davejenbarnes

Its about time someone gave me some pointers.

David and I attend a Tuesday night Bible study which, at our church, is referred to as a small group or REALife group. The group we have been attending for almost two years is a neat group of couples… married on average 2-3 years with no children (David and I have the oldest marriage in the group). This summer, three of the regular attending couples and one periodic attending couple announced pregnancies. Add them to the sister-in-law, cousin-in-law, and two other friends and I have eight pregnancies to shop for! Anyhow, pregnancies was not the point I set out to tell you about in this post.

The pregnancies, I feel, changed the group. With 50% of the group expecting babies in the next seven months, the group couldn’t possibly go on forever. Alas, it is rather sad that the group will be disbanning in July, before the first baby is even born. There is another REALife group starting up from this one, but the night they will meet is rather inconvenient for us as I have Wednesday night lessons and David more often than not has rehearsals on Wednesdays. David and I are faced with the decision of going when we can (which for me is never unless I reschedule my lessons) or finding a group that meets on Tuesdays or Thursdays. I will try to remember to post what we decide.

Other than the fact that we are leaving it all up to God this month, we really have no news. I am contemplating on how I will make the announcement to everyone out there. I will need an online way to announce it, a Bible-Study way to announce and then a parents way… so that WHEN it DOES happen, we can let everyone know in a creative way. It hasn’t happened yet, people.

I am spending lunch and this afternoon with Cristy who is due in mid December (December 21, 2004). She will find out the gender of their child in two weeks, so we’re gonna do a little pre-gender-knowledge nursery research at Baby Depot to see what kind of baby stuff they have compared to Babies ‘R Us and Target.

Tomorrow I may get together with Lisa (Feb 1, 2005) and Nicole (Sept 6, 2004) (yes, their due dates are in parenthesis) to watch yet another thrilling summer blockbuster rental. Lisa is in the middle of her first trimester and is sick a lot of the time. Nicole is in her third trimester and says that she is sick a lot of the time, but in a different way than the first trimester.

And in other news, well, I guess it’s not really news, but I’m still excited for them… Chris and Darlene (Nov. 30, 2004) found out the gender of their baby yesterday. I still don’t know what they’re having, but I don’t want to barge in on Darlene’s email account as if I knew her, which I don’t. Perhaps I will ask next month when I send them an email for their anniversary.

For me, the months can’t seem to pass fast enough until September. I would really love to be covered by insurance and pregnant in September, even if I will be sick beyond all sickness. I think it’s my body talking, you know. I feel like I cannot control this hunger to be pregnant and have a baby… it’s not like a decision I made, it’s like an appetite. I started feeling this way two years ago but David’s logic against children always won. It was hard agreeing with him that we needed to be in a little better situation… It was hard to continue taking that stupid little pill. Emotionally, it was hard hiding from him the turmoil I was in by this drive to have children. I always told him I didn’t want them. I don’t get along with children… They’re loud, rude, careless, greedy… but that’s other people’s children. How could our children possibly be loud, rude, careless and greedy? (haha, don’t answer that!) We won’t know until we meet them. Oh to hold our baby in my arms and look at them eye to eye. Someday…

I have been waiting almost a week for more invites to gmail. It seems that they have as many people as they need… so I will no longer open my comments concerning gmail until I have plenty to go around, and even then, the comments without the strikethrough are still waiting on them as well.

On pretty much every browser I use, with the exception of Firefox, my homepage is set to Apple’s homepage. I usually click on the hot news ticker underneath the main graphic to check out the haps in the world of Apple. Above the articles in the hot news section, there are three graphics which usually go along with whatever hot news there happens to be for the day. The center of these three graphics, a beige Texas with an aqua-ized blue widget on top of Austin, was an unexpected suprise that has already made my week a happy one.

Apple has opened an Apple Store in Barton Creek Square Mall. This will be the closest Apple Store to us, and the third one that I will have been to. I really wanted to visit one in the DC area while we were up there, but I forgot to find out where they were located (I found out later that there are actually three in the DC area, but none were within a reasonable walking distance for us).

I’ve thought that Austin has needed an Apple Store for a while now…and not just because I wanted one. Austin has a huge Apple community, an enormous University (you guessed it, Concordia University), and I believe the largest MUG (Macintosh User Group) in the country. It just makes sense to have an Apple Store in this town.

I’ll be playing hookey from work tomorrow so that Jen and I can go visit the store. I imagine it will be similar in size and in layout to the Apple Store in the Willowbend Mall up in the Dallas area, but I’ll keep you posted with details, and possibly some pics.

On another Apple related note, one of my projects this summer is to cram our entire CD collection into our 20GB iPod. We’ve had 796 songs on it for about 4 months now, and its time to diversify our iPod. iTunes makes it ridiculously easy to rip songs from CDs. One of the options upon inserting a CD is for iTunes to rip all of the songs off of the CD, and then eject it! Basically, I’ve been sitting in front of my Mac, and inserting a new CD every time it spits one out since 2:30 this afternoon. I’ve managed to increase the song count by over 400. I started by using Apple’s lossless encoding for all of the CDs, but after I watched my spare disk space dwindle under the massive size of those files, I’m back to using AAC. We’ve got a lot of lame CDs, so if I run out of space on the ‘pod, I’ll just axe a few of those albums. I’ll keep you posted on the progress, and the final song count/GB usage.

As Mark mentioned in his weblog, we had plans for this weekend which would have involved having been wet yesterday and being sore today. We did not get wet and we are not sore, and instead we were able to spend some time with my family and our cousins, Adam and Meredith. David and I were planning on driving up to my family regardless of the rafting trip, but rafting on Saturday would have moved our drive up by one day. We were really wanting to get the cool waterproof camera case for the little canon on loan from my brother so that the camera could get wet with us and have just as much fun.

This first picture is the camera case with camera enclosed, looking at itself in the mirror and the second is with use of another mirror, revealing, in all its reflective glory, the plethora of buttons for David to play with!

Mom and I got to enjoy the swing in the back yard and talk about the flowers and deer while the guys washed the blue Saturn which hasn’t been washed in months.

Of course, Sammie thought she was the only reason for our visit, so I had to get the obligitory Sammie shots!

This last one is for David. He had so much fun with the waterproof camera case last night despite the lack of rafting water in our lives the last two days… I just HAD to post it for him. :-)

I think I will weblog for a little bit this fine Austin evening about life for us the past few days. Photos, photos, photos… we have been shutterbugaholics this past week. You would think that with 797 photos on the iBook and another 6 in the camera when we got home from this trip to Virginia that we wouldn’t feel like taking another picture in a long time. Ever, maybe. 803 pictures sounds like a lot. But we did take more pictures. Yes, just yesterday. And without any further ado, here they are:

I am battling the jealousy that is bubbling up from the darkest depths of my soul like heartburn after a spicy meal. The number of pregnancies I know of is staggering… and none seemed to really want to be pregnant before it happened. Why? Why must I be surrounded by pregnant women when I want it more than all of them combined? Why are the ones who don’t care the ones getting pregnant? Why does it seem so unfair? Why do I get upset by all this? Why can’t I just be happy for them? Why does thinking of them pregnant and me not . . . make me cry?

I have never had these emotions before. I am surprised by my reaction to every new announcement. I am glad I wasn’t there for the latest announcement, although it was good to express my feelings to Lisa over the phone. Why do I want to avoid them now? I think I know the answer to that last question. I don’t want to hear about anyone else’s pregnant experience. I want to learn afresh with mine, to discover, not to just experience what they experience first. I don’t want to compare my future experience with anything I’ve heard from any of theirs. I want a future experience. I want . . . children.

I am itching to get the post-processing started on our vacation pictures. We have over 775 pictures and I will most likely be editting about 700 of them or so and uploading them to the gallery over several days. The pictures, however, reside on David’s iBook and the cable for the Canon digi-cam also resides with the iBook so I remain impatiently pictureless.

To edit such a high volume of pictures, I will attempt to write a script for the GIMP so the process will be a one-click process. Since I am pictureless, I will look up how to write a script for the GIMP!

UPDATE: Yes, an update already… writing a script for/in GIMP is going to be quite educational. I will need to learn basic Perl and another programming language! Eek! Anyone wanting to do this for me is welcome to take a stab at it! Jer?? Mark?? Peter?? Shelley?? anyone??