Category: …And Little E Makes 3

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...And Little E Makes 3 Television & Movies

And he’d already have a cat buddy nicknamed Obi-Wan…

For all of about 60 seconds last night, we were hemming and hawing over the possibility of Ewan as a baby name, and then it was back to Evan. The only problem there was simply that, like Ellison (remember, that name where I was the only one who liked it), nobody would be able to disassociate it from, well, someone else in particular.

I have to recant a bit on a pet hate of mine – my wife has actually gotten me semi-hooked on a reality show, in this case Discovery Channel’s Deadliest Catch, or, as I call it because I can’t believe I’m actually tuning in on a regular basis for a reality show, That Damn Crab Show. I got to thinking about it the other night – as much as they go on and on and on about how these king crab fishermen who brave the Bering Strait are paid kingly amounts of money for all that crab…I wonder how much Discovery Channel is paying the photogs who are tagging along with them, getting in the way, and getting their gear soaked on a routine basis? At least the poor bastards accustomed to working on deck know what to do when some whacking great rogue wave knocks the ship on its side. What in the world do you do when you’re just standing around on the slippery deck with a $25,000 camera to hold onto and not much else? There are some jobs you couldn’t even pay me enough for.

And speaking of crab meat and danger, let’s talk Lost. … Read more

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...And Little E Makes 3 Critters Home Base

Light brainshowers

I’m about to keel over here from exhaustion, so here’s a cute picture of Oberon and Xena:

Oberon and Xena

Actually, no, I’m not just going to leave it at that. My wife and I spent the afternoon at my dad’s house, because we haven’t been to see him in ages, and because we wanted to show him the ultrasound video and personally deliver the still pictures. My stepmother was there too… ’nuff said. Still, it was pleasant enough visit, and I’m hoping we can have an even more pleasant one in the near future. (‘Nuff said.)

A less pleasant part of the day was finding out that my wife’s vehicle, which was in for one more minor repair, now requires one more major repair. The repairs don’t seem to come in flavors of under $600 or so, so I’ll admit that the word “lemon” has been rolling off my tongue quite a bit lately. It was a good deal when we got it, but I’m starting to think this was a set of wheels with one good year of service left in them, and we’ve passed that year. Long since passed. The constant surprise problems we’re getting have completely eliminated any kind of “backup for a rainy day” that we had built up, and when we need to be buying baby stuff and working on redoing parts of the house, that’s just absolutely killing us.

I’ve been spending a lot of time on GreenhouseFX.tv over the past few days, including working up what’s basically a print version of the website to distribute as a printable PDF.

I’m having one of those weeks where I wish I could declare my own by-week and just catch up with the rest of the world later. Too damn tired to even think about thinking about thinking.

Now that I’m done cooking up the food we’ll be nibbling on tomorrow during the day, I’m going to go get…well…maybe all of a couple of hours of sleep.… Read more

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...And Little E Makes 3 Gadgetology Serious Stuff

And so it goes…away.

Poor old Vonnegut – I hate to admit to being so ill-informed, but even when that book of essays came out a year or three ago, I assumed it was posthumous.

I know a great many folks compared Douglas Adams to Vonnegut over the years, often enough that Adams railed against it if reminded. Which is one area where I have to disagree with my favorite author – if I had written any fiction that was compared to the works of Vonnegut, I would’ve hung it up right then and there just in case my next project didn’t live up to that praise.

Vonnegut’s work was informed by an edge of bitterness that, at least until “Mostly Harmless”, Adams just didn’t have (and even in “MH,” Adams didn’t deserve to claim that bitterness). Bitterness and yet just a smidgeon of world-weary hope that maybe humankind might gets its act together and learn the folly of its ways – it was such a weird mixture, and I’ve never run into anything quite like Vonnegut’s writing. I doubt I will again. I’ve been really bothered by my inability to write an obit for the news section that came close to even being in the same solar system as an adequate send-off. I’m going to write it off as me being tired and just not quite able to process the news.

I figured out how to beam new wallpapers and MIDI ringtones into my wife’s phone via infrared from my phone. Talk about a convoluted way of doing things – her phone isn’t bluetooth capable. Oddly enough she didn’t want any Katamari Damacy music or “Xanadu” as ringtones!

In news that will stun absolutely no one, the “video game characters” theme seems to be out the window where the baby room is concerned. I knew that idea was going to last about 10 minutes tops (and I wasn’t even the one who suggested it). Ah well. Guess I’ll just keep that little idea about painting the baby room to look like the interior of the TARDIS to myself…

I’m a little scatterbrained and burned out mentally right now, so you’ll have to forgive me for not having more to say at the moment. During the course of the day, it really hit me how damn tired I’ve gotten after the almost completely sleep-free Week Of Worrying, and I’m looking forward to crashing this weekend, with my head on a pillow and a bed full of warm kitties.… Read more

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...And Little E Makes 3 Cooking With Code Funny Stuff Home Base Television & Movies

Road tripped

Tomorrow we’re headed to Little Rock to have Those Other Tests done since we had some alarming markers show up on the baby blood work. It’s funny how one of our local hospitals builds a whole extra wing supposedly devoted to the best pre-natal and natal care in this part of the state…and yet, still, you can’t do jack without heading out to Little Rock or Tulsa. Thanks to everyone for their well-wishes and advice on the tests – believe me when I say that your experiences and stories are pure gold at this point. Tonight we have to take Jan’s vehicle – or, as I’ve always called it, Happy Wagon Of Death 2K3 – to leave it with the dealership in Rogers to fix tomorrow so she can be back to delivering the mail out of it Wednesday. I swear to God, everytime she turns the wheel even slightly, it sounds like an angry, asthmatic Wookiee is screaming out his rage from below the vehicle; the dealership is hopefully going to make whatever fixes or remove whatever Wookiees are applicable. Happy freakin’ life day. On the way, we’re going to try to stop in Fayetteville so I can snap some pictures of the R2-D2 mailbox that’s up there. I can’t believe there’s actually one in Arkansas.

No haircut yet; I may just have to tie it back and tuck it under tomorrow. I’ve really gotten out of that habit when my hair gets long. Adrian Paul, I ain’t. Instead, my wife and I spent Sunday night preparing prodigious quantities of food and then wolfing 90% of it down. I did the steaks and she did…well…all the stuff that actually tasted good. She even did the brownies, though at one point she cracked an egg open…right over the drain at the sink. In it went. We both stopped and looked at each other like “WTF?” She’s said that both her mother and her sister have warned her that expectant mothers apparently start donating brain cells to baby in large quantities during pregnancy, and I guess I really didn’t grok what that meant until I watched that perfectly good egg go from the shell straight into the garbage disposal. Just between you and me, I’m gonna milk that moment of comedy gold for months to come.

Hopefully everyone likes the latest main menu illustration for the site; as time consuming as these things are (that one was a 3:00am special), I’ve been trying to look for ways to tie everything together conceptually, even if I have to just flat-out invent the connection. 😆 (On the other hand, the process I was using to treat the pictures made Evangeline Lilly look positively hideous, which is something that takes quite a bit of effort, so my apologies there.)

And speaking of Lost…spoilage ahead if you haven’t seen it: … Read more

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...And Little E Makes 3 Critters

Boy’s hand will squeeze the giant’s heart

Before I forget:

Is this the new kitty?

Our new kitten

I'd just as soon kiss a kitten

Happy birthday Olivia! The cuddly kitten is a year old today, and she’s got a brand new puffball to play with to prove it.

In other news, I just got back from hearing the baby’s heartbeat. Turns out we’re still six weeks away at least from knowing a gender (the suspense, and not knowing what to buy just yet, is killing us), but either way, the little one’s already got a new nickname: THUMPER.… Read more

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...And Little E Makes 3 Gaming Television & Movies

Just a ton of stuff

This is going to be kinda choppy, kinda like my train of thought right now, which has zipped right off the tracks, straight through the guard rails, and off into the abyss.

Best MAME cabinet project ever? It’s bigger on the inside. I just hope he’s got Dalek Attack and Destiny Of The Doctors installed on that thing.

Best butt coverings ever? Take a look at these, folks with babies – we’re seriously considering them, not just for the hip biodegradable factor, but because it seems that most diapers are now coated in a common herbal skin-soothing agent that I happen to be highly allergic too (which has us concerned that the baby will be allergic to it as well). Septic tank safe, and very cost-effective next to disposable diapers, and therefore replete with awesomeness.

Best baby room ever? Nobody would believe this if I didn’t tell you about it: my wife has suggested that the walls of the baby’s room could be adorned with cute video game characters. Part of me is thinking “let’s see how long this lasts.” The rest of me will already be busy designing it in my head. 😆

O2-a-thon. Fired up the mighty Odyssey2 tonight to play my newly arrived copy of Puzzle Piece Panic, and did some catching up on other O2 homebrews that I’ve had for a while but have barely had a chance to play properly. I had four O2 homebrews or repro releases of prototypes sitting on the “to play” pile; Puzzle Piece Panic and Shark Hunter both rocked, while Impossible Mission was honestly a bit of a bore, and Calculator…well, it’s a neat idea, but more of a tech demo than anything. Still, as incongruous as it may seem now, I bet Magnavox would’ve put this puppy on the market back in the day.

It’s a funny old world. When I was a wee tot, I used to play this machine constantly, wonder where the ideas for the games came from and who made them, and even obsessed over the artwork style. Now I know who makes the games and to a certain extent where they get their ideas, and it seems like I do the artwork for about half of them. (In the case of Puzzle Piece Panic, I didn’t do artwork – I just suggested a name that met the vintage Magnavox style of “descriptive but slightly cheesy,” and it just kinda stuck.) Funny how these things work out.… Read more

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...And Little E Makes 3 Home Base Serious Stuff

Patching up some holes in my genes

I’ve been almost incommunicado this weekend because I’m about knee-deep in a little project that I’ve wanted to do for a while; having a baby on the way and some other recent things have brought it forward in the priority just a little bit. It’s time to clear some brush around the old family tree and take a look at it.

Family Tree

Using various online resources (the first of which is a page out of one of my previously mentioned “baby books,” filled out by my mother, without which I’d be dead in the water), I’ve accomplished what I think it a pretty impressive amount of work for having started a couple of days ago. One line, on my grandmother’s father’s side, I managed to get extraordinarily lucky on and trace all the way back to England in the 1300s with a fairly high degree of certainty thanks to someone else’s dazzlingly meticulous research. There’s some Scotland and Ireland in there too.

The sad thing is that there just isn’t very much solid information about the Green line. Either that, or it’s completely buried because, well, y’know, it’s such an uncommon and distinctive name, though I have managed to get as far as finding out that, unless I’m barking up the entirely wrong family tree, the Greens have been working-class and stuck in Arkansas for nearly 200 years, with allowances for minor excursions that always ended up back here within a given person’s lifetime. I’m really wanting to find out where that line comes from. … Read more

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...And Little E Makes 3 Critters

Horse Power

I was immensely saddened to see that Barbaro didn’t make it. Not a total surprise, but still heartbreaking. I’m sure some folks wonder why his owners poured a fortune into saving him, but I completely understand. Almost better than I’d like to. It’s sad that he didn’t get a chance to add a few little Barbaros to the world, but of course he couldn’t be bred in the condition he was in.
I’ve had a roughly four or five day period where I’ve questioned my own breeding. Namely, the wife is in the hospital for the second time in a week, unable to keep liquid, food, or much of anything down. Even water would make her throw up. She’s coming home tonight (her mom is bringing her home after taking over for me at around 6pm tonight; we’d been in the ER since 11:00am) with yet another batch of prescriptions that are supposed to get her back on her feet and working again. At present, I have no idea where my offspring’s well being stands with regard to her ill health and the barrage of medications. I’ve spent much of the day bracing myself for very bad news.
One thing is for sure: the old tale about mood swings during pregnancy ain’t a lie. I’m going to have to find something to do, or friends to hang out with, within a reasonably close driving distance, and soon, or I’m convinced we’re gonna strangle each other with our bare hands. I’ve been advising the guys at Star Trek: Origins, a new fan film being made in Kentucky, but Kentucky is hardly a short drive away. (Though there have been nights recently where I’ve felt like I’d rather Olivia, Othello and Oberonbe in Kentucky…) Hopefully once we’re both back to normal health and I’m not staying home waiting on her hand and foot around the clock and can actually sleep, there might be some equilibrium restored. God, I hope so. If I can survive this, I’d like to think it’ll be a while before the kid can do anything to try my patience near as much. I’ve tried at all times to be understanding and compassionate, but I can only take so much abuse in return.
For some reason, Livejournal didn’t receive an entry I posted early this morning during one such sleepless interval, so here’s a link to it if you didn’t catch it. Why that happened, I’ve no idea. It’s kinda disjointed anyway, so maybe you folks are better off in that universe where the last entry was the picture of Oberon and Othello curled up asleep. To make it up to you, here’s a picture of all three of them, just moments ago, keeping the bed warm for Jan before she comes home.
I miss sleep.
(Reposting to make sure LJ crosspost still works.)… Read more