Um, yeah.

I've been a little bit busy. The week after Audrey was born, we took her up to my parents, so that they could see her. My brother Josh was there, and mentioned that he'd been playing Final Fantasy XI:Online.

Now, I'd been avoiding that game like I'd avoided EverQuest and UltimaOnline and any other online RPG. Same reason I avoided MUDs for all those years as well. Addiction. And I didn't really want to shell out x number of dollars a month in order to play. But Josh was playing FFXI, so it couldn't be that bad, and I did have 6 weeks of maternity leave to kill. So I bought it!

Coinciding with the PS2 release. I considered the PS2, but 100 for the hard drive in order to play the game? No thanks, I'll just shell out the 50 bucks for the PC version. But...my video card needed to be upgraded, and while we were there, Jer talked me into a new hard drive, so my PC could start out fresh (i'd been using Win98 1 for the longest time, and it's not very stable), oh, and while we're at it, don't forget the CD burner to replace the fried one. $300 later... *sigh*

But it's cool. For weeks my days were:
2pm - crawl out of bed. (earlier if Audrey has an appointment)
feed baby, feed self, check email, let DH know I'm alive, play game, eat dinner, etc
midnight - DH goes to bed, baby all mine. play game between her feedings.
6-7am - crawl into bed. wake periodically until 2pm to feed her.

Then we went on vacation, but more about that later...

Audrey
She's doing well. Her first week was iffy. Birthweight was 6#10oz, release weight was 6#6oz. At her first appointment on the 22nd, she was still the same. She checked out fine healthwise, she just wasn't gaining any weight. We had to return for a weight-check on Wednesday. She was down an oz to 6#5oz. We had to return Friday, no change. We were there on the 29th, and she was up to 6#10oz. She was no longer marked failure to thrive!

We then returned on April 2nd for her official 2 week appointment. I don't remember her weight right now, but it was in the 7s. 7 even I think? I dunno.

April 13th she had an appointment with a pediactric dermatologist at JHU to look at the mark on her back. He said it was nothing to worry about, it was just a spot where flesh failed to grow, so scar tissue formed instead. He did take a picture of it, and we signed consent for them to add it to their skin picture database. Wow, she's already famous...well, maybe not, the picture is anonymous.

April 16th was her 1 month appointment, weighing in at 7#14oz. It's about freakin time she put some serious growth on her bones.

Anyway, her 2 month is May 18th, so I can't wait to see what her growth has been. Before we left for St Louis, she looked so small in her swing. We'd put blankets beside her to keep her upright. She also barely fit into her newborn sized clothes. Now she fills them out well enough and she's no longer dwarfed in the swing.

Vacation
We left on April 25th for St Louis. Our purpose, to show the kids off to Jer's grandparents and to play tourist.

We left late in the day, so we stopped in Columbus, OH for the night, and then continued on to St Louis. The trip out wasn't that bad. I didn't even do my stitching. I either slept or watched the scenery.

We get to St Louis and our initial hotel's definition of High Speed Internet Access was a room on the first floor where you could jack in. NO THANK YOU! We changed to a different hotel, which turned out to be nicer and cheaper. They had access in their rooms, but we discovered a problem. Our connection would reset every 15 minutes. It made it hard to sustain a game. But I could log in to check my plants and do other oddities. I avoided battles, as I didn't want to be in the middle of one and get my butt kicked 'cause I wasn't 'there'.

So the evening of the 26th we visit Jer's grandparents. We go out to dinner with them, and his aunt and cousin. Afterwards, it's back to the hotel with us, to plan what to do the next day.

The 27th we start out at the St Louis Zoo. The first thing we did was go see the Penguins. Then Mikey saw the train, and it was "can we ride the train?" every five minutes. Then we walked past the carousel. He wanted to ride that, too. After watching the seals be fed, visiting the apes, and walking up the hill, we finally decide that he's not going to stop begging to ride the train until we do, so we buy tickets and take a trip around the zoo.

We thought he'd settle down, with his train thing statisfied...we were wrong. He wanted to see the birds. Well, he turned into a terror. We hurried through there and left the building. We decided that he was hungry and went to get something to eat. He barely ate anything, and then proceeded to mess around while I was in the bathroom. I came out to a very mad Jer, and a crying Mikey. We decided that he wasn't going to settle down to see the rest of the zoo, so we headed for the exit. I wanted to get my postcards from the gift shop, and he was constantly touching stuff there. Ugh. I found them, bought them, and we left.

We considered calling it a day, but it was still early. So we decided to go all the way downtown to visit the Arch. Afterwards, we'd go to Union Station to the Hard Rock Cafe.

The Arch... Wow. I delt with Mikey through the metal detector at the entrance while Jer handled the baby. EVERYTHING goes through the detector. If it's too big, like the stroller, they wave the hand-wand around it. We meander around the museam part of the building for a bit. Mikey's getting more and more uncontrollable. Finally we finish walking around and buy our tickets. Our tram was boarding in 5 minutes, so we get to hang out in a display room. Jer points to this round thing with seats in it and says "I think that's what we go up in". I say "no way!" It's so small, it looks like something out of an old space movie.

We go down a level, stand in front of our gate. The portal is rather small, I think. I hope I can fit through it. [Boy would that be embarrasing.] We watch this 3min video, the tram arrives, doors open, and the people flee. I look inside...It's the thingy from the floor above! OMG. It's a good thing I'm not claustrophobic. It's the four of us and some guy in the thingy. Mikey thought it was cool until we started to move, then he was freaking out. I held onto him and it kept him still. I'm starting to have problems because I don't like heights, and you can watch the emergency stairwell as you go up. It didn't help that it was hot and stuffy in the car. I mention something about not wanting to walk up all of them and Jer mentions that when they had the fire, the people at the top had to walk DOWN all of them. Holy cow!

So we get to the top, Mikey's glad to be out (I'm glad to be out, too!) and we go into the look-out. Wow. The view was great. I took many pictures and Mikey thought it was the coolest thing. He didn't want to go back down! But we did go when the next tram arrived. We figured that his fascination wouldn't last long. We'd barely gotten into our car when the doors shut. Jeeze they cut it close. Mikey was just as scared going down. I took my arm out from around him at one point and he shot me a dirty look and pulled my arm back around himself.

We went to the gift shop for my obligatory postcards. Got a Tshirt for Mike. Postcards. A magnet. A pin. Thought about getting the "Passport" thingy they have (you visit federal parks and get a stamp that you've been there), but decided we'd forget it or forget to stamp it or something.

The walk back to the car Mike was unruly. At one point he took off, and Jer wound up whomping on him, since it was at the entrance to the parking lot. The kid just doesn't understand that a car could squish him in an instant. We decided that going anywhere else was not an option and headed back to the hotel. It didn't take too long for Mike to fall asleep. Audrey slept through the entire Arch visit.

We had dinner over at Jer's grandparents place. Jer's cousin Josh brought his family over, so I got to meet them. Mikey played with their daugher (MacKenzie, I think) and Josh's brother Robbie. After dinner, Jer disappeared with Josh to pick up a computer. I wound up with the baby that would "snack" on her bottle and refuse to go to sleep. Luckily, Mikey wasn't too much of a PITA. It was almost midnight before Jer returned. He was lucky, I was leaving for the hotel at midnight without him if he hadn't returned.

Wednesday, the 28th, we headed downtown to the Anheuser-Busch factory. Tour time... It was uneventful, but long and a lot of walking. Afterwards they had a sampling opportunity, so I tried one of their Bacardi drinks, Raz. Not bad. Doesn't even really taste like alcohol, either. Got the postcards from the giftshop, a pin, and a tshirt for Mike. We were going to go to the Hard Rock, but my head started hurting, and my migraine stuff wasn't in the diaper bag. We figured that Jer had it in his jacket, where he'd put it the day before. His jacket was back at the hotel. Or so we thought. After we drove all the way back out to St Charles, he couldn't find it in the room. It turned out to be in the car the whole time, in the back seat. We head back downtown to Union Station.

We park on the opposite side from the Hard Rock. Walked through Union Station and back outside. Mike thought the Cafe was cool. It was really slow inside, though. Dinner was cool. We saw the video for "I Believe In A Think Called Love" and it gave me a whole new perspective on the song. Heh. After dinner it's the visit to the gift shop. I got a T-shirt that I'm going to have to lose weight to be able to wear. It's the dark version of the traditional Tshirt. Jer got a hat and a different shirt and a beer glass. And I got shirts for the 2 kids and a pin for myself.

We get back to the hotel around 930pm and I collapse into a chelly puddle into bed. Next think I know, it's morning. [I woke up at like 6am and played FFXI a little and poked about on the web for a bit, then crawled back into bed around 8am]

Thursday. Thursday I wake up and I hurt from all of the walking we did the day before. We're all pretty worn out. Around 1pm we go next door to Ruby Tuesdays for lunch. We're waiting for word from two of Jer's ISCABBS friends we're supposed to meet. Lunch over, we're back in the room. One guy cancelled totally, the other said we could come by earlier. Woohoo. So around 7ish we're at his house, and we're going to Denny's for dinner. I've realized by this point that we have a total pancake monster for a son, so he gets pancakes. The visit was uneventful, and we part ways and head back to the hotel. We pack most of our stuff up before bed.

Friday morning. Up earlyish to get dressed and pack the car. We're meeting Jer's grandparents next door at Bob Evans for breakfast at 10. Uneventful. The kid can pack away a lot of pancakes. We part ways and we load up into the car to head for Iowa City for the ISCANic. We had decided that the best way would be to take 63 North, rather than going back out to Illinois and grabbing I-74 to I-80.

It rained on us a little. And we spent a good portion of it on a 2 lane highway. Behind a "land train". I had suggested to Jer that we stay on 63 for a bit instead of getting onto 218 as soon as we hit it, as 63 has less mileage as a 2 laner. Hah. We get onto 218. At first it wasn't that bad. It was brand new 4 lane highway. That wasn't on the map. But after a few miles it goes back down to 2 lanes. And we could see the roadbed for the other side the whole way up to where we go back to 4 lanes. Some of it had been untouched for some time, as things were starting to grow in it. It'd just rained, so there wasn't any workers out and about. I'm not quite sure they had been working even before the rain came...

I did observe that a lot of the "back roads" in Iowa are dirt or gravel. Unpaved. In the rural area it was paved if it had a number, otherwise it wasn't. I could be wrong, but that's just what I saw going up 218.

ISCANic

We get to the Iowa City area and it's time to hunt and seek our hotel. It seems that someone didn't bother to print out directions or location of the hotel at all. I wanted to throttle him because I'd been looking at the hotel's website the night before. I could've written that info down! We got off of 218 onto I80 East and start looking. We got to the last Iowa City exit and hadn't seen it on the exit Lodging signs, so we got off at another exit that had a sign for "tourist information". The tourist info place was right beside a bagel joint that I'd eaten in the last time I was in IC. Familiar scenes. Our hotel was the first exit after 218. We'd gone right past it and didn't know it, since we weren't able to see the lodging sign. Go back, check in. They have wireless high access! woohoo!

Rent a wireless card. Why isn't this working? One of the other guys with our group couldn't get on anymore either. I finally kicked Jer into going down to ask the front desk what to do. Oh dear, the access point for the 3rd floor is down. We can get onto the WAN from the 1st floor, but not from any other. Their tech support'll be onsite in the morning to look into it. Hrmph.

We keep our door open so we can see traffic as it goes by. All of us are staying in the same block of hotel rooms. I've never met any of these people before, and have talked to only 2, and even them I hadn't chatted with in ages.

After a bit we all decend upon Red Lobster like locusts. One familiar face joins us! I hadn't seen Chris since 1997 and he didn't look at all different.

After dinner, we return to the hotel (after a quick stop at WalMart to get swimsuits), and people start getting ready for the party. We've reserved the meeting room. With 2 kids, we had trouble deciding who would go downstairs first. Finally I kicked Jer out. I told him that the sooner he went down to drink the sooner he could come back and I could go down. While he was gone, Mikey fell asleep on the floor, and I managed to coax Audrey into sleep. (I had to lay next to her until she was well and good asleep) And I have an idea while I'm in the room. Jer comes back and tells me that he's not having any fun without me, and I reveal my idea. Baby Monitors! So off to WalMart he goes. We set the monitor up, test it to verify that we can hear it downstairs, and we both head over to the party...me with the laptop in tow.

And I set up shop in the meeting room. They're all a bunch of drunk smokers, but I was playing my game, so I tried to ingore the smoke. Chris comes in the room and visits me. And yanks the wireless card out of the laptop *fume*. It's a good thing I wasn't in a battle right then! After a few rice krispie treats and discovering that the laptop can't see the network in the pool room (right next door), we decide to don our swimsuits to sit in the hottub. I'd gotten a shirt to wear in the water, but once downstairs I decided to take it off. I'm naturally self-conscious, but when some of the people you're hanging around with are in their underwear in the pool...

Anyway, Jer got himself drunk, other people got themselves drunk, Chris got himself dangerously drunk. I stayed sober. I don't like beer or hard liquor anyway. We call it quits around 2-3am and go to bed.

Saturday is the picnic, so we join up with some other people for breakfast (at noon) at a local restaurant, and then head to the picnic "fashionably late". Luckily it wasn't raining. The picnic was pretty lame from my point of view. I spent most of my time sitting with Audrey or running to the bathroom. After a couple of hours, people start to leave "to get ready for the party" that night. We leave too. I was going to spend some time online, and Jer was going to take Mike to the pool.

Only I'd been downstairs for an hour when Mikey comes down and tells me that he wants to go swimming and that daddy's not feeling well. I send him back upstairs to "check on daddy" and log off. By the time I get up (slow elevator), Mike's already heading back downstairs. Someone in our group did grab him and bring him back up. :)

Jer...had gotten himself whomped on the head while sparring at the picnic. He had a concussion. I couldn't keep an eye on him and watch Mikey in the pool, so Mikey was distraught. He'll live. Later we went to the party.

The party was cool. I had some of my Raz. Audrey stayed asleep until the end. I saw another friend I hadn't seen in 10 years. I didn't even recognize him. Mikey flirted with the women and attached himself to one of them for a good portion of the night. He was playing his gameboy so he was mostly preoccupied. We did have to send him to the room Audrey was in later...he got too wound up. We played pass the baby after Audrey woke. Jer got himself very drunk early on, so we spent awhile hanging out, waiting for it to work its way out of his system.

Sunday morning we passed on the goodbye brunch, and headed back east. As much as he wanted to go back down to I70, I80 was a straight shot across the country, only we had to pay tolls in Indiana, Ohio, and PA. So we took I80.

Unexpected construction outside of Chicago made an interesting time. It wasn't on the map. It should have been. It was a massive interchange reconstruction.

Things were uneventful after that. Jer wanted to drive all the way home in one day. At 3am Monday morning we're just east of the pittsburg area when I cry enough. I wasn't driving, but I was tired of being awake, making sure that he stayed awake. So we stopped at a hotel. The rest of the trip took less than 4 hours. So close, but they would have been 4 very very LONG hours had we kept going.

And that's the trip.

Work
First day back was Tuesday. It was an eventful night. Geeze. Can't even let me ease back in. I'm working 6pm-3am. Gotta get used to sleeping from 5am-noon. I can't remember any of my passwords, but I can remember the system password from March. I've only been gone for 2 months.

Heh. And that's it.