In the Loop

Can life get any better than this? I submit that it cannot.

Brooke usually has boundless energy right up until there’s no gas left in the tank. Most of the time, you have to watch her gait turn into a standardized field sobriety test before you can tell. Saturday night was a different story…

Sam is less than two weeks old and already wants to hold his own bottle.

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So how’d things turn out? Pretty well so far…

We are in the delivery room and the nurses have readied the room. It’s almost time to push. Sam-Sam is on his way!

Groundhog Day. This is the perfect day to say hello again after a long absence. Let’s take a little inventory:

In the last seven months…

1. I’ve learned I’m going to be a father to a son.
2. I earned my MBA.
3. My daughter turned 1.
4. I got pneumonia.

Son

Samuel Martin will be here very soon. He’s going to be big like his sister before him, so we’re not going to let things go on more than another two weeks.

MBA

I finished with all A’s, excepting the blight of an A- in Crypto a couple of years ago. I’m the most proud of our Capstone project. I graduated with honors in November. There has been a withdrawal of sorts. I do miss the week to week, term to term grind, but my family does not. I have promised my wife that there will be no more graduate school or certifications for at least a year.

One

Brooke turned 1 just before Christmas and she is the delight of my life. Watching her grow from first sitting up last summer, to crawling, standing, cruising, walking and now running has been the most amazing experience of my life. She’s going to make an awesome big sister.

Pneumonia

I’ve had a sinus infection since roughly Thanksgiving. It has come and gone, but I haven’t knocked it out. I went to an urgent care clinic on New Years Eve and got a flu test, which was negative. They wrote me a script for Cipro, which knocked it back, but unfortunately did not knock it out. A couple of weeks ago, I started getting tension headaches in the afternoon. I woke up one morning with a fever over 104, but no other serious symptoms. I trudged back to the urgent care clinic, was given another flu test, which was negative, and sent home to treat the symptoms. I slept all day and felt better that night.

I felt well enough the next day to workout, and felt better still the next morning. Then the relapse came. I had fever back up over 104 on a Sunday afternoon, so my wife ordered me to go to the ER. The ER gave me a flu test, which was (again) negative, diagnosed me with “fever” and sent me home to treat the symptoms. The respiratory distress from the pneumonia flared during the night and I thought I was going to be done for. Thankfully, I survived until I could see my regular doctor the following afternoon.

If you go to urgent care or the ER for very high fever, or any kind of relapse of fever — other symptoms or not — don’t let them give you a flu test and send you on your way: get a chest x-ray.

I’m almost finished with my course of Levaquin and Medrol. I’ve been cooped up at home all week and I’m champing at the bit to get out of the house and to resume my training regimen. I think today is that day. I’m going to start back very slowly with a treadmill walk. I’ll work up to a 65-70% BPM level on the cross-country machine this week and then stay at that level at least through the week before I start adding the high intensity stuff.

So that’s where I am now. I need to do a ton of updates to the site, and those will get rolling sometime soon.

Stay tuned…

In a little less than two hours (according to the count-up clock on the wedding page), Robin and I will have been married one year. It’s been an adventure so far. One thing that I’ve discovered is that in all of the ups and downs the notable “ups” have been outnumbered by the notable “downs”. Still, the marriage itself is the one untrumpable up. It amazes me that we’ve made it through some of the disagreements, spats, and arguments. Who knows your weak spots better than your spouse? Who knows which buttons to push and when to push them? I don’t see how a marriage survives all of that without God. I’m sure there are examples of sustaining, Godless marriages out there, but don’t ask me to explain or account for them because I will always need God’s help with my own marriage.

Given more time and thought I could flesh this out more fully, but I think for a marriage to work, you have to have two independent people supporting a dependent person (the marriage). One can’t lose himself in the other, nor can you lose yourself in the marriage. There are times when you need to lean on one another — and I’ve certainly experienced times this year where I leaned on the marriage. Today is the one-year anniversary of the wedding when Robin and I made our vows to each other before God and before our families and friends. Would I do it again? You bet your boots.

At long last, the wedding page is updated with actual photos from our wedding day. It’ll soon include a copy of our wedding program and order of service as soon as I can get to the scanner.

Robin and I have returned from our belated honeymoon week in Jamaica. This was by far the most lavish vacation I have ever taken and I highly recommend the Grand Lido Negril to anyone who wants a very classy vacation. A very special thanks to Doreena, Tanya — aka “The most beautiful lady on the beach (after 6pm)”, Marsha, Marie, Delvin, Oliver, & Orville of the entertainment staff. Thanks also to Carlene, Cleon & Ike in the Amici piano bar for good music and good conversation. Thanks to Paula, Shudette, Sheldon, & Shawn at the Main Beach Bar, the Gran Terazza, and La Pasta for your bright smiles and for making us feel so welcome. Thanks also to my new friends in Ingredients. Any house band who can back me singing Just The Way You Are and then turn right around and back my wife singing Patsy Cline’s Crazy is one great band. We will be coming back and we hope to see some of our new friends again.

Happy New Year to all! We’re back from our short honeymoon weekend on the town in downtown Dallas. The real honeymoon comes in a few months, but it was a nice weekend to unwind after all of the pre-wedding stress.

The wedding went very well and I’ll be posting pictures up on the wedding page as soon as I can make the time to go through them, do some processing, etc.

There are busy days ahead this week with moving and both of us preparing to start new jobs. My school trimester at UD also starts next week.