So, other than my daughter, what else do I find awesome these days? Hmmm.

I'm digging this huge freshwater stingray. The headline link on the NG main page is "World's Biggest Freshwater Stingray Found?" and then you see that photo when you click on it. So you can't help but think that they found it in that kiddie pool.
Nautiloids (nautili? nautiluses?) are pretty cool too.

This is why we all need to go back to cassette tapes right now! Though I would be happy to stick with my iPod Touch if someone would write an app that turned it into a lightsaber.
Remember that episode of the Tartakovsky Clone Wars cartoon that had Padme and Yoda (and C3PO and R2-D2) on a snowy planet and they were attacked by droids? So do these artists:
Katie Cook

Adam Hughes
'
Grant Gould

Cuz rly u need to have a bath sometimes.

Thinking about the eye thing- in the comments a few posts back we were discussing whether the human eye ever grows. "They" say it doesn't, but looking at a baby's eyes it's hard to believe. And it doesn't make sense because the eye develops in utero right? It must grow at some point in there so why not ex utero? Must be a myth. A giant squid has the biggest eye ever but a baby giant squid is about the size of a jellybean.

Anyways. I like to play this game when I read the newspaper- whenever I see a crazy headline I always add "due to the bad economy" and then read the article. Today it was "Shark Attacks Down in 2008". Sure enough, this was blamed on the economy. I guess blamed would be the wrong word, but you knowutimean. Apparently, the recession means less tourism which means fewer tourists in the oceans for sharks to bite.

Anytime you spend more than three weeks away from a coal mine you pretty much need a tour to get oriented again. Geologic changes that would ordinarily take millions of years and an asteroid impact or two we accomplish in a month. None of the shovels are where you left them. One of our main roads that we've been using for four years is all dug out. Now we have to use alternate routes. Which means that my old hiding places are no good anymore!
Our cable reeler is broke down. Which sucks. Means all the endless cable work we always do now has to be done by hand, and with pickup trucks. The cable reeler is an old- like, 25 years or so- Cat loader with a reeling attachment instead of a bucket. As cantankerous and bitchy as it is, it is one of the most valuable pieces of equipment out there. Without it, moving shovels and drills becomes extremely difficult. Can't move your shovels and drills? Can't mine. Yet we find a way. And the big bosses see we can make do without so they don't sweat about the reeler so much. See how it's a vicious cycle?
I missed a minor bit of excitement when a baggie of dope was found on one of the haultrucks. Charlie was joking that he should go claim it, since just last month he had to get his PSP back from the big boss. Then I said he could just say it was medicinal marijuana that he'd bought with his health and wellness account. But the funniest was on facebook where one of my friends was sending birthday greetings to another guy: Happy birthday man! Did you find that bag of weed I left you?

This is the only photo of the cable reeler I have! The machine with its back to the camera. I guess even I take it for granted. Well, if you care, my friend Craig posted a pic on Facebook but I dunno if you can see it or not. It's kind of hidden behind the haultrucks.

Happy Family Day! I am going to celebrate by leaving my family behind to go off to work for a couple of days. Only two, just baby steps here. But after that it is back to the 4 on 4 off rotation. Ergh! Okay, me go spend time with my family now.

I love this sequence of photos:

Yogic Flyers

have you heard of the yogic flyers?

their flyer caught my eye

the one on the bulletin board I mean

and I couldn't get them out of my mind

I always wanted to fly

though I was never much for yoga

but I went to their meeting

spent three hours 

bouncing on my bum

my friends laughed when I told them

and they howled when I showed them

but I'm just at stage 1

next week I'll learn stage 2

and after that

well

I'll wave to you from the clouds

Okay I don't really know where that came from, I just wanted to write a quick fun poem to prove I still can even with a baby in the house (helps that Grandma is here for a few days to help out). Check out this video for more on yogic flying. I think I saw Aang!

Life is still pretty crazy but there is time to read a book of poetry (really excellent stuff, Harvey, for real!) and watch a season of Lost. There just isn't that much time to discuss such things in depth.

But, time for a  favorite passage from Moonshot, from Tusalava:

a

porous world

within skin

where silly bacilli wobble

a jelly ballet

on invisible wires

I think tomorrow we will try our first outing as a family. In the last week I have left the house twice to go to the store. Michelle hasn't left at all as she recovers. And Pallas has only been outside once in her entire life!  To come home from the hospital. So our big adventure tomorrow will be modest- a trip to the local SCup I think. Time to get my child her first espresso. 

Anyways, while People Magazine hasn't called to offer us a million dollars to publish photos of  Miss Athena, the internets is still lighting up with photos of her here and there.

I gave Michelle The Tales of Beedle the Bard as a stocking stuffer, and I just read it the other day. Fun book, pretty much perfectly suited for stuffing a stocking. I think my favorite tale was Babbity Rabbity and Her Cackling Stump. Which sounds like it might be a cutesy Beatrix Potter-like confection, but none of the tales really are, and I think Rowling even casts some thinly veiled scorn hexes at Potter. Uh, Beatrix, not Harry.

Anyways, a good excuse to bring the Quidditch Bear back for a few days!  When is the new Harry Potter coming out, anyways?

Neil Gaiman was on Q this morning. The Coraline movie comes out tomorrow. Which means Michelle and I should be able to see it in a year or so. Oh well. Coraline was the first book I read to Michelle when we started dating. I remember going to Hawrelak Park and laying in the sun, reading about this brave little girl and her Other Mother.

Anyways, now that Michelle has to spend quite a chunk of time feeding Pallas, I started reading to her again. This time it's The Flying Troutmans by Miriam Toews. Good book, funny. Partly depressing too but I am sure Pallas won't pick up on that. When she gets a bit older I will start reading to her for sure. Good books with just the right amount of subversiveness, like Coraline and anything by Roald Dahl.

Baby's sleeping, wife's resting. I have a few minutes.
That turned out to be a lie but now wife is feeding baby and I have a few minutes. So. The ordeal.
Tuesday morning we woke up at 6:30 or so and Michelle calmly informed me she was feeling contractions. Not crazy ones but definitely contractions. Breakfast was normal, I even timed my farts to join in the fun. Turns out there is no pattern to those. We did our normal routine, went shopping, went for lunch, all the while contractions, regular and manageable. We even watched Hellboy II which I really enjoyed. Cool villain. But by the afternoon we decided to call in our doola. Dula? Doula? However you spell it it means someone who helps and advises us in the childbirth process. In this case my aunt. She sat with us for a while and said that when the contractions got to the point where they lasted 30 seconds and were coming every four minutes or so we should head to the hospital. So we did.
They sent us home, since there was hardly any dilation.
A few hours later it was even worse so we went back.
They sent us home.
The next day.

And it just kept getting worse for Michelle. I got five hours of sleep but she didn't. Her birthday and she was in hard labour the whole time. I don't even remember when we went to the hospital for the third time. Sometime in the afternoon. Even then they couldn't do much as she just wasn't dilated enough. But the sympathetic nurse let us walk around for an hour and then she would re-examine her. So we did, and Michelle threw up from the pain. Finally the nurse declared she was 4 cms which might have been a fudge but whatever. We were in. Right away she got set up with an epidural and that made a huge difference for her pain. But even with oxytocin there was not much progress and another 12 hours or something went by. Finally her ob-gyn came and said it was time to do a c-section- baby was facing the wrong way and was stuck. Michelle welcomed it but it turned me into a mess. They're gonna cut my wife open! My baby is stuck in there and not coming out any other way. Not much sucks worse in the world that I've ever known than that.
But you know what? Less than an hour later Pallas was born and Michelle was fine.
Pallas was more or less healthy but swallowed some maconium or myrconium or whatever you call it so they whisked her away to the brand new neonatal intensive care unit where she had to spend her first 24 hours in a cool Viper-like canopy.

There she got fitted with some wires and leads and sensors and even a cylon toe! But she is not a cylon. She looked a little like a mountain gorilla when she was first born because her head was all coned up from getting stuck but that went away. And her little rancor arms too!
Anyways, so we spent something like 5 days in the hopital. Mom had wires and Pallas had wires and it was sorta scary, but it was nice to have so many amazing nurses looking after everyone. Even the first poo meltdown was rescued by a nurse while Michelle and I watched slack-jawed in shock and awe.
We're home now and thanks for all your support!

She's here! She's home!



Her name is Pallas and she's perfect!

Well we've been to the hospital and been sent home- but Michelle is definitely in labour and has been since 6:30 AM. Tomorrow- well, in five minutes, it's her birthday!  And likely my baby's birth day as well. Cheers!

Look what came in the mail yesterday:
First some art cards I bought from Spiderfreak818:

(Just the Royal Guard from that last image)

Then my friend the Rebel Penguin made a chibi version of, well, I guess their names are still kinda secret at least from the internets. Anyways, he put them on little tiny t-shirts for the baby and sent them to me! Sweet! Here's the image he made, from his deviant gallery:

No baby yet.
But I am on holidays for the next 22 days so now it can come whenever. I won't have to abandon my buds in the midst of moving shovel 10. Because that would have been awful. Just terrible.
Anyways.
Have you ever read Guy Gavriel Kay's The Summer Tree? It's the first part in a fantasy trilogy, popular enough to warrant a special 20th anniversary edition, but so far after a hundred pages I am not really that into it. Neither do I hate it. Earlier I read his newer book Ysabel and had the same reaction, though I have a friend who loved it enough to read it out loud to his wife.
One writer I absolutely love is Augusten Burroughs. Friend at work recommended him. You might not know his name but maybe you saw the movie based on his book Running With Scissors? I haven't but I plan to sometime soon. The book is all about his childoohd and it's crazy. Funny and shocking too. Then there's Magical Thinking which is more essays about his life after childhood. Good stuff. Look- he's got a blog! Uh, blob, actually.

Today is the due date, but still no baby. Therefore I am heading off to Hinton to work nights. No sense burning holiday time till the baby is actually born.

I'm reading Neil Gaiman's Fragile Things. Obviously it's fantastic. I love short stories. It's been a while since I read some, and even longer since I wrote one. But here's the first part of a story I wrote under Gaiminspiration. It's kind of a true story, I just fictionalized the particulars a bit.

It was his retirement tour. If he was honest with himself, it was his second retirement tour. The first time it was after he got married. No married man should be out hitch-hiking around, he told himself at the time. So just this one more trip. And a few years later when she told him she was pregnant, and after the euphoria settled down, he decided he should hit the road one more time before the baby came and he had to become responsible.
He grabbed his sleeping bag and hiking boots and quick! out the door. He left a note for his wife telling her how much he loved her and that he would be back in a few days. Most other wives would have been angry and she was no different but she would forgive him. She knew when she married him he was a wanderer. And so long as he wandered highways and not beds she could live with it, even if she worried.
He never worried, not really. Sometimes he got into peculiar situations, even times he might call Crazy Fucked Up Shit, but he always found his way home. And anyways he had a way with people. He could build a rapport without even trying. Most times he didn't try, actually, and his rides would open right up to him. He was a story sponge. He never told stories, he just absorbed them from the people who gave him rides. You're a good listener they would always say. Thanks for the ride he would say.
It took a couple of hours to get out of the city- it always did. He hated that part but it had to be done. Once out on the highway though it was better. Even when it took hours to get a ride it was better. He could think. This time he had a lot to think about. Being a dad. Talk about Crazy Fucked Up Shit. His thumb was out but he didn't really look at the passing cars. Someone would pull over eventually. Maybe sooner, maybe later.
This time it was sooner. He almost didn't notice, actually, all lost in thought. It was an 18 wheeler. Usually the big rigs didn't stop. Too dangerous. Against the rules. Insurance costs too much. You know. He had to approach casually, in case the driver had pulled over to check a map or something and hadn't meant to pick him up. But the driver waved him to hurry so he climbed in.
Middle-aged white guy, hair going grey. Thin. They greeted each other. Then from the sleeper he noticed two kids. Brothers, probably, though they were not both the same color. The younger one was metis, by the look of him. The driver asked where he was headed. Prince Rupert I think, he said. Maybe the Charlottes.
I can get you to Jasper at least.
Cool. Thanks.
Name's John. These are my sons. Matt. Luke.
He thinks to himself, Matthew Luke and John. Who's missing? Mark. But he says, pleased to meet you.
The boys are shy at first but their rambunctiousness wins out eventually. They are on an adventure with their dad, and strange hitch-hikers just add to the fun. They ask him all kinds of questions, and he answers them till their dad tells them to leave him alone. Luke, or maybe Matt, though, gets in one more before they comply. Do you have any kids?
Not yet. Wife's expecting, though.
John beams. No kidding? Congratulations man! Kids are the best thing ever happened to me.
Jasper is four hours away, and they spend the time telling jokes. The kids in the back love knock knock jokes. He tells them his favorite.
Knock knock.
Who's there? they both shout.
Bearp
Bearp who?
You just said bear poo!
They laugh, and then they discover the plenitude of permutations of this single joke, each more hilarious than the last. Cowp! Dogp! Giant Squidp! Gorillap! Tyrannosaurus Rexp!
John buys them all lunch in Edson. While the kids eat their burgers and giggle, John asks about the baby. When it's due. If he's excited. Scared yet?
Soon John starts talking about his own kids. He says being a trucker's hard on a marriage. So he takes the kids when he can. The wife doesn't ever come though. But at least he's still married.
Later, in Jasper, when John drops him off so he can turn south on the 95, he jumps out of the truck there on the side of the road. The kids are sleeping.
It was nice meeting you, man.
You too. Thanks for the ride.
Listen.
Yeah.
When your baby comes. You love that baby. Take care of him. Her. Whatever. They're the most precious gift god will ever give you.
I will. For sure.
Maybe you noticed Luke and Matt aren't full brothers.
No I never noticed.
Well, they aren't. Luke is my son. One time I came home early from a two week haul. There was a strange car in the driveway. Well, you know the story. But you know what? I believe in the bible and I forgave her. Matthew is my son and I love him. I'm a lucky man. I really am. And so are you.
John held out his hand and he shook it. John got back in his truck and drove away.
He stuck his thumb out.

Also, Megadeth's Rust In Peace album is a lost classic. Tornado of Souls! Holy Wars- The Punishment Due! Hangar 18! Dawn Patrol! Hard to believe it's been almost 20 years.
Yet I know some of you won't rush to download it from iTunes. If you want something a little more current try Hayloft by Mother Mother. And of course always Wendy McNeill. Why haven't you listened to me about her yet? Check out "Stop" and "White Horses".
Ah Megadeth.

No baby yet. Today would have been a good day for it to arrive since it was a bad day at work. Not the Worst Day Ever but the worst day so far this year at least. Our big digger has been down for a month and the bosses were getting antsy to get it working. It finally came up today. So we had to move it to where shovel 8 was. And then shovel 8 had to move to where shovel 6 was. And then shovel 6 had to move to where shovel 10 was. Which is easy to do when you are an engineer moving blips around on a map, but not so much fun when you are the guy who has to do all the grunt work with the cable and stuff. Plus a little short on the manpower today. There was even some Blood Boiling Over here and there, which is actually pretty rare at the ole coal mine, at least from my foreman. He was mad because we Stopped For Lunch. We were mad that he was denying us our Marxist right to Stop For Our Damn Lunch Already. So I was calling Michelle and asking if she was having the baby yet so I could go home. She kept saying no even when I was like, "Are you sure? Really? Because it seems like you might be contracting to me. What was that? Did your water just break?"
Anyways, we moved all the shovels and I came home and still have no baby. Maybe tomorrow.
On the plus side- from the time I got on the highway from Hinton all the way to here I didn't have to stop once. I might have fudged a yellow light a bit at Henday and Terwillegar just to keep the streak intact but I did it.
I finished The Baroque Cycle a few nights ago. I don't think I've ever used the term tour de force before in my life but it fits. At least I assume it fits since I don't really know what tour de force means. Kickass awesome is what I think it means.