A month ago C. gave birth to a 7 lb. 14 oz. baby boy. He got himself stuck in the birth canal and for a few minutes the doctor was not able to record a heartbeat. They tried using a vacuum to get him out, but all the succeeded in doing was splattering everyone with blood. A room was prepped for an emergency c-section. At the last moment, on the final push, C. was born with umbilical cord wrapped around his neck. A dramatic entrance.

For a month we've stayed mostly home. C. is a strong, healthy baby, and for that we are thankful. C. is a hungry baby who does not need and does not seem to like sleep, and that is our challenge. That month is over, and though we try to but some semblance of a life together, it remains difficult. Her challenge is uncomplicated. Though there were a whole host of issues in the first couple of weeks, but now it has boiled down to fatigue and frustration. It's a monumental feat, feeding a baby 9-13 times a day, 30-60 minutes a feeding. His frequent cries make us wonder if he's eating enough. I wonder if it's possible to have a repetitive stress injury of the breasts.

My own fatigue is not nearly so great. This evening was more difficult than most. I've cobbled together perhaps a hour of my own time and this entry is being written while I really should be sleeping. For the most part, I try my best to be supportive, but there's little I can do by way of shouldering her burden. This is her task, and she makes me proud.

I am thankful that I can take time off to bond with my child, even before the child is born. In truth I need this time and C. wants me home for this period of interminable waiting. Really though, for me, it's not that bad. There's plenty to do around the house; shelving to be installed, new furniture to construct, some dicey electrical work, landscaping ... home improvement like waiting, never ends.

While the eight of nine, California's employed give or take, were bustling about, many in tall steel and glass towers, we were hitting up the mall and going to see a movie. These places, crowded in our memories, were nearly barren ghost towns during the week. It's a wonder the shops and restaurants even bothered to open. We chanced upon a manager in a fast food restaurant taking up one of many vacant booths, looking over inventory lists or employee schedules. Waiting for business to pick up. Waiting as many of us do, for the weekend.

In a few days, definitely no more than ten, we will finally begin a new stage in our lives. There are worries aplenty in anticipation, the labor, the breast feeding, the sleepless nights, and the never ending series of challenges that come after those first months and years. Our parents are in retirement now, but somehow they are too busy to come up until after the baby is born. I begrudge them nothing. Even in retirement I know, it never ends.

"...there's never a wish better than this/When you only got (100) years to live"

A couple of months ago I caught a cold, which lasted less than a week and wasn't at all that severe. At the same time I started to develop a rash all over my body. I'm used to allergies of all sorts, and I lean pretty heavily on Claritin when the weather is just so. There was this one time in college where I had some bad shellfish and broke out all over the place, but that lasted only one night. This time was much worse. Since it started, I've gone straight through an entire box of Benadryl. Initially, I set up a couple of doctor's appointments ... and then a couple of dermatologist appointments. I fought with my insurance company to get some medication and now eight weeks after it started and a week and a half since I start using the medication, some artificial sunlight in a tube, I'm mostly healed. Despite not feeling very sick, these past couple of months served to remind me that I am, in fact, getting old. There have been other reminders too. It hasn't been a very good year for many people around me, a number of friends have had immediate family pass away this year. I had a close call this year too. It'd be easy if each of us knew just how much time we had. I'd like to think if I did, that I wouldn't squander even a single day.

"I'm (22) for a moment/She feels better than ever"

We saw "(500) Days of Summer" on Monday and if you caught on that I'm stealing from more than one artist, kudos to you. I'm a sucker for these kinds of movies. Movies that aren't love stories. Movies that are about love -- that are exciting, funny, sad, painful and where generally, nothing happens. As the man said, "That's amore!" Maybe that's why I liked "The Half-Blood Prince". Yeah the characters are about half my age, but as Big D. masterfully deadpans, "Oh, to be young and to feel love's keen sting." Since they cut out the fighting, that pretty much sums up the movie. I've been thinking a lot recently about how I'd explain any of this to my son one day. It'd be easier if we listened, understood, and learned. But youth, as they say, is squandered on the young. And maybe that's the point these movies are trying to make, it's just better this way.

"I'm (33) for a moment/Still the man, but you see I'm a they/A kid on the way/A family on my mind."

Today was my last day of work for a while. I feel like it's my first really break in my ten plus years there. I left a few filing odds and ends, but other than that, there's nothing that I feel bad about abandoning. Today, I started paternity leave and in a few days I will be a dad. I'm not sure what comes next. I'm not sure what I need to become. I feel like I've been an adult for a long time now, though I know I haven't acted like it for most of those years. People all around me are trying to give me advice, but for some reason, I can't really hear it. I'm trying to listen, but I just don't really understand. But in a world where you can sample everything vicariously through the web, maybe it's better that some things seem unexpected. Some things you should just walk in to, come what may.

Reset, then a blinking cursor. Once again, as many times before – here, publicly, ere privately.

Recently I’ve been organizing, reorganizing, reshuffling, recycling and just plain throwing away, the physical odds and ends of nostalgia. It’s amazing how much you can accumulate late on Sundays after many a busy weekend. How, over time, all of it can sit and gather dust in the corners of your home or mind. Then one day you return to the scene, find these moments paused. Some things you wonder why you ever kept, others you can’t bear to throw away just yet.

I just moved 3.6 gigs of data from a DVD to the network here at work. Some of it, probably all of it is duplicate. There’s just so much stored there and so little remembered about what things were called or what they looked like that it’s almost impossible to find. I heard somewhere, probably public radio, that the human mind still has the edge on computers when it comes to storage. It makes me feel good about the human mind to think that true; however, it’s never really been about the limits of storage, rather about the methods of retrieval.

It’s amazing to me just how much stuff we can squeeze into this home of ours. How the interior has seemed to grow, even as its value has dropped. Recently we’ve invested quite a bit in a brand new kitchen, the most obvious sign of our reconsolidation, a small act of renewal. This home, my mind, our lives; now in constant reshuffle. I keep bringing to the surface loosened memories, feeling keenly the distance from those simpler times.

A dream of words, I haven’t given it up quite yet. My timing is poor, as it has always been. But I have to try to find a rhythm of writing again, before everything changes.

Recently sent to a friend who inquired about the recently announced government intervention in the impending financial "meltdown":

Here's my take: First, the part that most people understand, housing prices are declining. In more fiscally conservative times this would be a bad enough thing, but not something that I would agree with taxpayer financed intervention for. But what works in theory, "Thou shall not kill," seldom comes without exception.

So housing prices are declining and the banks which lent that money are leveraged, which is fine by most modern theories of economics. This is important to understand -- banks are leveraged, they lend money they don't have. One might ask, why are housing prices declining? It's because banks came up with complicated loans(adjustable rate mortgages), mortgage brokers pursued people in a predatory fashion(subprime lending), and some people just wanted to make money on rising home values. In short, people were greedy. A lot of people, not just "Wall Street". Now, leverage works both ways, and you don't need a lot of defaults or foreclosures to bring down a bank. For my part, I sort of see the leverage that banks employ as a match and the greed of the last several years made it easier to spark. As soon as the housing prices start to decline, the match is lit. When Congress talks about propping up housing prices they are talking about putting out the lit match. Which might be a good idea these days. Why? Here's part two:

Because banks are risk adverse (who isn't?) and because someone had the bright idea to deregulate the derivatives market (commodity futures modernization act of 2000) banks recently started bundling thousands of loans and reselling them with no government oversight. This gets complicated so I might not have this 100% correct: These loans are then split in the pieces (according to quality) and repackaged and resold. These are CMOs (Collateralized Mortgage Obligations). They are bought and sold, but because only a relatively few people can deal (or even understand) them, their actually value isn't well understood. These are called Level 2 assets. Then, people start insuring and re-insuring these assets by trading, essentially, the risk that mortgage holders would default. These because a broad category of assets known as credit default swaps (CDS) Because these are extremely hard to quantify, these are called Level 3 assets. I'm pretty sure there are other types of Level 2 and level 3 assets. I'm sure that not all of them are bad. Think of them all as firewood. Firewood is useful. Lots of very dry firewood can be dangerous. Think of the everything related to mortgages as very dry firewood.

So get rid of the match and you still have a conflagration waiting to happen. How bad is the problem? I've seen at least one estimate that right before this started unraveling there was a estimated 500T worth of derivatives ... I use "worth" very loosely. I don't know how bad it really is.

No one does.

But they can guess ... and they can be scared. And banks can stop lending to each other because they are scared. And that fear can do enough to cause four of the five largest US investment banks to sell or considering selling themselves and enough to cause the world's largest insurer to take a $85B loan from the government at roughly 11% interest. It's enough to cause my workplace to eliminate half of my co-workers.

But then again, maybe it isn't that bad. The short sellers on wall street want to know. They've been wanting to know for months now. Their voice of dissent is going to be quashed (they aren't all virtuous either, "naked" shorts are the equivalent of eco-terrorists) But it's enough to know that some people want the truth. Because maybe, just maybe, it isn't that bad.

This last week in wall street was interesting to say the least. But it isn't a meltdown. Not by a long shot. Let's all hope it isn't as bad as they aren't saying.

I finally got around to reading this article in an issue of the New York Times Magazine a couple of weeks ago. It references one of my favorite numbers, the Dunbar Number, and has encouraged me to be more active on Facebook. We'll see how that goes. Dunbar aside, it's really this idea's that got me interested: "This is the paradox of ambient awareness. Each little update — each individual bit of social information — is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends’ and family members’ lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting."

During most of my weekday mornings, I spend a portion of my time engrossed in news as it pertains to the market. On slow news days this doesn't really amount to much. On days like the last two, it renders me rather unproductive. (It doesn't help that the only other engineer left in the building doesn't have a lot to do right now and loves to discuss the stock market) If you haven't been keeping up to date, Merrill Lynch has been bought by Bank of America, Lehman Brothers has filled for bankruptcy, and AIG has been more or less taken over by the government. For those trying to keep score, this is only a week after Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were taken in to conservatorship by the government. Toss in the demise of Bear Stearns a number of months ago, season with IndyMac and a number of other failed names, and you have quite a bitter broth. What's for dessert? WaMu.

I'm actually hoping that this is the news that leads for awhile. I'm pretty sick of hearing about lipstick on pigs.

A mini update: They called this afternoon -- we're sorry this and we're sorry that. In short, I'm definitely safe ... for now. Rumor is, we're going through this again at year's end. And again next July.

I have very little motivation on Fridays. Considering my phones aren't ringing off the hook, I really should get some of this tidied away. Also, since we're fond of counting in calendar days, getting something out on Friday is much, much better than waiting until Monday.

On the flipside, it's Friday! It's the first weekend in a while that we have some breathing room. Say it with me now, "Breathe in, breathe out". Rinse and repeat. Now break six slabs of ice and sing it, "I am a man who will fight for your honor..." Alright, so I get a little crazy sometimes.

And the best comes last: A hearty welcome to my friend's daughter Clarisa: "This world isn't the greatest, but it doesn't suck nearly as bad as your dad thinks."

They sent for us by e-mail, last Thursday at 10:55pm. Labeled in red, they called it a "Work Status Meeting". They set up six teams of our peers, scattered around the main building, to hand us letters describing how our positions had been cut and how we might have rights to bump other people out of a job elsewhere or that we would receive severance if we chose or had to leave. They brought in extra security for the day to monitor the elevators and the doors. And, when I went at 1:00pm on Friday to get my letter, they told me they had lost it.

I had planned to make my rounds and talk to people in the main building before I left. As I had no certainty of what was going to happen to me, I did the same anyway. My coworker, D., took me to get a drink at a nearby bar. Afterward, I proceeded back to my division where people were busy packing up there stuff. The principal in charge was planning on treating everyone to margaritas. I felt I really couldn't decline. My afternoon wasn't very productive.

My superiors tell me that no news is good news. Apparently some late resignations had saved my position. I called our human resources about this a couple days ago, they told me they are still checking on it.

Summers usually get off to a hectic start. A number of my good friends are cancers and as soon as the solstice is over, the birthday dinners begin. As for myself, C. treated me to a weekend away in Costanoa, an upscale coastal campground complete with spa and other yuppie amenities. The interminable onslaught of nights out had already taken their toll on me and I hacked my way through the entire weekend. But for that, it was a pretty ideal weekend starting with an early morning IMAX showing of "The Dark Knight" and lunch at Hog Island Oyster Company, continuing with a hike in the Butano State Park while worrying about imaginary mountain lions, and finishing with a stroll along the Santa Cruz Boardwalk and watching the Chinese Acrobats.

Even with all the festivities, I've spent most of July worrying about my job status. Ironically, I've never been busier, my long awaited project has just started and I'm at work for about twelve hours a day, though my weekends have been unsullied so far. The Friday before last we received notice of how many people in each job classifications are being cut. Where I work people must be laid off in order of seniority, from least to most, based on their time in their current classification. As it so happens, there are 18 people just like me and I'm number 10 from the top (or nine from the bottom). And as it so happens, they cut 8 people. It gets a little complicated after that, but there's still a chance that someone else could take my spot and I could be out of a job.

This past week I've been riding a roller coaster of emotion. On Monday it seemed there was a possibility that I'd be out of a job based on one interpretation of what was going to happen. On Tuesday, that seem to get reversed and on Wednesday, I heard that I was definitely "safe". On Thursday however I saw an e-mail that informed me that Human Resources would not be telling anyone definitively who was leaving until this coming Friday, the 15th. The plan apparently is to call those "affected" to notify them and then to have security escort them out. Classy, really classy. Anyway, there's only four more days to go. Three if they decide to tell us in the morning.

In the Land of Sand there was a dream of a girl who had fallen in love with the hour of eventide. ( Read more )