I suppose I could use the fact that we’re having a baby as a brilliant excuse for me not blogging, but that would be a load of crap.  I just haven’t been motivated to try and organize my thoughts into coherent sentences.  Which is another way of saying I’m lazy.  Also, I’m easily distracted.  Focussing on one thing for longer than 5 minutes is hard.  SoI’m sure this won’t be a long post.

Anyway, yeah, we’re having a baby!  It’s pretty awesome.  And terrifying.  And confusing.  And… well, basically everything anybody has ever said about it.  It’s all true.  Mostly though, it’s just awesome.  We’re both really excited and anxious.  So far, it seems like we’re just doing a lot of waiting.  Who knew 9 months was such a long time?

Everything seems to be progressing as it should, though, so that’s good. Meghan’s healthy, the baby’s healthy.  In a little over a week, we’ll be going in for the main ultrasound* and finding out if our little bean is a boy or a girl.

… that all of the sudden seems very very soon.  WHOA.

With a baby, of course, comes a lot of big changes.  The most significant thus far is changes we’re making to our house.  We going to be remodelling the basement so we can move the office down there, and turn the current office into a guest room, so the current guest room can become the nursery.

Which is kind of bummer, because it means we can’t really set up the nursery until the basement gets remodeled, and that’s not going to be done until the beginning of November.  So, yeah.  Waiting.

Coincidentally, our dishwasher started leaking all over the place last week, so we’re going to get a new one.  A proper permanently installed one, rather than the roller we have now.  And since we’re doing that I figured we might as well get that garbage disposal we’ve been meaning to put in forever.

That’s not really baby-related though.

Hey look at that, it’s almost 5pm.  Guess I’ll have to put writing up those e-mail setup instructions off until tomorrow.  Aww, shucks.

* – Because of last years practice run, we actually had an ultrasound at 6 weeks, but that only seemed to indicate the baby might be an octopus.

I’m gonna try and do better.  Maybe once summer starts?

Went to Fargo this past weekend to see Mastodon & Valient Thorr with some dudes.  Various accounts have been posted already.  I won’t duplicate.  I will say I had a fun time, even though I drank too much during the show and missed most of Mastodon.  Whoops.

Also, if you’re ever in the mood for insanely huge donuts, check out Nelson Bros @ the Clearwater Travel Plaza.

Friday night Meghan & I went to the Chatterbox in Edina for dinner. It’s a fun place, but our food was a bit disappointing. I had chicken strips that tasted like they bought them at the grocery store in the frozen food isle. The beer was good though.
Saturday morning, we got up at 6:30am in order to get to the Mall Of America by 7:30am for the Fraser Walk for Autism. 6:30 is super-early for me, and I hadn’t prepared well for it, staying up until about 3am the previous night working on the new MNBU server. I did alright though. Lots of coffee helped.
After the walk, we went out to breakfast with Naomi & Troy at the Louisiana Cafe. Troy had the ‘Tex Mex’, which was roughly 2 pounds of hashbrowns smothering the usual TexMex fair. I had the Farmer’s Breakfast which was about a pound and a half of hashbrowns smothered in onions and cheese. Apparently, they really are into eating a shitton of hashbrowns there. It was good, although mine was way too oniony.
Then Saturday evening, we went out to dinner with Melissa & Mark at the Anchor Bar, which is a new place in Northeast Mpls that specializes in authentic British cuisine. Mostly fish & chips. Easily the best fish & chips I’ve had, too.
After dinner, we hopped through a couple of bars and ended up at Grumpy’s, where I enjoyed a delicious Grain Belt Nordeast. It’s hard to find, but I’m hoping they make more of it because it was awesome.
We came back to our house around 10:30 and played a few rounds of Catchphrase. We switched the teams up to every possible combination, and I won every game (with my teammate at the time) except the last one. I blame beer for that one. ;)
And today my main event was finally cleaning up the mess I made in the backyard when I cut a big ol’ branch off one of the trees. I spent about an hour and a half picking up twigs and branches and cutting down the remains of the branch into handy sized logs for later use.
I also decided to work on digging up all the hosta behind our garage, but I got a little light-headed after about 15 minutes of that, so I had to stop.
The rest of the afternoon was spent watching various TV, including the end of the Twins game (a loss, d’oh!)m a few episode of the Law & Order: Criminal Intent (sooo.. no more Vincent D’Onofrio huh? Weird.)

I and just now about to sit down and watch this week’s new Dr Who episode. Yay!
The new Doctor is a lot better than I thought he would be. And the new companion is hot, so yay!

Feb 28:
In Benson, Ben’s son
baptised at Our Redeemer’s
We are godparents.

March 6:
Meant to look at cars
But Meghan ate bad sea bass
So we watched TV

March 10:
Ben came into town.
We played Super Mario
And drank a few beers

March 13:
Went to look at cars
Car salesmen are stupid jerks
Don’t want to buy new.

March 14:
Went to Poquet Auto
The salesmen was much nicer
Still no car was had.

March 15:
Looking at more cars
Went to over 4 dealers
Where is Meghan’s car?

March 16:
Almost had a car
Even signed some paperwork
Salesman lied to us.

This is a graph of the music I have/listen to by release year.  The blue line represents songs I have.  The green line is songs times the number of times I listen to them.

1994 was apparently a big year, surpassed only by 2008, which gets a huge bump listening-wise, I’m assuming due to the presence of Gods Of The Earth.

The program can break it out by genre, too, which is fun:

This is Metal only  (ranging from Black Sabbath to Goatwhore)

(Anybody know any good metal albums that came out in 1998?  Apparently, I’m missing out)

Rock: (a pretty generic category, ranging from AC/DC to Clutch to The Big Wu)

Alternative (Soul Coughing, Cake, The Decemberists, Murder By Death):

Punk:

(Note:  I lived with Ben in 2001)

Pop (LOL):

This stuff only covers listening history for the last three years or so since I had lost my iTunes Library somewhere in there and had to start over.

This year was fairly similar to last year.  We stayed at the Riu Palace, which was right next to the Riu Sante Fe, where we had stayed on our honeymoon.  The view from the balcony in the lobby bar brought back fond memories.  We got to the hotel around 1:30 on Thursday, after a direct flight into Cabo, and a slightly confused shuttle bus ride.  They had it set up for us to check in at the lobby bar, but unlike last year, they weren’t very clear on anything.  In Cancun, I remember when we checked in, they sat us all down together and talked to us as a group about how the hotel worked.  At the Riu Palace in Cabo, they just had a table set up and the guy gave us our keys and that was it.  This would become a theme over the weekend.  Compared to the Riu Palace in Cancun, the Riu Palace staff in Cabo are pretty lazy.

Our room wasn’t quite ready when we checked in,  so we hung out in the lobby bar and had a couple drinks.  After a while we decided to go see if the room was ready and found that our room had too large single beds shoved together, rather than one bed.  We had talked to another couple who suggested that if we complained about anything in our room, the Riu would likely upgrade us to a better room.  So we went and complained about the bed, but the staff basically shrugged and told us they were full and to try again tomorrow.  A few days later, one of Meghan’ coworkers suggested that the staff seemed to be looking for bribes to do anything.  I hadn’t thought about it before that, but now I kind of wonder if we would’ve gotten a better room if we’d slipped the front desk guy 10 bucks.

We ended up deciding it didn’t really matter.  We were on a free trip and we’d be happy with what was given to us.  So we went back to our room and changed into our swim gear to head out to pool.  While we were there, the cleaning staff came by and asked if everything in the room was okay.  We told him about the bed and he said he’d change the bedding.  I didn’t get it at first, but it turned out that they stuff a blanket between the beds and then put one big sheet and blanket over it, essentially turning it into one ginormous California King.

We headed down to the pool, but it was less than 80 degrees out, so it turned out to be a little cool for swimming.  I think we stayed down there for maybe an hour before deciding to go get dressed for dinner.   We ate at the buffet the first night and then met up with everyone at the lobby bar around 8 for a Meet & Greet.  We were a group of 35 people, so it was basically a big party.

On Friday, Meghan had her usual training in the morning, so after getting some breakfact, I went down to the lobby bar and sat in the shade and played Scrabble on my phone for a couple hours.  After her training was done, we got some lunch and then spent the afternoon in the pool.  1:30 to 3:30 was designated as “team-building”, which in years past has meant volleyball.  This year, it just meant lounging in the pool with cocktails.  Which was awesome.  It was warmer that day, and the pool was fantastic.  After team-building time, Meghan & I took a walk on the beach and then hung out in the pool a bit more.  Then it was back to the room for a little nap.  We had a group dinner at the Steakhouse (exact same menu as last year, although the Baked Alaska was not nearly so impressive).

As with many vacations, we took to going to bed early.  The first two nights I think I was asleep by 11.  On Saturday, we had the morning free, so we got some breakfast and debated about what to do.  We couldn’t come up with anything and ended up going down to the pool around 11.  After lunch, we took another walk along the beach.  We had fond memories of being hit by the waves on our honeymoon, so we walked along the beach near the water.  We caught by surprise by a big wave though and got knocked on our asses, which was hilarious, except for the fact that Meghan twisted her knee a little bit.  We sat on the beach for a while before going back to the pool again for more ‘team-building’.

That night we had reservations at the Mexican restaurant.  We had fajitas.  Then later, we went out as a group to Cabo Wabo.  We had gone there on our honeymooon, but only during the day, so we were excited to go out at night because it had been talked up to be such an awesome place by a lot of people.  We had a fun time, but Cabo Wabo wasn’t really anything special.  They had a really good cover band, but, as one would expect, everything was pretty overpriced.  Especially for Mexico.  Still, Meghan & I managed to drink 4 or 5 beers each and only pay for 3.  So yay!

Sunday was a completely free day, so Meghan & I decided to take a boat out to Lover’s Beach.  We took a taxi down to the Marina and wandered around looking for a water taxi.  Despite a lot of people down there actively trying to sell us stuff, we had a hard time finding one.  Eventually, the host of one of the restaurants guessed what we were doing and called one of his affiliates.  We ended up on our own little tour, because the water taxi guy couldn’t find anyone else to go on the tour.  The arches and rock formations were really cool and it was a glass bottom boat, so we saw a bunch of fish.  It was a fairly short tour, since we didn’t want to pay an extra $70 to go whale watching.

After the tour, we had lunch at the restaurant with the helpful host (Alexander’s).  I had coconut shrimp (served in a coconut).  After lunch we decided to try and find some souvenir’s.  After looking around at several places, nothing jumped out at us.  We didn’t ended up buying anything, so instead we found a tattoo artist and Meghan got a henna tattoo on her arm.  Along the way, some (American) girl in the street gave me a beer somebody had given her that she didn’t want.  Yeah, I totally drank it.

During the trip, we had heard a couple of Meghan’s coworkers talk about an awesome bar they had been to called The Office.  We decided to try and find it.  We handed seen it while walking around looking at shops, so we asked a guy at a little information stand and he informed us it was one the beach.  He gave us directions and we decided to start walking that way and see how far we got.  We ended up walking through almost all of downtown Cabo, including a couple shady streets and an alleyway next to an abandoned movie theather that had graffiti all over it.

We eventually found The Office, which, as it turns out, if you’re not getting way drunk on tequila poppers, isn’t really that fun.  It’s literally on the beach, with wrought-iron chairs sitting in the sand.  We had a beer and then decided to go back to the hotel and lounge in the pool.  We took a taxi back and were in the pool by 4.

That night we had dinner at the buffet.  After dinner, we had another drink at the bar.  Around this time, I started feeling really cold and kind of nauseous.

A couple days before we had found out that the bus to take us back to the airport on Tuesday was scheduled to leave an hour earlier than was listed on the itineraries.  Meghan informed everyone we saw and even made an announcement at dinner on Friday night, but word didn’t seem to be getting around.  So Meghan decided to try and have the front desk send a message to everyone’s rooms.  After getting the usual shrug from the regular staff, she talked to the guy who manages the group bookings and he got her hooked up.  We went back to the room, since I was starting to feel gross.  After about an hour or so, we still hadn’t gotten the message delivered to our room, so Meghan decided to call everyone.  Of course, not everyone was in their rooms, so Meghan ended up wandering the hotel grounds while I laid in bed trying to get warm.

It all turned out fine eventually.  Everybody made it to the bus on time the next morning.  Although, I’m still feeling kind of queazy even now.  I’m not sure if was the free beer on the street, the shrimp, or maybe just something random, but Montezuma got his revenge on me.