TeamSax: July 2009

Craft time!

I got the bug to make crafts this afternoon and decided that I would make a few gifts for two favorite coworkers. I found a great idea on Vanilla Joy to use scrapbooking paper & mod podge to recover a boring clipboard. At Michael's I picked out 4 pieces of paper- two a heavier card stock- and came home ready to create! I realized quickly that the lighter pieces of paper bubble quite a bit and so one of them isn't nearly as nice as the other. Oh well, live and learn!

Here are some pictures of them. Let me know if you're interested in having one made for you!

What a nice hobby :)

My sweet husband has, for the last year, been interested in photography and in the printing of his own black and white film. Sadly, a job and an impending baby have put a bit of a damper on this budding hobby.

This past weekend my Dad came to visit and we spent the day in the city- Dad off to a play/ Erik and I to the mall and some memorials. This was a great excuse for Erik to use his camera and take some shots of things that inspired him. We walked first to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial and Erik took a lot of photos. After wards, we headed next door to the National Building Museum (beautiful inside, if you've never been). We looked at a few exhibits of photography there and then walked the mall. At the end of the day Erik had taken most of the roll and we were ready to return home.

Last night, Erik surprised me by asking me to go to a blog website about photography. It is his own :) He has wanted a place to express his thoughts about photography only...so a new blog has been born! I hope that you will encourage him by checking out what he has to say and the things he is creating.

www.darkroom-photos.blogspot.com

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In other news, we just returned from meeting with a potential physician for our baby. She was fantastic and just what we are looking for. Our search is over and we are both planning to use her as our family doctor as well. What a blessing!

31 weeks and counting!

Well, in as little as 6 weeks we could have a new family member on our hands. I can't quite believe that I am 31 weeks already. It seems like just yesterday that Erik and I found out that we were going to be parents. That was a shock in and of itself, but now to realize that this growing punching thing inside of my stomach is coming OUT!? That is just insane. I'm not sure anyone is ever ready for their first child, but I have confidence that we are going to be great parents. Erik seems pretty excited and we have some great activities on our "to do" list for when he/she gets a bit older.

On Wednesday Erik and I are going to interview a doctor at a family practice who will be the primary pediatrician for our little Sax. What's nice is that if we like her then both Erik and I can also have her be our primary physician. We have been looking for a doctor with specific criteria including a more holistic background and the desire to prevent medical problems rather than just writing a prescription for them. If you are in the process of looking for a newborn pediatrician, here are some good questions that you may want to ask:

1- What is your schedule for newborn visits?
2- What vaccinations do you routinely do?
3- If we have objections to some of these or to the timeline, would this be an issue?
4- When do you think is the best time to wean?
5- How do you know if my baby is getting enough milk from breastfeeding?
6- What do you recommend if the baby is gaining slowly?
7- Who fills in for you while you are away from the office?

And obviously questions about insurance and their background as well. I think that the answers to these first 6 questions will be very telling about the type of practice you are getting involved in.

We'll let you know how our first interview goes. We have a list of quite a few other doctors, but this one seems like the best fit so far.

I wish we had some more interesting pictures to show you, but here are some of the nursery and the baby bbq that we had. Sorry to Jenny, these will be repeats for you!

Me and Lee at the BBQ

Charlie wet from playing at Fountain Head

The venue

Quilt made by Lee

Nursery in progress (and me!)

Babies Don't Keep

SONG FOR A FIFTH CHILD

by Ruth Hulbert Hamilton

Mother, oh Mother, come shake out your cloth,
Empty the dustpan, poison the moth,
Hang out the washing and butter the bread,
Sew on a button and make up a bed.

Where is the mother whose house is so shocking?
She’s up in the nursery, blissfully rocking.
Oh, I’ve grown shiftless as Little Boy Blue.
(Lullaby, rockaby, lullaby loo).
Dishes are waiting and bills are past due.
(Pat-a-cake, darling, and peek, peekaboo).

The shopping’s not done and there’s nothing for stew
And out in the yard there’s a hullabaloo
But I’m playing Kanga and this is my Roo.
Look! Aren’t his eyes the most wonderful hue? (Lullaby, rockaby, lullaby loo).

The cleaning and scrubbing will wait till tomorrow,
For children grow up, I’ve learned to my sorrow.
So quiet down, cobwebs. Dust go to sleep.
I’m rocking my baby and babies don’t keep.

Babies don’t keep.

Baby Update!

Erik and I had another midwife appointment this afternoon and all is looking good! We are measuring right on for the number of weeks we are and the baby started moving all over when we put the doppler monitor on him/her. For Sheila: the most current heartbeat was 146.

There is 10 +/- weeks left in our pregnancy and we have given ourselves a deadline of September 1st to get everything done. That means each weekend we have a LOT to do! This weekend we plan on painting the nursery and Erik wants to do more landscaping. My Dad is also coming to visit and will be seeing King Lear on Saturday downtown. It will just be a day visit, but it will be nice to show off the work we've done on the house since he was last here.

I'm working with Charlie on calming down when someone comes to the door and I am hoping that by the time the baby comes he will be much better. Treats really do seem to do the trick :) He's always hungry!

Gas mileage

Our friend Paul is traveling the country on his Honda Shadow, and is apparently getting a disappointing 30 or so miles to the gallon (usually he gets 50+). Real world factors cutting the milage of his v-twin 750 in half include: ethanol, wind, and speed. In the less populous states, people move along the highway much faster, which is bad for milage.

This got me thinking about my own gas mpg, as Claire and I own three very different cars. Our truck, a 3.0 litre V6 gets about 20 mpg. It's a big truck, but it's a stick shift and the vulcan v6 has a knock sensor so it runs well on regular. My echo has taken a dive over the last few years, from 37 or so down to 30-33. It may be time for a new air filter. The prius does much better; better than most people think.

If you own a Prius, you might feel a little let down by the average gas milage the readout calculates for you automatically. The problem with this is that it discourages you from calculating your own gas milage at the pump by dividing, which is a shame because the prius (like the echo) gets about 10 gallons for a full tank, making the calculation really easy. If you pump 10 gallons, you can just drop a digit off how far you went on the tank (if you pumped 5 gallons, double it first). The last time I did this with the prius we'd gone about 500 miles on about 10 gallons, so 50 mpg. The readout said 46mpg. I didn't get why at the time, but I logged this information away.

The other day I finally figured out why when we were tooling around, and I coasted to a stoplight to charge up the batteries. When I was in school, ( http://cs.gmu.edu/~eclab/projects/robots/flockbots/pmwiki.php?n=Main.AuthorList ) we built some robots senior year. One of the problems we had to learn was that if you try to calculate an instantaneous speed off of a digital encoder, it's either 0 or infinity. You have to count the readings of infinity over a time period. The Prius faces a similar problem calculating instantaneous gas milage, and they stretch out the calculation over a few seconds to combine fuel flow with velocity. When you take your foot off the gas, your instantaneous gas milage actually approaches infinity - you know, dividing by zero! Since the fine engineers at Toyota would like you to see a nice clean graph of your instantaneous gas milage, they artificially cut off the graph at 100 mpg.

My theory is that they can't actually capture the information that you're getting infinity mpg during a coast or when braking, and this pulls the average down from reality. The more coasting, the further off the reading. Toyota has probably thought about this a lot, and concluded that it wouldn't make sense to display the infinity symbol on the graph, and the computer couldn't calculate it anyways. I have a solution however, if they displayed the gas usage/hour "instantaneously" by looking at a few seconds at a time, they could avoid showing an asymptotic value, because the amount of fuel flowing even at a very slow speed will be finite. The fuel rate gauge would only go to a maximum value if you were trying to go, and were stuck somehow, which happens so rarely that you could view it as a non-issue.

Unfortunately, the Toyota engineers probably discarded this idea too, because people only care about mpg. Maybe it would have been better to leave out the reading, so people wouldn't feel slighted.