I meant to say more in my last post but I got distracted because I couldn’t upload the picture (I have an admin page I use to upload pictures to go along with blog posts, so that I can do it on a machine with no FTP client, or where port 20 is blocked, but it wasn’t working yesterday).  By the time I walked Stephanie through doing it on the phone, I didn’t feel like writing much post to go along with it.

Some additional thoughts/comments:

• They can’t determine the baby’s gender yet; it will be about two months before we know that.

• The baby is about 2 cm long right now.  That’s less than an inch!

• We could see the heart beating on the screen, at around 170 beats per minute.  That sounds like the baby’s about to have a heart attack, but they said that is a normal rate at this stage.

• It may have been hard to tell from the picture, but the baby’s head is on the bottom-left, and is almost the same size as the rest of the baby.

• Although we didn’t want to tell everyone at the time, this was the main reason Stephanie quit her job working as a pharmaceutical tester.  Not exactly the safest environment to be pregnant in.

• “Morning sickness” is a misnomer, it can occur at any time of the day; Stephanie gets it mostly at night, and it seems like every time we mention this to someone they say that they had worse morning sickness at night too.

I guess that’s all the additional information I have to share.  So, umm... peace out y’all.

What you are reading right now is the official announcement that the shrimp-shaped person pictured below is looking forward to meeting all of you, sometime around March 19th.

That is all.

Update: Additional information can be found on my follow-up post.

Well, a week ago today Stephanie and I closed on a house, which officially makes us homeowners.  I advise anyone reading this to not listen to anyone who tells you that it takes 30-45 minutes to close on a house:  counting driving time to the attorney’s office (on the opposite side of downtown Charlotte), I was gone for nearly three hours.  But anyway, we aren’t fully moved in yet; all the big stuff is going to be moved this Saturday.  The new home is in Concord, but still pretty close to where I work.  We’re also really close to the speedway, which means I’ll have to take a different route home from work during the two race weeks, but I already had to plan my life around avoiding races in my apartment as well so that’s nothing new.

We don’t have many pictures, and if we did they would be of sterile white rooms with no furniture.  Maybe after we’ve done some painting and decorating I’ll put some pictures up for you guys to browse, but for now I’ll put up one that the home inspector took:

My site may disappear briefly sometime in the next week.  Or it may not.  I thought it would be gone already apparently not.  I’m switching registrars to GoDaddy, since it costs less than half what my hosting provider charges.  But rather than saving that extra eight dollars, I spent seven of them to buy vacantnebula.com (that’s without the hyphen), which redirects here.  The main point of this is to make it easier for me to tell people my URL, and subsequently to help people who forgot about that hyphen.  The phrases “vacant hyphen nebula dot com” and “vacant nebula dot com, with a hyphen between vacant and nebula” seem to confuse people.

I have made a few small changes to the site lately.  First off, I got rid of the “Home” page; the blog is now the default page when you come to my site.  Secondly, I replaced the “Contact” page with an “About” page, where I plan to put more information that could be useful to a new visitor to my site (not that I expect many of those).

But the big thing, that I just finished, is the triumphant return of the music page.  For over a year the page has said “I really do plan on putting something here someday.”  Well that day is today!  I found a Flash mp3 player, so that you won’t have to download the tracks to play them, since you probably don’t feel like doing that anyway.  I still need to do some work on the page—hey, did you guys know some scientists in a bunker in New Mexico invented something called CSS that can totally help your webpages look nicer??  I need to hit up some of that on my music page!  Also, none of the text there has been spell-checked, I’d prefer that you let me know privately if you find any mistakes or anything (as opposed to, let’s say, putting all my typos in the comments).  Lastly, look for the lost lyrics to “Why Me?”  Anthropologists have been searching for them for years, but they never looked in my brain.  I just did.

why me why always me

I’m on MySpace now.  I only created a profile because it told me I had to be logged in to read someone’s blog (but I don’t think that’s true anymore).  I was originally going to try to make it look nice, but then I lost interest and made it really tacky instead (much easier to do).  I even put up an extremely low-quality image to give it a finishing touch, which has been faithfully reproduced to your right (highest JPEG compression level Photoshop would allow!).

So... let me know if you want to be my friend... or whatever it is you do on MySpace.  So far I’m only getting friend requests from porn sites, so it will be a nice change.  Maybe I’m missing something, but I don’t see how MySpace got so popular in the first place.  It’s like GeoCities was nine years ago, except now there are more ads, more idiots, and more people trying to sell you Cialis and consolidate your debts.  And some of the things you can choose to show in your profile make no sense, even if you think of it as a dating site—I mean, income??  Who would possibly list their income on their web page?  And it keeps telling me I need to list my school.  Maybe this is unusual, but I don’t go to a school anymore.

In conclusion, you’re welcome to visit my MySpace space.  Just don’t expect me to be there.

I know, I know, it has been way too long since I last posted anything on the site.  I’m sorry to all those who are just waiting to hear what is happening in my life lately.  Well, here’s the scoop...

Kip and I are officially an uncle and aunt respectfully!!  My older sister, Emily, gave birth to a bright-eyed baby girl on August 2nd!! Riley Paige was welcomed into the world by a very loving and happy family to meet her.  Though I haven’t seen her yet in person, and I can’t wait to do so at Thanksgiving, there are pictures of her online for those of you curious to see what she looks like.  She definitely looks like Emily as far as her hair goes (Emily was born with a full head of dark black hair, who’d have thought that she would be a total blonde).  Riley does have Dustin’s very distinct forehead though.  I think she is just so precious and I love her to pieces already!!!

I’m now officially the Nursery Coordinator at church.  I find it ironic that the only married lady without children in the church should be in charge of the ministry that takes care of all the babies in the church.  My duties (go ahead, laugh, I know you want to) include: organizing the schedule of who works in the nursery when, making sure there are enough snacks and diapers and whatnot in supply, and creating a working list of nursery policies to be followed while working in the nursery.  That last one I actually took on myself simply because to my knowledge there wasn’t one, and we weren’t exactly following the recommended policies to the full extent to which they covered.  The first job was the schedule, which I know you are thinking sounds really easy.  Well, it isn’t as easy as one might think.  You have to take into account who teaches Sunday school, who is scheduled to play the piano and organ during the church services, who teaches AWANA on Wednesdays, who has a preferred time slot that they like to work, who doesn’t want to serve a whole lot, and who loves to serve and wishes they were always in there.  I have to also make sure that people are getting into the services regularly to hear some good preaching.  It was kind of complicated to begin with, but I got the hang of it.  So I think as far as that goes I’m doing ok.  I do know that I have the full support of my husband, the pastor is behind the changes I’ve made (though he doesn’t want me to offend people with creating too many changes suddenly as people are often resistant to change), and the police officer and his family that attend our church.

Another big development at church is this years Christmas play.  I have been asked to direct the acting portion of the performance.  I am very excited about this, but also extremely nervous, as I have never actually directed before.  Those of you who know me already know that I am extremely dramatic, so it isn’t that much of a stretch to see me teaching other people how to be dramatic.  But still, it is a little different when you are acting in the performance as well.  That’s right, ladies and gentlemen.  I’m also acting in the play.  The lady I had cast as Mom, decided that she had too much to do this fall, which I respect as she is a school teacher with tests and papers to grade.  So the task fell to me to portray Mom in this year’s performance of “A Peanut Butter Christmas”.  We will be performing on December 17th, in the evening service, if you are interested in coming and watching.

I guess that gets everybody caught up on my life.  If you didn’t want to know all the cool things happening, well, then why did you read my post??  If you did want to know all the cool things happening, now you know, and knowing is half the battle!! :)

Just wanted to make an update to my previous post:  I now have a layouts page, where you can pick the layout you want to view the site in.  I mean it’s no CSS Zen Garden, but I think I have a nice little infrastructure set up and it should be really easy for me to experiment with new layouts without throwing away the old ones.

If anyone out there is really bored, feel free to make a new layout for the site.  Not that I actually expect anyone to actually do that... but if you do and it looks decent, I’ll put it up...

Just under one year ago I brought you an all-new design for this site.  If you preferred the old layout, or if you never saw it, now’s your chance to go back.  Just slap “?1point0” onto the end of just about any URL on my site.  There is now a better way to do this.

A few notes:

• 1point0 layout option is not persistent.  So clicking on any link in a 1point0 page will return to default layout.  This is something I will probably fix some day.
  Fixed

• Text-only layout takes precedence.  So if you are viewing a page in text-only layout, you will need to click that “view full graphics” link down at the bottom of the page before going into 1point0 view.
  Fixed

• As you might expect, there are a few rendering problems in Internet Explorer.  Nothing that makes the site unusable, but if you’re still using Internet Explorer you should really consider a better alternative anyway.

• I actually improved upon the original design, using only one table for layout purposes.  I’m sorry but the CSS trickery required to do equal-height columns that look right on all browsers is less intuitive and consistent than a table with two cells.  Sue me.

• It all validates, except that I need to replace strike tags with del tags.  I’ll save that for another day.
  Done

Note:  I have improved this in many ways.  See my next post for details.

I’m takin ya back to the old school cause I’m an old fool who’s so cool

I found this to be rather interesting: Lost will be airing without reruns next season.  Another article (can’t find a link, sorry) said they will air six episodes in a row, starting in October, finishing up in November with some kind of mini cliffhanger.  Then they’ll start back in early February and continue to the end of the season without reruns.  I think that’s pretty cool.  I think 24 did something like this too... but I don’t watch 24 so I’m not really sure.