J. Jason Lazarus Blog

Once again, no real news - but that’s good. Had our Week 36 OB Appointment last week and all seems well again. The doctor had a bit of a problem finding the baby’s heart beat and separating it from Deanna’s but it sounds nice and strong. It’s slowed down quite a bit in the past two weeks - down to 120bpm, but that all sounds good. The doctor thinks that we might be looking at already a 7.5lbs baby, even a month before the due date. Deanna’s continuing to have a stellar pregnancy with only minimal issues - mainly the getting-up-out-of-the-couch part.

We also have been attending a ton of classes to try our best at being ready for the baby when it does come. Last week it was breastfeeding classes, this weekend it was a cloth diaper workshop. Although these classes can be daunting and almost make you feel like you have a child before you do, it does manage to give me some level of reassured faith that I can, in fact, do this - and at that, do it moderately well. Cloth Diapering no longer seems like the overwhelming task that many have made it out to be and literally can’t outweigh the inconvenience of lost money, time and midnight runs to Freds for a new disposable pack. Although many would see this as a green move, financial reasoning alone pushes me toward our choice - I can’t reason throwing away so much money. It may be fine for some, but I’m too much of a cheap bastard to do it any other way. The breastfeeding classes have been extremely informative as well - and knowing that there’s public lactation consultants in the Fairbanks area willing to do house calls if you can’t figure it out - and at that, for free, makes me feel so much better about Deanna and I doing it.

So, we’ve got a little more than another week until the baby could be safely delivered - there’s basically a month, from Week 38 to 42, where it’s safe for a baby to be born - we both don’t really care when it’s born just that they are safe and healthy when they decide to grace us with their presence

Week 36 Heart Beat

Before I manage to give some poor person a coronary condition, I’m ok. But there has been a pretty big accident, read on..

So, this last Sunday I finally took up an offer from one of my friends to go skiing - for the first time in my life. Yes, I live in Alaska - and I have for the past 11 years - and haven’t managed to ever ski. I suppose my previous failed attempts at roller skating and ice skating had managed to put a damper on any enthusiastic adventures on seemingly unwieldily objects placed on my typically two left feet. Well, I swallowed what I assumed was a misguided phobia and faced one of the first things I’ve tried to take off my “bucket list” in a while. Although the desired effects were not met nor were they even closely reached, I’ll be the first to admit that my goals were relatively lofty: visions of me slowly slicing back and forth through fresh powder did float through my mind a time or two the day before. What really did happen was quite different, but even so, I have to admit, a lot was accomplished in only a few hours:

• I mastered falling down. In fact the above picture serves as a testament to exactly what position I was in for the majority of the time on the slope.
• I was pretty fluent with putting back on my skis after they fell off after falling down.
• Like a newborn babe, I successfully got up off of the powdery snow after falling down - with no help. Although this seems easy, skis tend to make everything more comical.
• I figured out how to put on and take off the ski boots.
• I managed to maintain upright for over 15 seconds sliding only slightly off from 90 degrees perpendicular to the ski slope.
• I managed to laugh at myself after every single fall.
• I managed to attract the attention of two ski patrol members - both of which offered help and tips how to ski, rather than simply falling down, all tips of which didn’t help at all. I even managed to get an offer to be placed on public display as a rescue victim - yes, indeed, they offered to haul me back up the hill on a snow machine because I was unable to even get down a quarter of the hill before I gave up - mind you, this is a mountain run - not a hill.

What I didn’t master:

• Actually skiing.
• Actually turning without falling down.
• Actually using the ski lift because I never managed to get to the bottom. The hike up, although I only found this out after doing it, was much, much worse than continuing my fall-down-ski-for-15-seconds-repeat routine all the way down the hill would have been.
• Managing to get my left and right legs to act independently. Without such highly-developed motor skills, turns are, well, to say the least, interesting.

And after all this, in careful retrospection, I realized that I had been a willing participant to a horrible accident:

I had, indeed, attempted to ski. This was the only accident that had actually occurred on the entire trip. I dare say it’ll be a while before I consider trying again, knowing full well what kind of grotesque accidents can happen if I, in fact, do attempt to ski. One would definitely have to say that the accident did affect me in one way - seriously not only bruising the entirety of my body below my waist but also seriously bruising what ego I had. Mount Aurora has definitely put me in my place.

I’ve finally managed to get a web-based Photography Portfolio up and running. Some of you might know that I’ve been dabbling in Adobe Lightroom over the past few months and I’ve really grown to love it as a photo-processing suite. One of the best features of it is a quick-and-dirty web portfolio creator that’ll do a pretty decent job in presenting your photos in a flash-based portfolio. In the past, I’ve only contemplated designing my own knowing full well that actually designing something that looks good would not only take a lot of time but would probably come at the expense of several key hairs on my head.

So, although this one is a bit rough right now - as in I was hurrying to get it finished and intend to refine it quite a bit, I do now have my portfolio online. Please send your constructive criticism concerning not only how the pictures look but also how the site functions. Although, I’ll have to admit, if I were to complain about anything about Lightroom, I’d have to say the customization options for the web portfolios are very limited - so, with that being said, there’s only so much I can do with it without placing a lot of overhead on my own shoulders. I also plan to flesh out some of the bits within the next week, depending on how full this week gets.  For those that are wondering, or those of you that didn’t get out to see the show back in September, these are the prints from that show - 3 series, 17 photos all together.

Here’s the link to my Photography Portfolio.  Enjoy!

We’ve got quite a big (and busy) week coming up - between Breastfeeding Class tonight, OBGYN tomorrow and a cloth diapering class this weekend, it’ll be pretty jam packed. One good thing about all these classes is that it is ramping up how busy life is - hopefully making the entry into parenthood a little less jolting.

Most of you know that years ago I held the Recycling Director position at the University and, not in an effort to pat my own back, I was probably one of the most level-headed recycling directors that have ever attempted the position. Although I aggressively expanded the program, I didn’t let the fantasy of a “world without garbage” or the dream of “3 recycling bins in every garage” cloud my judgment and preoccupy my work. I knew that reasonably I could not expect people to recycle, what with the track record of recycling programs in Fairbanks consistently disappearing literally months after their inception, Fairbanksans were sick of being let down by half-assed attempts to get them to recycle. The people responsible for the recycling and green actions in town quite literally don’t understand their audience, going about their work as if Fairbanks as a whole was a great metaphor in the Field of Dreams - lamely, and naively so, assuming if you build it, they will recycle. After the town didn’t recycle, those interested in recycling pointed the blame at the town when they, themselves, were the ones that slacked off and thought the job was done after setting up a box in the middle of nowhere that says “recycle”. Unbeknownst to most liberals around this town, Fairbanks is a CONSERVATIVE town - the University is quite literally an island of liberalism in a sea of conservatives. Well, I suppose it’s a string of islands - there’s Goldstream to consider. One can’t simply assume that this town is just going to recycle - it just doesn’t work. You actually have to convince them.

Which, through a roundabout way, gets me to my real pet peeve. I’ve always had a problem with Fairbanksans in the winter and their insane obsession with leaving their cars idling in parking lots to run into Freds, Safeway or Wal-mart. I understand that it may be an absolute frigid (note the sarcasm, some of you out-of-staters might not get it) -20 outside but your car will manage to maintain its core temperature for the 15 minutes you plan on being in the store - in fact, it’ll still easily start if you decided to keep it out in the cold, unplugged, for the next month at those temperatures. Fine, fine, lets assume it’s -40… oh wait! The same applies, aside from the fact that your car may need to be plugged in, or at least idled for 5 minutes, if you plan on staying in Freds more than two hours - and NO LESS. Why is it then that it’s 18 degrees above and people assume that they need to keep their car running in the parking lots on campus? Sure, one could complain and say that it’s only a minute or two - but this isn’t the case: They kept their car running *all* day long. Running from at least 7:30 in the morning till lunchtime - and this isn’t the only car that does it on a regular basis. How the hell do you rationalize that? I mean in my mind, and once again let me remind you, I not only understand how conservative Fairbanksans are but also consider myself pretty damned level headed, and yet I can’t even rationalize leaving my own car on for more than 30 seconds picking up Deanna from work! Every time I go into the store my car remains off, even at long stoplights my car will be turned off during the summer to conserve fuel.

I can’t even use the perfectly normal reasoning that these people going into Freds as their cars idle use:

“It keeps my CAR WARM“

How ridiculously lame is that? You manage to live in Alaska and can’t stand some cold - can’t stand cold for the five minutes it takes your car to warm up? What if the unthinkable occurs and your car is stranded on the side of the road - how long will you survive because with such an obviously inane lack of reasonable winter gear? What if you have an accident? Shouldn’t you be prepared to face the bone-chilling temperatures of 18 above? How do you rationalize pumping through gallons and gallons of fuel just for an additional five minutes of heat in your car?

I suppose what steams me the most about this whole situation is that these are the same people complaining about skyrocketing fuel bills at their homes - these are the same people that complain when their cars get stolen cause they left their keys in a unlocked running vehicle. These are the same people going bankrupt because they can’t afford their mortgages; these are the same people going to the food bank for sustenance. At $3/gallon you’d think people would be more sensible, but even as level-headed as I consider myself, I can’t even rationalize this.

And don’t one of you dare compare my rants with that joke of an environmentalist Al Gore - I think what I’m ranting about at least has a measure of reason to it. He’s as bad as any of these guys with his $2200/month electricity bill for one of his houses.

I suppose if you need a reason to not waste so ridiculously, just think, Al Gore is watching you. Like the evil villain from some communistic propaganda poster from WWII, Al Gore is watching you. He sees you causing global warming and it makes him cry. You don’t want to make poor old Mr. Gore cry, do you? For Al’s sake, turn off the cars, trucks and SUV’s - cause we all know how super serial Al Gore is and he knows that you’re responsible for killing Mother Earth. If that doesn’t work for a guilt trip, I don’t know what will.

Oddball Title, I know. Over the past two months, mainly due to Deanna leaving the car radio on it for some reason, I’ve been listening to a lot of Public Radio. Now understand why this is odd - for years, I’ve silently berated public radio listeners because they’re usually high-minded socialites with a firmly placed skijump on their collective noses - or so I thought. Especially locally here, although I’ll admit I don’t know much of the details, there’s been quite the public outcry when the political flavor of the local station dramatically changed due to firings - unlike traditional media, people are very adamant about public radio not only being exactly what they want but being a almost constantly fluxing reflection of their beliefs. Although some of this is obviously justified, from an outsider’s point of view, it seems a might… crazy. A hard task, admittedly, for Public Radio to stand up to - and to be honest, I have no idea how they manage to appease all their listeners and still manage to get donations from such a wide variety of people. Nonetheless, my interest in NPR has dramatically increased over just a few weeks of listening in the morning mainly because I finally feel like I’m getting something back from the news - I’m actually learning about the world around me. NPR isn’t nearly the conglomeration of liberal phriahs that my closed mind had always assumed that it was and seeing that the national news coverage can’t manage to find a story that isn’t about someone killing their children or the exalted Britney Spears, it seems only logical to switch my normal routine over to a network that seems to actually care about the world around it. I had always thought that the seemingly monotonous, droning voices could only interest those of our greatest generation but it was extremely reassuring when I found out how wrong I was - I’ve been enthralled enough to tune in each morning to catch the next segment on a six-part series just to learn something new. Like I said before, I finally feel like I’m getting something out of the news I watch. Thank you, NPR, for proving me wrong and showing how naive I truly was.

Tech Projects - I’ve been working on a lot, lately, and I don’t know why. I keep on picking up new projects to keep me insanely busy for some reason - I’m certain if I were to talk to our OB doctor about it she could easily suggest that I’m beginning to nest, and in some twisted manner I suppose I could agree with her. Between this huge blog update to a Wordpress Blog and the new Gallery 2.0 I’m currently working on to replace my entire gallery, I’ve also been working on a lot of Mac-based projects. I’ve been digitizing Deanna’s family videos - some of them on more than 20-year old VHS tapes that are in dire need of saving now before they start truly deteriorating. Dubbing them onto DV Tape, then importing them into Final Cut Pro to edit and then the final burn to DVD in iDVD, I’m learning much more about the video editing side of Macs that I didn’t know before. I’ve also centralized all my mail in, well, Mail. Now I’ve got direct access to my four major emails in one program - something I haven’t managed to do in almost a decade - way back in ‘98-’99 when Eudora was popular - that was the last email client I used consistantly. I’m also backing up data more proficently and even planning to start using iPhoto more but just for family and trip photos - lord knows that’s not a real photo organizer. Mainly I’d like to start using iPhoto more so that we can start getting those photo books Apple offers through the program - I’d love to see our first baby photos in a nice hardcover professional photo book. I’ve also been digitally backing up all my family’s physical photos - starting with a huge box that’s been neglected for years. I want to make sure that I really do save them, so I’m doing quick 300 dpi jpg scans of them just so that I can actually start using them - hopefully somewhere within my gallery. I’m also working on a more professional gallery for my actual photography work - we’ll see how far that comes within the next few weeks. What’s interesting about all these projects is that I’m actually getting to a sense of completion on a lot of them - I’ve already ripped over four hours of family videos for Deanna, about 200 printed photos have been scanned for my parents, the gallery is almost completed, this blog is going pretty well - nonetheless each job has more to be done to it, but each project is getting near completion.

Another week, another baby update. They’ll start to come even more frequent now as we’re getting down to the last stretch. We’re in the middle of Childbirthing Classes - another piece of this massive puzzle that has caught me completely off-guard and has kept me naively saying “that’s not how it’s done on TV or in the movies” - I always had the impression that all Childbirthing Classes were about was breathing methods - not actual education. And excuse me for saying that breathing methods aren’t “actual” education - they’re extremely important and can aid you through labor like no other method can, but it still doesn’t beat out actually finding how when to come in to the hospital, how to work together as a team, what’s actually happening to the baby and your body during labor - all those things can be used as additional reassurance during the labor as well as calm much of the anxiety associated with first time labors. I know, I know, I’m still speaking without prior experience - but I’ll tell you this much, I’ve been much happier knowing that my only defense against a raging set of contractions and a angry wife isn’t breathing like an overaged marathoner.

That being said, we also had a OBGYN appointment yesterday and as per usual, heard the baby’s heartbeat. Everything seems to be going well, Deanna hasn’t gained any more weight and her pregnancy is going well - the main new hurdle is getting up out of our couch. As much as it’s nice and comfy and sucks you in and makes it hard for even non-pregnant people to get out of, it’s definitely not a pregnant-friendly couch.