Heptadecagon

SCAN0189 Originally uploaded by three beans I've updated the Flickr page with more artwork created by the kids. This picture shows Talia and Zoe (conveniently labelled "T" and "Z") outside with me and the telescope on a dark, starry night. Several of these stars seem to have gone supernova at the same time, so it looks like the three of us are on the verge of a major scientific discovery. I'm so excited that my eyes turned red. The moon is also out, and despite the darkness, the grass is quite clearly green. Amazing.

After every baseball game, the players are responsible for cleaning up the field. Especially rookies. I'm a rookie. We sweep out the dugouts. We rake the dirt along the base-paths. We remove the bases and cover the base posts. We cover the pitcher's mound and home plate area with tarps. We are a grounds-keeping machine . During the post-game clean-up (wow, back-to-back hyphenations) our manager, Terrey, had me get a broom and told me to sweep a circle around home plate. This took all of thirty seconds. "Ok, I'm done," I called out to him. "Keep going, around and around," were his directions. So I did. I kept going in a small circle around and around home plate, in the same direction until I felt so dizzy I couldn't walk straight. Finally, Terrey came over to me, shook his head, and said to make the circles bigger each time. "You mean you want a spiral?" I asked. "Terrey, you have to speak geek to me." "Make a spir

Chris had been feeling a little uncomfortable all day Wednesday, but at 38 and a half weeks pregnant, I'd guess that's the normal way to feel. We'll pick up the story around 11 pm, when contractions were about five minutes apart, but according to Chris, didn't feel like they were contractions of the entire uterus. I have no uterus, so I can only write what she described, and that's how she explained them to me. Oh, and another thing: this post will use the word "uterus," and other words that cause queasiness among beer-swilling men. If this sort of talk upsets you, skip all the words and scroll to the bottom of the post for the baby pictures. But back to the uterus (UTERUS!). I had noticed that the contractions kind of followed the scheme of one big one, and then two smaller ones, all spaced about five minutes apart. I don't really know for certain if this was what was happening; I was just trying to estimate the strength of the contraction by ob