On Diapers

Oh, poop. This is sort of an interesting conversation we've had in our house lately. Cloth vs. Disposable? Is there such a thing as an eco-friendly diaper?

There are a lot of different options out there. Cloth. 7th Generation and Tushies diapers are chlorine-free. gDiapers are flushable. Or we could just start potty training at 7 months.

We're not really leaning one way or the other, just weighing our options. They all look crappy. Ba-dum-bum. There's no secret that Ash and I try and do our part for the environment and all. Nothing too outrageous. I don't drive a Crisco car or anything. I can't even affort a hybrid, but I'd like to get one someday. We just do little things like recycle what we can, and take canvas bags to the sto'. It's fun watching the dipshit teens fumble with the canvas bags and go all 12 Monkeys Brad Pitt trying to fill them.

I am leaning towards regular Pampers or Huggies or whatever works best. Neat-and-tidy is more of a priority to me than environment when it comes to cleaning up yellow stanky diarrhea. Ash is leaning more towards cloth, or maybe a mix of cloth and disposable, whatever makes sense at the time. Curious to hear if any of my dear readers have some experience with anything out of the ordinary.

Doubleshot of the blog tonight. Some updates on the job & home front this week. Had a phone call with someone from GE this week, a job I was hoping would work out. But they wouldn't pursue it further unless I agreed to move to Schenectady, NY. No way. Then the recruiter tries to sell me on Schenectady by saying "well, we don't get near as much snow as you did in Michigan, but it does get pretty cold." OK, first off it's not the snow I don't like, it's the cold that goes with it. Going through a winter of teen-degree cold for four months and having it only snow like 3 times sounds absolutely depressing. At least if it's going to be cold, yeah, it better frigging snow.

A couple of other job things are in the works. I have been extremely interested in a company called Hewitt Associates, and I finally got a call from them last week. I hope that works out, or something else in their company. They do HR outsourcing (mainly benefits, although apparently some payroll, both of which are my specialty), but more important than that a lot of their employees work from home. That'd be awesome. For this particular gig, I might have to travel one week out of every month, but I can cope with that.

Ash spent the week packing and getting us ready to "move" up to the farm this weekend. Our plan is to sell the house in Columbus, but because we have three dogs, that would be a pain to try and sell the house, what with all the loose hair and general stank. So we're staying up at "the farm", my FIL's place where we got married. I got back from ATL Thursday night, did some packing, moved our stuff into storage all day Friday and Saturday, and then packed our essentials up and convoyed up to the farm Sunday. I spent much of the day getting the Tivo up and running, and hooking up our computers. I finally got some consistent internet here now that I brought up my own router.

Hopefully this move was temporary. Best case scenario, we'll be here until I find a job hopefully in the next month or two. Worst case, we have to stay here until the baby is born. Absolutely awful case, I don't find a job and we get evicted because technically the farm is up for sale. Knock on wood that it doesn't sell anytime soon, no offense to my father-in-law but I hope nobody likes the place. We love it though. I just don't want anyone else to.

On Vacation

We've been back a week now, so this blog is a little late, but I did want to go ahead and at least post some pics. Here's a link to the pics I took, mostly at the cottage with Eric a.k.a. Sniper and his family. Most of them have captions so you can just peruse and get the scoop over there. We had fantastic weather at the cottage this year, which was doubly awesome since every time Ash has come up to the cottage the weather has been craptastic.

Tuesday, Eric and I went up to the casino and within about 2 hours I was up over $700 playing poker. Yeah, I'm that good.

I brought up my Guitar Hero controller so we played some co-op. If you didn't check out the album link above, you at least have to check out my nephew Cam jamming out behind his back. The funniest thing was he was actually doing pretty good, I think he did a whole song like that.

Thursday we went to mom's and opened up our first baby gifts. Thursday night was when Jackson died, so that was messed up. But Friday we bucked-up and went to Frankenmuth - Zehnder's for lunch and Bronner's after. Ash loves Christmas time, so I thought she'd like Bronner's, which is a huge year-round Christmas store. Then we flew back Saturday.

More later on the move and stuff.

In Memory of Jackson

Jackson

It is a sad time right now for the PalmerRaineyan Pack, as we lost Jackson early last Friday morning. We had a house-sitter staying at the house while we were in Michigan, and she had called us Thursday afternoon to tell us that Jackson didn't finish his breakfast, which is odd for a 100-pound dog like big Jack. By the evening he was very lethargic, and by sundown he was throwing up. She took him to an emergency vet and while they were drawing blood, he had a seizure (no history of epilepsy) and then went into cardiac arrest. They revived him, but he went into a second cardiac arrest shortly after and they were unable to bring him back.

We don't really know for sure what took him; his white blood cell count was through the roof, which more than likely meant he had cancer, and because dogs are fairly stoic it would have been nearly impossible to know. Jackson was just shy of 10 years old and had a very good life, but he is leaving a big hole in our hearts and at home. Here's 10 things we loved about Jacksonville, one for every year of his life:

1. He ate the most food but was always the first done. I don't think he knew how to chew. Of course he did have a few teeth knocked out by a horse when he was a puppy, so maybe chewing wasn't really an option.
   
2. He was so big he could steal food off the counter without craning his neck. On separate occasions, I lost two buttered slices of bread, a slice of pizza, and a McDonald's cheeseburger (for which he was briefly nicknamed Cheeseburgler).
3. He would play with himself by flinging a ball or toy in the air and lunging after it.
4. He was hilarious to watch playing and wrestling with Xander, our 20-pound terrier mutt, throwing him around like a rag-doll.
5. He had big ole' floppy ears and looked like Alf. We turned him into a bobble-head Alf on grooming day.
6. Speaking of grooming day, it was hilarious how he would literally wrap his front legs around Ash's leg when she took him to the groomer. "Don't leave me here!"
   
7. He was the biggest freaking dog, but he was the biggest wuss when it came to thunder storms.
8. He'd get so excited at dinner time, he'd back into the water bowl, spilling water all over the place. And it never gets old watching a big dog scramble for the traction on the hardwood floor as the dogs get excited to go outside. Graceful, he was not.
9. That dude hated remote control cars. Hated. We have these trashy neighbors across the street that have this big loud whining remote control car. He'd sit in front of the window barking and growling at it for hours.
10. His tail was like the spawn of a baseball bat and a feather duster. And he was such a happy dog he would thump his tail on the hardwood floors if you just said anything nonsensical in a completely different room. It always cracked us up, hearing the thump-thump-thump; he wouldn't get up or do anything, just lay there and wag his tail against the floor, thumping.

View a couple more photos by clicking on the photo above.

On...Bay-Bay!

Sorry I just can't say "baby" without doing Fat Bastard.

Well, I'd hoped it would take longer to work (wink...wink), but alas my virility has betrayed me. Bam! First month. Well, we didn't know we were successful the first month that we tried but that's a longer story...read on.

I came home June 15th from my first week contracting in Atlanta, and she woke me up at 4 am to gleefully wave the little digital readout on a pee-stick in front of me (kind of gross now that I think about it). Exactly how excessively technological is a digital readout on a pregnancy test? So very excessive. But I love it. So anyway, needless to say I didn't get any more sleep that day. I had to go into my former place of employment (quack) and wrap up some things, as it was technically my last day there. I skipped out of work at about 3pm and we went to the movie Knocked Up (how appropriate), and then to Barnes and Noble to buy the stereotypical small arsenal of baby books. I did have to put my foot down on the $20 baby name book. I ordered the same thing on half.com for like four bucks. $20 for a list of names...seriously.

So, we thought two weeks later when we went to the first ultrasound, that we were just about 5-6 weeks pregnant, tops. It was pretty amazing to start to see her outline the blob on the machine as some sort of potential-human. But when she flipped on the audio, my jaw dropped. Ash and I looked at each other and we told the nice little nurse lady that we didn't think you could hear a heartbeat until much later (which we knew, of course, because we had already studied our new baby textbooks - and by "we" I mean "Ash"). She said something to the effect of "oh, no, I put you at about 9-10 weeks pregnant." Holy sh'pocky.

Until that point, I hadn't been stressed at all about looking for a job and wanting to move to Florida. I was then. But it was overshadowed by our excitement about what's to come. Ash is now about 14 weeks, give or take a few days, and our due date is 1/24/08.

Just don't call us "breeders" yet. We're still shooting for just one, but I guess a lot can change. Who knows, I could actually become responsible and shit.