up late

I'm staying up late because one of our c02 detectors went off. A little freaky, because we couldn't figure out anything wrong. We have a wood stove, so that was probably producing it, but we couldn't get it to stop. I finally took it outside and tested it and it still went off! Well, that seemed suspicious. Unfortunately, the other detector started going off too. I swear, it was sympathetic alarming or something. After yanking the batteries and putting them back in, it quit going off and then I never could get it alarm again. So, hopefully we're ok and not going to die in our sleep or anything. That would be a real bummer.

Correction

Rebekah just corrected me. She's @ 29 weeks. I can't keep track. it keeps going up for some reason. Like the inverse of the stock market.

Daddy's girl

by Grant

Liberty is a chip off the old block. She is sooo lazy. Watching her try to get out of the carseat is both frustrating and hilarious. And just now I put some crackers on the table right by her face. Instead of reaching up and grabbing them as I thought, she tried to suck them off the table with her mouth. I of course, indulged her a little by giving the cracker a nudge into the chasm of death (cracker death that is).

BTW, anybody on facebook can follow my blog easily because I have it importing into my facebook notes section. That is so cool. So non-techies that don't understand rss feeds can still stay on top of my inanities with a minimum of inconvenience.

I had somebody ask today what the gender is of the new twins (previously called beta twins in blog posts of yore). One male and one female homosapien is what they tell me. So, 3 boys and 3 girls. 1 dad. 1 mom. 1 female cat. I guess our next dog needs to be of the male persuasion...

Clarification

Rebekah is @ 28 weeks. the previous blog post about weight of the babies was determined by the ultrasound.

I was unable to attend the appt. w/ my wife as I had to be at work to disable a coworkers account and change passwords. I feel like the last man standing in IT. It's not far from the truth. We have a fair number left, but i'm the primary system engineer for about 200 servers and dozens of ancillary systems. I have to babysit the backups this weekend for all that stuff I just mentioned. Argh. But at least I have a job, right? :)

Self immolation

by Grant

What causes people to self-destruct? It's sad to watch. It's heartbreaking if you know the person well. Giving in to all your wants and desires is the surest path to misery and destruction.

Good news

the babies are 2 pounds and 14 ounces and doing fine :D

Uh oh

by Grant

Within the past two weeks we've had a bit of shake up in upper mgmt. The CEO stepped down and his brother's taking over. The CFO is doing something else and another guy was promoted into that spot. The temporary HR manager (who was running an efficiency program earlier) has been permanently put in the post. Now we have some sort of building wide meeting. All meetings these days are bad. But the IT director left for the day so I guess that's good.

In other less anxious news, I went to a car auction on Friday w/ a friend. I don't know if those vehicles went for too much or not, but paying thousands of $$ for a worn out vehicle isn't my idea of a smart move. Most were bank repos and old with high miles. A lot of them had some sort of damage. It was as if all the good vehicles got picked over by dealers and then the rejects got auctioned off to suckers. There were some pretty good deals, but I tried to buy a 22 year old van in pretty nice shape and some psycho lady was prepared to bid to the moon (or so it appeared). I had passed up minivans because thought I could get this cheap, but she wanted it bad. So, I let her have it. What was funny is that I went to lunch and when I came back the auction was almost over and there were still people waiting in line to sign up. Crazy. I'll bet they felt rather chagrined to find out they'd missed everything.

BTW, Beka is still hanging in there but she is not getting hardly any sleep. Typically she's not falling asleep until 4am. Crazy. I would have lost it and been in a padded room if that was me. God sure gives grace.

Beka update

by Grant

  Well, Rebekah is having a harder time. She pulled a muscle the other day (we think) and is in a lot of pain. Basically she's bed-ridden. Well, she's couch-ridden. I had to come home today and work but by doing that she was able to get some rest. Working in the afternoon works pretty well because the 3 youngest are asleep.

anyway, she feels a bit better now so we're gonna go out to eat for my birthday. All that I've had to eat today was some peanuts so if we don't get out of here soon, I'm gonna gnaw my arm off. After all, they're doing wonders in prosthetics these days...

Office Space...

...Should be required viewing for executives. This movie speaks to me so much more each time I watch it. I just regret the language in it. Mostly in some gansta rap playing when some guys take out their anger on a flaky printer in an empty field.

Pretty decent saturday. I got up early and activated the electronic babysitter for the boys while Rebekah slept. Her sweet slumber was interrupted a couple hours later by the boys pushing a little basket around screaming. I got some pictures as the boys slid around and crashed. They were having fun. I was enjoying the fact that they weren't fighting or bugging me.

I spent two or three hours this afternoon trying to resurrect my gerber multitool from a cremation attempt by my wife last year. She claims it was an accident, but we didn't burn something of hers now did we?
Anyway, we burned some boxes and the Gerber was in the boxes. Luckily I fished it out, but it had melted plastic into the mechanism and was non functional. So I got a propane torch and my dremel tool and went to work. It took me a couple hours, but the final result is functional if not fashionable.

Oh, and back to life at the WG (my work). Somebody actually quit this week. Fed up with it. Not my department, but I'd known the person for a few years. Good news (I guess) is that if there are any more layofss, one of the guys in my department is volunteering. Young guy with lots of options and he's probably being a bit facetious, but I know that he'd be fine with it. He says that he thinks his stress level will be less if he just stays home and plays "Call of Duty 4" all day. I tend to agree.

Church tomorrow!

yeah, i know

by Grant

My last post was incredibly stupid. I blame it on some sort of a nervous breakdown. Even if I keep my job, which although it may be more solid than I had thought is no means guaranteed, others are suffering and will continue to suffer.

Anyway, Rebekah is still hanging in there although she's about had it with Titus. Anybody want him? He's really cute. Housebroken and everything.


I joke, I joke.


/sotto voce
But seriously, offers can be sent to my personal e-mail account iamnotreallytryingtogetridofmychildren@gmail.com

Some good news!

by Grant

It's all about me. me. me. Sorry, I'm just very happy. Hey, that rhymes! I met with my new boss and she said that I was considered core and she wanted to utilize me more. So, that's all I can ask for. It may not seem like much, but I take it to mean that I have a job for at least a few more months. Whoopee!

Thanks again for your prayers. Maybe now we can buy an 8 passenger vehicle!

Small amount of good news

by Grant

background: On Wednesday of last week, right after the layoffs but before any announcement a vendor cut power to the entire data center. This is a total disaster as we have 150 normal servers and several other systems that went down hard. Most will come up ok, but our primary system is known to get corrupted. To make matters worse, the guy that takes care of that system was out on vacation without his laptop. To make my life worse, I was supposedly his backup.


I did pretty good in my book and I guess the powers that be agreed with me because I (along with 4 others) were singled out in an e-mail sent to all the IT (that's left) and the CEO/VPs.

One small bit of good news on a monday that's shaping up to be ugly as other divisions cut more people today.


Thanks to everybody that's praying for me (and my family). And to the heathen unbelievers, you know who you are, thanks for at least taking the time to read my blog post.

argh!!!

I just lost my blog post, so I'm just gonna summarize it quicklike as I'm tired and have to bathe my kids for church tomorrow.

1. Work is bad
2. Rebekah is OK. She's at 26 weeks right now.
3. Kids are good except Titus broke his finger.

Black Wednesday

They laid off 20% of IT (Information Technology). I'm still employed for now.

Just trying to hang on

by grant

Rebekah is 23 weeks pregnant. She has started to have contractions and is having trouble taking care of the kids. No fun. We think we have some contingency plans worked out, but they will definitely increase the stress of daily life, but they are necessary so that Rebekah can get by.

So, one boy and one girl on the way. they're growing good. the boy only has 1 artery in his umbilical cord which happens a lot but still isn't too thrilling since it can mean problems later.

anyway, work is scary but I still have my job so I'm thankful. For the Christians out there, we could really use your prayers. It's only by God's grace that we can get through these things without (me) snapping. For the skeptics out there (matt) find us a nanny that will work for free.

Twins 2: This time its personal

ok, for anybody who is still reading this (rss feeds keep you from totally abandoning it. check out google reader or bloglines.com), I'd like to announce that we are having
1 boy and
1 girl!

yay! 3 and 3. 4 and 4 if you count the parents. We have a female cat, so I guess we need to get a male dog soon.

The twins are growing as expected so that's good. The umbilical cord on the boy has only two channels instead of the normal 3, but that's not too abnormal. Titus was that way. The girl had a shiny spot on her heart, but they've seeen that a lot but never known it to mean anything. The C-section will be scheduled for the 37th or 38th week of the term. So that means a late April or early may birth if all goes according to plan. Rebekah is doing ok... but she's doing less and less and having a harder and harder time. I think she'll be on bed rest for the last few weeks.


The other kids are doing ok. I'm slightly mad at times because I have less patience and the boys are not cooperating like I need. The girls are pretty good. They're dolls most of the time, but they have attitudes that have to be corrected. Also, sometimes they (individually) are very fussy and nothing consoles them.

We're still not sure about transportation. we don't have 8 seats in our Durango and even if we did, car seats take too much space. We can't trade our Durango in because an SUV is worth about as much as a bucket of warm spit. We still owe a lot on it, and it's lost way more value than normal. So, we're considering lots of options.

I am doing ok, been having more pain in my wrist. I think it's a pinched nerve in my neck. I had Carpal tunnel surgery and it didn't help. I went to a neurologist last week and he had the gaul to say that carpal tunnel was my problem. It doesn't make any sense. He said the only other thing could be was a pinched nerve in my neck. I've done research and it turns out that you can have pain anywhere in your arm and NOT in the neck with a pinched nerve in your neck. It fits better than anything else that I've read.

Work is still work. They cut our pay 5% which is painful. But we're hoping that between that and agressive cost cutting, they can ride out the storm. At the very least, I think that the WG should be able to outlast many of its competitors. Bad (and sad) for them, but good for us.

I'm shocked! shocked I say...

by Grant

...to read this morning that somebody doesn't like Obama. Al Qaeda is bad mouthing him and calling him names. Next thing you know Hamas and Hezbollah (sp?) will say that he has bad breath or something. I say we bomb al qaeda back to the stone age. Oh wait, we already did that.

Wow

by Grant

  Ok, so there isn't really a lot more to say about the beta twins (Liberty and Serenity are the Alpha twins). Rebekah hasn't been back to the Dr. yet, so we don't have any more info. She's just past her first trimester, but she's still pretty miserable. I'm glad this is our last time around the maternity block.

Forrest made me dinner tonight. Peanut Butter and honey. Our food stash has gotten rather empty of late. I've been busy trying to help at the church as well as scrounge up some other work. My pay is being cut 5% as of January 1, 2009. I can't afford that except by putting my 401k contribution to 0%. So, that's unfortunate. But in some ways, I am relieved. I was waiting for the other shoe to drop. The housing market is 1/3 of where it was at its peak 2 years ago. Our company is getting about 50% of the revenue it did two years ago. Wildly enough, there has not been so little new housing starts in the past 50 years. This is the worst it ever has been. Where have all the people gone? Don't they have to live in houses? I checked my trees and nobody's hanging out there. I mean, even if things are bad now, there should still be people getting married (for the first time) and needing a house so somebody gets something in the divorce. I mean, if all you have to fight over is who gets the dog it sounds a lot more petty. But I digress. Our family is doing well. As you can gather from the earlier statements, Forrest is a great help (when he wants to be). He likes being responsible but sometimes he finds it a drag. Well, I find it a drag much of time so I can't fault a 5 year old too much. He helped Rebekah a lot when she was sick the other day. I couldn't come home because we had the shoe drop meeting and attendance was required. So Forrest made cereal and fed the girls crackers and yogurt (or something like that).

I spent some fun time looking for a new vehicle this week. Today especially was fun. Rebekah wanted a Ford Excursion, AKA Land Yacht, since it had the room we need plus room for groceries. Alas, we are upside down on our Durango due to the severe devaluation of SUVs. But, since the car guys are semi-desperate I thought I'd see if they'd do anything. Their offer was so amusing (offering me 50% of trade in value on my Durango) that I laughed. Finally after a bit, they said "What can we do to make this deal happen?" I said, "Make pigs fly." He chuckled until he realized I was serious. It was an amusing experience. Our Durango is really nice and comfortable, but since it can only hold seven I guess we'll have to just drive two vehicles if the whole family goes anywhere. That's ok. that way I can listen to rock or some such heathen music while Rebekah indoctrinates our children with something wholesome. I see it as a win-win, don't you?

Breaking News!

by Grant

Rebekah is pregnant with twins again! Thankfully they are in separate sacks. And no, we don't know the gender.


More to follow if the blogger isn't too depressed.

Beka's Birthday

by Grant

  So, it's Rebekah's birthday today. We have a friend who is going to come over tonight and watch our kids for us. That's really nice. We won't do anything too fancy. I thought about taking her to a movie, but nothing looks good which is good because an adult ticket costs $9!!! Holy cow. Do people still go to movies? We finally got a big TV this year and I bought a Dolby Digital amp from a friend and so we have a really nice home entertainment system. It's pretty darn close to a theater experience. Plus the concessions are cheaper.

Pretty fascinating watching the Stock market implode. Amazing what fear can do to people. But you know the old saying "buy low, sell high." It's low now. record low. It'll probably still go lower, but I personally think it will be one of two things. 1: It'll go so low that we have a major worldwide depression in which case you'll have bigger things to worry about. Or 2: it'll eventually hit a bottom and start coming back up. The one good thing I saw about friday is that some financial stocks actually went up. Most of the drops were from other companies (like GM) that were now being affected. This sort of thing has to work itself out. The government has a role to play, but socialism is a dangerous threat if they do too much.

Ok, boring stuff I know.

Anothing boring note. Titus is up and he's watching Max and Goofy in "A Goofy Movie." I find it amusing that they're driving a pacer. The seats and the doorhandles look right too. Of course, pacer was made by AMC and they went out of business over 20 years ago. OH no! It just blew up. It made it through the entire movie and then blew up and Goofy kicked the bumper. Sheesh, it's not a pinto. Stupid Hollywood.

Toddler/Life update:

For those of you who don't know, Rebekah is pregnant again. I'm praying it's not twins or if it is, then they're in separate sacks. I have no idea how we're gonna pay for another kid, but I'm trusting in God to provide. The girls are doing great. Liberty seems much less fussy these days. I think she's done cutting teeth. But now the temperaments of both girls are more even. I'll try to post some more pictures on my next blog post.