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We survived Science Olympiad

March 15, 2009 in Adults by T | 1 comment

Yesterday was Oregon’s state Science Olympiad competition — a science competition with many different types of events that the clever among you will note is very Olympic in nature — which J coached for the third year in a row for the school where she’s also a science teacher.

(Here’s where I catch my breath from the wreckless pace of this blog entry, what with the writing about events mere hours after the events transpired and all. What do I think this blog is, some sort of newspaper with fancy, fact-filled ledes? No, really this entry is less about describing our lives and more about shaming our friends with their new blogs but less-recent posts — less about information, more about competition, as it’s meant to be on the Internet.)

In any other year, this would be just another story about how J coached and I helped (occasionally even assistant-coaching) and the girls worked hard and so on. But those paying attention or otherwise in-the-know know that, in addition to coaching an award-winning team, J is also 37 weeks pregnant. And we’re moving into our new house next week. Oh, and J was also one of three people running this year’s Oregon Science Olympiad competition.

In short: [mild exclamation of your choice]! What were we thinking? What? Were we thinking?

Yes, well. I won’t say it hasn’t been one of the most stressful periods of our life together — indeed, while I usually consider myself a fairly laid-back kind of guy, I haven’t been this stressed since late college. Which is exciting, because perhaps it means that my time of stressful-college-nightmares-as-dreamworld-metaphor has come to an end, henceforth to be replaced by nightmares about hiring contractors, packing boxes, and working twelve hours at a science competition.

All of which sounds far too whiny. With the competition now over, and one fairly major item on our checklist now largely checked off (for simplicity’s sake, I will simply ignore any preparations needed after the competition … but more about that in the next entry), I’m already in “happy retrospective” mode vis-a-vis Science Olympiad: “It was all worth it, to see the team having competed and worked so hard!” And so on. Hopefully, the following weeks will see similar shifts in opinions about buying and moving into a new house, and the final days of pregnancy.

And while it can be trite, after a endeavor has been successfully completed, to thank God (I’m thinking here of the occasional televised award ceremony winner), I really can’t see how we could have made it this far without him. It’s easy enough to ignore his blessings when I feel in control of things, when I have a plan, when I know how everything is going to play out.

But in times like this, when I come home from a stressful time at work to a house that is full — but not yet full enough — of boxes and calendar full of activities that do not lend themselves to filling more boxes, not to mention the occasional, looming feeling that I am ill-prepared for my imminent parenthood and thus already a bad father … well, there’s precious little else to lean on besides God (and the blessings he puts in our lives, namely family and friends). At times like this, trusting merely in my own abilities leads me to lying awake two hours before I’m supposed to get up, quietly freaking out. And while I’ve certainly tried that approach a lot lately, it hasn’t generally been one I would dub successful.

Anyhow, that’s done. Phew. Thank God.

A moving story

February 22, 2009 in House by T | 3 comments

At one point, I thought of buying a house as a singular action — like buying, I don’t know, a piece of furniture. Sure, there was the house-hunting, which could take a while, but once you found the house you wanted, at some point after that, you’d clearly own the house.

And I guess there will yet be a point at which we can say, “We have a house now.” But that point is still off in the future.

And yet … we … have a house? Sort of? Or we will … in a week or two … have the keys to a house … which, many years from now … we will truly own, and not the bank … actually?

Mentally, of course, we already have the house. And given that the inspection is over and we’ve signed various Important Documents, we have very little legal recourse to back out at this point from the evental purchasing of this house. But someone(s) in a bank somewhere — I imagine it to be a tall grey monolith filled with short grey suits — needs to cross-reference something in a table on a computer, nod, and then sign something before they can buy the house for us and let us call it our own. Which is nice of them.

(I have to be nice to them, so they don’t revoke the comparatively low mortgage rate they’re giving us — given as much information as they take into account when processing a mortgage these days, I have no doubts that “Did they say something mean about us on their blog? [yes] [no]” appears on a screen somewhere in that tall grey building.)

Anyhow, I’m given to monolithic postings here — when I bother to post at all — and I have more to say on this house issue, but there’s the story for you. Of course, most of you already knew this, but hey.

We found a house. We close in a week and a half.

The winter of our Web content

December 23, 2008 in Adults, Weather by T | No comments

Since I last blogged about Portland’s winter storm, the snow and cold temperatures have continued (and continued), resulting in the longest spate of winter weather I’ve ever experienced.

I realize “bad winter weather” is all relative, and many from points north and east of here would scoff at what we’ve been going through. Still, you can’t argue with the effect the weather has had on Portland, shutting down various aspects of it because, well, we don’t get feet of snow very often!

Anyhow, things were actually looking pretty good through the end of last week, such that, while Julia was off every day due to school being canceled, I made it in to work along with everyone else in my office. This was mildly disappointing, not only in that I begrudged Julia’s ability to stay snuggled in a warm bed while I went off to work, but also because, after walking over the ice and snow and then hopping on a bus with chains, I was kind of hoping to find the office empty of less stalwart folks who weren’t nearly as brave as I’d obviously been. Turns out everybody who rides the bus was equally brave, which is to say that it wasn’t that brave after all.

They’d been forecasting bad weather over the weekend, so we weren’t surprised when the predicted snow hit Saturday morning. In fact, the heavy snow was charming in the way only that ironic things that you’ll later come to fear/loathe can be.

But all the nearby restaurants — or at least the ones within a shortened walking distance — were open, and I consider this a win for local businesses. The employees could walk or bus to work, and so could we. And boy, were we happy to see them open! Given that we were flying out on Monday (he said, ironically foreshadowing … perhaps), we hadn’t stocked up a lot of food at home, so our food options were a meal at Sckavone’s or Detour Cafe, or … whatever odds and ends just happened to be in our fridge or pantry, the true details of which I am too embarrassed to admit.

Anyhow, Saturday passed without problem. Julia went to a prenatal yoga class, we had lunch nearby, and then we went over to the Kunze’s for the night. Not the sort of stuff I’d usually blog about, except that every trip, every meal seemed exceptional, hard-won, a victory over the snow continuing to pile up outside.

Church was canceled Sunday morning, which was not at all surprising, but frankly a tad welcome, given the previous week’s adventure. With the extra free time, I engaged for only the second time in my life in shoveling the walk. After only a few minutes of this activity, I was glad I’d only done it twice so far — that is hard, aerobic activity. Nothing like sweating while cold! I was even feeling so charitable that I shoveled most of the neighbor’s sidewalk, too, though this was only marginally useful, given that most of our neighbors did not clear any snow away. Heck, I had to borrow one of our neighbors’ snow shovels just to do my bit.

Lacking any other plans besides sitting inside and looking at a computer screen, I decided to light a fire — another surprisingly rare activity in my life. In our house, the fireplace is somehow designed to completely fail to heat the room, so we only light them when it really suits the moment. Basically, it’s the thermal and visual equivalent of one of those fireplace DVDs.

We’ve never bought any firewood because whoever rented the house before us left a few dozen logs in the garage (along with other things — there were dishes in the dishwasher and clothes in the dryer; one wonders exactly how quickly she left and under what circumstances). There were also a few pieces of scrap wood which we used for kindling.

But, to be honest, one of the main reasons I wanted to light a fire was to destroy documents. See, we’ve had this ever-increasing collection of papers with sensitive data we’ve meant to shred for several years. At one point, it would have been manageable, but as it grew, it became obvious it was simply too much for our dinky shredder to complete in a reasonable amount of time.

Of course, why shred things when you can spend an hour balling them up and throwing them into the fireplace, I always say? With a soundtrack of Mussorgsky playing in the background, I felt legitimately sinister, as if I was nefariously destroying crucial evidence of my own malfeasance. In reality, I was burning tax documents from 1990, when I didn’t even have a job and hadn’t graduated from high school. If the IRS wants those, they can now piece them together from the copious amount of ashes in our fireplace. Along with too many credit card offers to mention.

And while Julia got no warming benefit from the fire, I, seated mere feet from the flames while I tossed paper wads in, found myself sweating for the second time that day. I sweated more on December 21st than possibly the whole month of November.

We woke up on Monday to see that even more snow had fallen, rendering the previous day’s shoveling largely undetectable, and the previous day’s shoveler a bit cynical about the whole process. “Well I’m not going to bother doing that again!” Everyone was trudging through the compacted snow of the street, anyhow, the sidewalks being slow-going due to the deep snow.

It’s not the most exciting story ever, but given the relatively historic nature of the weather, I wanted to have some documentation of it. Other, of course, than the hundreds of largely-white photographs I took, which I will inevitably upload to my Flickr account in, say, several months.

Winter wonderland, my (cold) foot!

December 18, 2008 in Adults, Weather by T | No comments

Since sometime last week, we’d been hearing about the forthcoming winter storm, due this past weekend.

Of course, living in Portland, there is no such thing as an uncapitalized winter storm. When you have generally mild (if damp) weather year-round, cold plus snow gives you, at a bare minimum, a Winter Storm. To hear the news folks tell of it, it yields more like a Winter Storm Death Blood-on-the-Ice Mayhem Catastrophe 2008 Snow-Zombie Apocalypse.

Now, I know you folks from more wintry climes are laughing at such hysteria, but deep down you’re jealous that we can freak out so easily about what is, to you, just normal winter weather. It just shows how nice it is here normally, so you “win” by having your weather be suckier. I happily concede.

Anyhow, by Saturday, things had gotten cold, but the forecast snow had yet to materialize. Not a surprise, of course — like I said, often the only thing blowing hard in winter is the weather talk. So when I woke up Sunday and peered out through the window condensation at the yard, only to see green grass*, I figured there was no reason not to drive to church.

However, while we were showering, dressing, and otherwise not looking, the snow suddenly launched a sneak attack. And how! Not merely coming down in the way where you have to look closely at a really dark tree for a few seconds — heck, not just coming down, but actually sticking and blanketing the streets in white!

Even in Portland, this isn’t that unusual. What was unusual was that I was considering driving in it. As little as we drive these days, my experience with driving in snow is pretty much near-zero — I may have driven once or twice while a few flakes were coming down, but without actually threatening to get between my tires and the road.

So I called our pastor, just to see what the story was out in Hillsboro (a suburb 15 miles or so to the west where our church is). As much as I enjoy our church, I was secretly hoping our pastor would say something like, “Are you crazy? Drive out here in this weather? Dear me, no!” Even though he doesn’t really talk like that — such is the power of winter weather. Or so I’d hoped.

Unfortunately, our pastor, like many Lutherans, spent quite a number of years out in die lutherische Mutterland, if you will, and as such had no apparent sympathy for a pair of native Texans looking fearfully at the falling snow. I believe his most comforting words were, “If it gets impassable or you start sliding, then turn around.” See, this is why I don’t talk to you people with experience in Midwest winters. If our car starts sliding, then owing to my Texas-bred inability to automotively deal with anything remotely slick, we will necessarily careen over a ledge and explode in a ball of flame — even if we are on a completely flat plain!

But the damage had been done. Namely, to my machismo. “It’s only snowing a bit — in fact, it had only started snowing recently, right? Snow itself isn’t so bad, right? It’s the ice that causes cars to crash and burn! I see no ice out there! We can do this with minimal automotive damage!” And so forth.

So it was that we ventured boldly out of the driveway. And, observing that we not only hadn’t died but hadn’t even hit any cars or trees, we kept on going. All the while muttering “I can do this” and “This is, of course, crazy” in equal measure.

Now, those of you who are familiar with Portland and its western suburbs know that to get from the former to the latter, one has to take Highway 26 over the West Hills, which entails a climb from near sea level to several hundred feet above sea level (the best estimate I could find was 400 feet). And while the West Hills are normally a pleasant spot, full of zoo animals, Japanese gardens, and the luridly well-to-do, in wintry times, they are also rather intimidating.

There’s nothing like snow to make you suddenly aware of your city’s topography. Not only does the snow become thicker (both in the air and on the ground) at higher altitudes, but that uphill drive you’ve done hundreds of times suddenly seems to be taking a much longer time than you remember.

Of course, in part, this was because we were driving a lot slower than normal, which I counted as a good thing. But then there was the general confusion of driving in the snow, which for me entailed following the relatively clear tracks made by previous cars. As opposed to any official notion of lanes, which had by apparent mutual agreement been abandoned by those on the highway. Every so often, I would catch a glimpse of the actual lane dividers in the tire tracks, though the two did not always run parallel.

Not that we had all lanes open to us. At the top of Sylvan Hill, there was more than one accident, with flares closing off the surrounding chunk of highway. In a way, I was thankful for those who had gone before, as they served as an suggestion to my fellow Portlanders to try and drive less foolishly — it has been noted that, in any wintry weather, it is Portland drivers’ stupidity that is the most dangerous element.

The view from west of Sylvan Hill, heading westbound; notice the very safe distance and speed!

And then, somehow, we arrived at church. Fifteen minutes late, but completely unscathed — even mentally. Who knew I was capable of such capable driving?

Indeed, on the journey back home from church, I was remarkably at ease. The human mind is a fantastically plastic machine, acclimating with incredible speed to different situations. Somehow, it seemed like I’d always been driving on white-covered roads, and adeptly, at that. “Ha ha!” I laughed at the dark gray clouds — not literally, as such, lest Julia think I was actually going snow-mad or whatever people do when it’s actually cold for long stretches of time.

Of course, scoffing at the weather is never a wise thing to do, even in mild Portland. So it was that, as we again neared Sylvan Hill, this time on the way home, we noticed the electronic highway sign that told us that chains were required in the Portland metro area.

Um. Well. That’s all well and good, of course, but we don’t actuall own any chains, you see. It’s sort of a matter of principle. If chains are required for driving, then I shouldn’t be driving in the first place! All very logical. Except for the part where I was somehow able to leave home without chains, only to be told I needed them to return.

At this point, we were left with several less-than-perfect options. We could exit the highway and hope to find a nearby store selling tire chains that happened to be open on Sunday while it was snowing enough to require chains. This one seemed pretty dubious from the start.

We could try to park somewhere that was both free and close to a public transit line, and come back at some later date once the snow had abated. However, given that the now-vindicated forecasters had called for up to a week of this weather, I wasn’t keen on the possibility of leaving my car in Beaverton for days on end.

This left, as best I could reason while still trying to drive safely, the option of driving back to Portland without chains and hoping for the best. Which presumably would involve minimal traffic tickets and/or death.

Rather than attempt again the relatively high altitude of Sylvan Hill that Highway 26 traverses, I decided to take the rather long way around, south on 217 and then back north on I-5. The only flaw in my plan was that, for whatever reason, I’d never actually driven this route in my life, and so I was unsure if, in fact, I’d be driving at lower — and therefore presumably less treacherous — altitudes. But my hunch seemed correct, and that’s as good as reality in these crazy postmodern times, right?

So yeah. We headed south, slowly, though safely. And then turned north onto I-5. Where we were again treated to electronic billboards alerting us to the need for chains, and possibly the certain death that awaited us if we ignored the part about the chains.

Okay, not really, but do you remember that scene in Close Encounters of the Third Kind where Roy Neary is driving closer and closer to Devil’s Tower, and the government has spread false reports of a nerve gas spill, so people are evacuating? And even though Roy thinks the spill is a fake, it seems very ominous as he continues on, passing dead animals and such? Well, we kind of felt like that. Nearly everyone had pulled over to the side of the road to put on chains. And there we were, passing them all while chainless. It certainly felt ominous.

And then, somehow, we made it back to downtown Portland, none the worse for wear, except for possibly a tense back on my part. I’d decided to avoid taking the Marquam or Ross Island bridges across the Willamette, since they both went a bit high for me to be comfortable driving on them in the cold and snow. Not that any bridge sounded like a good idea, but at least the Hawthorne could reasonably claim that it wasn’t at a higher altitude than any other surface street — any ice-inspired swerve and subsequent plunge off of it would be mercifully short.

Division Street, where bad drivers go to play

Interestingly, it was in this final stretch of our trip on the surface roads that we saw some of the worst driving. I was heading down Division, behind a pick-up truck whose driver would accelerate so fast after coming to a stop that it would fish-tail. And he either thought that was really fun or he was too stupid to learn from his mistake, because I watched him over-accelerate and then fish-tail six times. I found myself yelling at him, “Idiot! I’m a native Texan and I know how to drive better in this than you!” Not that he could hear me over the squealing of his tires.

Anyhow, we made it home, where I plan on keeping the car in the driveway until there is no sign whatsoever of anything remotely frozen** on the roads.

*See? Our grass was green in December! You “our winters are so bad that half my friends died of exposure last week” types probably had your grass die sometime in October! However, I will actually concede that, in losing (which is to say winning) the Crappy Weather war, you have actually won this battle, as I hate our lawn and wish it was dead pretty much year-round. I have little interest in mowing the lawn in between the frequent winter rains.

**Yes, that’s right, I only plan on driving on molten roads, you chemistry nerds!

Ultrasonic baby boom

December 5, 2008 in Progeny by T | 6 comments

Last week, Julia and I went in for her 20-week ultrasound. I’d write more here up top, but it would only delay some people’s ability to get to the pictures quickly, so I’ll leave my yammering to the bottom, where it can be safely ignored. One note, though: you can click on the images below for a larger version, which I suppose is suitable for framing or printing onto coffee mugs.

Okay, maybe a little interstitial yammering between pictures. Now I know that baby photos are supposed to be cute and all (even if we all secretly know that babies don’t get really cute until a few months after they’ve been born — not my baby, of course, just everyone else’s). But frankly, this shot gives me the heebie-jeebies. All I can really make out is the eye. That soul-piercing, unblinking eye. Clearly, Grendel is staring at me and asking why I have dared to disturb his* peaceful slumber with these pestering ultrasounds. Is that his* pelvis over to the left, or is it shoulders? Okay, the more I type in this caption, the more weirded-out I get. Next picture.

Ah, that’s more like it. A nice, cute foot. Now, we’re no ultrasound experts, but Julia and I both thought this may have shown a little 20% bonus in the metatarsal region, if you will — that is, a sixth toe. Again, I’m no pedopodiatrist. And what if he** does have a few extra li’l piggies? Like they say, “as long as he has 10 fingers and 10+ toes, I’ll be happy.”

Now for the good stuff! He** clearly has inherited his* father’s monstrously large head, and as can be plainly seen, is the cutest child ever. And that’s not just my opinion. I asked the ultrasound technician if, in fact, this was the cutest baby she’d ever seen. Really, I did. “Yes,” she said. And ultrasound technicians cannot lie. It’s part of the Hippocratic Oath.

More of that profile you know you just can’t get enough of. Plus a nice shot of the spine. The spine was definitely one of the most obvious features in the whole process, which is often a confusing mess of static punctuated with adorable little motions. His* mouth is open, apparently saying some sort of “ah” sound, perhaps the word “Mozart”.

I’m starting Grendel’s musical education as early as possible, with strict emphasis on the Classical period. Which is why I was horrified one day to walk in on Julia listening to Debussy. “No child of mine,” I said, “is going to grow up thinking this Impressionist cacophony is ‘music’. If you want him* to grow up to be anything but a mouth-breather, we must play Mozart!” Okay, I’m lying to make these captions more interesting. If we ever become parents like that, please slap us.

Go on, Grendel, stretch it out! Clearly, our little genius has been learning a little yoga of his* own while Julia’s been at prenatal-yoga classes. I fully expect him* to be born being able to touch his* toes with ease. Fine, all babies can easily touch their toes, but ours will do so with grace and panache. No matter how many toes he** has.

I saved my favorite for last. For while — as my friends Aaron and Morgan noted about their own ultrasound — Grendel does bear a passing resemblance to Skeletor, he** is also clearly waving, as if to say, “Y’all come back now, hear?” Grendel being the progeny of two native Texans, it is not unexpected that he** would phrase it thus, and it should be seen as a sign of his* mastery of multiple dialects instead of a product of poor grammatical education. And if it is the latter, I blame Debussy.

And now, some notes from a nerd father. Have you read the book Flatland? It’s an 1884 novella that both satirizes Victorian culture and explains dimensions (i.e. 2-D, 3-D) with surprising clarity. I know, most of you are long gone now — “Ooh, geometry and Victorian satire? I’m done reading this entry.” Go on, then. Perhaps you’d prefer to listen to Clair de Lune?

Anyhow, the story largely takes place in a two-dimensional world (that is, Flatland) inhabited by various shapes. At some point, a sphere comes along and introduces one of the denizens of Flatland to Spaceland — that is, the three-dimensional world that contains Flatland, but is, of course, much taller.

Now if you’re not very good at visualizing such things, you may want to find a copy of the book to read for yourself, as it is good at explaining them. But you may be able to imagine how odd a sphere would be in a 2-D world. As it passes through the plane of Flatland, it starts off as a point, then becomes a small circle, which grows larger and then smaller, and then back to a point. All of which is naturally unnerving to a Flatlander, as the sphere appears to come from and go to nowhere while passing through. Not only that, but the sphere can see the inside of everything in Flatland, including its people.

Anyhow, all of this came to mind as I was watching Julia’s ultrasound. Because the device ultimately displays a 2-D slice of Julia’s uterus, and this is what you see above. Of course, Julia’s uterus (and the child therein) is three-dimensional, so as Grendel moved around (or as the operator moved the wand), you would in effect see him* passing through this plane, often creating unsettling images.

For, just as the operator had arranged things so that we were peering at Grendel’s face, he** would lurch forward, and we’d be staring at the inside of his* brain. Needless to say, this doesn’t happen in normal life. In fact, God willing, that will be the only time I stare inside his* or anybody else’s head.

So that’s what was on my mind while I was peering into Grendel’s.

*Or her, whatever. Don’t make me type his/her everywhere.

**Or she. Again, pronominal precision at this point is just frustrating.

Realty, really

November 2, 2008 in House by T | 3 comments

So Julia and I are looking for a house, again. (To buy, that is — if we just wanted to find one to admire from across the street, we’d already be set.)

We tried this house-hunting routine in 2005, in order to have a place to move into after we got married. That didn’t work out so well. The house part, that is. The marriage is fine, thanks.

Back in 2005, people in Portland were, as they say in the real estate business, bat-freaking insane. We’d find out about a house in the morning, race over to see it in the afternoon, and have to decide instantly whether we wanted the house or not. If so, we’d race down to the nearest coffee shop to fill out the 700 forms necessary to make an offer.

Because of the irrational exuberance then in vogue, we would offer something like $10,000 over the asking price of the house, only to be told a few days later that ours was one of the lowest offers and had been rejected. Over and over. I think we made five offers before giving up. I think the other, winning offers may have included firstborn children.

At the time, it was a grueling process, visiting dozens upon dozens of houses, and signing my name more than I had done cumulatively to that point in my life.

But, as so often is discernible only when looking back on things, it was a blessing to not have found a house in that market. To all those whose bids trumped ours, I have this to say: suckers. Of course, you’ve probably all defaulted on your mortgages, anyhow. Jerks.

But things have calmed down since then — if not in terms of prices, then at least in terms of sheer insanity. And with a wee one on the way, I feel it is our turn to be the suckers/jerks.

Of course, having only recently started looking at houses, there isn’t a lot to report. We certainly haven’t yet found the perfect house, but signs are promising.

But the real reason I started this entry was to let you in on one of our little inside jokes. Now you, too, can revel in the hilarity that is the Stadler humor inner sanctum. (?)

You see, back in 2005, we had a realtor who, while very nice, pronounced the key term of her profession in a way that is a pet peeve of mine.

She would say the word “realty” as “REE-lit-ee” and refer to herself as a “REE-lit-ur”. I know, I know, I’m nitpicking. But it did seem odd, given how key that word is to being a real estate agent.

So it was that when we first met with our agent this time (a different guy), and he asked us if we had any more questions, I actually quizzed him on the pronunciation of these terms. He passed with flying colors, which clearly augurs well for our house hunt this time. (?)

And now, our inside joke. I have often said (with no seriousness whatsoever) that I wanted to open my own real estate agency, named King Realty. And the agency’s slogan would be: “At King Realty, we treat you like royalty!” (You can imagine your own insipid, yet catchy, tune to go with it, something along the lines of a jingle you might hear for a mattress commercial on daytime TV.)

The joke being in the pronunciation, of course: “At King REE-lit-ee, we treat you like ROY-lit-ee!” It still makes me giggle. Me, Julia, and, like, no one else, I’d guess.

Time for T

October 21, 2008 in Adults by T | 2 comments

It’s easy to forget, but this blog is about all of the Stadlers, and not just any wee ones who may happen to be inside other, larger, cuter members of the family. As such, allow me a post about myself.

As you are only all-too-aware if you’re reading this blog, I can ramble and really prolong the resolution to any story I tell, so here’s the ending: I’m fine. Really.

But I woke up around 2am Sunday morning. I’m not sure why, but I was very aware of my heart beating.

This is not unusual for me — several years ago, I went to the hospital because my heart seemed to be racing very fast and getting faster. They ran several tests on me and came to the conclusion that, while I had experienced “mild tachycardia” (an elevated heart rate), there was nothing wrong with me, and heart palpitations (where you become aware of your own heart beating without having to take your pulse) aren’t necessarily anything to worry about, the fear of dying notwithstanding.

In fact, the only thing from that experience I did have to worry about was the bill from the ambulance ride. So that’s two things I learned: don’t freak out about heart palpitations, and don’t ever ride in an ambulance unless you really think you’re not going to survive a ride to the hospital (not that I was at all sure of that at the time — heart issues are like that). It would have been cheaper for me and several of my friends to each take a stretch SUV to the hospital! And then I would have had access to a minibar!

So when I woke up in the middle of the night a few months ago (yes, I still haven’t gotten back to the near present in this story), aware of my heart beating faster than might be expected for a body that had until recently been lying in bed and sleeping, I thought it was odd but didn’t do anything about it. True, my skin, especially on my feet, was clammy, and after some time I began to shiver as if I were quite cold (which I wasn’t), and yet it felt like palpitations again. I was convinced they would soon pass, although I ended up losing a lot of sleep that night. But nothing came of it.

So what was happening early Sunday morning seemed remarkably similar to that night a few months ago. My heart rate seemed high, though only inasmuch as I expected it to be a slow, sleeping one. Eventually, along came the clammy skin and the shivers, too. I know, it may sound scary, and it definitely was to me — all the moreso at three in the morning.

My shivering woke Julia up, and she encouraged me to call the advice nurse. This seemed like a good idea, and I was glad that line is open 24 hours. Not that the nurse had a lot to say to me after I described my symptoms. She told me to be alert for a truly high heart rate or any skipped beats, but other than that, it didn’t sound like anything to worry about.

Of course, I had my own second opinion on that matter, but it was hard to deny that there was a negative feedback loop working here. Everything seems more scary in the middle of the night — knocks on the door, phone calls, and suddenly being aware of your heart beating faster than you’d expected. This, in turn, certainly caused me to worry, which seemed to be verging on panic at times. And at 3am, there wasn’t a whole lot to calm me down.

I tried going back to sleep, but I couldn’t. Around 4am, I actually felt pretty calm, though perfectly awake, and I considered just getting up and doing some reading, just to pass the time. But I was more interested in getting some sleep, not that I was terribly successful at it. I remember being mostly awake, punctuated by short bursts of near-sleep, until about 6am, at which point I guess I finally started dozing.

On waking up at 7:30am for church, I expected to be tired, but with the night’s episode otherwise behind me. Not so. Something was still amiss, with my heart still not calmed down, and what’s more, the beat was not the steady four-four rhythm I’d come to expect as a trained drummer. It was going one, two, three, four, pause … one, two three, four, pause.

If I’d been relatively calm when I woke up, I nevertheless lost it after that. Maybe it’s that I’m blessed to have led a rather healthy life to date, but it seems to me that heart problems are an order of magnitude more frightening than the gastrointestinal yuckiness I would otherwise consider my worst illnesses in recent memory. With stomach ailments, the motif seems to be that “this, too, shall pass.” But with my heart seemingly against me, I felt peculiarly helpless.

So we changed plans and headed to the hospital. We live rather close to the hospital associated with my insurance provider, which is nice — not that it made those red lights feel any faster. Upon arriving, there was the question of whether this was, in fact, an emergency or not. I may have been freaking out bodily, but mentally, I still didn’t want to impose too much. You know, hate to be a bother. As it happened, the lady at the information desk pointed out that “urgent care” was at a different address and not open on Sundays, anyhow — causing me to wonder, momentarily, how “urgent” things could be there — so off to the emergency room it was.

Upon explaining my symptoms to the lady at the desk there, I began to feel more and more like a fake. I mean, I walked in on my own power, and was able to describe my symptoms myself (“Any shortness of breath?” “Well, I am freaking out right now, so … maybe?”) — how much of an emergency could this be? This was emphasized all the more by my being asked to sit down and wait for the plastic object they gave me to buzz. Wait, is this actually a Chili’s? Will I get seasoned fries at the end of it all?

Anyhow, soon enough, I found myself, for the second time in my life, hooked up to various monitors via sticky pads and a clip on my index finger. And as uncomfortable and unwelcoming as the whole situation was, I couldn’t help but feel reassured that, if my heart was in fact freaking out on me (and not merely freaking me out), there were few better places for it to do so.

Which, of course, is why I probably started to calm down for the first time since I’d woken up a few hours earlier. This probably helps to explain why there were no skipped beats observed by anybody at the hospital (though I am glad that Julia had confirmed them for me, so as to rule out my being a complete hypochondriac).

The staff were all amazingly nice, and I was impressed by how long the doctor who eventually saw me took to explain everything to me. Though I wasn’t sure if he was exceedingly thorough or just chatty, given that there was little chance I was going to understand everything he was saying in unabashed medical jargon.

Still, here’s what I learned from this experience: first, as I learned several years ago, your heart rate usually has to be impressively fast for it to be considered a problem. Second, I learned the name for the symptom that finally convinced me to go to the hospital: premature ventricular contractions. Sounds serious enough, doesn’t it? And yet, they so often fall into the category of “not serious and don’t require treatment”, as the discharge instructions they gave me say.

As for the clammy skin and shivering? That’s how your body reacts to excess adrenaline. It probably doesn’t seem so odd when you’re, say, running away, or taking a test. But in the middle of the night, your body still has to get rid of the stuff. My doctor pointed out that such side effects are also what meth users experience, though presumably, they enjoy it. (Memo to self: do not take up meth habit.)

I don’t know whether I’m happier or not knowing that these things that seem scary are probably nothing. Part of me wanted them to find something wrong so that they could then, in turn, fix it. With a diagnosis of “you seem fine” — my emotions notwithstanding — I’m left to contemplate the (slim) possibility that something is wrong, but they just didn’t find it. And yet, that’s what I thought several years ago, and in the intervening time I’ve hiked up some serious mountains and generally lived a medically uninteresting life.

I’ll schedule an appointment with my regular doctor, just to be sure, but there you go. Of course, being discharged with a clean bill of health didn’t make me magically less aware of my heartbeat in the succeeding days. I’m still attuned to it right now. I just have to learn to ignore it, since it’s ever so normal. But how odd is it that, merely by suspecting in the middle of the night that something seemed amiss, I could create a feedback loop that eventually made it seem something truly was?

Perhaps, then, it was good that I happened to read this Bible passage at an eminently normal breakfast, after being released from the hospital (from the fourth chapter of Paul’s letter to the Philippians):

Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

I especially liked that part about guarding my heart.

Cliches of future past

October 8, 2008 in Progeny by T | 2 comments

Since the dawn of time, mankind has sought to see into the future, to know what will be.

Of course, in the past, this largely consisted of people, all named Og, making guesses about whether a given rock, if let go, would in fact fall to the ground. Modern physics largely put to rest these raucous, prognosticative debates.

But that was then. This is now, more than ever, and nowadays, increasingly advanced microprocessors (the brains of the computer), with wires only a dozen nanometers thick¹, enable us to make increasingly more precise, detailed, and, frankly, freaky predictions about the future.

It was this power I wished to harness when I took our baby’s ultrasound image to the Advanced Prognosticative Imaging Lab at the hospital. “Doctor,” I said, “my child — what of his or her future?”

“Easy,” he said, fiddling with some dials and presenting me with this image:

A projection of our child's future, as a be-antlered fetus.

Whoops! Turns out, the doctor had made a few incorrect settings, accidentally predicting only the very near future for our child, and possibly having the wrong setting for the “species” button. Not sure. But after a few more minutes of flipping switches, he arrived at this computer-simulated age progression for our child (unfortunately, the simulatrix cannot predict gender, so I had him click the button for “boy”):

Isn’t technology something?

In other news, I’ve now been an uncle for a year, possibly more (depending on when you read this and in what hemisphere — I believe in Australia it is a Sunday). And yet, rather than celebrate my accomplishments as the brother-in-law of the child’s mother, most of the celebrations thus far seem focused on my nephew. Fine. But has he demonstrated this level of Photoshop prowess, I ask? Nevertheless, a happy birthday to young David.

Oh, and those wishing to download an entirely different ultrasound image than the one I posted last time may enjoy this entirely antler-free scan.

¹That is, one ten-thousandth the width of a human hair, or one-hundredth the width of mitochondria²
²Known as the “powerhouses of the cell”

The winds of change

September 29, 2008 in Progeny by T | 8 comments

Medical technology is amazing. J went to the doctor a few weeks ago and came home with what appears to be some sort of radar image, presumably some sort of personalized micro-forecast of her own weather for the next few months:

"Tropical storm 'Grendel'" as seen from some sort of radar image

Now, I’m no meteorologist, so I have no idea what this is all about. But given that there appears to be a small weather system inside J, it may explain why she was feeling a bit odd for the past few months.

Those of you who know more than I do about this subject may feel free to consult a larger version of the image above, free of the colorful overlays, for your own meteorological consulation.