10:07 PM :
jess and i bought a mac a little while back. a longtime windows user - the last time i didn't have a mac was when i my parents had a commodore 64 - i did not come to my decision lightly.

the mac mini is available for $800. it comes bundled with ilife, a suite for photo editing, movie making, and personal web development. the mac has a built-in wireless adapter, so instead of needing to buy a router to distribute my internet connection to my other computers, i can use the mac itself as the hub.

also, it runs on an intel processor, so i can boot into windows. no more emulation here, so the windows-familiar wife (well, relatively speaking) can use that if she likes.

also, paul likes burning dvds.

7:04 AM :
in december of last year, jess and i found out we were pregnant. okay, she was pregnant, but i think i might have had something to do with it, too.

jess is diabetic, and that means the baby has a statistically higher risk of ending up with one or more defects. the doctor took her blood a couple weeks ago to do some tests, and he called us to say he was worried about spina bifida.

so we went to the hospital to have an ultrasound done - the equipment at the doctor's just wasn't powerful enough - to determine if the baby actually has spina bifida. as it turns out, she doesn't, but this story is not over. they saw a problem with the heart, but couldn't pinpoint it. so they told us that the baby has congenital heart disease. this may or may not, they told us, be operable. it also may or may not mean that the baby will die soon after birth.

i suppose knowing must be better than not knowing, but it didn't feel like it at the time. i feel better now, though. read on.

we went to children's hospital's herma heart center, one of the best places you can go for a child's heart care. they did an echocardiogram and determined that our baby, instead of having two pumping chambers in her heart, has only one. and depending on the condition of her arteries connected to the heart, she may need an operation right after she's born. for sure, though, she'll need one at six months old and again at two or three years, to correct blood flowing in and out of the heart.

we'll know more in four weeks, when we go back. the baby's too small right now to see the arteries.

the news that our baby has heart disease is frightening. the prospect of the massive doctors' bills is daunting. but our baby can be operated on - the one-chambered heart cannot be made into a two-chamber heart, but it's something that people can live with. our baby will live, and that is most important.

you may have noticed, i referred to the baby as "she." the doctor is 80% sure that it's a girl, so we've taken to calling it a her. if we do have a girl, we have a name picked out (if we have a boy, we'll have to do some quick thinking). the name we like is namine olivia. the first name is japanese, from the kingdom hearts games. according to what i've found, it means ocean wave.

show me what it's like
teach me wrong from right

9:04 PM :
hello again. it's been a long time. i've tried other web designs, but i think i've always loved v3nt's format the best.

i'm returning once again because i miss having a space to rant, to say what's on my mind, to share. if you frequent here in hopes that i once again raise my voice to the unknown, or if this is your first time, welcome. there's much thought, love, anger, and discussion on these pages; come and discover with me the heights and depths of human emotion.

it's time to v3nt.

12:16 PM :
I'm certain you've noticed by now that I have significantly reduced my links bar. The top one is Blogger Buzz, your place for up-to-the-last-month Blogger news, but I digress. Recently they've introduced Blogger Beta, in which they add one of the coolest features (in my opinion) ever to be featured in blogs: categories. For so long has Blogger been saying "yeah, we'll put in it eventually," that they might have taken over production of Duke Nukem Forever.

So Blogger has unveiled Blogger Beta, in which you can (among a myriad of other stuff) finally assign categories to posts. I tried out the Beta the other day, and there are some very neat features. For one thing, they've done away with the need to edit your template by editing the HTML - it's drag and drop, click and add sidebars, et cetera, et cetera. (The fact that you can use your Google account does not escape me; it's another appealing factor.)

Since I am a techno-junkie and a web whore, I direct you to v3nt mark II. I'll be making all my news posts there from now on, and I hope to get it looking the way I like it in very short order.

1:12 PM :
Matt sent me his MySpace link. Since I remember with disturbing clarity what Emily's MySpace looks like, I started twitching uncontrollably.

Once I regained control over my lower motor functions, I went to Matt's MySpace. I have since come to conclude that never again will I go to anyone's MySpace. As much as I like my friends, I just can't stand going there. I can barely link to him.

I have to take a shower. I feel dirty.