Gustav and Egon, and the Past Resurfaces

Gustav from the title is Gustav Klimt, his most famous painting is the masterpiece "The Kiss," which is very similar to the following portrait:

His style is recognizable and made him well known in his own time. He lead a Viennese art movement at the turn of the 20th century, and inspired a young buck, Egon Schiele.

Egon's work was as expressive and shocking in its own day as it can still be today. Here's a self portrait:

Much of his work is, eh, risque? Sometimes called pornographic, his nudes are anything but boring.

When I noticed that he died at 28 years old, I thought WTF? Artists of his skill set and incendiary subject matter may flame out, and I was curious if that kind of end came into play with this dude.

A little research shed light on all of it.

Both and Egon and his mentor Gustav died in the influenza pandemic a century ago.

I started digging a little more. Walt Disney survived, but the Dodge brothers, the two guys who started the Dodge motor car company, both died. So did William Randolph Hearst's mom.

Things are going to get worse before they get better.

To end this (as I rush through in between work emails and family discussions) on a high note, I learned something: Grover Cleveland's sister, Libby Cleveland, did First lady duties during the first two years of his first term. How weird is that?

Happy St. Patrick's Day 2020

St. Patrick's Day has essentially been cancelled. Bars are closed. People aren't allowed to congregate in groups larger than thirty. All non-essential stores have been shuttered. This is an attempt to "flatten the curve," an unfortunate setting for serious wide-spread math-speak.

The curve that's being referenced is the bell-shaped curve that models the infection rates of this novel coronavirus, and if human-to-human contact s limited, the rates of infection should slow. Really, though, we don't have nearly enough tests, and enough tests will help usher in a spike.

Anyway, we're sequestered at our apartment, like so many other people. The stores are full of anxious folks, nary a bag of rice or pack of toilet paper in sight. Is this where we are? 2020 and people are freaking out like the plague is sweeping through?

Well, it kinda is, right?

The day for drinking and wearing green and pretending to celebrate all things Irish when we're really celebrating what we like to think Irish things are is here. And solemn? Is that the word?

Weird, for sure.

We have two kids, both wearing green, and giving us a new kind of anxiety.

Temporary tattoos all around...

A Pandemic is Finally Happening

I was going to make some joke title for a post like, "Novel Coronavirus Delays Pi Day Post," but that seemed in poor taste.

Things have gotten bizarre in the world, with sports grinding to a halt, plenty of jobs grinding to a halt, and people hoarding toilet paper for some reason.

And, in some poor Thai village, now void of tourists, tribes of ill-tempered monkeys have taken to the streets to battle for territory and food:

I wanted to say something else, but the time is not now.

Easy Reading

I've been working on a Tuxedo eulogy for over eighteen months, and probably won't get to it before my birthday, in April. I have a few other things I wanted to post about, but life gets in the way, either by taking whatever time there may have been to do the work and filling it with more, or less, useful activities, or, by rendering the topic moot through experience.

But this past Saturday I got some good pics of my kids. My son and his weekend light reading material:

That's the first book I ever read to him, by the by. That same copy, too. (Uncle Walt's Leaves of Grass)

We also pulled out the cherished hand-made onesey that became even more cherished in November on 2016:

What can I say: my kids have good taste.

Happy Leap Day 2020

Before heading to bed this Saturday, this February 29th, I thought I should go check out my old posts and see if I wrote anything on the other leap years.

When I saw that I had contributed on both leap years in question (2012 and 2016), I decided to stave off bed and write a little acknowledgement.

It was funny, reading those right before writhing this. In 2012 we'd been back from Corrie's birthday trip to Central America for a few weeks, and I was still working at the restaurant. In 2016 Corrie was pregnant and we'd just returned from a trip to San Diego.

Now, in 2020, it's Saturday night and I'm assed out---hard---with a second tiny kid and in a constant state of weary. I love it, all of it, for sure, but as of right now I'm so very tired. It's a different kind of tired, different that when Cass was on wake-up-every-three-hours duty for that month after birth. That was...something else.

Anyway, happy Leap Day!

Doing the Right Thing Gets Difficult

My son had a thing, a minor routine medical procedure that the surgeon told me they do hundreds of times a year. "Routine" and "general anesthetic" don't usually go hand in hand in my imagination, and, just in case you weren't aware: general anesthetic means getting knocked out and fully unconscious.

It's way better to do this now, we were told, because it gets dangerous later in life, both for the procedure and for the chances that things develop poorly in the meantime.

This was the right thing to do.

But damn it if it didn't feel like the right thing in he moment.

He looked cute and happy and chilling and all once he relented and agreed to put on the hospital issue scrubs:

Which made what I knew was about to be happening all the more difficult and heartrending.

General anesthetic is the IV drip of sleepy knockout drugs that keep you under for the duration of the procedure, but they always have to start a person out with gas---knock out gas, nitrous oxide, AKA hippie crack.

My son is already recovering nicely, having refused pain meds (mostly) and ice (completely), and is happy to talk with anybody listening about his privates. And this is a great thing. It was the right thing.

And that's what I have to tell myself, since my experience was vastly different than his.

My son loves me and trusts me and, even as we battle often, I don't mind having a headstrong and confident boy. But, in my last moments being able to be with him in the OR, in my last moments before they shooed me out to go wait in a lobby where I could follow the progress by color coded numbers on a screen, those last moments were spent holding him down and forcing a mask of gas over his face.

He fought and fought, and held his breath like a champ. Eventually his eyes rolled back into his head and he sounded like he was hiccuping. It's always like that, dad, they told me as they walked me through the doors. I couldn't form thoughts.

They made me drop of the scrubs they'd given me, and I couldn't even talk. As I waited, a wreck, for the color code to change on the screen for over an hour, the only thoughts I had were: If this turns catastrophic, my last moments with him were gassing him out.

I nervously read a book (with the faraway monitor in my field of vision, keenly watching the color block) to keep from sobbing.

He won't remember. Won't remember any of it.

And me...I'll never forget.

My February Girls

Today is my wife, Corrie's, birthday. Yesterday she gave birth to a daughter, or second child. Now I have two February girls.

Having made it to the due date---January 30th---and sailed past it, was an accomplishment in itself. Our first baby, the extremely boyish boy Cassius, was five weeks early, and all the doctor-y folks we talked with mostly summarized our likely birth proceedings as, "Oh, don't worry, but that baby will be early, too."

That turned out to not be the case.

Not necessarily feeling it with our OB, we decided to change plans at week 37 or so, and had a series of "speed-dates" with a midwife we liked, and decided on a home-birth, mostly because our choices were limited.

The midwifery from 2016 that we'd planned to use with Cass had ended up not working out, and our opinion on the place had shifted by the end of it all. And since we were opting out of the OB and the same hospital that the Boy was born in, we were left thin of options besides home.

So, that was our new plan.

Sunday night rolls around. I finished my slides and papers for Monday, shaved, and joined a pregnant Corrie in bed. We went to sleep before 11:30. At 12:45 she was waking me up, asking me to get towels because her water had broken.

We got the bed ready for future amniotic leaks, I went back to my computer and set my substitute up, and we settled in to go back to sleep, Corrie pretty sure that we couldn't know how much time would be between the water breaking and the baby coming. It was now about 1:20.

As we laid back down, her body---which had been slowly cramping and contracting for weeks by this point---seemed to have a serious cramp, which was actually a real contraction. She breathed through it and said, "That...seemed like a real one."

Ten minutes later and another "real" one, and we texted the midwife. She texted back saying to let her know when they were five minutes apart. After another one, we started timing.

About forty minutes in, averaging eight minutes between contractions, a no-effing-around variety of contraction, they quickly picked up the pace, and started to come about ninety seconds apart. I anxiously texted the midwife again, asking her to head over.

She said she was a half-hour out. The time between her saying she was on her way and the next text, saying she was a half-hour out, may have been four minutes, but felt like twenty. I was standing around helpless, as Corrie was moaning and painfully uncomfortable for a minute every other minute. She said the contractions were getting "pushy," and there was some blood now showing up.

I texted again. The response I got was, "Call or face-time if it feels imminent and we're not there yet."

Okay. OKAY. I got this.

They arrived, Corrie moved to the bedroom proper, stayed on all-fours, and labored for about an hour before our daughter, Camille Adele, arrived. I caught her, but unassisted this time, and got to announce the sex.

Throughout all of it, Cass never woke up, despite being next door the whole time.

7 pounds 8 ounces, 21 inches long, grip like a welder and leg strength like a gymnast, our baby girl is something else.

Our Perfect Day

So, water broke at 12:45, baby came at 4:42, Cass woke up around 6:50. He was so excited; he'd been saying that he wanted a baby sister. We asked him if he wanted to go to school and tell everyone abut his new sister, or stay home with us and have a family day. 

We were ecstatic when he said he wanted to go to school. That time we needed. We spent the rest of the day taking turns cuddling and napping with the young lady. Eventually I showered and went to get the Boy, made dinner, and went back to cuddling and sleeping.

It was a perfect day, a perfect birthing day.