Any Day Now

Not a whole lot to write about for this blog that is non-baby related and we are trying to keep most of that on the baby blog so someday we can put it into a book for our daughter.  We are in any day now mode and so the days just seem to run together.  It does look like a very late season Hurricane is going to visit the Caribbean starting later today and through next week.  Its current track is not good but most of the models have it reaching the central Caribbean and then turning north before Jamaica so while it is disconcerting it is not yet a major worry and we are cautiously optimistic it wont be an issue.  We will be keeping a close eye and if it does come our way will have to go to the hospital to ride it out.  I am trying to wrap up as much at work as possible so that I can take several weeks off after the baby comes.  I have been asked to chair a session of the National Healthcare 20/20 conference in a couple of weeks and other than that am working on clearing my schedule for rest of November and early December.  The nice thing about using almost no vacation days this year is that I now have 36 of them and since 20 of them expire if I don't use them by Dec 31, I will be using those 20 plus about 10 more to have a good six weeks of Paternity leave. 

Penguin Cake

Today we are celebrating the September and October birthdays at work. It was a perfect excuse for me to use the penguin cake pan that my mom gave me a while ago. It is a "cupcake" cake pan. The pan itself is made up of smaller, piece-sized sections. You bake the cake and then put the sections together to make the penguin. After you have decorated it, each section can be easily pulled apart to make a separate piece.

The cake recipe I used was a bit dense but it meant that the cake wasn't crumbly so that it was easier to get the pieces level after baking. For next time, I will probably use less almond flavoring or even try vanilla as the almond taste is pretty strong. Of course it is whole wheat as well since I don't have white flour in the house.

After the cake that one of the students brought for the ICCI shower, I really wanted to try decorating the cake by making little flowerettes using a special tip instead of smearing the frosting on. I experimented on little cupcakes to get the technique down and then set to doing the penguin. I still don't have the hang of getting the flowerettes close enough together the first try so I did have to do some "patching" to fill in spots. I also didn't produce consistently sized flowerettes but I think it looks pretty good for a first try!

There is a God

33Miles has a worship song, "There is a God". As I was baking this afternoon, I had on ITunes and had it on shuffle through all our music, and the ITune shuffler decided to play it.

The words hit me strong today. Here is just the first verse and the chorus.

FIRST VERSE:

There's a beauty to the dawn, a rhythm to the rain
A silence in the soul that I just can't explain
There's a breath of life I breathe, a beating in my heart
A magnificence, a scary sense of what lies past the stars
Beyond what we can see behind the mystery
I know that it could only be

CHORUS:

There is a God; this is the proof
That all around the evidence is speaking the truth
From the center of my soul to the edge of the universe
Creation is crying out believe it or not
There is a God

Through my faith journey over the past few years nothing has struck me so much as evidence of God as this life that wiggles, kicks, and continues to grow inside me. Yes, every finger, toe, eyelash, and hair can be explained through science and the specific cell signatures that grew out of the first merger of cells between Scott and I. Science has mapped out how I now have a 5 pound 10 ounce baby girl squirming inside me that started off as a mere collection of cells but faith gives me the wonder at what is happening. I choose not to divorce science and faith. I choose to see the wonders that can be explained through science as more evidence of a God who has created this world where two cells can combine and know what to do next to create a new human life.

Whenever she decides to join us, this baby girl will be a unique person. She will probably look a little like me, a little like Scott. and a little just like herself. She will probably act in some ways like me, someways like Scott, and someways just like herself. All of these things can be explained through the scientific mapping of her DNA but faith allows me to see the unique combination of everything that will make her HER as specific choices by a God who sees the path for her life.

This baby girl is a combination of the science that conducts the manual labor and the God that orchestrates the whole thing as he watches over her. She is the most powerful evidence in my life that there really is a God.

The problem with crying wolf

So once again the local news is full of coverage and everyone is in a tizzy about the possibility of Tropical Storm Richard forming to our south later tonight or tomorrow.  Whenever that happens invariably we have students asking us about classes being cancelled and generally everyone on edge.  The problem is that this is about the fifth week in a row that we have had some kind of storm warning, flood watch etc. and at some point it just feels not real.  That I suppose is the real danger you stop being so sensitive to the weather channel and all the hurricane websites and stop being completely prepared and then bang the storm really comes.  With Katie just three weeks from her due date tomorrow, we are still paying close attention but really just want the season to be over with and no excitement to come our direction.  Even if we get the storm it will likely only be a tropical storm which means no classes but also means no need to put up all the hurricane shutters etc.  So, we are once again we are on storm watch and hopefully this is just one more time of crying wolf and the real thing passes us by like TS Nicole and TS Paula did with just a slight glancing blow of rain and no more excitement than getting to see the warning flags flying in all the roundabouts. Meanwhile just because I am sick of the rain and to show how pretty the foliage here can get below is a shot of the side of Friends Hall our main classroom building and what we get to see every July and August when the trees here are in full bloom.

Thursday Morning Update

Looks like it has formed but to our south and is eventually headed west so just more rain unless it takes a weird turn.  Right now the center is just to the right of directly south of us.

Buccaneer's Feast

Tonight to celebrate Katie's 27th birthday we went to the Buccaneer's Feast at the Marriott Beach Resort. The dinner was on Seven Mile Beach at the Solana restaurant. It was a buffet style feast with Alaskan King Crab, BBQ ribs, a pasta station, sushi, tons of other hot dishes, and a lot of desserts.

After the meal, there was a pirate show with a DJ, fire dancing, and pirate sword fights. Katie made some new friends and we both enjoyed a great meal and a good time.

Happy Birthday Katie

The big birthday party is tomorrow at the Buccaneer feast over at the Marriott but today of course is the Big Two Seven for Katie.  Will post pictures of the feast and show this weekend.

Watching Paula

Late season storms are always a headache because they form to our south and give us little lead time.  TS Paula is now forming to our south and west and will be in our neighborhood all week.  No idea yet which way it may move so we are watching it closely.  As you can see Grand Cayman (which is directly to the right of the Saturday projected location) is in the outer loop but outside the watch cone.

Rum Point Harry Potter Morning

As today is a Longhorn-football-free day we went this morning up to Rum Point. We did bring our swimsuits but it was pretty windy so the normally glass smooth water was choppy. We decided just to enjoy the sun and read Harry Potter instead of getting in the water.

As we are working on recapturing the wonder that is Cayman, Scott took a bunch of pictures that normally the tourists take but we normally ignore when we go. It really is a pretty place and captures the typical Caribbean view.

Of course there is also the silly picture of Baby C now that she has grown so much! 4.5 weeks to go! When it is calm, we think that Rum Point will be a great place to bring her so that she can get used to the water.

Losing the Wonder

When we first arrived on Cayman, so many things that captured our attention. We were fascinated by the cow in the Ivan damaged building, enthralled by the chickens that crowd around your car at the grocery store, and interested in the crabs that would play "chicken" with the car as we were driving.

Now that we have been here three years, we have lost some of that wonder over the little things that make Cayman unique.

A few days ago, as we were heading home from the college, we saw a car with a white license plate (a tourist) parked in the middle of a field right in front of a bull covered in white birds. The tourists were taking pictures while the bull politely allowed them to. We'd passed that bull many times and the birds were just a part of the scene but we'd never thought of it as anything special. We'd lost that wonder at the little things that make Cayman, Cayman!

After dropping Scott off at work this morning, a white license plate car about 200 yards in front of me suddenly pulled to the side. I was going to stop to see if I could help but then I noticed the camera. Yet again a tourist had pointed out to me what we miss on our day to day trips through Cayman. She had stopped to take a picture of the newly erected, quite funny looking, goat farm that sits right along the bypass. Although we'd noticed it, we never thought anything of it. We've lost the wonder!

We need to work harder to notice the things that make this place special, the things that stand out to visitors as uniquely Cayman!

The Ritz Carlton

Although we have been on Cayman well over 3 years, we had yet to visit the only five star resort on the island, The Ritz Carlton.  We have students who work there and have driven past it literally hundreds of times as it sits right on Seven Mile Beach road, but had never gone in or been to an event there.  Last night we finally got to see what all the fuss is about as we attended a gala dinner put on by the Cayman Islands Society of Professional Accountants which honored graduates of the two local colleges who got degrees in accounting. 

As we pulled up the long driveway into the Ritz our first question was parking but that was quickly answered by the valet who met us on the road and indicated that valet parking was a part of our tickets to the event.  Feeling very special, we pulled right up to the main entrance, handed our keys to the valet and headed in.  Employees of the resort pointed us in the right direction as we headed to where the dinner was being held.  The Ritz is a huge complex of several buildings on both sides of Seven Mile Beach road.  Our event was in the main resort on the land side of SMB road.  The dinner was in a huge ballroom and as the reception was going on we spent some time "exploring" the resort.  It was dark so we couldn't see the outside amenities but did get a chance to wander around inside and see the gallery.  The inside was very nice but not so much that it  blew us away.  The dinner was good and it was great to see several of our students recognized who had graduated last year with degrees in accounting.  Ironically, the keynote speaker was Don Seymour a local businessman who is a graduate of the University of Texas (yes I watched the game yesterday afternoon and we shall speak no more of it!).  We were both tired after the excitement of yesterday morning (about which you can read on the baby blog) and the adrenaline rush was wearing off so by 10 p.m. we were ready to skip the dancing part of the evening and just head home.  It was nice to see what at least part of the Ritz was all about.  A huge part of the Ritz's reputation is their service and we could definitely see that was deserved.  I am just not sure we could ever stomach paying 500 or more a night for a room no matter how good the service might be.  It was a fun evening though and certainly helped take our minds off the worry of earlier (and of course what turned out to be the real tragedy of the day, the Texas-OU game).