A Bit Of Perspective

I just read a news story about the NRA filing a suit against the NOPD claiming they didn't make a "good faith effort" to find the owners of guns confiscated after Katrina. The NOPD managed to return about 100 out of 1000 guns. The NRA's hired private investigators were able to find 75 of the 300 owners they identified for their suit. "Finding these folks has been a nightmare," they lawyer is quoted as saying. I say the difficulty the NRA is having in finding these people just leads me to believe that the NOPD did in fact make a decent "good faith effort." Here's the story.

A Story Of A Squishy Gift

I got some nice things for Christmas this year. What I'll likely enjoy most are the DVD sets of Superbad (from my wife,) the complete Blackadder series (from my in-laws,) and the second season of HBO's Rome (from my parents, who apparently didn't notice the first season was still on my wishlist. Oh well. My birthday's not far off.) The most memorable, though, was something much more ephemeral, but it's not memorable for the nature of the gift itself, but rather on what happened to it.

My parents sent us a box of gifts for us, my in-laws, and our niece & nephews on my wife's side. We opened the box yesterday and among the individually wrapped gifts inside were a couple small round-ended gifts for me. They felt soft and I squeezed them a bit, guessing they were socks or some such thing.

This morning my wife and I opened our gifts from each other and from my parents. I squeezed the soft ones again, still speculating they were socks. I opened the first one and found that whatever it was was wrapped in bubble wrap. That was a good thing because it turned out to be a chocolate Hubig's pie. Oops. The other was the same thing. I opened and ate the softer-feeling of the two and it turned out fine, if cracked in one or two places. I think being surrounded by plastic kept the crust a bit moister than it would have been, and therefore a bit less prone to crumbling. That was fortunate. I can only imagine their condition had I squeezed them like I did if they were wrapped unprotected.

Maybe I'll post more later. For now I need to work on some Secret Headquarters business to prepare for tomorrow.

Happy Holidays!

Another Outlet For My Genius

Okay, maybe that's overstating things a bit, but we all do have our moments of genius and near-genius, don't we? Well, I'm hoping one or two of mine will occur through the lens of a camera because I've signed onto another print-on-demand site. This time it's Imagekind.com, which is focused on high-quality art and photo prints with a large assortment of frame and mat choices. If you have image files big enough, you can get prints up to 60"x45". The size selections for each image are automatically limited by the resolution of the image.

It's pretty easy. You sign up, pick an account type (they range from free with a 1-gallery/200M/24 image limit, to $11.99/month or $94.99/year unlimited Platinum plan,) create & name your gallery(s), and upload photos to them or import from Flickr. After that you can set names & descriptions and tags (if you want your images to be found in the on-site search,) and set your markup if you want more or less than the default 10%. And of course you should set up your profile and payment information so you can get the checks they should eventually be sending out.

It's fun! You can find my stuff, currently a dozen photos, here.

For The Record

A few of you may have already heard. Our second IVF cycle failed. This time we didn't even see a chemical pregnancy, though we may have just been lucky to catch it the first cycle.

We're regrouping now. We still have two embryos frozen so we can try again at a lower cost than a full cycle, though there is a chance neither will survive being thawed. My inclination at this point is to let my wife's younger sister try carrying them, or at the very least have a more thorough examination of my wife, perhaps a scope of her uterus, to determine if there are any factors preventing implantation. If there are, and it's just something correctable, we can do something about it before we try again. If there's something that's not fixable, we'd pretty much be left with my sister in law as a carrier.

If that fails, we might consider IUI with donor sperm. I'm thinking since I do have some fair-enough sperm, though admittedly not much, I'd like to see if we could do IUIs with a mix of my sperm and that of a near-lookalike donor. At least then any child to come of it could be genetically mine.

For now, we're taking a little time off to get some distance from the disappointment so we can make good rational decisions to maximize our chances for a baby. It's not that difficult to take our minds off it at the moment, actually, since we both have bad colds. I'll be getting back to blogging about other things as well.