Saturday Night Whatever

I baked a couple of loaves of banana bread today. They turned out pretty well, though nothing too special. The apartment smelled great for a couple of hours, though, as the smell of fresh baked goods permeated the air.

Sarah really hasn't been feeling well for the past day or two. She had a fever tonight of just over 100 degrees. Apparently, fevers during pregnancy aren't of much concern until they exceed 102-103 degrees. Who knew? She's drinking a lot of fluids, though, and taking it pretty easy. She'll continue the taking-it-easy trend tomorrow, too, because Sunday in our house means watching roughly nine hours of football. It's good to be an adult.

Here are a couple of answers to a couple of questions which we have been getting quite frequently:

- We are going to find out the sex of the baby, but we're not going to tell anyone outside of our marriage. It's important to us that we know, but we don't think it's important that everyone else share that knowledge. We want to know in order to have a stronger connection to the child before it is born, not in order to buy blue or pink outfits or whatever. Truth be told, we'll probably dress our child in both blue and pink, regardless of the sex. We'll dress our child in whatever is cheapest, actually.

- The kids name will be Isaiah Wiley Kole if it's a boy, or Nora(h) Wiley Kole if it's a girl. The H on Nora(h) is currently under debate. We're set on these names and have been since before we were engaged to be married (October 28th, 2006, to be exact).

I am sure that there are countless other things that I could say or share, but I think that pretty much covers the couple of things that most people seem to care about as far as baby stuff goes. I'm sure we'll have more say about other baby-related issues as the pregnancy progresses.

A little more than a dozen kids from my hall got together today to play some ultimate frisbee. I went to play with them because 1) I love ultimate frisbee, 2) I haven't played in forever, and 3) it's sort of my job to hang out with my students. While I work out on a fairly regular basis, I must admit that an hour and a half of ultimate frisbee really wore me out. I'm sore like I haven't been for awhile. So it goes...

I wish I were here right now...
From :55 seconds into it until the end.
Amazing.

RIP MLIW. Sad that I'll never get to see another show.

The vice presidential debate wasn't quite the shit storm that I thought it would be. Palin didn't eat her foot too terribly, even if she scripted every line she delivered. It seems that she's taking the "positive" performance (and the "victory" it won her) as a directive to be more of the "pitbull" she was hired to be. She labeled Obama earlier tonight as someone who is "palling around with terrorists" because of some very distant and loose ties he has to a radical activist from the 1960's who engaged then in acts of violent revolution. Ridiculous. Grasping at straws...

First rule of politics: Always answer the question you wish you had been asked during interviews and debates. Palin took care of this on Friday night.

Second rule of politics: Resort to character attacks and destroy the reputation of your opponent if you yourself have no character or reputation of which to speak. Looks like we're headed in that direction...

Third rule of politics: Always call yourself middle-class, even if you hold major office and have personal or familial ties to multi-billion dollar corporations. Yep... Ten-four there, too.

What a fucking joke. What a sad commentary.

I had a doctors appointment this past Wednesday. I'm pretty healthy, I guess, besides having high blood pressure. Also, I'm 6'2" now. I've always been 6'1", but not anymore. That's pretty cool. I've always sort of wished that I was taller. I think 6'6" would be an awesome height. I'll just keep eating my vegetables...

That's all for now. I'm going to adjust my fantasy football line-up for tomorrow, and then I'll be going to bed. Have a good night everyone.

Stay Gold,

MMK

P.S. - If you didn't catch it earlier, I do, in fact, believe that Sarah Palin (and McCain, both independently and by association) are jokes that are being played on the American public. The thought that an angry, bitter, old man and a clueless, irrationally angry, doe-eyed "hockey mom" (like that's more than just an arbitrary title invented to draw voters into a surface-level connection with her politics) might be running our country come January is entirely laughable. Call me angry or rude or out-of-line, if you want, but I'll remind you that they set the rules for how our political discourse should play itself out.

9 Weeks, 5 Days

Sarah and I had a doctors appointment on Monday at the women's health center where we'll be going for all of our check-ups, classes, and other things that come along with having a baby. I thought I'd pass along the news that came out of the appointment, even though there isn't that much to tell, really.

Basically, everything seems to be progressing normally. They took blood and did all of the normal tests. Everything pointed to the development of a healthy fetus. They figure we're about 9 weeks and 5 days into the pregnancy, so we'll go back in about a month to get an ultrasound and do some more tests for things like Down's syndrome and any neural tube disorders. They tried to listen for the fetus' heart beat yesterday, but it's a bit early along in the pregnancy for the rhythm to be very pronounced, so we didn't hear anything. So it goes.

The due date we've been given is April 30th, so... Keep that in mind, I guess.

So, that's all, really. Things are going well, for the most part. Sarah is pretty nauseated and fatigued almost all of the time, so we have been taking things pretty easy around here. The new TV we got has been getting a lot of use, so I've got to give a big high-five to pregnancy in general for justifying the amount of money we spent on the TV. Hoorah.

Not much else to say for now... I think we'll be taking some more pictures around here soon, so maybe we'll be sharing those on here. I sort of feel bad for not taking more pictures since we moved here. I forget sometimes that most of you all have no real idea what it looks like out here or what we see on a daily basis. Hopefully we can help to change that soon.

Be good, kids. Stay Gold!

MMK

The Same Sun

This is an interesting time in my life. In our lives. In America. There's too much going on right now for me to coherently compose my thoughts. Others have already said it more eloquently than I ever could, anyway.


HAVE HEART - "The Same Sun"

"Son, did you stare too long in front of that mirror?
Did it break when your conscience didn't get any clearer
because of the stomach you'll fill with all the food you eat
and the lack of pain you feel for the eyes that weep
outside of the windowsill in the castle where you sleep?"

Has the sun stopped shining upon the crown you hang?
Has your love and your hate begun to feel the same?
Did that leave you feeling empty, feeling sick,
feeling as empty as a poor child's stomach?

As alone and forsaken as you'd like to be,
there are shoreless miseries of oceans, not seas.
While you wallow and wait in your tower of ivory,
your sister is starving, your brother is begging.

Your sisters are starving, your brothers are begging.
Your mothers are mourning, your fathers are folding.
Unseen, unsung -- under the same sun.

Wake up, look up, there's a warmth up there.
A reminder of peace and a reason to care.
A reason to care.
Wake up, look up, that's something you share.
There's more to life than the boy in that mirror...
Wake up, wake up, wake up."

...From the depths of this hell -
where the free are slaves,
no difference between the cowards and brave,
where our love and hate have become the same -
it's time that we "unbecame"...

Where the ears are deaf, and tongues too dry,
where the arms don't hold, and seeing eyes go blind.
Where nothing is everything and everything is nothing...

"Arise-my soul, and sing."

By The Sea

I used to think that I knew who I was and that I would always be the person I knew.


"By the Sea" by Modern Life is War

We were young, numb, and violent all at once. We were always smashing glass but it was never enough to make us feel OK. Are we normal boys? Is this the normal way? We've been dragging dead weight across Midwest towns. Killing our times with our frowns. Alone in the crowd four years down feeling torn and beaten down. Alone in the crowd four years down, our hearts were beating to this sound. Me and you, we never got much sleep those nights. There was too much turmoil too deep inside. Lost in the dark without our pride... There was a light at the end of that tunnel, but we chose to shield our eyes.

Could It be? Are we seeing clearly for the very first time? We've been to the edge and we know what it's like to want to die...and that's something we won't glorify. We'll leave those miserable times behind. How far can I go? I'm rising from the depths of my own hell. I don't need another tragic tale. I need the strength to walk the other way. I found conviction in my ever changing mind. I grew up tied down and bleeding on the inside, but I know I was a victim of my own device, and I want to live to see a brand new life.


Stay Gold,

MMK

It's a boy and/or girl!

Yep. We're gonna have a baby.

I guess I'll tell you more when there's more to know.

Thanks, God, for making us fertile.