SURPRISE ENDING TO THE VILLAGE

One of the most annoying aspects of entertainment journalism today is the public conspiracy by movie reviewers of nearly every stripe to avoid Spoilers in their reviews. To the uninitiated, Spoilers are details of a movie's plot that are meant to be a surprise to the viewer and are frequently integral to the movie's success. The Sixth Sense, by M. Night Shyamalan, is perhaps the best example.

Well, his new movie, The Village, promises to have a surprise twist at the end of this gothic tale and no one seems to have the intestinal fortitude to come right out and reveal the ending, or even hint at it, in the name of professional critical integrity. HOGWASH.

Because I personally think that studios are leading critics around by the nose, I've decided to research for you, dear reader, the ending of this movie and post it on this website. I call it The Spoiler Spoiler(tm). You'll find it by holding the button down on your mouse and scrolling over the blank space immediately below. Remember, It's a surprise ending, so don't view my Spoiler Spoiler(tm) if you think you'll complain to me that I ruined it for you.

**The End of the Movie Spoiler Spoiler(tm)**
You get up and leave the theater wondering why you wasted $8 on such an awful piece of garbage... Wait, there's more:

The monsters are not real, but rather the village elders posing as monsters to keep the villagers scared and pent up inside the village. The Village is nothing but an elaborate false construct by the William Hurt character in the year 2004. He inherits his murdered brother's billions and buys a wildlife refuge, in the middle of which he has devised a village for people whose family members have also been killed by violent crimes. He wants to protect them from the evils of the outside world by keeping them in a 19th century hamlet. They have grown up knowing nothing of the modern, outside world. The surprise is revealed when the blind lead character ventures out into the woods in search of a town for medicine and after climbing over a wall, is nearly run over by an SUV.

Clever, huh?! Not really.

There's plenty of things you can do for $8 - entrance to a museum, fee for a State park hiking trail, a good meal at a cheap Thai restaurant, a month's sponsorship of a needy child.. plenty of stuff. If you can't figure out something else to do with your money, send me a tip for helping you save your hard-earned income!

UPDATE: MORE FALSE CONTRACTIONS
 
They're still irregular and not very frequent, but they are varying in intensity. Jill's still doing alright, but having more difficulty sleeping due to general, not contraction-ralated, discomfort.
 
UPDATE: A TRUCK FULL OF VISITORS?
 
Leigh emailed with greater detail about their pending visit to the Portland area. I couldn't sum it up any better than she has:
 
Wanted to let you know that Teri is going to be heading up there with us as well.  I believe Toni and Taryn are going up with Sue...not sure though so don't quote me (oops, I did quote her-ed.).   Teri and I aren't sure if we are going to drive or fly...depends on how much time she can get off.... Both girls are excited about going.  They want to camp, pick berries, play with Elle and Toni said she wants to go fishing. 
 
Looks like Me-ma will have to charge up the batteries on her scooter as the girls will be keeping her and the rest of us on the go.  As for my take on the berry canning....it's gonna be cruel, simply cruel.  I'm still on the good 'ol South Beach Diet and won't be able to enjoy the fruits of my labors. LOL

I thought South Beach allowed you to eat darker fruits like berries and such because of the Vitamin C and antioxident content compared to the pure carbohydrate content.

Either way, sounds like great pun!

FALSE CONTRACTIONS 
 
Jill reported having Braxton-Hicks contractions for the first time on Friday. Apparently, she had them irregularly for the better part of the afternoon, including off and on at home and at Costco. Changes in her activity did indeed stop the contractions, so she knew they were false at the time.

We're approaching our 38th week and I'm not able to travel much further than an hour or so from home. Adding insult to injury, I've been working like a dog, unable to help Jill and we've been having a heatwave in the Portland area.

TOM TO GET SWORN IN

Unbeknownst to me, a State of California judge can swear in a freshly-minted attorney for another state (republic). So, Tom doesn't have to make the trek up here to a local county courthouse, stand behind a line of gay couples rehearsing their nuptuals, and get sworn in by an Orygun judge.

Mom and Dad will be in Sacramento next weekend for the ceremony. Tom, have you paid all of Kate's and your parking tickets? Probably not a great time to have that brought up.

We might have gone also, but we didn't want to take the risk of our baby being a Californian. (With apologies to Kate, of course.. we love you anyway)

VISITORS EXPECTED SOON
 
Looks like Portland/Vancouver will be a crossroads for quite a few people in the next few weeks.
 
Sue will be driving Me-ma, possibly Leigh, Toni and Terran (sp?) up here in the near future. She's on her way to Sheena Flowers' wedding in Anchorage. Jeff Bahr will be flying to Portland, switching planes, and then heading to Anchorage himself for the same reason.
 
The girls and Me-ma will likely stay in the area for a while, the former enjoying various entertainment and recreational opportunities afforded up here.. like mowing my lawn. Just kidding! I think Mom has some bright ideas for them, including berry picking. Weigh them before they pick.
 
Leigh, I am told, may come up to also pick berries, vegetables and fruit in the local orchards along with Mom. I don't know what army they plan on feeding, but I expect our Christmas stockings this year will be rather heavy and clink like glass.
 
Alternatively, Charlotte Wachdorf insists she'll be headed our way in time for the birth of the baby of undetermined gender. For her, it's simply a matter of getting someone to accompany her all the way from Illinois (or is that Texas?) to Portland.
 
HOME IMPROVEMENT IN ABSENTIA
 
While I've had my hands full with work, there have been many nice volunteers helping with sanding, priming and painting of doors in the house before the baby arrives. Specifically, I wish to thank:
Jill, John, Mom and Dad.
Thank you!
 
GAMES
 
If you're looking for addictive on-line amusement to fill some time or reduce some stress, check out Orisinal.com. The games there are all free, amusing, suitable for the whole family but a little too cutesy for my taste. The best of the few I've tried is Floats. 

UPDATE: TOM PASSES THE BAR!

Tom called today around 4pm to say that he passed the Oregon Bar exam on appeal. As I referred to many days ago on this blog, Tom's initial grade on his first Oregon bar exam was below "passing" by the narrowest of margins. But he appealed some questionable scoring on a few essay questions and they granted him enough additional points to get him through.



Congratulations!! Hopefully he and Kate get to celebrate tonight in addition to ceasing his (re)study of Oregon law. Now he can look for a job in this direction and/or prepare for the California bar exam.

WHERE DID THE MONTH GO?!

I looked at the website and realized it's been a month since my last entry.. that's how busy it's been. Much has been going on, so here's my attempt to fill in the gaps.

OUR LAST HURRAH, EH!

Realizing that Jill is not going to be able to travel anywhere after her 34th week, we decided to take a long weekend in our favorite long weekend destination, British Columbia.

It was pretty much a garden tour:

Dr. Sun Yat-Sen's Classical Chinese Garden in Vancouver's Chinatown


Classical chinese gardens are highly manicured and controlled to achieve full balance of textures and structures very much in line with the balance of Yin and Yang. Unlike English gardening style, every square inch of a classical chinese garden is planned and controlled for that reason. It's not our favorite because we enjoy nature taking its course in the garden.

Butchart Gardens on Vancouver Island


I like this shot of Jill enjoying the rose garden, then at peak bloom. We spent the entire day there (2pm to close at 10:30pm). We first enjoyed High Tea overlooking the rose garden and the Italian garden. A full pot of wonderful, loose-leaf tea and then all sorts of finger sandwiches, cakes and other good stuff to thoroughly sate your appetite. We then spent the rest of our visit enjoying the gardens - which are always different when we visit because of the different plants in peak.

Van Dusen Botanical Gardens in Vancouver


Van Dusen Gardens is a former golf course that was purchased by Vancouver for a questionable princely sum "rescued" from housing development and is now a remarkable botanical garden, displaying a wide variety of species from all over the world. It's a definite must-see while you're in Vancouver.

UBC Botanical Garden in Vancouver


The University of British Columbia garden is great because half of it is a large woodlands garden with all sorts of native cedar, spruce and fir trees with all sorts of large plant species from Asia. The above photo was taken by Jill. It shows a pink peony-headed or heroin poppy, a purple poppy and some red cape fuchsia. We have the red cape fuchsia in our garden and the hummingbirds love it.

When we weren't at gardens, we were eating at Hon's House of Wun-Tun... the best place in town for cheap, outstanding Cantonese food.

Who knows when we'll be back again, but we look forward to photographing the baby at all of these favorite places when it's old enough.

ME-MA INJURES HER HIP

Me-Ma fell and cracked her hip - barely avoiding a full break - in Tempe while we were in Canada. She was in the hospital for a couple of days, but she's been on the mend in Las Vegas at Sue & George's. They haven't yet moved to Pahrump as their house hasn't been finished yet as I am told (here's a link to info on their new neighbor). Her recovery is in our prayers.

PROFFITT SHIN-DIG IN GALLUP

Because she got hurt, Mom and Me-Ma both missed Terry's reception dinner after his recent wedding in Kansas. Tom, Kate, Sue, George and a host of others attended and reported it was a nice event, though Terry was working the room and wasn't able to visit people for an overly long time. But that's what you do at an event like that held in your honor. Susan, I believe, is the name of his new bride and we wish them both much happiness. I understand they're now in Hawaii enjoying a nice honeymoon. Good for them.

NEW KITTEN FOR MOM

Chance (or Tuesday as she was formerly known) was formally adopted by Mom when she was in Tempe. The five-week old kitten - long on black and white hair but short on common sense - was a nearly-dead orphan before Melissa and Miranda spotted her on a bicycle outing not long ago. The kitten was clearly abandoned by its mother, so it's been nursed back to health and now happily residing in Vancouver USA. She apparently is rather fond of Ellie and plays non-stop with her. That's a good thing as Ellie's so quick and jerky in her movements that she freaks out Nino and forget about Sundaye entirely.

BIRTHING CLASSES Q&A

And finally, we're in full swing with birthing classes. Right now, we're taking two of them: the hospital (mandatory) classes and the Bradley classes.

Q: What are the Bradley classes?
A: The Bradley(tm) method of birth is a natural childbirth approach that is notable because the husband is the coach.

Q: What do you mean by natural?
A: By natural, we mean with little or no medical intervention, i.e. drugs that induce, accelerate or deaden the pain of pregnancy.

Q: Are you completely insane?
A: Maybe, but that has nothing to do with our decision to have a natural birth. The whole idea is that medical births as they are commonly practiced in hospitals in the U.S. are flawed in ways that potentially harm the mother and the baby. They pose harm to the baby via the potential effects of labor pain-killing drugs and use of devices to extract the baby because epidurals (administration of drugs to epidural area near mom's spinal chord) actually slow and delay labor. They pose harm to the mom because the use of medical devices and procedures - episiotomies, etc. - are more common if inducement drugs and epidurals are administered, which in turn significantly increase the chances of need for a far more tramatic cesarean section birth.

Q: That's great, but does Jill have any idea what she's in for?
A: No, but then no first-time mother does. Yet natural childbirth is what the body was designed to do. It's a matter of physical preparation through exercise and relaxation techniques as well as education about the whole process that helps get through the inevitable difficult parts and avoids unnecessary difficult parts.

Q: What do you mean by unnecessary difficult parts?
A: Many things that uninformed couples do, before and during the hospital birth, can serve to complicate or make the birth far more miserable than it should be. Going in to the hospital too soon, not knowing what can be done pre-admittance to get baby into the best position possible, the mom not knowing all of the therapies that are available to her instead of drugs, the mom being allowed to lie flat on her back during labor, limited amounts of time for various stages of natural labor before inducement is required, inducement drugs administered at too-high dosage causing far more painful labor, artificially painful labor that then requires the mom to get an epidural, the epidural slowing labor and increasing the chance of a cesarean section, the rate of which are on the rise nationwide. All of these things can be avoided with education about the woman's body, labor stages and strategies for different parts of those stages to get through them without drugs.

Alternatively, a fully natural birth has many benefits, including a fully healthy and alert baby that is immediately ready to feed, an alert and healthy mom that is able to immediately begin breastfeeding and will have a higher success rate of sustaining breastfeeding through infancy, and a hormone surge that serves to reduce the size of the uterus more quickly as well as return the mother to her healthy normal weight sooner.

Q: But what if there are complications you can't control?
A: I didn't say we were militant, I just mean that we want to do everything we can to avoid medical intervention. If the baby is breach (butt/legs first), the chord is around the baby in a complicated manner or anything else, we are prepared to allow the doctors to intervene for the health of Jill and baby. But if all is normal, then a natural birth it shall be.

Q: So what does the dad do during all of this?
A: He's the coach. He is the anchor while Mom goes through labor, works with the hospital (nurse-midwife in our case) personnel on behalf of the laboring Mom, massages and comforts Mom in any way necessary and helps her to rest, relax and position herself however (soaking tub, labor bar, pregnancy ball, however!) so that labor passes as well as possible. His presence is particularly important through Transition - the short 45-minute to hour window of time when the Mom is insistent upon pain relief. Transition is immediately before the less painful Pushing stage begins and with Dad there to encourage her, she can get through the short Transition and begin delivery with less discomfort. Most women can get through late-stage labor without pain medication, but for whatever reason turn 180-degrees and psychologically demand it in the short, final transition stage, even though things will get much better very quickly soon after.

MORE LATER!