so it's been a week

November 17, 2017

Welcome to a Friday night edition of Corgi Class Starship, because there are no rules here.

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory Giveaway56 - Hawaii or Mordor"Jon (@ferociousj), guest co-host Jen (@jennifermarie), and special guest Thomas (@thomasthecat) discuss a licensing nightmare and some new Star Trek fashion options before Thomas drops a great idea of his own."In this episode, Thomas explains the movie Last Action Hero to me in a way that makes me really wish I'd seen it. I don't know what else to tell you.You can subscribe using:Apple Podcasts RSS Stitcher Google Play MusicYou can also just go to the website to play or download episodes:https://ideafactorygiveaway.simplecast.fm/

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.There isn't one this week; check out #dadthoughts for a story!

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.We were a week plus two days past our due date and it was starting to get old. True, we were spending our days doing nothing but lounging around making extremely last-minute plans (dinner with friends! a matinee of the new Thor movie!), but we were also waiting for literally the most momentous and life-changing event of our entire existence, which tended to amplify how little either of us really liked waiting for anything.On Friday, we were scheduled to get what they call a "non stress test," in which the mom sits in a chair with some monitoring units strapped to her so they can get a graph of what the baby's heart rate and the mom's uterus are up to. This revealed what the tech termed "questionable lates" -- it turns out the placenta has the potential to reach what's essentially its end-of-life before the baby's born, and one of the first signs the placenta might be wearing out is that the baby's heart rate dips a little every time there's a contraction. This was happening in Mavis's body then, even though she couldn't feel the contractions at the time. It wasn't life-threatening or scary, but they decided to send us to the Labor & Delivery floor at Kaiser Oakland for some more monitoring. Which we did. Those little dips in the graph kept showing up, and the L&D staff decided that it would be a good idea to just go ahead and induce now (we were going to be induced four days hence in any case).Funfact: inductions are generally done either with drugs or a mechanical method. The graph told us drugs were a no go, so we went with the mechanical method: basically, they stick a balloon into the uterus, fill it with water, and drag it out of there a little at a time, which forces the cervix to open up and generally jumpstarts the whole process.I say "jumpstart," but it takes 24 hours, so.By Saturday afternoon, the balloon was out and it was time for the Pitocin drip, which would start the contractions that would bring about active labor.(This might be a good time to insert that prior to starting down this whole journey roughly a year ago, I had no idea what the actual process of childbirth was like, which is to say I had the same idea everyone else gets by absorbing TV and movies. It turns out there are more or less two real stages:1. Contractions, wherein the uterus puts the baby into proper launch position.2. Active labor, the part where the baby actually gets pushed out.The contractions take a long time and they're not fun.)Mavis's contractions in particular made her more or less incoherent with pain, which if you know about the pain tolerance of women in general and my wife in particular is saying something. Witnessing them secondhand, I would guess that contractions feel like someone coming up and stabbing you in the guts with a screwdriver before twisting it for about sixty seconds at a time, every 3-5 minutes.Mavis did this for twelve hours.At the conclusion of that time, which brought us to Sunday morning, she decided it was time for an epidural. An epidural, for those not in the know, is a process wherein an extremely smart and skilled person installs a sort of artificial canal in between the bones of your spinal column so the lower half of it can be flooded with drugs, severely blunting the pain of contractions. This happened. Its effect was transformative: Mavis could talk again. She actually even slept. So did I; I'd been up literally all night, save for a couple of nonconsecutive hours in which our amazing doula Zoey helped Mavis manage her contractions solo.A few hours into this new world, the attending physician identified some new slight wrinkles: the baby did not have a taste for Pitocin, and Mavis was exhibiting some signs of preeclampsia. The IV pole gained a new friend in the form of a magnesium drip, and the Pitocin was halted. This started a pattern that would repeat (verrry sloooowly) for the next 20ish hours:10 Baby's heart rate goes up20 Mavis's contractions stop30 Pitocin is restarted40 Mavis's contractions begin anew50 Baby's heart rate goes down60 Pitocin is haltedGOTO 10This took us through the shifts of two doctors (it was apparently Groupon Weekend at the Kaiser Oakland L&D, and between the 9-12 other babies being born, at least one of them had an emergency that required immediate and prolonged attention. I begrudged them nothing; if anything, it gave Mavis (and us) more time to gather our energy during the contraction-light phases) until Monday morning, when it was determined that a C-section was really the best way forward. Mavis, who had never before had surgery, was bundled up and sent to the OR, and I followed a short while thereafter shrouded in a paper jumpsuit, booties, cap, and mask.The rest of that interval is a blur.I do remember holding Mavis's hand in a cold, bright, white room and talking (babbling, really) about anything I could think of to take her mind off what was going on past the blue curtain that had been put up in front of her chin: music, I think? Summer camp? I don't even know, people.I do know that at 943a on Monday 11/13/17 (the first three two-digit prime numbers, don'cha know), we welcomed Quentin Malcolm Gruver Sung into the world, and he immediately made about as dramatic an entrance as the rest of the weekend seemed to foreshadow. He stopped breathing briefly upon exiting the womb, and right as they were about to stick a tube down his throat, he opened his mouth and started yelling. As a precaution, the staff decided to send him to the neonatal intensive care unit, leaving Mavis behind to be sewn up (we had agreed previously that I would accompany the baby wherever he went if she was unable to follow physically herself). His condition kept improving as they prepared to roll him out, however, and by the time we got out the door and down the hall to the NICU, they determined there was no reason for him to be there. We literally opened the doors, showed him the NICU for half a second, and rolled right back to the OR. It was amazing. I don't know a thing about astrology, but Mavis warned me she'd been told by others that Scorpios like to Make an Entrance.Mavis met Quentin for real later in the recovery room, where a quiet bustle of maintenance started that followed us to the postpartum room where we stayed until Friday, learning things like how to feed and care for a newborn human. Mavis also developed a spinal headache as a result of the epidural a couple days into recovery: this is a thing that sometimes happens where spinal fluid leaks out of the hole they made to install the epidural, changing the pressure inside the space where the spinal cord and brain sit; this causes a massive headache. Fortunately, the fix -- which is called a "blood patch" -- is relatively simple and undeniably metal: they draw some of your own blood out and inject it into the hole, which restores the pressure and clots at the injection site, plugging it up so nothing else leaks out. This fixed Mavis right up, and we made ready to leave the following day, exactly one week after we first went in for our non-stress test.That takes us to pretty much right damn now: with some help from Mavis's parents, we arrived at home and put the whole place through a flurry of unpacking and settling in. As I type this, Mavis is snuggling our son on the couch while we check out the Big Family Cooking Showdown on Netflix (hail, Nadiya). Next week: shoutouts and overall thoughts, because this took a damn long time to type.

Fascination Corner

I read a lot of newsletters; here are some links that caught my eye.

I swear to fucking god if there's a subsurface ocean on Ceres, too, I am going to convert into a being of pure energy on my own just so I can zip out there and see what the fuck is under the crust for myself.
Someone did a study on what kind of music dogs like back in January before I started this newsletter. End of line.
Some Dartmouth researchers wrote a program that analyzes your house and designs custom 3D-printable reflectors that channel wifi signal through it, and all it costs is about $35 and 23 minutes of time.
The headline really speaks for itself: I tweeted for Hillary Clinton for a year and a half. I learned some things.
In a purely academic sense, if we just switched around where the crops on Earth are grown, we could feed almost an extra billion people while actually reducing our water use.
A long and fascinating read on The Mythical Whiteness of Trump Country.
Here's an interesting piece about putting a magnetic shield in front of Mars in a bid to help it build up an atmostphere, but frustratingly, it doesn't actually say how to build one of the fuckin' things. Is it not even conceivable, or would the effort of designing and building such a thing with present-day tech be so ludicrous as to not be worth going into?
Here's a WaPo read for you on how to fix American democracy from 38 people, some of whom are smart and some of whom are complete fucking idiots.
If you only ever read one ClickHole article, do yourself a favor and make it this oral history of One Direction.
Your Worrisome Vox Read of the Week is definitely this one about America's epistemic crisis. Please tell me there are philosophy professors holed up in a room somewhere forging an epistemological god-weapon that we can ram through the metaphorical hearts of Fox News and their followers everywhere. Please. I need this.
Want to see what it looks like when some real thinkin'-ass people get to designing traffic noise sound barriers? I promise you it is nothing like what you imagined.
It turns out the names of countries really translate to one of about four things.
Here's a thinkpiece that suggests workers who've been replaced by robots should try being caregivers. Having spent a week at a hospital with some goddamn amazing nurses, I agree that they're probably not replaceable by robots, but I also am not totally positive that caregiving is just something you can do; you need to be predisposed to it psychologically. Right?
There's a big British construction company out there with some Serious Ideas for how building things will look in 2050. Am I the only one surprised by the level of tech optimism happening here?

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.A band and their albumThe Actual Bad Guys, War Is Upon Us

Thanks

If you've read this far, I thank you. Feel free to forward this to someone you like, or inflict upon someone you don't.