September 2007 Archives
It has been a while since we posted a segment for the Halleigh Show, but here's a clip from Halleigh's birthday on Monday. The big party was on Saturday, a couple of days before her actual birthday, but the big event on the 24th was getting a "new" piano. Actually it is a really old piano we found free on Craig's List. But it has character, and it sounds good as long as you don't have anything against the kind of tinny sound that is common with older instruments. You might be able to see from the video that the insides were recently refurbished (new felts, etc.) but the outside will need some TLC. Anyway, our girl seemed to like it and that's what matters most. Enjoy the video!
I just finished tracking the US Women's match against Brazil. Looks like we got shelled. I couldn't watch the game because work has ESPN 360 blocked, so I would really like to see some replays later. There were already plenty of questions surrounding the US line up entering the game, and ESPN is calling the first-half red card on Shannon Boxx questionable. But the US has been lackluster all tournament and the game seemed to be in Brazil's hands before Boxx's ejection. Did anyone see how we got a header own-goal from almost midfield? The text play-by-play just doesn't explain it. I guess our star commenter, Hilde, will be on the bad list until after the US-Norway consolation match.
By the way, I'll be pulling for the Brazilians in their final against Germany. And what's up with Pele, Ronaldo, Marta, and Christiane? Is there a rule about how good you have to be before you can go by just one name?
I can't believe that I have been a mom for a year. This has been the fastest, slowest, most fun, sleep deprived year of my life. I LOVE IT!
I have started this post several times now, not really knowing what to say. The week surrounding Halleigh's birth was filled with so many emotions; it is hard to describe how it feels to be a year removed from it. I was totally not ready for Halleigh, and yet she came at just the right time. I didn't want an epidural or a c-section, but we have a healthy, beautiful little girl and I thank God everyday for that. I definitely didn't want to have heart failure, but somehow God was in that too.
I will always remember sitting there and having the doctor tell me that I was probably not going to be able to have anymore kids, due to the peripartum cardiomyopathy. I felt like the world was crashing in around me. "Don't worry about that now, you just had a baby and you have plenty to deal with," they said. "WHAT?!?!?! You have no idea, being a mom is my calling in life! I can't have anymore?" I wanted to scream at them. No one seemed to understand that yes, I may have this newborn baby now, but what about in two years when I am ready for another one and I CAN'T HAVE ONE! Is it going to be okay then? NO!
I remember my mom and Miles' mom had taken Halleigh home to stay with them at our house that night, and my mom was so optimistic, calm, and seemingly relaxed. I think she just knew that everything would be okay. I thank you for that mom. You were my rock, a calming force in a VERY rocky time. I feel like there should have been more celebration of me on Halleigh's birthday... I am the one after all that gave birth to her. And it makes me wish/ want to celebrate my mom more on my birthday!
My dad too, I remember Miles calling him to tell him that we were back in the hospital and why we were there and telling him that I was mostly upset because they had just told me that more kids was improbable. I half-way expected him to act like the doctors and tell me that I needed to focus on Halleigh and worry about that later, but he didn't. He didn't tell me that everything was going to be okay, because as far as I was concerned, it wasn't going to be okay. Or maybe it would be okay, but not great, or even good. He just let me cry and grieve and be scared and genuinely sad. Dad, you will never know how much I needed that from you.
And Miles, where do I start! Miles was AWESOME! He took everything in stride. When the doctors gave me the news about the heart failure and the no more kids deal, and I started BAWLING, he said to the doctor, "It's okay, she's tough, she has just been through a lot today." I am so glad that he never freaked out, even when I passed out during the epidural. ha ha ha
I love what I have learned about Miles in the last year. He is a really great dad. He loves Halleigh with amazing strength, and I hope that one day she will feel about him the way I feel about my dad.
He read an article a while ago that talked about how the closeness of the dad-daughter relationship has a direct correlation to how many diapers he changed in infancy... we laughed at it more than anything, but I now call for "daddy-daughter bonding time" quite often. Miles is great, especially with poop.
Oh yeah, and we can have more kids. My heart has made a miraculous recovery (although, I know it isn't a miracle, it was God) and as long as I am under the supervision of a high-risk OBGYN and my cardiologist, they say I have the go ahead on more kids now that Halleigh is a year old and the "episode" was a year ago.
Halleigh Jane is the light of my life. I can't imagine being without her. I would go through it all again to have things just the way they are now. She is a smart, beautiful, fun, easy-going child that amazes us everyday with her development! This has been a fun year. I tell her often that she will never know how much I love her, but I hope that the day will come when she holds her first in her arms, and she will know how much I love her.
This morning I got an email bemoaning a perceived lack in proper history and civics education in
Now I'm always suspicious of these things, and I chuckle inwardly when people hear that I'm studying history and ask, "you're going to teach the true history, right?" Well friends, its not that easy, and I'll come right out and say this: since I took it in ninth grade, I've felt that civics was an outdated attempt to forge a national consensus, when really the country would be better off with a little more diversity of thought and some new, creative approaches to the old way of doing things.
So I took the quiz. I found it to have some good questions and some bad ones, and the difficulty level ranged from duh! to huh? Some of the questions were certainly less than objective, but in general I think the topic covered are worth knowing, even if the answers assume less shades of gray than I might like to see included.
Anyway, I scored 86.6 percent, missing 8. Now I'd like to see what my readers would score.
Take the quiz at www.americancivicliteracy.org, and report your thoughts in the comments. No pressure to reveal specific scores if you don't want to, but certainly share your thoughts on how we teach history/civics and what you thought of the questions.
So I just got done watching the US women win against Nigeria to advance to the elimination rounds as the top team out of group B. It looks like Sweden beat the North Koreans, which puts those two into a tie for second in the match points, but it's not enough for the Swedes since they needed to win by 3 to match North Korea's goal differential (which acts as the tie-breaker).
The Bill of Rights symposium was really interesting yesterday. If you want to hear all the gory details, you'll have to give me a call, but the most interesting tidbit was that the case for NC's legal ownership hinges to some degree on a transcription error in the NC Bill. Of all the unaccounted for copies (5), NC's copy is the only one that uses the word "where" rather than "wherein" in the 8th article, which became the 6th amendment to the Constitution (right to a fair and speedy trial). The inconsistancy was discovered and verified by a researcher helping with the litigation, and I think the State should give that girl a raise.
The depressing thing is that because of the poor condition of the document (as a result of improper preservation), NC does not have the resources to install a permanent display advanced enough to protect the fagile Bill. Therefore, the Bill will be stored in the State Archives and only come out for special occassions. SO... if you want to see the Bill before it's locked away, you better take advantage of the opportunity while you can. Who knows how expensive it will be for admission to the fundraising galas that will probably be the only chances to see this treasure in the future.
Finally, UNC dropped another close one, and my 4-win prediction is on dangerous ground. Let's hope we can sneak up on USF so I can watch the VaTech game.
Today Brooklynne and I will go to the NC Museum of History to take part in a symposium in honor of the return of NC's stolen copy of the Bill of Rights. The return has been a long journey for the document, which surfaced a few times between 1865 when it was stolen by occupying Union soldiers, and 2003 when it was finally recovered in an undercover FBI sting operation. Following the seizure, the document remained hidden while a legal battle over ownership played out. One of the illegal pocessors of the document claimed the Bill was fair war booty.
George Washington had 14 copies of the Bill of Rights made, and gave one copy to each of the thirteen original states and one copy to Congress. NC's copy was postmarked by John Adams and delivered to Samuel Johnson, NC's first state governor. Folklore has it that when the Bill arrived in NC, it helped convince NC lawmakers to ratify the Constitution, which they had previously rejected. (The spot where they voted down the Constitution is marked by a small stone on the north side of W. Tryon Street in Hillsborough.)
However, the legal wranglings seem to be over for now, and the Bill has come out of hiding for a victory lap of NC, making appearances at various NC historic sites. If you want to find the closest tour appearance to you, you can check the schedule here.
You can also read more about the history of the document and the recovery at these urls:
http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0808/p01s04-uspo.html (This account wins the award for use of the terms "Union 'marauders' " and "yankee" in connection with the controversy.)
Yesterday I heard through my good friends at NPR that the X-Prize Foundation has announced that they will partner with Google to offer $30 million dollars in prizes for the first two teams who can land a privately funded rover on the moon. The deadline is 2014.
Well, I'm officially throwing my hat in the ring. How hard can it be? I've recently endorsed the idea that if you have the internet, google, and wikipedia, you can learn to do anything that's been done before. Now I've got seven years to prove it.
So in a way, this is a statement of intentions. In another way, it's an invitation for partners. If you have a PhD in physics and think you've got the right stuff, I'll be having try-outs for my lunar challenge team in my backyard on the morning of October 20. Interested parties should bring a copy of their resume and an Estes Rocket that he or she has assembled from scratch. Contact me for more details.
I've already got a working design and it's not even 9am. I don't want to let the other teams in on my secrets, but let's just say it's a combination of this and this. I'll keep you posted as my progress continues.
I think I would work better if everyone would wear a Mexican westling mask to work each day. No one would know my true identity, so I could be much more daring and creative. People would respect eachother, lest they get the flying elbow off the top of the fuzzy cubical divider. And we would just look more complete. Who ever thought it would be a good idea to wear a tie without a Mexican wrestling mask?!!!
Folding laundry with a toddler in the room.
I have finally figured it out. I have been clicking on the wrong button and was unable to post... until now!
I am dealing with a child that is getting two teeth at the same time. Not a pretty picture. Screaming, snotty nose, drool everywhere, restless. She has taken some Tylenol, and that has yet to kick in and I have applied baby orajel, and I think that it helping a little. Oh what a fun day... she has been unusually fussy the last couple of days, and I just got it... oh look there are two teeth coming in.
After discussing NCAA rules about bowl eligibility with Brian and Marc at Brixx last night, I decided I should do some investigation into how many games UNC would need to win to become bowl-eligible. I clipped this blurb from the NCAA handbook on postseason football, and it looks like JMU will indeed count toward our total of 6 required wins. However, since we will play at least 12 games this year, we would only qualify with six wins if we were going to a bowl that has a contract with the ACC (no at-large invitations). In past seasons when we earned at-large invitations with 6 wins, it was allowable because we only played 11 games and had a +.500 record. The rules go on to state that the contracted bowls would have to invite every other eligible ACC team with a +.500 record before they could invite us if we finish 6-6. So, with one BCS birth, the Gator Bowl, Peach Bowl, and Carquest Bowl (?) contracted with the ACC, we would only qualify at 6-6 if there are no more than 3 ACC teams with winning seasons (not counting the unlikely possibility of a second ACC BCS invitation). Am I forgetting a bowl with an ACC contract? I'm sure there's some kind of loophole Baddour will try to exploit, but it looks to me like we will need at least 7 wins to go bowling this season.
If you don't know this already, my (Miles's) parents have been planning to build a cabin in the Appalachians for the past few years, and they finally closed the deal on 10+ acres near Independence, VA this summer. So, this past weekend, Brooklynne and I decided it was high time to initiate the Travis family mountain getaway by camping on the land for a night. Perhaps we would have stayed longer, but we took Halleigh with us, and we figured a short test-trip would be in order before embarking on a full-fledged back country adventure with an eleven-month-old toddler....
I didn't notice that I left a gaping hole in my predictions for the Heels, and sure enough, Carolina had to post a score that fell right in that hole. The problem is that UNC beat the Dukes by 23, which would put them in the scoring range of my prediction of a winning season, but by giving up more than 7, I torpedoed that prediction. Also, if I simply downgrade my prediction by a bullet point, the next one down is still defense-dependent. I'm going to give UNC the benefit of the doubt, though, and start with the 5-win prediction. However, UNC had one fumble and one interception. Therefore, according to my ruberic, we have to backup one bullet, and I stake my claim to a 4-win season. I hope we get at least 6, and make a bowl, but for now I have to stand by my predictions and be realistic, and I think a 5-win mark may still be optimistic. Only time will tell.
On another note, as Elizabeth pointed out, UVA let me down by losing badly to Wyoming in their opener, and with Dook as their next opponent, they will have no chance to redeem themselves before we play on September 15. That means that I will not watch the South Florida game, and whether or not I could possibly watch the VaTech game will depend on South Florida's performance against Auburn next weekend. Go Bulls! If the Bulls can't put together a respectable showing, then I may not watch a game until the end of October or November. Conceivably, we could qualify for a bowl game with wins against JMU, ECU, UVA, SFL, NCST, and Dook, and I will not watch the bowl game because we still have not earned a quality win. That would suck. Perhaps in that scenario, I'll redefine a quality win to include a 60-point thumping of Dook, just to keep the door open for one football game this year. But let's not get ahead of ourselves....
