The dresser is flimsy. The drawers don’t open well and are unfinished and splintery on the inside. There’s a crack in the back of the dresser which I didn’t see until today since the delivery people brought it in and immediately put it against a wall. But I could have actually lived with all that. The problem came when I tried to attach the Kendall changing table topper to the Kendall dresser. The instructions made it look easy and said all I needed was a Philips head screwdriver. All I had to do was screw two metal plates into pre-drilled holes on each side. So I looked for the holes and found that there were no holes whatsoever on the changing table topper. Nor were there any holes in the back of the dresser. WTF?!?!?

So I called customer service. I was told that they would have pre-drilled the holes in the dresser if I’d ordered the topper and the dresser together. Well, they were all purchased in the same order, so to me that would be the definition of “together”. They said they had no idea why the topper had no holes in it and that it should have them. They said they’d be happy to replace that, but that I’d have to pay to exchange the dresser. They suggested that the best thing I could do is just drill the holes myself into the dresser. I was truly flabbergasted that they weren’t willing to replace it for me for free.

So now I have to drill the holes myself, hoping that this flimsy piece of junk doesn’t fall apart in the process. I am deeply disappointed by the furniture and the customer service response.

The crib I ordered is on backorder and tonight I plan to decide whether to cancel that part of the order completely. We’re planning on putting the baby in the Amby Baby Hammock in our room for the first few months and I guess I’ll just figure out what to do after that. It was really the only crib I liked, but I’m worried that there will be more quality problems with this piece as well. Considering that poor crib quality can kill a child, I’m seriously leaning towards canceling the order.

I had planned to buy a new coffee table since mine seems like a disaster for kids (very pointy edges). I was going to purchase new slip covers for my sofa since they’re getting a bit ratty. I was going to order some cute toy storage. I was going to order it all from Pottery Barn. Not anymore. Not if they were the last furniture seller on Earth.

Pottery Barn, you just lost an extremely loyal customer who likely would have spent tens of thousands of dollars on your furniture over the course of my life. Maybe you should consider putting the same attention to detail into your children’s furniture as you do into your regular PB furniture, because you likely will lose a lot more customers this way.

Things you’ve already done: bold
Things you want to do: italicize
Things you haven’t done and don’t want to - leave in plain font

But I thought it would be interesting to see how Adam and I stack up side-by-side in our experiences.

Our handsome guy at 20 weeks

When we first started talking about having a baby, I thought of pregnancy as no more than a necessary (and annoying) part of getting a baby. I didn’t relish the thought of my body changing, not being able to do all the things I normally can (food, drink, activities), and just feeling generally crappy. I’m surprised to find that I’m really enjoying being pregnant, even with the occasional physical discomforts. It’s amazing to know that there’s a little person growing inside me, and now, to feel him kicking all the time absolutely blows my mind. I don’t mind being big, though so far only my tummy has grown. My goal is to not have to buy new underwear during this pregnancy — I want to be one of those women who looks exactly the same other than the bump. Here’s hoping! Either way, I’ll be happy. I look at myself in the mirror now and feel excited to see my tummy growing. I like what I see. It’s been a very pleasant surprise.

I don’t think either Adam or I have written here that we found out we’re having a boy. YAY! I would have been happy either way, but I’m definitely excited to have a slightly clearer picture in my head of who our baby will be. For Adam’s sake, I’m glad it’s a boy. I’ve seen how Adam is with his niece and I can guarantee that a daughter would have him so wrapped around her fingers he’d be useless in enforcing any sort of rules. Also, I think he’ll have an easier time relating to a boy, as will I since I was a bit of a tomboy growing up. When I told my mother we were having a boy, she said that it wouldn’t be as much fun to shop for clothes, but I’m actually having a blast. There are so many cute outfits for boys these days (check these out!) and I don’t have to worry about anyone buying him something pink or frilly.

We’re doing pretty well as far as getting ready for the baby goes. The nursery is shaping up, we’ve registered for regular childbirth classes at our local hospital as well as a 3-session hypnobirthing series, we’ve chosen a daycare and will sign-up this week, we did extensive research on baby products and registered for lots of goodies at Babies R Us and Pottery Barn Kids, and we’ve even started to buy some of the things baby will need, like clothes and blankets and (of course) books. Adam and I have read to the baby a few times since they say he can hear us and studies have shown that babies recognize the books and music they heard in the womb. So cool!

But no matter how much research I do, I feel woefully unprepared for the sheer number of decisions I have to make while pregnant and, of course, once I have the baby. How I want to give birth. Whether to bank the baby’s cord blood. Who we want to designate as our baby’s guardian in case something happens to both of us. Who we want to have as the baby’s doctor. Whether to to vaccinate our child and (in our case, since we know we want to vaccinate) how we want those vaccines administered. Whether to keep the baby in our room for the first few months or in their own crib in their nursery. The number of decisions to make are mind-boggling and the evidence for and against each of these choices is extremely conflicting. Take for example peanuts. I used to eat peanut butter almost every day, but, because of things I read, I gave it up before Adam and I started trying to conceive. I’d read a number of articles that suggested that eating peanut butter or peanuts leads to a higher incidence of peanut allergies and asthma. Later on, I read a study that suggested the opposite, that eating peanuts in moderation is actually good because exposure in utero is actually good for preventing peanut allergies. Seriously, what is one to believe???

I’m not freaking out too much over all these decisions (though I have my moments as Adam can attest). Hell, my parents gave me clackers to play with when I was well under the age of 5, and I’m still here. Adam’s parents brought him home from the hospital in a cardboard box and he’s none the worse for wear. I figure I will do my research, read as much as I can on any issue, and then make my own educated decision that I hope will be the best one for my son. It’s the best any parent can do. Sometimes I wish I was one of those people who  doesn’t do research and does whatever their doctor/mother/friends suggest. Ignorance can be bliss, especially when there’s no clear-cut RIGHT and WRONG to most decisions you have to make as a parent.

I get a pretty generous winter break (a week and a half off), so my big plan for that time is to baby-proof the house. I know a lot of it doesn’t need to be done until the he is crawling, but I figure I have the time now and probably won’t later, so I might as well get as much of it done as I can. I’m also chomping at the bit to get up to Burlington to go shopping for more baby clothes! That is definitely more fun than reading books about vaccines and writing our will. Having a baby can’t all be deadly serious.

We didn’t do a lot with our house for the first few years that we lived here (click here for pics of what it looked like when we moved in). I got my book deal within 2 months of moving to Vermont, so my mind was singularly focused on writing for a good long while. By the time that was finished, we were unsure if we were really going to stay here. I learned a lot in my first professional librarian position, and one of the things that I learned was that the sort of job I was doing wasn’t really for me. I was good at it and there were elements that I liked about it, but I found myself getting a little bored. I was really interested in doing more teaching and wanted a management position, so I started looking for jobs in that fit my interests. So, since we didn’t feel too committed to the house, we only did the things that absolutely had to get done: replacing the tartan plaid carpet that covered the entire downstairs of the house, completely re-doing the landscaping, painting the exterior of the house, and fixing up what was a sad little guest room (and is now cute and cozy and something we don’t have to be embarrassed of).

When I was offered my promotion at work to Head of Instructional Initiatives, we decided that we were going to stay in this house a while. We’d already talked about having kids and were waiting to start trying until I got a new job. Well, we had no more excuses to wait for any of it (baby or house fix-er-up-ing). I don’t want to be one of those people who moves their whole family every couple of years to rise up the career ladder, and we so love Vermont, so we committed in our heads to staying here — not forever, but for a good long while. And very shortly after that, we found that we were expecting our little munchkin. That was when we finally got the energy and motivation to start fixing up the house.

Here’s what we’ve done so far this Fall:

• Got rid of the ugly green carpet that covered the upstairs and replaced it with nice, normal beige carpet. This alone made us feel like we were living in a new house.
• Got new window treatments for a lot of the rooms to replace the inconvenient and dirty plantation shutters that were there before (before and after)
• Replaced some of the uglier light fixtures (before and after & before and after) with ones I’d been eying for years from Pottery Barn.
• Replaced the scary, swaying ceiling fan in the kitchen (that I was sure would kill one or both of us one day) and had ceiling fans installed in our bedroom and the nursery (which has made it feel much less dry and stuffy in our bedroom so far this winter).
• Painted the baby’s nursery (click here for pics).
• Moved Adam’s office downstairs.

Downstairs living room when we first moved in

Adam’s office is definitely the project I’m most excited about. Ever since we moved in, we’ve been at a loss to figure out what to do with the “living room” downstairs (there’s one upstairs as well that we actually do use). It’s this weird L-shaped room with a fireplace and the shape really makes no sense for entertaining or  anything else as far as we can see. There’s no good place to put a couch or a TV, so we’ve just sort of done nothing with the space for the past 3 1/2 years. When we got pregnant, we knew that Adam’s office (right next to our bedroom) was going to have to become the nursery. So we moved Adam down to the L shaped room in the little alcove part (it’s about the same size as our guest room). It actually works really nicely as an office, and we

New wall to separate living room from office - in progress. No more wood paneling!!!

have a contractor who is right now putting in a wall and pocket door to create a real extra room.  Now, that downstairs living room is nice and rectangular and finally makes some sense. And Adam is loving his new office, which I must admit is a lot cozier and better laid-out than when it was in the bigger room upstairs. (click here for more pics of the office in progress)

The nursery is really starting to shape up too! Adam did an amazing painting job and the baby’s furniture has started to arrive. The only major piece of furniture that hasn’t arrived yet is the crib, so I’d say that for being about 15 weeks away from D-Day, we’re in very good shape. I didn’t want to be in the position of working on the room and rearranging furniture at 8 or 9 months pregnant, so I’m glad we got a jump on it.

Newly-painted nursery with some furniture.

For the first time, I really feel at home in our house. It feels like it’s “ours.” And while we still have some projects left to do — like buying a new stove and wallpapering the bathrooms — I finally like the house and feel like it reflects our taste a lot more than that of a 70-something-year-old woman.

OH NOES!

Those of you who know me, know that I tend to be very loyal toward the technology in my life.  I milk the durable goods that I buy until they turn to dust.  This probably reflects some deep psychological pathology that I can’t articulate.  Or maybe i’m just cheap.  

I took home my new 1996 Subaru Legacy almost 13 years ago, with 3 miles on the odometer.  I couldn’t have asked for a more reliable, dependable car.

It survived the horrors of Michigan and Vermont winters (and a few Florida summers) without complaint.  It followed me through medical school, business school, a doomed startup, the founding of my own firm, and even lived long enough to see me get married!

Unfortunately, all good things come to an end.

Here’s hoping the old girl’s replacement lives as long!

Thank You for Your Service!

OS X has been a bit less stable for me than Linux, but a whole heck of a lot better than any version of Windows.  It can run Adobe’s apps natively.   And X11.  And frozen-bubble2 via MacPorts.  What more could I ask for?  

Well… one massively irritating ‘feature’ in MacOS is the shortcut command to switch windows, Cmd-Tab.

In Windows, KDE, Gnome, and just about every other desktop environment I can think of, Alt-Tab allows you to rapidly cycle between all open windows.  With OS X, Cmd-Tab (the equivalent of Alt-Tab) cycles between applications, not windows.   

This can be very annoying when you want to quickly jump back-and-forth between, say, browser windows then quickly jump to another application.  Apple offers a second shortcut, Cmd-`, to cycle between windows of a single application. But when you work with multiple platforms throughout the day and you have decades of muscle memory urging you to hit Cmd-Tab, using an alternative shortcut just feels wrong.

Mac-people frequently say “just use expose” instead of keyboard shortcuts. But like so many folks I am much faster with the keyboard than with the mouse. (I even went old school with my keyboard to maximize typing speed… much to the dismay of my wife who can’t sleep over the racket.)

Fortunately, there’s a solution to this problem: a shareware program called Witch gives you task switching the way it should have been out-of-the-box.

Unfortunately, OS X doesn’t allow you to assign Cmd-Tab to third-party applications like Witch.  

To overcome this limitation, you need to get two more (free) applications:  Unsanity’s APE and PullTab by Raging Menace.  These two apps work in concert to ‘release’ the Cmd-Tab key and allow you to assign it to a third-party app like Witch.

I will never leave my bed again.

That night, I had several nightmares about having serious problems while giving birth and woke up feeling scared and anxious. What she said really got to me, made me feel afraid to give birth there. But I don’t want to do a home birth under any circumstances, and I really don’t feel comfortable with the idea of driving 45 minutes (or more) when I’m in labor. I’ll admit that I wasn’t feeling too crazy about my midwife already since she’d been less than sympathetic and a pretty bad advocate for me when I was having daily excruciating pain from my kidney stones (it’s become more infrequent now, thank goodness). She’s also not a particularly warm person and I don’t feel super-comfortable with her. I did question whether she would be a really good advocate for me when I give birth and planned to talk to her about my concerns at my next appointment. But now, I just feel sick… I feel like I’m totally stuck. She and her partner (who I like better, but you get whoever’s on-call when you’re giving birth) are the only midwives who practice at my local hospital’s birthing center — all of the rest practice at the one 45-minutes away. So if things don’t work out with them, I’m going to be forced to go to the other hospital (which I have heard great things about, but I’m very anxious about the distance) or choose an obstetrician which I’m even more uncomfortable with given their much higher rate of cesareans.

I just think it’s horrible for someone to scare the crap out of a pregnant woman, especially in the extremely forceful way that she did it. I know lots of people have had bad experiences with childbirth or have had great experiences, but they should not make a pregnant woman feel anxious about the choices she’s made, especially when she lives in a rural area where there just aren’t that many choices. I know she probably meant to help, but all she did was totally freak me out. I can’t think of anything else now, and my next midwifery appointment is 2 1/2 weeks away.

So, if you hear about someone’s plans for giving birth and you don’t think they’re making the best choice, don’t tell them horror stories. I would never do a home birth myself, but I respect the choice that my colleague and his wife made to do that. And I wouldn’t sit around and tell stories about all of the bad things that can happen with a home birth. It’s insensitive and you’d think someone who was a doula would know better.

Please folks, don’t scare the pregnant lady. She’s full of hormones, going through something she’s never done before, and is hoping she is making choices that are best for her and her baby. Build her up — don’t bring her down.

So, with this extremely painful medical issue, Adam and I are supposed to be flying to Iceland on Saturday for 6 days to attend a conference and see the sites. On top of that, Iceland isn’t sounding like the best place to travel to at the moment. If people think our economy is bad, they should try Iceland, where four of their major banks have failed, their currency has lost most of its value, and the government has given up trying to peg the Krona to other currencies. People can’t even get their money out of their banks. Since the people of Iceland (and companies) can’t get foreign currency, they’re predicting serious food shortages and other problems. Normally, I’d be game for this and probably would find it a fascinating experience to bear witness to what’s going on there. However, now that I’m responsible for another human life, I feel like I need to be more cautious. And with my current health issues, I don’t want to be stuck in a country where I can’t get the basic care I might need.

So, the trip I’ve been looking forward to for months and months now feels like an anchor around my neck. I don’t want to let the conference organizers down — I’ve never missed a conference before and I’ve spoken with food poisoning, a horrible hangover, a cold, etc. I also don’t want to lose the money I spent on two plane tickets to Iceland if Adam and I decide not to go, as well as the experience of visiting a county I’ve dreamed of going to for well over a decade. Adam and I plan to wait and see how things look late in the week and then make our decision, but I definitely will not take any risks that could put baby in danger.

On a positive note, I’ve just started to show a bit, though to most people I probably just look like I’ve developed a small pot belly. It’s definitely made the whole baby thing feel more real to me, and I can’t wait until I can actually feel the baby move around and kick. In spite of how crappy I’ve been feeling, it hasn’t lessened my giddiness over the pregnancy one bit.

Still waiting for that second trimester pregnancy glow though…

My own system for keeping organized has evolved over the past couple of years. Between running a company and being responsible for all the household paperwork since moving to Vermont, my desk became a blizzard of papers, bills, half-eaten sandwiches, and old coffee cups. Not good.

The organizational system that I’ve developed works on two core assumptions:

Assumption #1: I’m lazy. Very, very lazy. If any step takes more than a couple of minutes, it won’t get done.

Assumption #2: Paper is bad. A few pieces of loose paper on my desk is the first step toward chaos. So the goal is to do something with the paper before it piles up and buries me.

The Tech
My system involves a little bit of technology to work:

• An inbox on my desk for papers
• A Fujitsu ScanSnap S510 - a high-speed document scanner
• FineReader for ScanScap - an OCR program that’s bundled with the ScanSnap.
• Yep, a program that lets you tag PDFs and visually preview them

The Workflow

1. Triage
When I get a new piece of mail, i categorize it in one of two ways:
A) Mail that needs a physical response (ie, bills that I can’t pay online, quarterly taxes, etc.. all documents that will require me to deal with a stamp, envelope and the mailman.)
B) Mail that just needs to be filed and/or dealt with online (bank statements, merchant account statements, credit card statements that I pay online, etc…)

If something falls into pile “A”, i do it immediately, or as soon as possible. This keeps clutter to a minimum and ensures that our heat doesn’t get turned off. Once everything from pile A is finished, it gets dumped in with pile B, to be scanned…

2. Scanning
This is the critical step. The Fujitsu ScanSnap is a high-speed scanner — it can do 18 double-sided pages a minute. It scans with the single press of a button, then automatically turns the scan into a PDF and places it into a directory you specify before-hand.

It is one of the most useful pieces of business equipment I’ve ever used; i was able to scan my archive of 5,000+ documents in <2 days. The "M" version of the scanner is bundled with software for OS X, and it works very well indeed.

This video just shows you how quickly it performs the scans.

Keeping up with scanning my incoming mail requires only 1-2 minutes a day.

I set up 4 different directories for the scans (you'll see why in a minute):

• New
• OCR In Process
• OCR Finished
• Tagged

The ScanSnap puts all new scans immediately into the New directory. It automatically names the files based on the date and time of the scan. (ie, “2008_09_24_16_58_41.pdf”). This behavior can be configured.

3. Dispose of the Paper!
According to the IRS, you can apparently shred or otherwise dispose of paper documents that you’ve digitized, including receipts. I tend to err on the side of caution though, and don’t mind keeping paper for at least a couple of years as long as I don’t have to see it. So for those few documents I can’t bear to shred, I just file them into a plain old cabinet.

My assumption is that I won’t ever have to actually look through those papers, so my filing system isn’t very complicated: throw them in a drawer, forget they exist.

4. OCR: making the scanned documents searchable
About once a week, i’ll go through the “New” folder where all the new scans are placed, and drag the entire folder’s contents into the “OCR In Process” folder. I then take all the files and pass them through the FineReader OCR program.

This program, bundled with the ScanSnap, makes all the texts in the PDFs searchable by spotlight and other search programs.

The reason you shouldn’t run an OCR program at the time that you’re doing the scans is because OCR can take a long time, even with a fast machine. It can take my Macbook Pro up to a minute to perform an OCR scan on a particularly tough document. So it is best to take all your new documents once a week and do all the OCR in a batch, and just let it run in the background while you do other things. FineReader is good about not hogging the CPU, and won’t slow down other programs while it does its thing.

5. Tagging and Searching with Yep
Once the OCR is done, i move the scanned files from “OCR in Process” To “OCR Finished”. I then fire up Yep.

Yep describes itself as an “iPhoto for your PDFs”, which is a fairly accurate description. It lets you easily tag each document and perform very rapid searches. Once you start using Yep (or something like it) you’ll wonder how you ever got along without it.

Yep has a few critical benefits that I didn’t see in other similar programs:
A) It is cheap - $34.00. Free demo available too.
B) It doesn’t use proprietary tags; Any tags that you create get placed into OS X’s Spotlight database. Not using some funky, proprietary database but instead embedding the tags into the PDF’s metadata means that getting locked-in is much less of a concern.
C) it doesn’t move the PDF files around — it can find them anywhere on your hard drive (or even over a network), so you don’t have to muck around with maintaining pristine directories or even having logical filenames. If you can devise a good tagging system, you can find just about any file in an instant regardless of where it located on the hard drive, or what it is called. This is beneficial for the lazy and disorganized.

A Concrete Example: My Electricity Bill.

Tagging:
After scanning in a document, Yep automatically sees that there’s a new, untagged PDF. To tag it, you just click on the file and start typing in the tags you want. Here’s an example video of me tagging my electric bill in Yep, just to give you a sense of how quickly you can get it done.

Video: Tagging my electricity bill with Yep

Searching:
Tagging would be useless if you didn’t have a fast facility to retrieve the document. Fortunately, Yep takes full advantage of the search capabilities offered by OS X.

This video shows you how quickly you can pull up documents by tags. In this case, i’m searching for the electric bill that I just tagged. As you select tags, Yep narrows down the search parameters by only looking for the tags that remain in your sub-selection. This makes finding any document incredibly easy.

Video: Finding my electricity bill with Yep

6. Backups
Now that your entire financial life has been digitized, it is critically important that you make secure, reliable backups. (In fact, the IRS insists upon it if you are going to shred the original paper documents.) I’ll get into my backup technique in a future post.

Good luck taming your own paper monster…