the various thoughts, reflections & perspectives of michael tangen

August 18, 2008

a whole lot of change going on

Well, I apologize for the delay in not posting another update sooner — it’s life and it sorta has a way of getting beyond your control and before you know it, you’re on to new adventures and have nearly forgotten the ones you just came from.

It’s nice to be home finally — the last week of our vacation was a miserable experience for me, struggling with an all-out ear infection. I know that Natalie’s friend Anne was probably upset that we had to cut our time short there, but the reality is that I was in pain and needed to see a doctor. With some antibiotics and ear drops, it took about a week and a half to clear out the infection and get to sorta normal again.

Sorta.

Then as if life wasn’t done throwing curve balls our way…

$we\'re pregnant$

Yes, if you haven’t kept on my Facebook updates, my wife and I are now expecting and are about eight weeks along now and have guestimated that we’ll be delivering around April 1st. We don’t know a gender yet — it’s too early for that, and probably won’t know for another ten weeks or so — but we have some candidates for names. While we don’t quite agree on names for a girl, my mom was instrumental in helping us unanimously come up with a boy’s name: Christopher Michael, which oddly enough is what I was going to be named until they decided at the last name to make me a “junior”.

first ultrasound

We had our first ultrasound a few weeks ago, and when I saw that little grain-sized spec with a heart beat that nearly started beating just a day before, I was filled with a sensation that I’d never experienced before. And maybe if it was only for a moment, a lot of my anxieties about fatherhood were set aside for the time being.

It is overwhelming. I tell people that I’m equally excited as I am terrified — terrified of the responsibility, but I guess excited about the prospect of experiencing a different kind of love that I’ve yet to experience: the love for a son or daughter. Fortunately, we’re not starting out with twins… so I’ll say a “thank you” to God for that. No need to overwhelm me any more than I already am.

Natalie’s been doing awful though, nauseous every day and has just recently started vomiting as well. Literally a day or two after she took the pregnancy test (July 25th) the nausea hit like a freight train and simple things — like riding in or driving a car and even sleeping — became difficult to endure because her nausea was so bad. She’s doing her best to do things like eat a lot of crackers, drinking lemon water, and other things we learned at our first prenatal class, but it’s still tough for her and she hasn’t been sleeping well.

But all this should pass in a few weeks — we hope.

Anyway, that’s the bulk of the change. The rest of the change is pretty insignificant by comparison. I’m finally dumping my co-located hosting service for a much cheaper, easier to maintain environment and am finally just hosting my own stuff and not giving free rides to design clients from my freelancing days. One less thing to manage.

Though, I did lose some data in the process. The version of cPanel/WHM I was using didn’t properly export the SQL tables and I ended up with a TON of empty SQL files. GRRRRR. So I’ve lost all my data for my beer brewing site (which I don’t write anything for anymore) and the Crash Effect blog. Oh well. I’ll miss having that data, but I’ll live.

I did manage to get my solo acoustic music website up and running and on a wordpress installation. I’m thinking of picking that up again but on a much more casual basis — maybe like spending Saturday mornings or evenings at the studio and just track a few things here and there. Lord knows I spend way too much time on World of Warcraft — probably a healthy thing to allocate a little time to something more fruitful.