05.30.01

Spent some time re-working my .emacs and my .gnus files. Thanks go to Charlie for pointing out a couple of errors in my Gnus setup. I now have a fully functional email client in Emacs!!

Ronan had his thyroid tested yesterday (the Dr saw some elevated levels of something from one of the hospital tests and wanted to do a follow-up). Today Ronan had to have his kidneys checked because the ultrasounds showed a bit of fluid in one. Well, not the best news here. It looks like he has some sort of urinary reflux causing him to get a bit “backed-up”. One of Faith’s friend’s children had the same thing and she said that it is something that they almost always outgrow. We just have to be cautious of urinary-tract infections for a couple of years.

05.29.01

My first day back at work and what a day it’s been! Not only did I have to leave Faith at home with all the children (with which she is doing quite well!) but I spent most of the morning catching up on over two hundred e-mails and putting out fires and oh yes, halfway through everything, on of the I.S. departments Metaframe servers crashed and I was no longer able to access my M$ Exchange email. Well, after my pro-M$ rant yesterday, I felt it only just to balance the scales…I set my mind to configuring Emacs to use the Gnus newsreader to retrieve my mail from the exchange server. I know I’ve fought this battle before (and lost), but now that it’s configured (and working) I just can’t imagine what my problem was before… This was almost too easy to set up. Granted, I have a way to go with splitting my mail into different groups, and all the nifty things that Gnus can do for me, but at least I am on my way!

05.28.01

I put a temporary twins page in place of the old one and posted a few of the new pictures as well as some AVI vid clips. In order to save some disk space at my hosting company, I decided to put the avi’s on my ISP’s server. Unfortunately, it looks like they have implemented disk quotas and I went over my limit there with the video files so they were removed. All but the video of Keenan will need to be reloaded once I find a bit more space to hold them.

Paul has finally taken the giant stride into the twentieth century now that he has e-mail!!! He sent a rather noteworthy e-mail in response to the birth of the twins and in particular had this to say about Ronan (who was born breech):
I see that Ronan had a statement for everybody upon his arrival……
“HERE I AM WORLD…YOU CAN KISS MY BUTT!!!”
Yes, that would be another infamous “Brahlerism”!
Brahlerism: def. One of many pithy quotes coming from Mr. Brahler.

The twins are doing wonderful at home. Last night was a bit rough, though. We managed to overstimulate them and get them off their schedule. Wow. I don’t want to do that again! I was able to get to sleep around 3:00am, poor Faith only slept for a few minutes at a time throughout the night. With the help of a book called “The Baby Whisperer” by Tracey Hogg, we have made great strides in our understanding of why the babies are behaving the way they are. According to the book, we have to remember that since they were born premature (by seven weeks) they still need to have their environment as close to womb-like (no bright light, very quiet, NO disturbances ) as possible. Yesterday, we had the TV on in the bedroom, the lights were up, we were constantly holding and playing with the babies- all of which is definately NOT conducive to a womb-like atmosphere! Once we realized this (Faith read the chapter on preemies from 2:30am to 3:00am) Faith fed the boys and then swaddled them. Lo and behold! they pretty much went right back to sleep and now are pretty much back on the correct schedule.

Ronan and Keenan are on a three hour feeding schedule which does not leave much time for sleep (or anything else for that matter) I managed to take three days off last week so I could help get things under control here ::insert snide chortle here:: before I go back to work tomorrow. Faith’s friend Connie should be here tomorrow to help while I am at work, but I may take another day or two just to be on the safe side.

On a completely different note, I have finally won an auction on Ebay! That is, of course, because I took advantage of someone’s “Buy it Now” option and didn’t bother with the whole bidding thing. I found a rather nice, modestly priced HP 360LX handheld PC that with luck will be arriving later this week. I am anxiously awaiting my new toy! (I have already found two different versions of Emacs that is supposed to run on windowsCE)

Speaking of Mr Gates’ empire, as everyone who knows me will attest, I am not overly fond of using, promoting or otherwise mentioning ANY Micro$oft product. Until now. I have been minding my finances electronically for several years now, using an old copy of MS Money. Being the anti-Gates zealot that I am constantly being accused of, I desperately wanted to find a better financial software package. Well, Quicken is as good as it gets, at least in the eyes of several of my peers. Three words for my peers: you are wrong. At the end of last year, I switched over to Quicken from Money. Since I always use Turbo Tax to do my taxes, (and I will continue to do so as it IS the superior Tax software) I purchased the Quicken Suite which includes Quicken, Turbo Tax and some sort of Legal forms thingie that crashes every time I try to open it. Well, as I mentioned before, Turbo Tax worked flawlessly and I filed my taxes and received my refund long before I gave up on trying to utilize Quicken. Not only is the interface completely boggling to all but those too blinded to try something else, the blasted package mangled my accounts by occasionally downloading payments more than once. (at one point, Quicken claimed that I was approx $8000.00 in the hole!!! ) This was the final straw- after all, I can work with a poor GUI (I’ve been running MS Windows on one of my boxes at home for some time, and I manage with that!) but not being able to rely on the data that was presented, that I cannot abide! So instead of reverting to my old, tried and true version of MS Money, I upgraded to the latest version. Installation was a snap, electronic payments are intuitive, reconciliations are simple. The whole product just proves that there are different groups of people in Redmond who just don’t seem to talk to one another. (Bill, are you listening, this is the only time I will ever say this:) Microsoft has by far the superior product! (stop laughing, Mark).

05.23.01

Today is the day! The twins are finally home! I had planned on finding the right screws to finish the crib this morning, but Faith called and I realized that she didn’t have any breakfast! So as soon as I got Logan off to school, I jumped in the car and headed to McDonald’s to get her the big breakfast. I figured that I could drop off breakfast, head to the hardware store to get the screws for the crib, get home, put it together and then head back up to the hospital in time to bring everyone home. Well, things just didn’t quite work out that way… I ended up staying with Faith and the boys until it was time to come home. Keenan and Ronan got their pictures taken before we left (soon to be posted on the twins page, I promise!) and then about noon, we headed home.

What an absolutely joyous gift we have in these boys! It is so wonderful to have them home! As we were driving home it finally sank in: We have children!

05.22.01

Left work a bit early today to try and get a few last minute things ready for when the twins come home tomorrow. Faith is going to spend the night at the hospital with the boys staying in her room. This will be a good opportunity to spend time with them and still have the support of the nursing staff at St. Luke’s. ( I just can’t speak highly enough about the all of the nurses that we encountered over the past several weeks- ) Before we left for the hospital I started to put the cribs together that we have had stored over at my mom and dad’s house. The problem with storing things for nearly ten years is that invariably pieces turn out to be missing. In the case of the first crib, this was somewhat obvious as the missing piece was the rails that hold one side together. No big deal, we have two cribs and the boys will be staying in the same crib for some time anyway. So I put the second crib together only to find that I was missing a couple of the more necessary screws. Argh. Oh well, I will just have to fix that in the morning before I go pick up everyone from the hospital. So, with visions of buying new cribs, we set of to St Luke’s to get Faith all settled with the twins and then Logan and I went to Babies-R-Us to look at new cribs. I don’t mind using one of our old cribs if I can get the right parts for it, but it would be really nice to have brand new furniture for Keenan and Ronan.
05.21.01
Good News!!! It looks like the boys will get to come home either Wednesday or Thursday of this week!! It turns out that yesterday, Ronan pulled out his feeding tube (again!), this time they decided to leave it out and see how he does without it. It seems he is doing well, so they went ahead and removed Keenan’s as well. We will know more tomorrow, but it looks as if they are finally coming home!
05.20.01
The twins are seemingly doing well. The doctors just won’t give us a time-frame as to when they may be coming home.

Saturday morning, Logan and a few of his friends were playing in the backyard, once again attempting to build a lean-to shanty/fort to play in. Logan asked to borrow a hammer and maybe a couple of nails (”Don’t worry Dad, we won’t nail anything to the tree”…), so I volunteered to give them a little help. A half an hour later with a few cuts from my circular saw and some drywall screws, we christened the new structure “Fort Dragon” It’s a smallish four wall, free-standing fort with a name-plate and a place for the fort’s banner (which the children are in the midst of designing) No roof yet, that will go on either later this week or next weekend.

Matt has the nicest things to say….

Amber has kindly pointed out that I had mis-typed the link to her site. I have made the appropriate adjustments.

05.16.01

Visited Keenan and Ronan at the hospital on my lunch hour. Ronan was fast asleep, but Keenan had just eaten, so I sat and held him for about thirty minutes before I had to go back to work. There is another baby in the NICU (neonatal intensive care unit) that arrived a couple of days after our boys, and he gets to go home tomorrow. I am really ready for the twins to come home. I know that they need to be in the NICU for a while, and that it’s the best place for them, but it just doesn’t feel right without them at home.

Last night I downloaded the demo to Age of Empires II for Logan. He and I transferred across the home lan and installed it on his pc. Wow! It looks like a really cool, historically-based game (in the first campaign, you play William Wallace and try to defeat Longshanks) After going through the start-up screens, the game switches from 800×600 to 1024×768 (the default for the demo) Unfortunately, Logan’s monitor/video card doesn’t seem to support the higher res. We tried quite a few tricks to get it to work (the vidcard is a Diamond Stealth 16meg card, so I’m reasonably sure the card supports the resolution ) The monitor is a rather old 14in VGA monitor. (it was my original monitor that I purchased with my 386DX25 from A-Z -ahhh, the good old days!) So I guess we will try swapping out monitors tonight, although I don’t think we’ll have much time since we need to start moving books and knick-knacks to prepare for the new carpet tomorrow.

Thanks to Tracey for the mention on her webpage and to Amber for the kind words she sent.

05.15.01

The twins are doing well, gaining weight and beginning to feed from the bottle and Mom (instead of the feeding tubes). Once they are completely off the feeding tubes, they should be able to come home. It is very strange not having Ronan and Keenan home with us. Hopefully I won’t have to get used to this situation and the boys will be home where they belong.

After reading about Charlie’s carpet escapades, I am glad that we will have ours installed for us. The installers should begin on Thursday morning to recarpet the whole house. They are supposed to move the furniture and everything, but we are supposed to empty the bookshelves and disassemble the bedframes. I guess that’s a fair trade for having someone else do all the other work.

As you can see (if you load this from www.Xionic.Net) I have once again re-worked the layout here. This page is kind of like the weather here in St. Louis- if you don’t like it, wait a minute, it’ll change! I like to try different layouts, coding techniques, etc… and this is where I try them out. Feedback is always appreciated!

Added links to my web logs as well as some statistical info provided by my host.

05.13.01

05.13.01
The babies have arrived!!!! At 7:49pm on May 6th, (one week ago tonight) Keenan Jeffrey came into the world! Twenty four minutes later at 8:13pm, his brother, Ronan Jeffrey followed suit! Keenan weighed in at 4 lbs 2.4 oz and 17 1/2 inches long. Ronan weighed in at 4 lbs 5.8 oz and 18 1/2 inches long. They arrived nearly seven weeks early, but they are doing great! It has been a full week now, Mom has come home and the boys will be coming home soon. They are absolutely beautiful! (don’t take my word for it, check out the pictures) Faith has been keeping a daily journal that will be posted on the twins page shortly. There are many more pictures that will also be posted shortly. If I can manage to edit some video, I will also post a couple of video clips of the boys.

So, the whole story. Faith had been experiencing some high blood pressure as well as a few other symptoms that lead her physician to believe that she was suffering from preeclampsia (sp?) This is a rather serious condition that occurs with some pregnant women with the only cure being delivery. On April 27th, Faith visited the doctor and was promptly placed in the hospital for observation. Due to the preeclampsia, there was a possibility that the doctors would have to take the babies early. In preparation for this, Faith was given a shot of steriods to help develop the babies’ lungs and intestines. However, after two days of observation Faith was allowed to come home on Sunday. About 2am the next morning, She found it very hard to breathe. We rushed back to the hospital to find that a side effect of the steriods and/or the preeclampsia caused her lungs to fill up with fluid. Not a good situation. After a couple of doses of lisix (a diuretic), her breathing improved dramatically. She stayed the night and came back home on Tuesday afternoon. Friday was another doctor’s appointment, and once again she was promptly admitted to the hospital. This time, however, Dr Durer said she would not be getting out until the babies came. Saturday morning they began to administer pitocin to help induce labor. By Sunday afternoon, we needed to make a decision whether or not to have the babies delivered by cesarean. We decided that we would wait a few more hours and see what would happen. Those few hours proved to be just what we needed. At 3:30pm, Faith was dilated to only one centimeter. By 6:45pm she had progressed to four (the contractions were getting longer and more intense). Since she had progressed this far, the doctor ordered the epidural to help block the pain. The anesthesiologist arrived in about five minutes and by 7:10, the epidural was in and beginning to take effect. The timing couldn’t have been closer. By 7:15, Faith was ready and began saying that it was time!!! We rushed into the maternity operating room where a support staff of about twenty people were waiting to assist. Keenan came right out, but over the weekend, Ronan had turned breech (his head was up, instead of down). The nurses spent about twenty minutes trying to get Ronan to turn around so that he could be delivered without a c-section. Ronan decided that he wanted to come into the world in his own way and so he actually came out bottom first! Even the doctor said he was quite surprised to see this! Ronan spent the first night with an oxygen tube to assist his breathing, but that was promptly removed the following day. They both lost a little weight about mid-week, but they have been slowly gaining it back ever since. As is customary, the whole immediate family was called as Faith went into “active” labor. As fast as we went to the O.R., there really wasn’t any time for anyone to get to the hospital, so you could imagine me surprise to find that my brother was in fact, already at the hospital! Apparently, he had a feeling, so he packed up his family and just headed to the hospital. By the time my mom had called him to let him know what was going on, he was already there.