3:00 AM: “Sweet Jane” is playing — the “Cowboy Junkies”:http://www.cowboyjunkies.com/ version, of course — and Ella’s asleep at last. She _was_ screaming her little head off not too long ago, but I’ve already forgotten.

She also did pretty well with Natalie Merchant. I have a new appreciation for mellow music. For someone who’s been obsessing over Pavement and The White Stripes recently, this’ll be quite a shift.

UPDATE: Jim Henley has a “low opinion”:http://www.highclearing.com/archivesuo/week_2003_12_07.html#004780 of the Junkies’ “Sweet Jane.” For shame.

For anyone aghast at extensive baby chatter on a blog, all I can say is, “you’ve been warned”:http://www.polytropos.org/archives/000169.html.

One summer in college, I taught my aunt’s home-based English classes in Tokyo for a few weeks while she and her family were in the States. There were only a couple classes a day, so I had plenty of chances to explore the city. More to the point, I had time: lots and lots of time. I filled two five-subject notebooks in the space of six weeks, with musings about Japanese culture, snippets of story, descriptive exercises, and the like. I’d take the subway somewhere and just sit and write. A couple years later, looking back over those notebooks and reviewing that whole experience, I realized its central irony: the reason I had _written_ so much was that I hadn’t actually _done_ a whole lot.

I love writing, so I’m not saying that that’s a bad thing, but my life situation since starting the blog, and up until a few days ago, has been similar. I’ve been able to write because I’ve had plenty of time. Now, though, Ella has changed everything, and I find myself with a new irony: I have more new things to write, more things to say, more new insights into life, more stories to tell (er, OK, all about Ella, but still) than I’ve had in months, even years, and yet there’s been so much to _do_ that I haven’t had the time or the energy to write about it. Or the inclination, even: it’s taken me a long time to write even this much, because glancing over my shoulder to watch Ella sleep is an infinitely superior experience.

In the meantime, though, here’s some pictures.

“01”:http://www.polytropos.org/mt-static/ella/ella01.jpg — Suanna and Ella, 45 minutes or so after she was born.
“02”:http://www.polytropos.org/mt-static/ella/ella02.jpg — The next day. Ella is sleeping soundly: something that she likes to do during the day, but not so much at night. You can see my attempt at a good baby-burrito blanket fold starting to unravel.
“03”:http://www.polytropos.org/mt-static/ella/ella03.jpg — Ella and I, about half an hour after she was born. Moments before she decided to open her eyes.
“04”:http://www.polytropos.org/mt-static/ella/ella04.jpg — Suanna and Ella.
“05”:http://www.polytropos.org/mt-static/ella/ella05.jpg — Ella sleeping . . . um, yeah, I guess not all of these really need captions, do they? “06”:http://www.polytropos.org/mt-static/ella/ella06.jpg and “07”:http://www.polytropos.org/mt-static/ella/ella07.jpg are more of the same. With “08”:http://www.polytropos.org/mt-static/ella/ella08.jpg you can see her eyes.
“09”:http://www.polytropos.org/mt-static/ella/ella09.jpg and “10”:http://www.polytropos.org/mt-static/ella/ella10.jpg More of Suanna and Ella. Note the finger-sucking. When Ella is awake, she likes — nay, _demands_ — to be sucking something. For some reason my left pinky is preferable to my right pinky. We had planned, as per hospital advice, to avoid giving her a pacifier for the first few weeks. We lasted about 48 hours.
“11”:http://www.polytropos.org/mt-static/ella/ella11.jpg — Ella and I. Though you’d think the stage direction was “Stare reflectively into the distance,” I was probably just contemplating how long it had been since I’d had a shower.
“12”:http://www.polytropos.org/mt-static/ella/ella12.jpg — Obligatory foot shot.
“13”:http://www.polytropos.org/mt-static/ella/ella13.jpg — Suanna and Ella, back at home.
“14”:http://www.polytropos.org/mt-static/ella/ella14.jpg — Obligatory car seat shot, fresh from the hospital.
“15”:http://www.polytropos.org/mt-static/ella/ella15.jpg — All hail the Humpty Dumpty vibrating chair! We’d not have made it through our first night back home without it.
“16”:http://www.polytropos.org/mt-static/ella/ella16.jpg and “19”:http://www.polytropos.org/mt-static/ella/ella19.jpg — Ella with Suanna’s father and mother, respectively.

UPDATE: Down in the comments, Mike Jacobs points out a curious coincidence between pictures 12&13. See if you can guess it and then check his comment for the answer.

Elanora Willow Bruinooge came into the world at 7:37 PM on the first of December. Ella weighs 7 pounds, 7 ounces and is 19 3/4 inches long. She is very healthy and quite serene, at least compared to all the little screamers in the nursery right now. Needless to say she is the beautifulest baby ever.

Suanna is happy and tired. I am happy and ought to be tired but am ramped up on caffeine and adrenaline. All three of us are living in light.

Concerning Ella’s Name

Elanora

It’s a Tolkien reference, albeit a subtle one. ‘Elanor’ is the name of Sam and Rose’s daughter at the very end of The Lord of the Rings. Here’s the bit that explains the name:

‘Well, Mr. Frodo,’ [Sam] said. ‘I’m in a bit of a fix. Rose and me had settled to call him Frodo, with your leave; but it’s not him, it’s her. Though as pretty a maidchild as any one could hope for, taking after Rose more than me, luckily. So we don’t know what to do.’

‘Well, Sam,’ said Frodo, ‘what’s wrong with the old customs? Choose a flower name like Rose. Half the maidchildren in the Shire are called by such names, and what could be better?’

‘I suppose you’re right, Mr. Frodo,’ said Sam. ‘I’ve heard some beautiful names on my travels, but I suppose they’re a bit too grand for daily wear and tear, as you might say. The Gaffer, he says: “Make it short, and then you won’t have to cut it short before you can use it.” But if it’s to be a flower-name, then I don’t trouble about the length: it must be a beautiful flower, because, you see, I think she is very beautiful, and is going to be beautifuller still.’

Frodo thought for a moment. ‘Well, Sam, what about elanor, the sun-star, you remember the little golden flower in the grass of Lothlorien?’

‘You’re right again, Mr. Frodo!” said Sam delighted. ‘That’s what I wanted.’

(LOTR VI 175-6)

With apologies to the Gaffer, we’ve made the name even longer by putting an ‘a’ at the end of it: partly because we like the sound of it, partly because the trochaic feet slide nicely into her last name that way, and partly because her nickname (and what we’ve been calling her most of the time) is ‘Ella’.

Ella will be forever correcting people who assume that her name is ‘Eleanor,’ but that will give her a special bond with her mother. ‘Eleanor’ is evolved from ‘Helen,’ which means ‘light’: a fact that Professor Tolkien was certainly aware of when he made his Elvish word. But the Elves aren’t the only ones who can lay claim to our particular spelling: as we discovered after we had settled on the name, ‘elanora’ is also an aboriginal name meaning ‘a home by the sea.’

Willow

Suanna and I have always been partial to willow trees. When we were dating we’d seek them out to picnic under, and so the name was on our short list even before we knew we were going to have a child. We like the fact that Ella’s names are a flower and a tree, respectively.

Bruinooge

An unpronounceable mouthful, to be sure, but it’s what she’s inherited. The word is still out on whether an infusion of Steeby DNA has produced another Bruinooge who actually has brown eyes. They’re big and grey at the moment, but we think we can detect a hint of brown in them waiting to come out.

UPDATE: If you’re coming to this entry from the printed announcement, you should also know that Elanora has her very own website, called Cerin Amroth. Feel free to stop by.

7:50 AM

The woman with the gap between her teeth clears away the dirty trays, empties the trash cans, and smiles as she greets everyone she sees by their first name.

The beautiful people filter through in flocks for their morning coffee. The residents complain about having to rewrite their CVs. The med students ask each other how many points the exam will be worth. All of them have perfect haircuts.

The man who shepherds his two young sons in front of him walks as if in a dream. I cannot tell from his face if his wife is about to have their third, or if she is sick, or worse.

And sitting in the corner, a solemn man in a baseball cap, with craggy skin and work-worn hands, reads his pastel brochure — “Chemotherapy & You” — page by lonely page.

Here are some of the phrases that people entered into a search engine that led them, by hook or by crook, to this site. Last month’s are “here”:http://www.polytropos.org/xxxxx.html. Next month should see a big influx of Two Towers-related search hits, but no wacky Tolkien ones have trickled in yet. I’m hoping there’ll be at least one ‘gimli eowyn chocolate pudding.’ We’ll see.

Wachowski Bros. Dept.

_in increasing order of ire_

the wachowski brothers explain
wachowski disappoint
wachowski brothers suck / the wachowski brothers suck
wachowski brothers email address
wachowski brothers address / what is the wachowski brothers address
sinister wachowski

I Think You Want ‘And’ Not ‘Or’ Dept.

slacking or palpable or selective or guidebooks or tariffs
ciphers or cosmopolitan or righter or cofactor or aura
abstracted or technologists or commonplaces or infarct or flaw

Dept. of Etiquette and How-To

how to address two brothers in a letter
beat the players in backgammon
matrix form fusion farms rubber band
free step by step levitation
counterterrorist defenestration

Dept. of This-And-That

muay thai cry tears bangkok
hay ride to hell
gnome novel
is there reasons why tarantino is not an auteur
what yu gi oh character comes from the streets & is a very loyal friend
old hero like odysseus and new hero like indiana jones are the same
poems about car mechanics

I certainly didn’t plan to do any blogging from the freakin’ _hospital_. But Suanna was napping earlier today, so I wrote some stuff. And now she’s napping again after getting an epidural, and lo and behold I found a phone jack I could dial in from with the laptop, so now I can post a couple of entries (coming right up).

There’s some hours to go yet, but everything is going fine. I can’t tell you how happy and relieved that makes me.

There’s a bit of a strange story about that last entry. I wrote it earlier this afternoon and kept getting bizarre “Internal Server Error” errors from Movable Type when I tried to post it. I assumed something server-side was wrong, but when I sat down to toodle with things again a few minutes ago did I discover that the problem was _only_ with that one particular entry. I could edit other entries or post new ones with ease.

I assumed that there must be some bizarre code in there that was causing the trouble, so in systematic debugging style the first thing I did was remove the url & link from ‘National Do Not Call Registry.’ And lo and behold, it worked. Happy happy joy joy. The url had been ‘https://www.donotcall.gov/default.aspx’, so I tried just ‘http://www.donotcallg.gov’ instead, and that caused the exact same error. So I changed the url to ‘http://www.polytropos.org’ — and there wasn’t an error. I changed it to ‘http://www.donot.gov’ — and there wasn’t an error there, either.

Apparently, that one specific url is causing Movable Type to bail. (UPDATE: typing the urls into _this_ entry worked just fine, though.) How very strange. Why _that_ one? I feel a conspiracy theory coming on . . .

Back when the National Do Not Call Registry first came into being, there was a fair amount of talk about the exemptions to the rule (nonprofits, surveys) and whether telemarketers would find clever ways to circumvent the Registry. I seem to recall a humor piece on NPR portraying just what such a call might sound like, though I haven’t been able to find a link to it.

I wasn’t thinking about any of that earlier today, though, when a pleasant-sounding lady called from Potomac Survey Research and asked if I’d be willing to answer some questions about “television and the Internet.” I was in a pretty congenial mood, and looking for some way to pass the time other than trying to get my mind around the fact than in twenty-four hours or thereabouts I will be a father. (That fact has had a way of creeping into recent blog posts regardless of context or appropriateness. I don’t know what to say about that, except that it accurately mirrors my life.) I also thought that maybe I’d get a chance to mention my favorite television shows and web sites. (“Yes, “West Wing”:http://www.polytropos.org/archives/000149.html, mm-hmm. And for Internet that’s p-o-l-y-t-r-o-p-o-s-dot-org. I can’t believe you haven’t heard of it!”)

So I consented to the 7-10 minute survey, and started rating my general impressions of this technology or that company on a scale of 1 to 5. Gradually the questions started narrowing in on cable TV service, and it became clear that the survey was either being conducted on behalf of Comcast or one of its competitors. After the questions about what I thought of Comcast’s customer service, we hit a yes-or-no one that struck me as a little odd:

“Were you aware that Comcast provides HDTV service for a number of channels, including NBC, CBS, ABC, Fox, and ESPN?”

“Um, yeah, I guess so.”

“And were you aware that such service is available for as little as –”

That’s when the alarms went off. Now, I didn’t know for certain whether the entire survey had been, in fact, leading up to a thinly veiled advertisement. I briefly considered holding out to the bitter end just to be sure, but I was taken by a suddenly strong sense of having my time egregiously wasted, especially since the questions they’d asked weren’t really about “television and the Internet” at all. So I hung up on the pleasant-sounding lady.

Curse those telemarketers! My phone survey days are now done. I’ll still make time for a political poll, in the hopes that my small voice might make its infinitesimal imprint on a sea of data. But if the guy calling from the Dean campaign wraps up by telling me I’ve won a Caribbean vacation and all he needs is my credit card number, my head is going to explode.

UPDATE: “Jim”:http://www.highclearing.com/ was sent some “interesting info”:http://www.highclearing.com/archivesuo/week_2003_11_30.html#004742 about the very survey call I received, from “someone”:http://amygdalagf.blogspot.com/ who actually worked on the survey! Turns out it’s not a sales pitch, though some questions stray admittedly close to the line. Follow the links for the whole deal.

. . . which I guess qualifies this as a “footnote.” I observed earlier that the $2 million not-bounty money was probably put up by feisty Congresspeople who hadn’t consulted with the State Department. According to my contact, a senior official at State who made a fine sausage stuffing on Thanksgiving, the main person responsible is Representative Frank Wolf (R-VA). This isn’t inside information, though: Wolf has a press release on his website that includes letters he and his cosignatories sent to Colin Powell and Kofi Annan, calling on them to pressure Nigeria into turning Taylor over to the Special Court for Sierra Leone. Clearly Wolf wants people to know he supports this cause, but his name never came up during any of my news trolling. A search on news.google.com for ‘wolf’ and ‘charles taylor’ comes up empty, even. Somebody needs a better press secretary.

I’m still having a hard time deciding just what to think of all this. It would please me greatly to see Taylor de-exiled and forced to take responsibility for the atrocities committed on his watch, but the way the situation has been handled thus far has been vaguely embarrassing. My contact noted that for the rank-and-file people at State, Charles Taylor is a solved problem. He’s not in power, and the situation in Liberia is more stable than it was (though the peace process is not without its snags ). There are bigger crises to manage, and besides, pressing the Taylor issue introduces all sorts of diplomatic complications. The reasons to stay on Taylor are therefore ideological, perhaps moral, but not pragmatic. For me, the peace and stability of the region trumps any sense of vindication at bringing one man to justice. But whether a captured Taylor would help or hinder the big picture, I can’t say. Hence the hard time deciding.

That last entry was also a field test for “Zempt”:http://www.zempt.com/, a simple Windows client for posting stuff to Movable Type. My main concern was that it play nicely with “MT-Textile”:http://www.bradchoate.com/past/mttextile.php, and so far it looks good. For me it’s not that big a deal, since I do all my blogwriting in a text editor (“TextPad”:http://www.textpad.com/) and copy/paste it into MT anyway. But Zempt will save me a click or three.

Hat tip to “Jim Henley”:http://www.highclearing.com/ via “Ginger Stampley”:http://www.whiterose.org/pam/.