RB update and pics! 32 weeks and going strong.

So look at the pics above- I'm enormous now. Ari says it looks like I've shoved a pillow up my shirt. All my original maternity clothes are too small and the bigger ones I bought recently are getting too small. I think I'm going to have to buy more clothes soon. RB is doing well- kicking vigorously and keeping me up at night. As for me- well I'm still sick. My cough is still here and the pain hasn't gone away. I'm now on a steroid inhaler to relieve lung inflammation. I have never taken so much medicine in my life! Good thing Ari works for Microsoft because we have yet to pay for a single drug or doctor's visit. Even my ER visit was free! I love Microsoft. I'm hoping this all resolves soon cause I can't imagine going through labor and dealing with the rib pain at the same time. Even if I get an epi, it doesn't reach that high so I'd still be in pain. I'm taking care of myself and Ari is making sure that I eat enough. I'm not gaining that much weight anymore. Just one pound in the past two weeks so now I'm up to a net gain of 20 pounds.

We went out on Wed. and bought two beds for the other guestroom- so now we have 4 beds that can accommodate guests. Please let us know if you'll be in the area or you just stam want to come out to Seattle. We love guests from back home! Ari will blog about the rest of our adventures hopefully tom. But now I have to go so we can play on the gamecube Ari "borrowed" from work.

Pictures!!!

These are some of the fallen trees from the windstorm here last week. Notice the power lines entangled in in the tree in the second picture. Luckily that family was in Israel so they only had to worry about spoiled food in the fridge.



















Sufganiyot pics! Ari said that they looked like little brown footballs. They tasted great though, and his coworkers finished the leftovers the next day.

Ari made his traditional onion rings and french fries. I thought the friench fries were ok but the onion rings were great! And I've also included the traditional Avner eighth day of Chanukah picture. We didn't have a good location to light this year but we are hoping that next year we will have a menorah box on our front porch.

At least the weather here isn't boring

Sorry it's been so long since my last post, but I've been getting lazy. Also not that much has been happening here, and Rachel's been doing a commendable job at holding down the blog. I'm almost tempted to ask who your favorite blogger is, but I kind of like being married so I think I will avoid that minefield... See Mom, I've learned a lot since I got married! Just in time for having a kid!

The most exciting recent event was the storm we had that left about 1 million people without power. They said there were winds of 80+ MPH, and there were trees down all over the place. Just a block away from us there was a massive tree that fell that blocked the road and took out 2 utility poles, which I think is why some people around here took 4 days to get their power back. It started Thursday night. Our power went out in the middle of the night. I normally work from home on Friday, so since we had no power I was thinking about going in to work. After some shopping for shabbos I was on my way there when I called their security hotline to find out the status of power on campus (earlier the message said it was open and they were running on generators) and it said there was no power. So I got a free day off, sitting in our dark cold house. I probably would have preferred work to that, but whatever. We ended up eating out Friday night by some people that had a gas oven (most people here including us have electric), so we at least had a hot meal, albeit a dark one. Like every other place, the shul was dark and cold. They got these camping lanterns for Friday night so we could daven. We got our power back on late Friday night, so we were only out for about 24 hours, although we did not have internet access until last night. But others were not so lucky. The shul and the people in that area didn't get their power back on until last night - that's almost 4 days without power! Actually there are still some, a couple people I work with among them, who still don't have power yet. One guy brought his cats in to work today because he thought they were too cold at his house.

In more mundane news, our office "holiday" party was today. It was actually supposed to be Friday so I wasn't planning on going, but because of the power outage they rescheduled it for today. Disappointingly, there was no beer (my team did have a "beer bash" a couple weeks ago- This is definitely the first place I've ever worked where they serve beer at meetings). They had this thing similar to secret santa called white elephant. The way it works is that everyone brings in a wrapped gift, all of which go on one table. Everyone picks a number out of a hat which determines the sequence of the turns. On each person's turn they can either pick one of the unopened presents and unwrap it or steal an already opened present from someone who has already gone. The one from whom a present is stolen then has the same choice - he can either steal from someone else or take one from the pile. The only restriction is that any gift can be stolen a maximum of once per turn - that way every turn eventually ends and the same gift can't keep going back and forth on a single turn. Once everyone has gone, the person who went first has a choice to either keep his gift or steal anyone else's, since he had no choice of stealing when he went the first time. Obviously going first is best. If he steals someone's, the one he had goes on the table again and the person without a gift can take it or steal anyone else's, and so on, until someone takes the gift from the table and the game ends.

Extra credit: In a game of white elephant with n participants and n gifts, what is the maximum number of "steals" that can occur in one game?

Anyway, since I hadn't been planning on going to the party, and it was only rescheduled as of yesterday, I didn't have a chance to go out to buy something, so I didn't play. I would have bought either a darth potato head (I can almost hear dovid scrambling for his wallet to order one right now...) or a big tub of play-doh. There were some silly/funny gifts though. The best in my opinion was the mini arcade frogger game. Some of the funnier ones were the book, "The Google Story," a Google pen, some spanish movie DVD, a singing Scooby Doo doll, and a demotivational calendar.

Work is slow overall right now, but I'm beginning to get more responsibility in my team. I'm working on Windows Desktop Search, which is available as an add-on for windows XP, but it is the built-in search engine in Vista. So right now I'm just working on fixing some bugs, errrr, did I say bugs? I mean there are no bugs in Microsoft products! What I meant to say is that I write pristine bug-free code the first time around, just like everyone at Microsoft. And then I ride my unicorn home. His name is Billy.

Sorry, I blacked out there for a second. So like I said, we're all working on stamping out bugs right now, but in another month or so we're going to start working on planning for next major release. But so far I'm learning a ton and I really like it.

So that's about all from here. Before I conclude, I don't want to start a whole onlysimchas-type thing here, but I just wanted to give a shout out to Sheinfeld for having a baby and to Joseph for getting engaged. Good job guys! Keep up the good work!

Ari

Snap, Crackle and Pop!

Over Thanksgiving I developed what seemed to be a bad cough/cold. My cold went away after a week but my cough didn’t seem to be getting any better. I have been coughing for over two weeks- deep racking coughs not the ones from a sore throat. I took some tussin last week but it didn’t seem to be working. I wasn’t too worried because there’s a cough/cold going around here at the school and I figured that’s what I had.

Sometime last week, my ribcage on the left side started to hurt. At first, I thought it was because I slept on it funny or that I pulled a muscle. The pain started to get worse but I just ignored it. Then yesterday morning while in the midst of a coughing fit I felt something crack/pop in my ribs and I nearly passed out from the pain. I could barely move. I called my doctor and spoke to the doctor on call and he was like you might have pneumonia so you can either wait to see your doctor tomorrow or go to the emergency room. He didn’t seem to be of much help, and I was in so much pain that Ari and I decided to go to the ER.

So off we went- we spent three hours there yesterday- and the place was empty. Thank G-d we went immediately because when I left, it was starting to fill up and if we had come then we would’ve spent much longer than three hours in the ER.

The doc there heard crackling in my lungs when I breathed and he was worried that I had pneumonia so I had a chest X-ray done. It came back all clear so in the end he diagnosed me with bronchitis but he couldn’t figure out where the rib pain was coming from. He thought it might be that because I have been coughing so much, I tore the cartilage that connects the lung to the rib cage. The only thing I cared about was that he prescribe something for the pain. By that point I couldn’t get up from a bed, couch, chair without Ari’s help. That morning, Ari had to help me get dress because I couldn’t bend over at all. The pain was excruciating.

So after a long wait- I was finally discharged with prescriptions for antibiotics for the bronchitis which he thought was bacterial and percocet for the pain. I was excited to take percocet- I’ve never been on painkillers before. What a bust. I took one in the hospital and the nurse told me it would take 10-45 min for it to kick in. When I left close to an hour later, I hadn’t felt a thing. I took more later as prescribed and still nothing. Percocet also suppresses coughs so at least my coughs aren’t so bad anymore, and hopefully that will allow whatever is hurting to heal.

I’m still in pain- and Ari’s staying home with me today because I can’t drive due to the pain. I have a doctor’s appt this morning so I’ll check and see how RB has been handling all this. RB followed its normal schedule of kicks and gymnastics yesterday so I’m not too worried. But since I’ve been sick, I’ve barely been eating the past two weeks and I haven’t put on any weight. Plus I’m anemic now so I’m always kinda tired and out of it. I’m taking a day off from work because there is no way I can run after thirteen three year- olds in my condition. I also couldn’t sleep last night because every time I wanted to switch positions I woke up. I can’t roll over without Ari’s help so I kinda just lay there. Needless to say, I don’t feel like I’m on top of my game right now. Hopefully by tomorrow, I’ll be feeling better –enough so that I can resume my normal schedule.

Other than that- all is well. Winter is settling in here. It’s pretty cloudy all the time and the temps hover in the high 40s/low 50s. It rains sporadically during the day but nothing too bad. I’m always hot now so our house is about 63 degrees all the time. Ari is always complaining how cold he is- it seems we have switched roles. I can’t imagine being pregnant in the summer! It must be so uncomfortable and hot all the time.

So that's the drama over here in the Emerald City. Hopefully this week will be back to boring as usual.

Finally- normal weather

So it turns out that the weather was pretty bad this week- worse than I had expected. There was a snowstorm Monday night here during a football game. Traffic was terrible and there were accidents everywhere. Ari said that some of the people from work took over 5 hours to get home. Tuesday that city practically shut down. I was off from work because one of the roads to get to school was iced over. Normally ice isn't so bad but it's so hilly here that it's dangerous. I had work on Wednesday but public schools were still closed then and there was still ice everywhere. Ari went to work all week but he said it was dead. The cafeterias were closed and there were no secretaries or facilities staff. He came home fairly early on Tuesday and Wednesday. Most people just worked from home. Finally it warmed up to 68 degrees on Thursday and everything melted. The city is back to normal and the storm had moved east. I heard that the Midwest was hammered over the weekend. At least here it's nice and there hasn't been any rain yet.

Other than that, our week has been pretty uneventful. The kid in my class that instigates all the trouble was on vacation so I've had a pretty easy week at school. Two of the kids might also have chicken pox and another kid is out because her brother has them so I might have a small class this week which makes everything easier. Shabbat was nice. We ate out Friday night and I'm finally getting all the politics in the Jewish community here. My cold/cough is almost gone and Ari's thrilled cause now he won't wake up at night when I'm blowing my nose. I've realized that it's worth buying more expensive tissues so your nose doesn't get chapped when you blow. For those of you who are concerned, I'm feeling fine otherwise. Everything seems to be going well and my normal appetite has returned much to Ari's relief. He was afraid that I was getting too expensive due to the quantities of food I was eating.

That's all for now! I want to know how the weekend went and also- Julie and Leah- did you discover Mom's magic freezer???