The infamous baby picture

Many moons ago, I made a reference to the picture taken of me shortly after my birth, in which I was screaming bloody murder with my fist raised as though I wanted to punch out the photographer.

I'm far too lazy to actually go back and find the post. However, I did find the picture:




Complete with baby-mohawk and everything. I was punk before it was cool!

Pictures, scanners, and the flood of stories

The scanner John got me for Christmas turns out to be even cooler than I thought-- if I put several small pictures on it and press the Scan button, it can recognize that there are multiple photos and will save them each to their own file. This has drastically sped up the process of digitizing photos, meaning it should only take me decades to get through all the albums, instead of lifetimes.

I'm also doing my own photos at the same time, and between my photos and the family photos of people I recognize, there are about a million stories dying to be put into writing. I'm trying to contain myself and spread the posts out so as not to overwhelm people who actually read this (why y'all find me that interesting, I will never understand, but I'm grateful for the audience).

Instead, I will share tidbits of information that I learned a few days ago while cleaning out Mom's old financial papers. They're not full-fledged stories, but they'll at least sate my desire to write things down. For now.

First, I've decided that the personality required to run a business is genetic. So is insanity. (These statements are not unrelated.) I knew that my grandmother ran a trucking business back in the day, where "the day" is defined as "from sometime before I was born until the early 80s when Ronald Reagan deregulated the trucking industry, and boy did I hear a lot of rants about that when I was a kid." (My grandparents were possibly the only people in the nation who voted for Mondale in the 1984 election, and they did so on the grounds that he was Not Reagan.) What I did not know until a few days ago is that during the three years that my parents were married, they also ran a business. I'm not sure exactly what it was, or whether they were both truly involved or just one of them. But filed away with their tax returns was all the documentation for the business's profit.

I also found the hospital bills from my birth. After insurance, I cost my parents a whopping $16.87 (cheap at twice the price, I say). The insurance company shelled out $2200, most of which was totally not my fault. Well, mostly not my fault. The fault can only be laid on me in the most indirect sense. You've heard of breech babies, when the baby doesn't turn and tries to come out feet first? Me, I started to turn. Then I got sidetracked along the way and only half-completed the task. (This explains why I have so many partially-finished projects scattered about-- it's been with me since birth!) I got an arm out, but my shoulder just wouldn't go. So, I started to kick. An interesting side note is that when doctors measure how hard a woman's labor is, they measure muscle contractions. They do not measure the rhythmic pounding of a small foot directly into the mother's ribcage. Thus, the hospital staff was telling my mother that her labor wasn't that bad yet, while she was telling them that the pain was unbearable. After a few hours of this, someone finally decided to do a C-section. They prepped my mother for surgery, wheeled her towards the operating room... and then left her in the hallway because there was a very bad accident on the freeway and all the operating rooms were being used for emergency surgeries. Where they left her was directly under an air conditioning vent on one of the hottest days of the summer.

Naturally, she got sick. I was ready to go home after a day or two, but she was kept for an entire week. Of course, they kept me as well, so a small portion of the $2200 was for 7 days of nursery care. More of the $2200 was for chest X-rays for Mom to make sure that she didn't have pneumonia, and a bunch of drugs that had everything to do with her being sick and nothing at all to do with her having just given birth. If I had finished turning then I probably would have been born naturally and she wouldn't have been left in the hallway for over six hours. Totally not my fault.

Pictures, scanners, and the flood of stories

The scanner John got me for Christmas turns out to be even cooler than I thought-- if I put several small pictures on it and press the Scan button, it can recognize that there are multiple photos and will save them each to their own file. This has drastically sped up the process of digitizing photos, meaning it should only take me decades to get through all the albums, instead of lifetimes.

I'm also doing my own photos at the same time, and between my photos and the family photos of people I recognize, there are about a million stories dying to be put into writing. I'm trying to contain myself and spread the posts out so as not to overwhelm people who actually read this (why y'all find me that interesting, I will never understand, but I'm grateful for the audience).

Instead, I will share tidbits of information that I learned a few days ago while cleaning out Mom's old financial papers. They're not full-fledged stories, but they'll at least sate my desire to write things down. For now.

First, I've decided that the personality required to run a business is genetic. So is insanity. (These statements are not unrelated.) I knew that my grandmother ran a trucking business back in the day, where "the day" is defined as "from sometime before I was born until the early 80s when Ronald Reagan deregulated the trucking industry, and boy did I hear a lot of rants about that when I was a kid." (My grandparents were possibly the only people in the nation who voted for Mondale in the 1984 election, and they did so on the grounds that he was Not Reagan.) What I did not know until a few days ago is that during the three years that my parents were married, they also ran a business. I'm not sure exactly what it was, or whether they were both truly involved or just one of them. But filed away with their tax returns was all the documentation for the business's profit.

I also found the hospital bills from my birth. After insurance, I cost my parents a whopping $16.87 (cheap at twice the price, I say). The insurance company shelled out $2200, most of which was totally not my fault. Well, mostly not my fault. The fault can only be laid on me in the most indirect sense. You've heard of breech babies, when the baby doesn't turn and tries to come out feet first? Me, I started to turn. Then I got sidetracked along the way and only half-completed the task. (This explains why I have so many partially-finished projects scattered about-- it's been with me since birth!) I got an arm out, but my shoulder just wouldn't go. So, I started to kick. An interesting side note is that when doctors measure how hard a woman's labor is, they measure muscle contractions. They do not measure the rhythmic pounding of a small foot directly into the mother's ribcage. Thus, the hospital staff was telling my mother that her labor wasn't that bad yet, while she was telling them that the pain was unbearable. After a few hours of this, someone finally decided to do a C-section. They prepped my mother for surgery, wheeled her towards the operating room... and then left her in the hallway because there was a very bad accident on the freeway and all the operating rooms were being used for emergency surgeries. Where they left her was directly under an air conditioning vent on one of the hottest days of the summer.

Naturally, she got sick. I was ready to go home after a day or two, but she was kept for an entire week. Of course, they kept me as well, so a small portion of the $2200 was for 7 days of nursery care. More of the $2200 was for chest X-rays for Mom to make sure that she didn't have pneumonia, and a bunch of drugs that had everything to do with her being sick and nothing at all to do with her having just given birth. If I had finished turning then I probably would have been born naturally and she wouldn't have been left in the hallway for over six hours. Totally not my fault.