avablog

Some _ _ _ _head came in in the last seconds of the auction and outbid me.  Fine.  He can have them.  I wasn’t going to spend more than $20 on them anyway. I hope they split up the crotch.

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So, here’s a shot of just one of my surgery sites from the Great Mole Removal 2006. This one is on my left shoulder, just under the clavicle. I think there’s one other shot in the public photos in my flickr stream, for the brave. There are also pictures of pretty horsies from the parade […]

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So the mole extraction went well. Pretty much exactly what I was expecting. My range of movement is a little limited today, owing to the five sets of stitches I have on my chest and back, but everything is otherwise fine. And this happy outcome is due in large part to the wonder drug Lidocaine. […]

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It is a great unwritten rule that as soon as you find a great thing, whether it’s a food item, a television show, or a picnic spot, it’ll be discontinued, canceled, or paved over just as you begin to love it. Some years ago (could it be 10?), I picked up a pair of men’s […]

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I stayed home with Ava this morning, as she’s presently under quarantine from her daycare for having had a fever yesterday. We had a really nice time.  The wonderfully paradoxical thing about this 24-hour-fever-free rule at the daycare is that infants rarely have fevers that last for more than a couple hours (if treated promptly […]

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There’s been a lot in the news for the last couple years about how being married or otherwise socially engaged is good for one’s health.  Without reading the stories very closely, I’d always assumed that the constant stress of a relationship helped condition the heart and other vital organs.  Turns out I was wrong.  People […]

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Ava’s building quite a little library for herself. She must have close to 100 books already, and she can’t even read on her own. A lot of her books are ones that I had when I was a kid. Where the Wild Things Are. The Giving Tree. The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Blueberries for Sal. The […]

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What is it about them, anyway? They’re all so clean and white and have the same pictures on the walls and the same countertops and cupboards and everything else.

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Ava seems to be doing a bit better today, though she spiked a fairly high fever last night.  This is when it really gets rough to have her in bed with us.  It’s not necessarily that we want her in bed with us, but since she’s still breastfeeding, she tends to wake up at least […]

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After some futzing around, the photo gallery is now back online. I haven’t added any new pictures in a couple days, though I have been taking pictures. I’m thinking now that I’m going to archive all my photos on Flickr. This approach has a couple advantages. I have a pro account there (I jumped on […]

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Of the three hard disk drives I have sitting around running at any one time, the one I’m most worried about dying is the one that holds my photo archive. We had a thunderstorm last week that caused a power outage at the house.  Everything came back up just fine, except for the drive that […]

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As regular readers know (if there are any out there), I was hoping for good weather this past weekend for a bike ride I’d been planning on for months.  Well, I got what I wanted, sort of.  Saturday morning broke clear, a little breezy, and HOT.  Really hot.  Like, stay-inside-and-close-all-the-shades hot.  But I’ve never been […]

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Leah and I got a babysitter last night and went out to dinner. It was really nice, after some initial turbulence. Our meals were good, and it was half-price wine night where we dined, so we got a nice bottle for not a lot of money.

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I have outdoor plans this weekend.  It’s an event I’ve been anticipating for a couple months now, so I’m hoping the weather pans out for Saturday.  As of right now, it’s supposed to be sunny and in the mid to upper 90s — perfect for a 30-mile bike ride to one of the state’s best […]

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I had to do some maintenance on the garden recently. My snap pea vines have grown much taller than the 3 feet advertised on the seed packet. It’s only mildly problematic. I took some of the long strips of redwood left over from my trellis project and wove them vertically through the chickenwire fence where […]

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Ava was off with Leah in Decorah this past weekend to have a girls weekend.  I missed them both. When I saw Ava on Sunday afternoon, there was something different about her.  She didn’t look any taller or heavier, but the way she moved and talked made her seem somehow…older, like a little girl instead […]

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It’s a good feeling to get everything done over a weekend that you’d hoped you’d get done going in. The weekend had a couple notable highlights. The first, not surprisingly, was the astounding meal we had on Saturday evening at Simone’s Plain and Simple. And “astounding” really isn’t much of an exaggeration. Between the gorgeous […]

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I try not to post too much stuff like this here in deference to my sister in law, who prefers all Ava all the time.  Hopefully she’ll be able to cut me some slack just this once. Via BoingBoing.

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Leah’s taking Ava to Decorah this afternoon for a girls weekend, so I’ll be on my own until Sunday afternoon.  What to do, what to do…. Tonight I’m going to have a little screening of International Blue Velvet, which is on loan from a friend.  I’ve never seen it before, and everyone I’ve ever heard […]

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Whenever I find myself talking with someone who’s thinking about having a first child, I’m never quite sure what to say.  I tend to be encouraging in a general way, because when it’s all said and done, I do believe having a child is a worthwhile pursuit and a net gain in the happiness column.

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