Robert’s Blog

When Christine and I got married, my mom gave us my grandmother’s china. But for the past seven years, all that china has spent 364 days a year hiding away on a high shelf in our kitchen because we never had a proper cabinet for it. Now, at long last, we’ve found a cabinet we like, and the china has a place to call home.

In other news, we found our pattern listed on Replacements.com, so we can eventually start to slowly rebuild my grandma’s set to what was probably its original glory, and eventually pass it all along to Maya.

With a baby on the way, I recently made a point of taking out a term life policy. But when the results of my blood test showed that my cholesterol levels were unusually low, the underwriters for Farmers balked and conducted a follow-up investigation, including a second interview with me by telephone. They must have decided that my cholesterol levels were acceptable for a vegetarian, though, because I got word today that they’ve approved my policy. Here’s what the Mayo Clinic has to say about low cholesterol: Cholesterol level: Can it be too low?

UPDATE 12/3/07: Turns out I got a 20% discount on my life insurance premium, thanks to my low blood pressure. So there’s some food for thought for all of you who think vegetarianism is impractical.

That at-home gender prediction kit was a little like our current president: fiercely decisive and flat-out wrong. Today we had our 20-week ultrasound and, in addition to finding out that our baby appears perfectly healthy, we saw very clearly that she is a girl. In this ultrasound you can see her making a tight little fist, which she has been using to punch mommy in the tummy lately. We hope that particular behavior will taper off outside the womb.

This is by no means official, but as a favor to our friends at Pregnancy magazine, Christine used the IntelliGender prediction test this morning. Tomorrow we go in for our 20-week ultrasound, where we’ll get a more official determination. Look for Christine’s comments on the IntelliGender test itself in an upcoming issue of Pregnancy.

Need proof that Apple despises its own customers? On the left is Apple’s price, direct from the company’s online store, for 4GB of RAM for the iMac. On the right is the exact same RAM from Crucial, one of the leading memory manufacturers.

While I was grabbing a few things at the Apple store in Walnut Creek today, I asked the guy who was ringing me up what their price was, and he said, “A thousand bucks.”

I said, “No, really. How much?”

Him: “A thousand.”

Me: “Come on. Is it more than $200?”

Him: “Really. A thousand bucks.” He looked dead serious.

Me: “Wow.”

I guess Apple’s philosophy must be that anyone dumb enough to buy their RAM deserves to pay 500% more. Apple is now officially as evil as Microsoft, if not more so.