Back Up!

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This site is back up, running on namecheap.com servers, with my domains all registered through Namecheap as well. Getting used to how they run things compared to Godaddy. cPanel is new to me, as I did everything manually with GD, and now I have tools to do stuff with.

If you didn’t know, here are the other sites under my name:

I’m excited to start getting JediDaddy filled up with content. It’s more a photoblog of what goes on as I turn in to the parent of a little girl, and how I raise her to be as awesome as possible.

 

Goodbye Godaddy, You Grimey Ghouls

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If you haven’t seen, Godaddy supports SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act). This act essentially gives companies the right to be the censor of the internet. Not only that, but the manner in which companies could censor the internet is not a technically sound procedure. The act is being flown through congress without any review by technical experts, who largely agree that this legislation is utter horsecrap.

So screw you Godaddy. I’m removing all of danakin.com, worshipriot.com and northernbrethren.com from your grubby fingers. These websites will (likely) go down later today, and will be restored when the sites have been sucessfully transferred to HostGator Namecheap (nothing against HostGator, I just got better deals at Namecheap, and they also oppose SOPA), who opposes SOPA.

Echogenic Bowel – Synonym for Insomnia

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Last week we found out that our baby peanut is actually a baby GIRL! Take a look at the 21 week ultrasound:

Our joy in finding out the gender was cut short by a call shortly thereafter where we were told that our doctor was concerned about a few things she saw. The first was the spine; because the baby was laying funny they couldn’t see the last few vertebrae. The second thing was that they saw something in the bowels they didn’t like. Jill and I were referred to a prenatal imaging center in Nashville.

The appointment was for yesterday, so we made our way through the pouring rain and crappy drivers and got there a bit early to fill out paperwork. Yada yada, boring details…

Baby Lackey has a full spine (we knew that, but just had to get images of it), and is incredibly acrobatic, with her left foot up by her face (this could be imagery magic…). But what the doctors saw in the bowels the first time was confirmed; our girl has an echogenic bowel. This means that the intestines show up bright like bone in the ultrasound.

 Not a picture of our ultrasound, but you can see the intestines on the right are about the same brightness as the spine and the leg bone on the bottom of the shot.

That’s pretty much what we saw too. The ultrasonographer took a few measurements, and then started looking at the heart. Seeing all 4 chambers work in lock-step will never get old to me. That is my daughter’s heart!

The cause can be the baby ingesting amniotic fluid with blood in it, or it could be a blockage in the bowels, an infection,  or it could be caused by an issue like Down’s syndrome.

I have been reading up on this condition all night (and having a pint of Guinness or two while doing it to keep me calm…) . The list of things that are related to echogenic bowels worry me: Down’s Syndrome, Cystic Fibrosis, aneuploidy (chromosomal defect where there is an abnormal number of chromosomes, the cause of Down’s [trisomy 21]), intrauterine growth retardation (IUGR), and intrauterine death. Right now, I’m only worried about ALL OF THESE THINGS.

The problem is that echogenic bowels are like coughs. It could indicate a cold, or a flu, or cancer, or a speck of food caught in the throat, or it could just be nothing. Same thing here. The EB could clear up in a few weeks, or it could persist. Should it persist, it could be nothing, or it could be cause to run a number of screens, including an amniocentisis. We will have to go in for a number of appointments in the next few months, including a follow-up ultrasound on the 19th to measure growth and see if the EB has cleared on its own. If it hasn’t, Jill and I will have to decide if we need to meet with a genetics counselor, who can help us decide what screens we should run. Uncertainty wrapped in uncertainty.

The plus side is that we will be having ultrasounds every 2-4 weeks to measure the baby’s growth (to ensure that we aren’t seeing any IUGR) and that’s just more chances to see her beautiful face.

Megaproject Wisdom

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Some of my favorite quotes from work:

“That won’t start us from stopping up” – Operator, after being told that one of the chemical scales wasn’t calibrated

“We’ll work 24/7. And nights if we have to”

“We have to have a sand in the line”

“I’m sorry, I was dreaming” – dept manager after having a workflow explained to him in a meeting he called

“How long did it take for you to get in a half hour of singing?”
“About 30 minutes…”

“The heat of the meat is proportional to the motion of the ocean, and that’s what takes the paint off”

“If you did not receive this email, please reply to *retirement services email address*” – Email received after coworker elected to retire through our online employee services system

 

Can’t Sleep Mind-dump

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In roughly 16 hours we will be in Springfield, TN at the womens’ health center of the Northcrest Hospital, potentially finding out the gender of the baby. This is exciting. Enough that I cannot sleep. Well, that and nerves about work.

The quick rundown is that my company has deferred construction of future phases to an unknown start date due to market and economic conditions. As a result, job certainty is diminished for the future. It wouldn’t really concern me if we didn’t have a kid on the way. But we have a kid on the way. Oh, and Big Boss wants to talk to me tomorrow. So there’s that…Not sure what it’s about at all, but hoping for the best.

My next two weeks are appealing. Working a shortened day tomorrow so I can get home and get to the appointment. Then a regular week. The following week has us loading up the car and driving to Michigan for the holiday. Likely going to leave Tuesday to beat the traffic, and return Sunday. In between is a bunch of catch-up with MI folks, football, food, and a bunch of reading.

I finally finished “In Search of God and Guinness” which leaves me with a number of other books I can get through. My tendency is to jump from book to book midway, so the list keeps growing. “Lucifer’s Hammer” is top on the list, followed by “Black Hawk Down” (which somehow I have never read or seen). I also have some professional development books I will be reading and taking notes on, including a fairly chunky tome on industrial megaprojects. Delving in to the contracting strategies book is a task for a future date.

The one book that just recently made my list is Dostoevsky’s “The Brothers Karamazov.” Might be a Christmas vacation read…

The True Cost Of Commuting

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I’ve been thinking about how much it costs just to drive to and from work. Let’s make some assumptions, and then do some math.

First, let’s say you make $20/hour. And you live 20 miles from work, and it takes an average of 30 minutes to drive to and from work. And you have a decent car, it gets roughly 30 miles to the gallon. It cost you roughly $10,000 as a decent used car, and you plan to replace it every five years or so.

Let’s start with the depreciation. We’ll simplify the crap out of this. In order to pay for the car you need to save up $2,000 a year each of the five years.  So off the bat, commuting costs you $2,000 a year.

Now you are a lucky person who only has to work 5 days a week. Good for you. That comes out to 40 miles a day, and 200 miles a week. That is 6 and 2/3 gallons of gas a week. Here in Clarksville, gas is running about $3.50/gallon.  This works out to $23.33 a week in gas alone. But you know, you might go out to eat for lunch or something, so let’s round that to $25/week in gas. Multiply that out for the year and…drumroll… $1,300 a year!

Keeping up? That’s $3,300 a year already.

Oh yeah, cars operate with oil. And it gets dirty. We’ll assume you have a car that uses modern synthetic oil that you have to change every 5,000 miles or 6 months. You drive  10,400 miles a year, so you’ll need to change your dino-juice twice. There’s another hundred bucks.  Up to $3,400 for the year.

Are you getting paid for your time getting to and from work? I know I am not. 30 minutes in, 30 minutes back. An hour. At $20/hr, five days a week, that’s a hundred smackers a week. Fifty-two weeks of that…well that’s $5,200 a year in lost wages.

Let’s also assume, since you have a used car, you’ll need some maintenance on it every year. To be safe, $500 a year worth of maintenance. This includes a sinking fund for tires, and all the fluids and spark plugs and wiper blades and all that kind of good stuff cars require.

Did you see that? The cost to drive an economical car to and from work for a year is $9,100! And even if you don’t buy the “lost wages” part of it, it still hits your wallet for $3,900.

Just sayin… 

When did this happen?

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Jill is pregnant, as anybody who actually reads this should know by now. If not, I have an announcement: Jill is pregnant. 14 weeks pregnant in fact. That’s over 3 months, for those bad at math.

And suddenly, I understand why people say you won’t have any money until the kids move out…

First it’s our air conditioner that lets out (Jill was pregnant at this time, but we didn’t know it yet).  In order to get anything over a SEER13 replacement unit, it would have been $8,000+ because the furnace would also need to be replaced. So we got a SEER13 somehow. I’m thankful for the circumstance that allowed us to even replace it in the first place, but that was the first brick piling up on my back.

Then, Jill’s appetite got funny. Because she’s pregnant. That’s what happens. Our food budget, which I have thought of as a reasonable number, was no longer working. Jill couldn’t eat just anything at one point (and really, that still applies), and so we’d have to go out and get whatever she could keep down. That’s mildly unbudgetable. The second brick.

Our utilities bills got increased due to annual rate adjustments. Yet another brick.

Jill’s car has tires that I don’t trust to last much longer. I could go with something we could afford now, but I want to get her at least middle of the line tires that I feel comfortable with. There’s a big brick.

A check that we sent out about a month ago was just cashed today. I thought it got cashed three weeks ago. That was a shock to see where our checking was today. Had to make an emergency transfer so one of our bills would clear next Monday (living on a monthly paycheck can get a little bit close sometimes…but we still are in our budget somehow…). B B B BRICK

Our aggressive “PAY OFF THE CAR SUPER FAST” plan…too aggressive. I feel so utterly stupid for making us so housebroke by going that route. It feels like we have no money to do hardly anything. Why did I ever think to attack that debt THAT hard? Now Jill sometimes worries that we don’t have money to fall back on. It feels like that, “feels” being the operative word.  That feeling isn’t the biggest brick on my back. Jill worrying is.

And DIAPERS! SO MANY DIAPERS! Did you know that in the first year of a child’s life you will go through roughly 3000 diapers? I DID NOT! That’s a lot of diapers. How are we going to pay for all those diapers? Diaper Genie refills are expensive at that! Plus clothes! And new intrinsically safe outlets so our infant who will not even be able to crawl would not be at risk of a freak seismic event throwing his or her little fingers in to the outlets and electrocuting our newborn. And we need a new window in that room so bugs don’t find their way through the little crack that’s forming at the top. Oh man my head hurts. A brick for my back and a beer for my head please.

Oh yeah. Battlefield 3, the follow-up to one of my favorite FPS games of all time (not that there are many choices, but…) comes out right after I get paid. Our entertainment budget covers that, and it would be my half of the entertainment budget. Jill’s half would likely go to HIMYM and Big Bang Theory on DVDs. But, should we even have an entertainment budget? Are we responsible enough to? My head is swimming. Hit it with a brick.

Now I’m facing dilemmas in my own head. Do we need to let go of our WorldVision sponsorships? How could I? I have so much and these are human lives! I’m helping real people! Is it ok to skip out on a tithe? I could really use that 10% staying in my savings… but I gotta trust God sees what is up (and down) with our accounts. He has delivered before when we gave unselfishly, and though it will be hard to write that check in a few weeks in any manner that appears “cheerful” I still will. Why not change utilities and telcom services? If only we weren’t so addicted to hockey and gadgets… (how’s that for a mature unselfish view? Grumble grumble)

This is all temporary I’m sure. It’s been an extraordinarily different three months than I had expected. Money woes aren’t killing us (despite the tone of this entire post…) but they are relatively new to us as a couple. I have been blessed with an amazing job with an amazing employer with a salary I cannot argue with (wellllll….I did just take on THREE new responsibilities with values that tally FAR BEYOND what I ever thought I’d handle). Jill’s had some trouble finding a job here, and the pregnancy does not help her capacity to work a full time shift.

Been following Dave Ramsey’s Baby Steps. But at this point I feel we need to reverse two of the steps. Instead of full on Debt Snowball, we need to be putting money in to savings. Our debt is manageable, as it is just the Honda at this point. Once we rebuild our emergency fund and our Baby/Maternity Clothes/Pregnancy Cravings/Holy Crap We Are Gonna Need A Ton Of Diapers fund to a comfortable point for the kind of expenses we’ve seen the last three months, we will attack the car payment full on.

Payday is next Tuesday. I’ll be much more optimistic and magnanimous when it rolls around. But for now, I really am worried more than I have been about money since we got married.

Thank you for indulging me in this mildly cathartic writing session. I feel much better.

Project Idea Submissions

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It seems like every month at work I see something posted on our intranet homepage saying that the Project Idea Submission forms are available. I have not yet submitted anything, because they are really looking for product and plant/chemical engineering ideas, and I am a construction manager with an emphasis on CSA (Civil/Structural/Architectural – read: concrete and steel)

But I need some help. See, I have roughly 200 shotgun shells and twenty .40cal casings. I have some ideas for turning them in to decorations, but I’d like to hear some of your ideas.

Sometimes, You Hit A Lull in Your Rut

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Right now I’m in a holding pattern. No writing for a while, right? Well…sometimes I just need something good to write about. I have a lot good to write about now. But it’s all still digesting. Still converting from slivers of an idea to something meaningful. Dividing and multiplying. Turning in to something substantial. The timing isn’t right. I don’t know why. It just isn’t. Like another Star Wars remaster. Yeah, not right. Gotta let dust settle. Gotta clear out the emotion and see things with an unbiased eye.  Stand on the peak of the quaquaversal (yeah…spellcheck doesn’t like that word, but it also doesn’t like the word “spellcheck”) and remain balanced.

Sometimes you just need to go to the gun range and fire off a bunch of rounds to clear your head. Even better when you get shooting lessons from a Tennessean who sounds like he might just be out on the range every day.

Every.

Dang.

Day.