This is It

OK, last day of work for a couple weeks. Thursday is the big day. Expect to hear from me again in the middle of May.

Excited? We're Beyond Excited

And well into Nervous territory along the border with Terrified.

The reality is starting to really sink in now. Relaxing Sunday afternoons? No more. Evening after work where we just sit and veg? Over. Pick up and go to a movie on the spur of the moment? Never again.

Sleepless nights? Check. Expenses upon expenses? Coming up. Fevers, colic, whining, and more? Guaranteed.

Gah.

Next Week: Life Changes

Ah Friday. The last Friday of my life I'll be just a husband and a man.

By next Friday I'll officially be a father.

Of course I am a father technically speaking now. Just because my boys are in Kim's belly does not in any way make me less responsible. But its a feeling I guess; right now they are Kim's wholly and truly but once they are out, they will be ours. A family.

Next Thursday our life changes.

*INCOHERENT SCREAM*

I don't know what my office mate is eating, but its loud and crunchy and very annoying. Its worse than his daily flossing. Its driving me crazy, so thank goodness its quitting time.

Weekend Wrapup

This weekend Kim and I decided to stay close to home with the due date looming for the boys. This allowed me to get spring kicked off to a good start.

* * * * *

We got the BBQ working earlier in the week and we kept it going this weekend, cooking some pork chops and turkey franks for dinner on Sunday night. MMMMMMmmmmmm, BBQ!

* * * * *

On Saturday it was raining and cold outside so I stayed in and did some housework that needed to be done, mainly sweeping and mopping. I took my time; Kim was watching Biography channel (free preview weekend) and I often stopped to see what was going on.

That night we watched a couple good movies. Mr. Brooks which I really enjoyed (4/5) and Dan in Real Life that turned out to be better than I expected (4/5).

* * * * *

On Sunday the weather was clear and cool so I was able to go out and celebrate the annual Cutting of the Boxes spring festival. This spring we had not only boxes from Christmas but a large number of boxes from furniture and baby stuff for the twins. It was so bad that when I took my patio table out earlier in the weekend for BBQ duty the mountain of boxes collapsed and I was buried for three days until an international team of avalanche rescue workers from BC and five trained St Bernard dogs from Switzerland could find me and pull me out.

So there I was with my box cutter and work gloves and I got to work on the mountain swearing that no other unfortunate soul would risk life and limb to transverse it. It took a couple hours and there was a surprising amount of garbage like Styrofoam and plastic that at the time of disposal I figured I would get to later and now that it was later I was wishing I had dealt with at the time.

When I was done I had four garbage bags of debris and one organized pile of cut up cardboard. Now I need the Yard Waste facility open.

* * * * *
Today marks the beginning of our last full week as a couple with no kids. Its still hard to fully comprehend what next week will bring.

Surreal

On a lark I googled "Greenbush Ontairo" and the first link to be returned? A news article from the Taipei Times.

What. The. Hell?

Sure enough, its about my home town and the characters that inhabit it.

In the back of Greenbush General Store, in the heart of a tiny village an hour south of Canada's capital Ottawa, the locals get together twice a day to chew the fat over coffee and the odd cigarette.

What they are talking about should be enough to make Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin and the local member of parliament, Joe Jordan, gag on their own coffee as they mull the next election, likely this year.

"Those Liberals, they're nothing but a bunch of [expletive deleted] crooks," came the opening volley from store owner Floyd Salmon.

Yep, that's home all right. The funniest part about all of this? Taipei Times is published in Taiwan; Taipei is the capital city! Apparently Reuters didn't have better sources to go to for this article. Weird.

Second link was a Wikipedia entry and here it is in its entirety:

Greenbush is a community in the Canadian province of Ontario.

That is what I expected to find. Basically a stub saying "people live here". Not a piece quoting some of the best political minds Greenbush has to offer in a newspaper from halfway around the world.

Surreal.

Braxton-Hicks, Our Nemisis

Yesterday Kim and I had our last appointment with the High Risk Unit at the Ottawa Civic Hospital and everything checked out good. The boys are estimated at 5 pounds 10 ounces for Sean, 6 pounds 5 ouches for Lukas. That's right: one ounce short of 12 lbs of babies. Poor Kim.

During the checkup we talked about the periodic random contractions Kim gets during the day or night and the nurse said "if you get 6 or more in an hour, call in." More fateful words were never spoken. Of course, Kim had maybe two or three spread out over a day so we weren't too worried.

We got home and Kim was feeling lots of contractions. Every 10 - 20 minutes since the ultrasound in fact. We've talked about Braxton-Hicks before. We were gun-shy about going into the hospital for nothing but the number of contractions was worrisome. Then between 7 and 8 Kim recorded 6 of them. We called and sure enough the triage nurse on the phone said better come on in.

So we jumped into the car around 9pm and made our way into Ottawa. We got there, got into a triage room, and hooked up to the monitors.

Of course, as soon as we got to the hospital, not another contraction. Well ok, one in about 3 hours. Sigh. The doctor on duty was busy delivering someone else's twins so we had to wait for three hours until he could see us, in a hot stuffy little room with old magazines to read. We were so tired and annoyed that the contractions had stopped and we didn't need to be there anymore. After two hours we enquired about leaving without seeing the doctor but they didn't like that idea. Something about going AMA being a bad thing (absent without medical approval?).

Well, the doctor gave his approval and we headed home about 1 am. Tired but not as tired as we will be once the boys arrive I'm sure.

Fifteen days or less.

Assembly Day

Yesterday was Assembly Day in Casa de Dullemond.

While one of the bassinets from the baby showers was assembled by my father in law for the party, the second was left to me. So I dutifully gathered my tools and went to work and after about an hour had it put together and ready for its charge.

Then I went to work preparing the car seats for deployment. That wasn't too hard, they just needed some adjustment and straightening of the pads.

Finally I went to work on the motorized swing which was more of a challenge and nearly took off one of my thumbs in the process. The metal bars all had little snaps that you had to press in to slide into another metal bar, and plastic cowling in the way of all that. I knew it was coming and knew it could not be avoided: sure enough, SNAP and the plastic dug right into my thumbnail. BUGGER! Fortunately, I survived.

At this point Kim was doing some vacuuming upstairs when suddenly I hear "OOPS!" and the vacuum run hard. She turns it off and declares "I sucked up a sock!" She takes off the attachment and peers down the tube. "Its not in there." Since there is still three feet of hose until it gets to the motor, it could be in there, or in the bag.

So Assembly Day becomes Disassembly Day. I can't get the hose off the motor at first so I try and work the other direction from inside (after making sure the sock is not in the dirt bag) but find to my frustration that the internal end is firmly attached to the external end. There is no two ways about it: that hose has to come off.

Out come the tools and the tool assistant. With Kim holding down the vacuum with her foot and pulling up on the hose with both hands, I worked a screwdriver into the slot to try and pry the hose off the the nozzle. Much cursing and grunting was heard. Then, POP! The hose came off.

There is the sock... and a pen? "Where did that come from?"And a tube of chapstick? "Oh yeah, I sucked that off the dresser by accident a while ago." Insert long suffering sigh here.

Anyway, we put the vacuum back together with a new dirt back and cleared hose. It should work better than ever now.

Music = Good

At work I share an office with a co-worker who for the most part I like and get along just fine with. With one exception.

He flosses. At his desk. For like a half an hour after lunch. And the noise drives me CRAZY. To fight the creeping insanity I've taken to listening to music with headphones in the afternoons and it has helped immensely but the problem is that I only had a few ripped CDs on my computer and after a few months my selection was getting stale so I brought in a lot of old CDs from home and ripped them onto my work PC.

Now I have lots of selection to pick from when I feel the terrible need to escape the sound of floss picking food out of teeth.

Today its Matchbox 20 followed by classic Aerosmith.

Ah, that's better.

Spring Has Sprung

You know how I know? The Infamous Garage Door (scroll to bottom):

You see, my garage is actually more of a carport converted with walls. I.e. not professionally done (hey, I didn't buy the house for the garage). Anyway, the main door of the garage has a poured cement blob for lack of a better word where the paved driveway meets the gravel floor of the garage (yes, I typed that correctly. Really, the house is great, the garage sucks). When winter comes moisture in the ground under said cement blob freezes and pushes blob up preventing the garage door from opening and closing. I leave the door partially open all winter so I can get in and out with recycling and garbage.

In the spring the ground finally thaws and eventually the garage door will allow itself to close again. And yesterday was that fateful day. Ah Spring!

That post was from April 4, 2005. At least the Garage Door is consistent.

As an aside... I've been blogging for three years?! WHAT?!

Is This Wrong?

FBI posts fake hyperlinks to snare child porn suspects

I was browsing the other day and saw that headline. Clicking on it and reading the article I found myself torn.

The FBI has recently adopted a novel investigative technique: posting hyperlinks that purport to be illegal videos of minors having sex, and then raiding the homes of anyone willing to click on them.

That seems awful Orwellian, doesn't it? Sort of a "thought crime" type of justice?

Undercover FBI agents used this hyperlink-enticement technique, which directed Internet users to a clandestine government server, to stage armed raids of homes in Pennsylvania, New York, and Nevada last year. The supposed video files actually were gibberish and contained no illegal images.

A CNET News.com review of legal documents shows that courts have approved of this technique, even though it raises questions about entrapment, the problems of identifying who's using an open wireless connection--and whether anyone who clicks on a FBI link that contains no child pornography should be automatically subject to a dawn raid by federal police.

Roderick Vosburgh, a doctoral student at Temple University who also taught history at La Salle University, was raided at home in February 2007 after he allegedly clicked on the FBI's hyperlink. Federal agents knocked on the door around 7 a.m., falsely claiming they wanted to talk to Vosburgh about his car. Once he opened the door, they threw him to the ground outside his house and handcuffed him.

Vosburgh was charged with violating federal law, which criminalizes "attempts" to download child pornography with up to 10 years in prison. Last November, a jury found Vosburgh guilty on that count, and a sentencing hearing is scheduled for April 22, at which point Vosburgh could face three to four years in prison.

The implications of the FBI's hyperlink-enticement technique are sweeping. Using the same logic and legal arguments, federal agents could send unsolicited e-mail messages to millions of Americans advertising illegal narcotics or child pornography--and raid people who click on the links embedded in the spam messages. The bureau could register the "unlawfulimages.com" domain name and prosecute intentional visitors. And so on.

"The evidence was insufficient for a reasonable jury to find that Mr. Vosburgh specifically intended to download child pornography, a necessary element of any 'attempt' offense," Vosburgh's attorney, Anna Durbin of Ardmore, Penn., wrote in a court filing that is attempting to overturn the jury verdict before her client is sentenced.

I'm sorry for quoting so much of the article, but I think its important to get an idea of what happened here. Mr Vosburgh was charged and convicted of attempting to download child pornography and while I agree that child pornography is heinous and perpetrators of such activities should be punished to the full extent of the law, there still seems something wrong with law enforcement enticing people to commit a crime and then arresting them when they do so.

Its like trying to get out of a marriage by hiring someone to seduce your spouse and then accusing them of being unfaithful. Yes they strayed, but would they have done so had not the temptation been thrown at them?

On the other hand, one might say that the means justifies the ends: a person who encourages child pornography to be made by being a consumer of it is now in jail so the end result is worth the questionable tactics. And its hard to argue with that because its such a terrible crime.

But are we in a slippery slope situation? Would the same tactics be OK to catch, say, a tax evader? Well probably not because most laws are not worded to be against the "attempt" to do something unlike "attempts" to download child pornography.

But let's say someone takes that fake link to a government server and emails it to people without explanation of what it supposedly leads to? And they click on it, see static, and shrug and go about their business only to be a victim of a dawn raid the next day by the FBI and police? Their good named drawn through the mud because the government thinks they are trying to download child pornography, and neighbours looking aghast at them even after their named is cleared when their computer and home is torn apart looking for more evidence. Its a scary scenario but completely possible.

Or perhaps they are using an unsecured wireless network and their IP address shows up in the server logs while its their neighbour borrowing a ride on their connection? Even though the innocent will most likely be found innocent, is the possible destruction of their good name justified by the capture and conviction of actual attempters of child pornography downloads.

As you can see, I'm torn. While fighting child porn at every turn is important, I don't like much the idea of enticing people to commit crimes in order to do so. It just feels wrong, dishonest... or maybe just unrighteous. But maybe its worth it.