From Wit’s End

Every morning, Jack has peanut butter toast (“toast an’ bubber”) for breakfast. I spread peanut butter on the toast, then cut it in half and fold it over into a sandwich. Then I put it in front of him and ask him what shapes he wants it cut into. Until today, he has asked for squares, triangles, or rectangles, and usually there’s also a “moon” shape from the rounded top of the bread. Today, though, he asked for something different, and I did my best:

When he invited me to play Legos with him up at the farm this weekend, this is what he wanted me to build:

Here’s what this picture sounds like

Jack likes to sit down at the computer and “bype” different letters out. Today he freaked us out a little bit by typing “TAC” and saying “cat!” Whoa.

While Rachel and I were out watching a movie this evening, Jack apparently made his first pun — at the age of two and a quarter, no less:

My folks were watching him this evening, and they were playing in the backyard with Jack’s favorite ball. Everytime it was kicked or thrown, Jack would squeal delightedly. My mom told him that he was screaming, and that of course that was okay to do outside. After some more ball-playing, Jack would squeal and then yell, “Ah! SCREAM!” everytime the ball was kicked.

Then Grandpa kicked the ball and Jack squealed and yelled, “Ah! Scream!” and then he rolled his eyes and grinned real wide like Groucho Marx and said, “…AND CAKE!”

WordPress’s iPhone application was just released in the App store, and this is my first post using it. There is picture uploading capability here somewhere, so I’m going to peruse the photos I’ve taken with my new toy so far, and include it with this post. Here goes…

[UPDATE: Okay, Rachel, this isn't really a photo taken with the camera from the iPhone, but it is a screenshot taken from it, using the screen shot function that I heard about (Hold down the home button and quickly press the lock button). When looking through the pictures residing on the device for this post, this one seemed like the most appropriate. So there. Nyah. ]

…because I can!

I have been in possession of my new iPhone for about 24 hours, and it is COOL!

I was actually in the original iPhone line on Friday morning, but after two and a half hours, it was taking too long, so I left. I had showed up five minutes before opening time, and I was far back enough in line that the manager of the store told those around me that we were all “borderline” as to whether we would actually get one of the first seventy available that first day. It was an interesting experience, but I am glad that I left early. We’re currently trying to potty train Jack, and Rachel runs out of energy pretty quickly in this first trimester. I came back to the same store later in the afternoon and signed up for one by mean of what they called “direct fulfillment”, which basically means that they will special order it and contact you when it is in the store.

So I went to pick it up last night, and though they still had a little trouble with their computer system, it eventually all went through. On my way out of the store, I heard, “Hey, How’s it going?” I looked up and saw the guy that had been immediately ahead of me in the original line. I said “Hey! Did you get one?” He said, “Yeah, I was actually the last one to get one.”

We heard the results of the genetic test on our second child from the doctor today. He is a boy, and he passed away because his genes had the flaw known as Trisomy 18. If you are familiar with Down’s Syndrome, that is Trisomy 21. Trisomy 18 (a.k.a. Edwards Syndrome) is an unsustainable genetic anomaly: most of the babies die in the womb, and the rest of them survive a short time after they’re born, but not usually very long. My mom told me this afternoon that she once attended a child with this anomaly when she was a nurse back in the day, and it involved a lot of machines and some miserable decisions made by the parents in the end.

So God was most merciful in taking little Noël when he did. I’m still looking forward to meeting him.

We found out at a regular checkup appointment this afternoon that our second child no longer has a heartbeat. We are numb, frustrated, and sad. The doctor told us that we probably won’t ever know how or why. Apparently, the child passed away a day or two after Christmas, and never made it into the new year.

Last week, we got into a new routine with Jack at bedtime. He gets his milk while we change him into his pajamas, and then he goes into his crib and his dad reads aloud until he falls asleep. The Lord saw to it that we happened to read the following passage from George MacDonald’s Adela Cathcart. Jack’s dad didn’t read this without weeping, but it expresses the solid Hope that we have in the midst of our mourning.

“…the broad-browed [preacher] began with something like this:”

“It is not the high summer alone that is God’s. The winter also is His. And into His winter He came to visit us. And all man’s winters are His — the winter of our poverty, the winter of our sorrow, the winter of our unhappiness — even ‘the winter of our discontent.’”

“Winter,” he went on, “does not belong to death, although the outside of it looks like death. Beneath the snow, the grass is growing. Below the frost, the roots are warm and alive. Winter is only a spring too weak and feeble for us to see that it is living. The cold does for all things what the gardener has sometimes to do for valuable trees: he must half kill them before they will bear any fruit. Winter is in truth the small beginnings of the spring.”

“The winter is the childhood of the year. Into this childhood of the year came the child Jesus; and into this childhood of the year must we all descend. It is as if God spoke to each of us according to our need: My son, my daughter, you are growing old and cunning; you must grow a child again, with my son, this blessed birth-time. You are growing old and selfish; you must become a child. You are growing old and careful; you must become a child. You are growing old and distrustful; you must become a child. You are growing old and petty, and weak, and foolish; you must become a child-my child, like the baby there, that strong sunrise of faith and hope and love, lying in his mother’s arms in the stable.

But one may say to me: ‘You are talking in a dream. The Son of God is a child no longer. He is the King of Heaven.’ True, my friends. But He who is the Unchangeable, could never become anything that He was not always, for that would be to change. He is as much a child now as ever he was. When he became a child, it was only to show us by itself, that we might understand it better, what he was always in his deepest nature. And when he was a child, he was not less the King of Heaven; for it is in virtue of his childhood, of his sonship, that he is Lord of Heaven and of Earth-’for of such’-namely, of children-’is the kingdom of heaven.’ And, therefore, when we think of the baby now, it is still of the Son of man, of the King of men, that we think. And all the feelings that the thought of that babe can wake in us, are as true now as they were on that first Christmas day, when Mary covered from the cold his little naked feet, ere long to be washed with the tears of repentant women, and nailed by the hands of thoughtless men, who knew not what they did, to the cross of fainting, and desolation, and death.”

“So, my friends, let us be children this Christmas. Of course, when I say to anyone, ‘You must be like a child,’ I mean a good child. A naughty child is not a child as long as his naughtiness lasts. He is not what God meant when He said, ‘I will make a child Think of the best child you know-the one who has filled you with most admiration. It is his child-likeness that has so delighted you. It is because he is so true to the child-nature that you admire him. Jesus is like that child. You must be like that child. But you cannot help knowing some faults in him-some things that are like ill-grown men and women. Jesus is not like him, there. Think of the best child you can imagine; nay, think of a better than you can imagine-of the one that God thinks of when he invents a child in the depth of his fatherhood: such child-like men and women must you one day become; and what day better to begin, than this blessed Christmas Morn? Let such a child be born in your hearts this day. Take the child Jesus to your bosoms, into your very souls, and let him grow there till he is one with your every thought, and purpose, and hope. As a good child born in a family will make the family good; so Jesus, born into the world, will make the world good at last. And this perfect child, born in your hearts, will make your hearts good; and that is God’s best gift to you.

“Then be happy this Christmas Day; for to you a child is born. Childless women, this infant is yours-wives or maidens. Fathers and mothers, he is your first-born, and he will save his brethren. Eat and drink, and be merry and kind, for the love of God is the source of all joy and all good things, and this love is present in the child Jesus.

I know now today, that sadness can be like a wound: the only way to keep it clean while it is healing is with tears. Without tears, a sadness can become infected and unhealthy. So we will be nursing this wound for the near future. And I suppose every Christmas from now on will have a certain amount of sadness for us, as this one will leave its scar. But it will be countered by the hope that we have that Jesus will take good care of our second child until we meet again in the next world, where it will always be Christmas and never winter.

I just found the Speech Recognition settings on the Mac. I’ve been using it for about the last hour. It’s totally rocks!

• Delirious singing heard from the nursery in the middle of the night.
• With a 102F fever at 3:00 this morning, he still mimicked the beep from the electronic thermometer as it was taking his temperature. He’s the son of a geek, all right.
• Getting to take a one-hour nap this afternoon on the couch with him sleeping on my chest. When he woke up, he just laid there. We imitated each other’s breathing patterns and chuckled at each other for a while.

His fever broke this afternoon, and he seems to be more or less back to normal this evening.

More pictures are here.

For more pictures, go here.

…or as he calls them, “FSSSHHHH!”. For more pictures, go here.

For more pictures, go here.

Courtesy of iWeb ’08, we have a new photo album section here at Wit’s End. I’ll still post photos one at a time here on the front page, but to see more pictures, you can click on the link below the picture, if there happens to be one.

When it comes to computer programming and web programming issues, here is my approach:

1. Determine objective.
2. “Throw something against the wall to see if it sticks.”
3. If that fails, google a solution to the objective, and attempt to implement solution.
4. If that doesn’t work, look for typos and stupid, illogical mistakes, of which there are usually a few.
5. If things still aren’t working, fiddle around in the guts of it and get really frustrated. At this stage, if I don’t luck out and get things right…
6. Walk away in disgust. Wait between three and twelve months. Move on to other things.
7. After the prescribed time period, be working on something else entirely [usually at stage two or three above] and think off-handedly: “Gee, it’s been a while since I worked on that. I wonder if I can get it to work now?”
8. Walk right into the old situation, click a few buttons, correct a few lines of code, and fix that old problem in just a few minutes.
9. Return to stage three or four on new problem…

I was in the middle of Stage #6 on the problem of importing my old blogger entries to this WordPress environment. I had set up the personal blog here last May, and had manually transferred a few posts in the next month or so. This was extremely tedious. I tried doing it automatically, and it just didn’t work. Today, I decided to see if I could try it again. Since last time there had been a couple WordPress upgrades and Google had bought out nd upgraded Blogger. Just a little bit of typing and a few mouse clicks later, and Badda-Bing! Now I just have to categorize the old posts and clear out the 53 old unpublished draft posts that have been added to the wordpress database.

The fact that puts me in a good mood for the rest of the day is further proof and confirmation (as if we needed any more) that I am a geek.

UPDATE 08/17/07: I’m done sorting through the published posts in the archives. And I just remembered why there are so many drafts from the old blogger posts: I decided at some point to remove impersonal, culturally-oriented posts from the public side of what was my personal blog at the time. So I’ll have to sort through those next and publish the ones that are in a passably good form on the “impersonal” side, whenever I happen to get around to it.

Around 9:30 this morning, my world got turned around. And around. And around. And around and around and around. The dizziness just wouldn’t stop. Thinking the worst, like maybe I was bleeding out on the inside or something, I was taken to the emergency room. After a certain amount of time of sitting as still as possible and trying not to think about the perception that the world was anything but as still as possible, the doctor came in, took a look at me and told me that I had vertigo. They gave me some medicine and sent me home. The medicine makes me really sleepy, so that’s a lot of fun. It’s probably all due to this wicked sinus infection that I’ve been carrying around for months before I realized what it was and finally started getting it treated. So this too shall pass, hopefully.

I was looking out of my kitchen window as I was washing my hands his afternoon and a little bird caught my eye. He had flown up to the garden fence and perched on the top wire. I hadn’t seen his flight soon enough to know, but he was tiny, so I thought he was a hummingbird. Yep, he was, and he was enjoying my red zinnias, the last thing left in my vegetable garden that hasn’t been decimated by the heat and bugs. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a hummingbird in my yard. Welcome little guy!

Well, shoot. I got a nasty-gram from my webspace provider that I was using too many CGI resources and overloading the MYSQL server (whatever that means, it basically means I was breaking their little piece of the internet.) They shut down my website for a few hours yesterday afternoon and evening until I took out the offending code from my front page. After some experimentation, I figured out that it was mostly the code that rotates the banner pictures at the top of the page. (Reducing the number of posts on each page from 50 to 25 helps also.) So the picture at the top will be static and unchanging until I can figure out a more resource-efficient way of having them change. If the slowness of it depends on the sheer number of banners available for the rotation, then I should be able to fix it fairly quickly. Otherwise, it may take a while. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.

UPDATE 07/27/07: Well, it turns out that the scoreboard on the left sidebar of the impersonal site was what was causing most of the trouble. So until I can fix it, I’ve resorted to the sidebar widgets to make a more “standard” sidebar. The end of it will be a page that loads much faster, with a link to the scoreboard instead of the scoreboard itself.

Things I am doing simultaneously with the Mac right now:

• Ripping the complete works of Archangelo Corelli from ten CD’s into MP3 files.
• Downloading the last three days worth of podcasts from Glenn Beck’s radio show.
• Uploading a giant ZIP file of home movies to my webspace for my Dad to download and enjoy.
• Transferring all the latest pictures and movies from my camera’s memory card through my printer.

All this is happening at once, and the computer isn’t even blinking. In fact, its singing the Corelli tracks back to me the whole time. This computer ROCKS!

I just added some new banners to the 18 that were already in the rotation. So reload away! It will be most “refresh”ing, I’m sure! Collect them all! Trade them with your friends!

Also, I wasn’t kidding when I said we would be posting more pictures. Some of them are posted retroactively. See here and here

Longtime readers will know that I used to post a lot of photos, because all that HTML that I had to use to do so was novel. As the novelty wore off, the pictures gradually petered out. Indeed, it almost took the rest of our personal blog with it. But no more! Because I had a second reason to work to make posting photos easier, I found a really great photo blogging plugin for WordPress called “Photo Blogger”. So watch out world, here come some more pictures!

This ice cream does not call for heavy cream, so it is inexpensive enough to invite all your friends. Yum!

Homemade Ice Cream

In a large saucepan combine:

• 2/3 cup sugar
• 1/4 cup cornstarch
• 1 envelope gelatin

Stir in:

• 4 egg yolks
• 4 cups milk

Bring mixture to a boil over medium/high heat, stirring constantly. Remove from heat. Add:

• 2 T. vanilla

Cover pudding with plastic wrap, cool and chill.

In a 1 gallon ice cream freezer combine:

• vanilla pudding
• 1 can sweetened condensed milk
• 2 qts. milk (or enough to fill can to fill line)

Turn ice cream freezer crank until ice cream is stiff.

For about six months, two friends and I have been helping each other fill their freezers with meals. Our system has been working so well I can’t help but want to share it. Meals in the freezer can make evenings so much easier, can save a little money and make menu planning really easy! Here is what we do:

Each of the three of us pick two freezer friendly recipes, make 12 servings of each and package the dinners in two-serving packets. This makes six dinners worth of each of six recipes. When we get together to swap, each of us gets two dinners worth of each recipe, for a total of twelve dinners in the freezer.

We are going on hiatus with the dinner swaps for a little while. Our friend Ellie is pregnant, and so her appetite is really unpredictable! I thought now would be a good time to think about what dinners we really liked and to start looking for some new recipes. Here are some of the hits:

• Turkey Burgers – wonderful with a little mozzarella melted on the top and served in a bun with fresh spinach leaves
• Shepherds Pie – with filling and mashed potato topping in separate freezer bags, you can assemble it in any dish you want
• Calzones – Italian sausage, pizza sauce, mozzarella and anything else you like
• Cabbage Rolls – humble but impressive
• Italian Stuffed Chicken Breasts – flattened chicken breasts rolled up with mozzarella, sun-dried tomatoes and prosciutto in the center; served with creamy tomato sauce
• Pirogi casserole – made like lasagna, tastes like a pirogi
• Soups and Stews – lentil and bean soups, chicken and beef stews
• Marinated meats for the grill or broiler – no need to wait! by the time the meat is thawed, it’s marinated

Based on some good advice from a book on the subject, we found that it is best to put our dinners in freezer bags rather than containers for space efficiency, flash freezing them first when necessary. I’ve learned to love my little individual ceramic pie dishes to spoon thawed casserole filling into, top with bread crumbs and bake only as much casserole as I need.

I want to encourage you to try this. Three cooks seems to be ideal (we found that more make things confusing). This can work for any size family as long as the three families are the same size so that all dinner packets will contain the same number of servings.