a year in the life. We had our first class in there last night. Coats were hung on coat hooks I had hung five minutes previously. The person running the class had my phone number for two days to coordinate everything she might need; instead she showed up half an hour after she said she would and expected I could make it all work. And I did. But it's galling - "Yeah, I've never been here before, or met you before, and the last time my organization stopped by the sheetrock had just gone up I'm sure you can make my three hours of powerpoint and Youtube videos work just fine, especially if I give you half an hour, despite the fact that I've been forewarned the internet is spotty I'm sure you can work it out." And then my wife showed up and then I took the kid home and then she got home at eleven. I'm on my 3rd or 4th 10-11-12 hour day on this fucker. Monday night was two hours naked knee-deep in lukewarm water scraping blue protectant off a tub. Yesterday, on the other, was easier... but I discovered that the tub they were 3 weeks late in delivering (thereby setting us back 3 weeks) is a factory 2nd with a massive chip in it that will spread if I can't get it fixed. So that made me happy. The difficulty is the minute that class got there, it was abundantly clear that I don't belong. Nobody in the birth community says "husband" because it's offensive. We're all "partners." And we're all "supportive" and we're all expected to get out of the way so they can focus on women's mysteries. Except during the birth where the philosophy is basically "thou art thy partner's bitch who is suffering more than you can ever know to bring about the miracle of life you're lucky we let you in the room worm now help your master breathe!" So what I'm left with is I've spent like three years building a business in an industry actively hostile to my gender, that will never have anything to do with me, and which resents my participation. I am a fish building an airplane. It's a fuckin' P-51 Mustang to be sure but I still got gills, you know? The only thing I get out of it is gratitude from my wife, and despite spending the better part of two days cleaning and tidying and polishing that place I was denied any reaction from her last night because god forbid we speak too loudly to interrupt the class. I realized yesterday that while I've been maintaining social media channels for two years and organizing ad campaigns and infographics and all the rest, I've never once mentioned the birth center on my own Facebook page. This is really the only place I talk about it. That probably says something.
It's got 7x 350 lumen daylight LEDs hitting it. My father in law, the master gardener, thinks it won't get enough light. It's getting 50 foot candles, or 538 lumens/m^2, out of 2450 lumens. On eBay right now there are fixtures that will fit the track that take 250W quartz lamps. 5700 lumens each. I could fit three easy. That should get me about 350 foot candles. So the question is: do I let go of the low-energy utopia of LED MR16s and hang three torchiere lamps? I think yes.
Seems like the light is a bit low for what you need. The problem is that if you hit them with the amount they need for good growth its too bright and blinds you and/or you end up with a weird color spectrum (pink/blue lights). In living areas you almost need to have them setup as inverse proximity sensors where they turn on when nobody is there to be annoyed by the bring lights. One trick I've seem for places that do plant walls but dont have enough lights is that they rotate the plants in and out every week or two. You have a place setup off-site that has brighter lights and you grow the plants there for a bit and then move them back into your decorative locations. Its a pain in the ass but it can be done effectively. My favorite lights are Metal halide, they aren't as efficient as HPS for plant growth but you get one with a wide natural color spectrum. When I had one setup for the indoor Tomatoes I'd just sit under it on rainy days and it would genuinely make me feel happier. You get around 75-100 Lumens/Watt which is close to what you get in high end LEDs (CREE, Philips) and better than Chinese LED's. The problem is how you incorporate them into you design at this point.
I've always loved MH for aquariums. They're the only way to get the scintillation on the gravel. But they're pigs. They put out a shit-ton of heat. they're fragile. They're short-lived. And they're definitely not sitting on Gemini track. The pink/blue thing is a problem too because none of the grow lights have any kind of throw. They expect you to be growing tomatoes with a light hanging horizontally six inches from above. And nobody who does grow lights expects you to do any flagging - it's gonna be hella bright, it's gonna have a 360 degree pattern, and there will be zero facility to control the spread. Believe it or not, I threw a PAR meter on the thing. With 14 hours of on-time the wall gets more than 2 and less than 50 PAR. I actually did just fine with some exemplar plants over a year ago: The nice thing about having it on the wall 4' up is I can hit it obliquely and never hit anyone in the eyes.
Id love to see how you experiment turns out. Ive wanted to do something similar with built in plants but always thought it would be too impractical given the lighting thats currently available. There isnt a lot of documentation online about low light plants like the ones you have so it will be interesting to see if that you give them is enough
The moss is already spreading. The prayer plants are popping out leaves. The pothos are shooting out leaves, too, with some white to them. Even the Ludisias seem to be doing okay... the Spiders, though, are unmoved. We'll see. The water is on a tap under the sink, which goes to a drip irrigation line along the top. The intent is to slap a solenoid on there, and then put a timer on the solenoid. Bonus points if I can get a doser in there too for some liquid fertilizer because otherwise, fertilizing the thing is gonna be tricky. I wish I could call it an experiment. 80% of the installed green walls in the world use that system or the outdoor version.
this attitude blows my mind - Always has. I mean, as feminists aren't we supposed to be encouraging men to be more involved with their children? Doesn't that means bringing men into spaces like these and saying yes, you do in fact belong here? Fuck man, idunno. People often have blinders on to their own actions, especially when they are in opposition to their purported beliefs. One of the benefits of how my depression manifests is that I can usually see when I'm not practicing what I preach - because I'll flagellate myself about it.The difficulty is the minute that class got there, it was abundantly clear that I don't belong. Nobody in the birth community says "husband" because it's offensive. We're all "partners." And we're all "supportive" and we're all expected to get out of the way so they can focus on women's mysteries. Except during the birth where the philosophy is basically "thou art thy partner's bitch who is suffering more than you can ever know to bring about the miracle of life you're lucky we let you in the room worm now help your master breathe!"
Here's the problem: Left to their own devices, women will do births without any men around. There's no fucking reason for men to be involved. They have none of the plumbing. They have none of the pain. They have none of the experience. Most people aren't inured to hearing about "boggy uteruses" while you're eating dinner but I'm here to tell ya, there's a whole constellation of biology that men seldom come into contact with and that's pretty much fine. The problem is, once we blew through the tribe/hamlet/village paradigm we took it out of womens' hands. Thus the big holy hospital where the anointed ones confer the miracle of childbirth on you, rather than with you. Men's roles in it all didn't change - the handing-out-of-cigars is a traditional thing. But we splintered the village, we splintered the hamlet, and we flung families far and wide. So most young professionals of childbearing age? Their sole support is their partner. They're going to go through this process with their partner. They're going to do childbirth ed classes with their partner. And the guy who traditionally provides support and gets the hell out of the way when things get bloody and technical and vaginal suddenly has a contraction timer on his iPhone. And really? The women want another woman there to do this shit with but we can't leave the husband out. So we make him participate. Awkwardly. In a role he has no experience doing and no interest in. Next time you're out in a public space, look for a pregnant woman. Now look for the dude with her. Look closely into his eyes. Notice he looks an awful lot like he was having a drink in Portland and woke up in the hold of a ship bound for Shanghai but he's learned not to speak up so he doesn't get beaten. It's this peculiar haunted despair look that communicates pretty clearly that he doesn't know what he's doing but he knows his future depends on doing it right.
First off, that album is amazing. That place looks so homey, cozy, and WARM. I don't sense any of the hang-ups that people might perceive when looking at a hospital room, so if that was part of the mission, mission accomplished. And your little secretary is such a cutie pie. I don't think I have anything very helpful to say as to the birth center's clientele. That is a bit of a conundrum. But let me be the first to say that, for the past two years, I have loved reading your updates. You sure do love your wife.
It is what it is. I mean, we're talking about people who aren't phased by the question "so are you going to eat your placenta?" because that's a thing (because of course it's a thing). When you're dealing with a full-fledged womyns mysteries clan of the cave bear mystic circle crew you know that the husbands are either whipped or divorced. Gross generalization, not always true, but home birth clients are alpha females full stop.
Looks amazingly awesome but fuck man.... I don't see any Klein Blue. :)
Welcome to kleinbl00, where imgur albums show off the adorable daughter and the landline setup.
Dude that landline setup, tho. It's got 90 minutes of battery backup. It's got 16 lines of VoIP. It'll handle a hundred extensions. It's got a fax line and music-on-hold and the ability to kick normal old POTS out to the 3 client phones. And if you call after hours it'll record a voicemail that it emails that hits my wife's Android on T-mobile AND Sprint AND US Cellular AND wifi and punches through any do-not-disturb that's been set. All that for under a grand out the door. And I only had to read this fucking book to understand it.
"if a dude as dumb as steve can figure it out.... I can do this" Sounds like you've got some advanced features. Well done. I haven't done phones in years... what you've built far exceeds any of the requirements (or even available features) I had to deal with. Well done... and not just the phones - the whole place looks fan-damn-tastic.It was a real confidence builder
Yes. Well, we're trying not to make our customers feel hated. The worst part about most IP-based hold music is it fucking starts at the beginning every time you move in the queue. Apple was the worst for this, especially as their call centers were all wired together using coat hangers and baling wire. Crackle crackle fizz fizz distorted guitar fizz crackle "hi, I'm representing the world's largest tech company can you hear me sir?"
From experience, making a large phone system that doesn't suck is a pain in the ass and not enough of a priority to the powers that be, so you can either have a humorless phone system that makes your customers feel hated or a humorous phone system that makes your customers feel hated. I'll grant that you probably have more room to approach not-infuriating than most of us.
Okay, this is one of the things that hasn't been culturally translated to Sweden. What is it you run exactly? In Sweden when parents are having a baby they (except in a few exceptions) have it in the hospital with a midwife and a doctor sometimes. Now I've understood that the profession of midwifery has died out in the US, and that it is either epidural or hippy-ish stuff. (I'm generalizing, but in Sweden it is very common with laughing gas for the pain during childbirth for example which (as I have understood) is very uncommon in the US so to me it seems like there is less of a middle way) Classes in like, breathing techniques and such are usually offered by the state healthcare system, and I think are a bit more gender equal in terms of eh... A partners role in childbirth. But having a baby in the US seems very different.
I have built (love the past tense on that) a freestanding birth center, which is a place low-risk families can come to deliver babies out-of-hospital. It is understood by all parties that the minute things are looking unsafe momma is delivering in-hospital. In the United States, 98.64% of all babies are born in hospitals supervised by doctors. Midwives are witches to be burned at the stake. In our state, however, out-of-hospital births are more than 3%. In our county, out-of-hospital births are 6% and climbing. so much hippy-ish stuff. However, up here it's covered by insurance which means there's a higher percentage of normals. But yeah. There's a reason I know way too much about vaccine skepticism. We're allowed to run nitrous. We probably will. It's becoming a thing you can get at birth centers that you can't get at hospitals. (because you can't bill nearly as much as you can for an epidural) Around here it's 100% pure hippie. And that's why my wife ceased to be a software architect.What is it you run exactly?
In Sweden when parents are having a baby they (except in a few exceptions) have it in the hospital with a midwife and a doctor sometimes.
Now I've understood that the profession of midwifery has died out in the US, and that it is either epidural or hippy-ish stuff.
(I'm generalizing, but in Sweden it is very common with laughing gas for the pain during childbirth for example which (as I have understood) is very uncommon in the US so to me it seems like there is less of a middle way)
Classes in like, breathing techniques and such are usually offered by the state healthcare system, and I think are a bit more gender equal in terms of eh... A partners role in childbirth.
But having a baby in the US seems very different.
North enough for Snohomish County taxes and regulations, south enough that people in Ballard love how close we are. We are 1.0 miles north of the county line and 1.6 miles from the nearest off-ramp. And the nearest bus station is literally our parking lot.
I went to a yoga class the other day and I forgot about the whole " be totally silent as soon as you walk in so you don't disturb other peoples silence" thing which led to that very weird first class feeling of wtf do I do now. Also, this whole time I thought that blue stuff on the tub peeled off and I'm really disappointed to hear otherwise.
Half of it did. Half of it totally didn't. Probably comes down to "this one sat out in the sun for an afternoon so now it's like chewing gum." The chipped one peeled off like fruit leather... mostly. Except where plaster landed on it, because the plaster keeps it from bending, which keeps it from peeling, which means you have to very gently tap a plastic spudger under the plaster to get the shit off, and then rub it down hard with a wet washcloth. The unchipped one was fucking awful. I literally filled four garbage cans with blue crud, then another two with the protective film on the fridge.