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| okay fineSo I got an email from Xanga saying that they're going to start purging inactive accounts. I'm not inactive, I'm just... waiting. For the right moment to blog, yeah. Anyway, I don't have a premium account, so at the least this should keep my content here as my content.
Happy father's day to me, too! My family rocks. | | |
| Alanna Kate Alanna Kate was born at 4:06 p.m. today. She showed up in the world at 9 lbs and 7 ozs (and felt like more). She and mommy are both sound asleep, and hopefully will stay that way a little while longer. Me, I'll sleep in the morning. I'm just gonna watch them both a while... :) A couple more hours anyway, and then she'll be hungry again and there's not a lot I can do about that other than wake Arlene.
Kieran and his little sister, around six hours after she was born (and around six hours ago now)...
More to come!
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| This'll probably be the last entry I make before the baby's born, if my (in)frequency of posting holds true to form. I'll definitely come post pictures and stuff like that after she's born, but for now I'll just say that we're good and ready for her to make her grand entrance whenever she's so inclined, so long as that's really soon.
Her name's Alanna Kate, by the way. I'll post more on how we arrived at that later... For now I'm just excited to meet her, and see if she seems like an Alanna or an Ally or a Lana or a Katie or a Kate, or something else completely random.
Okay I'm really tired and tomorrow morning's not getting any further away. In the meantime, I'm sure Arlene will have posted a lot more than I have here recently. More later!
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| RandomnessOkay, so I was winding down and reading CNN and saw this little article talking about Billy Joel selling his 40,000 square foot home on Oyster Bay for $37.5 million.
Flash back to 1987. I was in the Soviet Union, part of a jazz and ballet troupe that was on a vacation/performing tour. We'd just gotten into Leningrad (okay, Saint Petersburg, but it was Leningrad then and it had been Leningrad as long as I'd been alive), fresh off a few days in Copenhagen where we'd had at least one performance a day as long as we were there. We were staying in the Grand Hotel Europe on Nevsky Prospekt, it was late, and I was really, really tired.
This was all going on at the same time that Billy Joel was in the Soviet Union doing those two concerts he did in June, 1987. I was shuffling off to get some desperately needed sleep, and while I was on the elevator headed up from the lobby to my room, I was vaguely aware of these two Americans behind me who were talking about Billy Joel staying in the hotel, too. The elevator stopped at their floor, and they and someone else moved past me to get out of the elevator. After the door had closed and the elevator was moving again, my good old slow-as-molasses brain figured out that the third person was Billy Joel, albeit a really, really tired, unshaven, needed sleep as much as I did version of Billy Joel who looked about like I probably did right then. I guess the two Americans had been roadies having a little fun with the kid on the elevator.
It turned out that Ted Turner was staying in the hotel, too. He was over there for filming of the "Portrait of the Soviet Union" show that was on WTBS back in 1988. I recognized him, though.
I had a really cool moment later on in that trip, too. On another night where I was just completely dead-on-my-feet tired, I was shambling down the hallway to my room to pass out. Each floor had this woman who would get you things like towels or ice or pillows or whatever if you needed them. The one on our floor was this absolutely quintessential older Russian matron. (Note to self: don't google image search for Russian woman, because it won't come up with what you're trying to convey here.) She was heavy-set, plainly dressed, really jovial, and I wouldn't even begin to guess where in between 40 and 70 years old she was. Anyway, I'd had a hard time communicating with her earlier on, but when I was coming down the hall she said "good night" to me in English, in this thick Russian accent. And I said "спокойной ночи" (sounds pretty much like "spokoinoi nochi") in what barely passed as saying good night in Russian for Idiot Tourists. But anyway, as an American kid in the Soviet Union, and someone who had lived in Oak Ridge (where they do a lot of work on nuclear bombs) during the Cold War, it was a pretty socially significant moment :)
It's weird. Our daughter, and Kieran too for that matter, won't ever really have much of an idea what this was all about...
Okay this has been your random 1987 flashback. We now return you to your regularly scheduled blog.
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| Noah, how long can you tread water?Kieran's soccer match this morning, which I was going to ref, was postponed due to rain. A couple hours before the match they still hadn't updated the website or the phone hotline, though the rain had already started, so I went on out to the grounds to see if anyone was actually showing up for the earlier matches. It looked like no one had noticed it was raining.
By 10 a.m. they had actually called off all but one of the matches, which had gotten underway just as the rain graduated from drizzle to deluge. There were still hundreds of people there, though, and kids running all over the place having a blast. The grounds held up pretty well, too. There are three regulation-sized fields side-to-side where we play, and each pitch has a good crown to it so that the water gets off beyond the touch line before it starts pooling up -- and pool up it did. After an hour or so there was a standing pool in between each of the fields, and another even bigger and deeper one off the end lines. Kids were just diving headlong into them after balls, and big mature me was out running around too. Of course I was keeping preoccupied doing things like taking down nets and pulling up corner flags, but it boils down to I'm a big overgrown kid getting a chance to go play in the rain.
Anyway, I'm home and dried off now - I was soaked to the bone. It was just really nice seeing all the dedicated folks who came out and stayed out until it was obvious there was absolutely no chance it was going to let up raining. I even thought I'd get to watch a bit of a premiership match after I got home, and in fact Fox Soccer Channel have the Sheffield United at Arsenal match televised, so I could watch that... if the storm hadn't knocked out the satellite signal. So oh well! Off to go shopping with Arlene in all likelihood... have a great day 
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