lewis and clark had a journal. you, beth-annie, have a diary.

Wednesday, June 28, 2006
It is very strange to wake up at 4:15am and have your bedroom -- which doesn't even face east -- already starting to lighten from the sun.  Craziness.

That's all I got, folks.  The next few weeks are going to be a little crazy as at various times we'll be in Iowa, Minnesota, Milwaukee, Ohio, and Josh will leave me for four days to go to Texas for a business trip (okay, so for that last one I'll be bored out of my mind and might even get around to some blog updating that's been a long time coming).  But the point is that blogging may be somewhat sporadic for the next few weeks, though it certainly won't be nonexistent.  And be sure to check back in about a week if you care to know whether our child will be the next David Beckham or Mia Hamm (the soccer player part seems to be a given  :-P).
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Thursday, June 22, 2006
Because I like being a tease.
Remember our list of 12 girls' names and 10 boys' names? We've eliminated 4 of them from the running, and I'm going to share those with you now, just to give you an idea of the direction we're going in but, you know, not going in. (And also, the entry title. :-P) Feel free to use them for your own children (not that you couldn't have anyway, but, whatever). In alphabetical order:

Alexander
Alexandra
Holly
Samuel
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Wednesday, June 21, 2006
In defense of Nacho Libre.
I loved Napoleon Dynamite.  So I was, of course, looking forward to the next movie from the same writer-director.  The commercials looked... interesting and didn't put me off the movie, but when the reviews started coming in I became a little more wary, as many of them were negative.  Still, we went to see it on opening weekend (and while we may see a lot of movies, most of those are at the bargain theater for $1-3 -- we almost never see movies first-run), albeit with tempered expectations.

Was it as good as Napoleon Dynamite?  No.  (The wrestling sequences especially dragged for me, though that's really not my thing just in general.)  But was it a bad movie?  No.  It seems like many who didn't like ND also didn't like this, which isn't surprising as both movies have a distinct and rather odd style and humor, which I think you either find funny or you don't.  And many who hold ND up on a pedestal were expecting another one, and when they didn't get it were immensely disappointed.  My opinion?  If you thought Napoleon Dynamite  was funny and you think Jack Black is funny, you should like Nacho Libre.  Maybe not completely and utterly adore it, but it's plenty funny enough to see.  Don't let the critics get you down.  They knocked on The Village, too.
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Tuesday, June 20, 2006
Five months.

Also, I know you're supposed to get clumsier as you get pregnanter, but I just completely missed my mouth trying to take a drink and ended up pouring a bunch of ice water right in my lap. I hate to think what I'll be doing in a few months.
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Thursday, June 15, 2006
Letters and numbers and how I hate them.
I have two big entertainment magazine pet peeves.  One is the seemingly ubiquitous feature usually called something obnoxious like "Go Figure" or "By the Numbers" where several numbers are listed, say, 4, $2169, 83, and 7.8 million, and then proceed to explain what each number represents -- for instance how many takes "X" scene took in "Y" movie or how much such-and-such cost.  All entirely pointless things that are thrown together for no reason other than they're all mini-blurbs that happen to involve a number of some sort.  Big whoop.  I don't care and I don't get the obsession with them.

The other is those stupid-head A-to-Z guides.  Ugh, make them stop!  In the same day I ran across them in both Entertainment Weekly  and TV Guide, and, once again, I just don't understand them.  I love "24" and "Lost," but I have absolutely no need for someone to pointlessly come up with one item per letter of the alphabet that's somehow related to the show (sometimes pretty weakly if the letter's a tough one).  They're silly and inane and I hate hate hate them, even for shows that I love.  I really need to not see one ever again, or I might just tear the pages right out of the magazine and burn them.
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Friday, June 09, 2006
I will say one thing:  we are not having twins.
Whew.  I mean, I would have taken them both, but I am so relieved we don't have to deal with TWO, the first time around especially.  I'm also relieved that, far as the ultrasound technician could tell, everything looks a-ok.  Based on growth it projected my due date as only a few days after my actual due date, which is well within the two-week margin of error, so it seems that was all pretty accurate.

It all took about 30 minutes, most of which was the technician looking at and measuring very specific areas of the baby, some of which were hard to get both because the baby kept moving a lot and because it was just in an uncooperative position in general throughout the entire exam.  As a result, she had a difficult time getting a good profile shot of the baby for us to take home, so we just had to take what we could get.  You can definitely see the head, and part of a limb (whether it's an arm and hand or part of a leg we're not sure, because the baby was really tucked into a very tight, well, fetal position at that time).  But there you go.

The coolest parts were actually being able to SEE the heart beating and the baby kicking, and finding out the baby's gender, which the technician said so casually and without warning just like every other thing she was pointing out to us that Josh and I were both caught off guard by it for a second -- though not necessarily in a bad way.  She told us before we even started that they can't be 100% sure, but she seemed pretty confident in her assessment.  And I have to say, knowing now if the baby is a "he" or a "she" has already made me feel more of a bond, so I'm glad we made the decision we did.  Just the baby being born is going to be amazing enough in and of itself, and this way we get a little of that amazing now.  Way cool.

Now, as for when we will share this information with the rest of the world?  Well, we decided that since we didn't get to tell any of our family members in person we were having a baby, we'd at least save this bit of information for the end of June when we're going to see pretty much everybody.  Then I'll post it on my blog after we get back at the beginning of July.  So y'all are gonna have to sit tight for a few weeks.  I know you can do it.  :-)
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So will it be Engelbert Humperdinck Prins or Amelia Bedelia Prins?

We know.

But we're not telling.

Yet.

Ha ha.

:-)
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Wednesday, June 07, 2006
Since we're on this baby name kick... a continuation.
When Kim mentioned in the comments the Social Security Administration's annual list of the 1000 most popular baby names, I decided to look up the list for 2005 and see how our potential-names placed.  Here are the somewhat cryptic -- and very genderifically different -- results.

Of our 10 boy names:
-- 9 fall between #10 and #60
-- 1 falls in the upper #100s

Of our 12 girl names:
-- 1 is (ouch) in the top 10
-- 4 fall between #10 and #75
-- 2 are in the #200s
-- 2 are in the #300s
-- 1 is in the #600s
-- 1 is in the #700s
-- 1 does not appear on the list as we have it spelled, but two alternate spellings exist in the #600s and the #900s

On another note, it's amazing to me that many of the names that were very prevalent when I was growing up, so much so that there was often more than one in a class at school -- like Amy, Lindsay, Erin, and Heather -- are not even in the top 100 today.  But Makayla is (#44).  Um, huh?
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Tuesday, June 06, 2006
Name that baby!
We finished going through our baby name book last night, and when it was all said and done we had written down 22 names.  Total.  Period.  There are only 10 boy names and 12 girl names we would consider naming our child, and some of those even probably not really.  And to clinch I'm sure that our baby will in fact be a boy, our personal favorites of the girl names on our list overlap a lot, while our favorite boy names don't really at all, meaning it will be much more difficult to agree on a boy's name.  Meaning that's what we'll have to do.

In the meantime, some of the name meanings that amused me:
PEPPER (Latin) - condiment from the pepper plant.
RALPH (English) - wolf counselor.  [I always wondered what one who counseled the wolves was called.]
BICKFORD (English) - axe-man's ford.  [Hehe.  Axe-man.]
TUESDAY (English) - second day of the week.
REBEL (American) - rebel.
CHALONNA (American) - a combination of the prefix Cha + Lona.  [Apparently Americans like combining stuff like that.  A lot.]

I'll narrow down for you what might be on our list:  none of those names.  :-)
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Monday, June 05, 2006
Test run.
In anticipation of hopefully makng it to that LPGA tournament in Ohio in July, we drove down to Lake Geneva on Saturday to go to a Futures Tour event (which is like the minor league to the LPGA's major league).  It was a fairly successful practice run, although it wasn't terribly hot (in fact, later in the day when the wind blew off the lake and the sun would go behind a cloud it was downright chilly), we had the luxury of just stopping and sitting at whatever hole we were at if I got tired because we weren't there to follow any specific players (something we won't be able to do at the LPGA event as we'll really want to follow at least one particular group for their entire round), and I'll also be more than a month further along at that point.  So basically, we're going to make cancel-able plans to go to Toledo and then see how things go until then.

While in some ways I was surprised at how close the Futures Tour event was to an LPGA one in terms of things like food and drink available for spectators, even at a couple of locations out on the course, it was definitely less fan-friendly in other ways.  There were no leaderboards scattered throughout the course, no one walking with each group carrying a sign that told you what players they were and what their scores were -- meaning not only did you have no idea how the players you were watching were doing on their round or overall, but to even figure out who you were watching you had to either be lucky enough for one of them to have their name embroidered on their golf bag and manage to catch a glimpse of it, or perhaps happen to overhear one of them called by their first name and match it to a group on your pairings sheet.  Few of the players had caddies, also, and for the ones that did they weren't wearing the caddy vests with their player's last name on the back to help in identification, either.  If you parked yourself at a green and watched several groups go by, once you managed to figure out who you were watching you made sure to follow along on your pairings sheet so you knew who all the subsequent groups were as well.

Then on Sunday we went plant shopping to get some replacements for the few that died.  Two of them were from Home Depot (who we bought A LOT from last year and we otherwise have been very happy with most of their plants that are still living and even thriving), which has a one-year guarantee on all their plants.  We're coming up on one year, and I saved a bunch of receipts from last year just in case something like this happened, and wouldn't you know I can find pretty much all of them EXCEPT the one with the two HD things on it that died.  Typical.  Guess we won't be able to get our money back on those afterall.

We managed to get everything planted yesterday:  a dwarf burning bush for next to the front stoop, a yucca (which I've always loved and wished we had gotten the first time around), a couple of lily varieties (brilliant orange Asiatic and bluish-purple Lily of the Nile), and an awesome-looking perennial called stonecrop that looks like a scculent but isn't (yes, I like desert plants, okay?).  I also learned that planting stuff is not nearly as easy for me now as it was last year.  Good thing we did it when we did, or Josh would've had to do it all by himself.  And, trust me, neither of us wanted that.  :-)
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Friday, June 02, 2006
My first baby nightmare since I've been pregnant.
It's our first night home with the baby (a girl, incidentally -- in the dream, not real life), and when I wake up in the morning and go check on her, her lips are all blue.  Needless to say, I freak out, only to notice that some of the blue is this little crystally stuff all over her lips.  She then proceeds to TELL me that it's okay, Mommy, it's just some Fun Dip she got from on top of the dresser ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE ROOM.  So apparently we have a child who, from birth, can speak in complete sentences, move around on her own, and has an affinity for Fun Dip.  All scary things.

New album happiness (with a pinch of disgust).
After quite a few months of not buying a single newly-released CD, the next couple months will bring me new CDs from three of my favorite bands.  First and most anticipated is Guster's first new studio album in three years, whose release has been delayed over and over for almost a year now.  Then just in May it was announced that Counting Crows is releasing a live album (their last studio album was now four years ago) the SAME DAY as Guster's new album, which just so happens to be two days after my birthday.  Happy birthday to me!  And then just today I discovered Muse is finally releasing a new album in July (I knew there was a reason I've never unsubscribed from that mostly useless Rolling Stone email newsletter -- keyword being "mostly").

Now if only Counting Crows stupid website hadn't gone and made much of their website, including messageboard access, available only to those who will pay the $30 annual fan club fee -- which gets you very few perks aside from website access and concert presales, whoop-di-doo.  I don't know how much the band itself had to do with that decision, but I'm kind of ashamed that a band I've loved so much would either treat their fans or let their fans be treated so crappily.  Downgrade.
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