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Ran across an odd “holiday” called ‘Take Back Your Time Day’. The idea behind it is that on that day (October 24 this year), Americans will already have worked as many hours this year as our Western European colleagues will for the whole year. That’s through a combination of the American proclivity for overtime, as well as the European policy of a month’s worth of vacation time. The site describing the day lists it as just one step in a fight against ‘time famine’ and a struggle to better handle the work/life balance. Americans aren’t balanced in anything, work/life or otherwise. We eat too much. We spend too much. And now, as demonstrated by ‘Take Back Your Time Day’, we whine too much. Want to work European hours? Move to Europe! Or scale back your spending and ambition so that you don’t need to be on the bleeding edge of overtime, whether that requires you to change jobs, companies, or even careers. The idea behind ‘balance’ is that you can’t have it all – to get more of A, then you need to give up some of B. Want the big American salary to live in the big American dream home with the big SUV and the fancy vacations? Then to fit that into your balance, you’re going to have to work a bit more.

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At 1:00 this morning, I woke up with a back ache and contractions. Aha! This would be it! No more non-stress tests, ultrasounds, weekly visits, discomfort at night from poking elbows and knees… I’d just have to make it through the labor and delivery process and this pregnancy thing would be pretty well wrapped up. Still, I waited to be sure this was the real thing – having already experienced false labor once (a fun thing to experience at work), I didn’t want to wake my doctor or my mother-in-law up for something that turned out not to be real. By 2:30, I was pretty well convinced. So, I woke my doctor – she turns out to be pretty chipper when paged at 2:30 in the morning – and we agreed that we’d wait until my contractions were 5 minutes apart before I called her again and went to the hospital. Of course, she advised me to get some sleep if I could, and of course, the combination of contractions and just general excitement meant that I really couldn’t. Add in a toddler who decided to wake up at around the same time, plus then our cats made just enough intermittent noise to make it seem like there was an intruder in the house, and I didn’t get back to bed until 4:30. I was still having contractions, but figured that I’d try to snag whatever rest I could, since today was apt to be a long day.

7:00 – wake up to a calling toddler. Discover that contractions have stopped. Toddler’s not going back to sleep, so there’s really no way for me to get back to sleep unless I take her to mother-in-law’s and then retreat back to bed. But by the time I go to the effort of getting her over there, might as well just go to work.

I’m now at work, luckily in an up-time for me for energy. This afternoon’s going to really suck, though. I’m waiting on my doc to call me back so that I can schedule those non-stress tests, and I’m very inclined to say – “Uh, induce me, please… Pretty please???” Theoretically, this could all continue for 5 more weeks, between the 2.5 or so weeks before my due date, and the two weeks after that are usually considered “the zone” for having a baby. 5 more weeks…??! Forget about the baby blues after delivery – I’ll be a walking zombie before this baby gets here!

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Now that the baby has decided she’s just about on her way, I guess it’s finally time to finish painting the nursery. One wall at a time, the Caribbean green/aqua scheme that was there is being transformed into a light shade of purple. I won’t go so far as to paint the girls’ room pink (until they’re of an age where they themselves request a pink room), but figured purple was doable. Light purple over bright/dark shades of green takes several coats, I’m discovering. I primed the room a while ago, and thought that it’d only take one coat of paint. But I suspect that I’m not going to get off that easy.

Does this count as nesting, I wonder? I’m taking it nice and slow, stopping at the end of each wall for rest and refreshment (in the form of big glasses of water and big spoonfuls of chocolate pudding – girl’s gotta have some way of rewarding herself). At this pace, though, the room will be done when the girls’ are going into kindergarten!

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I’m pulling together a presentation on test-driven development for our company’s Java technical community, and so I’ve been forced to look at my own development practices. Sure, I use Ant as a build tool, and even use it to run my Junit tests. In fact, I’m so convinced of the value of this sort of stuff that when I made my brief foray into PHP, I found its corresponding xUnit tool, PHPUnit, and used it to help me build my system. But, casting a critical eye on how I actually do things, I can’t actually call my style of development “test-driven”. Often “test-validated”, and even sometimes tests that are written concurrently with code, but hardly ever test-driven. The idea behind test-driven is that you write the test first, and then your code once you have a test case to validate what you’re writing. My approach generally is to write the code first, and then to not consider it “valid” until it passes a test case that I’ve yet to write. Unless, of course, I consider the code I’ve written either too trivial to be worth testing (danger, Will Robinson!) or too difficult to set up a test case for (holy coding ostrich, Batman!) – in which case, I just sort of cross my fingers and figure that it’d be easier to catch any bugs as we use the stuff than it would be to write the test case to find it at the outset.

I’m not sold yet on TDD. Although I’m a fan of unit testing, my client doesn’t pay me for unit tests, they pay me for a working system (yes, I recognize that there’s a correlation between the two, I just think the correlation is looser than one to one). So, I’ll have to see a clear win in terms of either time required to do initial development, or time required to hunt down bugs. So far, I think I’d spend more time writing unit code than I’d recoup. (Remember, I’m already writing unit code for some things – just not all things.) Although I know there’s flexibility in TDD, that not _everything_ gets tested to the lowest level, seems you’d have a hard time defining where to stop. I’m looking over Kent Beck’s Test-Driven Development by Example book to see an expert walk through the process and make sure that I’m giving the thing a fair shake. May give more room in my blog later to some of the stuff I find out…

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I lurk on a yahoo mail group dedicated to clown ministry. I’ve felt that I’ve had this calling for years to do something with clowning, and just haven’t managed to do more than sketch out some ideas and do some research. But, that aside, a guy by the name of Bob Smith expressed an idea today that just seemed to be worth sharing and expounding upon.

He was giving his advice to a woman who was asked to teach public school kids about clowning. Given the concept of ‘separation of church and state’, she wasn’t sure that she would be able to use her Christian clowning in a public school setting, and yet she wanted to use her clowning gifts in a way that ministers to others.

Mr. Smith’s response differentiated between doing things with a CHURCH focus and doing things with a CHRISTIAN focus. He pointed out that by interacting with the kids, she’d be ministering to them, whether or not she was presenting the Christian gospel message directly. Spending time with the kids, treating them as folks with value, praying for them, and using the gifts God gave her to spread smiles, whether or not God is an explicitly mentioned player in the clown troupe, ministers to and potentially through the kids as they clown to others.

When we work to explicitly spread the Word, by quoting scripture or giving out Bibles, then we’re working with something of a church focus. Our aim is to show folks the truth about the Gospel so that they may accept it and join the body of believers, who are the church. When we work to show the Word’s effect in our lives, and use that effect to minister to others, then we’re working with a Christian focus. God may or may not use that particular instance of ministering to bring someone into His kingdom, but we are still showing some tiny sliver of the impact that the Gospel makes in our lives.

As we look at our lives, and how we use the gifts we are given to minister to others, we should be careful to not focus solely on a CHURCHianity focus to our efforts. New folks whose posteriors are plopped into pews are wonderful to see on Sunday mornings, but they’re not the sole evidence of the impact we’re called to make. We are called to spread the Word, ’tis true, and more explicitly to be able to give an answer for the hope that is within us. But the pop quizzes are few, and the practicums are many.

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Realized that something felt different yesterday. Ah, yes… I can breathe again, and there’s a bit of extra room in my maternity clothes. I had forgotten about this part of the pregnancy – the ‘lightening’ or ‘dropping’ where kiddo decides to prepare for takeoff. Head down, butt up, everything in a line to exit the pod. Crash helmet at the ready, our little daredevil prepares to run the luge.

Suddenly I’m no longer quite so confident that things are a good month or so away. My grandparents are visiting in early October, and I’ve been forewarning them that the baby probably won’t be here before they leave. Now, every little twinge makes me wonder if labor’s starting. The ‘what to expect’ books aren’t very helpful – they say that for first time moms, lightening generally happens two to three weeks before delivery, and that for those of us who’ve had kids before, lightening can wait and not happen until just before or when labor begins. But, they note helpfully that there’s no good hard and fast rule. Darn it, I want the hard and fast rule that says I now have precisely X days to get everything in order and to prepare for labor pain to begin! That on day Y my schedule will become completely not my own, as I stop whatever it is that I’m doing and navigate to the hospital. If our child chooses poorly, I could get to navigate not one but two Beltways to get to the hospital! Traveling those byways is nerve-wracking enough on a normal day – can you imagine what kind of driver I’ll be as I grip the steering wheel through each contraction and try to swerve around any potholes?

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I think I was on the impacted end of an answer to a prayer that I didn’t make. You see, I’m about five and a half weeks away from our due date for our little girl. And in two weeks, I was supposed to be in a training class three hours away for a week. I knew it was horrible timing, pregnancy-wise, but figured that odds were good that I wouldn’t deliver while I was out there, and decided that even if I did deliver out there, I didn’t have any reason to worry about the birth itself. It would be quite inconvenient, but I didn’t see it as putting our baby or me at risk. Babies are born in hospitals all over the country every day. No reason to think that a doctor at a hospital in town X couldn’t do just as well at delivering a baby as a doctor in town Y.

This afternoon, I got an email saying that my class had been cancelled. That’s unfortunate, as this was really the only class session that I could even have attempted to attend, and the material is stuff I need to know in the very near future. Other sessions were either even later, or would have required me to fly. Airlines and doctors usually don’t like that whole flying thing in the last trimester. So, I went to tell my husband that the class had been cancelled and I wouldn’t be going away for a week after all. He smiled and said something to the effect of “Remember I told you I had been praying for a while last night??”. Well, he never said that he had been praying that the class had been cancelled; I think it more likely that he was praying that God would handle the situation and keep the baby and me safe. But, whatever he specifically prayed for, the answer to that prayer is that the class is cancelled and I will be safely here.

So now I’m thinking, …., if the way to keep our baby safe was to keep me local that week, guess we ought to get the nursery done in a hurry!