Progress on the room and names.

My Aunt Esther pointed out to me the other day that these haven't been as funny for a while as they were in the beginning.  I have nothing to say to that except to acknowledge it.  My guess is that when Secondhand Pregnancy gives way to Firsthand parenting it will start to get funny again.
Happy Birthday Uncle Steve.
My colleague, weight training partner, and good friend Nate and his pickup truck took me out to the furniture store today to load up the glider that we bought last fall and bring it home.  It's now installed in a corner of the baby's room by where I'm going to build the crib tomorrow.  Right at the window, because the directions explicitly say not to put the chair in sunlight.
This glider is really our big splurge on baby furniture, but I think it was absolutely worth it.  Furniture is one of those things, in my experience, where you more often than not tend to get what you pay for.  It's true, I'm sure, that there are some brand names in that industry that carry a premium, but in general when we've gone cheap on furniture we've gotten cheap furniture.
We did not go cheap on this glider.
A glider was important because of the potentially disastrous results of combining rocking chairs and cats.  We have one rocking chair and two cats.  So far we've not had a bad cat/rocking chair incident, but we don't use the rocking chair that much.  We expect that we'll use that sort of thing a lot with the baby, so we got this glider that can rock the baby and not damage the cats, all at the very same time.
If there is a premium name in gliders it's the one that we bought.  We got pointed to it by a guy that sells Amish furniture in town.  We went there first, and the owner told us that if what we're after is a glider, then we really need to go to one of his competitors up the street and look at a Dutalier.  He doesn't sell them because they're made by French Canadian people, not Amish people.
Amish furniture guy had a pretty nice glider.  We actually tried to buy it, but the choices for upholstery were, well, Amish.  The make great furniture, and they're definitely who you want around for raising barns and not using buttons and stuff like that, but they're not really known for their aesthetic sensibilities.  The sales guy at the Amish furniture place was absolutely useless.  This is not the owner, by the way, it was a second trip and the owner wasn't around.  We're standing there, credit card in hand, trying to buy the glider.  It was very nice, and way less expensive than the Dutalier, but still too expensive to buy if it was going to be as butt-ass ugly as it would have turned out utilizing their upholstery options.  The sales guy, who clearly isn't on commission, was pretty unconcerned about the fact that Kate and I and our credit card were leaving without making a purchase.  His only real response was to point out that the Amish aren't known for being fashion-forward.  We left and went up the street to the other place and bought the Dutalier.  I suppose I could have asked to speak to the owner, but I'm only willing to expend so much energy for the privilege of spending several hundred dollars in someone's store.  In case the guy from Home Depot Customer Care is still cruising here, that was Don's Home Furniture in Madison. 
So we bought the Dutalier at Woodworks in Madison.  They also stored it for us until we had the room ready for it at no extra charge.  I just sat in it.  Worth every penny, and the folks at Woodworks were great.

We still don't have a name for the baby.  But it's time I spoke a bit about John Peterson.
John was my boss for the last several years.  John was a retired Navy officer who commanded an aircraft carrier in the first Iraq war, flew jets in combat in Vietnam, and was the ranking UN officer on the ground during the UN involvement in Somalia (amongst other things that meant that he was the last non-Somali to leave the country when everything unraveled and the UN pulled out).
John was an avid hunter, a very observant Christian (Deacon in his church, I think), and when I met him eleven years ago he'd voted Republican in every election he could for longer than I've been alive.
You might think, from the above description, that John and I wouldn't ever get along.
Hang on.
Some of you reading this might not have ever met me, so let me pause for a moment and describe some things about me.
I came into my current career of IT technologist and then personnel management after many many years of self employment teaching martial arts and self defense, and filling in my income gaps when those didn't cover rent as a bouncer and cab driver and line cook and a few other things my mother would rather not know about.  I got into IT as an instructor of software, and then got my first technologist job at the University of Wisconsin's central IT shop on the recommendation of my friend and training partner Robert, who already worked there.
Robert told me they had a job I'd be perfect for.
After reading the requirements for the job I told Robert I wasn't qualified for that job.  Robert suggested that I leave that to him, and try not to overtly acknowledge not being qualified for the job in the interview.
So, I got that first job, and then several more after it.  Turns out I have a knack for fixing computers.
Who knew?  Prior to that I hadn't really displayed a knack for fixing anything except dinner.  I fix an excellent dinner.
So I was, very much to my surprise, a pretty good technologist.  Then I went into management.
Turns out also that a professional background in adult education is excellent experience for personnel management.
That one's not as surprising.
John hired me into my first, second, and third (current) management jobs.
Something else for those of you who don't know me...
My last gig as a bouncer ended six or seven years ago.  I've been an IT guy for twelve years now.  In spite of that, I still look way more like a bouncer than an IT guy.
I'm big.  Not tall, but bulky (5'11", 220ish).  My head is generally shaved, I wear earrings, and have tattoos on both arms that show unless I'm wearing a business shirt.  At 43 I'm still pretty muscular (which I work at quite a bit), and when I'm wearing contact lenses it's pretty obvious that my nose has been broken more than once (a lot more, in fact).  Most of the year I come to work on a big loud Harley Davidson Road King.
I tried to do the business casual thing, and I can't.  It just doesn't work for me, I'm a blue jeans and t-shirts and motorcycle boots guy.  I'm way uncomfortable in khaki pants and when I wore a suit to interviews John said I looked more like a hitman than an IT guy.
I'm socio-politically waaaay left (though still a disappointment to my parents in that regard, I suspect).  I strongly believe that we haven't been involved in a just war since WW2, that the money that goes into the military and big business should be redirected to education and social welfare, I think that gay people need to have the right to get married and that women need to have sole decision making authority when it comes to their own reproductive issues.  Also, I'm a [loosely] practicing Jew.
So, from purely superficial description you'd think that John and I wouldn't get along well at all.
Oh yeah, one more thing...
In spite of the fact that I look more like a hired thug than an IT manager, and that fact has caused me some professional problems, I'm pretty good at what I do.
Thing is, John saw that, in spite of those superficial variations from the norm, I'd probably be pretty good as an IT manager, and gave me a shot anyways.  And then fought for me to be fairly compensated and evaluated in spite of the fact that I don't look like a lot of people's idea of a [fairly] highly paid IT manager.
The first thing that I learned from John is that my preconceptions about military guys and their preconceptions were way wrong.  I assumed that as a military guy John would never trust a vocally lefty visually non-clean cut traditional guy like me.  But John was a real military guy and a real military officer.  Part of that means (I learned from him) that evaluating people based on superficial concerns like appearance choices or even politics is a luxury that can't really be accommodated in the real world.
As I said above, I'm waaay left, but not as left as my parents (last time I checked).  I'm not rebelling against my socio-political upbringing like most of my lefty friends.  My ethics and values are a reflection of the environment I was raised in (Kate's too, by the way).  So I've been surrounded by politically and socially progressive people my whole life.  John Peterson, my retired military officer, devout Christian, Republican voting boss, was more blind to a person's superficial differences than anyone I've ever met.  John evaluated you and me and everyone else strictly on his assessment of their capabilities.  That assessment was made very quickly, and it was frighteningly accurate.  He hired and worked well with and supported the careers of women and people of color and non-christians, and gay people, and was blind to gender and sex and religion and race and orientation when it came to performance.  And he did it right.  He didn't pretend I wasn't a Jew, for example, or that the women that worked for him weren't women, or whatever.  He just knew that those things were irrelevant to job performance.  I think that this quality comes from being under fire in combat, where indulging bias is a luxury that will likely get you killed.
John was hysterically funny.  He and his wife had six or seven dogs they'd adopted, and he was always coming to work with a new story about one of them, complete with dead-on impressions of the animals facial expressions and barking and whining. 
He had, as you'd probably imagine, fascinating stories about the military and his experiences.  He also was absolutely horrible when it came to remembering whether or not he'd told you a particular story before.  I heard some of his stories so many times I can probably tell them as well as he could at this point.  Whenever John said "Have I ever told you about...?"  the correct answer was "no" and then you'd better sit down because this was going to take a while.  He was the boss, after all.  Being the boss has privileges.
I went into IT because I couldn't be an itinerant martial-arts and self-defense instructor forever if I wanted to own a house or pay off my student loans or be able to reasonably support a child.  I have run with every opportunity I've been given in my career, and been very successful.  That's to my credit.  But I couldn't have done that without being given the opportunity to do it, and while John wasn't the only one to do that in my career, he was the main one to do that.  I'm very very good at my job, and well-paid for being so.  That's why I can sit in the basement of the house that Kate and I own and talk about this in the first place.  I brought a lot into my job from my teaching background, but I learned more about how to do my job well by being lucky enough to work for John.  The guy commanded an aircraft carrier in combat, running an IT department at a university was really a no-brainer for him.
I am a good leader, and that's largely because I got to learn from a guy that had forgotten more about being a good leader than I'll know (if you'll forgive the cliche).
For those of you that don't know (though you've likely caught on by now), we very unexpectedly lost John on April 9th of last year, the Thursday before Good Friday.
I have a new boss, and he's a great guy.  I'd worked with him before, he's very supportive and I have no doubt that I again have a boss that I can trust to support me in my career.  That's huge to me, because I care way less about what I do than who I do it for.
But I miss John every day that I'm there.  John was one of the only people that knew that Kate and I were trying to get pregnant, and one of the greatest irreparable disappointments of my life is that I'll never get to introduce my son to John.
Traditionally Jews don't name children after the living.  I don't know why that is, actually, but we don't.

Kate and I are waiting until he's here to finalize a first and middle name for the boy, but one of them is almost certainly going to be John.