Still Not Perfect

Look out – sweeping generalizations and rhetorical language ahead.

Hey you, Christian.  Yeah, you, with the moral monopoly.  You know that favorite cause of yours?  The pro-life one?  The abortion issue?  You’re approaching it all wrong.  You’re part of the problem.  Every time you give a mother in a tough spot a disdainful glance or gossip judgmentally about their situation you push them (and your own daughters) towards the very option you find so abominable.  Just because your sins are easier to hide than a bulging pregnant belly doesn’t give you the right to judge.  That’s not your place.  Neither is it yours to heap shame upon them.  The shame tactic hasn’t been working for centuries.  People have sex because they like to.  They’re practically programmed to do it – hormones, be fruitful and multiply edicts, etc.  Get over it.  It’s part of life.  It’s the very source of it, in fact.

If you really believe what you say you do about the preciousness of the life they carry, then put your money where your mouth is.  Celebrate the potential of that life they carry.  Love them and support them.  Surprise them with your compassion.  And do it unconditionally, with no prerequisites.  Don’t require parenting or finance classes.  Don’t require statements of faith.  Don’t require their personal reform.  Offer support.  Offer friendship.  Offer options and resources.  Do it as Christ would have – with love and compassion.  Your daughter, or at least a close friend of hers, will need that kind of willing and open support someday.  Start practicing it now.

That doesn’t mean you have to stop working for legal reform if you believe in it.  But, if you don’t reform your own attitudes towards women in need, legal reform won’t make any difference.  Abortions will still occur, legal or not – they always have.  The most effective defense you have against abortion is to make it a legitimate option for the mother to keep the baby (or at least keep it alive).  That’s work you do with your hands, your hearts, your spare rooms, and every resource you’ve got, if you really believe life is as precious as you claim it is.  [Then again, if you really believed that, would you generally be as pro capital punishment / pro torture / pro war as we've seen you been?]

We had a couple of days of downtime (really just 1) because of the move. Like an idiot I didn’t take enough care when shutting Ridcully down and some MySQL tables got corrupted. Hex didn’t wake up right away after the move either. It wouldn’t even power on, and normally it is the DNS server, so it was kind of hard to research how to fix the MySQL problems I was having on Ridcully. Finally after just letting it sit for a little while Hex woke up, and then a quick ‘repair table wp_comments’ later on Ridcully we’re back up and running error free. Just looks like we lost a few comments (probably the last 25 or so).

The last couple of weeks have been really tough for me and my family. It started with me forgetting to reorder by medicine until I only had a day or two’s worth left. Now my refills usually get here within a couple days of me ordering them, but of course this time it had to take almost two weeks. Even though it’s a relatively mild medicine (lexapro), the withdrawal can wreak havoc on you.

To add to that my sister-in-law came into town just when things were starting to get hard. That made it even harder because she was staying in my “study” which is where I like to wind down and level myself out, stuff that is even more important to try to do when you are suddenly coming off of your medicine.

Then, a couple of days after she arrived my wife started to get really sick (high fever, etc). Turns out she had a gallbladder infection and a couple of stones. Time for emergency surgery. A couple of days in the hospital to recover and she is feeling much better. I’m thankful my sister-in-law was around to help some during that time. Once we get my wife home from the hospital we’ve got the house to ourselves again, and my medicine had arrived so I could start ramping up on it again.

And then things get rattled up at work. I had known a management change was in the works, and even that it would be happening soon. It is just hard knowing that I am leaving what will probably be the best manager I will ever work for. I’m getting used to the new team now, but it just isn’t the same (even though 4 of my teammates are the same).

Of course I haven’t really had the energy to even record everything that has been going on until now, almost a month after most of it. Oh well, that’s how life is sometimes I guess.

Our son Ian Randall was born 2/17 at 1:39AM. He is 8 lbs 11oz and 20.5″ long. He’s got a full head of dark hair already. Unfortunately he’s been having a lot of trouble with his oxygen saturation. The official diagnosis is pneumonia, but the doctors aren’t quite sure that’s exactly what’s wrong. He’s also had a bit of a heart murmur, but that seems to be clearing up. He’s still in the NICU, and will be at least until next Sunday. Obviously I’ve let things get a bit stale on my site during all the craziness, and don’t expect me to get too much up-to-date for a bit. We’ll be spending a lot of time at the hospital visiting Ian. Please keep us all in your prayers.

Eventually I will catch up with the WP world too and update my Flickr gallery plugin to be WP 1.5 compatible. But it might still be a while.

Update: I’ve posted some pictures of Ian here and here.

Holidays can really be exhausting. Not so much because I didn’t get enough rest, but because there is so much I want to catch up on once I get back home. So even though I returned home well rested I managed to spend a couple of late nights wasting that rest away because of all the things I wanted to do. Anyway, I’m glad to be back home.

2005 promises to hold plenty of excitement for our family. Ian is due to be joining us out in the real world February 9 (but I’m pretty sure he’ll be here well before that). We are looking forward to that with much anticipation and an equal helping of “we don’t have a clue what we’re doing” fear.

We are starting to house hunt too, as our apartment will be kind of cramped for three of us. We are looking for something unique, but it seems to be hard to come by. The great majority of the housing in our area has gone up in just the last ten years. That means that most of the houses seem to come from a relatively small group of cookie cutter designs. We have found one neighborhood we really like (it’s unique and private) – but it seems everybody currently living there really likes it too and isn’t planning on moving out anytime soon. Maybe patience will pay off and something will open up in that neighborhood by July when our lease is up. In the meantime I’ll keep daydreaming about fixing a place up to be our very own.

Anyway, we wish everyone a great 2005.

As if the last couple of days wouldn’t have been crazy enough with the Thanksgiving holiday and family get togethers, we decided to throw a couple of hospital visits into the mix. Thanksgiving day we had a good time visiting with the family and eating lots of great food, but on the way home Alex told me she was feeling contractions (cue Ray getting really nervous). So she started timing the intervals – 5 mins between, then decreasing down to 3. So I finally convinced Alex to call the on-call nurse who tells her to take it easy and drink lots of water for an hour. We wait for the hour and things are actually getting worse. So the nurse tells us to come in to the hospital. (more…)

The weeks seem to go by so fast, but not as fast as the weekends. I’m finding myself falling into the “living for the weekend” rut. I just look forward to having my own time. The weeks go so fast because work dictates so much of my time, socializing (which is a big drain sometimes) fills up a lot of evenings that I’m not on-call, and what little is left after that is for everyday chores (needless to say they don’t often get done when they should).

Then when the weekends do come around (which lately seems surprisingly fast) they get filled up too. I try to avoid the social stuff on the weekend, much to my wife’s chagrin, and instead work on my own projects at home, read, or otherwise relax. I just wish there was a way to slow time down so I could fit all the things I wanted to do in the weekend. Of course if I could slow time down I wouldn’t even need a weekend because I could get work, socializing, leisure, and rest all in everyday.

How do people even busier than me (of which there are many) not go crazy?