Operation: Hell Stone

After a surprisingly short 3 hour journey to the Emergency Room, I found out that I have kidney stones yesterday. I'd recently had some side pain coupled with changes in urine color, and thought I should probably head to the Doctor this next week. But, that all changed when I started having severe side pain yesterday evening. I passed a small stone at the hospital, and that made most of the immediate pain go away. Then, I had to give a urine sample, which Jill said had the color of Ruby Red grapefruit juice. It's never a pleasant sight to see blood in your pee.

After a CT scan, I've been told that I have four more in my kidneys/bladder that I'll need to pass. First one up in the batting order is a nice 6mmx4mm beauty that is sure to knock me out of the park. Unfortunately, there is not much they can do for me except pain management. I just have to grin and bear it.

Yahoo.

More baby stuff!

Here's a picture of what Jill looks like at 20 weeks pregnant. This was taken today. Isn't she a beauty?

The Doctor's office created a DVD of the ultrasound today. I ripped the video from the DVD and I've posted it. The video is about 11MB, so it may take a bit to load depending on your connection speed.

Here's what you can see:

1. Some general anatomy of the baby, and you can see him move a little bit.
2. You can see his limbs, and they do a few measurements.
4. A look at his hands and his feet.
3. The best profile shot of the baby.

It's a boy!

We had the 20 week ultrasound today, where they check the anatomy of the baby. And it's a boy! We were really excited to find out and both of us are really happy. Although, I think we would have been happy with a boy or a girl. Of course we immediately went out to the closest baby store and started looking at baby clothes and furniture for the baby room. Now that we know that it's a boy we'll know what we can buy.

We've also been calling all of our family to tell them. :)

Well, that's just a little cheaper

We have noticed, on average, that the cost of living in Austin is about 20 - 30% cheaper than in California. This extends to almost every aspect of life. From fast food, to movie tickets. It's a nice change from the ever increasing costs in SoCal.

Also, we've been going to the Walmart Supercenter to do some grocery shopping. Say what you will about what that does to local businesses, but it's just cheaper. Except for produce. That's just gross at Walmart.

Judging your neighborhood

We are currently trying to estimate the "niceness" of our neighborhood. At first we thought it was pretty nice. The neighborhood is relatively new, only a few years old, and it's a maintained by a master community HOA that trims the community lawns. Then, we noticed the disturbingly large number of Payday Advances store fronts around. Is that an indicator of ghetto? Than there are lots of pawnshops nearby. Than there is the drive through liquor store just a couple of blocks away.

Is this bad neighborhood, or just Texas?

What is Austin like?

This is a question that we get a lot from family and friend back in California.

[Note: None of these are complaints, just observations]

In todays edition of "How is Austin different?" we'll look at the roads.

You wouldn't think that roads could be that different, but they are. First off, all of the freeways/highways have frontage roads that run along side them. This is both a blessing and a curse. You can move pretty quickly with out having to get on the highway, but you may have to drive for 2 miles before you can make a U-turn. Then there are the people that are trying to exit the highway or get on the highway and they cross the 4 lanes of the frontage road in about 50 yards. It's a recipe for accidents, and I've already met two people at work that have been in serious accidents because of this.

Next, the roads aren't labeled very well. In Cali you come to expect large traffic poles with big green signs for the street names. In Austin you get small signs usually hidden behind a tree or a bush. This results in lots of missed turns.

Also, urban planning does not appear to have been at the forefront of the minds of the city planners in Austin. In California you can usually expect suburban area to be build on some sort of grid pattern sprouting off of freeways. In Austin, however, the city seems to have grown much more organically. It makes it much more difficult to get around unless you know where you are going ahead of time.

Lastly, are the drivers. I thought that California had some crazy drivers, but Austin beats them hands down. There are some CRAZY drivers in Austin. It's like driving isn't a form of transportation as much as it is some sort of combative exposition. Weaving in and out of lanes, cutting people off, crossing huge swaths of traffic. It's nuts.

Did you hear that noise?

So, we got in to our house, finally got our stuff from the movers, and we're currently in the process of getting everything unpacked. Monday and yesterday were the first nights we spent in the house and we started to hear something scratching and rustling. At first we thought it was someone or something out in the back yard. But I checked and there was no one there, and I heard it in the wall and I said to myself "Oh crap."

Now, we're waiting on pest control to get out to the house and trap it and then remove it. Yay for texas.

The eagle has landed...in Austin

Our move to Austin is almost done. We spent three days, well 2 and a half technically, on the road to Austin.

Day one, we drove from San Diego to Yuma. Not a bad drive. It only took about 3 hours.

Day two, we drove to El Paso. We were pretty surprised about the state of the city in El Paso. As you drive east on the 10 and you enter the city, right when you pass a large smoke stack on the south side of the 10, there appears to be what we can only describe as a shanty town. We didn't think there were shanty towns in America.

Day three, we made it to Austin after about 9 hours on the road. The geography you drive through changes a lot over those 9 hours. You start out in desert, then grassy plains, then rolling hills, then verdant hill country. But, at last we're in Austin.

Now, we've been hanging out in a hotel for the past couple of days. We actually got a pretty good deal at a La Quinta inn for only $80 with a AAA card. We're waiting for out furniture to show up now. We hope that it'll get here in the next couple of days.

There are a lot of things that we've noticed about our new city and I'll be posting about them in the coming days.

Going over the pond

Well, this is the first update in a while, but an update it is. My sister has crossed over to England and will be there studying at Oxford for the next 7 months or so. The family has decided that it would be a fun time to cross over the pond and go visit her in England. It should be a great time!


By Pat

Of floods and overtime

Tara managed to pull a Noah on her apartment and flooded the whole bottom floor, which happens to be were her bedroom was. Being the wonderful brother I am I was so gracious as to allow her to move in with us while she's waiting for the restorer's to fix the mess. It hasn't been too bad having her around. She spends most of her tmie galavanting around San Diego, either at Capoeira or PB and sometimes school even, so we don't see her too much. She's just a busy girl.

Then it wouldn't really matter if she was spending a lot of time at our place because I'm not spending a lot of time there myself right now. Work is releasing a new product on the 8th so I'm spending just about every waking hour at work testing functionality and all the different features we'll be offering. I can't say it's very exciting, and I'm not getting paid overtime (damn exempt status) but this product is really important to the company and I'm willing to make the sacrifice for a week or so. I just learned that after 13 hours at workd, 5 red bulls, a mountain dew, and a pepsi you start to feel a little twitchy. At least they're buying dinner for us.

Posted by Pat

He Won!

He won! 

We won't have to be afraid anymore.

The House is ours again

We're done prossessing family members through our house for a while. Having so many women in the house was certainly an interesting experience. I thought there was something missing from my life and it turned out that watching women do the twist in my living room was it.

We all had a good time and enjoyed having family spend some time with us. Pics are up.

Posted by Pat

Family Visit 2.0

Fresh from having my side of the family visit last weekend, we're having Jill's side visit this weekend. But, this time it's only the women. Besides Jill, there will be 5 other women in the house. I'm afraid this may cause some sort of estrogen buffer overflow and break the house.

I'm not sure if we have anything really planned for the weekend, but I'm sure it will involve taking the dog to the beach, eating food, and sitting around.

I'm glad I have my tablet.

Pics will be up as we post them.

Posted by Pat

After family report

The Family visit last weekend was a good time, if only too short. Everyone was happy to see our new house, and was impressed with what we've done with it in such a short period of time. We ate at the Mandarin House off of 5th at the suggestion of Rich, and we were all pretty impressed with the quality of the food. I haven't had a Tsing Tao in a while.

And, I guess were now having Christmas at our house this year. Which means that we have to decorate and prepare for a grandmother inspection at the same time.

Pics will be up on GigaHornepics soon.

Posted by Pat

Family coming to town

We've got the whole family coming in town for the weekend. These will be lots of eating cheese and drinking some wine. We'll probably go have a nice dinner somewhere and we'll get to show every one the new house. It should be a good time.

Of course we have to prepare for the Grandmother inspection.

Posted by Pat

More pics

We've added some pics to the gigahornepics page and did a little bit of housekeeping to make it easier to navigate. Now on the right hand sidebar you will find Links to the individual photo posts which will act like photo galleries. This will make it easies to view older galleris as the posts drift in to the archives over time.

We'll be adding more pics as we have the opportunity.

Delivery Boy

I've been lucky enough to be tasked with delivering some important work to a business partner in Indiana next week. The downside is that I fly out at 11pm Sunday night and I'm back in San Diego by Monday at 7pm. I'll just have to think of it as an adventure. I feel kind of like James Bond.

Announcing GigaHornepics

Ok, I created a new blog called GigaHornepics where we'll start posting pics from our lives. Check it out:

GigaHornePics 

Good morning!

So I wake up this morning a little early and I couldn't get back to sleep so I decided I would post to our blog(with our new tablet pc of course).

I was mulling over what i wanted to do with this blog, because Jill wants to post a lot of photos of past events and such. I'm not exactly sure how to make something like that because Hello only seems to be able to post single pictures even if in series. Just doesn' t seem like an efficient way to do lots of photos. Maybe I could create an additional blog and post series of photos there with descriptive titles. hmm....

Mental note: The tablet PC doesn't pick up L's very well with the stylus.

Ok, enough inane ass babble. Time to get ready for work. The hardest part is waking up Jill.