So, I've been working with the high school youth group at our church during the past few weeks. The kids are pretty cool, so it's enjoyable. I hope to keep working with them throughout the semester.
Anyway, the group took a trip yesterday afternoon up to Mt. Major in central New Hampshire. We hiked up the mountain, cooked some dinner at the summit, and then hiked back down before it started getting dark. There were a lot of people on the mountain, so that kind of took away from the experience a bit, but the view from the top was outstanding. Mt. Major overlooks the largest lake in NH and the leaves on the trees of all of surrounding mountains were vibrantly orange, red, and yellow. It was pretty awesome. Sarah stayed at home, but I'm hoping to take her up the mountain sometime soon. It was a great way to spend the afternoon.
Here are some pictures:
Enjoy! I normally shrink 'em down a bit, but I left these big so that you can see some of the details of the landscape. That last one there is a little look at what it looks like to drive down the highway out here right now. It's pretty crazy...
Anyway... Hope these make you want to come visit. :)
Hey, pregnancy... Thanks for messing with Sarah's hormones or whatever and giving my wife a heightened sense of smell. I never knew it before, but I've recently learned that I apparently smell all of the time and have terrible breath. Who knew? Gross.
It's coming up on Homecoming weekend here at UNH. There's a parade tomorrow night, a football game on Saturday, and a hockey game on Sunday. It's kind of weird being on a campus where the school's hockey team is a bigger deal than the football team, but that's how they do things up here in New England, I suppose. I will be the one Hall Director on duty for the entire campus this weekend, but I'm hoping that the students here don't get too out of control.
I need a haircut. We'll see if Sarah feels up to styling my coif this weekend. She's gotten pretty good at it. Having her cut my hair saves us money, too, since she is pretty cool with working for high-fives and a more handsome husband. I don't think I've payed for a haircut (besides for a formal event or something) for almost five years now. Awesome.
Here's what I'm listening to lately, if you care to know: H2O - "Nothing to Prove" (New record from a quality old school sxe band) The Wedding - "The Sound and The Steel" (Jesusy pop-punk) Relient K - "The Birds and The Bee Sides" (More Jesusy pop-punk, but with style) Verse - "Aggression" (The album that taught me to like this band) The Warriors - "Genuine Sense of Outrage" (This album melts my face with its goodness)
Sarah has been feeling better over the past couple of days. She has a head cold that she can't seem to shake, but it seems like her nausea and fatigue has been dying off a bit. I'm hoping that this trend continues. It's pretty shitty to see your wife feeling terrible all the time, yet be personally powerless to really do anything to help. I'm sure that my discomfort pales in comparison to hers, though, so I won't pity myself too much. I just hope that the second trimester is all it's cracked up to be.
We're both looking forward to being back in Iowa over Christmas break. We'd like the time to pass a bit more quickly, but we'll be patient. As quickly as time seems to be going, though, I'm sure that the vacation will be here before we know it. Let us know if you'd like to see us while we're home. If it works out with our travel plans, we'll do our best. I think we're planning on being in Iowa from December 23rd until January 2nd.
That's it for now. I showered earlier tonight, but I might want to get another one in before I go crawl in bed. I'd hate to be kicked out of bed for being too smelly, or something.
Stay Gold!
MMK
P.S. - I've discovered the true explanation for the extinction of the dinosaurs.
Also, here's a picture of our house (aka the building for which I'm responsible). It's nothing much... Three stories, 125 residents. But it's a great building overall. I couldn't have asked for a better place to start my career.
In other news, my fantasy football team performed absolutely atrociously this weekend. Not that anyone really cares, but I'm pretty devastated. So it goes.
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.
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.
