From Wit’s End

Rachel has been having mild contractions since about 6:30 this evening. It’s been really hard for her to get comfortable, because of her kidney infection. She’s been alternating positions all night so far, and not able to get much rest. Please pray that her infection would be healed in Jesus’ name, so that she can have the strength for Jack’s delivery. The nurses are saying that this isn’t quite real labor yet, because she hasn’t dilated past 3cm yet.

So we haven’t actually been moved into a Labor & Delivery room yet, but we are on the Maternity Ward. Feel free to leave a comment on any of these posts if you would like to send us an encouraging message.

The doctor said this morning that he wanted Rachel to be without a fever for 24 hours before he lets her out of the hospital. She got another dose of antibiotics by IV early this morning, so it’s going to be at least another 24 hours. Please continue to pray for Rachel and little Jack who is still waiting to be born.

1:30am this morning – Rachel can’t sleep because she’s in pain. She takes her temperature — 99 deg F – and then some Tylenol.

~3:00am this morning – Rachel can’t sleep because she’s in pain. She takes her temperature — 101 deg F — and we call the doctor. He said we should come into the hospital because it is likely an infection that can only be treated by intravenous antibiotics. We drive to Lexington Medical Center [with pre-packed bags, just in case] sail right through the Emergency Room waiting room and right up into the Maternity Ward, pretty dazed.

~6:45am – After the nurse and doctor talk with and examine Rachel, there is finally some good medicine flowing into her veins. The doctor says that she may only be here for about a day and will probably get to leave tomorrow morning. I call both sets of parents to let them know what is going on and a fellow tenor in the choir at Church to let them know that I won’t be in church this morning. I also call Rachel’s sister to put our dogs out and feed them.

8:30am – We still get to hear the church service, because our church recently starting streaming all its services over the internet. It’s almost as good as being there, what with the pastoral hymn-singing solos, and the one-sided pastoral small talk from our senior pastor leaving his microphone on at the end before he realizes what’s going on.

9:30am – Rachel finally gets some breakfast. The nurse tells us that the place has been busy: They’ve had four births in one hour! We can’t help but wonder if one of them is the Andersons’ baby (a couple in our Sunday School class), who has been due to be born for about a week.

11:00am – They move us to another room, and Rachel declares herself hungry again. Almost as if on cue, her lunch comes in at around 11:30am. While she eats, I find out that the Lexington Medical wi-fi network blocks Blogger. One more reason not to like blogger.

12:20pm – I decide to get home to take care of the dogs and get a few things that Rachel would like from home. I get out on the road and realize that I probably shouldn’t be out on the road, because its raining cows and horses. I keep my hands on the wheel, my eyes on the road, and a prayer on my lips [having experienced driving foolishly in the rain in Columbia], and take it real easy driving home.

1:20pm – I make it safely home, find my poor dog Mercy without the sense to come in out of the rain. I bring her in and towel her off, and just to let our other dog Kat know that everything is okay, I have a glass of Ovaltine and scratch her ears thoroughly.

3:00pm –Back at the hospital, Rachel and I watch Law & Order reruns, and Jennifer shows up to visit.

5:00pm –With Jennifer there, I feel able to duck out and attend vesper choir practice and participate in the evening service. The choir practiced “Love Never Fails” by J.A.C. Redford [5MB mp3 file] and, as usual, I choke up a little bit while hearing it. That song is very intertwined into our marriage. I sung the solo of it on the day that Rachel and I started “going steady”, The Chancel choir sung that as the anthem at our wedding, and LOVE NEVER FAILS is inscribed on the inside of our wedding rings. To top it all off, the vesper choir will be singing it next Sunday, which is Mother’s Day, which is Jack’s due date. It’s like God is conspiring to get me to break down and bawl my head off for joy. But besides the emotional reaction I’m pretty much doomed to have, He is also constantly, continually, and powerfully reminding me that His love is so powerful and infinite that it has to manifest itself in many, many ways, so as to make one’s head spin for the wonder of it all. In particular, tonight I thought of all that my wife means to me, and how she loves me so well its almost frightening how little I deserve any of it. I also thought of my son Jack soon to be born, and how heart-rending it is to see my beloved ill and prayed all the more fervently for her to be healed and for Jack to come out easily to meet us, strong and healthy.

6:00pm – …Anyway, I help sing the offertory with my fellow choir members, stay for an excellent sermon that kicks off a promising series on the book of Jonah, the “runaway prophet”, but I don’t stay for communion, because I want to get back to Rachel. I get there at…

7:20pm – …and find the hospital cafeteria already closed. So I walk across the street, and get some dinner at the Atlanta Bread Company, then I come back to share some of my chocolate chip muffin with her and watch an episode from Due South, season 3. I tell her, “I love you. Call me tomorrow… and don’t forget to call me tomorrow. I love you…” until she smiles, and then (what the hey?) I drive down the highway through more cows-and-horses rain at 45 miles an hour with my emergency blinkers on to finally come home at around…

9:45pm – …much to the relief of our poor dogs. But for me time moves ever and ever slower, and I will have no relief until my whole family is back home safe and sound. Good night, strange world. I will be back in your face in the morning, however early that may be.

With little Jack on the way, Rachel has decided that she would like to have an outlet here. So it is with great pleasure that I welcome my lovely and gracious to this space! With “J-day” quickly approaching, we will probably both have more to say From Wit’s End. Here are some things that she wrote about last year that never quite got published:

• June 28th, 2005: Here it goes…
• June 28th, 2005: Terraces.
• July 4th, 2005: Jungle.

Well, the range vent hole under the oven got put in the wrong place, right over a support beam of the house. Ironically, this is the same thing, in reverse, that we found to be the case with the old range vent that went up to the ceiling. And the dishwasher isn’t wired right, but we have a working sink! So like the thing on my other site that I worked on all week, the kitchen is essentially right, with some details still to be worked out. Merry Kitch-mas to us! Rachel says, and I quote, “YAAAYYYY!”

The counters got put in today!

								It’s the Rachel Wisdom Show!

Rachel is sitting on the chairs that will be at the island counter.

As i kissed Rachel this morning after breakfast, I sensed that she was somewhat distracted, as her eyes were moving around the room in a funny way. She said, “He’s moving! Here…” and she put my hand on her tummy. A few second go by, and my hand felt something (I should say someone) in there! He moved around a few more times every few seconds. Daniel Jackson Wisdom is alive and kicking!

Well, the light fixture over the island and the chalkboard were installed today. As you can see below, Rachel’s already starting to move back in. There probably won’t be any more kitchen pictures until after the new year. That’s when the tile and the countertops will come in. See you then.

The cabinets came today.

Installation begins tomorrow.

Dear Wife is has only just begun to be thrilled.

Well, today we packed up the kitchen stuff. Rachel felt sick today, so that I despaired of finishing the packing all by myself. I called around some friends at church, and a Deacon J.N. at our church was kind enough to come over with two of his kids, and even came with a whole lot of boxes to pack things into. They were quite helpful, and Rachel alternated helping out and resting. We wrapped it all up in just a couple hours.

Mrs. N. called later that day and invited us over for lunch the next day after church. We ended up staying for about four hours and hardly even noticed the time go by, we had such a good time talking. God is good to us.

It took about 6 days for the cucumbers and zinnias to germinate – I noticed on Friday that the majority of those seeds were up. The lima beans have followed closely behind. I noticed that there are two yellow squash plants up today. I am amazed at the success rate for these seeds, since all were a year old and it is so late and hot for vegetables. We’ll see if these plants thrive, but since all of them like hot weather, I think they’ll probably do well with enough water and mulch.

Ben has been on a campaign this weekend against the encroaching jungle in our backyard. The bamboo and wisteria and other vines come through the fence at an incredible pace from spring to late summer, and the only thing we can do is cut and beat it back for the next onslaught. It looks terrible. We spoke to Davy Jo (our neighbor) about how she deals with it. She showed us how she had built some cinder block steps over her fence so that she can climb over into the woods behind. From there, she cuts everything down within about six feet of her back fence. So Ben went to the house on the other street whose backyard adjoins ours, and asked the lady who lives there if he could cut out most of the brush back there. She was happy to give him her permission, and showed him a few trees and a bush that she wanted to keep.

My success with the seeds planted last week encouraged me to plant some sunflowers “Velvet Queen” on the shed’s wall that faces the vegetable garden.

[From Rachel's archives]

This past Saturday, Ben and I finished up the second phase of our (okay, my) grand ambitions for the backyard. The first was to move the old shed that was up against the house down into the yard to a more secure foundation, thereby opening up a perfect space for a patio in it’s old footprint. The second was to build four raised bed terraces on the sunny side of our backyard. We filled each bed with “Dixie Mix,”a mixture of mushroom compost, sand, limestone and other minerals that was created especially for raised beds by a local landscape company. Thanks to Beka and Nik for helping fill up the raised beds with us!

Here are the seeds I planted in the new vegetable garden Saturday evening:

1. Lima Beans – Dixie butterpea
2. Zinnias – Parks cutting mix
3. Cucumbers – Diva
4. Summer squash – Sunburst

These seeds were all packaged for 2004, so we will see if they germinate or not…

[From Rachel's archives]

After having a blog set up for my own personal use for almost a year, I am going to start writing in it. I had and do have lots of excuses – too busy, nothing interesting to say, and so on. But it occurred to me recently that I DO have a use for this thing – a garden journal. So when I have nothing interesting to say, I will use it to keep a record of what I have done in my yard and garden, including what works and what doesn’t.

This blog will have two purposes. One is to keep a record of what I have done and learned in my garden (for me), the other is to give friends and family members another way to know what’s going on with me (for you).

Rachel and I both cleaned out our desks today. But it’s much better than it sounds.

Rachel recently accepted an offer with Netbank (which used to be RBMG) to help them write reports to the SEC and other press releases. This is a welcome change for her, because she won’t have to deal with 55-hour work weeks during tax season, or traveling out of town for days at a time. She gets a decent raise out of the deal, too. Netbank’s building in town is an abandoned Wal-Mart renovated to be a cubicle farm. Rachel says she’s just tall enough to see over the cubicle walls to see the grid as far as the eye can see.

I am accepting an offer to go over to the new Diesel Systems North America Division of Siemens VDO Automotive Corporation (SVAC). This is is basically a spin-off company made up of a significant portion of the R&D group of Siemens Diesel System Technology, a joint venture of SVAC and International Truck and Engine Corporation (ITEC). I moving from what has grown to be a fairly large factory employing about 500 people, to a smaller R&D facility employing a few dozen. This will be a return to the old days for me, as when I was a drafter at SDST when it was still in its temporary facility and only a few dozen people worked there.

There’s all sorts of funny converging circumstances with this. Before the change, Rachel had a monthly paycheck and I had a biweekly paycheck, and now it has switched. In my old plant, I could wear jeans every once in a while, and Rachel couldn’t, and now it has switched. Our respective commutes will both be about five minutes shorter.

On balance, it’s all good. We have each been worrying and praying about these things for a little less than two years now, and God has been better to us than we deserve.

And I’m glad it’s over.

1. Rachel was out of town for business training from Sunday night through Wednesday.
2. The tiresome and fake showboating in Boston this week.
3. This is the last week before my infusion, and i’ve been feeling kind of yucky.
4. gapless budget + end of the month = harrowing Thursday

But…

1. I only had to be at work for half a day today,
2. I received that aforemention infusion of grace this afternoon,
3. i managed to hit all three of the Office Depot locations in town today,
4. We both got paid today,
5. and It’s Friday!

So life is good.

Last night and tonight Rachel’s sister Jennifer, her housemate Susan and her housemate’s dog Jessie are staying over due to hardwood floor refinishing going on at her housemate’s house.  I am currently the only male in the house out of seven living beings (one man, three women and three dogs).  Some notes on the experience:

As we were getting ready for bed in our room last night, Rachel listened to all the activity going on outside and commented that it was like living in a girl’s dorm.  This gave me a small but not unpleasant artificial feeling that I was getting away with something…

When we woke up this morning Rachel told me that she had an unpleasant dream last night that she was only one of my many concubines.  The irreverent part of my mind recalled our hospitality situation of these two days, and i laughed and told her, “Don’t worry, you’ll always be my favorite concubine!”  She only partially appreciated that…

Everybody had a bad day today.  Rachel had her annual performance review at work today, harrowing under any circumstances; Susan’s loaner car broke down downtown (her actual car having broken down in the middle of a cross-country July4th vacation), my day at work was a little empty and boring, and Jennifer, being empathetic, was having a bad day because everyone else was having a bad day.

For my wife’s sake primarily, I was on my best behavior.  I made dinner, did the dishes, delivered the tissue box, and tried to help everyone feel at home.  At one moment, when everyone was at the diningroom table commiserating, I walked in with the glass snack-cube, saying: “It is my decree as head of the house that everyone who had a bad day today must eat at least one chocolate-covered nut.”  This was met with general approval and kudos for Rachel from our guests for training me so well.

We picked up the two side tables that Rachel remarkably found and matched from two different places in the multi-story furniture store that they visited last Saturday. After we moved them into place as shown in this picture, I told her, “Well, when you married me, you didn’t just get one night stand!”

Sorry for the low resolution, but that’s all the church picture company would part with in digital format. The prices were kind of steep, so we only ordered prints of the one with the blue background and the one with just me, since I’m usually the one behind the camera.

	Heh… oops!

My intrepid and lovely wife Rachel has been working 10 hours on weekdays and 5 to 8 hours on Saturdays for the past three months during this tax season, and we have been in survival and maintenance mode. But today is tax day, and Rachel is allowed to be a human being again. Lord willing, we won’t have to deal with such a harrowing schedule again for the foreseeable future. Let the gardening, travelling, and hospitality resume!