Łukasz

you were born on january 27 - a month premature. i knew that a month early, especially these days, is not bad at all, but watching you suffer like that right from the get-go felt really shitty. they plopped you down on the scale, all naked and cold and screaming, then put you on some examining table, squirting antibiotic cream in between your puffy eyelids, repeatedly vaccuuming your nose, mouth, throat and lungs with this tube, to clear out as much fluid as possible, injecting you with all kinds of shit to help with this and that, hooking up the intravenous, cutting your heel and squeezing and squeezing and squeezing to get way too much of your very thick blood for tests. other babies get to rest a lot with their moms after they're born. not you, little guy. your mom was in the recovery room, drugged and vomiting and being pumped with other drugs that were supposed to help but only exacerbated it. finally they ran out of things to inject her with, and she stabilized.
what did it do to you, baby - being born to pain for hours, and then subsistence for weeks - almost no comfort of human contact, just machines: checking your heart-beat, your breathing, your blood oxygen saturation, keeping an elevated air pressure to your nose with extra blows of air when you're supposed to be breathing, machines dosing intravenous fluid with an added fat solution and electrolytes, and a tube taped to your little chin and going down into your tummy to make sure air bubbles come out easily. and a UV lamp on for 2 days straight to help get rid of your jaundice. people would come around every now and then, to stick an IV in a different hand, foot, thigh, both sides of your head, and all you got to show for it is a crappy mohawk and tracks and bruises everywhere.
the nurses said that you were doing pretty good for a premie, but there wasnt much to be rejoicing about. i felt fucked up, and all i did was look.
but sounds like you've been doing better and better - too bad we havent even been able to visit with you more often, but we've been sick, and we dont want to risk getting you sick. wonder if the nurses think we're shitty parents. fuck'em if they do - i think this is unfortunately the best course of action. maybe they know and understand. here at home we've all been going through a stomach flu, a cold, boogie's teething, and trying to let mommy heal from the c-section. your babcia has been helping with your sister, so that's been great. times like this you feel the value of being part of a community, a family, having someone to help you when you need it - its survival of the group, not survival of the fittest.

spring is here, and summer is surely just around the corner :)
we've been having some truly summery days recently, and i'm totally hyped about the prospect of going for little picnics with Phx and Boogie on the various beaches around town, and even in the park across the street :D
i love it when i get up in the morning and already the sunshine is trying to burst in through the blinds :)

congrats to romek + monika on the arrival of their first baby!!! :D
just yesterday i was putzing around the pad, and i thunk: "i wonder if monika gave birth yet. she'd be overdue by now."
a few short hours later on, as i'm doing something or another that requires my undivided attention and both hands, the phone rings. ugh! dammit. so by the time i get to it it's just stopped ringing. now who was it... romek! oh, i think i know what this call is about! :D
so i call him right back, he answers, "hello", "hello", he's like "how are you", i'm like "good, good, and how are you", to which he answers "i'm very good!" son-of-a-bitch :)
finally i'm like "well, out with it!" so he finally says "i have a son!" awrite! he should have followed with "so did you see the game last night?"
we went to the store and picked out a card. there was one that said in the front "Children are gifts from God" or something like that. i thought it would be funny if inside we wrote something like "...too bad you're a bunch of fucken heathens! well, congrats anyway :)"
phx didnt think it was that funny, but it kept me giggling for the next few minutes. i gotta start printing my own brand of cards :)

approaching the transcendental object at the end of time

things are speeding up and getting crazier and crazier. or are they more and more crazy..? bah - no time for semantics. or propper grammar. "the crib project" is still going strong. bought a used wooden crib. noticed it had some scratches on it. thought i could sand them down and touch it up. then thought that it would be obvious where it was touched up, even if i found a good match for the veneer or whatever it is. so i thunk i'd just sand the whole bloody thing and recoat it with some thing nicer, more transparent. sanded one surface of one endpiece down with an electric sander, and thought there must be a better way. home depot sells these paint-on strippers - jusrt remove them mess with a putty knife. big mistake. the crap softened the wood more than the veneer, and so it was impossible to get it all off properly, so most of the crap just dried on, making the wood even darker, but still sticky, and the putty knife scarred the wood like a bitch. we went on to try and wipe at least some of the goop off with a paint thinnner, and sand the rest down. this has worked ok. i must have put like 4 full days of work into this by now, with other people helping too. i could have bought more than one brand new crib by now if i'd spent the time working. thats a big price to pay to learn a thing or 2 about woodwork. the crib is finally sanded and i test painted the first coat of the veneer onto a small area of the crib - we'll see how it turns out. its a crazy heat wave over here. i had sweat dripping down my face when installing the car seat for the baby. lots of swearing, but its done. noe just gotta certify it or whatever it is they do. phx' feet keep swelling like crazy, but she keeps helping. i'm very lucky to have her for a wife :)
i better get going help her prep breakfast and then onto our new place - try to fix the walls and test wash the carpet - see if its worth keeping.

i just saw my baby kick! :D
not only finally felt it for sure, but even saw phx' tummy move! :D
that was cool :)
my lil' baby is gonna be a boxer, or a vault-polist 'er 'izer 'person :)
apparently i was an active lil' fetus too :)

now it feels all too mundane to write a thunk i had a bout "artificial" sentience. well, it wasnt even a whole thunk. i was just on one of my kicks (that i hope something will come of some day) about how i should really strive for self-realisation. figure out what i really want, but - then just do a little self-check just to see why i think i want each one of those things, just to weed out stuff that might prove to really have been just a hype, and not something i'd personally really want. then figure out ways to achieve these goals, and get on doin', stopping to re-evaluate once in a while, but not too often, so that something actually gets done. unlike my side job - which has been with me for an eternity now, and just when i thought i got the bitch working, turns out the bloody thing crapped out over the weekend. too bad i didnt have the clarity of mind to think to do the calculations before i overloaded the goddam power supply. i guess its a tribute to its resilience that it worked a few times for an hour or 2 at a time before. it just couldnt handle it long term. i hope i dont have to cough up for a new one - i dont really wanna put any more into this.

so anywho - goals and achieving them. some peeps have posited that the web might achieve sentience some day. but what does that mean - awareness? out of what? why? i can see something of an evolution though. wonder if i should post my idea or might it not matter because someone else will soon enough..? maybe this already exists - viruses seem to have been pretty "stupid" bots till now, or so i think. but would programmers make a virus that would "work" with information available off the net? in what way? i suppose data extraction programs already do that. i guess to be more like life, it needs to get out of control, have some kinda morphing built into it. but that would be so random. wouldnt it be more elegant to give it intelligence to try and improve itself in some kinda reasoned way rather than purely by chance? hmm, but would it actually be more efficient..? i sometimes think that evolution seems to be working "vectorally" somehow - i guess mutations or differences seem to be thrown up pretty randomly, but then once a mutation seems to work, more changes seem to then happen in that "direction". but maybe its not really like that either - maybe its only that after a mutation establishes itself, it then limits the possible mutations that may happen after it. like a pair of gills might be an awesome mutation in the water, but once ur living on land, its kinda useless, and it just wont survive. but the gills in water may get constantly refined . until theres no more food in the water, and then it would pay to be able to breathe at least a bit above water.
i once read somewhere that british telecom was developing programs that route telephone network traffic, and they would actually like "mate" 2 diff progs, and a 3rd one would be made, and then it would be allowed to work, but if it didnt do a better job than its parents, then it would be terminated by its parent. something like that. they were hoping to get the programs to evolve themselves. i wonder where they're at with that now...
but anyways - the web is full of info, u'd just have too have a pretty good program with a goal, and it would do its thing, but then if it could actually set its own goals, and what would we think of those goals, and would it piss us off if we couldnt do anything about them? :) i guess it would take a good programmer to start with, to write a program that would survive the longest, or forever... :) including something that would let the goals vary, so that if survival is a priority, the chances of survival are actually good :)
i bet there's programs like that already... :)

the company christmas party was too much of a blast. i think i have to figure out how many shots to allow myself per night. also, what fucked me over, or what contributed to fucking me over, was the fact they ran out of tequila and so i switched over to vodka. stick to one type of alcohol tommy! would 10 shots be a good limit? i'm lucky i've got good friends and a great fiancee. they took care of me when i've obviously had enough, got me a cab, put me in it, somehow found out where i live and told him, as well as got him not to fuck me over. you hear stories about asshole cabbies all the time, i even know this girl who was almost raped by one. maybe i just cashed in some good karma that night, who knows. the dude didnt even fuss when i had to get him to do an emergency pull over so i could toss me cookies. maybe 7 shots would be a better limit. phx took really good care of me, and deffinitely tried, even when my conscious self wasnt there anymore, just the primal sub-conscious. i've heard about people lapsing in and out of consciousness after severe physical trauma, reverting to their mother toungue, but even my mom, when in the emergency ward when she had that concussion, was able to sorta communicate in english. i thought i would always be able to, no matter what. and it didnt even take a concussion to prove that theory wrong. the lights were on, but there was nobody home, so i guess the home automation system had to take care of things. so 7 shots sounds like a good number. and NO pot when drinking heavy! that was just stupid. actually, that was probably what ultimately did me in! my drinking do's and don'ts learning curve is pretty horizontal... :(

feelin' a'ight :)

maybe cause i only worked like 3.5 hours at my side job tonight, with no precipitation, and hardly any cold. poor phx is not feeling very well these days, feeling so tired, nauseous, puking, not eating much, head aching... i wish i could do something to help her with it... but she endures it all, because it is our baby... i feel so grateful for her, and i know she will be a great mommy and wife :)
its still such a novel idea, but i guess nothing will really change, other than the formality. well, with the baby there will be changes. but somehow, since finding out she's pregnant and then asking her to marry me, seems to me like my love for her got a boost, got rejuvenated. i'm very glad this is all happening :) i guess i kinda wish we had a bit more time, but what the hey - its all that much more exciting :)

i love my babies! :)

fuck dinner, fuck everything, stop everything for just a moment...
thank you
just got back from a wonderful walk, on this beautiful march 25th.
2005
;)
which will hopefully be inspiring me for weeks and weeks and weeks
beside the beauty of the cherry blossom petal strewn alleys, on the very busy intersection of willingdon and hastings, a black dude is standing at the bus stop. i was just crossing the street with a bunch of ppl, and as we walk toward that black guy, as the first people start walking by him, he starts telling ppl "happy good friday! happy good friday!"
"we're all brothers!" he says to some asian and italian kids ...
as we walked by him, smiling, wishing him a happy good friday too, giggling, i hoped after, that other people felt like me, happy and thankful for such a simple, heartwarming thing to say... hope next time i react fast enough after something like that happens, so that after passing someone like that i can turn around and say "thank you for saying that, man!" cause if anything, that brought a whole bunch of smiles to the world, and a sense that things are awrite.
what a beatiful day...
:)