Well after all that lovely work I did yesterday and this morning, I’ve had maybe 3 contractions since noon. I’m very annoyed and am now going to go read Pretties since I finished Uglies at lunch time. I blame Stephen. He bought Uglies at Panoply for about $4 so after I finished it, I had to immediately zoom out to the bookstore to buy the next one. Maybe Liza is waiting until I’ve read all three before she decides to come. I guess that means I need to read faster.
I Would Have Written Sooner but I Couldn’t Get to My Own Website
I started having contractions sometime yesterday. The best I did then was about 45 minutes apart. I went to bed, expecting to be woken by something substantial going on and instead, slept all night. This morning, I had almost an hour of 5 minute apart contractions but then those easy, short ones stopped to be replaced by much further apart but much more intense and longer lasting ones.
If I didn’t have a doula to tell me to stay the heck at home, I probably would be all up at the hospital full of pitocin by now and possibly delivering already.
We are fine otherwise. Mom and I just took naps, each of us on a different couch. Stephen is “working” at the kitchen table. Maybe he’s doing something actually productive or maybe he’s busy getting ready to tump over the site again. Eli is at school doing whatever it is that he does at school. We’re gonna get some lunch and maybe something else will be happening this afternoon.
Someone will post again later today with an update. Either I’ll be bored and posting the weather report or maybe saying we’re headed to the hospital. Thanks for all your well wishes, thoughts and prayers.
Welcome LOLTrek Visitors
“Hey, this is funny,” my friend John says to me. “Do you mind if I submit LOLTrek to BoingBoing?”
“Sure,” I tell him, thinking that they won’t really link to it.
Two minutes later, we’re Boinged. Then Wil Wheaton links to LOLTrek. Someone in the comments says, “David Gerrold is a friend of mine, I am sooooo gonna show him this!!!” Now that we’ve had our own bacon cat moment, we can quit the Internet.
To the hordes of new folks, welcome! I’ve had a number of y’all ask if I’m going to do this again. Sadly, the answer is no. I think LOLTrek was funny at most one time, and I used all of my good jokes up on it. Though if I were going to do another TV show, I know which one I’d do.
[tags]loltrek, lolcats, lolhouse[/tags]
LOLTrek
Let’s talk about lolcats. Lolcats, or cat macros, are a subset of image macros. They’re pictures of cats with captions typed across them. In essence they’re the “Hang In There Baby” posters gone feral.
Anil Dash has a great post about them, in which he identifies a number of lolcat subclasses and discusses kitty pidgin, the mangled English used in many lolcat pictures. Kitty pidgin is surprisingly regular, which I suppose means, as Anil Dash puts it, that cats can has regular grammar.
A number of sites collect lolcat pictures, among them I Can Has Cheezburger and Meme Cats. If you browse through those sites, you’ll quickly get a feel for how lolcats work. If you’re inspired to make your own, remember: use Impact or Arial Black, and put a black outline around white letters.
While this is nice and all, I quickly realized that there are no long-form lolcat works. The closest is Spatch’s wonderful Cat Town, and it’s only a relative to lolcats. That set my fevered brain to spinning: what would a lolcat story look like? What if lolcats had a TV channel? What kind of shows would be on it?
The answer is clear: they would show Star Trek.
Heroes and Scruff
Hey, let’s talk about Monday night’s episode of Heroes and listen to my wild theories. The next bit is spoiler cut for your convenience.
Eli Has Nigel Beat
Eli has been crazed these last few days. He’s been getting up at 5:45 and, aside from early naps, been going non-stop until we all pass out from exhaustion at 7:30 or so. He gets into everything and tries to grab anything that catches his eye. It’s like living with a strung-out raccoon.
Just now we were in the kitchen. Eli was stomping around so he could hear the quarters in his pocket jingle. “Eli,” I asked, “are you dialed to eleven?”
“Ha, nooooo,” he said. “I’m dialed to twenty-two!“
Photos from Panoply 2007
My little linky do thing gummy is broken and so I am not HTML savvy enough to make a photo link. So I will just give you two old-fashioned links to go to to see photos from Panoply and Eli’s new toy…
Stress Eats Our Brains
It’s stressful around here. At any moment I will look out the window and see Liza’s sonogram being lit on a cloud and will rush home, and that adds an element of uncertainty and fear to my life. This is a roundabout way of me saying “Do not be surprised if we make odd posts over the next several days.”
In other surreal news, my NPR/classical music radio station played Danny Elfman’s score for Tim Burton’s first Batman movie. I was listening and kept thinking, huh, why does this sound so familiar?
The World, It is Calmer Now
So in the quest to relieve my anxiety (it also turns out Stephen had a fair dose as well) my mom is here. So now, if the baby doesn’t come this week my mom and I will have the nursery fully organized, the house cleaned, Stephen’s mass of shirts ironed and when we’re bored we might just put up Eli’s jungle gym in the back yard.
Friday Night Videos: I Used to Have Adult Fans
Dan Zanes and Friends: Jump Up (2007)
Hey, remember The Del Fuegos? “Don’t Run Wild”? “I Still Want You?” Yeah, them. Their frontman, Dan Zanes, does kids’ music now, and it’s on heavy rotation on the Disney Channel. Anyway, this video is fun and all, but it’s more fun to invent a story to go with it. “Hey, I was just out walking my upright bass and heard you guys playing. He loves to join in impromptu street performances!”
They Might Be Giants: Flying V (2005)
Goodness knows They Might Be Giants’ songs, with their loopy wordplay and odd instrumentation, work well for kids. Eli’s a big fan of “Particle Man,” for instance. But their songs aimed at kids are even better, as this example from their alphabet-propaganda album “Here Come the ABCs” shows.
Hey, let’s have some bonus videos!
Zelda Zii, a live-action recreation of Nintendo’s venerable videogame series. Sadly they countersink a number of the jokes, but the fight scenes are fun. And time on YouTube has made me appreciate people who edit their short films intelligently.
Since I didn’t do a bonus video last week, let me make up for it this week by giving you all three Die Hard movies (plus the upcoming one!) turned into a rock song by Guyz Nite. In the future, instead of watching the actual movies, people will just watch this video. Be warned: cursing, gunplay, and totally awesome explosions abound.
This reminds me that I have yet to explain why the original Die Hard is such a well-constructed action movie.