timeimmortal

So over the last few days, Grace, my mother, and have been looking at various pieces of baby-related merchandise, and it’s been pretty fun so far. Contemplating the arrival of our little one in such concrete terms as “where do we put the crib?” and “what kind of stroller should we look for?” somehow makes the whole thing seem…well…even more real than it already is. It’s pretty cool, actually.

Even more cool is just being with Grace through this experience. Aside from the fact that lately we’ve been losing sleep, we’ve been growing closer and closer as the weeks roll past, and she has been just radiant for…well, for as long as I can recollect, to be sure. Just radiant — she really has that “pregnant lady” glow about her, and it’s both cute and touching just how much she obviously loves and cares about our little one.

I don’t think the English language has words I could use to adequately express my gratitude and awe.

One thing I just thought of: baby products…what a racket! One would think that baby products would be simple and straightforward, but in reality the opposite is true — worse (and more annoyingly) still, the stuff all comes in matching sets! You can get the playpen and crib in a matching colour scheme, and also the stroller and carseat, and even the bedding, all co-ordinated with the same patterns and earthy colour tones. Much of it seems cute, but much of it gives off a creepy vibe.

Baby as fashion accessory. Sometimes, society just gets under my skin, in a bad way.

Fortunately, we were able to cut through some of the B.S. and come away with a compact, functional, relatively simple stroller. It isn’t too big, doesn’t have the full cup-holder deck that one so often sees, and folds up neatly into something that could fit comfortably into the back of a Smart Car (we drive a Chrysler Sebring, though). And the crib we found is also fairly straightforward — finished wood railings, metal (not plastic!) sliding apparatus for opening the one side.

Cribs, though…there’s another racket. There’s not a single one these days that retails with a mattress included, at least not that Grace and I were able to track down. But then, we did manage to track down a smart-looking unit, with room to spare in our budget for a mattress and some bedding. It will look really nice in the corner of the apartment we have set aside to be “Baby’s Corner”.

Now we just need diapers and a couple of jumpers.

Also, I found the neatest little blog add-on, and it should be visible at the top of the main content pane. It’s a little…slider, I guess would be the best term for it — that shows (based on the projected due date) some basic information about the expected development of the baby. Very cool.

On days when Grace works, I will pick her up from work in the evening. Usually, I time the drive over incorrectly and wind up sitting in the car listening to the radio for a few minutes while I’m waiting for the time her shifts end at to roll around.

Sometimes, though, I remember to bring my camera along on these short jaunts, and sometimes I see a photo opportunity.

These are the cherries (and some of the beads of the Rosary that hang from the rear-view mirror of our car. I had to really slump down in the driver’s seat of our Chrysler Sebring to get the camera at a good angle from which to snap the shot, and I wanted to capture as much of the white framework of the hospital’s entryway awning as possible — hence the cherries being off to the left of the shot.

This was a high ISO shot, and so required a fair bit of noise reduction. I also had to boost the luminance in the red and green channels to bring the cherries out a bit more. But overall, I really like the shot. It’s a bit random, and the only reason I even tried to take it was because there was a chance something worth posting to the site here might result. Fortunately, that bet paid off.

Tried to goad an unmarked Chevrolet Impala police car into an impromptu highway drag race.

Sgt. Cam Woolley of the OPP highway safety division said the teen was driving his parents’ 2008 Chrysler 300 toward Windsor on Friday when he pulled up alongside the unmarked OPP vehicle, a Chevrolet Impala with tinted windows.

Police say he repeatedly tried to get the Impala, driven by the Chatham-Kent OPP detachment commander, to race. The Chrysler’s speed reached over 160 km/h.

The teen was pulled over and arrested. His licence was suspended and the car impounded for a week. He also faces a minimum $2,000 fine if convicted.

Woolley said the teen’s parents had to pick him up after the car was taken away.

Nobody likes getting a ticket, obviously, but I for one rather enjoy the fact that more and more police departments are using ‘ghost cars’. People will do very stupid things on the road when they think a cop isn’t watching, not so much when they think a cop might be…and I for one think that stupidity in a vehicle almost always deserves to be rewarded with harsh fines. Hence my love of ghost cars.

I’ve never seen Edmonton drivers, in everyday circumstances, obey the rules of the road as well or as rigidly as they do as when an interceptor has been in plain view nearby. I feel a swell of guilty enjoyment when I see the car that went whipping past me twenty blocks earlier pulled over on the side of the road with an unmarked cop car sitting behind it.