Oh. I should be in bed by now. I really should. I need to drive up to Logan tomorrow and I should leave by 9 or so. Eh... I guess that's not too bad. I'll be okay.

Son

I have thrown up an event page for Eli, so go check it out.

A little more background

On Friday night, I stayed up late working on various projects. It was about 3 a.m., and I was just about ready to turn my computer monitor off and head to bed, when Christine came into the office and said that she had just had a real painful contraction.

I asked her to tell me more and she told me it had been about 20 minutes since the painful contraction and she hadn't had any more since then. I suggested we both go back to bed and get some sleep.

I had a hard time getting to sleep. Probably drank too much Diet Coke while I was working. When Christine woke me up around 4 a.m., I probably had about 25 minutes of sleep. She told me she'd been having consistent contractions spaced six minutes apart since we went to bed at 3. She was ready to go to the hospital.

Jennie and Jay were in Park City with Jennie's family, so I called my mom to ask her if she could come over and stay with the kids. She said she would. I helped Christine gather a few things together while we waited for my mom to come over.

When my mom arrived, we headed up to Alta View Hospital.

They checked us in and got Christine in her gown and hooked her up to the monitors. She was 4 and a half centimeters dilated and about 85% effaced. She was doing pretty good with contractions about four to six minutes apart. Then, they started an saline IV drip. It all went south from there.

When Christine was pregnant with Maya, we were going to do the natural childbirth thing - no drugs, no epidural, etc. We had read in one of the books we had that the IV drip slowed labor down sometimes because it dilluted the concentration of natural labor-inducing hormones in the bloodstream.

That would perfectly explain what happened to Christine. She and I sat around for six to eight hours waiting for her labor to progress and it only digressed. I got a few winks of sleep while we waited, but not much good sleep.

Towards the end of that time, the anesthesiologist came in and gave Christine an epidural. A little while after that, a nurse came in and hung a second bag of fluids, but with pitocin added. It wasn't long after that before Christine's labor picked up well.

Somewhere in there, the main IV bag ran dry and the pitocin-laced fluid kept dripping slowly into the IV. I noticed it just before the nurse came in and replaced the main bag. About two minutes after she got the main bag hung and connected, Christine had a really powerful contraction that made the graph on the monitor screen jump way up high and stay high. The baby's heartbeat disappeared from the monitor and the nurse got visibly nervous and reapplied jelly to the electrode surface and moved it around on Christine's stomach in an attempt to relocate the baby's heartbeat.

After a few moments, the “megacontraction” subsided and the baby's heartbeat was back - strong as ever.

From then on, Christine's contractions were about three to four minutes apart. When the doctor came in, Christine only had to push during three contractions before Eli was born.

The Sons rock the Zephyr

So how do we get from this birth story to talking about a Pink Floyd tribute concert? Easy! After Eli was born, I went to work a Sons Of Nothing show.

I didn't leave Christine and the baby until I knew everything was okay. I made it to the Zephyr Club in Salt Lake City around 6:30 p.m. and got all my gear set up and tested.

A local Led Zepplin tribute band named No Quarter opened up the evening with a 45-60 minute show full of energy. A lot of people had settled into the club by the end of their set. I'd never seen that many people at a Sons Of Nothing show and was concerned they'd all come to see the opening band and would soon be leaving.

But, it was not to be the case. Most didn't leave and more trickled in. The place was nicely attended when our friends Sons Of Nothing hit the stage.

I had put together a decent cue sheet for myself to visually organize all the visual and sound effects cues for all the songs and it helped a lot. It was the closest I'd come to a flawless execution of my duties... and it rocked!

At one point early on in the Sons set, Thom took a moment between songs to ask the crowd if they liked the screen. They whooped, hollered, and applauded. He then proceeded to tell them a little about the guy running that portion of the show — me — and how I edited all this video for the Sons Of Nothing shows and that I was there on the day my wife had given birth to our third child.

More than a dozen people congratulated me after that, some more inebriated than others.

In the end, the show went spectacularly well. The band had a great time playing and I thoroughly enjoyed doing what I did. And, since I get paid a little for my work now, I was pleased when I found out the band was paid above and beyond their guarantee because of the nice attendance.

And, it looks like Sons Of Nothing will be returning to the Zephyr Club next month. Yay!

I stuck around after the show to help pack up and offered Thom a ride home. We ended up leaving the Zephyr somewhere around 3 a.m. We were both hungry, so we stopped at a Dennys and had some late-night food. Then I took Thom home and headed home myself. I fell into bed around 4:30 — 24 hours after taking Christine to the hospital.

ipac-ng

Tonight, I was researching some network accounting tools and came upon ipac-ng, which seems like it will fit my needs very well. This program establishes an arbitrary number of IPTABLE rules for tracking packet traffic through a Linux system. Then, it can do all kinds of fun stuff with that data. For example, it can draw charts - showing bandwidth utilization and other statistics.

I'm pretty happy with it so far. I tried rolling my own program to do the same thing a few months ago, but it didn't work quite right and I never got back to it. Maybe I won't have to now.