IT'S A BOY!!!

Say "hello" to Hunter Joel Regalado! Currently 17 weeks and 3 days "old," lol.  Still due February 11, 2013; at least as far as we know!  We're so excited!  :D :D :D

First baby pictures!!

Our every first baby pictures!  Yaaaay!!  Our sonographer said he/she was "cute," so our baby has officially been complimented already, lol.  It was so cool!!  We could even see him/her wiggling around and everything, which the sonographer said was pretty rare to see this early (I am 9 weeks along today!).  So I guess that means he/she will be hyper, lol. 

It was such a cool experience!! My husband teared up (we knew he would; he's such a softie!).

I have to go buy a baby book soon...

Arguing with my embryo

Embryo:  I have decided that sleep is for chumps, and I won't have a chump for a mother. You're welcome.

Me:  What do you know?  You're the size of a jelly bean.  Go. To. Sleep.

Embryo:  Um, no. Also, I rather enjoy this peeing thing, so you'll be doing that more often. Probably instead of sleeping.

Me:  You know, you're not too small for me to come in there and spank you.

Embryo:  Is that SASS I hear?  Are you SASSING me?  Just for that, beef is going to smell like hot garbage and week-old roadkill for at least the next week and a half.

Me:  Don't test me. If you're old enough argue with me, then maybe you don't need those stinky prenatal vitamins that give me the fish burps for three hours anymore.

Embryo:  Hey, if you want a half-retarded baby, that's on you.

Me:  If you're going to keep me up anyway, then maybe I'll take up drinking coffee and tequila. I bet you'll fall asleep if you're drunk.

Embryo:  Guess what?  You're going to crave cat food at some point during your pregnancy. I'm not going to say when or for how long, but it's happening.  Brace yourself.  Also, I'm going to love Dad the most. 

Me:  This is what I get for taking those expensive vitamins. An evil genius jelly bean baby.  Awesome.

Embryo:  Ain't it though?

Me:  "Ain't" is not a word.  You will use correct grammar while in the womb.  I won't have my offspring sounding like an ignoramus.

Embryo:  Don't make me take away ice cream.

How hot is too hot?

Alright, I have a question for all of you, as even my not unremarkable researching skills have failed me.

As you may know, I live in Texas, where summers are HOT. Like I hear northerners complaining about 90 degrees and I laugh at them.  It's not unusual to have the hottest days of the year reach over 110, and that's before the heat index adds another 5-10 degrees. Last year alone, we had over 100 days at over 100 degrees.

This doesn't usually bother me. My car doesn't even have air conditioning, and when my cars HAVE had it, I almost never used it. My motto is, "suck it up and roll down the windows."  We don't even turn the air conditioning on in our house until the daily highs are well over 80 degrees, and we turn it back off and open up the windows as soon as the temperature drops back below 78 (which is the lowest we ever run our A/C).

But now there's a fetus involved, and I'd very much like it to not die from heatstroke on the drive home from work.   My husband's truck has air conditioning, but it's a gas guzzler and I'd prefer not to use it unless it's necessary.

So my question to you is...HOW HOT IS TOO HOT??  There's no doubt that I'll take the gas-chugging truck to work on days when the high will be 105 degrees, but what about 95 degrees? 98?  I have a 1/2 hour commute (barring traffic, etc.), I'm inside the car so I'm out of direct sunlight, and I have the windows down while I cruise along at anywhere from 40-75 miles per hour.

The only information I found online about pregnant women and heat was to avoid hot showers, baths, and spas, which has surprisingly little to do with my daily commute.  I'm fairly used to the heat, but I don't want the baby to be missing an arm or half its face or something because I picked the wrong day to drive my gas-sipping Aveo to work instead of the air-conditioned boat of a truck.

So, what's the cutoff?  What is the "danger zone?"  Not what's comfy or convenient; I can live with a little discomfort in the face of such high gas prices, but what is the UNSAFE temperature for a pregnant woman to be driving in an un-air-conditioned car for about 1/2 an hour?

Any thoughts?

Happy time is Baby time!!

In case you missed the exciting news via Twitter & Facebook, I'm pregnant! YAAAY!!!  I'm about 5 weeks along (according to their weird calendar, anyway.  The baby was conceived 3 weeks ago, but that's not how they measure it; go figure), probably due in February.

We just told the Grandmas 9and everyone else) this weekend.  I made these crystal bracelets (for the girls) and keychains (for the boys) for each family member that said things like "Nana," Grandma," "Hello, my name is Uncle Bobby," etc. We have them their presents and waited for the gasps!  This will be the first grandbaby for everyone, so everyone is SUPER excited! My mom cried all day, told everyone we saw all about it, lol. 

The crazy thing is that my sister is also pregnant, just about as far along as I am, so we'll be racing to see who will REALLY give Nana the first grandchild.  I told her no having them on the same day, because we live over an hour apart and of course Mom can't be both places at once!  It'll be kind of nice, since I was beginning to despair that my kids would ever have any cousins, or if they did, they'd be so far apart in age that they wouldn't be interested in one another.

There sure does seem to be something in the water, though; my best friend is pregnant (5 months along), and one of my husband's best friends' wife is, too, also 5 weeks along. Craziness!

I;m going to try and stick to my low-carb diet for the most part.  not TOTALLY, of course; it wouldn't be safe for the baby for me to only eat 20 carbs a day, so I'm bumping it up to around 60-70 carbs a day, which is the "maintenance level" of the low-carb diet, and I'll try to get those mostly from fruits and veggies.  I won't lose any more weight, but I shouldn't gain too much, either.  Everything I've looked at online seems to back up my belief that this will be fine for the baby. After all, I can't imagine that I'll be denying my baby any real nutrition by abstaining from sugar, bread, and pasta.

My first prenatal visit will be July 2nd.  We're so excited!!

Fixing your Broken Smartphone

My husband dropped his EXTREMELY expensive, 1-month-old, Samsung Galaxy SII smartphone a couple of weeks ago.  And yes, it broke.  It was now a $600 brick, and we sure didn't have the money to replace it.  After waiting a few days to make sure it really was broken and not just "sick" or something (because androids can repair themselves, right? RIGHT? No? DANGIT!!), we started looking around for repair options.

Replacing it with a new phone of similar abilities was out of the question, and the 48 hours he'd been using one of our old phones that only makes phone calls and sends text messages had convinced him that he could likely die from technological starvation if he had to use it for another 2 years.  So we started poking around on the internet looking for anyone who might be able to repair smartphones.

Lo and behold, we stumbled across MobileTechVideos.  They gave us a quote that was $100 less than anywhere else, and they have some spiffy YouTube videos showing how they can "unbrick" your phone.  With no small amount of trepidation, we sent them my husband's broken phone, $200, and prayed.

About 2 weeks later, it came back to us in brand spankin' new condition, and my husband claims it works even better now than it did before he broke it.  The staff there was very helpful and communicative, and they assured us that it only took as long as it did because they didn't keep the necessary parts for that phone in stock and had to wait for it to arrive from Samsung.

We couldn't find any reviews of MobileTechVideos.com before we used them, so we were understandably nervous about sending our phone to them, but we did it, and they did a fantastic job.  So if you need your phone fixed, I highly recommend them.  They were quick to reply to our questions, cheaper than anyone else I'd found, and they did a really great job.  They repair many types of phones, and you can always email them to ask about yours.

Yay! I won a contest! :D

It's been a good writing news kinda week!

I found out last night that I won the Utica Writer's Club's critique contest! Yaaaay!  They made their decisions based on the query letter and first 250 words of the entrants' manuscripts.  I'm so excited that they chose mine as the winner in the fantasy category!

So now I've won a critique of the first 5 pages of my book by a published author.  I'm so excited! 

You can read all the winning entries in all 10 categories on Jordan Mierek's blog.  And feel free to comment on them; you all know how we aspiring authors love constructive criticism! 

And thank you so much, to Jordan and to the Utica Writer's Club!  This is the first writing contest I've won, and I'm SO excited! :D

Huzzahs to Wes Chu!!

Handstands all around for one of my fellow Anxious Appliances, Wes Chu, who just signed his *first* book deal with Angry Robot Books!  Wes, like myself, had his manuscript passed up to the angry robot overlord editors during last year's Open Door month. 

And, having beta-read his manuscript, "The Lives of Tao," I can assure you it's brilliant, so everyone should buy it immediately upon its release.

I insist you check out all the details at the Angry Robot Books website, because they've already said it better than I can.

Congrats, Wes! I can't wait to buy it! :D

HUZZAHS!

Ace/Roc Publishing just asked to read my full manuscript!  SQUEEEEEEEEEEE!!  Happy dances all over the internet!!  I'm SO EXCITED!! 

That is all. :)

Fairness for Struggling Students Act

Anyone else out there struggling under the Sisyphus-like burden of student loan debt?

Then check THIS OUT!!

I don't know what your situation might be, but mine is a result of my school telling me to borrow as much money as I could as often as I could--including living expenses--because I simply COULD NOT expect to work and ever graduate from their school.  Or so they told me, over and over and over again.

Should I have known better?  Yep.  Should I have ignored their constant nagging and the incredible pressure to borrow another $10k? You betcha. But I was 20 and stupid and I borrowed and borrowed and borrowed some more.  When I had doubts, they told me not to worry, because when I was done with school I was going to make so much money that I'd barely even feel those student loan payments.  They brought in the court reporters from the O.J. Simpson trials who went on and on about how they made over $1 million apiece.  They brought in closed captioners who worked for NBC and made HALF A MILLION DOLLARS A YEAR.  They brought in people who only worked 3 months a year, remotely, from their mansions in Hawaii or Alaska or France.  I was enthralled.  I believed them, and I borrowed more money.

What they didn't tell me is that court reporting is something that either you can do or you can't. Either you have it hardwired inside of you the ability to write at 250 words per minute, or you don't.  But nobody told me that until I was too deep in to just walk away.  They told me before I enrolled that the average graduation time is 2 years.

Five years later, when my money ran out at last, they told me that court reporting just wasn't for me, that I was one of those unlucky few who just couldn't do it, and that the time had come for me to quit. 

Horrified, in shock, and half-blinded with tears, I had to quit, because I'd exhausted both my federal and private student loans.

Unable to even THINK about paying off my nearly-6-figure-high student loan debt, I enrolled in my local community college and paid tuition out of pocket, and found out that none of the classes I'd taken transferred. Not even the normal ones, like English, Psychology, or Medical Terminology, because they were labeled as "English 1401- FOR COURT REPORTERS." "Psychology 2106 - FOR COURT REPORTERS," etc.  So I had to start all over.

All the while, my debt was (and still is) incurring interest at a rate that I can't think about without throwing up.  There was no hope.  You can't discharge student loans through bankruptcy and they never go away like bad credit card debts will after 7 years.  And even when I'm eventually done with my Master's degree in Library Science (probably still about 7 years away because I'm paying everything out of pocket and I can only afford 2 classes at a time), I can only look forward to making about $45-55k a year. My student loan debt will easily be three times that amount by then; probably more.

Yes, I was young and stupid and I should have known better, but in my defense, I was young and stupid and dozens of teachers and administrators knew that.  They took advantage of it, and they urged me to keep on borrowing for five years, and when I was  all dried out, they cast me aside.

But now there's a ray of hope on the horizon!!  There's a bill before Congress called the "Fairness for Struggling Students Act" that would allow students to discharge their student loans (at least the private ones) through bankruptcy! Is bankruptcy ideal?  Heck, no! But it would mean a fresh start for millions of students who had to borrow money to pay for degrees that they can't use or don't pay enough, because their families were too poor to pay for their college tuition out of pocket.

So please, please, please consider signing this petition to show your support for the Fairness for Struggling Students Act.