The baby is fine, as far as we know, growing in Holly's womb, ignorant of the turmoil just outside its cozy home, turmoil it serves as the catalyst to. All the joy and excitement of having a baby has been sucked away from me, quite possibly permanently. I would love to be a bit melodramatic, it's always a bit fun and has this great "pity me" feel to it, but it will serve no good end, thus I will be open, honest, and frank.

I re-calculated our budget, this time without Holly's income, and it is a bleak, desolate, depressing picture of despair. I want to run; I want to run, hide, disappear, and never look back nor be found again. The financial Hell-hole Holly and I only recently climbed out of looms again in our near future, only this time we cannot point to a sudden lay-off as the cause; this time we'll have to willingly jump into it . . . for an indefinite period of time. The worst part is I have not yet figured out how much the baby will cost us per month. I've heard estimates but I don't trust them. I have only figured out what our utilities, groceries, loan payments, and three "luxury" services will cost us, and this alone pushes the limit of my salary.

It's official and confirmed by the doctor's blood test: we are pregnant! Sometime in June we should bring home a little bundle of stress, worry, "innocence", and a tax-break. Am I excited? You bet! Am I nervous? You bet! Am I scared? You bet! Would I do it all over again? You bet!

More news to come as it develops. Eegads. I'm going to be a father!

Eleven hours ago Holly and I drove into the hospital, got checked in, and settled down in the waiting room to (guess what?) wait. Both sets of parents came, and a pastor friend came as well, and we waited some more. Holly was admitted into pre-op about forty minutes after we got there; we were allowed to see her for a bit just before nine, and then she was ushered into the operating room. The entire procedure took about an hour, and the surgeon told me it went great, no problems, no complications. Now the remarkable thing, I think, about this surgeon is he took some time to investigate a secondary problem Holly has been recently complaining about. This was a quite a blessing because he was able to take some good pictures and diagnose the problem better than the ultrasound she had last week.

This story is a work in progress, as the caper has yet to happen. In truth I am attempting to start a new genre of detective story, one where I predict what will happen and then the gumshoe will have to solve the case. I think it will take a few dozen decades to catch on, but I'll be hailed as a genius! A genius I say!

My poor Holly has multiple gallstones, and from what the doctors could see on the ultrasound image she's had them for a couple of years. The pain on New Year's Day that sent Holly crawling to the doctor's office turns out to have been a gallbladder attack. She's since continued to suffer, so much so that the doctors were convinced they needed to do further tests as their original diagnosis was flawed. So now it's come down to this, and Holly is to have her gallbladder removed in its entirety.

The slow road to recovery includes a stops at the massage therapist. I had put off ever setting foot inside such a den of human comfort in part due to the money and in part due to my shape, which is to say round. The vertigo and headaches finally grew to be enough to make me go, and I'm glad I did. I've been twice now, two weeks apart, and I've got one more visit in a week, and it's done wonders. The chest pain I was feeling was in fact a knot in my pectoral muscles. My vertigo was exacerbated by tension in my neck and shoulders (if not entirely caused by it). The tension headaches, well, we all know where they come from: tension.

I've begun assembling a list of what I consider to be the best sites, pages, movies, pictures, et cetera on the World Wide Web. It's for general consumption, which means I keep the “techie” things out. It does not mean it's always safe for the kiddies. It's never intentionally unsafe, but I'm not a good judge of these things. I'm told I scare small children just by looking at them (and there's at least one to which I know this is true).

You can find this list at http://scbarber.tumblr.com/. Enjoy!

I'm perfectly healthy! But wait, I still feel crappy. What gives? The blood work, EKG, and “bladder sample” all came back good, so good that there seems to be no reason for why I feel so off. Then the doctor gave me one of the “follow my finger with your eyes” tests and pronounced that I have form of vertigo with the word “benign” in it. The best part is, he said it's most likely transitory and will go away on it's own; he indicated we won't do any treatment unless it develops into a chronic case.

So lucky me gets to deal with dizzy spells, lightheadedness, and the nausea that accompanies it. Let this serve as a warning why I don't eat much, act miserable, and possibly puke all over you. It's not that I don't like you, or your cooking. Really. (Honestly though, who makes asparagus pudding and then garnishes it with ketchup? With cooking like that it's no wonder I'd get sick.) This means I'm hoping and praying it'll go away on its own soon. I don't like driving when I feel dizzy. I don't like doing much of anything really.

I am getting older, for time now flies by and months fall off the calendar. I dare not think of what milestones await me around the next corner, but suffice it to say I'd love to find the pause button: I need to catch my breath. The last four months both crawled and flew by, proving that my perception of time is as firm as it has always been, which is to say, tenuous at best. Thanksgiving, Christmas, the New Year, Valentine's Day, and St. Patrick's Day have all come and gone, and not all of them left pleasant memories.

In short, I've been feeling quite sickly all this time. A good portion of it has to do with the upheaval commensurate with a new job. I've gone on at length on my other blog about change, but to sum up, change brings with it a tremendous amount of stress. There is but one other time in my life that I have been as stressed, and that was the year I served as the Interim Pastor. Stress of this magnitude and this duration always makes me sick to my stomach all the time. As you can now well imagine the holiday feasts were no joy to me, but a chore in not embarrassing myself by publicly displaying what was previously in my stomach. To those poor souls who supped with me, this is why I was nowhere near cheerful.

I know it has been too long since my last missive. We've passed two major holidays, two minor ones, and St. Patrick's day is near. I'm still settling into my new job and I have quite a few things I could say about that, I'm sure. I will write about these things, only I don't know when. However, I do have to share something that has nothing to do with anything. Creativity begs to be shared and so I share this with you (click on the image).

Once upon a time in a kingdom far from normal there lived a old bearded bald man. He lived a quiet little life of desperation trudging a long way to and from work every day. He had a beautiful wife and two wonderful little kitties, and every day he had to go to work he missed them. One day a fairy god-friend popped out of the forrest and said, “Oh you poor old, cranky, ugly man, what foul fate has befallen you? You should travel to the little brook not far from your home and there you will find a new job and all will be well, though I can't promise your hair will grow back.” So the bearded bald man visited the little brook and. . . .