The Jack Noodle Journal

Have you heard the new Nine Inch Nails album yet? No, no, I’m not talking about Ghosts I-IV. I’m talking about “The Slip”. NIN is giving it away for free this time. You can get it here and give it a listen. Another album already! Hasn’t it only been 2 months since the last release?

Yeah, yeah we get it. Mr. Reznor has now become insanely prolific. Starting with the release of “With Teeth” in 2005 there has been 5 releases in 3 years. It use to take him 5 years to release one album. I’m finding myself starting to get nervous about this. What the heck is he doing? Is he just emptying everything off of his hard drive? Will my favorite band not be so special to me if I can get a new album every month? How are we supposed to get albums like “The Slip” burrowed deep down into our souls if we aren’t forced to play them over and over for years while waiting for new material like we did when “The Downward Spiral” came out?

I really listened closely to “The Slip” this morning. It’s a pretty good album. It’s fine. It has some of the same themes, motifs, sounds, beats and ideas that were on “Year Zero”. Come to think of it, it also has a lot of the same stuff from “Ghosts” on it. How does this all relate to “With Teeth”? Thinking a little bit more about it, I finally came to a conclusion.

“With Teeth”, “Year Zero”, “Y34RZ3R0R3M1X3D”, “Ghosts I-IV”, and “The Slip” are actually all one giant work. Five different chapters of the same album. It’s an 89 song, 5.7 hour CD that should be listened together as one piece!

I created a playlist on my iPod that has them all collected into one long continuous piece. Actually, I took the remix album off of the playlist so there are 4 albums containing 75 songs, with the whole thing clocking in at 4.5 hours. I listened to the “NIN works” playlist on shuffle while doing chores and was pretty impressed. All of the songs jumbled together work well with each other. It’s a seamless shuffle. I haven’t made it all the way through a 4.5 hour shuffle yet, but I think that’s the way I will be listening to this body of work from now on. It’s way good that way.

With most of our music being digital now, we aren’t held to the same time constraints that were forced on us with having to flip records and tapes over to side two or being held to the 80 minute CD format. Maybe we should be making longer 4 and 5 hour works? Perhaps Reznor, like some crazy classical composer, had it planned out ahead of time that the last 3 years of Nine Inch Nails work should be heard on your iPod or computer all in one sitting.

I have found the behind the scenes stuff with the last 3 years of NIN work really interesting as well. Kind of like a conceptual art project where the actual journey and creation of the piece is where the “Art” is at and not in the final product. The path to the destination is more important than the actual destination.

There has been interesting innovations formed by NIN as they figure out how to get above the dying music industry. There has been new paths traveled down concerning digital music and traditional music distribution. There has been some fun marketing schemes and interesting video and gamer elements tied in. The new remix site has been pretty cool in getting fans to feel like they are part of the creative process. What they have also been doing by pulling everything under the creative commons licensing is also very cool.

I don’t know, it seems to me that there has been a lot of cool exploring, expeditions, and trail blazings going on here trying to plant a flag on the ever moving new world of music entertainment. This is just a glimpse of what our interactive digital world may look like in the future kids!

and…

END WEIRD RAMBLE

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Let me of course preface this story by telling you that we were extremely exhausted last night. Our final last sparks of energy had been drained after a car ride home from Newberg in which a certain baby who shall remain nameless cried most of the trip back.

I don’t think it was that late. Maybe 10?

I was inside holding the youngster.

K had let the dogs out to the backyard for potty time.

I heard Abby barking. This isn’t unusual. She fancies herself a barker and indulges herself quite often.
I noticed though that it started to pick up in urgency and tone.

Phillip started barking. Phillip is usually more conservative with the barking so this alerted me that something was up out there.

I was in the front room with the baby and from there I heard K head out to the back porch.

She started screaming bloody murder at the dogs!

“NO! Phillip! ABBY! ABBY! NO! NO! NO!”

This freaked me out beyond belief. My heart was racing and the adrenaline started pumping.
I thought that the dogs were fighting with something. Maybe they had got a hold of a cat or maybe a raccoon was attacking them.

Somebody was hurt!

I hurried to the back porch as fast as I could while still holding the baby. Luckily I didn’t trip and fall as I ran down the stairs to the backyard.

K was screaming and crying, “They’ve got something dead in the yard over there and I can’t get them away from it!”

I was picturing the worst. Phillip and Abby gutting some dead rotten corpse, with blood and guts spraying everywhere.

“Take the baby! Take the baby! Take the baby!” I handed the baby off to K who goes back inside the house.

I yelled at the dogs and hurried into the dark near the garden beds where they were barking.

There laying in the garden was a dead possum!

It was creepy looking.

The dogs were definitely riled up and checking it out. Sniffing it. I didn’t think they were eating it.

I got a hold of Phillip first and dragged him by his collar into the house. I finally chased Abby down and pulled her back inside.

K had lost it. The tiredness had taken it’s toll.
The dead animal was the straw that broke the camel’s back.
She was horrified that the dogs might have got some decease from the possum or that the possum could have killed them right then and there! I assured her that they didn’t appear to have any wounds. She told me to get the dogs the hell away from her and the baby and give them baths. Wash that dirty possum off of them!

I began to come back to my senses a bit and calmed down while scrubbing soap all over Abby. Then it hit me!

IT WAS A POSSUM!

The bastard was playing dead!
Oh my! Creepy dirty creatures!

I headed in to see K who was beginning to calm down by this point. I informed her that I believed that the possum wasn’t really dead, only pretending.

I went and checked the garden this morning before letting the dogs out again. Sure enough the possum had vanished!

The whole episode was absolutely frightening!

It got me thinking about the whole defense of playing dead. I’m going to have to read a page or two on it. It must work for possums. I mean the possum in our story got away right?

What would have happened if K or I accidently stepped on it? What if one of the dogs bit it? How far will they take the playing dead act? Do they spring back to life if you step on them or bite them?

Those little monsters are freaking evil looking I tells you!

Such is the cloudy, ferocious, dream world our nights have become here at the Noodle compound.

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So far I seem to be getting a healthy night of sleep every other night. I felt great and well rested yesterday. Not so much today after last night.

Every other night sleeping is pretty good right? At least I’m not staying awake every single night?

Gilby is a good baby. He is probably screaming and crying far below the national baby average. He has been a bit cranky over the last couple of days but it all is eventually manageable. He’s been needing to eat at 12 AM, 4 AM, and 8 AM during a night. That’s fairly workable.

I’m very sleepy right now.

Isn’t white noise fascinating? We have been cranking the home stereo up on the AM side of the radio and listening to static, off channel, noisy snow. Yes, we may be going a tad nuts. It sure would be funny if someone came over while we were listening to our white noise.

White noise totally calms the raging baby! It’s pretty amazing. It’s been hypnotizing papa as well.

K has been reading “The Happiest Baby on the Block” book and I think she got that white noise bit from there. There are all kinds of methods one can use to soothe the little one. I’m going to have to read it.

And of course, as we are continually finding out as new parents, here is the opposite argument to the white noise issue. White noise damages the development of your infant’s hearing and language you see.

It seems that you can find an argument for or against any child rearing advice you get. I guess you just have to pick the side you feel the most comfortable with and go with it.

I had never changed a diaper in my life before I met the Little Noodle. I’ve been getting lots of practice now and think I’m getting pretty good at it.

We have been trying out a couple of different diaper options. I think we are going to go with gDiapers. They are pretty awesome. Have you seen these things? You flush the poopy pee pee parts of the diaper down the toilet and aren’t filling up a landfill somewhere with disposable diapers. It takes a bit of figuring out to get a good working routine down with them, but what doesn’t take some learning in babyland?

I really like that you are using a product that is attempting to be better for the environment but you don’t feel like you are sacrificing the often times better function that comes with environmentally damaging products. That seems to be the trend with a lot of the green products being invented these days. Designers are finally making them function better and smarter than their Earth damaging competitors.

I believe the gDiaper cats are from Portland as well.

Gilby likes the handsome G monogram on the front of the stylish outer wrap.

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The Noodle family journeyed out on an expedition in the woods last Saturday. We went, watched, documented with video and digital photography, the bungee jumping adventures of sister Sarah and JR.

It was pretty crazy! What a drop. It was hard to capture just how high up you felt using photos. The photo of Sarah up above has a pretty good perspective. The red circle I added there is highlighting a jumper in mid jump. I haven’t watched the video I shot yet.

They were claiming that it is the highest bungee jumping bridge in North America. Really? Right up past Battleground WA a ways?

Sarah bought Junior a bungee jumping package from these guys for his 30th birthday.

They both jumped! It was quite a thrill to watch them.

Nope. I didn’t bungee jump. I actually didn’t have any desire to this time. Being a new father is all the adrenaline I can handle at the moment. I definitely can understand the rush and appeal though. I got butterflies for sure peering over the edge, but I would have done it if I was going to do it. I don’t think I would have been scared back off the edge once hooked up. No really. I’ve jumped off a bridge or two in my lifetime. Never bungeeed though.

We were a hour and a half late for their jump time due to missing a turn, getting lost and driving way out into the middle of nowhere. It was a beautiful drive through the forest. I think we were traveling pretty close to Mount St. Helens.

At K’s postnatal doctor’s appointment check up yesterday, I told the doc that the recovering K was a good girl and didn’t bungee jump out of fear of splitting in half at the gut. She gave me a forced chuckle and then said that she knew way too much about bungee related injuries and accidents.

Oh yeah, there’s that.

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A film crew with several trailers, motor homes and other gear moved in around the corner less than a block at the old folks home last Friday afternoon. I think they are just starting up work today. They had an early start time this morning. We can see some of the going ons from our back porch. Oh yes, what a hip neighborhood eh? No, I think they are just filming inside the old folks home (Not the politically correct term? Is adult long term care facility better?). I’m sure there’s probably a good movie set or two, and lots of filmable stuff inside those funkyish brick buildings.

Yeah, yeah get to it Noodle! What movie is it?

Well Martin, Seth and I walked by the lot yesterday on our way to go buy a pizza at Stark Naked Pizza. There was a security guard type guy sitting in his car at the entrance but he was asleep in the warm sun. We let him sleep.

On the way back from getting pizza, he was awake and sitting up in his car seat, we asked him what movie was being filmed there.

He says, “Twilight. It’s a vampire movie”.

“Huh,” Says we. “Never heard of it”.

I summon forth the internet later in the evening and find that IMDB has a pretty healthy entry for this “Twilight” movie.
Looks like they are filming at several Northwest locations.

I’m not familiar with any of the actors in the movie. I seem to sort of recognize the director. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen a couple of her projects before. Looks like a teen drama.

Friend Eric informs me with an oh yeah, that the Willamette Week ran a little story on Twilight this week. Well look at that. Now we know.
Gosh, I haven’t picked up a Willy Week in months!

So Twilight is a hit bestselling teen (young adult) novel that everyone is going nuts over? They are now making it into a movie.
Boy, it just keeps getting harder and harder to keep up with this stuff doesn’t it?

I’m going to head over and see if they need any extras.

I could totally play the creepy janitor that lives down in the basement by the furnace role.

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We all just got back from a trip to the dog park. Abby and Phillip were SO happy to get out of the house.

This gray weather sucks.

Yes, the young Gilby, his pretty mommy, and his weirdo dad have been venturing out into public.

On Sunday G Noodle visited his first restaurant. We all went to Russell Street Barbecue. We quite enjoy their grub. You should go if you haven’t been. Silly Gilby is such a baby though! He slept the whole time and didn’t even finish his baby back ribs.

Yesterday we tried out a new place to us. We went to Hopworks Urban Brewery over on Powell. It was a pretty cool place. Pubs are so pleasant in the middle of a workday not at lunch time. Their IPA was tasty. I will return. K and I were daydreaming about how magnificent it would be to be independently wealthy, not have to work for a living, going from hangout to hangout while everyone else was at work.

While there at Hopworks, I spotted two exquisite creatures. At the pub sitting across from us were two stay at home daddies with their babies. Would they be called house husbands? I was quite intrigued and a tad bashful at the same time. Their babies were a few months older than G Noodle. What were they doing? What was their story? Daddies are allowed to take their babies out for a pint with other daddies while mommy is at work? We got the head nods and invisible hi-fives because we were there with G Noodle.
Hmmm… stay at home daddy. House husband.

Gilby likes his Rockabye Baby NIN album. He rocked out to it yesterday. He also listened to Brian Eno’s album, “Ambient 1: Music for Airports” . He seemed to like that one too but got sleepy towards the end.

He says he wants the Sweeney Todd soundtrack next. We’ll see.

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Oh yes! Another blog post from babyland. Stuffed with photos!

We are doing great.
There was a bit of trouble with some fussiness last night. Not too much sleeping was had.

I think we really, really learned last night that we should get our sleeping in while baby is sleeping.

We watched 3 hours of quality television last night and baby slept through all of it. When mommy and daddy had their fill of TV and were ready to go to sleep, baby woke up with a roar.

We’re learning.

I actually should probably be napping right now instead of writing this post.

G Noodle’s belly button stump fell off yesterday. ICKY!
K saved it.

We are up to our elbows in spit up! Gilby enjoys the occasional urp. Phillip the dog puked once this morning. Pierre the cat puked 4 times in various spots around the house. I hope they didn’t get into anything.
A house full of weak stomachs!

Abby the dog pulled half of my roast beef sandwich off of the table this afternoon and ate it.

When Gilby looks back to his first two weeks of life I think it will be important for him to know how many great people came to visit him and were happy to meet him. We have enjoyed seeing all of you that have been coming by. It’s been a nice steady stream of visitors, never too many at a time, for which we have been grateful.

The meals have been great!

We have been getting lots of help, which has been wonderful in helping K recover quickly.

Gilby has some pretty cool grandparents.

Mr. Baptist “Poppy”, has been here since day one. We are quite happy that he was able to come over from Arizona and spend Gilby’s first moments and weeks with him. It’s very easy to see that Poppy is quite pleased with the Little Noodle.

In the evening hours Poppy has been spending the night over at Gilby’s great grandmother Ann’s house. Mr. Baptist has been missing the screaming and crying so he thinks Gilby is always chill and mellow.

Mr. Baptist is flying to Japan tomorrow for two weeks. He’ll be staying with friends of the family.

My mom really stepped up to the plate and was an amazing help to us! We are forever in her debt and are very thankful for all her work. She took several days off of work and spent 6 days with us when we first got back from the hospital. She cleaned, did laundry, cooked and did other chores for us while we were getting to know our little guy. Having my mom here was great for K and kept her off of her feet.

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Oh at last.
We have some sunshine. Please tell me it will be here for more than an hour.
We are in desperate need of some sun here at the Noodle compound.
We want it to warm enough for us to be able to go and sit in the yard.
It is spring right?

They are saying that Saturday should be nice.

I hope so. I need to mow the lawn again.

We are getting a mild form of cabin fever.
I got out and walked the dogs in the rain yesterday.
Gilby, K and I went to the grocery store for the first time yesterday evening.
That was nice.

Being warmed up enough to go out of doors comfortably would cure our cabin fever entirely.

Probably about a day after we got back from the hospital, we tried to watch the first episode on the first disc, season three of Battlestar Galactica. We fell instantly asleep when we turned it on. Way too exhausted for TV viewing.

Now back a week and a day, our appetite and TV viewing stamina has returned.

We’ve got more Battlestar episodes and more The Wire episodes coming in the mail today.

We’ve also got “The Big Lebowski” coming. I have been wanting to watch it again. I had been hearing people talk about it in several different arenas and thought it was time to see it again. The Big Lebowski keeps coming up in conversation.

Oh, and new Lost episodes started up again last night! They better do me proud with the next episode or I’m going to… I’m going to do something. I’m not sure what.

Uh oh!
Looks like some clouds are rolling in. Hopefully the sun can burn them away.

BEWARE…

When Gilby smiles he poops!

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a biological anthropologist.

a restaurant in England.

a master unicyclist.

a construction company.

a silkscreen company.

a cute dalmatian cartoon character.

a nursery and orchard.

a city in North Dakota.

Oh yes and…

Gilby is a rocker who was once in a band called Guns and Roses.
This one gave us an “ARGH!” and a “Aaah Geeeeeze”.

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I must get some of my thoughts and memories down before they start to fade. I wanted to get a good solid birthing story out. I have quite a few notes jotted down with pen on paper, so that is a good start.

We are so happy that Gilby is here. The journey to meet him was quite the emotional workout. The hardest times I have ever experienced and of course the hardest thing K has ever been through. Thank goodness the outcome was so marvelous!

K tried out all of the different birthing options delivering Gilby. I’ll give the abridged version of the story here for the journal.

On Friday night (11th) K had some stirrings that she thought might be something.

On Saturday (12th) we continued with our normal activities like mowing the lawn (me). By the night time around 6PM K started to feel what she was beginning to think was contractions. Here she started to feel it all in her back. We called K’s sister, Sarah who we had come over to the house. Sarah was our doula and did an amazing job. We can’t imagine how it would have been without her there.

At 11:25 PM we thought (little did we know then) that the contractions were progressing along enough that we should go into the birthing center.

We chose to have a natural birth at Andaluz Waterbirth Center. They have been great. We highly recommend them.

We got to the birthing center at 12 in the morning on Sunday. There’s this horrible thing called back labor. K had outrageously horrible back pain during her labor. The midwives were begining to believe that baby was in occiput posterior position. Sunny side up.

K labored like this for 24 hours at the birth center. It was very hard for me to see her in so much pain. At hour 24 K was exhausted and we all were suffering from lack of sleep. After an examination it seemed that there hadn’t been any progression. K was ready to be done with the pain.

We all got in the cars and caravanned to Plan B. Oregon Health and Sciences University. We got settled in there at about 12 AM Monday (14th). Once there, the sciences kicked into high gear for us. K was given an IV and was brought to great relief with an epidural. K felt a million times better and was able to finally rest a little. One thing she said after the fact was that before the epidural all she could think about was the agony of the pain, but after the epidural she was actually really excited and thought a lot about finally meeting the baby.

K was stalled at four and a half centimeters dilation. They let her continue to labor with just the epidural for about 2 hours. After two hours without increased dilation they started her on a pitocin drip. We continued this way for 6 more hours. When they tried to increase the pitocin levels the babies heart rate would go up (or was it down?) so increasing pitocin levels was turning out to not be an option.

When K was examined again she was just a tad more dilated at 5 cm. This was far too slow of a progression for how long her body had been working at laboring. It was becoming evident that we were approaching a diagnosis of arrest of labor.

The baby was healthy and strong and the doctors were thinking that it would probably be good time to get him with a cesarian before waiting for it to become an emergency situation. K and I didn’t want to wait much longer and put baby’s health at risk so we agreed that it was time for a cesarian birth.

The doctors let Sarah and I be present with K during the operation (daddy was a given, having Sarah there also was a rule bender). I was very scared. Everything was SO intense. I was a mess while waiting to go in the operating room.

One of the cool, funny things that happened was the doctors agreed that they wouldn’t announce the sex of the baby, keep it a secret and allow K to declare it once she saw the baby. This was cool because it was something that I had thought would be special a while ago and then forgot about. When baby was born, the doctors lips were sealed, they showed us baby over the curtain and I instantly yelled “IT’S A BOY!” before K got the chance to announce it.

Gilby was born at 12:15 PM, Monday April 14th, 2008.

We were all besides ourselves with joy when we heard little Gilby crying and screaming. I held his little naked body next to K’s head so she could kiss and love him.

An hour later we were all together in the recovery room.

We would find out a few days later when talking to the doctor that operated on K that Gilby didn’t appear to be sunny side up but may have turned slightly at the last second. After 36 hours of labor his head hadn’t descended very far and he was in the womb sideways.

We had hoped to have a natural birth, but that didn’t work out, and that’s fine. We feel good about making the right decisions. We have a healthy baby!

There’s a larger coulda shoulda debate concerning cesarian births that I probably won’t have the strength to get into for a while.

This was the view from the window in our hospital room at OHSU. Down the hill and in the distance there is a nice shot of the city.

We spent the next 3 days recovering in our hospital room at OHSU. I went home once to check on things and get cleaned up, but stayed every night with Gilby and K.

That OHSU campus is something else! What a massive complex. I was quite impressed with the crazy eclectic architecture. Building stacked on top of buildings stacked on top of other weird buildings. There are a number of what look like to my untrained eye, architectural stunts being performed. For instance, what’s the deal with that mammoth bridge to the veteran’s hospital? I would really be interested in reading more about the history of the place. What made them think that it would be a good idea to build a giant hospital way up on the hill? Perhaps I will give it a good googling shortly.

Oh yes, I did ride the tram (free). It was pretty alright.

The staff at OHSU was amazing. We probably saw about 100 different faces during our stay. Every morning our team of 5 specialists came in to our room to wake us up and give us reports. We really felt like we got top notch treatment.

By day 3 though we were SO ready to go home. When we finally got home and were able to take a breath again, the water works flowed! Happy gusher tears of joy and relief.

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