So, here I am in the dermatologist's office, getting my annual checkup, and waiting for the doctor to show up. As it turns out, if you can read this, I can post to LJ from my new phone.

This round of surrogacy did not work. We'll start on the third round and give the last two embryos a try.

I seem to be having some feelings about the process, and the probability of failure. Perhaps I will have more to write when I've figured out what those feelings are.

Perhaps someday I'll feel like I have the time again to post about things as they occur.

Two weeks back, the -thump- -WAAAAH- early in the morning was the sound of my girls pulling their dresser down on top of themselves. I ran into their room to see their heads sticking out from underneath it. Fortunately, all they suffered was a few bruises. The furniture in their room is now all strongly attached to the walls.

My company spent the previous week in a grand meeting pulling in everyone working on my project from all over the planet. We decided to add a new piece of software to the task--which I'll end up building out of some research thing I've been working on. I'm a bit concerned, though... my plate is already full with lots of requests from companies who want to evaluate our stuff. Some of that work is being tossed to the guys in Japan, thankfully. But it may not be enough. It's good for the company to be busy, but I could use some more help.

As part of that meeting's results, I've been talking most workdays with a coworker in Japan for an hour. It's good to communicate, but it's cutting into the rest of my life.

I bought a new cell phone this weekend, and spent much of the weekend configuring and tweaking it. Unlike everyone else on the planet, I passed on the iPhone and bought an HTC Fuze. It's got all the hardware gimmicks of the more recent iPhone--except for the compass--plus a flash for the camera, a fold out keyboard (I like typing things, darn it), twice the screen resolution, and probably some other little bits I'm forgetting. Sadly, it's a Windows Mobile device... which means I'm now hacking around Microsoft bugs in my pocket. But the browser is spiffy; when I've got a fast enough connection, I can even play Mafia Wars on it.

My chest hurts from lifting the girls too much this weekend.

Smorgaschord sang the Star Spangled Banner at the Redwood City parade yesterday. It was brief, but fun.

Tomorrow we find out officially if this round with the surrogate worked. She took an early pregnancy test on Friday evening, which suggests that it didn't. But we'll see.

Next Monday, we're going to Hawaii (Big Island) for a week and a half with the Zadiks and Eric. I don't know if it'll be fun... but at least it'll be a change of pace. I have some trepidations about caring for the girls in a strange place. Hopefully no one will get sick, this year.

Just now, I picked up Michelle from the exercise bicycle and put her on the ground. As she was walking away, she said, "I love you."

--beam--

Normally, I just ignore the girl's chatter and get up at 7 to get them changed and all. This morning, though, at 6:17 I heard, "No diaper! No diaper!"

-sigh-

Sometimes, stuff happens.

Stuff didn't happen in my coding, today. I spent most of the day trying--and failing--to figure out why those lovely nVIDIA CUDA libraries don't like a call I'm making, ten minutes into my program's execution. CUDA can do some pretty cool stuff, but when a function fails with an "Invalid Configuration" error and no more information than that, it's hard to figure out what's going on. If I still worked there, I'd go pester someone with some source, and it'd be fixed in a few moments. But I don't, so I putter around, trying to guess what the problem might be.

Stuff ended at my therapist today. The nasty daily anxiety's been gone for two months or so, now. It's time to move on, without the training wheels. I've learned and relearned a few important things about living in this world and in this brain. I'll try to remember that, no, I'm not perfect, and trying to be perfect will only get myself hurt. Part of that imperfection is being attached to a physical body, which has minor aches and occasional pains and random irregularities. These random irregularities are not crises... and the only crises I've had to deal with (kidney stones) take a few hours to develop, follow a predictable pattern, and can be dealt with reasonably easily. With panic attacks, truly, the greatest thing there is to fear is fear itself. If you don't fear the fear, they can't get a foothold. Also, I need to treat myself to fun things (massages!) more often. My therapist has told me so, and I should really believe Chris when she says it's okay and she'll watch the girls.

I did a lot of thinking about medical stuff yesterday, too. I learned that a friend of mine (who'd rather remain anonymous on the searchable interwebs, for now) has breast cancer. ... Don't worry too much about who it is; if you know me, and you know her, you've already heard about it. ... This really sucks. Perhaps it's something about turning 40, but suddenly there are people in my circle of friends with all kinds of life altering and life threatening diseases. Fortunately, it was caught fairly small, and there's magic potions from Genentech to go with the chemo, so aside from having to go through a ridiculous amount of stress and months of likely uncomfortable treatments, she's going to be okay. ... Listening to her story, at least, demonstrated quite clearly that my own medical anxiety stuff is back under control. I didn't have to run to the bathroom or anything upon hearing her story, and could be appropriately supportive and offering of help. ... Then I came home, talked with Chris about it, and picked up the prayer book and prayed on her behalf. It's not something I do very often, but in difficult times, it seems like the right thing to do. The story is, of course, her story, but in this journal, what I can write about is my reaction. I do wish her well, and an easy time for the difficult path ahead.

This weekend, Smorgaschord will begin recording its next album. As I've said to many people, I hope that the songs come out well enough that we can not just burn CDs, but can try to put them up on iTunes or something. It may be a bit like vanity publishing (Hi, Kit!) but it's actually not that expensive to burn CDs, and the whole process is still fun. Actually, since we're recording on the Sabbath, I'll end up donating my share of the proceeds (if any) to charity.

It's late. I should go sleep. Tomorrow, as it often turns out to be, is another day.

Last night, at 5am, I woke up out of a short dream. I was holding a little, dark-haired boy, about one year old. I was moving him through some jumpy play dance moves. Occasionally I poked at the laptop, which was playing Schoolhouse Rock songs--Conjunction Junction, in particular. I felt a little guilty to be showing him videos (it's against house rules), but he was my son, and I was content and happy to be there with him.

Second embryo transfer, early next week.

"I'm gonna get you there, if you're very careful."

I have a cold. Sore throat, stuffed nose, etc. Plus the occasional sharp pain in my gut.

By 8:30am, I'd gotten to clean up extra, independent child messes involving pee, poop, and barf. At least the snot messes were ordinary.

The day will probably get better from here...

Michelle, on the diaper table: "I hug you". Two pronouns in one sentence, properly used.

Rebecca, playing with a toy dog and doghouse: "Put doggie in a house." That's a prepositional phrase.

Language acquisition is cool to watch.

I haven't been posting as much, lately. Perhaps the occasional notes in Facebook have taken some of the impetus out of longer notes from me. Perhaps I've just been preoccupied with living my life, and the lack of spare time that involves. But I'm still here, and there's much more to my life than the occasional pseudo-political post.

My anxiety stuff has been mostly silent for over a month now. That is a *huge* relief. When the anxiety stuff is going on, I spend nearly every waking moment with some corner of my brain worrying about Bad Stuff happening to me. With the help of my therapist and some resources she's provided, I've been able to push that mostly behind me again. There's only the occasional odd twitches, and that's survivable.

The girls turned 2 a week ago. They are both fully mobile, with walking (not toddling) and a second gear which they refer to as running. Michelle will often speak in sentences of four or five words. Rebecca's putting the occasional sequence of words together, too. I'm sure they both understand a lot more than they say. Rebecca is a bit cowed by Michelle, which isn't great, but as the pediatrician says, one of them has to be in charge, and they'll all be fine. At their 2-year checkup (which I went to... apparently it's not that common for both parents to show up at these things, but I feel I ought to be there. Wacky me.), we determined that they're both 50th% height and 75th% head circumference. Michelle is 75th% weight, and Rebecca is closing in on 25th%. Between them, we have 52 pounds of two-year old.

Work is, at times, quite a bit of fun. At other times, I feel like I'm pedalling as fast as I can, and it's just not going to be enough. I've made my research software run somewhere between 30 and 3000 times faster (depending on how you count) over the last few months, while adding functionality and improving accuracy. This is very cool. I'm very good at what I do. :-) However, to make it easily marketable, it needs to be another order of magnitude faster, and probably another order of magnitude more accurate. I'm just not sure if it's possible to do that. So I fret. It's fun to have the freedom on this project to explore whatever avenues I want to, but more and more I'm thinking it'd be nice if there were someone that I could really chat with about the details. Building, by myself, a new research toy that's supposed to be responsible for half of what the company does *and* change how semiconductors are manufactured is exciting, but occasionally stressful, if I think about it too much.

I've been biking nearly every morning since seeing the results of some of my 40th birthday medical tests. There's nothing actually diagnosable wrong with me, but some of the numbers are less than ideal, and I'd like to try and fix them. When I'm not tired from all the biking, I generally feel pretty good. I've lost a few pounds, but I'd like to lose a lot more, and it looks like I may actually have to tweak my eating habits even more to make that happen. I'm not happy about that.

The house network is still not right, and I'm making occasional side trips to the computer toy store to try and find a good replacement for the faulty DSL modem/router. It's less than a year old, which still puts it under warranty... but warranty service requires dealing with tech support and getting an RMA and shipping it to Netgear, which would take a few weeks during which we would have no Net. That won't work, so I'm going to replace things, and then just ship them the faulty modem (three of the four ethernet ports on the router are flaky; everything else works) and see what they do with it.

Sometimes--today in particular--I feel like life is just a big pile of things that need to be done. I seem to recall that there exists such a thing as "time off", and possibly even fun things to do on the side. It's just been a while. Smorgaschord is on hiatus, so I'm not even singing much these days. Except to the girls, of course. It's going to be a long time before Chris and I can actually wander off somewhere and not have a pile of responsibilities for enough time to decompress. Historically, I haven't really felt rested from a vacation unless I got at least two weeks off. It disturbs me that I can't picture when I'll have the opportunity to do that again.

I went to Maker Faire with Linda and Hazel last weekend. It didn't really do it for me, although it was very nice of them to take me...

The lightening of my anxiety stuff means that I've been able to watch Dollhouse again. It's somewhat amusing, and it's very Joss-like.

I've also gotten hooked on the Facebook game "Mafia Wars". Fortunately, it's self-limiting. There's only so many action points one can get, and those get used up in two fifteen-minutes sessions a day.

That is the State of the Harold.

Ex (thank goodness) VP Cheney: "I do not believe and have never seen any evidence to confirm that [Hussein] was involved in 9/11."

I'm not really sure what else to say...

Here's a better link to Mr. Allen-Rouman's letter, via e-mail from him.

http://www.thatdorkjordan.com/2009/05/29/open-letter-to-my-friend-who-opposes-gay-marriage/

Have a link to an eloquently written note by Terry Allen-Rouman on Facebook.

-sigh-

So, where do I go to sign the petition to put a measure on the ballot to strike the offending line from the California constitution?

At least my friends are still married...

Hmm... Chris tells me the net's down. ... "Looks like there was a power failure." 'No, I power cycled everything." "Even the server?" ... Tweak the server... no, it's okay. But the keyboard's batteries ran out, so I can't check for net from there. Well, we have two networks, one inside and one outside the firewall. Let's check... I can get to the interior network server, but not to the net. I can get to the exterior network server, and to the net from there. ... Bad ethernet slot? Nope. ... Bad device plugged in somewhere? Nope ... Stupid Netgear warranty requires an RMA to replace a $60 box, which also requires going through tech support. That won't be any fun... Ride my bike, and then go out... Hmm... maybe it's a bad cable. Let's get one from the room where Michelle is sleeping... Try it. Ah.

Yup. Bad cable. Weird. All better now.

I don't think anyone wonders why I don't do this for a living. It's just not my kind of fun.

Me to a coworker, about to take a short break to get some fresh air:

"A life without breathing just isn't living."

So true...

Michelle apparently isn't waiting for Chris and I to figure out how we're going to potty train her. When I came home from work today, she asked to use the potty, and then did use it, properly.

On the other hand, Rebecca threw up just as she was climbing into bed, leading to an extra twenty minutes of washing, wiping, and rug cleaning.

Balance. Life has good stuff and bad stuff. But it's generally pretty good, if a bit messy.

No luck this month. We'll try again for the next cycle, most likely.

On Friday, we (mostly) had the walls of our house insulated. In between the thin exterior paneling and the thin interior paneling, we now have a pile of treated cellulose powder. We'll have to see what it's like when the temperature outside is substantially different from the temperature inside, but I do note that the last two mornings, our bedroom hasn't been cold. It's very nice.

The contractors didn't quite finish their work, so our house is covered with little white circular cut-outs, representing the holes through which the stuff was blown. Hence the conspicuous aspect. Plus, since the insulation is made from processed used newsprint, we're actually recycling. And sequestering carbon in the walls, too. :-)

It's boring, but it's cheap ($2K), and it'll probably make the house more comfortable to live in. When the roof wears out, we'll replace it with something thicker, too, but that's going to be a decade or so in the future. And there are always dreams of solar panels...

I just pulled out to rad the next Jacqueline Carey novel, and briefly wondered... Kushiel's Cylon?

No substantial anxiety for a few days now. It's a little odd, but quite restful.

Round one surrogate blood test on Thursday...

One of the things about having occasional anxiety issues is that they often manifest in terms of fear of a specific physical failing.

For example, back when I had some anxiety issues six years or so ago, I would feel a little pain in my side and become terrified that I was having another kidney stone. Kidney stones suck, by the way. Eventually, as I made my way through various massage classes--and massage and PT received from Gale--I eventually figured out that the pain in question was actually my quadratus lumborum being unhappy about trying to keep my hips straight when one of my legs is nearly a centimeter shorter than the other. From my deep tissue massage class, I learned how to massage the relevant muscle and make the pain go away. Anxiety trigger solved.

More recently, I've been having vague pains in my left chest, and thinking that it might be a heart attack or something equally miserable. Except, of course, that heart attacks happen when you're doing something vigorous, and I get my pains at random times when I'm not doing anything in particular. Plus there's a whole bunch of other symptoms that go with cardiac troubles, which I don't have. And I exercise every morning these days, so if something weird was going on, that'd be the real time for it to manifest. So, I wonder, what's going on. I was thinking about this yesterday when I got home from work. Rebecca said, "Up! Up!". I picked her up with my left arm, held her close to my chest, and went, "Ow! ... Oh, right..."

I'm going to be more cautious about lifting the girls for a week or so, and see if the pain goes away...

For all that I worry about health stuff all the time, I'm actually one of the physically healthier people I know. I'm 40, and aside from sports-related injuries, three kidney stones, and the anxiety stuff, I really haven't had any substantial health issues. (Sure, there were some issues for a year or two with weird hormone levels, but the final expert analysis was just that I have slightly weird hormone levels, and I was mainly suffering from too much compensatory medical care.) I still take no daily drugs, and I hope to keep it that way as long as possible.

Now, if I could just convince the emotional part of my brain to believe the reasoning part, all would be well.