBA Street and GRAW2 for the 360.  I might pick up some used DS games from Gamecrazy tomorrow, I have some coupon thing for a “buy-one-get-one-free” on used portable games, maybe I’ll snag something to burn up some slow time at work on the DS Lite.

 

Speaking of gaming, I picked up a Rubik’s cube from Amazon the other day.  I had one as a kid, never solved it without the use of a butter knife and some re-assembling skills.  I handed it to my wife, she sufficiently scrambled the crap out of it for 10 minutes and I started screwing around with it.  I solved about half of it, 2 and a half sides so far.  It’s fun going back and looking at a puzzle as an adult, logic instead of brute force.  My wife also enjoyed the opportunity to point out once again that I’m just a big kid. 

Posted by SciDad23 @ 5:34 pm EDT | Permalink | 6 Comments