What We've Been Up To

I have been woefully neglectful in updating this blog. Kori and I have been keeping busy, especially in getting ready for the arrival of Keelie.

Our friend Jen took some great pregnancy photos in mid April. We also had more ultrasound pictures taken on April 20. You’ll see these photos in this update.

Keelie is quite a mover and loves to kick Mommie. It’s easy to see her movements on the surface of Mommie’s belly. She’ll stop moving long enough to listen to Daddy’s voice. She also loves listening to music. Yeah, this is how we all got here and hundreds of millions of women are pregnant at any given time, but isn’t it always different when it happens to you? And since Keelie is our first child, we’re going through experiences we’ve never had before. It is definitely one thing to know something on an intellectual level, but an entirely different thing to actually experience it.

The picture above is of Keelie snuggling up next to the placenta, and you can see her knee in the shot. The shot to the right shows Keelie with her foot in front of her face.

I have to say that Kori handles pregnancy well (and looks great!), though she has finally reached the point where she is ready for the pregnancy to be over.

We’ve had a lot of friends and acquaintances welcome babies over the last year, and we’ve been able to observe, on a casual basis, some of those babies as they go through their first few months. My father’s wife’s daughter just gave birth to her second child. Our friends Lynn & Erin just had a boy. I guess we’re just at that age.

We went to the birthing classes at the hospital, and a class at church designed for expecting first-time parents. I have three books for first-time expectant fathers that I’ve been reading through. Of course, there has also been the shopping, a baby shower limited to Kori’s close female friends, and the gifts (thank you!).

To get ready, we’ve been de-cluttering the condo in general, and I went back to working on “The Cave” so that we could turn it into the Nursery. That’s been quite an effort. That picture to the right should give you an idea of the look Kori is creating for the nursery. Also, rather to fix the problems we were having with our 4-year-old computer, we went ahead and got a new one, complete with Vista. This will no doubt keep my blood pressure raised as we work through the problems of Vista. Thanks, Microsoft.

Anyway, the reason I brought that up is that it meant we had yet another old computer taking up space in our place. I’ve been trying to move everything still on the one with Windows 95 to the one with XP so we can then properly dispose of the hobbled thing, and I won’t bore you with all of the gory details of that migration, which I haven’t managed to entirely finish yet.

Kendra and Steve, as a gift, recently devoted a lot of time and energy (with some assistance from Kori and I) in putting up shelves for our Christmas village miniatures. The village had been set up on a collapsible table along our front window while we were on our honeymoon. Since that was in December of 2004, It was well-past time to get that table back to Kori’s parents and free up some more space in the living room while enhancing the look.

Our most recent out-of-town trip killed three birds with one stone. We went to the San Diego/La Jolla area. It was a delayed Valentine’s Day/first-date anniversary observance combined with a “babymoon” that we deliberately moved to coincide with our attendance at Tez & Fermin’s wedding. Tez’s parents and Pam (Kori’s mother) went to high school together and have been friends ever since, and that extended to a family friendship between the two households.

As gifts, Kori made two blankets in their wedding/reception colors. The wedding was beautiful (so was the bride!) and the reception was a big-time party. The father of the bride is a successful TV writer/director/producer, and I was able to recount to him how, early on in our dating, I was telling Kori about how I watched his show and about a certain moment of a certain episode that I found hilarious, not knowing that Kori’s parents even knew him, let alone that they were consultants on that very episode. When Kori had filled me in, we’d shared a good laugh. So, I thanked him for being one of the reasons Kori and I ended up married. I was able to meet a couple of the actors, too.

We did a few other things on that trip. Kori and I ate at the 1950s-themed Corvette Diner, because Kori has for memories of that place, and hankering for a burger with peanut butter on it. That was good. The place is popular. We also ate at a Mexican restaurant in old town, visited the San Diego Zoo, and went to Sea World, where I finally got to see the haunted lighthouse 3-D movie in which ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic has a cameo.

Speaking of Mr. Yankovic – he and his band are on tour again, and scheduled to appear at the Orange County Fair again, but those appearances are awfully soon after Keelie’s due date. So, it looks like we’ll need ear plugs for Keelie. Okay, I kid. It looks like this will be the first time in ten years I’m going to be passing up a chance to go see my favorite act. I really hope they add a date or two later on at another local venue, like they have in the past - sometime in the late fall or whatever.

Something new we’ve been able to do in recent months is attend some of a certain friend’s Friday night film viewings. He’s from our parents’ generation but is young-at-heart, lives in beautiful, enchanting home he designed himself, and has an impressive home entertainment system. Typically, some of the folks meet for dinner out, then even more join up at the house afterwards or at a cinema for the viewing. In addition to new/impending feature film releases on DVD, the home viewings often include material attendees have brought to share. It’s a lot of fun. Kori had never been over the house before, and so she got a full tour. Also, she found kindred-spirit fans of “The Happiest Millionaire”.

With changes to our schedule and changes to the television networks’ schedules, we’ve resorted to taping more shows. Because of Kori, I watch more shows (or parts of shows) than I would have otherwise.

Not only have I been neglecting this blog, but I’ve haven’t been spending as much time contributing to LaughingPlace.com, The Disney Blog, and personal projects as I’d like. We’re not making Disneyland trips as often as we’d like, either. I guess we’re being prepared for life with a child. In recent months, every other set of days off or so, I get in some extra sleep, such us sleeping for thirteen hours or taking a long nap. We know we need as much sleep as we can get before Keelie emerges. Unfortunately, it is a lot easier for me to sleep than it is for Kori, as you can imagine.

There’s no resolution yet to our open legal matter. (We are the plantiffs.) That should all be wrapped up during an arbitration session sometime this year. Interestingly, three of the four people on “the other side” have long since left the company or have been fired.

Things are going well for me at the office. ACWM is a much lower profile place than DPW, so my quotes aren’t in print or going over the air nearly as much as they did when I was at DPW. I’m building a Public Information Office there, which involves a combination of taken some things off of the hands of others, and doing things that weren’t ever done before. Although it has been a while since we’ve all worked together, Marina, True, Kerjon, and I keep in touch.
Kori has been working hard and keeping busy getting things ready for Keelie. She’s doing a great job, and all of the help and encouragement from our families and friends is highly appreciated.

As for other news about our families… Troy has been selling insurance since coming back from Louisiana and has recently brought Toby in to help him, and Kirby has been performing as a fill-in in Pirates Dinner Adventure (and we’ve gone to see her). Kendra and Steve have been a GREAT help to us in preparing for Keelie’s arrival, Steve being a trooper given he’s had a tough job doing things like working on the website for a certain top-rated television singing show and will still join Kendra in helping out. Pam’s been working with the new mothers and newly arrived babies in her nursing duties, and Bill continues to work in real estate. Chris has been working for a local school district. Vicky is still working at the Pasadena Ritz-Carlton, and she has also been keeping company with a certain famous lawyer who is in the news a lot lately. Mike is still working in the same line of work, and Kim is still assisting with the special needs students in school, and they are also raising Keelie’s cousins Blaine and Macon, who are both in high school. Mom is teaching less as she oversees some home improvement projects. Dad continues to work hard in private practice three years after retiring from county service. His wife, Kathleen, is as busy as ever with her work and projects.

Through participating in online pregnancy forums, Kori has discovered MySpace. I may have to set things up here so that we can both be online at the same time on different machines.

So, that’s what’s been going on here. If you want more my thoughts about stuff such as television, computer/online stuff, work, and so on, check it out on my blog. I didn’t think that Kori’s friends should have to wade through all of that here. Only my friends should be so tortured.

It has been over three years since I proposed to Kori, and I was struck the other day by the intense feeling that I have absolutely no doubt that I made a good choice, the right choice, in proposing to her. With so many things in life, it is easy to think “What if I had made a different choice? Would I be better off now?” I can say with certainty that in this case, I made the best choice. I have no regrets or questions lurking in the recesses of my mind – that was the smartest thing I’ve ever done for myself.

Drop us a line to let us know how you are doing and what you’ve been up to.

-Ken