Welcome, Elliot Dashiell!

Our second son, Elliot Dashiell, was born this morning at 05:28 after about 12 hours of labor. He weighs 7 lbs, 6 oz, and in 18.5 inches long. He’s also perfectly healthy and incredibly beautiful.

Meg labored through the night with the gentle support of Jan, one of the O.B. nurses at the local hospital. She had an entirely natural delivery after 26 minutes of pushing, and amazed all of us (the O.B. staff, our doctor, me) with how focused, collected, and strong she was. Damn, baby!

See more pics, including one The Boy shot, at our Flickr account.

I’ll shoot and post more tomorrow, when I’ve had more than four hours broken sleep in the last day-and-a-half.

Edit 01/22/08: Corrected Elliot’s birth-length to 18.5 inches. See what sleep deprivation will do to a guy?

Ethanol fuel = bad

E-85 is selling for $2.65 a gallon up here in Wistucky these days. It’s significantly cheaper than standard gas ($3.09 as of yesterday), but it has less available energy per unit than does petro-fuel, so consumers end up buying more of it. That means more land will go into corn production, more corn will get fermented, and more small towns will have their men and women-folk revert back to their vocational roots: moonshiners, albeit with government sanction this time.

It’s the land going into corn production that worries me; I’m all for more small-town moonshiners. Call me kooky, but I’d assume that the vast majority of land that gets converted to corn production, either from previously fallow land, or from a different crop, is going to be managed conventionally, ie. with insecticides and fertilizers based on petroleum. That’s a whole lot of petro-energy to put into growing a crop for bio-fuel. Then there’s additional energy input into the process when you talk about actually using the corn to produce ethanol. In fact, based on this study from the University of California at Berkley, we’d be better off putting the energy it takes to produce ethanol straight in the tanks of our SUVs.

While it’s true that ethanol burns significantly cleaner than petro-fuel, we’re just creating other problems (further degrading agricultural lands, skewed agricultural policy, and throwing away energy to make energy [ignorance of the laws of thermodynamics is no excuse!]) in our quest to mitigate one: global warming.

I’ll give you this: global warming is a potentially big problem. But does it make sense to keep rushing around with blinders on and creating more problems than we solve? I say we break with tradition, admit that we lost this round, and slow down while we figure out smart ways to mitigate the damage we’ve done while slowly, intelligently reversing the changes we’ve unwittingly engineered.

On the cusp

We made it! The Wife is officially at 36 weeks in her pregnancy today, so that means:

1. It’s all good from here
2. No more restricted activity (hubba hubba, and what not)
3. Our house is about to get a *whole lot* cleaner
4. Our lives are about to get a whole lot busier

It also means The Boy will officially be a big brother, and able to teach things he knows, like his new (and only) knock-knock joke (the punch line is “WaZOOka!” and is hysterical if you’re three. It’s not bad if you’re thirty-somethin’, too.), and the best way to wheedle Dad out of “somes root beer, pleeeese!”

We’ll keep you posted, with words and images.

Busy boy

Wow. The winter holidays have come and gone, and I feel like my feet are finally starting to touch the (frozen, icy, and *very* slippery) ground again. It was really nice to have my folks come up for a brief-but-fun visit for Christmas eve and Christmas day. The Boy implemented a play-with-it-after-you-open-it policy for all his gifts, so he didn’t finish off his monster-stack of presents until the evening of the 26th. (It doesn’t help that I made a tactical error by using Hot Wheels as stocking-stuffers.)

And in the past couple of weeks, I’ve had a bunch of potential side jobs start stacking up. Of course, none of them (except a free site rebuild I’m doing for some friends) has actually come to fruition yet. Everyone’s talking pretty big, but with most side projects, I ask for half (usually) the money up front, and I won’t start work until I have a check. Most folks don’t have a problem with that, but I have yet to have anyone in this group actually hand me a check. Oh, there are rumors of money, even, with one group, assurances that “the check is in the mail. Really.”

And while I’m not working on any of these projects yet, I’m still thinking about them all of the time, and I feel pressure from them all in the back of my head like I *should* be working on them, but have chosen to slack. But I’m standing firm. I’m telling these folks what Cuba Gooding, Jr., told Tom Cruise in “Jerry Maguire.” Show me the money. We’ll see how that works out.