Grand Entrance

March 22, 2006

First, you'll have to excuse the blog name. I've been sick and am feeling particularly void of creativity.  Some neat things happen to me, and I thought I should share them.  Of course, I can't promise I'll limit myself to parts of my life that the rest of you find interesting, so prepare yourself for some skimming.  I don't really feel like doing a full background on myself, so I think I'll just start here.

Daniel is learning to crawl.  Last week we could place something a mere 12" from him and be sure it was safe from his dripping hands and mouth.  Today he crawled up under our coffee table and attempted to eat the table leg.  Luckily for my laptop, the second phase of his plan failed.  The table lives on, but I don't know for how long.  He also got his first tooth a couple days ago.  This is very exciting, but the pain that accompanies shoving a tooth through human flesh seemed to upset him somehow, and the birth of this tooth was met with weeping and gnashing of... gums.  Somehow, gnashing of gums sounds more wet than menacing.  Still, though, no amount of Orajel/Tylenol/Snuggling/Cooing/Feeding/Singing/Combination thereof can console a teething baby, so be prepared.

BTW, do not confuse singing with singeing.

Like I said, I've been sick lately.  I have had "cold-like symptoms" for about a week, and I had my second migraine of my life Monday night.  If you've never had a migraine, consider yourself lucky.  To those of you who have, let me describe mine.  They say that when you feel a migraine coming on to lie down in a cool dark room and try to sleep.  My migraines have only happened at night.  They begin with a bad headache just as I'm drifting off to sleep.  As the night progresses, I pick some random problem to solve.  The first time it was storming a certain base for paintball.  The second time it was destroying a force in Dawn of War.  The tasks are not that difficult, but I can't seem to finish.  As I struggle, my head pounds increasingly harder.  I roll from side to side because I somehow believe that changing positions will help me solve my task.  Images start to skew and my mental image of what is going on becomes erratic.  Everything starts moving fast.  My mind's eye can't focus or hold still.  Everything is swooping in and then out again.  I truly have delusions.  I never realize I'm having a migraine or that I need to take medicine.  I never even realize I'm asleep.  I am trapped in this world that won't hold still, everything moving so fast...., and my head aches like nothing I've felt.  I wake up the next day exhausted, weak, and disoriented.  So... uh... migraines bad.

I am still waiting to find out what our group got on our interim report in Thermal Design.  We're designing a heat exchanger, and had to turn in a report showing our progress.  In class the professor talked about it casually, outlining general principles and things he would be looking for.  Unfortunately, private conferences with him revealed he had a much higher standard than anyone had guessed.  We found out Tuesday of last week that we needed to get much deeper into the project than we thought.  To us, this meant that the work we had done over the last 2 months had to be redone with more detail and depth in the next 3 days.  Well, we had to wait for installation and fabrication estimates from companies, and we couldn't recommense work until Thursday afternoon at 4:30.  That's when we started, and we finished 2 minutes before it had to be turned in.  And the deadline was 8:00am the next day.  You'd be surprised what 4 people can do when frantically working for 16 hours straight.  I didn't feel tired until 15 minutes after we turned it in.  There are some changes I wish we could have made, but we did well.  I'll let you all know when I get the grade back.

Somehow, I think the baby story was more interesting than the other stuff.  Oh well... like I said.  These are my own chronicles, and readers are incidental.  Still, I hope you enjoy it and that I can keep it up.  I like doing this stuff.