The Morula Logs

Many of you know that we’re hard at work on making a baby!

Now that we’re well along and baby is doing well, we’re publishing our pregnancy blogs. If you’re interested in following our pregnancy, check out The Morula Logs.

 

Fishy outside!

Knowing so many kids of around the same age, it’s really easy to watch common developmental phenomena as they come and go. One thing that seems to be a favorite talent to two-year-olds is the ability to give two word commands in the form of “<person>, <action>!”, where action is something that the person is supposed to do with said two-year-old. If the action is not soon performed, the two-year-old follows up by a grabbing of the adult’s hand and dragging them toward desired action.

Verl’s desired action is definitely “sit”, as in “Mommy, sit!” and “Daddy, sit!”, which means, “I am playing with this toy, and you should sit down and play with the toy with me.

It’s interesting that they have learned to clearly desire the participation of others in their activities, and to request it.

Flynn’s favorite action is “outside”. When we were over there a couple of weeks ago to babysit, he kept saying “Fishy outside! Fishy outside!”, more and more insistently, and then grabbing my hand to drag me outside, since it was dusk, and the adults were hanging out inside for a while before mom and dad took off for their date. As I’ve mentioned, Flynn loves anything to do with water, including fish, so I figured there must be some kind of a toy fish or something outside that he wanted to play with. I was saying, “You have a fish out there, Flynn?” Finally, Owen chimed in, “No, I think that’s you.” Of course, the standard formulation! “Mommy, outside!”, “Colin, outside!”, and “Fishy, outside!”

So, yeah, I’m “Fishy” :). And very flattered to be so, given Flynn’s love of fish.

 

Quick blog catch-up

Fun things we’ve been up to lately while I haven’t been posting.

• Colin’s Mum turned 60, and we had a birthday bash for her out at Glenn and Glenda’s beautiful house and garden.

• Sue, Michael and Verl came to visit us in Seattle, and they brought us a truckload of awesome baby stuff! It was very fun watching Verl and Flynn play together and to see how quickly they picked things up from each other. Flynn’s been asking people for “cheers” clinking cups ever since.
• We went to visit Sue, Michael, and Verl in Portland, with special guest stars David and Megan in attendance. Lots of great food and fun companionship.

All this fun stuff happened before my latest back incident. More fun stuff to come now that I’m back on my feet.

 

Home workstation

My back has been out again for the last week.

Last time this happened, I miserably did nothing but listen to NPR, which actually has really crappy daytime programming, and sleep.

But this time, Colin rigged me up a way that I can actually use my computer from a a full lying-down position – laptop on a bedstand, and keyboard duct taped to a pillow. Here I am, working from home.

I still can’t wait until I can move around freely again.

 

More pictures of my new family members

More pictures of Robert and Elizabeth and family are on Jenni’s blog.

 

Elizabeth Juliet and Robert Paul – Welcome to the world!

Colin and I am thrilled to have a new niece and nephew! From Jenni’s email:

We’re very excited to welcome Elizabeth Juliet and Robert Paul to NYC!

The twins came earlier than expected! They were born on August 11, 2008.

Elizabeth (left) pushed to be born first. She was born at 7:10 PM.  She weighs 6 lb. 1 oz. and is 19 inches long.

Robert (right) followed immediately after, and was born at 7:11 PM.  He weighs 6 lb. 15 oz. and is 19 1/4 inches long.

Jenni is thrilled and recovering nicely, Anna is extremely proud of all three of them!

Yay! I’m so proud of all 4 of them :). We are going to go spend a week with them in Ohio September 12-19. I can’t wait!

 

Birthday camping

We went camping for my birthday, at this awesome campsite called Pine Flats, on the east side of the cascades. We picked that one because it had a group campsite you could reserve. Only a few people were able to make it out camping with us – Noah, Amy, and Andrew – but I had a great time. It was just a beautiful site, very warm, and it didn’t rain at all while we were there.

The group site at Pine Flats was awesome, and it would’ve held way more people than we had. It had trash cans, a water pump, lots of parking, and a huge fire pit surrounded by logs for sitting. The whole area was covered by lodgepole pines, one of my favorite trees. It was totally quiet except for the Mad River, on which it is right on the banks. I loved having the river noise as background. I didn’t do much except lounge about and walk around. It was very relaxing.

The first morning, Colin and I slept in late, and when I got up to eat some breakfast, I discovered a piece of our firewood on the table with some scrawlings on it. At first I thought it might have been left over from a previous camper or something, but then I noticed a word that looked like “river” and a word that looked like “rock”, and I started trying to piece together if it could be a map of our campsite area. Then I heard some sounds down by the river. I picked up the firewood and followed the map down to the “dam” by which there was supposedly going to be a “me”. Sure enough, there was Noah. He had found a logjam partially spanning the river and spent a good amount of time trying to get a log to span the last portion of the river, so that he could climb the hill on the other side. The logs kept getting picked up by the current and carried downstream, though.

He had seen a crazy sight that morning. A bat had been out, in broad daylight, skimming the surface of the river, presumably for bugs. The bat dove under the water, then came out and sit on a rock to dry for a while. Then it seemed to cling to the rock upside down and drink out of the river! I wish I had seen it.

We saw all kinds of crazy animal life. On our drive in Friday night, Colin and I saw a skunk crossing the road. Colin said he didn’t think he’d ever seen one live. Colin and Noah got a glimpse of a Great Horned Owl, sitting in a tree, being harassed by smaller birds, like the bat another strange daytime sighting! I saw it flying away. I’ve never seen an owl before, so it was really exciting, although I wish I’d gotten a better look. It was pretty neat/strange-looking in flight. On the same hike the next day, we saw a mink, slinking along the steep bank across the water! We didn’t know what it was at the time, but googled different weasel-like mammals when we got home until we found it. There were Cedar Waxwings all around the campsite. I’ve never seen the before! On a walk by the river we watched them dive and swoop over the water, catching insects. We also saw Western Tanager. So many things I’ve never seen before, and all on a short car-camping trip!

The area was a really deep river valley, so there were incredibly steep hills all around that Noah and Colin climbed in occasion. They always came down hot, red, sweaty, and exhausted.

Amy and Andrew showed up on Saturday and stayed the night, even though Andrew hasn’t done much camping. It was fun hanging out with them!

Unfortunately, the drive and the camping somehow messed up my back pretty badly, and I ended up lying in bed for the next week unable to even get up and email :(. I have to say, though, I think that it was almost worth it! I just love being out there in the woods.

Mammals

• Striped Skunk – Mephitis mephitis
• Bat
• American Mink – Neovison vison

Reptiles

• Snake (2 kinds)
• Lizard

Birds

• American Robin – Turdus migratorius
• Western Tanager – Piranga ludoviciana
• Great Horned Owl – Bubo virginianus
• Cedar Waxwing – Bombycilla cedrorum
  

Mushrooms

• Cryptoporus volvatus
• Wolfbane Lichen – Letharia columbiana

Plants

• Western Red Cedar – Thuja plicata
• Douglas Fir – Pseudotsuga menziesii
• Douglas Maple – Acer glabrum
• Ponderosa (Lodgepole) Pine – Pinus ponderosa

• Thimbleberry – Rubus parviflorus
• Red Twig Dogwood – Cornus sericea
• Ocean Spray – Holodiscus discolor

• Bracken Fern – Pteridium aquilinum

• Oregon Grape – Mahonia nervosa
• Fireweed – Epilobium angustifolium
• Blackcap Raspberry – Rubus leucodermis
• Yarrow – Achillea millefolium
• False Solomon’s Seal – Smilacina racemosa

Arthropods

• Water bug
• Ants (at least 2 kinds)

Mollusks

 

Health Care for All

I am really happy to see that the health care movement in the United States seems to be growing. It makes sense that the movement is growing, since our health care situation is getting worse and worse. Here are some stats from a recent Healthy Washington Coalition caucus I attended:

• Health care costs are skyrocketing
  • Over the last 5 years, health care costs for the typical Washington household have risen over 6x faster than family income.
  • This year, 1 in 4 Washingtonians under 65 will spend more than 10% of pre-tax family income on health care costs. 84% of these have health insurance.
• Poor coverage quality leaves many without security
  • A Consumer Reports study found that 24% of the U.S. population is “underinsured” – with insufficient coverage to pay for many health care expenses. [This rate is probably much higher now.]
• Medical debt is the leading cause of bankruptcy in the United States
  • An estimated 19,000 Washington residents file for medical bankruptcy every year.
  • 3/4 of those bankrupted by medical debt had health insurance at the time they were sick or injured.
• Employer-based coverage is eroding
  • In Washington, since 1993, employer-based coverage declined from 71% to 66%.
• Almost 600,000 Washingtonians are uninsured
  • Nearly 1 in 3 non-elderly Washington adults goes uninsured at some point in a 2-year period.
  • Every year, 380 Washington residents die because of lack of proper medical care.
  • In 2005, premiums for Washington families with private, employer-sponsored coverage were $1,206 higher due to the unpaid cost of health care for the uninsured.
• Our health care system is inefficient and quality is uneven
  • In our system, administration takes 30 cents of every health care dollar.
  • In the U.S., adults receive only 55% of recommended care.

The situation is especially pitiful when you compare us to other developed countries. You can see some of these other systems on Wikipedia, in Michael Moore’s movie Sicko (although of course you have to take everything he does with a grain of salt), on a special NPR series, and much more.

Health care should be affordable, universal, and complete. It’s shameful that people should be going bankrupt or dying for lack of health care, and the situation is rapidly worsening. In my opinion, the best way to accomplish universal healthcare is to get the insurance companies completely out of the mix and have a single-payer plan where the sick and the healthy pool their money to pay for all of our eventual needs.

It’s an exciting time in Washington, because the legislature has commissioned research around a set of 5 proposals:

• The “Private Insurance Deregulation” Plan – allow insurance to offer plans with more limited coverage
• The “Massachusetts” Plan – people who can’t afford coverage can get help paying premiums
• The “Washington Health Partnership” Plan – everybody can choose between private and public coverage
• The “Single Payer” Plan – guaranteed coverage administered by the state, paid for by all citizens (this one makes the most sense to me, by far!)
• The “Guaranteed Health Benefits” Plan – catastrophic coverage guaranteed by the state

An actuarial analysis of these proposals is going to be presented in February 2009, under Washington SB 6333. I’ll be really curious to see how the numbers add up for each of these plan, and to see the real change that I hope will come as a result of the study.

 

Flynn is two, Flynn at the zoo

Flynn turned 2 on June 17th! Nicole and Owen threw him an awesome party.

Flynn and all the other kids thought that water balloons were the best invention ever, but that they ought to come in an essentially unlimited supply.

Then on Saturday, we got to babysit Flynn all day! After dinner and some playing around the house,

we went to the zoo.

We’ve been wanting to take him to the zoo for a long time, because he’s really into animals. We had a great time. Flynn’s at a really fun stage where he repeats basically any word you say. So a lot of the zoo time was pointing and saying animal names and listening to him repeat them.

It was really interesting to watch his brain work on the categories of animals. So many monkeys look so different from each other, and so many cats look so different from each other, but Flynn could tell that the gorilla was a monkey and that the lion was a cat.

Flynn was really interested in the toucans, with their remarkable beaks, and we stood watching them a while, Flynn saying “Be” (which means bird, due to Mum’s lovebird being named Be), “bird”, and “toucan”. About an hour later, we came to some flamingos. Flynn immediately said “Toucan!”, which made a lot of sense, because they’ve got some pretty big beaks too!

Flynn loves water and everything to do with it. Anytime there was a river or a lake or even a little puddle in a cage, we’d say “look at that animal”, and Flynn would say “AGUA!” and point to the water. Then he would start saying “fish! fish?”. Usually, there weren’t any fish in the water, although we did see a couple. Interestingly, when Flynn saw a duck, he said “Be! Bird! Fish!” :)

Flynn enjoyed the non-live-animal parts of the zoo at least as much as the animal parts, including milking a plastic cow, driving a stationary tractor, and climbing on the animal statues that were outside of most exhibits.

 

Automatically move your Netflix account/profile ratings and queues

Like many Netflix users, we love the Profiles features, make great use of it, and were very disappointed that it is being dumped come September 1, 2008.

In order to save all of our work rating movies and creating queues, we wrote Net::Netflix and netflix_mover, which are free and open source. This software allows you to retrieve your ratings and queue from a Netflix profile and, optionally, populate a different account with the information.

A lot of people are upset about this announcement from Netflix:

• Netflix blog
• Netflix community forum
• Ars technica
• Ars technica – user comments
  
• Twitter users
• Slashdot
• Hackingnetflix

We really hope they change their minds! Petitions: Save Netflix Profiles, Petition Online.