The Post Nanowrimo World

(The Nanowrimo website is not allowing updates to word counts anymore, so I switched formats on my blog to allow me to add a word count widget so I will stay accountable towards my goal of 50k words on Peasant and Enjoyable (Working title for my book. Plot is kind of like Clerks meets Narnia). Let me know if the new format doesn't work for you!)

I love Nanowrimo, but as I predicted, I failed this year, but not for lack of trying. I doubled up my efforts early in the month with the hope of reaching 50k by November 25th (Cleo's initial arrival date) and despite getting massively sick and having a baby early, I still reached 30,000 words. I love the camaraderie of Wrimo, I love the challenge, and I love having that word count goal getting knocked out of the park every night.

The downside of Wrimo, though, is that I'm not sure how well it does with establishing healthy writing habits.

I believe this man was the winner.

Consider the Bicycle Commute Challenge I recently participated in. I bike to work nearly every day, about 4 out of every 5. During the BCC, though, you tracked your miles and frequency of biking for a month. So it became 5 days a week, regardless of weather or health. This was in the peak of fall soccer season, mind you, so I was playing 90 minute games on the weekend and, in order to keep my perfect commute record, I would bike from work to futsal, play 1-2 futsal games, then bike from futsal to home.

It wasn't a huge change for me, but four weeks of me pushing on regardless of what signs and hints my body gave me over the month was significant. I ended up with an injury at the end of the month. Thankfully it was only a small injury, but I ended up missing the last 4 days of the Commute Challenge and a soccer game.

What WAS concerning, though, was how long it took me to get back to biking 4 days a week!  For the entire month of October, I biked maybe 2 days a week. I had gone too far and burnt myself out. It wasn't until Cleo was born and I needed to go back to biking for financial reasons that I transitioned back to 4 days a week.

Not my problem if you can't type one-handed Dad.

So it has been with Wrimo. I was clocking about 2k words a day for early November. My goal currently is about 500 words per day.  Much more reasonable.  Much healthier and saner for me.

And damn near impossible lately!

Obviously there are constraints to writing with a newborn (that's a post for another day), but when I do find the time, it's harder to sit down to write. All that white space between writing sessions gets filled in with doubts and insecurities, too, so that it become harder to sit down again the next time.

Anyhow, I'm hoping that progress bar in the top right corner will help me keep going. Feel free to drop me a line if you see it hasn't moved in a while!

Cleo's Birth Part 3: Welcome to our World

A lot of guys say that after a pregnancy, your respect for your partner goes up through the roof, and I have to say I agree. H has never been a big one for discomfort and pain. When it comes to things like hiking or bike rides, H usually gets frustrated and quits when it comes time to "feel the burn", and I admit, I was worried about labor. There is no quitting or backing out when it comes to this and I was dreading what her reaction would be.

I didn't need to worry. She was magnificent.

There was an amazing toughness about her during this process and never once was there any of the crying or complaining I had secretly anticipated. Only steel resolve and strength. I don't think I've ever loved her more. (The downside for her is that when we go hiking or biking again, I know damn well how tough she really is and probably won't go so easy on her in the future!)

If the argument H and I had earlier in the night is one of the weaker moments in my life, I have to say that what comes next is one of the stronger ones for me. H was propped up in a way so that she could not see the monitors attached to her and Cleo. While I was holding her hand and looking into her eyes, coaching her in breathing and telling her how amazing she was, I was also able to see the monitors behind her.

And they were goddamn terrifying.

You see, Cleo had the cord wrapped around her neck. When H pushed, Cleo's heart rate would go down. Way down. Normal is 133 bpm. Cleo's heart rate would go down, down, down, to 30 bpm or lower (at one point, the sensors couldn't even detect a heartbeat for a few moments). Then it would struggle, wavering up, down, up and down and up again as it worked its way back up to 130 over the next few minutes. The docs had H skipping every other contraction due to this. They weren't saying anything concerning, but at one point a specialist was called in and I knew things were not right.

Watching that heart rate creep back up was terrifying, but H was looking right at me pushing past pain I couldn't comprehend with so much effort and courage! I couldn't let her see me freaking out about it. My only goal during this time was to make sure H felt supported and that she remained blissfully ignorant of how bad things were behind her.

To complicate matters, they put an oxygen mask on H to give Cleo help with recovery.  However, H was in a world of near aneurysm inducing pain and exertion where she wasn't completely rational. She didn't fully understand why the mask was on her and the pain and the effort of pushing would cause her to rip off the oxygen mask (H said it made her feel claustrophobic). After she was done pushing, I had to gently (sometimes firmly) place the mask back on H with her glaring at me as if I were a hooded torturer, all the while trying to remind myself to breathe as Cleo's little heart wavered back up to normal.

Two hours of this.

Then came the moment of truth. H would have one big push and the docs would have the opportunity to get the cord out of the way.

And suddenly there she was. My little girl's grimacing face, out in the world. Thankfully the docs moved quick, and the cord was off from around her neck. A few more pushes and she was free.

There was a partial cry. Then a few moments... and a full cry! With a squeak at the end of it when she sucked in breath! H was visibly overwhelmed with astonishment, saying "Oh my god!" over and over again as they put Cleo in her arms, tearful and and amazed. I cried. A lot. More than I ever have in my adult life.

Thankfully, despite the incident with the cord, she was completely healthy (Apgar of 9). I'm not sure about H, but due to the kidney issue, I was worried there could be more wrong with Cleo, and I was able to breathe easily now that I finally saw her and doctors pronounced her perfectly healthy.

And with a shaky hand, I cut the cord.

They whisked the little one off to the sink to wash her. Her cry and squeak continued, and I witnessed the act that will likely be my downfall in the years coming when I discipline her: her lower lip trembling as she cried. I still tear up thinking about that.

After the bath, I held her for the first time. I haven't held many babies in my life, and it was extremely awkward, but it was also amazing! I had never really wanted children until recently and was completely unprepared for the amount of love I felt. I thought I would grow to love her, but instead, it slammed into me, catching me completely off guard with its own uniqueness.

The sudden love for your child is a hard love to describe, but since this is a geek AND dad blog,  I'll try using the medium of Doctor Who.

In season 5 of the new series, Amy Pond has the memory of Rory, the love of her life, erased from her mind shortly after he dies. For the most part, she just continues on with her adventures with The Doctor, only occasionally feeling that there is something wrong with her life. But when  Rory is brought back to her and her memory comes back, she cannot even comprehend how she could have forgotten him!

That's how it felt for me with Cleo. Once she was here, I suddenly understood that there was a gigantic hole in my life that I had never, ever noticed before, but now that it was filled, I now can't imagine how I could have missed it for all these years!

A super geek comparison, but not really out of place. As I looked at her for the first time, alien eyes blinking and unused to light, lungs erratic as they begin to comprehend how to breathe a gas instead of a liquid, I was struck by how odd it is that something that is so incredibly ordinary about humans could be so sci fi! She is an amazing, life changing traveler from another reality that somehow always belonged in mine. And I cried again.

Welcome to our world my special little traveler! I promise I will do everything in my power to make your stay here the best it can be!

Cleo's Birth Part 2: At the Hospital

So after a disappointingly normal drive to labor and delivery, we got H checked in. She was apologizing to the midwife in advance for wasting her time (H still wasn't convinced she was REALLY in labor). That's when we were informed that H was 5 centimeters dilated! Judging by H's face, this was both validating and terrifying for her. We both shared nervous smiles during this time as they started the machine chugging along that would end with us having a baby. This was really happening!

We were escorted back to the delivery rooms. I knock on Kaiser a lot and I personally had a decidedly less than pleasant experience staying in H's recovery room for the following days, but the delivery rooms are quite pleasant. Kind of a dim, hardwood decor going on back there like you get in a really nice Starbucks.  H requested a laboring tub and they went about getting things prepped for her to do this. They set her up with an IV bag (Not fun. H has tiny veins and is always a hassle to even draw blood from, much less set up an IV), and we were shown into the tub room.

For those of you who haven't seen a laboring tub before, it looks pretty freaking nice. It's like half a hot tub, molded into an oval shape. For the next 5 hours, H would be in there, moving around and breathing. This was the first (but not the last) time this night I would be immensely impressed with H. Her pain level was very, very obviously high at this point, but she was doing her best to move past it. Finally, though, she asked for IV drugs.

The image of this will stick with me till the day I die. I'll try to paint a verbal picture of this.

I demand narcotics as Tribute!

H stood up from the tub as the nurse came in. Nine months pregnant, mostly naked except for a swath of cloth attached to her to hold the monitors in place, she emerged from the birthing tub like a goddess of the sea! Water cascading down her, her hand clutching her IV stand like a trident imbued to summon the Kraken lest you thwart her will, she requested her pain medication to be bestowed upon her as if she were decreeing it to her mortal attendants. IT WAS GLORIOUS!

What followed, unfortunately, was not as glorious. They gave her the IV meds, but also examined her and found that while earlier she had dilated to 8 centimeters, she had now stalled. The doctor brought up breaking H's water, but H declined. The IV drugs helped some, and H gave it another hour in the tub, but it was obvious the pain was breaking through. The time had come for an epidural.

It must be odd to be a hospital specialist. For you, this is just a day. For everyone else, this is major fucking stuff. So it was with the anesthesiologist. He was a good natured man who had worked up in Alaska, and upon finding out that H was from Alaska and that her mother had been in the same medical outreach program as him (decades earlier) he was really fascinated by this.

H, on the other hand, was preoccupied with the pain.

"So, how long did your mom work for them?" the anesthesiologist would say from behind H as he inserted a tube into my wife's spine. H would answer him politely, but from my perspective in front, she was positively feral, with wild darting eyes and teeth bared.  I hope I never see that expression from her in another circumstance because it will likely mean she is going to drop to all fours, grow fur, and savagely pounce on someone, incisors going for the jugular. Finally, the epidural was in place and the snarling creature turned once again back into my wife.

The good news was it was enough pain medication that H was able to sleep, meaning I was able to finally sleep too. She was the one in massive life changing pain, but I was still sick, downing Mucinex, Sudaphed, Ibuprofin, and cough drops continuously.  I had slept 2 hours out of the last 48 and was probably not in a great mental state myself as I crashed on the "dad couch" in the room.

The bad news, we found out later, was that the epidural had squashed the contractions down significantly. In fact, Hydee was now only dilated to 7 centimeters. They put her on close to an 8mg drip of Pictosin (synthetic oxytosin) to re-induce labor and left us to rest.

This was not good. The kid was not dropping into the right position. No one had ruled out the dreaded C section, yet the specter of it was lurking in the glances the med techs gave each other as they drifted in throughout the night to check on things.

As a guy, the whole "git it done" mentality is damn near imprinted into your head from birth. So in a situation where there is nothing for you to get done, it's hard to keep a lid on your frustrations. Throw in sleep deprivation and cold medicine and I was an emotional walking wound myself. Which is how we stumbled our way into the conversation.

The short of it is that I expressed some frustration about how she hadn't allowed the midwife to break her water yet. H countered that she wanted a non-invasive pregnancy, and I got huffy, saying that the epidural had already made it invasive and now we might be facing a Cesarean.

I immediately regretted it. I'm good in a crisis when there's action and had been a rock for her while she was in pain, but now that things were getting slow and ponderous (and I was still sick and sleep deprived), I was beginning to founder.

Thankfully, H tells me it did have an effect on her in a good way. We were able to back away from the volatility of it and have a calmer conversation. As H describes it, she had an ideal of how she wanted the pregnancy to go, and even though we were way off the map, she still was trying to force it back into her ideal image. With us finally talking about it, she realized that instead of trying to shoehorn things back into the plan she wanted, she was able to take her situation for what it was and move forward instead.

Call me superstitious, but I kind of wonder if that's what did it. When the nurse came to do what felt like the final check to see if they needed to start talking to us about a Cesarean, Cleo had dropped. They propped H up on her side, the epidural began to wear off, and the pushing began!

Part 3 coming soon!

Cleo's birth (Part 1): At Home

So on Tuesday, November 13th, I was sick.  Really sick. When I was in bed, I was burning hot, but if I moved the covers a fraction off of my chest, I started shaking.  That kind of sick. I had called in sick to work that day. I was too congested to breath when I would lay down, so I was trying to sleep on the couch when I got a call from H that evening.

"Hello?" I said.


"I may be going into labor tonight. They have me on a monitor. If the readings get more concerning they're just going to induce me."

"Who is dis?" I mumbled around blocked nasal passages.

"Funny. Can you pack the bag up for tonight?"  H and I were expecting the child on the 25th and since we were told that first pregnancies are usually late, I was expecting the child sometime in early December. The "pregnancy bag" consisted of a few halfhearted items thrown together into our travel bag. This is not the task I was hoping to take on at this time.

I'm not one to shirk husbandly duties, though, so between bouts of shivering where I would retreat to my fortress of blankets on the couch, I spent the next few hours packing the bag.  I remember thinking to myself, "Oh god, not tonight" as I planned out how I would take a taxi to the hospital since there was no way in hell I could drive.

When H called to say they were letting her go home and not inducing, I sighed with relief and collapsed onto the couch. The downside of the whole experience was that no matter how stressful that night was, I couldn't call in sick the next day. Once per year, my program does an extensive crisis in-service at the police training facilities. They break us up into partners as if we were going out onto calls and the supervisors take the worst calls and situations of the last year and act them out, seeing how we all react to these situations that were botched horribly the first time around.  It involves fake scenarios, real police officers, supervisors acting like crazed clients, and they are even staged in fake apartments and fake school rooms. You almost invariably fail but it's really about helping us learn about what we do wrong on calls and trying to correct our habits going forward.

It's our equivalent of the Kobayashi Maru.

Emma comforting H through the process

So I pumped myself full of cold medicine and stumbled through the day. Thankfully my assigned partner was awesome and did most of the heavy lifting and I was able to look halfway decent even though I felt halfway dead. It was a long, stressful day that completely drained me. However, when I got home and tried to sleep,  the congestion again thwarted my efforts at rest and at 11:30pm, I surrendered to a night propped up on the couch again. I drifted off and got about 2 blissful hours of sleep when I was gently shaken awake by my wife at about 2:30am on November 15th.

"I think I'm having contractions," she said.

"You think you are?"

"I don't know. I've never had them before. It feels like cramping, but it keeps coming and going."

I sighed and we fished out H's iPhone and pulled up a contraction timer app. It's a great little app that times between contractions, averages out the times over the past hour or so, and gives you a great idea of where you stand on the 5-1-1 situation.

That is, if you use it.

I love my wife dearly, but until we got an automatic rice maker, rice making was always a disaster in our house. She's a free spirit who doesn't like to be constrained by things like time and space; a sort of zen cook who goes by the feel of the cooking. This works MAGNIFICENTLY when she has recipes going on that demand her constant attention. However, if she is allowed to wander away from the kitchen and the recipe has several steps like stove top rice does (boil 5 minutes, cook 15 minutes, let stand 15 minutes), it becomes a very chancy thing. We have had everything from crunchy rice to a proto-tapioca to accompany our food, as well as a few unsalvageable pots and pans sent off to the dumpster to the sound of our smoke alarm going off.

It was very much like this with the timer. To be fair, I suppose she had other things on her mind. I attempted vigilant questioning to determine that the timer buttons were pushed at the appropriate times but being sick and sleep deprived made me a poor timekeeper and in the end, we didn't have a damn idea what the contractions were at.

"What have I gotten myself into?"

They started out light, and for the longest time H wasn't even sure she was having contractions.  The morning crept on, though, and as the hot showers became more and more frequent and the requests for hot water bottles came more often, we both knew it was getting up there. I took an opportunity to get snacks and stuff for the hospital from the store (not to mention gas up the car) and came back with plenty of time to spare.

At 2:30pm, she reached a new level of pain where the hot water bottles weren't helping. At 3:00pm, H decided to call labor and delivery. She still was somehow unsure that she was having real contractions, but L&D told her to come on in.

I was hoping we could be like the movies, where I would gun the Civic into the red and creep that speedometer up past levels it had never been to before, rocketing along I-205, cops motioning for me to pull over as I, in turn, motion to my screaming pregnant wife in the back seat. Then they pull ahead, sirens blaring to clear traffic for me as we race to the hospital. Sadly, the trip in was pretty anticlimactic but at least it was safe.

Part 2 coming soon!

Another Sigh of Relief

What. A. MONTH! It's been a while since I posted last due to a few factors:

Where are all the posts on me?

1) My daughter Cleo was born on 11-16-2012! I will be posting the birth story soon and massive amounts of pictures for the foreseeable future.

2) Nanowrimo is over. I cleared 30,000 words before Cleo came along. I'm still plugging away at it at with a much more reasonable 500 words per day goal. I'll have a post with my reflections on that soon.

3) I was incredibly sick for a good part of November. So with being sick, the novel writing, the new child, and massive sleep deprivation, last month was seriously like some sort of fever dream that is just now starting to make sense.

Hopefully I'll be getting back into a routine of writing some stuff regularly!

The Final Countdown

So the purpose of this post, other than to get that 80's song by Europe stuck in your head (admit it, you can already hear that synthesizer!), is to let you all know that, as of today, we are in the final month of pregnancy! We're counting down until the 25th, which is a lot like having an Advent calendar for Christmas.

It's getting rough, though. My theory is that the child is leeching traits such as memory and coordination from my wife to stockpile them for her own future development. I picture her actively taking memories directly from my wife's brain and placing them on the walls of H's uterus as a form of decoration. Where did the debit card go?  Well unfortunately the baby needed that memory, but the good news is that she has really established a solid sense of Feng Shui in there that will help with delivery!

Off with their Fingers!

Another result is that H has been banned from doing chores due to coordination issues.  It's not doctor's orders, but it is for the safety of us all. Well meaning tasks have resulted in broken shelves, broken dishes, and just a general sense of things getting knocked over. Washing dishes the other day resulted in trip to Urgent Care as H nearly sliced off her pinky on a mandolin slicer. (In her defense, any contraption that looks like it can trace its origins back to the guillotine should never be trusted.)

The bright point is that it won't be much longer! I'm really looking forward to the date where we can start counting down to the delivery on our fingers, which will be the 15th for me... and the 16th for H.

Failing NaNoWriMo

So NaNoWriMo starts up next month and I'm looking forward to failing. I'd like to be optimistic, but with a baby arriving in late November, I'm pretty much predestined for failure. Hell, last year I didn't make it through to the end because I couldn't hold off on downloading Skyrim. Based on what people have told me, I'm assuming having a baby will be slightly more involving than Skyrim. This makes sense to me since while Skyrim has better character options and plot, I'm thinking a baby will be more interactive and possibly in higher definition.

Looking forward to that sandwich. Over.

Despite this omen of doom hanging over my November, I'm looking forward to it. I found that last year I still enjoyed the ride even if I didn't reach the destination. You see, I tried to write a novel when I was younger and it was a thoroughly unpleasant experience where sudden jets of self doubt would send me rocketing out of the atmosphere to collide with asteroids composed of raw depression and self hatred, ceasing my momentum with concussive force and leaving me to fall back to Earth like Felix Baumgartner. And then I would have lunch.

I like NaNoWriMo since it takes a lot of the stress out of novel writing. You just write and write and you don't think too much. Let's face it, writers of fiction are, by nature, dreamers. This is great for plots and characters and such. It's not great when you start fantasizing about book tours and writer panels. Before you know it, you're an author who wrote a bestselling novel but failed to write a sophomore novel from near terminal writer's block and you're living in a trailer somewhere eating beans and trying to dodge creditors and editors and your own fraudulent self. And then you have dinner.

Knowing there are a quarter million other people doing this also helps me to put it in perspective. Doing it last year felt more like a game than work. If I play World of Warcraft, I'm not doing it to be the best and to "win" it. I'm doing it to have fun and to create something unique that I enjoy. That one guy playing WOW to be the absolute number one best? He probably has some issues to work through that don't involve quests.

To sum up, for the next month my NaNoWriMo motto will be this: To Fun and Failure!

Conan the Bohemian!

There are times where you realize that a career in counseling/social services has completely ruined your view of life. Today while watching the new Conan the Barbarian was one of those times.

(I guess technically there are spoilers ahead, but really, if I'm actually ruining the plot to a Conan movie then life is likely a continuous uninterrupted series of spoilers for you and you are either living in a constant state of dazed wonderment or extreme anxious bitterness. Either way, not my problem.)

RAAAAAAARRRRRGH!
I STILL FEEL EMPTY!... I need a hug

So Conan's quest in this movie, much like Inigo Montoya, is revenge. Some bad guy comes in, kills Conan's tribe and his father to obtain the mystical MacGuffin, then moves to the next phase of his evil plot. Conan then spends the next 20 years tracking this guy and his cronies down. Conan arrives just in time, kills the cronies, kills the big bad guy, and saves the world. Now most people would be all "Yay! Go good guy!", but instead here's what I'm thinking:

"Wow. He's lived his life with exactly one purpose and now that he has accomplished it, he is without a purpose for the first time in his life. He's probably facing a lot of existential angst in the coming year."

I picture Conan riding around after the final scene, taking on odd mercenary work, still killing and wenching, but his heart really isn't in it. He's too much of a man to admit he needs help though, so he just throws himself into his work even more so until he eventually becomes king of some country. Then he slips a disk swinging that massive sword around on the battlefield and can't fight, but he starts throwing massive hedonistic parties at the castle to compensate for his lack of anima.  Those don't fill the void either, though, so he sends everyone away and spends the nights sleeping and eating cold chicken in his empty throne room kind of like Daniel Day-Lewis does in his personal bowling alley at the end of "There Will be Blood".

I mean, who the hell thinks like that?!

Branching Out

I've been learning a lot this year with blogging. It's pretty fascinating to look back at my older posts and see how my style is developing even in such a short time. The development is uneven, a  two steps forward and one step back kind of thing, but very fun for me to observe. One thing I've learned is that, while I love writing about soccer, it gives a disjointed feel to this blog. The friends and family who read this blog enjoy my observations about life and becoming a dad, but tend to skip the soccer stuff.

Based on this, I've been trying to find other outlets for the soccer posts. I recently emailed Slide Rule Pass about contributing occasionally, got some encouraging feedback, and sent my most recent post to them instead of putting it here.

And he actually put the post up!

We'll see how I handle the feedback I get from a site with a much higher circulation than this little blog, but hopefully it'll build my confidence (At least for now I'm all smiles!). I'll continue to link to whatever I'm able to get published elsewhere and give you all a respite from the soccer articles here!

Thumbsucker!

Just thought I'd add this for all. It's the 3D ultrasound picture of the kiddo. Based on the movements of the kid when we watched the ultrasound, she is either chewing on her wrist or sucking on her thumb! The tech would bounce her around to get her to move her hand so she could get a clear shot of her only for the kid to move her hand right back there. 

We were both reluctant to get a 3D image since we both think they can turn out creepy, but this one turned out wonderful. I am, of course, biased but I think she's beautiful already.

A Sigh of Relief

What a week! H's mom moving down here, a baby shower, having most of our family in town for the shower, my birthday, plus a hospital tour have really worn us down. Despite this, H pointed out the other day that my demeanor towards everything has shifted recently to a much less stressed out guy. Since this has been brought to my attention, I've tried to pay more attention to the change and I've come to the conclusion that it's due to an increase in efficacy.

Since the shower, we finally have baby stuff. While the stuff is great, it's more about the fact that we can finally take action based on having the stuff that's important. For example, I spent my birthday putting together the "My Little Snug-a-Bunny Cradle n Swing" for the kiddo. The Snug-a-Bunny had a LOT of pieces, directions in three languages, and that frustrating thing that happens when it tells you to put things together but secretly the pieces have already BEEN put together causing you to waste time searching for the "missing" piece. Throw in the fact that the core mechanism designed to rock my fragile baby to sleep looks, in isolation, disturbingly like an outboard motor and you'd think I would be incredibly stressed.

I wasn't stressed though. Despite the setback of initially putting it together wrong, it was a very relaxing experience. I think this is because it felt like progress. Putting stuff together, taking stuff apart, and moving things around all to accommodate the upcoming child are all results oriented. I can SEE the place changing into a kid friendly environment. That brings a level of satisfaction and confidence I haven't been able to enjoy so far in this journey.

The end result is that I'm more optimistic about this kid entering our lives. Now she will have multiple places to sleep, to play, and to crap which will buy us time while we run ourselves ragged. And really, isn't that what all these things are actually about?

The Silence of the Cars

(Here's a recent conversation I had with Car2Go.)

Tech:  Car2Go services and support. How can I help you today?

Me:  Yeah, I'm in one of the new Car2Go cars. I checked it out but it won't start.

Tech:  So it won't turn on?

Me:  Well it turns on, but it won't turn over. It's one of the new electric ones and not the gas ones. Is there a button I have to push or something?

Tech: Oh! That's a really easy problem to solve. So can you put it in drive?

Wuzzat gizmo?

Me: Uh... sure.

Tech: Okay, now drive it.

Me:  ...But... the engine doesn't turn over when I turn the key...

Tech:  Actually just put your foot on the gas pedal.

Me: ... HOLY CRAP IT'S MOVING!

Tech: Yeah. We've been getting this a lot lately. The electric ones are silent so people don't know that they can just drive it once they turn it on.

Me:  Wow, the future is really something! Okay, I'm taking this stealth car to work. Thanks!

Tech: (Laughing) No problem. Have a nice day.

Baby School

Recently we attended our first baby class. I really wasn't sure what to expect. Some people told me we would be watching graphic videos of delivery including screaming and bodily fluids to desensitize us to the actual experience. Others said it would be a boring experience where they would talk about stuff you already knew; basic common sense baby facts.

It was actually more of a mixed bag and I found it to be a moderately useful experience. We all wrote down our due dates and names, introduced ourselves, and did all that uncomfortable "getting to know you" stuff. We were prompted to list out our fears about pregnancy and the instructor states that she will get to all of these over the next month. We were shown a graphic of a woman's body and how the baby crowds out organs and strains tendons.

The good news is I'm ahead of the curve as far as I can tell. Some of the eyebrow raising questions floated by the group were: "I've been told you shouldn't let babies sleep for more than two hours. Is this true?" and "Should I give my baby Flinstone's vitamins or do I wait a few months." Thankfully the group is pretty accepting and no one was made to feel uncomfortable.

Halfway through the class, though, I had an epiphany. You see, I was looking around the classroom, thinking about how odd it is that I'll be with these people for the next month and it occurred to me that THIS is the true lesson. That for the next two decades or so, we will be spending immense amounts of time with people we have nothing in common with other than having a child of similar ages.

Some of the cast includes: a hip music store owner, a rigid accountant, and a Fred Meyer manager. None of whom likely play D&D or soccer. And here we are. Cohorts. Sharing this experience based solely on the fact that we all apparently enjoy unprotected late winter sex.


Likely it won't be these people in particular that I'll be hanging around with for the next few decades, but the fact that the people I associate with is no longer under my control is really, really eye opening and if nothing else, I've internalized this fact. Touché prenatal class.  Touché

Hoping for the Future

Oh those Timbers. This has been a humbling year. I think a lot of us (maybe even Timbers management) thought that since the Timbers have the best supporters, there was no way they could be terrible. Maybe they wouldn't have a great season, but not terrible. Terrible is what happens to those teams in the non soccer fanatical areas of the country where they have trouble filling a stadium. Not Soccer City though!

And yet... here we are. Not as bad as Toronto, but we're fighting to not end up with the Wooden Spoon. Lets face it, there isn't any hope left for this year, and I would even go so far as to say that includes the Cascadia Cup. We could barely tie Seattle at home! Sure, I'll cheer on October 7th, but I'm going to be realistic about it.

As the days get darker here in the NW signifying the shift to dreary winter and the looming specter of seasonal affective disorder, I feel it's important to stay optimistic about next season. Thankfully, there ARE things to be optimistic about.

1) Creativity.  I think that one of the failings of John Spencer was that he didn't know what to do with creative players. James Marcelin, let go from the Timbers for "non soccer related reasons", is by no means Iniesta and definitely had a bone to pick with the Timbers front office, but a quote of his really stuck with me in the early part of the season. Marcelin stated after being picked up by Dallas "I can say this coach is more relaxed and lets you play your game. Spencer doesn't let you do that, he's just yelling all the time."

Watching some of those early games in the season, I saw a lot of players that were afraid to make mistakes. You can't take a player like Songo'o and expect him to play perfect defense. That's just not what he is out there to do. He is out there to be the creative engine, and that means trying ludicrous step-over moves that sometimes don't pan out. There were at least two games where Songo'o was the only creative sparkplug on the field, and yet Spencer subbed him because he wasn't adhering to his gameplan.

I don't think it's a coincidence that Songo'o and Nagbe have really blossomed since Spencer left. There's a lightness and a willingness to be daring on the field. Sure, we haven't put it all together tactically, but it's a sign that things are transitioning to something more open.

2) Developing a Style.  Kevin at Slide Rule Pass (an amazing Timbers blog!) summed it up best when he described the method the Timbers acquire players as "magpie like". We see a good player at a decent rate and we grab, with no thought to whether or not he fits into our style of play. It's part of the reason we ended up with this weird Scotch-Columbian mix of players. This may have been due to us either not having a style or due to a conflict between Spencer's vision and the vision of Paulson and Wilkinson. Either way, the roster looks the product of a confused soccer hoarder.

Currently it feels like the Timbers are trying to sort through and figure some of this out. We are feeling out a style, trying out players in it, seeing who fits and who is Kris Boyd (or something like that), and ultimately just setting the stage for having an actual plan for next year. Which brings us to...

3) Caleb Porter.  I was really excited when Porter was appointed the National U-23 coach. What better man to develop the national team youth than the man who routinely churns out stars from Akron! Unfortunately, that didn't pan out when the US failed to qualify for the Olympics and Porter got burned as the scapegoat; unfairly in my opinion. He didn't really have long to work with the team (he started in October 2011, had one training camp, and then off to the Olympic qualifiers in early 2012) and while the scorelines tell a sad story, we really only failed to qualify based on a fluke goal.  He was also able to get some truly inspired performances from the mercurial and inconsistent Freddy Adu.

Klinsman's loss is our gain though. We've already seen a shift from Spencer's rigid style to a more open style that I can't imagine Porter has not had input on. Additionally, I would think we may shift from buying MLS veterans like Kimura, Palmer, and Chabala as stop-gap measures to patch up a sinking ship to a focus on developing youth. This, however, means that we will likely struggle next season as we blood more of the young players (Trencito, Gleeson, Jean Baptiste, Richards, and whatever youth we snatch up in the offseason) and focus on building for the future rather than victories now.

My take: We're not going to transition overnight and realistically we will not be a title contender until 2014 at the earliest. That said, next year is going to be more fun and exciting! We will have an opportunity to watch our team develop and grow into something better, which really is the true fun of being a fan!

The (Over) Expectant Father

The actual book

So I'll start this out by saying "The Expectant Father" is an amazing book. I've gotten two copies, one from my mother-in-law and one from a good friend, but instead of getting rid of one copy, I keep one copy at work and one at home. That's how much I like this book. Great, down to earth information and each chapter starts off detailing what's going on with the mom's body, the mom's emotions, the baby's development, and likely the dad. It really is great.


That said, this thing is also completely terrifying for me right now. Not because of any content (well the section on Cesareans is pretty freaking terrifying, but anyone who's seen Prometheus knows that), but more so because of how few chapters are left. I crack open the book and read for a bit, but suddenly every sentence in the book changes into "You are not prepared for this!".

How this book feels right now

You see we're having the baby shower next week. We're both looking forward to it, but it also means that we currently have nothing babyish in the home. A friend of H who is also pregnant currently has a nursery with tons of stuff in it and apparently the dad painted a freaking anime cartoon mural on the wall. We have a bassinet in the corner filled with baby books. Not because we don't want stuff, but mostly that we just don't know what stuff to get yet. Currently our apartment looks suspiciously like the apartment of two people who are in denial of the fact they are having a kid.

Ewok Air Force:
Protecting the Gene Pool

What this really means, though, is that H and I are in a holding pattern. A gentle holding pattern akin to floating on the breeze with, say, a hang glider. Reading stuff about after the baby arrives takes me out of this nice little holding pattern and launches me into a goddamn WARZONE! Remember how the hang glider squadron's fared back in World War I? Of course you don't, because even the people back then recognized that they would get completely freaking SLAUGHTERED! The only Person stupid enough to think that hang glider combat is a good idea is George Lucas! I still don't understand why the Ewoks, a race of creatures that live in a freaking forest, would develop hang glider combat unless it was some sort of crazy Darwinian kind of logic where any Ewok who straps on a pair of wings and face plants into a redwood at about 100 feet in the air probably was no good for the species anyway.

I may never say this again, but I am really, really looking forward to the reassuring clutter of baby stuff. Freaking Ewoks.

Forgiveness (Part 1)

(I've been in a bit more of a somber mood, but since I do want to continue posting, I'll post what's on my mind lately even though it's not quite as entertaining as the usual stuff.)

The theme of forgiveness has come up a lot around me lately; even outside of work. Posts on Facebook, offhand comments from friends, and was rather prominent in the documentary I saw on Ricky Williams (Run Ricky Run). So I thought I would write about it.

I thought I'd start with the definition since I think It's a concept that I think has evolved.  Here is the current definition of "forgive" when you google it.

Stop feeling angry or resentful toward (someone) for an offense, flaw, or mistake.

If we look at some of the past definitions, it is more about the act and less about the personal release.  For example, there is a site that has definitions of words from dictionaries in 1838 and 1913.

1. To pardon; to remit, as an offense or debt; to overlook an offense, and treat the offender as not guilty. The original and proper phrase is to forgive the offense, to send it away, to reject it, that is, not to impute it, [put it to] the offender. But by an easy transition, we also use the phrase, to forgive the person offending.

There is no real mention of release of an emotion. This definition has more in common with the other interpretations of the word, the erasure of a debt.  

In 1913, we do start seeing shades of letting go, but not until we get to the later definition of "forgive".

1. To give wholly; to make over without reservation; to resign.
2. To give up resentment or claim to requital on account of (an offense or wrong); to remit the penalty of; to pardon;
3. To cease to feel resentment against, on account of wrong committed; to give up claim to requital from or retribution upon (an offender); to absolve; to pardon

So, why is this important? I think it means that we have, within our collective unconscious, two definitions of forgiveness. One is where we feel we are letting someone off the hook for a debt and the other is  more directed at the forgiver letting go of things. The act is the same, but the object of the action has shifted from the person being forgiven to the person who is doing the forgiving. I think this helps explain why we are a bit schizophrenic about the concept since we're often not sure which definition we're thinking about. I plan on talking about that conflict more in some following posts.

First Game Back

No matter how hard you work in the off-season, the first game back to outdoor soccer hurts. I'm not sure why GPSD has a 2-3 month hiatus from July until September for soccer seasons other than some sense of gleeful cruelty. It's just enough time to get completely out of game shape but not enough time to realize it.

Kind of what it looked like

I thought that I was doing relatively well this year. I was biking every day to work and back, was playing futsal once a week, and was making practice whenever my schedule allowed. Unfortunately, on my first juke of the season where I moved past a faked out defender, the momentary rush of accomplishment  was ground into the dirt when I saw that I had about 40 more yards left to run to get to the goal.


The next day was a world of pain. I wasn't just sore. I had also been kicked and hacked by rusty, sloppy defenders so my shins and ankles were scraped and cramped as well as the fact that my feet, not used to outdoor cleats for the last few months, developed blisters. There was a point the next day when I was creaking, groaning, and staggering out of bed that I thought to myself "Oh crap. I'm going to have a screaming infant here next season who will require me to creak, stagger and groan myself out of bed to tend to her!" I'm hoping she'll be able to understand the concept of "injury time" relatively soon since I may need a minute or two added on to get there!

The Wheel of Time stops turning

Recently I've been engaged in a Wheel of Time re-read group on reddit (here's a link) that will read all 13 of the WOT books over the next few months, culminating in finishing about the time that the final Wheel of Time book comes out. It's a pretty illuminating experience. I've had mixed feelings about the sprawling, unwieldy series for a long time and it's kind of nice to look at some of these works over 20 years later.

For those not in the know, Robert Jordan started this series in 1990. I was fourteen then, and this series really captured my young imagination. The wiki page says it was planned to be a six novel series, though I'm skeptical of this. It was put out during a time when trilogies were the standard and I suspect it might have been a two trilogy situation.

Anyhow, what matters is that somewhere along the line, Jordan got lost in his world. Six books turned into eight, then ten, then twelve. This would be forgivable, but then Jordan got caught up in the minutia. He would spend pages describing a scene, down to the clothing and styles and history of styles and how each character interpreted the styles and how their style of clothing was meant to disrespect this style and so on, and then each character would leave the scene immediately after he finished describing it.

Also, there were NO throw away characters. In the Knife of Dreams, the last Jordan book, there are 685 characters! Jordan is constantly making random characters integral to the plot so you have to remember them all. Here's a short list of  some of the characters with a name that begins with "E" that are mind numbingly similar that Jordan will simply throw out as if he expects you to know them like you had coffee the other day:

Edin, Eben, Edessina, Elfraim, Ehvin, Elayne, Eldrin, Eldrith, Elenna, Elaida, Elienda, Ella, Elvaine, Elza, Enaila, Ethin, Eyndel.

Honestly, I'm not even doing the meandering nature of it justice. Here's a link to the Amazon page of one of the books. Scroll down to the reviews and bask in the sarcastic brilliance.

For me, I think it was after reading book six or seven where after about 900 pages the main plot has not advanced AT ALL that I gave up. It was hard. It had been a part of my life for 12 years by that point but the series was a dysfunctional relationship; leading me on but always letting me down. I was convinced it would never end and in 2007 I believed I was proved right. Robert Jordan had died and, at the time, the hope of closure on this series died with him.

Note how there are absolutely no similarities
between Robert Jordan and George RR Martin.

Thankfully this series would get a second life. Brandon Sanderson, a new favorite author of mine (if you haven't read Mistborn, you need to!) was commissioned by the publisher and Robert Jordan's widow Harriet McDougal, who provided RJ's notes to Sanderson, to finish the series. In 2009 he started a finishing trilogy. He promptly spent the first part of his first book killing off minor characters and tying up loose ends of minor storylines. He then dragged the spotlight back to the five or six characters that really mattered and moved things forward. It became fun to read again! And yet... some of the plot lines remain murky to me because I skipped so many books.

So here I am, reading the books one by one as we move towards A Memory of Light. I plan on posting my impression of each book as I finish and move forward to the next!

Futsal

Recently I've switched from playing indoor soccer to futsal and I've got to say that after the Apocalypse, I think futsal will be one of the sports still around. Indoor soccer requires a rink with plexiglass and barriers all around the edges. The local Portalnd Futsal center is just a converted warehouse with chain link fences surrounding the fields and heavy metal blasting over the speakers. Throw in a few flaming sconces at the corners and maybe make spiked shoulder pads a requirement and you've got something out of Thunderdome.

Spin the wheel raggedy man!

The good: Accurate passing is really important.  I feel like this is really going to improve my passing game.

The bad:  You end up using the bottom of your foot a lot more for moves. In a place like Portland where half of your outdoor games are going to be in mud and rain, the bottom of your foot is the most unreliable place to anchor any juke from. 

It's taken me a bit to adjust to.  The pace is faster, positioning is different, there's an actual out of bounds, and they count fouls kind of like how they do in basketball, giving a pk for teams after the foul count goes over 5.  

In fact, I finally started to get the hang of futsal when I realized it is not really soccer. It's basketball you play with your feet.  Just watch the movement on the following video and it's easy to see.

Outdoor soccer starts this weekend and H and I are eager to see if playing futsal will help my skills this season!  I'll keep you posted!

Unicorn City

So for those of you who don't know, Unicorn City was released earlier this month on iTunes and Amazon. In short, it's a movie about a guy who wants to get a job at "Warlocks of the Beach" and decides to create a gaming utopia to accomplish this, or basically a full time LARP.  I was really, really looking forward to it, and while it was entertaining and funny, it kind of fell short for me.  Here's the trailer:

The trailer makes it look really funny. And it is very humorous.  It's just not... whimsical enough I suppose. The characters in the movie are entertaining, but they are more funny awkward rather than the zany types depicted in the trailer. The main character Voss is a little too unappealing for too long. As a friend of mine put it,  the movie is one of those "How does a manchild become a man?" stories. You know he is going to make that transition, but I feel this transition is put off until way too late in the movie. It would have been nice to see an evolution of character rather than an epiphany. To put my feelings on the film in perspective, I'm a fan of low budget fantasy comedy, but after having rented it I'm just not sure if there is enough rewatch value to it  for me to justify plunking down more money to own it.

That said, they do the best with what they have. I'm really looking forward to "The  Knights of Badassdom" too, but this features a real special effects budget as well as actual C to B+ grade actors in it (Peter Dinklage, Steve Zahn, Danny Pudi, and Summer Glau).

Block

Wow!  Sorry for all of the lack of posts lately! Vacation plus a massive tooth issue both threw me out of orbit and it's been hard to direct time back at the blog.  Oddly, I also had my first brief encounter with writer's block.

You see, at a panel at a panel at Norwescon, one panelist I saw spoke about writer's block, stating that most people who think they have writer's block don't.  Her point was that not writing is not writer's block. Writer's block happens when you have been writing and then you suddenly can't.

To put this into my own perspective, I usually operate with about 20 half finished blog posts. I'll throw them into my phone when I'm out in the community waiting at the hospital or for police or I'll start one in order to track an interesting thing I saw on the web. It's kind of like seed starting for gardens where you grow seedlings under a grow lamp and take them outside once they have sprouted. When I'm not feeling innovative, I'll grab one of those and type away at it to finish it.

Except... that wasn't happening.  I'd grab one with the intention of typing, but just sit there staring at it.  I'd type a line, delete it out of frustration, and give up on the post.  This started happening prior to the vacation. While it's really only a glancing blow of writer's block, it was genuine.

This then got lost in the vacation and then the haze of dental pain I've been in. Since the dental pain incident, however, this has not been writer's block but instead was avoidance. That's something I'm much more familiar with and just requires getting back in the saddle and writing. I'm not sure when the writer's block ended and the avoidance started, but I'm sure I'll get more used to identifying this kind of stuff as the blog rolls on!

The Curious Case of Clint Dempsey

As an American and an Arsenal fan, there's few things more conflictual for me than Clint Dempsey.  Dempsey has been linked with transfer rumors to Arsenal for years. At this point he is the best player that the US has ever produced, leading Fulham and scoring the 4th most goals in the English Premier League; breaking the record for the amount of goals an American has ever scored in the EPL. No American field player (not counting goalies) has ever represented us at a top Championship League club (Man U, Barcelona, Inter Milan, etc) as anything more than an experiment. At 29 with only one year left on his contract, a lot of us in the States view this as our last, best chance for a while to see one of our own competing at the top level of football.

And yet.... many Arsenal fans don't want him there. Some of this is simply anti-American bias. They feel that American fans overrate him or that he is not young enough to benefit a team upon. These are really laughable points. On the first, he scored 17 goals last year! For the second, look at Ryan Giggs. Thirty eight years old and still playing for Man U. These days, only speedsters have an age 30 expiration date. The skillful and gritty can go for a long time. The only point brought up that does bother me is where he would fit in at The Emirates.

Dempsey plays either a winger, an attacking midfielder, and sometimes as striker. Arsenal is filled to the gills with wingers and has an assortment of attacking midfielders. Until striker and club icon Robin van Persie made his shocking announcement recently that he is done with Arsenal, there was really no room for him.  As an American fan, though, I still would be worried about playing time. Without consistent time on the field, it's possible he would fade.

The development of Americans in Europe is storied.  For every Clint Dempsey who goes to Europe and becomes a star, you have a handful of guys like Freddy Adu, a player with potential who sees it go to waste while riding the pine. This isn't just an American problem.  In Mexico, for every Chicharito, you have a Giovani dos Santos or a Carlos Vela; unquestionably talented players who cannot find time on the field.

Jozy Altidore. No longer his natural habitat!

To be a star, a player needs two things: 1) to play at the top level they can and 2) to get sufficient field time. What happens in the case of guys like Jozy Altidore is that they overshoot point one and end up with none of point two. It doesn't matter if the club can afford a bench made of fine polished agarwood or cheap pine, you don't get better by sitting on it.  Thankfully Jozy has figured this out, and instead of being a benchwarmer in a top league like La Liga or the EPL, he is content to be a starter in the Dutch league which is a technically a step down from the others but has done wonders for his skill.

Sadly, all of this hemming and hawing about Dempsey for Arsenal have left an opening for Liverpool who might swoop in and get him.  I've never been a huge fan of the Reds, but browsing their forums indicates they, at least, would appreciate him. Throw in Liverpool's stance to become one of the few professional sports teams in the world to openly declare their support of the LGBT community and march against homophobia and I'll be forced to HAVE to become a Liverpool supporter (Thankfully Arsenal and Liverpool aren't direct rivals like, say, Tottenahm or Chelsea).  Of course, Dempsey might never get a local bar named after him like Brian McBride did, but at least he would be playing on a high profile team!

Purge

Over the years, H and I have gone from being two people living in two apartments to one couple living in one small apartment. This has involved various accommodations for our stuff.  As someone who has moved in with a girlfriend in the past only to have it fizzle leaving me to sleep on a friend's couch because I did not have a bed, I was reluctant to suggest that we get rid of stuff in the beginning. So we had two sets of a lot of things for a time; one in the apartment and one in storage. As George Carlin states, we ended up with "too much stuff".

Some of these resolved themselves. TV's, DVD players, pots and pans... with all of these we have gone through the initial, the spare, and acquired a new one. Most things, however, required a purge. Since H and I have been together, we have moved six times. Each time has required an evaluation of stuff and a truckload or two of trips to Goodwill or selling things on Craigslist. We've done what I feel is pretty good job of whittling the stuff down. I'm more of a minimalist than H, so we have power struggles about bringing new things into the home vs reducing what we have, but for the most part I figured we had made our last mega donation trip.

We did not, however, account for a third person.

Faced with the reality that we HAVE to make more space, we are now in the midst of a possession purge that is truly brutal. So far we have taken this ruthlessness to books. Long ago we got rid of unfullfilling novels bought on whims, books we didn't really like that much, duplicates, and textbooks that were useless or outdated. More recently we had gotten rid of books we only kind of liked as well as textbooks and informational books that we were logically never going to use. Now we cut dangerously close to the emotional quick.


I really enjoyed "The Darksword" trilogy at one time, but I have not bothered to re-read it and there are other trilogy's I have re-read that I would rather keep... so into the bin it goes. "Healing the Soul in the age of the Brain" was an eye opening read and I loved it, but honestly I will never read it again... so into the bin it goes. Yes, I am very happy that I read "The Unbearable Lightness of Being", but the truth is, I'm mostly hanging on to it as proof that I did read it... so into the bin it goes.


Coincidentally, there is a lightness that comes about from shedding these possessions. After the pain of choice, the pain of getting rid of them, and the anxiety of having lost them, there comes the relief. The sigh you make upon seeing an empty shelf, ready to house children's books.

And then, on to the closet...

Failed Save vs Crappy Movie

No sooner do I invoke the name of the DnD movie than I am exposed to this: the trailer for Dungeons and Dragons the Movie 3: the Book of Vile Darkness. It is really, really sad.

So I pointed out in my post on a few weeks ago that fantasy movies don't specifically have to be bad. Yet the D&D ones consistently are. Why is this? Simple: they are not paying attention to what is different from a generic fantasy movie and D&D.

D&D is composed of two things. One part is the plot and the heroes who quest in a land of danger, magic, and destiny. The other is about the people who sit around a table (possibly drinking Mountain Dew) while rolling dice. You film one without the other and you end up with either a bland fantasy movie or a boring documentary.  Ah, but you put them together and you have... Dungeons and Dragons!

Dead Gentelment Producations (last I checked, these are local boys stationed out of the NW!) the creators of  The Gamers and The Gamers 2: The Dorkness Rising understood this. In both of these movies, there are two stories going on:  the story of the Gamers and their personal conflicts in the real world, and the story of their campaign where the same actors are acting out a fantasy movie. They use this primarily for comedic effect and execute it brilliantly considering the low budgets they were working with.

As the worst Futurama movie, it is still 10x better than
the D&D movies.

Another way to handle this duality is a concept that is actually right there in front of the guys at WOTC: the gamers somehow end up actually in the game world. If it seems like you may have heard this before, it's because you have. It is basically the same thing that happened in the D&D cartoon, except they used a carnival ride as the plot device instead of the actual game to make it more Narnia-ish; likely to appease book burning fundamentalists who were overly focused on D&D at the time. It's also reminiscent of what happens to the Futurama crew in Bender's Game.


It doesn't have to be that cheesy or ironic though. Joel Rosenberg used this mechanic in his 1983 book "The Sleeping Dragon", which became the Guardians of the Flame series. In this book, a group of college students playing a D&D-like game suddenly become their characters in a fantasy world. He does a good job of capturing the real reactions actual people would have such as panic, anger, despair in addition to wonderment. One character that enjoys it too much and treats it like a game ends up dead early on, establishing the gravity of their situation. You could also soften it up, but gritty material like this could also go over well now that Game of Thrones has set the stage.




So there we are. Two effective ways of making a D&D movie. Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and WOTC chose neither, tromping out into the wilderness without supplies and ignoring the baying of hungry wolves. And that has made all the difference.

Supergirls

So I recently got a book for little Kidney (that's our current nickname for her) called "My First Wonder Woman Book".  Gotta say, I love it.

Thick blocky pages and an ending featuring a tinfoil mirror so the kid can see their own reflection as Wonder Woman. Then I started thinking "I want more!"  But... there isn't much more. There are LOTS of Spider Man, Batman, and Superman things floating around the book area, but not a lot of superheroines.

And really, are there that many to choose from? At least, as far as iconic ones go.  From DC we have Supergirl, Wonder Woman, and Batgirl. Marvel we have Shadowcat, Ms. Marvel, Rogue, Jean Grey, and Storm. Supergirl is the only one to try a solo movie and Wonder Woman's 1970s TV show is so bad that it's something I plan on featuring on TGIS.

I do have high hopes for Lauren Faust's (the person who revamped My Little Pony) Super Best Friends Forever series and I'm hoping it'll become more than just a series of shorts and blossoms into a full blown show. I really need some more superheroine stuff for Kidney!