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For those of you who read my blog but not Ashley’s, go check out her latest post to read about our adventures this past week. I thought about writing a travelog, but decided Ashley’s done a more-than-adequate job for the both of us.

Hi all. Yesterday, Ashley blogged about baby names that we like / are decided on when it comes time to having kids — which I assure you is still several years away.

I gave some explanation for the names in the comments, so be sure to read that, too.

Check out our baby names!

By the way, this is a type of insurance: if, for example, five years from now, some author puts out a series of extremely medicore novels that women swoon over, and the worthless lifeform of a main character happens to be named Lydia or something, and then all the pregnant ladies decide to name their daughters after said waste-of-life, I can say with confidence and proof, “We thought of this name years ago.”

Around 11:00 this morning, Ashley called me from work saying she had been in severe pain all morning and was, at that point, keeled over in pain and had been lying down in one of the patient rooms for the past hour or so. She hurt so much she couldn’t even drive herself home. (She’s been having kidney stone issues for the past month or so, and the things won’t pass.)

I went to pick her up. We came home, she writhed in pain for a little bit. The pain got so bad it caused her to get really nauseous, and at around noon, she started throwing up…

And throwing up, and throwing up. We made an appointment with her doctor at UNLV, but the soonest they could get her in was 2:30. In the two hours between when she started puking and when we got her to the doctor, she had thrown up five or six times. Well, of course, she was really only throwing anything up the first two times.

So they stuck an IV in her to try to get her hydrated and put some anti-nausea drugs in her. It took them four different attempts to hit a vein because she was so dehydrated. And they gave her a shot to assuage the kidney stone pain.

Over the next hour she drifted in and out of sleep and went through two bags of IV fluid. By this time it’s nearing 5:00, and the UNLV health clinic is getting ready to shut down for the day. They’d like to release her, but she has thrown up a couple times since getting the anti-nausea drugs. So they start thinking maybe something else is wrong with her. They try twice to take blood samples but no blood will come out of her, due to dehydration.

She threw up one more time at around 5:30, and then the doctor/nursers are like, “Sorry, we have to recommend you go to the ER.”

The hospital they recommend is about a twenty-minute drive away from UNLV. And then we freaking waited forever in the waiting room to get into a so-called “emergency” room to be seen. Apparently there were more dire emergencies transpiring. Luckily, my parents and our friend Brittany came to wait with us, which helped alleviate some of the boredom. (Thanks, guys!)

This is where it finally started to get better, though. After sitting at the hospital for over an hour — and by this time, it’s been close to two hours since Ashley’s last puked — she started feeling a little better. We get her some juice, she drinks some, keeps it down. We’re still waiting in the waiting room. By now it was probably almost 8:00.

Ashley then decided we should just go home. She drank more juice, and we stopped to get some crackers. She came home and went straight to bed.

That was at about 8:30 tonight.

Hopefully the drugs will wear off during the night and she’ll wake up feeling mostly normal tomorrow.

With pain so bad it caused her to vomit almost continuously for several hours, and having to endure being stabbed with needles over a half a dozen times, Ashley has been a real champ today. I’m proud of her for being able to put up with it. But I hope she doesn’t have to go through that again.

A game called Mother 3 was released for the Game Boy a week before I came home from Japan. I got it and tried to play it, but only got a few hours into it before I came home. Once I got home, I was so busy adjusting to normal life that I didn’t play it much. By the time I could get back into it (many months later), my Japanese reading ability had declined to the point that I couldn’t fully understand what was going on.

Recently, a group of people has put together an English translation of the game (it sadly never came to the US in any commercial way), which Bob sent to me a few days ago.

This evening, I tried to get Ashley to play it.

About halfway through the intro, where it shows the island, the village, etc., establishing the setting for you (and before it actually lets you play), she says, “I’m bored.”

“Just hang on. It’s introducing you to the setting.”

“Ok…”

The game starts with someone knocking at the door. You’re sleeping in a bed on the second floor. “Where’s the door?” asks Ashley.

“You gotta go downstairs first, here.” I say, pointing to the stairs.

She walks to the door. The mom in the game says, “You gonna change out of your pajamas?”

Ashley selects “No”

Mom says, “Then you can stay inside the rest of your life.”

Ashley tries to go out again; she gets asked the same question. Again she selects “No”.

At this point I tell her the mom is going to ask her the same question over and over until she says yes. So then Ashley makes her way back up the stairs.

I chime in, “No… I think you have to actually say ‘Yes’ to your mom before you can change clothes.”

Ashley puts down the controller.

“I’m done with this game.”

Before it gets too late to tell this story, I figured I ought to post it.

For the past several weeks, I’d been helping my friend Mike with a tiling job. Due to her work schedule and our work on tiling, Ashley and I hadn’t gotten to spend a lot of time together. So one of the nights last week when I went to work, she went with me.

As we pulled up to the house and got out of her car, I did something dumb: I left the car keys in the car and locked them in. Whoops. To make matters worse, the keys to my truck were also in Ashley’s car. No spare keys were available.

I knew my brother-in-law Jeff had a door-opening-kit of some sort, and hoped he could come rescue us. Unfortunately, he was unable to come. So instead, my sister drove out and gave us the kit. Mike and I messed around with it for a good fifteen or twenty minutes, and then decided to call a locksmith. I used my phone to google “las vegas locksmith” and the first result (in Google Adwords) was the following outfit.

When I called, I asked how much it would be to get keys out of a car. They told me it was $50 and up, depending on the situation. Perhaps I should’ve inquired more, but I assumed “$50 and up” couldn’t go any higher than 80 or 100 bucks.

Twenty or thirty minutes later, this unprofessional, yet smarmy looking fellow in a car (no business decals on the side to indicate his company, either) showed up. He popped the door open in about 30 seconds. Then we walked back to his car so I could pay him, and he told me it was going to be $160.

I told him I wouldn’t pay that amount. I’d pay $50, $75… even as much as $100. But $160 was downright extortion.

He argued with me for a few minutes, and then Janet (the lady we’d been doing the tile job for) came over and started calling him a scammer. I reiterated that I wouldn’t pay him $160.

He finally said, “Fine, I’ll just put the keys back in the car and lock the door, and you can find someone else to come open the door for you.” I figured waiting another half hour for another locksmith would be worth $100 or so in savings.

However, by now, Ashley had posession of the keys. He yelled at Ashley to put the keys back in the car so he could lock it. After some minor confusion as to what was going on (Ashley hadn’t been really involved or paying close attention to what we had been arguing about), Ashley stepped out of the car and threw the keys back in. The guy got in his car and sped off.

As I was thinking to myself, “Well, time for Plan B,” Ashley revealed something amazing. Her key ring has detachable rings on it, and she had detached the car key and hidden it in her pocket when she threw the rest of the keys back into the car.

It’s a good thing I married such a crafty, tricky lady. She saved us from having to call anyone else AND 160 bucks. She succeeded in scamming the scammer.

When life gets disorganized… Sort It Out.

Ashley and I (mostly Ashley) started up a business this past week. I’ll just let you go to our website to find out more information.

Quick post–

I woke up at 4:30 this morning to do calculus homework. My first real calc class. We are learning about limits right now. Does anyone else think this stuff is fun? A cursory survey of my classmates finds I am in the minority. But anyway, I like it. Am I the only one?

In other news, Ashley and I got married a week and a half ago, Saturday, May 31. Since then, I’ve been in the slow process of moving my stuff over there. Unfortunately, we are remodeling the house and waiting to buy furniture, so I am desk- and workspace-less for the time being. My computer and most of my stuff, therefore, is still at my parents’ house. It should all get moved over within the next 2-3 weeks, though. And then I’ll blog more reguarly, I think.

It’s not my style (at all) to discourse on issues of love. Frankly, I find it cheesy when others do it, and so I try to refrain from it myself. That said, some people have gotten on my case about not being vocal or public enough about expressing my feelings. If you’re not into this sort of thing, skip this post: it’s mushy.

1. While your girly, emotional side sometimes gets the best of you, you are on the whole a very logical, rational, and reasonable person.
2. You are dependable and always willing to help me.
3. You smell nice.
4. You know all the bones in the body (and who remembers that?).
5. You’re willing to try out new foods, even though you frequently don’t like them.
6. You’re witty, funny, and silly, and your humor and cheerfulness always make me laugh and be happy.
7. You are willing to sacrifice for/with me in my educational and life goals.
8. You watched One Litre of Tears with me.
9. You listen to J-pop and video game music.
10. You’re the only person I might consider putting up on the same level of “anally organized” as me.
11. You have a cute nose.
12. You understand the subjunctive mood.
13. You like my favorite bands.
14. … and my favorite movies, too.
15. You like Lily, even though she’s fat and gets hair all over the place.
16. You listen to and agree with most (if not all) of my crazy ideas about politics and the world (I would say this ties in closely with #1).
17. You are creative… especially with the business ideas, which is something I wish I were better at. I’m pretty sure I’d admit you’re better than me at it.
18. You keep up with all of my expectations.
19. You like to be healthy.

Maybe I’ll come up with more later. But that’s a decent start.

I love you, Ashley.

Ashley and I are registered at Target and Amazon.com. So, go buy us lots of cool things:

Target

Amazon.com