I'm totally gobsmacked by how fast this happened, but Zoe's certificate of Australian Citizenship arrived today. I only sent off the application on Saturday, and it would have arrived in Washington DC at the Australian Embassy on Monday morning. For us to get it back on Wednesday means they processed it either the same or next day and got it back into the mail on Tuesday. Pretty amazing, given that the form itself sets the expectation of up to 12 weeks, and Embassy-specific web page sets the expectation of 3-4 weeks.

Next step, get an Australian passport.

Again, there's been this surreal time warp effect. 3 months has passed, and it feels like both a long time and a blink of an eye. It more feels like a long time though. I've mostly forgotten what it was like before Zoe came along.

Zoe is growing well. She weighs around 11 lbs 11 oz (5.3 kg), and I swear she's getting very long. When I'm holding her in my arms, there's legs everywhere. She started being able to roll from her stomach onto her back at 2 months, and her neck strength is pretty good now. I guess her next significant milestone will be being able to sit up properly. When she's on her tummy, she can prop herself up on her elbows and look around. She smiles all the time.

We had a few nights of 8 hours of sleep, then everything went completely out the window, and we had about a week of very disrupted sleep at night. I think she's starting to settle into a routine now though, with a few 5 hour stints the last few nights.

Her US passport arrived yesterday. We still need to get everything together to lodge her Australian citizenship application, which is the first step towards getting her an Australian passport.

Sarah's back studying now (two subjects this semester), which is proving to be a bit of a juggling act.

Father's Day in the US has always been a weird one for me. I've been pottering through the day oblivious, when a friend who is a father will tell me that they've been thinking of me especially today because of our loss. Then I'm reminded that Father's Day is in June and not September. I wonder what the deal is with that? It seems very few countries observe it on the first Sunday in September. Weird.

Zoe hits the 7 week mark tomorrow, and I return to work. Boy is that going to be a shock to the system for all of us.

The 7 weeks of paternity leave has been absolutely wonderful. Google's Paternity Leave benefit is now firmly my number one favourite employee benefit. Co-workers had complained that taking it all at birth was a bit of a waste, because all the baby does is sleep, but it's definitely been worthwhile taking it all now.

Because we've been predominantly bottle feeding with pumped breast milk, I've been able to be very involved with the feeding, and I've been able to do a lot of the running around helping Sarah, so I wouldn't have done it any other way. It's also been great to watch Zoe grow and develop. She's interactive enough at this age, and it's just great to cuddle with her, or share a nap with her.

On the sleeping front, things are a bit all over the place. She definitely gets fussy in the evenings, at around 5pm to 7pm. Often we have trouble getting her to go back to sleep after a feeding around this time. Sometimes the trouble can extend past the 10pm to midnight feeding. She sleeps magnificently during the day, and travels fairly well. She sleeps quite well in her car seat, and stays asleep in it when we're at a cafe or restaurant.

We had our first overnight trip while Sarah's Mum was visiting. We went down to San Simeon to take her to Hearst Castle. It was fun having Zoe in a hotel room with us. Whenever she fussed during the night, we'd just grab her and bring her into bed with us. She spent quite a lot of time in our bed asleep on our chests. It was very sweet. It was like a little baby vacation.

Zoe also had her first outing to the California Academy of Sciences, and we managed to spend about 5 hours there without any major meltdowns from anybody.

It was absolutely fantastic having Sarah's Mum here for 4 weeks too. She's great to have around. She was a big help in cleaning up the back yard significantly, and generally helping out around the house. It was great having her take care of the 7am feeding when Sarah and I were both zonked out from overnight interruptions. It was also nice not to have to think so much about how dinner was going to materialise.

My parents have decided they will come and visit in September, which is excellent, as they won't have to wait until February to meet Zoe. One of the other nice things about the Google Paternity Leave is that you keep accruing vacation time while you're on it, so I should have enough vacation time to take a couple of weeks off while they're here, as well as in February when we go back to Australia for Sarah's residential school at the University.

The next big event will be Zoe's vaccinations at 8 weeks. Hopefully that will be as uneventful as possible.

The fact that it's only two weeks feels totally surreal. I think it's the feeding approximately every 3 hours. That's approximately 100 interactions that we've had with her in only 2 weeks.

We had her two week weight check at the paediatrician's today. She's now weighing 6 lbs 12 oz (3061 grams), so she's made back her birth weight and then some.

We're still largely bottle feeding her with pumped breast milk. The paediatrician said that once she's 7 pounds she should have enough strength to breastfeed exclusively, so we'll get a lactation consultant involved if that isn't the case in another week or so.

Other than that, everything's going swimmingly. She eats, sleeps and poops. She sleeps amazingly well. I keep telling myself it won't last, but we're making the most of not needing to tip-toe around the house. In the last week, we had a new stove installed, which involved the contractor using a hammer drill to install the anti-tip brackets. He also used a drop-saw to modify one of the drawers. Didn't bother her. We had some shutters installed in the kitchen, which involved a lot of cordless drilling. Also didn't bother her. The gardeners for the complex were mowing the lawn and using a leaf blower right outside her window. Not a peep.

Today, after the paediatrician's appointment, we dropped in to Palo Alto Animal Services, the animal shelter where Sarah has volunteered for the last 4.5 years, to show them Zoe. They threw a bit of a surprise baby shower, and gave us a ton of baby clothes, which was very nice and totally unexpected. Zoe slept in her car seat on the table in the lunch room while a good dozen people or so made a lot of noise around her, and she was oblivious to it all.

Sarah's Mum arrives on Wednesday. Tomorrow will be a busy day of final cleaning up in preparation.

Zoe's a week old today. As such things tend to do, this feels like both an eternity and no time at all.

We've been back to the paediatrician twice since I last blogged. Zoe's weight is now on the increase again. Today she weighed in at 6 lbs 3 oz (2806 grams) (I think. My brain has gone a bit fuzzy)

We're largely sticking with bottle feeding pumped breast milk for now. Apparently 7 lbs is the magic size where they've got enough strength to feed exclusively at the breast.

Sleep-wise, I think we're all doing reasonably well. Zoe just eats, sleeps and poops. Sometimes we need to wake her up to have a feed. I think the longest we've let her got is 4.5 hours. She's taking a lot of milk at each feeding session - up to 90 mL, so I expect that she'll have blasted past her birth weight by the time she's two weeks old.

It'll be good when she's exclusively breastfeeding. The current regime is a little bit tiring. Zoe wakes up (or gets woken up). I change her diaper and give her a bottle. Sarah tries a little bit of breastfeeding. I put Zoe back in her crib. Sarah pumps some milk for the next feeding session, and I go and wash and sterilise bottles and pumping paraphernalia.

If Zoe's feeding every three hours, this only really gives us two hours to get anything else done.

Not that I'm complaining, mind you. At the paediatrician's this morning, there was another father with the same LPCH diaper bag that we'd received while we were in the hospital. Turned out he had a two-week old boy. I asked how the sleep levels were going, and he exclaimed about how they were only getting 2.5 hours at a time, and his son would raise the roof. I mentioned the 4.5 hour stint that we'd managed to have, and he was totally gobsmacked.

In other news, it seems like Sarah has a bit of UTI, which has totally wiped her out this afternoon. She got a 3 day course of antibiotics this afternoon, so hopefully that'll fix her up.

It took longer than expected, but we were finally discharged from the hospital early this afternoon.

There was some concern about jaundice in Zoe, so the hospital paediatrician ordered a bilirubin blood test, which we had to wait for the results from. It came back fine though.

The other concern was weight loss. She's still hovering around the 5 lbs 13 oz mark, which is at some magical 10% of birth weight lost, which seems to cause some concern for the doctors.

So for the next week or so, we're going to bottle feed her breast milk, as she seems very sleepy when she tries to nurse, and we want to make sure she's getting enough. It's nice to be able to more actively participate in the feeding routine.

Since we've been home, Zoe's not been sleeping terribly well on her own, so right now her and Sarah are having a nap together.

We've got our first appointment with Zoe's ongoing paediatrician tomorrow. She was the recommendation of a friend, and seems to be highly regarded by all of the hospital paediatricians we saw.

I'm feeling very disorganised in the nursery, because I didn't really participate in any of the set up of it. I knew where everything was in the hospital, so for a diaper change, everything was under control. I'm going to have to get a couple of totes tomorrow, so everything is on hand. I may also go berserk with a label maker.

Looking forward to a hot shower and some shut-eye after this next feeding.

The OB resident dropped by on her rounds this morning and asked if Sarah wanted to go home today or tomorrow. There was some brief indecision regarding stairs, but Sarah has decided to go home today. We only stayed 3 nights in hospital after Joshua's C-section as well.

So the staples have been removed, and we're getting discharged at about 11am.

Here's why:

Zoe Dianne Pollock was born at 12:30pm PDT, at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital, via Caesarean-section.

Her birth weight was 2920 grams (6 lbs, 7 oz) and she's 49.5 centimetres (19.5 inches) long.

As for why she was born 11 days early than her previously scheduled early arrival...

Monday morning started off like any other normal Monday morning. I got up at 6am to go to the gym with Dan. I got home at around 8am. I asked Sarah if she'd felt any baby movement, and she said she hadn't. Even after some jiggling and a cold glass of orange juice, there was nothing.

Not wanting a repeat performance of what happened last time, we wasted no time in heading to Labour and Delivery to get things checked out. When we were nearly at the hospital, Sarah felt some small movement, so that was a relief.

When we got to the hospital, they performed a non-stress test as they have previously. They spent a good couple of hours with Sarah hooked up to the monitor, and then the on-call obstetrician asked us how we'd feel about just having the baby today.

I asked if there was anything particularly concerning about the NST, and the OB said that she (the baby) was doing marvelously now, but was "less than marvelous" when we first came in. I haven't had a chance since to ask her if there was anything untoward observed during the delivery.

Anyway, she (the on call OB) said that rather than have Sarah get stressed out for the following 11 days, she'd talked with our regular OB, and they felt that since she was at 37 weeks (and considered "full term") that it was okay to deliver at that point. At the end of the conversation, it was upgraded to a recommendation, rather than an option.

So so much for an attempt at VBAC. We got to the hospital at around 9am, and I think they/we made the decision to deliver at about 10:30am. I had enough time to race home and grab the camera and race back again, and the next thing I knew we were all in the operating room, and Zoe was being delivered.

It was amazing getting to see the "extraction". They dropped down the sheet that was blocking our view of the action right at the end, and I got to see (and photograph) Zoe's head and whole body being pulled out. She gave out a little cry, and Sarah and I totally lost it with relief.

Things were a bit of a blur after that. I got to come over and meet Zoe while they were weighing her and measuring her, and then they bundled her up and let me take her back to Sarah's head-end on the operating table, so Sarah could get a look at her.

Sarah handled this C-section better than last time. She didn't get any nausea, but she still got the itching and involuntary shivering, courtesy of the morphine.

While they were still putting Sarah's insides back in, Zoe and I went to the nursery, where they put her under a heater for a little while to warm her up a bit. Then it was back to the recovery room to have a proper meeting with Sarah.

Once Sarah was ready to move to the maternity ward, Zoe and I again returned to the nursery, where she got her first bath, had her umbilical cord trimmed some more, and her anti-theft device fitted to her umbilical cord clamp. Then it was off to the maternity ward. I think we were all in the maternity ward by 3pm.

After a little while, we managed to get bumped to a private room, which was a lot better than the shared room (the other bed was vacant, but just having more space made a big difference), and that's where we've been ever since.

I've stayed each night on the roll away bed, helping out with diaper (sorry Aussies, I've been here too long, and dealt with too many babies, I never think of them as "nappies" any more) changes, and burping and other miscellaneous tasks.

Monday night was okay. Tuesday was a bit rough. Sarah didn't get any sleep on Monday night, and the anaesthesia totally wore off and she was in a fair bit of pain. She slept better on Tuesday night, and today, the breastfeeding has been going well, and the post-operative pain is well and truly under control.

She's lost a bit of weight since delivery (as is to be expected). She was down to 5 lbs 14 oz (2664 grams) at last night's weigh-in, and at tonight's weigh-in she came in at 5 lbs 13 oz (2636 grams). So the weight loss is starting to plateau. We're already supplementing the breastfeeding with syringes of colostrum/milk that Sarah's pumped previously, so I hope the weight loss will have turned around by tomorrow night's weigh-in. The breastfeeding in general is going pretty well as of today. Mum and bub have both mastered the latch. I think it's just a matter of Sarah's milk coming in now.

I've brought forward my 7 weeks paternity leave (an excellent benefit Google offers) to start as of Zoe's delivery. Sarah's Mum arrives on the 19th for 4 weeks, which will be great. We expect to be discharged from hospital on Friday.

Luckily we were pretty much all ready for this happening a little bit earlier. We had our last baby classes on the weekend. The nursery is ready enough to bring a baby home to, so aside from Sarah's Mum being disappointed that Zoe's going to be a bit older when she first gets to see her, we're all good.

The WiFi in the hospital is great. We've already Skyped with both grandmothers and they've had a chance to see Zoe. We've had a steady trickle of visitors, and the whole baby routine is making the time go pretty quickly.

Getting close now.

Sarah had another ultrasound yesterday, just to check things. Unfortunately I couldn't be there due to a self-inflicted scheduling screw up. Apparently you could see hair on the ultrasound, so I'm a bit bummed to have missed it.

The baby has "dropped", so that's good. Her head's still down, and she's swallowing, so that's all good too. Weight-wise she's now in the 38th percentile.

We're booked in for a C-section on the 14th, unless she comes of her own free will between now and then (which is what we'd prefer), in which case our OB will allow an attempt at a VBAC. Our OB is reluctant to allow the pregnancy to go past 39 weeks, given prior history and Sarah's heart, and they don't induce for VBACs, so it's going to require some planetary alignment to avoid a C-section.

The whole heart thing still being an issue was only a fairly recent discovery for us. Sarah's cardiac surgeon had told us we could go forth and have as many kids as we wanted, but it turns out the fine print in that statement is that while the previous aneurysm has been repaired, she has an undiagnosed connective tissue disorder, so there's no telling what might happen with the rest of her aorta in the future. So her OB is just doing what a good high-risk OB should do, and being extra paranoid, on two fronts.

So we've got a couple of weeks to try and convince our daughter to come more than a week and 2 days early. I don't think we have statistics on our side, unfortunately (although I had a surprisingly hard time finding concrete statistics on delivery dates relative to due dates for first-time deliveries versus subsequent deliveries).

No sooner do I discover it, and TransLink up and renames itself to Clipper.

I wonder how much that exercise is going to cost? I'm also curious as to what they're going to do in terms of a new domain name.

Ah, marketing:

Why is the name being changed?

Now that the system is fully operational on five transit agencies - Muni, BART, AC Transit, Caltrain and Golden Gate Transit and Ferry - it is available to the majority of Bay Area transit riders. Giving the system a new name and logo helps make it more appealing to potential customers and also takes away any confusion with other local programs such as FasTrak, Fast Pass, as well as several other transportation programs around the world that are also named TransLink.

With Bay Area public transportation being woefully inadequate, I have to wonder if much of any adoption problems (which is what I presume they're trying to solve with this rebranding) are more a function of overall patronage?

We went to "Slings and Things: The Art of Babywearing" at Blossom Birth this morning.

It was really good. We were the only expectant parents there, everyone else brought their babies with them. Seeing the little 3.5 week-old newborn made me wish we had our baby already!

The instructor talked and demoed us through pouches, ring slings and wraps. I think we're pretty sold on the Moby Wrap. She'd borrow various babies to show how they could be carried with each type of product. It was amazing seeing how content the babies became when they were positioned appropriately.

Blossom Birth seemed pretty good. It was like Day One, without all of the high-priced retail stuff.

Monday saw us at the 34 week mark. Yesterday was the point in Sarah's first pregnancy that we lost Joshua. So we're in scary uncharted territory now.

Sarah's OB has said that he doesn't want her to go past 39 weeks, given prior history, and he won't induce because of her heart (and they don't induce for a VBAC anyway), so if we want a VBAC, then the baby has to come of her own accord between now and the 17th.

That means that in a month from tomorrow, we should be parents!

So far our future daughter is keeping her presence felt, which is very reassuring. We've only had two unplanned trips to Labor & Delivery so far. One for decreased fetal movements at around 30 weeks (the baby had flipped head down it turned out) and the other for an unexplained blood pressure spike on Sunday (it sorted itself out).

Sarah's doing a non-stress test twice a week (up from weekly) starting this week.

The nursery is pretty much all ready to go. Just add baby.

A while ago now, Sarah commented that one night when she's woken up in the middle of the night, that she'd observed me stop breathing for a while in my sleep. She wanted me to go see the sleep doctors that she'd seen (she was diagnosed with obstructive sleep apnea a couple of years ago).

So I eventually packed myself off to the Stanford Sleep Disorders Clinic, which is at Stanford's shiny new outpatient centre in Redwood City.

They took a look at me, and declared I had a crowded mouth, and a narrow airway, and asked me to do a sleep study.

I did the sleep study in the middle of January. That was "interesting". I had a ton of wires glued to me, and needless to say, I didn't sleep particularly well, but apparently I slept enough for them to be able to diagnose me.

A couple of weeks later, I got a letter with the results. I had a Respiratory Disturbance Index of 16.6. The letter from the clinic defined RDI as including "events of 10 seconds or more with cessation of airflow or discernable reduction in airflow associated with arousal or oxygen desaturation of 3% or more".

I had one obstructive sleep apnea event, and 119 obstructive hypopnea events during the sleep study. At one point my O₂ saturation dropped to 89%, but it was very briefly. The overall average was 96%.

A month ago I did another sleep study, this time while I was hooked up to a CPAP machine, and they fiddled with the pressure. I was fairly exhausted that night, and slept like a log.

Based on the results of the second sleep study, I've been prescribed an auto PAP machine with a pressure ranging between 13 to 15 cm of water pressure (whatever that means).

I got the machine, a ResMed S8 AutoSet II a week ago last Friday. It's slightly more advanced than the CPAP machine that Sarah uses, in that it'll adjust its pressure within the range it is set to, as it deems necessary throughout the night. It also backs off the pressure when you exhale, like Sarah's does.

I'm not particularly thrilled to be sleeping with this thing on my face. The first night I used it, I slept fine. Something like from 10:30pm until 6am. Subsequently, I keep waking up at precisely 3:30am for some reason, and it's hard to get back to sleep with it on, so I take it off. A few nights, some sort of mask leakage alarm has gone off at some random point in the night. I haven't been in any state to try and diagnose what's going on when that happens, so I just take off the mask and turn the whole thing off.

I was curious as to whether I'd notice some sort of life-changing difference between using it and not using it, like Sarah does, but so far, I can't say I've noticed any discernable difference. I also haven't gone a night without using it yet.

Getting a properly fitting mask was a bit of a challenge. I spent ages at the durable medical equipment supplier trying on different sorts of masks. The one I've currently got still leaves a bit of a red mark across the bridge of my nose. I can take it back in the first 30 days, and get refitted, so I might still be doing that.

(It's actually been done since last Friday, I just haven't had time to sort out photos and write about it)

It's so nice to have our home back to normal. The kitchen is all done, with the exception of being down one handle, and two design bugs that need to be sorted out.

Bug number one is that the trim on the warming drawer underneath the oven sticks out a little bit more than the rest of the whole range, meaning if it's pushed all the way in, the cabinet door to the left rubs against it when opened. Solution: accelerate replacement of the range.

Bug number two is the drawer to the right of the range can't be opened when the oven door is closed (it runs into the handle). What I think happened is the kitchen designer didn't take into account the thickness of the new back splash behind the range causing it to come out further from the wall. This is disappointing, and replacing the range won't help. They all seem to have oven door handles that protrude that far out. The solution is to modify the width of the drawer on the left-hand side.

Other than those two issues, the kitchen is fantastic. We've very happy with it. The amount of counter space we've got is wonderful.

Here's some before and after photos, the whole lot are here

We just need to sort out some window treatments of some sort now.

Well, it's been a month since the initial demolition started

It's nearly finished.

We had a slight bit of scope creep in that we decided to redo the floor now as well. This was brought on by the fact that the new cabinets didn't quite meet up with the footprint of the old ones, on one side, leaving maybe a 5 centimetre gap between the new cabinets and the floor.

I wasn't a fan of having to haul the fridge and stove back into the living room again at some point in the future (the fridge is too big for the doorway and needs to have its doors removed) so it seemed like the best thing was to do it while everything else was being done.

Fortunately, it hasn't blown out the overall time of the work, as we're still waiting for the counter tops to be cut or manufactured or something. The ETA for them to be installed is Friday or Monday.

So in the meantime we got just the kitchen floor tiled.

The plan is to replace all of the floating wooden floor with tiles, but just not right now. To do the rest would involve faffing around with the downstairs bathroom, and pulling out the washer and dryer, as well as the hot water heater. Doing that now, on top of having all of the kitchen stuff in the living room just gives me the heebie jeebies, so the compromise is to keep the existing flooring for the rest of downstairs, and just buy enough tiles to cover it later. Maybe at Christmas time, if we go back to Australia, we'll get it done then while we're not around to be disrupted.

When they ripped up the floor in the kitchen, some huge cracks in the slab were immediately apparent, so they had to put down some DITRA as a foundation to prevent the tiles cracking as a result of the slab expanding and contracting.

The tiling should be finished by tomorrow I hope, and then we have to let the grout cure for 72 hours before we seal it.

The one small delay we've had was due to a miscommunication with the kitchen company: we'd never ordered any handles for the cabinets and drawers, so they only got ordered after the cabinet installation was completed. Had we had them on hand, we could have started occupying the cabinets and drawers already, which would have reduced the chaos in the living room a bit. Oh well.

Blow-by-blow photos of the work so far (I'm lacking photos of the cabinets with the doors on) are here.

We received our US census form the other day. Sarah's already filled it out, but I wanted to look at it before we mailed it back, just out of curiosity.

I'm astounded at how incredibly basic it is. Literally all it asks is name, age, date of birth and race. It's somewhat laughable how you're either "white", or one of a bazillion other racial ethnicities. They don't seem to be interested that I'm Australian. Or if I were a white Samoan, for example.

I can only remember having filled out one Australian census since I moved out of home, which was the 2001 census. I missed the 2006 census since I was living in the US. The US census seems to be a 10 year affair, compared to Australia's 5 years.

"Census night" was always a big deal in Australia. You were supposed to fill out the form on that particular date, for whoever was in that particular dwelling. So you really didn't want to be out visiting friends that night.

The US census form claims to care about the state of affairs on April 1, but it also says to mail it back immediately. It seems to only care about "full-time residents", so the whole visitor problem doesn't seem to exist over here.

Wikipedia tells me that the 2006 Australia Census had 60 questions, all compulsory, except for the questions about religion. I'm still gobsmacked by how small an amount of data the US tries to collect. I just quickly reviewed the 2001 Australia Census form, and I'm rather amazed at how many questions it asked.

I remember there being a meme at the time of the 2001 census to put down "Jedi" as your religion, with the word on the street being that if enough people said that was their religion, it would become officially recognised as one.

Sarah hit the 30 week mark yesterday, and we had the 30 week anatomical ultrasound.

Fortunately, it was far less eventful than the 20 week one.

She's growing really well. She's on average in the 51st percentile, so we couldn't ask for better than that. She's currently head up, but there's still time for her to flip over.

We've got another ultrasound in 6 weeks.

Looking back at my blog, it's amazing how much has happened in 10 weeks.

Sarah's Mum booked her flights to come out for the birth. I think she gets here the week before the due date.

Quite by accident, we managed to find a second hand nursing chair at the Home Consignment Center (which we'd only learned of the day before, and is an awesome place for a browse), so I think that rounds out the large items we need to get.

Sarah's doing her phlebotomy externship at San Francisco General Hospital on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and needs to leave home fairly early to get there by 9am. As a result, I've been walking to work those mornings.

I remembered to record a track this morning:

GPS tracking powered by InstaMapper.com

It's certainly an improvement on the old commute. It's a shame there's a slight back-track involved.

I'll have to try rollerblading in another time.

The kitchen renovations are slooowly progressing. Running away to New York for a week certainly helped.

The cabinets arrived on Monday, and our contractor started installation on Wednesday. Templating for the counter tops is supposed to happen on Monday, and then it apparently takes a couple of weeks for the stone to get cut to size. So much for this whole thing only taking a couple of weeks :-(

I expect the overhead cabinets can be installed once the templating is done (that's something I need to check with the contractor today).

It's very exciting to see the kitchen start to take shape. I'm dying to be able to actually use it.

Photos of the progress so far are here

Sarah got a call from the contractor on the weekend, saying he wanted to make a start on the kitchen demolition on Wednesday. So we've moved everything from the kitchen into the living room (fridge and stove included), and they started work today.

Boy, did they start!

It's all gone already. All of the cabinets, and the existing lighting, and the fan.

Here's how it looked last night:

Unfortunately there's no working lights any more, so I couldn't take photos of how things look tonight. I'll have to try and get some in the morning before the contractor gets here.

It's sounding like it's going to take longer than one and a half weeks, so we're going to be eating out for a while (or cooking with the microwave in the living room). Conveniently (depending on how you want to look at it given the temperature there) I have a work trip to New York next week, and Sarah's going to come along for a few days as well, so that'll help kill some time.

I think our next immediate need is to decide on what colour to paint the walls. Some light shade of green is a current contender.

I was rather shocked and dismayed to discover via Facebook this morning that there'd been a fatal stabbing at my former school, Saint Patrick's College at Shorncliffe.

The details are a bit sketchy still, so I can't say who the instigator of the attack was, but a Year 8 student is dead, and a Year 9 student was injured and is charged with murder.

There was a problem with bullying when I was a student there, and also when my little brother was there, so it wouldn't surprise me if there was still a problem today.

Very sad. This kind of thing doesn't usually happen in Australia.

Sarah got a piece of mail today from USQ, with a very ominous "Do Not Bend" on it.

It turns out because she averaged a 6.5 GPA in semester 2, she'd qualified for a special Dean's Award for Outstanding Academic Achievement, and will get a mention on the University's website and in a bunch of newspapers.

I'm really proud of her.

Unfortunately, she had to withdraw from semester 3 (the Summer semester) study because all of the baby's brain stuff came up right towards the end of semester, and that on top of moving and trying to renovate was just too much for her.

She's intending to take Semester 1 off, because the baby's due right around exam time, and then resuming study in Semester 2.

In buying a place and moving, we've left the home we've been in for just over 4 years. Central Park Apartments was a wonderful community for us, and we made many wonderful friends there. At the peak of awesome, we knew really well the occupants of 4 out of the 7 other apartments in our building, as well as numerous others throughout the complex.

The company running the place ran it really well. Everything was well maintained. I wouldn't recommend one of the single-level apartments, as the inter-floor sound insulation was pretty terrible, but the townhomes were great (albeit the kitchens were a bit small). We were in a Greenwich floorplan.

The other big plus for me was that it had data cabling.

We'll miss all of our friends there, but thankfully they're not very far away.

We finished off moving everything from the old place last weekend. Our new home number can be determined by adding 59115 to the old one (or calling the old one in the next 60 days).

The great unpacking is continuing. We're reluctant to unpack much in the kitchen because it's all going to have to come back out again in a couple of weeks.

The cats have settled in well. Lily is still spending most of her time under the bed, but she comes out to explore from time to time.

We had a bunch of fun with various bits of cable. I had some CAT-6 cabling installed throughout, and also some new RG-6 cabling was installed at the same time. The contractor ran a new line into our place and also a line to the patch panel he installed for the phone.

When Comcast came out to activate our cable TV service, the poor guy had all sorts of problems, until I realised there was an air gap between the line coming into the condo and the cables outside. Then the next problem was my contractor had run the new line out to the wrong location. The bunch of cables where he ran the line to was some old out of commission stuff. The Comcast guy was really great. We located where the current cable came in (via the attic) and he spliced that into the new internal cabling, and the net outcome was close to what was supposed to have happened in the first place. The funniest thing was the Comcast cable guy left in such a rush because he ran over time on the job, that he left the cable cabinet wide open, including the box with all of the building's cable connections. If I new how to crimp RG-6, and was feeling lucky, I could remove the filter that's restricting the channels we receive.

The next fun was getting the phone line sorted out. Again, my contractor had run a new CAT-6 line to the patch panel for the purposes of giving me a few jacks in the one place, so I could plug in my DSL modem, and a line into my Asterisk box. The only problem was he wasn't sure which pair was the phone line (and the phone wasn't active at the time) so there was an air gap between the end of the CAT-6 and the phone line. AT&T came out and sorted that out. I suspect the AT&T guy also left in a hurry, because he left a tone generator jumpered into the phone line.

Once the phone was working we had to wait a couple of days for the DSL service to get moved to the new number. It turns out that I got new static IP addresses with the move, so it wasn't just a case of plugging everything back in and it working, unfortunately.

But that's all behind us now. We're fully here, online again, and settling in. I think this weekend we'll bang in some picture hooks and hang up our paintings, and try to unpack a few more boxes.

Moving today went as about as well as you could possibly ask for. The movers arrived at a few minutes to 9, had most of the place packed up within 30 minutes, and I think we headed to the new place in a little over an hour.

Mad props to Handle With Care Moving. The guys were really great.

The rain also held off for the duration, thankfully.

There's just dregs left at the old place, oh and the entire kitchen. I think we're both subconsciously dreading (and therefore avoiding) moving the kitchen stuff, because we really don't want to unpack at the new place, because the kitchen is going to get totally destroyed in hopefully a couple of weeks time.

I'm finding wall space to be a bit of a premium at the new place. We're trying to keep the second bedroom as usable as a bedroom as possible, while primarily using it as a study, so that when we have house guests, we can throw some sort of bed down in that room and not have it all become ridiculously cluttered. When you've got desks all against one wall, a built-in wardrobe against another wall, and a full length sliding door on the other wall, that doesn't leave too many options for a bookshelf and retaining space for a bed. I think we might have to avail ourselves of some more elfa shelving and ditch the Ikea bookshelf we currently have.

On the other hand, our bedroom is looking pretty good. For the first time in ages, it's just going to be a bedroom. No desks, no filing, no storage. The wardrobe has less space than our old place, so we're having to be pretty ruthless with clothing. Oh, and the bathroom storage: way less. Not sure how we're going to sort that one out at the moment.

The phone and cable TV should get hooked up tomorrow, and then I'll get the DSL moved over, so hopefully by Wednesday, we'll have Internet connectivity.

We brought the cats over this afternoon. They're still confined to our bedroom at the moment until they calm down a bit.

We have until next Sunday to officially be out of the old place.

Yesterday we went back to Stanford for another ultrasound and a fetal MRI.

We had pretty much the same gang doing the ultrasound as two weeks ago, so that was a nice bit of continuity. A paediatric radiologist came in at the end to take a look. She was the most confident of anyone that everything was going to be okay. She thought she could see something resembling the cavum septum pellucidum on the ultrasound. I think the ultrasound report said it was an "unusual shape" or something like that.

After that, we got packed off for the fetal MRI. There was a bit of a wait, as there's only one MRI machine for the children's hospital, and the studies tend to take 30 to 45 minutes, but we eventually got in.

I got to sit in the room with Sarah while they did the MRI. I was hoping to be able to sit in the control room instead, so I could look over their shoulder and see how it was all done. We both got earplugs because the machine is pretty noisy. It's not the hammering sound that they seem to go for on TV, it's more various different pitches of a horn.

The radiologist told us she'd probably read the MRI later that night, as there'd be a bit of a backlog with the long weekend, and that we'd get a call today.

Sarah got impatient this afternoon and called her obstetrician, and he called her back shortly afterwards saying he'd spoken to the radiologist and everything was fine. Exact specifics are not known at this time, but we'll be quizzing the obstetrician at our next appointment in a couple of weeks.

Needless to say, we're both extremely relieved that everything is okay, and can scrub one thing off the list of things to have to worry about at the moment. Now we can just concentrate on trying to move house this weekend.

We've got a walk-in wardrobe in the master bedroom of our new place, and the existing fittings were pretty crappy, so as part of the repaint, I ripped out the old stuff, and we bought some new elfa stuff from The Container Store.

We did the initial design a couple of weekends ago, and went back today to actually buy the stuff.

The whole process is pretty slick. You rock up with your measurements of the space, and a designer fiddles around with some special CAD software and does up a design for you, and that spits out a pick list of all of the bits you need, as well as what needs to be cut to custom lengths. A couple of hours later, you come back, and they wheel out a cart load of bits and pieces, you put it in your car and head home to put it all together.

I was initially a bit worried about the assembly, but it's even easier than IKEA. You get tailored instructions for your design, and the only point at which it anchors to the wall is at the top, and then everything hangs from there, so it's pretty hard to screw it up, and it's all adjustable. Added bonus: in an earthquake, it moves with the tremors instead of toppling over or ripping itself out of the wall.

I'm very impressed by the product, and absolutely love the result. It only took us a couple of hours tonight to slap everything together.

We listen pretty much exclusively to NPR in the car these days, and often when we're pottering around on the weekend, we catch A Prairie Home Companion. It's a light-hearted radio show, which makes us laugh.

When we learned that it was coming to town, we lashed out on some tickets. We went to the recording of today's episode at the War Memorial Opera House.

We had seats towards the back of the balcony on the fourth floor. The opera house is a beautiful building. The seating is incredibly steep. The stage was miles away, I wish I'd brought binoculars. The opera house normally holds 3200, but because there was no orchestra they could put in some extra seats. It was a full house.

It was cool to get to see how the show is put together, and we had an entertaining time.

We're not huge users of Caltrain, because frankly, it sucks. It's way slower than driving to San Francisco, and by the time you've paid for two return tickets, you might as well have driven and paid for parking.

That said, we do use it from time to time. One of the things I noticed when we first moved over here was this intriguing box on a pole, to the side of the normal ticket vending machine. It looked all battered and faded, kind of like a deprecated form of ticketing that had been phased out years ago. Except it looked too high-tech to be phased out.

Fast forward to four years later, and we're using Caltrain to get back from SFO after returning from Atlanta for Christmas, and there's this "Don't forget to tag off" TransLink poster inside the carriage. I'm now officially intrigued.

I did some browsing of their website on the journey home. How could this be? Hong Kong's MTR has the Octopus Card. London's Tube has the Oyster Card, and the Bay Area has TransLink? Why the hell isn't this thing being pimped out more? It's awesome! I mentioned it to a co-worker the other day, who's been in the Bay Area for 7 years, and he'd never heard of it.

So I signed up for it for myself and Sarah, and two cards promptly arrived. If you sign up with an autoload of $20 or more, there's no cost for cards at all.

So from now on, whenever we need to ride Caltrain (or BART or Muni, which are the public transport networks we're ever likely to use) we can just wave these cards at something and never have to worry about a ticket ever again. It's awesome. Apparently VTA is coming on board with it later this year, so that'll round things out nicely.

It sounds like it's been an epic implementation, starting back in 1999, and still rolling out ten years later. Better late than never.

The added bonus will be for our visitors. When they come, we can just give them these cards, and they won't have to deal with BART's utterly confusing (for casual riders) fare system.

One of my favourite things about Hong Kong was the MTR and the Octopus Card. Now we just need awesome mass transit for the Bay Area. Somehow, I think that's going to take even longer than TransLink.

I was driving home from a late night at work recently, and I was almost home, when the car behind me lit up like a Christmas tree.

My immediate reaction was, "Oh crap, I'm tired and I wasn't paying attention to my speed". So I pulled over.

To my relief, it wasn't my speed that was the problem, my left-hand tail light was out. The officer was very nice about the whole thing, but he gave me a fix-it ticket.

He told me I had until I think some time in February to fix the problem, then I had to get a police officer to sign off that it had been fixed. I thought that was the end of it, and continued on my way home.

The other day, I got this official looking letter in the mail the Superior Court of California, County of Santa Clara. My initial thought was, "ha, the fools have issued me a jury summons like they did for Sarah. Can't they tell I'm an alien? Nanoo Nanoo."

So I open the letter and start scanning it. It's a courtesy notice. The first actual sentences I run into start with "Failure to respond to this notice by the due date may result in your bail being increased...". Huh? Bail? What?

It turns out that there's a bit more to the fix-it ticket story. Not only do I have to get a police officer to sign off that I've had the tail light fixed, to avoid going to court, I have to pay a $25 "dismissal fee" (also known as California is broke and needs every dollar it can get).

Today was the first day that either of us have had any time to scratch ourselves, so we trekked off to Toyota. The guy yanked off the cover inside the boot, and was poking around to show us where to change the bulb, when lo and behold, it started working again. So it was just a loose connector. Dammit.

So now I have to track down a police officer. Preferably under the cover of darkness, as we've tinted the front windows of the Prius, which is apparently cause for another fix-it ticket. Although I'm struggling to find the wording that specifically says that.

renovate

v 1: restore to a previous or better condition
  2: make brighter and prettier

remodel

v 1: do over, as of (part of) a house
  2: cast or model anew

I much prefer the term renovate to remodel. Remodelling to me feels more like tearing down internal walls and changing the actual layout of the place. But we're in America, so remodelling it is.

We've had a bit of (mostly self-inflicted) scope creep. It started with just wanting to get some Ethernet cabling installed, then we decided to get recessed canned lighting (the whole lamp thing over here drives us nuts), and then we discovered that acoustic ("popcorn") ceilings are a haven for dust mites (we're both allergic) so it made sense to get the ceilings redone while they were putting the lights in. We're also getting the light switches replaced, and new childproof power outlets. We also got the electrical panel upgraded.

Removing popcorn ceilings is somewhat hilarious. They put down plastic everywhere, then have at it with a garden hose, and then it just scrapes off. The ceilings they've completely finished already look a million bucks, so we're very happy with the decision to do that. The Ethernet cabling installation caused a lot of wall carnage, so we're going to get the walls repainted as well.

Then we can get the carpets cleaned and stain proofed, and then we can start thinking about trying to move some non-essential stuff in. Hopefully it'll all be done by next weekend.

The kitchen cabinets have a six week lead time, so the kitchen remodelling will have to be done while we're living there.

Unfortunately some unexpectedly time demanding stuff has come up at work, right in the middle of this, so Sarah's had to do the bulk of the running around to sort out contractors for all of the work, and I've been stuck at work until all hours, 7 days a week. To cap it off, I've managed to come down with a cold, and feel quite crappy. NyQuil consumption is ensuing.

Sarah hit the 20 week mark on Monday, and so we had the big anatomical ultrasound. We also found out that it looks like we're having a girl. We're now trying to come up with a name.

There was also a worrying piece of news: they couldn't see the cavum septum pellucidum, while they were checking out her brain.

Apparently the cavum septum pellucidum is a particular marker they look for when they're checking everything out.

Now what the absence of the cavum septum pellucidum actually means isn't terribly clear. Apparently normally this is found along with other abnormalities, but the rest of her brain structures look fine. The nuchal translucency we had earlier in the pregnancy came back fine also.

So we got bustled off to have a chat with the genetic counsellor (during which the 4.1 earthquake happened). We got booked in for an amniocentesis for later that afternoon, as well as a fetal MRI at 22 weeks, and trundled off home.

To cap things off, when we were trying to park back at the hospital for the 2pm appointment, I managed to scrape the car up against one of the poles in the car park. (The lower level parking is notoriously tight). Note to self: always use the free valet parking service from now on.

Sarah had some second thoughts about the amniocentesis, as it does carry with it some risk of miscarriage, and after chatting with with a couple of the obstetricians, we elected not to do it. The fetal MRI should definitively determine if the cavum septum pellucidum is absent, and then we can talk to a paediatric neurologist about what the ramifications of that might be.

One of the reasons they wanted to do an amniocentesis now, rather than after the fetal MRI, is the amniocentesis itself takes a couple of weeks for the results to come back, and that would bring us up to the 24 week mark. Apparently if we wanted to terminate the pregnancy, once it was at 24 weeks, we'd have to go to LA to do it.

Whilst I consider myself an atheist these days, I was raised a Catholic, and although I like to think of myself as pro-choice, I still have a lot of problems with abortion, so I don't think I'd be comfortable terminating unless it could be shown with reasonable certainty that our baby was going to be in a really bad way. Based on how the rest of the brain looked, and the nuchal translucency results, and the fact that the amniocentesis would only identify chromosomal and not genetic neurological disorders, I don't think we'll be aborting.

From my limited research, it sounds like the cavum septum pellucidum disappears at about 3 months after birth anyway, so looking at it one way, you could say our baby's brain is developing faster. Other research has indicated a correlation with optic nerve development issues, so I don't know if that means she might be blind. We really need to chat with a paediatric neurologist. But hopefully the fetal MRI will find it, and this will turn out to be nothing.

An anxious two weeks will now follow.

There was a minor hiccup yesterday. Our mortgage broker called me up towards the end of the day in a flap because something had gone wrong on the seller's side of things, and their bank hadn't accepted the transaction or something. I still don't know the full story. Something about them missing a mortgage payment possibly.

Anyway, she was able to arrange for funding and closing today, instead of funding yesterday and closing today, so the outcome was still the same.

Now the real fun starts.

The first thing I did tonight was program the garage door opener into the Prius' HomeLink thingy built into the rear vision mirror. It's always nice to be able to use a feature, even if it's taken 4 years.

Yesterday morning we went to the title company to do all of the paperwork for the condo purchase. I'm still not entirely clear on the whole process, but basically we signed a ton of disclosures and the loan documents, and the whole lot got notarised.

I found the thumbprint requirement rather amusing.

So the loan should fund today, and the title change will register with the county on Wednesday, and by tomorrow afternoon, we should have the keys.

We then had to do a walk through to sign off that the property hadn't turned into a pumpkin since we put the offer in. It was only the second time I've been able to see the place, so it was good to take another look. Sarah's been doing lots of running around to organise quotes for the kitchen renovation and measure the windows for curtains, so she's seen it many more times.

There's going to be a few little odd jobs that need doing around the place. There's a few lights that aren't working (presumably just bulb replacements. There's an outside cupboard that's falling apart. There's a little water feature that I think we'll just get rid of, as the pump is a waste of electricity and it'll just breed mosquitoes otherwise. It's going to be home.

Well that all happened rather quickly.

This morning, we met with our agent to go through all of the offer paperwork, at the bright and early time of 7:30am after (for me at least) a bad night's sleep staring at the ceiling.

It wasn't that bad. A lot of disclosures, a lot of initialling and signing. Here's what the stack of paperwork looked like:

The existing building reports didn't come back with any red flags. There's a little bit (around $1,000) of termite damage. We put in the contract that the sellers have to fix that. The hot water tank needs to be strapped to the wall to be in earthquake compliance. We put that in the contract too.

A couple of hours later, we'd got all of the paperwork out of the way, and Nick said he'd present the offer to the seller's agent at 3pm.

I got a phone call at about 5pm from Nick saying that they'd accepted the offer, with all of our conditions, so we're all ready to go for closing on the 23rd.

Apparently the reason the sellers are so motivated is because they borrowed against the equity in this condo to buy a house, so they're eager to close the deal. We managed to negotiate the price down slightly to $519,000 (anything lower would have been a short sale for them, and we already know all about what that can entail). Even for that price, they've made a tidy profit on the $180,000 they paid 14 years ago.

So this is working out really well, timing-wise. We'll close on the 23rd, go visit Chris, Bri and Clara in Atlanta for Christmas, and then have all of January to do any work on the place before our current lease expires.

Just got to wait for the finance approvals and an international money transfer now. I'm slightly miffed that I booked it yesterday at 0.90 cents, and the AUD has risen to 0.92 cents today.

So we pretty much gave up on the condemned house. The more we hear about it, the worse it looks. Our agent got some paperwork on the red-tagging today. Apparently the large room out the front used to be a car port, and enclosing that was done without a permit. There's also a standalone room out the back that has had a bathroom added without a permit. Apparently the owner is getting fined $2,500 a day by the city until it's either brought into compliance or reverted. No idea if that's actually being paid, or who's responsibility it would become in the event of a sale, so we'll just quietly back away from that whole mess and pretend it never happened.

Sarah was poking around Redfin again last night and found this property, for less than what the condemned house was going for (granted, this is a condo, not a house).

We got our agent to show it to us today, and we really liked the look of it, so we're going to put an offer in on it and see what comes of it.

We have to spend about three hours with our agent tomorrow morning going through paperwork. Wee.

It certainly seems like a good time to be buying. Interest rates are low, the AUD is high against the USD, and prices are down.

Yesterday, we managed to inspect the property that was for sale that we'd discovered.

I think you could best describe it as a renovator's delight that's had a bit of work done on it. The kitchen is pretty new. The bathrooms are pretty good. There's some cracking around the place, and the floating floor looks like it's a bit of a dodgy job.

That said, it definitely had potential, and for the asking price, assuming it wasn't structurally unsound, was something we could see ourselves doing up and flipping when we finally move back to Australia.

So our agent told us we needed to get pre-approved for finance as the next step, and hooked us up with a mortgage broker, who was able to see us today.

She said that pre-approval would be no problem, and we got what seemed to be a ridiculously good rate for a 5 year adjustable rate mortgage.

Our agent called us back tonight and told us that there was another offer on the table for less than the asking price, and that the property had been red-tagged. It would appear that none of the modifications had permits.

He's going to check with the city tomorrow to find out exactly what the nature of the red-tagging is all about, and what would be involved to get the property un-red-tagged, but I've got that feeling that it's going to be better to just walk away from it at this stage.

So that's how we've spent our weekend. Speculating on real estate.

Our lease runs out at the end of January, and we're thinking about moving to a bigger place.

In the four years we've been here (yeah, we just crossed the four year mark the other day) we've often thought about trying to buy as well. We go through these phases where we really feel like buying, then we run the numbers and run screaming back to the warm bosom of renting.

A couple of months ago we had the most serious foray into buying. We'd just checked out the models for Mondrian and we really liked the floorplan for Bleu, and found the price to be the least breathtaking of anything we'd looked at in the Bay Area.

I got as far as talking to mortgage brokers and running the numbers, and the things that killed it for us were the property taxes and homeowners association fees. The monthly repayments would have been doable, but it'd have really been a ball and chain. We're over here to see the country as much as anything else, and if the mortgage is going to be a significant impedance on our ability to travel, then there isn't really any point in doing it.

So we sadly passed up on Mondrian.

The three bedroom townhouses in our current complex are going for around the $2500 a month mark, which is a pretty serious jump on what we're paying now for our two bedroom one, so Sarah's been scouring Craigslist for anything better.

She found a 2 bedroom plus loft condo being rented privately in Mountain View, which we took at look at on Wednesday. The immediately downsides are it's older (the kitchen and bathroom are really a bit dated) and has no data cabling (this is something I've really loved about our current place) and no microwave oven included. The upsides are it's significantly bigger (about 500 square feet larger), the kitchen has heaps of cupboards, it has a washer and dryer, a lock-up garage, a small, fairly private yard (the rent includes a gardener), and it has what looks like a communal garden bed (the thing that really caught my eye were the compost bins).

So I think overall, as long as we can live with the kitchen and bathroom, it's going to be an improvement on where we are now. The windows are all double glazed, so it should be fairly well insulated. It's got a gas furnace and gas hot water, and I think the landlord pays for the water, so I think the utilities would at best come out the same as what we're paying here.

We've decided to put an application in for it and see what happens. The landlord is living overseas, so we're dealing with a real estate agent for the letting. Apparently we'd be paying the rent via PayPal or something. He's got a home warranty arrangement for maintenance, which sounds like it'll be pretty good.

Meanwhile, Sarah was scouring Redfin and found a house nearby that is for sale (a short sale), which is pretty reasonably priced. We've called up a real estate agent, and we're taking a look at it tomorrow, just because we can.

It's looking all good, so we're game to tell the world: Sarah is 13 weeks pregnant!

She had the nuchal translucency ultrasound today (which, due to the tight timing required for it, I was totally bummed to be unable to attend). The scan came back all clear, which is an enormous relief.

In the nausea department, poor Sarah has had a much worse time than with the first pregnancy. Particularly on the flights to and from Australia. This makes me think it's going to be a girl (just because the nausea characteristics are totally different from the first time around).

It's amazing how fast they grow in just a few weeks.

Here's the ultrasound from 10 weeks:

And here's the ultrasound from 13 weeks:

Well, here I am, sitting in a chair at 10,000 feet (or whatever the altitude currently is), using WiFi. Writing a blog post. And we still don't have flying cars.

I'm on my way to Dallas for the Ubuntu Developer Summit for the 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) release. Being an LTS release, this is of particular interest for what I do at work.

Sarah's still in Australia (well she's actually on a flight to LAX as I write), so I took the VTA light rail + shuttle to the airport. I must say, aside from not being particularly speedy, it was a pleasant experience. I've finally cracked open The Audacity of Hope, which I received for Christmas or my birthday last year.

I'm really loving the renovated San Jose airport. Now that all of the check-in counters have moved downstairs, they've about quadrupled the space the TSA has, which makes getting through security a much more pleasant experience.

Add to that, the nice lady in the Admiral's Club kindly reseating me in an exit row, all by myself, and this is a pretty sweet trip so far.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r1CZTLk-Gk