Luggin the Lime

Thats preggers talk! Check out some Cannon Beach photos when Cam girl-napped me Wednesday night to celebrate the signing for our new house!










Posted in: on March 19, 2010 at at 10:04:00 AM 0 comments  

These days things are getting interesting! Today Cam and I sign a hundred pieces of paper for our new abode! I'm feeling anxious of moving everything and accomplishing everything that I want to do to our new house. Luckily, there is no fixing up to do but there is a lot of painting in order to make it our own. Moving day is Sunday so far and we will have a few friends helping us move boxes of transformers and goods. Hopefully, I'll feel up for documenting the event, maybe with some video!

Cam has been supporting me and my mood swings a lot lately. Yesterday, I felt on top of the world but last night I felt so drained and heavy, I had to go bed barely able to eat a PB&J. Our photo shoot of my preg progress has fallen behind as I have little energy after work to get any of my million projects worked on. This morning, having nothing in my stomach I was super nauseous and caused more concern to Cam who now knows he has to force me to eat when I'm feeling my lowest. Other than that, I have forgotten for awhile that I am pregnant. I eat the same as I always have but am more conscious of eating more vegetables and better nutrients. I should be eating more than I am, but it is difficult to get past the mentality of feeling gluttonous and heavy after always feeling the need to be fit my whole life. As I begin to show more, which is very slight at the moment, this mentality should pass and I'll start to accept the whole thing.
Work hasn't changed too much and neither have people's attitudes toward me. When I first told coworkers, they would go out of their way to help me out but now it seems to have fallen out of attention. I pay slightly more attention to children than I used to but am still wary of them. They are strange and unpredictable. Cam is a child's favorite as proven when he went and hung out with a friends two year old the other day. He has also had little contact with children but really enjoyed reading to him and playing with his toys with him. The kid was a wreck when he finally had to be put down to bed and made quite the commotion.
Doctors appointment is next Wednesday so more pictures are coming! Stay tuned! Hopefully, we will work with our regularly scheduled OB and all goes well!

Posted in: on March 17, 2010 at at 9:25:00 AM 0 comments  

Tuesday


Had a great weekend entertaining long lost friend Carrie who I went to school with at Sydney Uni! I had promised her bands and booze a few months ago but the my new ordeal changed things up a bit. We galavanted all over Portland and Cam and Kim loved hearing of her round the world adventures. The timing may have been off, but good times were had and Cam and I are now working to move into our new house which closes on the 19th! Once in, then the nesting can begin... And expect a couple more updates from me now that I have this new iPhone app to help me keep the blog alive and not bother the Facebook folk with growing pains. Until next time..

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Location:Work

Posted in: on March 2, 2010 at at 4:35:00 PM 1 comments  

8 Weeks 3 Days


Back from the second checkup today!

This time with Cam in tow, we had an ultrasound which was much clearer than only two weeks before. The head and little stub arms were visible as well as the tiny heartbeat going the rate of a squirrels. The tech measured the heart rate to make sure it was regular and checked around the area to make sure nothing else strange was growing near the fetus. Lastly, she let us hear the heartbeat through the equipment and sure enough the thing was beating away making us realize that this being was now on it's own, making its own blood, making its own journey from here on out. We just had to guide it and nurture it and see how it shapes out. Now having two hearts in my body, I was still a bit foggy how the machine was able to determine that one little beating organ from the other dominate one. Cam on the other hand was going through a life changing epiphany complete with shivers and a momentous sense of awe.
From there we were then directed to the examination room where I met my substitute doctor as my original OB was on vacation(?) The new doc was extremely personable and made us laugh throughout my poke-and-prod exam. From there we sat with him in his office as he put on the serious doctor face and gave us the low down of what to expect in the next few months. There were tests to be taken, if elected, including a Nucheal Translucency to test for Down syndrome and a Cystic Fibrosis Carrier test. Both sounded like the chances were slim but risky if not caught early. He went over meds I could take and drugs I should stop taking (cocaine and meth will be the hardest) but I felt like I had already been educated in most of the topics due to some heavy book reading in the past couple of weeks. Cam, of course absorbed the info like a sponge and was so glad that he came along. I thanked Dr. F as I was so grateful for his welcoming attitude and cool demeanor. Unfortunately, I could not betray my original OB and switch teams, not because of loyalty, but because she was the only one who would travel to my insured hospital for the delivery. C'est la vie! As Dr. F is in the same clinic though, its nice to know that he is there, always looking out for patients whose regular docs are on vacation.
Meanwhile, Cam is taking care of me in the best way he knows how. His support is through the roof and I couldn't be any luckier. And as for the gummy bear, you don't know it yet, but you're pretty lucky too.

Posted in: , on February 23, 2010 at at 8:21:00 PM 3 comments  

7 Weeks 1 Day

It's Cam's birthday today! So far I have made him feel extra special by reminding him of the miracle of life inside me and the nausea that it brings. By not eating in my sleep, I wake up feeling fine for about 20 minutes until my body turns on me. Of course eating crackers in the middle of the night is not very appealing and I'm still getting into a rhythm of how this all works. Tonight we'll have a few people over, grill up some steaks and see how I last. Having quite a few errands to run today, hopefully I can keep it together enough for Cam to have an enjoyable day :)

Posted in: , , on February 15, 2010 at at 10:44:00 AM 0 comments  

5 Weeks 6 Days

I am starting this blog a bit late. But as with all situations as delicate as this, rushing is something that one needs to resist. But now, all seems "safe" enough to proceed and publicly shout "Hey look! Im not broken after all!"

My first appointment to the doctor produced these results with the ultrasound. The technician seemed disgruntled at her findings as the details are difficult to make out. I pointed this out to her and expressed, I was more than thrilled to see what she was seeing. However, I am still a bit disappointed at the quality of ultrasounds as I feel technology should have developed a bit better by now, being a futuristic year of 2010, to be able to see a 2mm speck in my uterus as clearly as if was being featured on BBCs Planet Earth. But alas, its still grainy black and white and we see a large black blob, being the yolk, with a tiny arrow (not part of the fetus unfortunately) pointing to what should be the important developing bits.


My technician didn't seem to be enjoying her job when I couldn't think of anything more exciting to do every day. No worry though, my bubbliness will see me through this, until I met up with my doctor.
She meets me in her office and looks over my chart. With an intense glare, she demands why I haven't been in in the last year for a check up on a procedure I had back in late 2008. Good question. My excuses are meager, like having no idea that she wanted me to come back for a check up. There could be complications down the road if I have any high level CIN squamous cells left in my cervix she explains. I agree, that should be made a priority for my health that this be taken care of. We make an appointment for two weeks from the day and she leaves the room. Kind of left in a shock, I leave the office wondering what I should be more concerned about: my doctor being furious at me, or me just being happy because the appointment was indeed a success. To be continued...

Posted in: , on February 7, 2010 at at 10:22:00 AM 3 comments  

Interstate Diagram Print Sample!


Interstate Diagram Print Sample!, originally uploaded by Senex Prime.

First print sample of my Interstate Diagram poster came in today. This one is from an online on-demand printer - I love the size (36" x 24"), and the colors look great as well, nice and bright! I could even make the type a little bit smaller at this reproduction size, which could neaten things up a bit. Still waiting on a couple of different printers before I make a final decision on which way to go.

Prints will be for sale soon - let me know if you're interested by emailing camgbooth -AT- gmail -DOT- com!

UPDATE: Posters - in both 25" x 17" and 36" x 24" sizes - are now available for purchase here.

Posted in: , , , , on November 20, 2009 at at 12:43:00 PM 0 comments  

Eisenhower and H.C. Beck's Love Child


Eisenhower Interstate System in the style of H.C. Beck's London Underground Diagram, originally uploaded by Senex Prime.

UPDATE: Prints of this diagram are now available for sale here.

Here's the result of my latest "designing stuff because I feel like it" phase: a map of America's comprehensive Interstate highway system in the form of a metro or subway map.

I came across a very different take of this on the internet last week, an incredibly simplified, very rectangular (and very orange!) diagram by Chris Yates. Many viewers of this map were calling it a "Beck style map" (after H.C. Beck, the originator of the London Underground Diagram) or a "subway style map", but on the whole, I disagreed with that point of view.

The best examples of subway maps use strong colour codes for separate lines and a clear hierarchy of detail (interchanges, major stations, minor stations, etc.) to convey a lot of information rapidly and clearly. And while there is some degree of geographical distortion in most metro maps (the centre of London in Beck's diagram is greatly enlarged compared to the outer suburbs), there should always be an underlying sense of the relationship between destinations in reality and on the map.

So that's what I set out to create - a simplified diagram of the Interstate system in the style of the best transport diagrams. Armed with Google Earth, Google Maps, Wikipedia, a gridded pad of paper and pen, Adobe Illustrator CS3, Chris Yates' map and another excellent map by Rebecca Brown that I found on Flickr, I began my Herculean task.

Early on, I decided that the "major" highways (those divisible by 5) would form the framework of my diagram. These would be thicker of line than the minor roads, and would be distinctively colour coded. Their termini would also be called out in a bolder fashion than the other roads. This was done relatively painlessly, with very little rejigging required to make all the major intersections line up. I was surprised at how much this simple grid already looked like America's borders, which gave me great hope that things were going to work out well.

Then it was onto fitting the minor highways into this grid. Even though these roads don't have specific colour codes, I strove to give some extra information in the shades of grey used: a darker gray was used for even-numbered roads (running from west to east; lower numbers to the south, higher numbers to the north) and a lighter grey for the odd-numbered roads (running from north to south; lower numbers to the west, higher numbers to the east). Each road has its number marked at each terminus, with a full key at the bottom of the map for cross-reference. A bit of tweaking was required here and there to make every road and name fit neatly (it gets a bit crowded in the eastern states!), but in general everything worked out beautifully. I even managed to show concurrency of Interstates by running the "lines" next to each other, just as they do on subway maps.

Then I added the Great Lakes, coastline, borders and the key. Done!

All up, this project took around a week to complete. There's still some little tweaks and fixes to make, and I feel sure that road aficionados across the country will be only too ready to point out my errors as time goes by, but overall, I'm extremely happy with the way it turned out!

Some oddities: I-99 breaks the grid by being placed to the WEST of I-95. Apparently, the number was written into Section 332 of the National Highway Designation Act of 1995 by Bud Shuster, then-chair of the U.S. House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, the bill's sponsor, and the representative of the district through which the highway runs. Why? Maybe he thought 99 was a cool number for his local highway?

I-97 is to the east of I-95 (as it should be), but it is the only Interstate that does not intersect with any other. In fact, all of I-97 lies in one little county just outside Baltimore.

Oh, and here's a direct link to a much BIGGER version (more pixels than can fit on your screen!)

Posted in: , , , on October 29, 2009 at at 9:13:00 PM 1 comments  

A Tale Of Two Cities (Bicycle Edition)


Bike Culture, originally uploaded by Senex Prime.

Here in PDX we think we've got it pretty good when it comes to commuting by bicycle. After all, Portland is far and away the best city in the US for biking. It's compact, (relatively) flat and easy to navigate (hurrah for the grid system). There's also an increasing amount of infrastructure at very little cost to the taxpayer: bike lanes, special signals at intersections, lots and lots of bike only parking... yep, things are good in Bike City USA.

That is, until you visit Amsterdam and see how things really should be. Bikes are absolutely everywhere and the amount of infrastructure to support and encourage bike use is simply amazing. Bike lanes thread their way through most of the city, often separated from the main roadway by a median, always coloured red to signify them clearly. Traffic lights almost always have bike signals on them and everyone gives way to bikes as a matter of course. The main railway station - Amsterdam Centraal - has a multi-level parking lot for 2,500 bicycles and there are secure and patrolled lots dotted throughout the city as well.

The other thing that's really different is the complete lack of bike snobbery and one-upmanship that is prevalent in Portland. Hardly anyone rides a fancy 21-speed Bianchi or a Cannondale with titanium forks, nor are there any hipster fixed-gear bikes. Instead, everyone rides big, clunky, black bikes with just enough gears to get you over the steepest bridge in town, barely functional brakes, a kickstand, fat fenders and a chain guard (hence no one in Amsterdam has to roll their right trouser leg up to save it from being ripped by the front gear sprocket, the sign of a hardened Portland cyclist). These are commuting bikes, make no mistake about it. And because everyone's bikes are so similar (black, old, dented), theft also seems to be much less of a problem - most people use a simple chain to secure their bike instead of super-hardened whiz-bang Kryptonite locks that are required here if you want to see your ride again.

Also not to be seen: that old Portland favourite, the cute little tricycle baby cart that trundles along behind your bike. Babies sit in little "car seats" mounted on the handle bars, while older children just climb on behind their parents and hang on. Older people give friends lifts on their bikes just about everywhere; we often saw women wearing incredibly chic outfits perched side-saddle on the back of a bike as it whizzed by.

Things aren't perfect in Amsterdam, though - a huge amount of tourists hire bikes every day and ride around as if they're immune to the very real dangers of the road, seemingly thinking that Amsterdam is Disneyland and they're on the latest theme ride. I saw countless numbers of people get their tyres caught in tram tracks and just have a general lack of awareness that put them in danger. However, drivers in Amsterdam all seem to have a great awareness of cyclists (probably because they're so omnipresent), and this lessens the risks somewhat.

In the end, the main proof of the difference between the two "bike cities" lies in the statistics. Portland's bicycle commute rate (ie, to and from work) just hit 6.5%, up from 4.0% a couple of years ago. Amsterdam's lies at around 40%, a truly staggering number.

Posted in: , , on October 12, 2009 at at 9:23:00 PM 0 comments  

One Last Flaming Hoop: Addendum

Sighhhh.

Why are things never easy when it comes to dealing with the government? Christine and I returned from our European sojourn (more on that soon!) to find that my I-751 application had been returned to me in our absence.

Why?

Because it arrived at the processing centre on the 18th of September, which is 91 days before my Green Card runs out. And you have to send them the application within the 90 days preceding the expiration date. That's right, it got there one whole day early, so they packed the whole thing up and sent it back to me.

The really funny thing? The date stamped on the included cover letter which explained why the application had been returned was the 21st of September, which is well within the 90 day window. Ah, stubborn bureaucracy at its finest!

Posted in: , , on October 10, 2009 at at 9:42:00 AM 0 comments  

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