All
right, here's the best portion of the best obituary of the week.
It's for Olaf "Oley" Neumann Thune Begtrup.
"Oley
was a longtime member of Woodland Hills United Methodist Church
where he sang with the choir. He was a fan of wildlife, trains,
cars, building and designing rooms, houses and garages, music, hummingbirds,
swimming, his family, arm wrestling, Norway, telling stories, speed
punching his punching bag, watches, cruises, weird figurines and
stuffed armadillos, watching people's behavior, making people snicker,
correcting people's grammar, and having people punch him in the
stomach as hard as they could."
I
like how "his family" is kind of randomly in the middle,
after swimming but before arm wrestling. And was he a fan of building
and designing rooms and separately a fan of houses and garages?
Or of building houses and garages? If only Oley could tell us.
===
The
new Justin Timberlake CD is bad.
===
In
a few minutes I'll be on my way to UCLA to see if that's where I
want to have the baby in my belly. The other day at the doctor's
office while listening to the heartbeat I said, "Holy crap,
I have two hearts in my body right now." Gray was like, "What
if you were having quadruplets?" It's enough to make a person's
head explode.
UCLA
apparently is the only place in this whole fat wide 10-million-populated
Los Angeles area that has midwives and a more natural birthing environment.
All I want is a big bathtub to sit in while I'm contracting, and
nobody but UCLA has them, not even the super-rich Huntington Hospital
in Pasadena where I'll have the baby if I don't go to UCLA. What
I'm aiming to avoid down the road is going into labor, arriving
at the hospital, and immediately having them slap an IV into me.
Everybody agrees that as soon as they get one needle in you they'll
want to stick you with more, and pretty soon that will mean induction,
over-monitoring, a big episiotomy and perhaps a C-section. The truth
is, unless you know there's something to worry about beforehand
or unless something bad happens during birth, the body is well-equipped
to handle pooping out a baby. And I don't have any idea what I'm
talking about really because I haven't been through it, but the
natural way is something to aim for. Then again, a week ago I was
so supremely constipated that I thought I was going to die, and
birthing a baby is 100 times worse but I think kind of the same
mechanism, so maybe I should give up now.
In
other news of that ilk, we've been training Paul and Beans not to
jump up on the bed in the morning because Beans has a problem with
needing no personal space and bounding right onto my stomach while
I'm sleeping. This hasn't happened since getting oven-bunned, thankfully,
and the training was going well -- (looks like he's going to jump,
is prevented; jumps up, gets pulled down right away) -- until the
other day when the weather turned cooler and the both of them decided
it's cozier on the bed. So the training begins anew. Man it's hard
to kick a snuggling-in-the-comforter golden retriever out of bed,
though.
