oops

I had a post I was working on after the 2nd ultrasound and I realized I didn't finish it and it would be a little untimely. Sigh .... oh well

We've obviously had a lot of time now to think about the name of our baby girl. I took a day and wrote a web service to generate random names incorporating combinations of Daniels and Clyde and hyphen and had it be slightly adaptive but it still made a bunch of horrible suggestions that made a lot of people doubt the seriousness of the endeavor. Still it was viewed by about 150 different people and to my knowledge only one person tried to hack it, so it was pretty good, and it gave me a look into my subconscious as far as name preferences. When we were watching her suck amniotic fluid the name Adelia was stuck in my head although it sounded slightly off and I thought maybe Adele or something like that. I dunno. The name generator picked a lot of gemstones like Sapphire, Emerald *** oh my god, the computer just asked me if I wanted to reboot and of course I was typing and hitting space bar 1.5 times per second and it interpreted that as a "yes" -- I seriously want to train this laptop to become a sentient being and give it a cyborg body just so I can fight it to the death ***

ok so yeah, names like Sapphire, Emerald, Ivory (not a gemstone, but ...), Amethyst ... things like that got big points. The name Marseilles Siobhan randomly came up and I kindof liked it -- Tai thinks you can't use the name Marseilles if you've never been there *shrug* ... I like how it's got a French thing and an Irish thing going on simultaneously which sounds about right. Anyways, I dunno. I always pictured going with a -ia name and we thought about Magnolia and Aria and I'm very tempted to run with Aria. In a lot of ways I think she is starting to be Aria in my head. The one mitigating factor is that my favorite book series (i shouldn't say "my favorite" -- scientific polls have established it as the best book series) ASOIAF has a character named Arya whose nickname around the castle is "Arya Horseface", and there's a very good chance that ASOIAF could become an HBO sensation in the next 3 years on par with Lost (people forget this, but lord of the rings was somewhat obscure to the mainstream up until 7 or 8 years ago ... anyone who named their son Legolas or Smeagol in the 80s or early 90s probably set them up for an uneventful first several years followed by a "whoa why the hell did you name me that?!" period after the movie came out) -- ok so what am I saying. I like the name Aria but it's a gamble. Then there's the middle-name-candidate "Esme" oi ... i just googled it and people are talking about Twilight. Well that could be annoying, who knows.

Anyways, working on the name thing, working on figuring out what our 5 year plan is ... I do feel a bit dispirited on that front but ... it really is a situation where only one thing has to go right and then you can figuratively "coast" for a bit. So I guess it's not surprising that while waiting for one thing to go right, there would be a period where no things go right (in case there's any ambiguity, I'm talking about job search / deciding where to live -- the "nothing going right" only refers to that, not relationship or pregnancy or picking a name). I also think it's important for me and Tai to remember that what we have *right now* is something that probably 90-95% of people in the world would be happy to trade for, as far as an environment for our child, access to food, clothing, high speed internet, learning materials, etc ... there is a lot of desire in both of us to move forward, improve our surroundings, make room for a crib, set regular hours for work, activities, etc, and that is because there is so much potential that is not being realized yet, but the fact that we're only at 40% or whatever isn't necessarily cause to despair, and I just need to remember this every time I'm writing a mindnumbing email to some person on Craigslist knowing that they will probably only print off the first page of my resume and spend 20 minutes arguing with me over --- ahh but i digress

I just took 45 minutes off from writing this to rub lotion on Tai's belly and watch biggest loser on the internet and while I was doing that little Aria was kicking my hand something fierce. So much for her being the size of a blueberry!