The Jack Noodle Journal

Yep kids. It’s getting close.
My guess is on soon.

I don’t think we are going to have an April Fool though.
That would have been something.
I’m not predicting any big April Fools pranks coming from the Noodle camp this year either, so you guys don’t have to be on guard.
I thought of a couple of good ones but I’m now reserving all of my energies for more important matters. No energy will be spent on pranking.

It would probably be pretty easy to tell if we were trying to pull a fast one anyway.

I think I’m ready.

It’s amazing how fast the last few weeks have gone by.
Everything is in order.
We are good to go.

Now we wait.

I wonder if K has been noticing that I have been watching her closer and jumping to attention with every twitch and sigh?

I wish that the Sun would stay out for longer than ten minutes at a time. This lame March wintery weather has got to go. It’s stupid really.

The Sun is shining right now.

We were discussing this morning how great it’s going to be to have a spring baby. We’ll be working hard and exhausted but at least we’ll be able to sit out in the backyard in the sunshine and not get snowed on.

Mr. Baptist will be flying in to town tomorrow. He’ll be here to greet the Little Noodle grandchild.
YAY! to that!

Waiting…

Don’t be afraid baby! It’s just your uncle Seth dancing at the dance party.
As you will soon learn, you have many wonderful and crazy aunts and uncles that can’t wait to meet you!

Oh yes. MMMMMMMMM!

I made some of my legendary potato salad last night. Potato salad is the only thing I make in the kitchen. I’m not a cook. I’m going to try to be more handy in the kitchen once baby gets here.

I love me some potato salad.

The ingredients to last night’s creation are:

regular ole potatoes boiled
red potatoes boiled
yellow potatoes roasted
onions
celery
red wine vinegar stuff
mustard
mayonnaise
hard boiled eggs
salt
pepper
a whole wedge of blue cheese
and bacon

I also meant to include pickles but forgot. Perhaps another cheese as well?
I have also been known to add a couple of sweet potatoes to the potato line up, but not this time.

Yes indeed.
Bacon blue cheese potato salad.

It’s yummy.

We’re taking my salad to brother and father’s birthday dinner tonight. Should be fun.
The birthday event was one of the times recently that we have said maybe we’ll be there, “depending on what baby decides”.

Bless you, oh bless you weekend for finally getting here!
Well, here in a few more tiny hours.

I am so ready for paternity leave!

Oh my goodness!
Start your weekend off right by watching this amazing video of a little girl giant that the lovely K found last night. It’s crazy.

We started watching “The Wire” finally. Season one disc 1 is behind us.
I can tell after only 3 episodes that we are going to love this puppy.

SHHH! DON’T TELL ME!

I know that the series just recently ended after season five.
The Wire isn’t really a spoiler sort of show though is it?
No, don’t tell me.

I want to go at it fresh.

I shant speak of The Wire again here in the journal until we’re all done with it.

I’m a little annoyed with Netflix. They should be sending us the next disc, but they skipped it because of a short wait. Lame.
They have been making us wait for quite a few discs lately. I’m almost tempted to go to Hollywood Video and rent the whole first season at once! Screw that waiting for the mail to come business.

Hmmm…

Well our friends over in the Lost universe are now on pause until April 24th. They finished up with the first 8 episodes of season four. Time to go make some more episodes.

I don’t know. That last episode really didn’t do it for me. You know, sometimes fans aren’t always right. There’s a reason why you are the producer and the fan is the fan. You are the adult and the fan is the child. They seem to be giving in too much to what the fans want. I guess that’s the point. There’s something a tad hokey a foot though. I think I should probably stop listening to the podcast and maybe my thoughts of hokeyness will subside.

Gosh, April 24th. We might not be into watching the rest of the Lost season or The Wire by then.
How does that work now? We can’t watch shows filled with sex, violence, drugs and swearing like The Wire once baby gets here right?
Only Disney cartoons now.

See there, you have Lost coming into the house via the internet and The Wire coming into the house via snail mail. We don’t need broadcast television.

Some of you thought I was off my rocker a few posts ago when I went rambling about February 17th, 2009. Turns out the art world doesn’t think I’m crazy. There’s a series of art shows coming up (woops opened last weekend) here in town contemplating some of those very same themes. Check out a write up about the show here.

Ooh! I should make some February 17th, 2009, “DO NOT RESUSCITATE” bumper stickers in the vein of the “Kill Your Television” stickers. They will encourage folks to let their TVs die. Woops. I let an idea slip out. Please don’t take it and run with it.

Ah, go ahead. I probably won’t make the stickers. Hmmm. Maybe I should though.

We went in today and got some doodles showing us how the Little Noodle is positioned.

Looking good pal. That’s where we want you so no turning around in the next few weeks okay?

We have been getting quite a bit done in the last few days. Checking off boxes on the to-do lists.

I was going to work some overtime during the weekend and on Monday, but there just wasn’t any way. Too many more important things to do.

Baby’s room is starting to come together. It doesn’t feel like a kid’s room yet. We need to get more cutesy stuff I think. Maybe some crazy primary colors or something wacky? Maybe it needs the kid in it to be an official kid’s room. I guess it’s going to be a baby’s room for a while so I shouldn’t rush it to kid’s room status yet.

We did a load of baby laundry already! I guess you’re suppose to wash all of the nasty newness off of baby’s new clothes before baby puts them on. I think baby already has more clean clothes than I do now. It felt strange folding all of those little outfits for the first time.

We need to start packing some bags soon. Gots to be ready you know.

Gosh, so much to read coming in from the feeds on this Good Friday morning. I should skip work and just read blogs today.

Obama is in town this morning. I won’t be seeing him this time. I can hear security helicopters flying over the Coliseum as I type this.

So yesterday my coworker was talking about and looking at photos on the internet of a steampunk laptop. Pretty amazing.

I headed over to his cube and asked,
“Did you say steampunk? As in the genre of sci-fi writing and comics?”

He of course said he did and that was that.

I’ll admit I am just a tad stymied. I totally love the steampunk genre and aesthetic! Wasn’t I just talking in this here journal about wanting to do something one day artistically or story-wise in the steampunk style?

Lets take a look.

Ah ha! On February 12, 2003 I was talking about steam punk (space between words there) and how I was really into Haruhiko Shono’s work on Gadget.

On September 16th, 2002 I was talking about wanting to do some sort of future primitive, steam punk looking stuff.

Oh and it looks like I bought a Steampunk comic book on March 7th, 2002.

Alright, so I wasn’t just recently talking about steampunk here in the journal. It’s been some years. I think the last time I thought about the style was when I watched the anime movie “SteamBoy“.

So where am I going with this?

I am just amazed at the amount of information that there is now on the internet about the steampunk genre. Back when I was looking into it on February 12th, 2003, there didn’t seem to be much information when I did my internet searchings. Now 5 years later there’s all kinds of stuff. Furniture, rock bands, books, movies, fashion. I’m going to totally dig into the wikipedia entry when I get a spare moment and find more avenues to explore.

I want to be a steampunk.

I wonder if other searches that I haven’t done in a while would yield new fruit? Maybe I should look up cyber paganism, or Heaven’s Gate?

In other news…

I read this interesting piece on having success by cultivating a thousand true fans. I think I got down to the essay following a trail of links while reading reviews of NIN’s “Ghosts”. The having a thousand true fans is a “well duh”, common sense idea that was good to read about in such detail. I hadn’t had that thought as tightly focused for me before.

You get a fan base of people that love your work and buy everything you create, go to every show you perform, and go to every book signing you have. The key to this is that you don’t shoot for a World wide recognition, just a thousand people.

Someone like Trent Reznor who has several thousand true fans has got it made. This isn’t really about that level though.

I’m not sure how many people tune in to read the Noodle Journal, but I don’t think it’s anywhere near a thousand. Trying to capture the hearts and minds of a thousand true fans is a great goal to set though. I’m going to attempt to get a hundred true fans first.

Are YOU a true Noodle fan?

Oh yeah. I’m not offering up any product for my true fans to consume am I? I’ll work on creating something worthy of fandom.

I have been meaning to read Chris Anderson’s book “The Long Tail” for a couple of years now but haven’t. I was looking at getting the audio book of it from iTunes yesterday but it was too expensive. The thousand true fans thing references it.

In other, other news…

Today is K’s last day of work! Woo Hoo!

Spring break 2008 begins!

I haven’t been actively pursuing new music much yet this year. I’m still working on being a good listener to 2007’s tunes. Luckily, some excellent music from this year has been chasing me down and jumping in my headphones. Three months into 2008 and it’s starting to look like it will be a great year for the tunes.

My second favorite album of the year so far is Hot Chip’s album, “Made in the Dark”. Oh man. So good. It’s totally jammed into my noggin. The songs have been floating around in my head for the last 2 weeks. We blasted it on the way to the beach last weekend.

You should check it out. I don’t think I’ll answer the “what’s it like?” question for you. You should make up your own mind.

You MUST watch their video for “Ready for the Floor“. It’s crazy cool. I did like the song a little bit better though when I thought they were saying, “Ready for the FALL”. Great tune.

I’m going to listen to “Made in the Dark” right now as a matter of fact!

The books tell us that week 37 is considered full term. The internet says that too. That means baby is developed enough to be ready for prime time and baby’s lungs are capable of taking in the air of the cold cruel world outside of the womb.

Anytime you’re ready baby! Papa’s waiting right here for you!

The midwives are reeling me back in a bit.
Our due date is still 3 weeks away.
They are saying we shouldn’t be in a rush. Week 40 or 41 would be just perfect according them.

They said something that we found to be pretty interesting:
Nice big plump babies are often times easier to deliver.
That doesn’t seem right at first.
It’s explained though that big round babies don’t have any room to move around to any other position except for the correct one for birthing. Smaller babies get all wiggled around and get their shoulders and arms in weird spots.

I can wait 3 more weeks.
We’ve still got some things we can do to prepare for the arrival.

Over the weekend we went away to the coast for our babymoon.

No, it’s a thing. For real. No, I didn’t make it up. Babymoon. Just ask Wikipedia. She’ll tell you.

Yes, our babymoon, our last hurrah before sleepless nights with the beautiful newborn, was spent at the Inn At Otter Crest down by Lincoln City. Mr. Baptist and Ms. Bee got us a gift certificate to the place for Christmas. I bet they were planning us using it just like we did when we did. We figured it was close to being the last time we would be able to go to the coast and use it for a while.

We had a marvelous time. The inn is right on the beach. The view from our room was amazing. We woke up in the morning and spent about an hour laying there looking at the ocean. We did some swimming in the warm but not warm enough pool. We had a delicious dinner. I had the salmon.

It was a very relaxing time. We were big blobs of relaxed jelly.
There were many intimate conversations and life with baby thoughts and reflections.
It was awesome.

So I was in Target last night reading one of those celebrity magazines. Not sure which one.
What’s her name? Oh uh, Nicole Richie, Lionel’s daughter, recently had a baby I guess?
First off, who’s the dude that’s the daddy? He looks like some kind of rock star?

I don’t know. Whatever.

What I zoomed in on though, was one of the things they got the baby was a lullaby baby version CD of Nirvana tunes. Oh my. How cool is that?

I remembered to look it up this morning.
Turns out there’s a whole series of Rockabye Baby music!

and then I see…

Oh no you didn’t…

I instantly hit the buy button without hesitation when I found this one.

I am all caught up now with the Official LOST Podcast. Well sort of caught up. As caught up with them as I feel comfortable with. I listened to all of season 3’s podcasts and all the way up to 3 under for season 4. I can’t listen to the brand new podcasts because even though they try not to give away any spoilers, I don’t trust them with the newer television episodes. I’ll stay 3 podcasts back.

I already figured something out from putting 2 and 2 together using information heard on the podcasts. I think. We’ll see.

The fanboy, geeky, sci-fi kid in me has been quite entertained by having the extra contemplations and theories about the story from the podcasts. There is also some sort of weird comic booky, nerd humor that has been cracking me up on the podcasts. I have been trying to keep my laughing and horsey chuckling quiet while listening on headphones at the office.
It’s “Who would win in a fight, Batman or Superman?” sort of stuff.

Gosh that’s a lot of solid back to back listening that I have done over the last few days. No wonder I’m feeling a tad nutty.

43 or so more episodes left of Lost and the series ends in 2010. I think it’s pretty cool that they have an end in sight and are able to map out their story line accordingly.

I was doing some daydreaming the other morning and I came to a conclusion:

I’m going to let February 17th, 2009 come and go and not lift a finger to do anything.

I say let it go.
Don’t race out and spend money just to keep it alive. There are hundreds of alternative venues to receive the same, if not higher level of pleasure.

I have several friends who are currently totally going without and they seem to still be perfectly fine and healthy.
I bet the Noodle family will be better off with that dude out of the house.

There really is no reason to panic. That’s what the MAN wants you to do. Freak out running down the streets like your hair is on fire.
You’re not going to die. The World isn’t going to end if you don’t have the things that they are forcing you to have.

I wonder if there are support groups forming filled with other people who are planning on doing the same thing? I should see what Google tells me.

Maybe there’s a movement starting where people are finally going to just let it die.

Here we have an architectural 3D rendering of the Noodle Compound remodel / 2nd floor addition as envisioned by my friend Mathew, superimposed over the top of a preexisting photo of the house, with some cutting and pasting by me and some quick dabs of paint to see what our house would look like red.

Gosh that’s nice. I could stare at that for hours. There’s something oddly soothing about it.

When we first learned of baby’s arrival I had a bit of a nesting freak out. Boy, I guess I did. I just went back and looked at this post. It has all of the nesting freak out explained for you in great detail.

I was really worried the house was going to be too small for the baby.

Our dear friend and architect Mathew, jumped in with his expertise and did a mountain of design work for us. He performed some great mental gymnastics and bullet sweating when conceptualizing an awesome layout that took Mama Noodle, Papa Noodle and Baby Noodle’s needs and desires into account. I really enjoyed getting a view of how Mat (no really, one T) works. It has been fun emailing photos of every square inch of the house, measurements, and my uneducated philosophical ravings on architecture to Mat in New York.

Mat has done a great job and I think we have a good plan started.

As I was quick to find out though, 9 months zooms by amazingly fast! We ran out of time. Looking back now, there was no way we would have had a remodel complete before baby came. I would be so absolutely out of my head right now if there was construction going on here!

Also, I don’t think K and I have a realistic view yet of how much a remodel of this size is going to cost. With all of the lame housing market fallouts and increasingly weak economy, we might very well have been in over our heads financially if we went through with the remodel funding. Now is the time when we really should be taking it easy and playing it safe.

That said though, we are definitely going to remodel in the future and we will be moving ahead with the plans we have started. I’m excited to one day start the building.
Yeah, and we will probably be painting the house red.

I’m not as freaked out now about the nest at week 36 of the pregnancy. It will be fine. The Little Noodle will be small and not take up that much room. People have raised kids in much smaller spaces. We have everything cleaned up, the rooms are arranged better now, and all our junk is stuffed in the basement. It’s going to be great.

Several months ago one night while sleeping, I had a wonderful dream that I was walking around in the upstairs remodel. It was a very detailed and crystal clear dream. They probably had about a month left on the construction and I was checking it out while the workers were working on it. I remember walking up the new stairs and checking out the windows in the front. It was great.

Parents to be have some pretty amazing dreams and a few crazy ones. You should hear some of the things K’s dreamworld has been creating at night!