Today is my birthday.

This week was more waiting for the birth of the baby. I don’t expect Madeline to come before her due date on Halloween but it is something always in the back of my mind. I have had some nifty little anxiety nightmares. In one nightmare Sarah had called me saying she was going into labor and then when I went to go to the hospital where she was I ran into a ton of problems including:

a)I needed to drop off Jeremy in some complex way so I had to use a taxi but because of dream oriented car swapping issues the taxi driver ended-up driving my car.

b) When I went to go inside to a party I couldn’t find my shoes
c) My cell phone was not my current cell phone but instead my old cell phone that didn’t have Sarah’s phone number on it
d) The taxi driver disappeared and couldn’t be reached when I came out of the party
e) When my car with the taxi driver in it finally arrived the entire rear-end of the car had been totaled because he had driven it like a mad-man.

The other nightmare was much simpler. I had to take a math test with four questions and I had two hours to take it at home because it was a take-home test. The content of the test was beyond my knowledge of calculus and differential equations so I never made it past the first question even though I started an hour early.

So I have some background anxiety coming from a combination of the baby, work deadlines, and an analyst presentation that I gave on Wednesday morning. The good news is that the mice have moved out of my nightmares. I got plenty of helpful mouse removal advice ranging from calling an exterminator, a strange bucket solution that many people like to talk about where the mouse jumps into the slippery bucket with water in it and can’t climb back out the side. The two variants of the bucket solution include drowning the mouse in a pool of water and just leaving them trapped at the bottom of the bucket. I didn’t resort to anything more than the traps because it appears that the traps didn’t catch a mouse and that the cleaning out of the toaster oven was a major deterrent to reduce the incentive to climb onto the counter in the first place.

The week in movies for us was an odd hodge-podge. I found on Monday night that Hotel Rwanda was a good way for me to reduce my concerns about my own life. If you aren’t being hunted down during an ethnic cleansing where people kill each other with machetes that the UN isn’t putting a stop to then you probably shouldn’t worry too much about your problems. But then we watched Monster In Law. That was a terrible movie. The week ended with two screenings of adult film history, The Legend of Ron Jeremy and The People Vs. Larry Flynt. I was surprised at how much the edited out any X rated content from the documentary on Ron Jeremy. The Larry Flynt movie is among the better movies with free speech as a central theme. It was much less preachy and awkward than the Majestic.

I had been listening on the radio by accident to some right wing talk about how they are pissed off about sex education being included in school curriculum but school prayer being counted out of the curricula. They want to be given rebates to educate children their own way if they don’t want to get inculcated with the public school system’s values. I saw both sides actually. A more interesting commentary came when a liberal guy mentioned that the religious right serves the function of providing a community for their constituents and if the religion is a side effect rather than fighting religion folks who want to battle the religious nuts should focus on how to provide similar functions of community without the religious stuff because you can’t replace the bad stuff without continuing to provide the good stuff. It’s a tough problem. I would like to see better organized secular communities but in general people tend to form broad communities (not like people who knit) around race and religion. The only likely place to start in modern society would be some combination health club combined with a social organization that plans activities.