brett's logjam

Baby Status: cozy, no signs of leaving.

Baby Status: grounded 1 year for every additional day he stays in the womb.

(Plus is currently grounded 2 years. And counting.)

Episiotomies May Bring More Risks:

For years, some doctors believed that an episiotomy, an incision to enlarge the vaginal opening during childbirth, would prevent spontaneous tearing that would be harder to repair. They also believed the procedure would help women avoid incontinence and improve their sex lives.

It turns out those beliefs were myths.

A new review of 26 research studies shows that episiotomies are linked with a higher risk of injury, more trouble healing and more pain.

Episiotomies also had no effect on incontinence, pelvic floor strength or sexual function. Women who had the procedure waited longer to resume sex after childbirth. And their first post-birth intercourse caused them more pain.

Baby Status: stubborn or shy, can’t tell yet. (I suspect the former.)

Baby Status: Expected delivery date is TOMORROW, May 5th.

Baby Status: Real Soon Now!

(We are scheduled for tomorrow AM, if it doesn’t happen tonight. Huzzah!)

Baby Status: going to hospital!

Baby Status: As of 6:15am DC time, contractions were 5 minutes apart. They head to the hospital…

As of 2:10pm DC time, Merrystar is still in labor. They started inducing at 10am and her contractions are about 2 minutes apart. Merrystar is doing well and Brett seems coherent. More to follow…

Welcome to the world, Trip Peters. Born 19:31 EDT. 5/5/05 2453496.3131944444 JDN, 7lbs 13oz. 20.25” 3.4E-12 AU and 1.54E-30 solar masses.

Status: Sleeping.

At home now from hospital. Everyone sleeping. Even me:

I can’t believe how tired I am, and I didn’t do any work!

Thank you to everyone who’s written so far - I’m still learning how to type with a baby in one arm, but I’ve read all your emails and am completely overwhelmed and touched. Thank you!

And a big thank you to Ryan, who kept this site updated while I was in the hospital. I owe you big!

Baby Status: at home, sleeping in the cradle his Popi made him.

Mom Status: at home, sleeping.

Dad Status: finally posting some pictures.

Delivery room, around 8 pm Thursday:

Post-delivery room, around 11 pm Thursday:

Coming home on Saturday:

Changed for naptime on Saturday:

In case anyone was wondering, Trip is usually quite good:

… but he’s not always an angel:

We’re still trying to figure out if his eyes are brown or grey:

And of course, we’re all falling in love with him:

More pictures in the log.

I have mixed feelings about last night’s Enterprise finale. It didn’t uplift my spirits like Next Generation’s finale, but it didn’t leave me in a frothing rage, like Voyager’s, either. Just sad about what could have been, and what was. They showed things I didn’t want to see and didn’t show things I did, and while it’s always nice to see Riker and Troi, I felt cheated as an Enterprise fan that the finale wasn’t on the terms of its own series, but instead part of the larger Star Trek universe.

And then there’s that whole Trip/T’Pol thing.

Fortunately, I can safely tell myself that, aside from the broad historical events, it was all just a holodeck simulation created 200 years after the fact. And thank goodness!

Did I mention I was conflicted about last night?

So — a fond farewell to Enterprise from one fan. I, for one, will actually miss you.

(The upside is that I will not miss UPN. Off of my Yahoo! Channel Guide you go! My hate for thee knows no bounds.)

BBC SPORT | Other Sport | Snooker | O’Sullivan races to another title:

O’Sullivan was delighted with his victory and heaped praise on the groundbreaking competition, which introduced a unique 25 second shot-clock.

“This has been my favourite tournament of the year. The World Snooker Association could learn something from the way it’s been run,” said O’Sullivan.

“There have been no slow frames with people falling asleep.”

BBC SPORT | Other Sport | Snooker | O’Sullivan will return - Reardon

Very solid review from Michelle Erica Green of “These Are the Voyages…” on Trek Nation:

There are probably two reviews that could be written of this episode: the critical reactions of an Enterprise viewer and the overall impressions of a longtime Star Trek fan. Being both, I must admit from the outset that the latter overwhelms the former for me; it’s hard for me not to enjoy any episode that features Riker and Troi (their relationship is one of the few things I love unreservedly in Insurrection and Nemesis), and it’s hard for me not to get a little choked up being told that Kirk and Picard’s famous voiceover was originally their predecessor’s speech to the assembly that became the UFP.

…

I don’t want to take anything away from Connor Trinneer, who really demonstrated in the final three episodes the extent to which he is the most valuable actor on Enterprise. He had me wiping my eyes in “Terra Prime” as he played Trip mourning for a daughter he hardly knew, even though I found the whole instant-paternity instinct rather contrived. His acting is the reason I believe Reed and Sato when they explain that there was so much more to Tucker than redneck hick and solid engineer, because there’s really not a lot in the scripts to suggest otherwise. But really I could say the same for Reed and Sato as well. I doubt that in these reviews I have ever given as much credit to this cast as it deserves. I really like all the characters on Enterprise in a way that I did not in the end like many characters on Voyager, and the credit for that must go to the actors, because if I sit down and try to make a list of things I learned about Sato or Reed as opposed to moments I think Linda Park and Dominic Keating really nailed, it’s pretty sparse.

…

Archer’s Enterprise is returning home to be decommissioned after ten years; we saw far more upheaval on Picard’s Enterprise in only six years. We know that ultimately Riker and Troi do come back together, that he gets his own ship, that they get the happy ending Tucker and T’Pol never will. And maybe they were never meant to, but it would have been nice to see them try, you know, instead of to see them in denial and then be told after the fact that it just didn’t work out and very little changed otherwise on the NX-01.

I don’t think that “These Are the Voyages…” is the stink-bomb of an episode that some of the early reviews have claimed, nor do I think it’s the glorious send-off for the Star Trek franchise that some folk at Paramount would like us to believe. It’s more an orphan episode of an orphan series that never quite worked out its continuity issues, that never fully embraced its role as a prequel to Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek…that provided several seasons of entertainment and likeable characters, but, had it not borne the Star Trek label (and who can forget that it didn’t for two full seasons), would never be classed as the sort of groundbreaking, gutsy science fiction that Next Gen and Deep Space Nine were and that I hope the next incarnation may be.

Upon a second watching of the Enterprise finale (this one without the baby screaming through the last 15 minutes), I can safely tell myself that, aside from the broad historical events, it was all just a holodeck simulation created 200 years after the fact.

And thank goodness!

Dream Theater as Wikipedia’s article of the day?

What the?

Just read a really interesting interview with Mike Sussman, one of the writers for Enterprise. Well worth a read if you’re a Trek fan, especially the bit about killing the golden goose (again):

“It’s very funny in that people say, ‘oh the franchise needs a break, the show needs a break.’ But in the minds of many TV viewers, the show wasn’t even on!” Sussman notes. “I can’t tell you how many parties I went to, where if someone asked me what I did for a living, the response, nine times out of ten, was `Is Star Trek still on the air? They’re still making new episodes?’ How can you fight that? I think the perception was that you didn’t really need to promote it--the Trekkies would always tune in so why bother? I think inevitably the franchise started to slip out of the consciousness of the general TV viewing public.”

…

“It was the Christmas break that killed us, literally got the show cancelled, because we came back in January, nobody knew the show was on, nobody knew we were airing new episodes. It always took a couple of new episodes in January before people started tuning in again.”

Sussman also laments that the show’s DVDs weren’t released at a more opportunistic time. “I think that if they’d released season one of Enterprise on DVD over Christmas, the advertising that that would have generated for the show could have boosted our ratings in January, and our ratings hopefully would have held. Again, look at a show like 24, which really struggled in its first year. In an effort to promote the show, [the studio] released the entire first season on DVD that summer. And people rented those DVDs and watched the entire season from beginning to end, and then when season two premiered a few months later, the numbers went up, as a direct result of the DVD sales.”

Sussman notes that the ratings didn’t necessarily reflect Enterprise’s audience given all the ways people can now access entertainment media. “It’s like the 1960s all over again when the original was cancelled,” he points out. “The apocryphal story is that demographics came into being in the late 60s and when NBC cancelled the original Star Trek, the demographics people told them, you just killed the golden goose. This show had the best demos of any program on television. In some ways we’re in the middle of a revolution right now. Not a demographic revolution, but a revolution in terms of the internet, DVDs, cable television--first run cable programming like Battlestar Galactica. If you look at lists of the most downloaded programs--illegal downloads on the internet—Enterprise is almost always in the top ten. If you look at the most TIVOed shows, I think Enterprise was in the top 25 in TIVO’s last list of the most season passes. The show is popular in ways that are difficult to measure right now with current systems and current technology. I think when and if they decide to bring Star Trek back, maybe it will be a show that you pay $9.95 and you download the latest episode to your hard drive. Maybe that’s the model that will make it profitable for Paramount. Star Trek still is profitable for Paramount, but they’re not making as much as they were before. But it’s too bad that in this world with all of these different opportunities and different ways of making money off of this franchise, it would have been nice if they’d tried a little harder to keep it around.”

Slashdot | Write Down Your Passwords.

Guess what I get to read up on today? Prevention of woodpecker damage!

Tip: Owls don’t work. Use hawks.

That’s it. I’ve finally had it with this city. Today’s drive home was the last straw.

The roadways of Washington D.C. and northern Virginia are now officially my enemies. We hates them, we hates them forever, gollum.

American Idol, by itself, isn’t very compelling.

American Idol plus Television Without Pity? Pure addictive genius.

(For what it’s worth, I wanted Bo to win tonight, but I’m not upset that Carrie won instead. Good for her — she needed it more. I’ll get Bo’s album anyway.)

Long overdue, but I finally had some time this weekend to pick out some of my favorite photos of my family.