The Bauer Confidential

My family is pretty big into sports.  My dad is a wrestling coach, my brothers have played just about every sport that is played in middle america.  Growing up, at least one TV in that house seemed to be perpetually tuned to ESPN.  Even my grandparents are big into football, my 84 year old grandmother loves the Huskers (is there any other team? Go Cornhuskers, woot!).  I’m not as interested in sports, most of the time.  I loved playing volleyball in high school, and was a pretty good thrower in track and field.  I really enjoyed playing co-ed softball in grad school and like to go out and play a friendly game of just about anything.  Watching sports on TV is a different story, as a general rule, I just don’t enjoy it.  I’ll happily go to any live sporting even and have a great time, but somehow it looses something in the broadcasting.

There is, however, one huge exception for me:  the Olympics.  I love the Olympics.  Have since I was a kid; I still remember watching the ‘84 LA games when I was six and falling in love with gymnastics, turning porch railings into balance beams and nearly cracking my head open.  I’ll watch pretty much any Olympic event, summer or winter games.  Since the start of this year’s games on Friday, the Olympics have pretty much taken over my life.  OK, that’s an exaggeration, but my evenings anyway.

The timed sports are the easiest to watch.  It doesn’t get much better than watching the American’s kick the speedo-clad butts of the French team in the 4×100meter freestyle after the anchor of the French team had professed that they would “crush” the American’s (though it would have been better if I hadn’t forgotten that live on the NBC screen means live East Coast time, so you should not look at CNN if you want any surprises).

The judged events are a different story.  I’m sure a lot of it is training and knowledge of the sport, but I’m often left scratching my head as to why one routine scores so much higher than another.  The most difficult system to grasp is the new gymnastics way of scoring.  I hate it.  It used to be a 10 was the best you could do in anything.  Now they give a difficulty score and an execution score, these scores are combined and any deductions subtracted to give the final score.  I appreciate rewarding athletes for the more difficult routines, but there is no longer the transparency of knowing which judge gave what score.  The process is even more hidden from the viewers.  The judges can review tapes of a given performance and then go and compare them to any other routine from that competition.  And they can go back and devalue or increase a score at anytime.  This just strikes me as wrong.  And it takes forever for them to give the scores.  Supposedly this is system will ensure less bias in the judging, but I don’t see it.

So I’ll just go on holding my breath as the men and women launch themselves into the air and grasp the high bar or uneven bars at the very last instant.  I’ll try not to care too much about the scores.  It was great to see the American men’s gymnastics team, composed of Olympics newbies after the loss of the Hamm brothers, take home the bronze when they weren’t even expected to be in the running.  It’s not always about the gold.

It’s been a while since we’ve expanded our cultural horizons.  Sure we see movies and read books, but we haven’t been to a play or a museum in a stretch.  We decided it was time to remedy this situation.  There are so many opportunities in our area to see great art and we really haven’t made enough of an effort to seek out such things since we moved to the bay area.  We remedied that a bit last weekend with a trip in to SF.

The bay area seems to sleep later than we’re accustomed to, but this is good for us; it means fewer crowds in the mornings.  We got up at a reasonable hour last Sunday and caught BART into the city and then a bus to Golden Gate Park (and the bus was quite crowded for 10:00 on a Sunday morning, I thought).  We came particularly to see a limited engagement exhibit at the De Young Museum of the artist Dale Chihuly.  I’d heard of people waiting hours to see this installment, but because we got there so early we went in immediately.

A master of color and light, Chihuly’s exhibitions are different than most artwork featured at museums.  The works are often large in scope and scale, comprised of many individual pieces of glass-work.  He came to fame for his innovative work with blown glass, but having lost the sight of one eye due to an accident, he can no longer “make” the individual pieces, but is the director of a group of artists who follow his vision.  Some of the works are visually stunning, sometimes even jarring, while one piece (glass bowls made to look like ancient indian woven baskets) was surprisingly subtle.  I can’t help but like Chihuly, I love vibrant colors, I love the radiance in some of the pieces.  His “Persian” pieces, comprised of many individual off center bowls created with a mille-fiore technique are meant to capture every color in the rainbow.  Individual bowls may have a palette very similar to a Monet “Water-lilies” type of piece, while others use more primary colors.  I prefer the bowls individually to the way they are presented in a large grouping, as they are individually graceful with hues that mix well, but taken as a whole, the piece can feel a bit disjointed, though the forms are constant. Photo courtesy KellyGrimm.com.

I’ve been told that Chihuly isn’t much liked by the artists in his native Seattle.  His work has been met with great commercial success, which often breeds dislike, and a lot of his works are annoyingly similar.  He’s obviously found something that works and is profiting from it.  I’ve seen Chihuly before, in 2002 at the Botanical Garden of Chicago.  I have to admit I preferred it to the De Young exhibit.  Set among plants and other natural elements, the organic and earthy aspects of many of Chihuly’s pieces are brought out, and anything beautiful is made even more so by gorgeous surroundings.  I also ran into a piece at Cold Spring Harbour Labs that was supposedly inspired by green fluorescent and yellow fluorescent proteins in neurons, but it looks a lot like all of his chandelier type pieces, just in pale yellow and green.

I really enjoyed the rest of the De Young museum.  The collection is eclectic to say the least, with modern art, contemporary art, revolutionary war American pieces, art from ancient cultures of south and central America, as well as New Guinea.  I particularly enjoyed the small collection of contemporary art which featured a handful of remarkable pieces.

Once we’d exhausted our eyes and minds at the De Young, we went for a more zen experience at the Japanese Tea Garden.  There we had the most overpriced pot of tea in history ($9 for rather nondescript Jasmine tea with almond cookies and rice snacks, I don’t care if they are served by Japanese girls in Kimonos, it’s still a rip-off after the $4 admission fee).  The garden is enjoyable, a short stroll through a rather non-traditional seeming environment with a few Japanese pieces (some of which are in bad need of repair).  After an even more crowded bus ride to downtown SF, we vainly searched for a decent place to eat, eventually dining in the admittedly upscale food court of the Westfield shopping mall.  By then we were pretty exhausted from all the walking and culture and we called it a day.

Today we tried to continue our cultural education by attending the Berkeley Art Museum.  I admit I’m grateful that admission was free since we work for the university.  Mostly I found this museum disappointing.  It features a lot of modern art, which I really want to like, but just can’t seem to wrap my head around.  I find it mostly pretentious and rarely enlightening or beautiful.  There was a video/performance art piece that I felt represented all that is wrong with modern art, though I’m sure a great deal of people would disagree, and that’s their prerogative.  Art is a highly individualistic by its nature.

There are still a lot of sights to see in the area, and I hope, as we find the time, we will continue to explore them.  Next time we’ll take the camera.

As you can see by our nifty little baby widget in the sidebar, today marks the 120th day of our pregnancy.  This is the halfway point (assuming the baby comes exactly on time, which is highly unlikely).  I have mixed feelings about this.  Part of me is thinking “Woohoo, we’re halfway there, yippee, so exciting, woohoo!”  But the other part of me says “Only halfway done.  Argh!  I’ve been prenant forever already.  I have to do this for another five freaking months.  This is a bunch of crap!”  And the logical part of me knows that the half that lies ahead is going to be much harder than the half that has past.

I know I shouldn’t complain, I’ve been really lucky so far.  My baby bump is just starting to become evident if I’m wearing the right clothes.  I was getting a bit anxious about this, as it seems everyone else was bigger than me by this point.  I went to prenatal yoga last week and the two women who weren’t as far along as me had much more pronounced bellies.  They were also much thinner than me to start with, which probably explains a lot.  I prefer to think it’s just that I’ve got really strong ab muscles, not that my belly fat is hiding the baby   My weight gain (or lack there of) has been good so far, I’ve gained less than five pounds which, considering I was already carrying a little extra insurance in that department, is good.  I started feeling the baby move last weekend; Matthew was even able to feel it with his hand on my tummy.  Now it seems like the baby is moving a lot, especially after I eat.  It doesn’t hurt, just feels a little strange.

Next week we will go for another high detail ultrasound.  If the baby cooperates, we should be able to find out if it’s a boy or a girl.  After some consideration I decided I want know, whether it’s suprise now, or a surprise at the time of the birth doesn’t make a difference to us.  And this will allow us to start getting all our ducks in a row by finding baby stuff and picking out names.

In case you’re curious, here’s how my belly looks at this point.  Didn’t take any before pictures, but you get the idea.

I really like the 4th of July.  Growing up, this was one of my favorite holidays because my family would get up early and go to the local park for a huge family picnic.  The day went more like this.  My uncles would get up at the crack of dawn to find a picnic site and sit on it until someone showed up with supplies.  These sites were first come first serve and very popular, so I want you to get the full extent of what I mean when I say they got up early.  My Mom, my aunt, and grandma would show up with all of the necessary supplies.  My Dad, my brothers and I would get up early and work in the fields getting soybeans planted, but only until about noon, and then we would join the rest.  This was a big affair – Food, grilling, softball, Frisbee, hiking, what one would expect from a good ‘ol American holiday picnic.  We would participate in picnicking activities until right before sunset.  By then, we have everything packed up and would head to the local 4th of July fair, and find a piece of open ground to sit, wait for, and watch the fire works.  It may not sound like much, but I had so much fun at these.  As I got into high school, and with Grandma passing away, this tradition faded away.  I look back with very fond memories.  Also looking back, I don’t think I ever celebrated the birth of the nation.  I knew what the day was about, but I was more looking forward to celebrating with family and friends, and I didn’t really appreciate the reason so much.  So if you have family and friends nearby, I hope you are all getting together, grilling some meat, drinking some tasty beverages, and partaking in some socially accepted pyromania.  Most of all have a Happy 4th of July!!!!

As you all have noticed, I haven’t been posting much.  One of the main reasons is that my damn computer isn’t working most of the time.  More precisely, my computer screen isn’t working most the time.  When I flip open my powerbook, the bottom two thirds or more of my screen is blank.  If I bang it with my hand, the screen will flicker back to life…eventually.  Most of the time, I shake it or lightly “nudge” it, and the screen flickers a bunch of incoherent lines of light in which, if I stare, I can see my wallpaper, some icons, and if I lightly tap it some more, the lines flash all around the screen.  Sometimes the lines cover my screen completely, its a huge mess.  If I really need to use my computer, this sort of negotiation can go on for up to twenty minutes.  Maybe longer, I don’t know.  By twenty minutes, and most of the time much less, I get all pissy, slam my computer shut, and threaten to toss it out the window.  Like threatening the computer’s going to work, they’re soulless bastards who don’t even care about themselves.  Sometimes, in my state of temporary insanity, I can feel the computer taunting me, giving me cheese Dirty Harry lines like “go ahead, make my day.”  That’s when I know it’s time to switch to decaff, and possibly meditate or seek professional help.

This isn’t apple’s fault.  I blame Jansport!  About three years or so ago, April bought me a Jansport backpack with a special spot for carrying a computer.   This bag had one major fault.  On each shoulder strap, there are two strap adjusters in which the bottom one doesn’t hold on to the strap well and the simple pull of gravity causes the strap to gradually slip out of the adjuster and the backpack goes falling off your back.  One bright and sunny morning, I threw my backpack on my right shoulder and as soon as I let go, the strap slipped though the adjuster causing my computer inside to hit the pavement.  At first, my computer seemed fine, but after a few months the symptom started to manifest.  First, I would open my computer and the bottom tenth of my screen will be black.  A few shakes of the screen, all back to normal.  It started creeping up my screen.  First it was the bottom tenth.  Then the bottom fourth.  Slowly marching up my screen where now almost my whole screen is affected.  I could try to get it fixed, but I’ve had this computer for about three or more years now, so maybe it’s time I upgrade (with the help of an economic stimulus check, just doing my bit to help the economy).

I don’t like this.  At what point in my life did a computer get attached to me so strong, that it became a sort of symbiont?  I got through high school fine without one, and even most of college.  It wasn’t until graduate school that my computer became my left arm.  I feel like I could probably get a hell of a lot more done at work if I didn’t have it.  In my down time when I should be reading science or thinking about why my cloning never works, I see it sitting there, like the old friends we used to be, telepathically reaching out telling me “come on, check your email again.  It’s been ten minutes, who knows who could have emailed you; your wife, long lost friends, parents, the Pope.”  I check my email and nothing.  I get a just a tiny bit down every time I check and I have no messages.  It only last a second, but this happens a fair bit because I check my email more often during the day than I’m willing to admit to.    I need to give myself some rules like; I can only check my email four times (or less) a day, or I can only mindlessly surf the web for thirty minutes (or less).  The only problem, who’s going to enforce them?

The air-mattress is deflated. The extra pillows are all stacked in the guest room. The beer bottles have been sorted for recycling. The house is back to normal. As much as a I relish the quiet, I’m sad to see my family go. The visit reminded me how far we are from home, and of all the things I miss there. I guess it’s not really things I miss anyway, but people, friends and family. I’m not in any rush to leave the Bay Area, there are a lot of things I like here too. Someday though, I’d like to be closer to home.

And for you curious voyeurs out there, if you’d like to see the picture to which Matthew alluded in his last post, here it is.

If you look really closely (and squint and stand on one leg), behind that big stack of logs, there are two people. No telephoto lens, sorry!

It’s been a bit since I gave a proper update. The reason has been two fold. One, my computer is acting up, and half of the time, I can only see the top third of my screen. Do you know what time it is when the screen blacks out? Time for a new Mac!?

Second, April and I had a very busy weekend last week with the Orsborn clan in town. As a reminder, April’s Dad, Stepmom, two brothers, and the girlfriend of one of the brothers came in town for a visit. In an effort to be good host and hostess, April and I tried to take them and see some of the sites. I have to give many acknowledgments to April who worked really hard to get the house in order and planned most of the activities. And I tried really hard at being a good husband, i.e. I kept doing as I was told.

Here is the itinerary that we had:
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OK, not an invasion really. My family is coming to visit us, all the way from Nebraska. They fly in tomorrow, and arrive in SF around midnight. I think with the two hour time difference, by the time we get their luggage and get them to our place, they’ll be silly with sleep deprivation. And one other tiny little thing, there are five of them, all coming to stay in our two bedroom apartment. Granted, our apartment is quite spacious, especially for Berkeley, but there’s going to be a lot of couch crashing and air mattress occupation. It’s a good thing public transit is so convenient in our area, because there’s no way to shove all seven of us into our Mazda3. I’m really excited to show them the area. Most of them have never been to California, so I think the visit will be educational, at the very least.

I’ve been using this visit as a good excuse to finally get off my hiney and do some spring cleaning. The house is looking pretty good, if I do say so myself, and I do. I’m trying to decide if hardwood floors are more or less work than carpet. Now what to cook for seven people? I’m planning lasagna, pot roast, and maybe chili, but after than I’m lost. There’s always take-out!

If you don’t hear much from us for the next week, we’re busy playing tourist in the bay area! Watch out beaches, here we come!

I’ve been thinking about my career these days, and I started wondering, what was it that I wanted to be when I was little. Then it occurred to me, why is it that people like to ask little boys and girls what they want to be when they grow up? I inevitably do this to my niece and nephew even though it’s a absurd question. I’m 32 and I still don’t know what I really want to do for the rest of my life, and I’m pretty sure a ten year old (or even most 18 year olds) isn’t really going to know either. But people ask little kids anyway, and for the most part little boys always say the same thing. They either want to be a police officer, a firefighter, President or (the correct answer) they don’t know. I also find it funny that most kids want to grow up as fast as they can, and most adults will gladly do about anything to be kids again. I don’t want to be a kid again, but that’s a different story. Anyway, I remember my first answer to that “what do you want to be” question. I wanted to be a veterinarian. Growing up on a farm with approximately a thousand hogs, thirty chickens, ten cats, and a hand full of dogs, my father and our vet were well acquainted. I remember taking our sick dog “Lady” to her. A few days later, we would go back and Lady would be as good as new. A vet was, to the eyes of a child, a magician. Plus, and even to this day, I really like animals, and fixing them up when they’re broken was very appealing.

I am not a veterinarian, and I can clearly remember the incident that really affected me. I don’t remember how old I was, but what happened was that a really sick cat hid in my dad’s workshop. She was not only sick, but mean as hell. No one could get close to her. She would hiss, scratch at you, run away, and all the time foamed excessively at the mouth. A mean as hell foaming at the mouth sick cat … rabies anyone?

Someone trained in dealing with rabid animals showed up and caught the cat. To determine the cat’s problem (in the 1980’s anyway), the veterinarian had to kill the cat and dissect out its brain and perform tests. All I understood was that a veterinarian took our cat and killed it. This incident must have taken place before I discovered why my dad had so many hogs, because the murder of this cat devastated me, and my view of veterinarians at that time dramatically changed. Of course, now I understand completely, but as they say, this is now and that was then.

That’s not what scared this young kid from being a vet. It was what I was told would happen if the cat tested positive for rabies. As a precautionary measure, I would need to get immunization shots. I remember being told that rabies immunization required around 20 shots into the stomach area. HOLY SHIT!! 20 shots! I remember asking my mother if veterinarians have to get shots like that as well, in which she said something similar to “you can’t be a veterinarian without getting shots.” I hate shots, and I hated shots a lot more then. So, lets examine the logic of an child.

To be a Veterinarian = getting shots
Shots = Pain
Thus logically
To be a Veterinarian = Pain.

Even though there maybe some truth to that last statement, the logic was a bit off. Not that it mattered because I had that logic in my head, so I didn’t want to be a Veterinarian anymore. I don’t think I was ever told what was actually wrong with the cat, but I never got those shots.

Of course, as I grew up and become more educated, the negative connotations tied to veterinarians was lost completely. This occasion in my life probably did have some long term effects though because becoming a vet never appealed to me ever again. I imagine that being a vet would be one of the most rewarding occupations. Of course, a Vet’s job is also probably one of messiest (digestive tract problems for example) and having any domesticated patient die under my care would probably wreak havoc on my emotions. I guess you eventually get kind of numb to it, but do I want to get numb to it? Yep, even though the logic of a child was completely off, I think NOT becoming a Vet was probably the right choice for me.

To this point, I would say I’ve been lucky, maybe even extremely lucky with this pregnancy. Yes, I had about three solid weeks of continuous nausea, but I never had to pray to the porcelain gods. I’ve been really fatigued, but extra sleep has taken care of that pretty well, even if my activity level has dropped a bit and the housekeeping suffered. My sweet tooth has diminished severely, which isn’t really a bad thing, though I’ve probably more than made up for it by cravings for salty/fatty things like chips.

But last night, I think I paid for that luck, at least a little. I have a pretty robust digestive system. Of course, I come down the stomach flu from time to time and have my share of feeling queasy even when not pregnant. In the past I have been lucky enough to avoid heartburn. Well all that changed last night when I tried to go to sleep. It’s my own fault, I just didn’t know it at the time. I put a pork shoulder roast in the crock-pot with barbecue sauce before leaving the house for work, anticipating a tasty and easy meal of pulled bbq pork for dinner. And that’s what we had. I also had a nice salad with balsamic vinegar and a tall glass of lemonade. And I paid for it; I’m actually still paying for it. It turns out that progesterone secreted by the baby’s placenta affects the smooth muscle of the digestive tract, allowing the valve that usually keeps digestive fluids out of the esophagus to leak, causing a nasty burning sensation. I took Tums, I drank milk, and eventually gave up and went to sleep. I didn’t realize that my dinner was, as Matthew so eloquently put it, “a recipe for an acid time bomb.” Apparently vinegar (which I had on my salad and was in the bbq sauce) and citrus (like lemonade) are really bad inducers of heart burn. Perhaps any one of these things alone would have lead to a bit of discomfort, but together, they were pretty excruciating. Upon Matthew’s advice, I propped myself up in bed this morning and dozed until the lead brick in my stomach felt more like a regular brick. And that’s about how it still feels now. I’ve learned my lesson! I’ll be more careful of acidic foods in my diet from now on!