Exercise

Runners, Y’all Are Disgusting

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Photo by Rene Schwietzke

Anyone who has run in an organized race recognizes the flotsam and jetsam of a run: water cups, gel packets, and the occasional item of clothing. While the piles of Gatorade cups can be a little jarring to see, they are more or less working as designed. Runners jog by a water table where volunteers have lined up cups, drink their water, chuck the cup, and go on their way. Longer races will give out “fuel” of some kind; the current trend is calorie dense gels that supposedly are easier to digest than actual food. At the end of the race volunteers clean up all the cups and in theory everyone lives happily ever after.

In practice, the cups and gel packets stray. Half a mile down course from the water station you’ll find some errant cups, some mashed to the asphalt and some still rolling around. Maybe the wind carried them there, maybe the shuffling of thousands of feet kicked them there, or maybe someone just held them half a mile. Either way they’ve now escaped the territory of the volunteers and unless the race organizer is particularly diligent (most aren’t) will become part of the local ecosystem.

On Sunday afternoon following the Philadelphia Marathon I went for a run along Kelly Drive, part of the Fairmount Park system which runs along the Schuylkill River. I saw some form of race detritus roughly every 5 feet for the entire length of my 3.5 mile run. The worst offender by far was the Gu gel packets, little foil and plastic pouches now flattened all over the road and sidewalk. A few cups, a few socks, but mostly Gu. Unlike the cups, which are certainly still a problem, the Gu packets will never break down. They will never biodegrade and go away. Instead they’ll eventually get washed into the river, mixed into the Delaware river, and then either hang out in the Delaware bay or get whisked out to the Atlantic ocean to join the other 6.4 tons of garbage in the world’s oceans. Also, it’s ugly.

Despite being a runner myself I can’t help but feel that these marathoners came in, blocked my streets, trashed my city, and left. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the economic activity the race brings to the city. But after my run on Sunday I’m frankly feeling pretty bitter about the whole thing.  In order to make marathons and other major runs a more welcome addition to cities and not just garbage generating traffic jams, three things need to happen:

1. Runners need to learn to be less disgusting

I get it, I really do. When you’re running it’s hard to focus on whether or not your cup made it into the trash can (and often there isn’t one anyway). Tossing your cup on the ground is part of the culture. That’s fine. What’s not fine is carrying whatever it is for half a mile or a mile and then ditching it there. If you’re able to run with your ipod, water bottles, and all the other crap I routinely see distance runners strap to themselves, you can find somewhere to hold that empty foil pouch until you get to another volunteer station.

Speaking of the culture, the culture is bullshit. If you’re an elite runner, I can see how you don’t have time to deal with a cup / trash can / etc. Most people running the Philadelphia marathon are not elite runners. The average finish time is over four hours. Are you really gonna claim you can’t spare the extra 10 seconds to find a trash can?

Also stop stripping during races. If you absolutely can’t handle wearing the same outfit for your whole run, at least have the decency to shed your layers at a volunteer station where it’s more likely to get cleaned up.

2. Race organizers need to step up their trash management game

I’m not going to lay the blame on the volunteers and staff who have the gargantuan task of trying to clean up a race course after the fact, especially if it’s a marathon course. I do however hold the organizers responsible for allowing the problem to get as bad as it is. I’ve been to races where there are only a few small trash cans immediately near the water station, or no trash cans at all. Water stations should have some sort of trash management solution on both sides of the race course, and there should be some place for runners to throw their trash at least a tenth of a mile out. Staff should be collecting the trash during the race so that the wind doesn’t blow it all over the city.

3. Sponsors need to choose environmentally conscious packaging

No matter what some garbage is going to escape. Over ten thousand people run the Philadelphia marathon, and there are probably a dozen or so water / gel stops. You have to plan for the fact that some packaging is going to get out into the world, and that stuff needs to be biodegradable. Then it’s still disgusting and ugly, but at least it’s not going to be floating in the ocean for the next 200 years. Gu packets aren’t even fucking recyclable.

FuelBelt
You’re carrying all this shit but you can’t fit an empty foil packet in there?

So yeah, that’s how I’m feeling about the marathon, and running in general, today. On the plus side my garbage-induced rage pushed me to a new personal record: I did a 10:54 pace over 7 miles. My previous best was a 10:59 for 6.2.

Hacking, Software

Weird problems: wordpress truncating captions

I woke up this morning to a fresh new problem at work: Wordpres was truncating image captions. Specifically, we have a lot of old content (dating back to 2007!) and therefore old shortcodes, and the old style caption codes (which use caption as an attribute) were getting truncated. They were also showing their opening quote. It was ugly, and it was confusing because I hadn’t touched the server at all in about a week.

I initially suspected an errant plugin, because that’s the cause of 90% of my pain in WordPress. Last night I’d spun up a staging server from a backup, so I had a <24 hour old copy of the server. Our databases are on a separate machine so I refreshed the dev database too.

Irritatingly, everything worked fine on dev. To figure out what was different between the two servers I use rsync (from within the web directory on the dev box)

rsync -avun -e ssh kellbot@production:/path/to/public_html/ .

The -n flag is key because it does a dry run rather than actually copying the files

Among other things, wp-includes/version.php was different. Turns out a security update had been applied automatically (taking us from 3.9.2 to 3.9.3). I updated us to 4.0.1 (uh, yeah been meaning to do that …) and everything was fixed.

 

Hacking

Customizing Buddypress / bbPress notification emails

We’re spinning up another buddypress community at work and need to customize many of the outgoing emails. This can be done via filters but is kind of tedious and doesn’t make it easy for non-devs to update the messages later. I found a plugin called Welcome Pack which provides a fairly straightforward interface for customizing some of the Budddypress emails, and have started extending it to encompass all of the outgoing mail we need control over (bbpress, wp core emails).

screenshot-local.wordpress.dev 2014-11-11 16-12-55

Ideally I’d like to add an Admin interface to link up new filter hooks, but for now I’ve just got a filter function you can use in your theme or plugin. It’s very much a work in progress, right now I’m doing a lot of refactoring to make things a little better suited to our use case. I think by the time it’s done it will save us a significant amount of time that I used to spend hunting down and editing email templates.

You can view my fork of the project on github. If this is a project anyone else is interested in, let me know!

Crafting, Family

Princess Bubblegum Hat

The toddler is Princess Bubblegum for Halloween this year, and I got a BMO dress off of Think Geek. For the record, Princess Bubblegum is pretty much the only princess I’ll ever allow.13bubblegum

I used a pink dress she already had in her closet, and made a quit hat with some fleece I’ve had in my closet for years, so the costume cost zero additional dollars, which is my favorite amount.

The base pattern for the hat is this earflap hat pattern, I just extended the ears to be longer and added a panel in the back. I freehanded the crown (which is a separate, removable piece) and stuffed the top of it with bits of scraps so it would stand up. I hand sewed the “jewel” on afterwards, but if I did it again I’d probably do it before sewing it together. The whole project is a little slapdash (and turned out a bit too small because I didn’t measure properly) but not bad for a quick costume.

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Gaming, Hacking, Programming

Animating build progress on a Minecraft server

My Minecraft server is seeing some use again, and I decided to build a life size model of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. I also thought it would be cool to have an animated gif of the build progress as things go.

2014-10-15

Configuring Overviewer

We use Minecraft Overviewer to generate Google-maps style views of our world for the web. I created a config file limiting the render area to the coordinates around the building

worlds["Main"] = "/minecraft/Minecraft/world"

renders["normalrender"] = {
        "world": "Main",
        "title": "Overworld",
        "dimension": "overworld",
        "crop" : (200, -90, 420, 70),
}
outputdir="/minecraft/renders/museum"

Compositing the tiles
I found a script for making composites from google map data, originally written for use with Overviewer, but it was pretty far out of date and written for a different version of python than what I’ve got installed. I used it as a jumping off point for writing my own composite script.

#!/usr/bin/env python

import Image, ImageChops

import os, fnmatch
import os.path
import re

import sys

CHUNK_SIZE = 384

def trim(im):
    bg = Image.new(im.mode, im.size, im.getpixel((0,0)))
    diff = ImageChops.difference(im, bg)
    diff = ImageChops.add(diff, diff, 2.0, -100)
    bbox = diff.getbbox()
    if bbox:
        return im.crop(bbox)

def find_files(directory, pattern):
    regex = re.compile(pattern)
    for root, dirs, files in os.walk(directory):
        for basename in files:
            if regex.match(basename):
                filename = os.path.join(root, basename)
                yield filename

def getAllFiles(srcdir):
  return find_files(srcdir,  "[0-9]+.png")

def getCoordinates(f):
  return map(lambda x: int(x), re.findall(r'[0-9-]+', f))

def getX(c):
  return {
    0: 0,
    1: 1,
    2: 0,
    3: 1,
  }[c]

def getY(c):
  return {
    0:0,
    1:0,
    2:1,
    3:1,
  }[c]

if len(sys.argv) != 4:
  print "Usage:", sys.argv[0], "<source directory (Dir)> <output file> <zoom level>"
  sys.exit(1)

sourceDirectory = sys.argv[1]
zoomLevel = int(sys.argv[3])
outputName = sys.argv[2]

width = (2**zoomLevel)  * CHUNK_SIZE
height = (2**zoomLevel)  * CHUNK_SIZE
print "Width:", width, "Height:", height

output = Image.new("RGBA", (width, height))

for f in getAllFiles(sourceDirectory):
  coords = getCoordinates(f)
  if len(coords) == zoomLevel:
    chunk = Image.open(os.path.join(sourceDirectory, f))
    #print chunk
    xbin = ""
    ybin = ""
    for c in coords:
      xbin = xbin + str(getX(c))
      ybin = ybin + str(getY(c))
    y = int(ybin,2)
    x = int(xbin,2)
    output.paste(chunk, (x*CHUNK_SIZE, y*CHUNK_SIZE))

print "Map merged, saving..."

output = trim(output)

if outputName[-3:] == "jpg" or outputName[-4:] == "jpeg":
  output.save(outputName, quality=100)
else:
  try:
    output.save(outputName, quality=85, progressive=True, optimize=True)
  except:
    print "Error saving with progressive=True and optimize=True, trying normally..."
    output.save(outputName, quality=85)

print "Done!"

This generates a daily snapshot and puts it in a web-accessible folder. I can then make a gif of all the images in that folder with ImageMagick’s convert utility
convert -delay 80 -loop 0 *jpg animated.gif

Checking for modifications
Originally I ran the script once daily on a cron, but later decided to run the world generator every half hour and only generate an image if there’s something new to see.

#!/bin/bash

rendersecs=$(expr `date +%s` - `stat -c %Y /minecraft/renders/museum/normalrender/3/`)
snapsecs=$(expr `date +%s` - `stat -c %Y /minecraft/renders/museum/last-snapshot`)
if [ "$rendersecs" -lt "$snapsecs" ]; then
  echo "Render was modified $rendersecs secs ago. Last snapshot $snapsecs secondds ago. Updating snapshot."
  /minecraft/renders/merge.py /minecraft/renders/museum /var/www/html/museum/$(date +\%Y-\%m-\%d-\%H\%M).jpg 3
  touch -m /minecraft/renders/museum/last-snapshot
  convert -delay 40 -loop 0 /var/www/html/museum/*jpg /var/www/html/museum/animated.gif
fi

Setting up cron tasks
I put two new jobs in my crontab file: one to generate the terrain and one to run my shell script. I give Overviewer a bit of a head start in case it has a lot of work to do.

*/30 *  * * *  overviewer.py --conifg=/minecraft/overviewer-museum.conf
10,40 *  * * *  /minecraft/update-museum.sh
Cooking, Recipes

Recipe Roundup

I’ve been cooking regularly for 9 months now! I’ve gotten considerably better at it, and my Evernote notebook has gotten fatter with go-to recipes. Here are links to some of my favorites.

Goat cheese and kale frittata cups
The texture is best the day they’re made, but they make a perfectly acceptable zap-it-and-run breakfast option. A good use of greens on their way out too. Gluten free.

Vegetable and Chickpea Curry
This crock pot recipe takes a fair amount of prep time in the morning, but once you get home it’s brain dead. I’ll swap in whatever vegetables I happen to have on hand, and usually keep cans of chickpeas and coconut milk on hand so Ic an make it with minimal planning. It’s a great way to eat your vegetables, and is both vegan and gluten free.

Turkey with Feta and Veggies
This is sort of like an adult mac and cheese. It is another one of my default “use up random veggies” recipes. The two central ingredients, turkey and feta, both are easy to keep around. Turkey can be frozen and a sealed package of feta will be happy in your fridge for a few months. Gluten free.

Steamed Veggies with Quinoa and Ginger Sauce
The sauce takes a little bit to make, but lasts a week or two in the fridge and makes for a good take-to-work lunch. Vegan and gluten free.

Roasted Carrot and Black Bean Tacos
You can sub in pretty much any greens if you don’t have carrot tops. Vegan and gluten free if you use gf corn tortillas.

Falafel and Cucumber Sauce
Falafel is kind of tedious to make but freezes well for another good lunch option. I pan fry or bake them instead of deep frying them. Gluten free if you use gf bread crumbs (I personally skip the pita anyway).

Grilled Fish Tacos with Chipotle-Lime Dressing
These are good if, and only if, you’ve got some good fresh tilapia. I tried it with frozen tilapia and they were kind of gross.

Fennel Smoked Salmon
A healthier alternative to my usual “drown it in butter” style of cooking salmon. Requires a grill and a smoker boxGluten free.

20 Minute Chicken Lettuce Wraps
Super quick dish. I was nervous because the fish sauce kind of smells like feet when you’re cooking, but the resulting dish is quite tasty. Gluten free. Honorable mention: Moo Shu Beef Lettuce Cups.

Creamy Chicken Quinoa and Broccoli Casserole
I am really excited it’s now getting cool enough to think about baking again. This stuff is delicious.

Kale and Quinoa Minestrone
Another vegan and gluten free option. I confess this is not quite something I’m craving, but it has a really good healthy-to-delicious ratio. Take the leftovers for lunch and impress your coworkers with how healthy you are.

What’s still surprising to me is how much planning I have to do in order to make it a week without going out for burgers. I’ve learned that if it’s 5pm and I’m exhausted I might still be willing to cook, but I’m definitely not willing to go to plan a meal, much less go to the grocery store for ingredients. And for this I have one final recipe, the pièce de résistance: Slow Cooker Turkey Chili. I keep the ingredients for this recipe on hand at all times for days when the fridge is empty (or worse, full of stuff that needs tossing). The turkey can be frozen, everything else is canned, and I can pick up an onion at the corner store (or skip it). In the morning, prep takes all of 10 minutes and in the evening I have delicious chili waiting.

If you’ve got some favorite default-everyday recipes, share them in the comments!

Family

Kellbot’s Big List of Baby Crap

Baby registries. They seem like fun until you realize you have absoutely no clue what you need. There are countless articles written about this topic, and most of them seem to be written by either a) people trying to sell you crap or b) the world’s most intense helicopter parents. Here’s my slightly more practical guide to registering for baby stuff. I’ve linked to the version we use/like where appropriate.

Babies don’t really give a damn about anything except eating and pooping, but the baby shower is your opportunity to get stuff that matches your decor (sort of not really) instead of “whatever is on sale when I realize I need it”.

Obviously she loved her Woombie, can't you tell?
Obviously she loved her Woombie, can’t you tell?

These are the best swaddling blankets. They are also astronomically expensive. That’s why they go on the registry.
My daughter also enjoyed a variety of baby straightjackets, particularly the Woombie and Swaddle Me although she usually escaped the Swaddle Me.

If you want to wear your baby around, the Ergo carrier was the most versatile for us. I still throw my toddler in it sometimes. They make a newborn insert for it, which I affectionately call the “baby taco” but honestly you don’t need it long and can probably use a rolled up towel to the same effect. Put it on the registry if you’re good on closet space.

A pack n play with a raised “newborn crib” area makes for a handy makeshift crib wherever you are. We also got a lot of use out of bouncy chairs and slings. Basically for the first 6 months you are constantly in need of somewhere you can set the baby down without it screaming. The baby never seems to accept the floor for this purpose.

I suggest baby toiletries and baby sized nail clippers. I tried cutting Bitmap’s nails with a normal pair of clippers and felt like I was going to cut her whole finger off. WHY ARE THEIR NAILS SO CREEPY AND TINY?

Get a changing table, changing pad, and like 8000 extra covers for the damned thing. Oh while we’re at it, waterproof crib mattress pads (plural). And at least 2 fitted sheets. More is better because babies leak. Babies aren’t allowed to have top sheets so don’t worry about those. All cribs and changing tables are pretty much the same so get whatever you think looks the least awful.

I really liked having a baby bath tub. It doesn’t need to be fancy. Holding them in the sink is harder than it sounds. To those of you who had no trouble bathing your infant in a sink/bucket/natural flowing river, just shut up and let me have my baby tub.

Register for clothes in the 6-9 month range. Everyone will get you a million newborn outfits, which your child will outgrow in approximately 3 days. 6-9 month clothing will get you through to the first birthday, where you’ll get more clothes.

If you feel like making your kid their own baby food puree pouches, infantino makes a “Squeeze Station” I find really handy. I still can’t get Bitmap to eat vegetables in any other form. Don’t get their blender though, it’s garbage. Get one of those mini cuisinarts or an immersion blender.

Homemade baby food pouches. Now accepting nominations for mother of the year.
Homemade baby food pouches. Now accepting nominations for mother of the year.

If you plan on breastfeeding, register for some hippie nice lanolin cream for yourself. Or just the Lanisoh stuff, whatever. DON’T ASK WHY JUST DO IT.

We have a standalone high chair and I like it because honestly it’s kind of like baby jail. I can put Bitmap in it, give her dinner, and then go cook mine without her under foot. She still uses it even though she is way too old to need it, I think she just likes having a chair that is hers. Ours is super easy to clean and has a cover we can throw in the laundry. This is not unimportant. We also have a portable booster seat which in theory we take when we go to friends’ houses but in reality we always forget to bring.

We have literally FOUR different strollers. Two joggers (I like the Baby Trend Expedition just fine), a stroller frame that her infant seat straps onto (super handy), a folding “umbrella” stroller that is quite frankly way too heavy. Definitely test drive the strollers in the store. If you actually plan on jogging/running, and not just walking in yoga pants, the bigger the wheels the better and a locking or fixed front wheel is essential. Unfortunately the strollers I can actually stand running with tend to be kinda big for navigating malls and other places.

Also, this thing has come in EXTREMELY handy.

One last note on car seats

The car seat thing seems confusing by design, and apparently now kids have to be in some sort of seat/booster/whatever until they’re 25. I jest, but here in Pennsylvania the law says 8 years old or 80 pounds.

There are four basic types of car seats:

Infant buckets – these are just what they sound like. They have a handle and usually clip into some sort of base for easy removal
Convertible seats – These are huge but go all the way from rear-facing (birth to age 2) to front-facing 5 point harness (ages 2 to 4).
High Back Booster – These come in two flavors: 5 point harness (ages 2+) and “belt positioning.” (roughly ages 4+) The ones with the 5 point harness usually convert to a belt positioning later, and most of them also convert to backless later.
Backless booster – This is just a foam wedge to raise your kid’s butt up. Some have cup holders. This is what your svelte 7.5 year old is gonna be surreptitiously sitting on.

At a minimum you will need two of these. You can get away with skipping the infant bucket, but they’re considerably more convenient for popping into the store with a sleeping baby. The car seat models seem to change hourly so I’m not going to link any, but having shopped for 4 of the damned things here’s my advice:

Infant bucket: go with something light. Moving these from car to car isn’t too bad, you can probably live without the extra seat base.

Convertible seats: these things weigh a ton and can be a pain to move between cars. If you don’t want to buy a million different car seats, look for one that will last you until you can switch to a backless (i.e. cheap) booster. The maximum height/weight should be listed in the product details.

High back booster: get one that covers 5 point, belt positioning, and backless booster stages so you don’t have to own a small army of car seats

Backless booster: as far as I can tell these are all pretty much the same. And mercifully much cheaper than the others.

Family

In Case You Have a Miscarriage

Occasionally I get questions about my miscarriages that come from a place of “could it happen to me?” They want to know what they can do to not end up in my shoes, or the comfort of knowing I have some sort of extreme weird situation that will never happen to them. But while I totally understand, I can’t give them that because miscarriage is actually pretty normal. So instead I offer advice for women who find themselves in the aftermath of their first miscarriage.

You are not alone.

It probably feels like you are, especially if you’re watching your Facebook feed explode with hundreds of perfect adorable babies. But you’re not. In fact, many of those perfect adorable babies were preceded by a miscarriage, maybe multiple. It’s not something a lot of people talk about, but if you start you’ll find people come out of the woodwork. Friends you didn’t even know were trying. Friends with multiple children and even more miscarriages. Older women, younger women, those with seemingly perfect lives, and those who are complete disasters. Miscarriage is surprisingly indiscriminate, for better and for worse.

You might have postpartum depression.

This one is a real kicker if it happens to you. You don’t get a kid, but you do get the debilitating depression that comes with it. This isn’t just the normal sadness that is to be expected when something tragic happens, it goes beyond that. It’s the feeling that even when you try to look at the bright side of things your awful brain just keeps dragging you down. It’s lying awake at night thinking “this is pointless, I wish I was dead. Wait what? I don’t believe that, why do I keep thinking it?” It’s being unable to feel the joy you know is there. The only good news is that for many women it passes as their hormone levels return to normal.

Find a way to keep your head above water.

Even if you don’t have postpartum depression you’ll probably be a mess of emotions. That’s normal and healthy, but find ways to keep it from overwhelming you. For some people this includes a therapist, or diving into a new hobby, or leaning hard on some close friends. For me it’s exercise (ok and therapy). Strategies I have tried and don’t recommend include drinking and binge eating.

There is probably nothing wrong with you.

The statistics vary depending on whom you are talking to, but if you’ve had a miscarriage the odds are nothing is wrong with you. An estimated 1 in 4 pregnancies ends in miscarriage. Even 3 in a row like me is not out of the statistical realm of “just unlucky,” which is why most doctors hold off on the fancy/invasive tests until you’ve had multiple. By all means talk to your doctor about next steps to make sure everything is in ship shape, but unless you’ve got other suspicious stuff going on they probably won’t do a ton right away.

Keep taking your prenatal vitamins.

This is where the science gets a little sketchy, because running randomized double blind studies on pregnant / miscarrying women is not only unethical, but damned near impossible. So doctors end up dipping into the “doesn’t hurt, might help” category. Pretty much all of the vitamin supplements fall into this scientific gray area.

While failing to take your vitamins does not cause miscarriage, there are a handful of conditions which are greatly improved by increasing vitamin intake. Conveniently, most of these vitamins are found in prenatals. There are other supplements to consider, with considerably more argument as to their usefulness, but prenatal vitamins are pretty much universally recommended.

 

As for my own story, some days I feel better than others. Some days have more hope, some have less. I’ve reached the point where I’m getting fancy / invasive tests, and to be honest it’s not super fun. I’m definitely glad we didn’t start all this right after the first miscarriage. I spend way too much of my time at doctors’ offices and labs, and even more time googling weird medical terms like “antiphospholipid syndrome.” I have a meeting with a Reproductive Endocrinologist who will likely do things like inject my uterus with radioactive dye to see if it’s shaped weird. And despite all that I’m still within the odds of “could just be bad luck.” It’s not all bad though, and every time my toddler throws a tantrum I think “yeah, maybe it’s OK to wait a little longer.”

New Construction Townhome, Organization

Toddler Closet Organization

It’s my favorite time of year… time for the Container Store elfa sale. This year the closet in my daughter’s room got a makeover. Her closet consisted of hanging organizers from Ikea which were the source of much cursing due  to their poor design and awkward center of balance. I have been planning this closet for months waiting for a sale. The day before the sale started I sprung into action, preparing the closet for Operation Shelving 2.0

The closet suffered many of the maladies that my office closet did, namely shelving that was glued to the walls. Thankfully this time there was a little less glue so I was able to get away with just one day of sanding/spackling. I also was a little less picky about them this time around.

2014-08-26 11.12.55
Walls patched and awaiting paint

It was at this point that my daughter looked into her empty closet and said “you broke my room. Fix it.” This time I opted to just paint over the patches rather than redo the whole room. Unfortunately I managed to pick the wrong shade of white from our pile of leftover paint. I decided I didn’t care and just left it. If you notice it, you can kindly keep your mouth shut.

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Walls painted. You almost can’t tell I used the wrong white!

I love the way the elfa system is organized. The whole thing comes in these nice organized bags. The little one has all the mounting hardware, the big one has various smaller elements for the closet and a separate side pocket containing customized instructions for installing the whole thing.

It's like Christmas for closets
It’s like Christmas for closets

Feeling like an elfa pro after doing my office closet, I happily set to work on the toddler closet. Unfortunately I got a little too confident, and did not measure the height for the top tracks correctly. As a result the hanging standards (vertical bits) overlapped my baseboard molding by about half an inch. Tragedy. I spent a couple hours cursing myself, wringing my hands, and contemplating my two options: rip out the top track (drywall studs and all) and reinstall it higher up, or cut an inch off the bottom of the vertical standards. Since I lack the tools to cut them myself option 2 required a trip out to the suburbs to have them cut. Both options sort of sucked.

After a quick phone call to The Container Store I went with option 2. Thank you to the staff at the Container Store in King of Prussia, who cut the standards for free (despite it being my mistake) and had me in and out of the store in about 10 minutes. I managed to get the standards installed just in time for toddler bedtime.

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Day 3 of Operation Closet was spent putting up the shelving and deciding on the spacing I wanted. For this closet I splurged on some of the “nice to have” finishing touches like bracket covers and shelf fascia. Stuff that’s not functional but makes the closet look nice. I didn’t bother with those for my own closet, but they do make things look cleaner and nicer.

As I put everything back in the closet I started culling stuff that was too small. I am a bit ashamed to admit that some of the stuff hanging up had been in the 9-12 month sizes (she’s two and a half now). When all was said and done she had about half as many hanging clothes and an entire additional storage bin full of too small stuff.

So now the toddler’s room is “fixed” and I can now easily find socks that fit her. So ends another fruitful elfa sale. Look out, master bedroom closet. You’re next.

Personal

Some quick feelings

There’s a lot going on but it’s been really hard to find any time to blog about it, or really update anyone beyond a quick Facebook post.  I don’t really understand how the folks who blog 2-3 times per week (or more!) pull it off. I suggest ghostwriters. Or maybe addictions to 5 hour energy.

I had yet another miscarriage. At this point I’m more aggravated than sad. I mean I’m sad too. But this time when the ultrasound tech said “let me check with the radiologist” I knew what was coming. I cried when they came in and told me there was no heartbeat, but mostly I was angry. The whole situation just seemed stupid. I also immediately (and rather unfairly) started hating the mom on 19 Kids and Counting. Why does she get to have like a million kids, and I can’t even have 2? And what the hell is suddenly so wrong with my body? I had my first daughter with no incident. I’m starting to wonder if she torched the place on her way out.

The silver lining here is that now I’m officially an infertility patient, so there’s a new crop of doctors and tests waiting for me. Of course there’s still a good chance that we’ll never find anything noteworthy, which is annoying, but there’s also still really good odds for me having another child. 70% of women with consecutive miscarriages go on to have more children1 . So it’s not all bad news. But after 3 pregnancies in the span of a year I’m just feeling tired and grumpy.

While I’m glad we’ll be getting some more testing it sometimes feels like there’s an infinite number of steps between me and even attempting to have another child. I had a D&E last week so they can run tests on the not-even-a-fetus. Hopefully next month my body will be back to “normal” and then my OB can start running blood work. Many of the tests have to be repeated over a span of a month or two in order to get meaningful results. For example: Antiphosopholipid Syndrome (a blood clotting disorder) is one of the first things they check for, and the treatment is relatively simple and effective (blood thinners), but the test has about a 5% false positive rate so you need two positives 6-8 weeks apart for it to count.  If nothing exciting turns up in my blood I’ll likely be referred to a reproductive endocrinologist (RE), genetic counselor, or both. They’ll check to see if my husband and I are horribly genetically mismatched, if my uterus has any obvious problems missed by the ultrasound, etc.

My mood and outlook come and go, and today I mostly feel exhausted. Between my four pregnancies I’ve had a cumulative 10 months of morning sickness. I’ve lost count of the number of ultrasounds I’ve had. When I went in for surgery my arms were so bruised from blood draws they had to put the IV in my hand. As much as I’m looking forward to getting some test results, I’m dreading all the trips to the doctor’s office.

Philly, as seen from my OB's office
Philly, as seen from my OB’s office

Fingers crossed that someday soon I’ll start loving this view again instead of resenting it.

 

  1. Every time I say those odds they seem terrible. But then I imagine someone saying “70% of people who eat this die immediately” and those odds seem really incredibly high and obviously I would not eat that because obviously it will kill you. So I suppose odds are a matter of perspective []