Three years is a long time

I haven't posted anything on here in quite a long time. Life gets in the way. Between work, marriage, and raising a kid there is little time for myself.

What has happened in those three years. Well, we had a son. It was a difficult pregnancy for my wife and stressful for us both. During her seventh moth of pregnancy we went until the OB for a normal checkup. Her blood pressure was sky high. The next day it hadn't come down and we were rushed to the hospital. The next morning she had emergency C-Section. Just reliving the basics through words on a screen gets me emotional.

Our son came to us eight weeks early. My wife recovered and he spend the next month in ICU. Multiple daily trips to the hospital were the norm.The nurses said he had a fighting attitude since day one. A trait that has for better or worse remained to this day. He is a little on the small side, but is a healthy, extremely smart, and stubborn two and half year old.

Also during this time period my work has also changed. Currently with the same company but the branch office I managed closed at the end of 2019 and at the beginning of the year I was transferred to our headquarters in Indianapolis. So we had a quick sell of our old house, a quick buy for a new property, and a move to kick off the year. We had to leave behind the only area my wife knew since she came to America, along with several friends.

Now we are in the middle of a pandemic, like all of us, and wondering what the next unknown day will bring.

That's the last three years in a nutshell. Father and Husband are my main roles these days when I am not working. It's an exhausting role, but rewarding in so many ways that I never imagined.





Observation of An Illogical mind by Sean Kimmel is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at http://www.seankimmel.com.
Please feel free to share the link but contact me for any other uses or publication. Thanks.

Baby Time

Just before we left for California, Pam was concerned. She wasn't feeling the best and her monthly period was late. She decided to take a pregnancy test. It came out positive. Later that day she took another with the same results. And in the wee hours of the morning before heading off to the airport she took a third test. Trifecta.

It looks like we are going to have a baby.

After we returned from California we scheduled a visit with the doctor. Blood work was taken and a revisit a couple of days later confirmed that she was about six or seven weeks along. Which would put the due date on October 31 (which is rather cool).

It looks like we are going to have a baby.

We scheduled an appointment with the OB about a week later. He had a little trouble finding the baby with a normal ultrasound. So we he order a vagina ultrasound and they were able to squeeze us in. I could see the worry on Pam's face as the technician did her work . I remained the rock to help ease her mind. Eventually the tech turned the monitor around a said "This little spec is the baby and this thumping is it's strong heartbeat." Tears rolled down Pam's face. Tears rolled down my face.

For the first time in three weeks it all came crashing down on me. The excitement, the fear, the joy of the situation.

We are having a baby.




Observation of An Illogical mind by Sean Kimmel is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at http://www.seankimmel.com.
Please feel free to share the link but contact me for any other uses or publication. Thanks.

California Love

When I took my new job as a manager for a our offices; it limited my travel time on the road. Actually halted it. Our anchor property was a hotel and none of other clients in the area traveled. When the anchor decided it was closing down to rebuild, it created some interesting scenarios for our office. It was decided that I could back on the road for a few events during the year as a technicians.

My first tech trip in nearly two years happened in late February. It was the same group that was my last road event before taking the manager's job. I always liked the client and the 2017 Conference was being held in Huntington Beach, CA. Getting out of cold of Northwest Indiana for a week didn't bother much.

Pam wanted to know if she she could come along. We checked ticket prices and flights were very reasonable so I brought her along to enjoy Southern California while I worked. She got spend a day with her cousin Marilyn who lives in Chino and then another day doing sightseeing in LA with a friend of hers and stay in a fancy Huntington Beach Hyatt Resort.

We did manage to get away from the resort for a couple of good meals. Of course we hit up an In & Out Burger on our first day and finished the trip at a local joint called SmashBurger.

At the end of the week I realized two years away from walking ten miles a days covering breakout rooms and pushing cases around facilities is a long time. This guy had one sore body and my arthritic knee was doing me no favors either.



Observation of An Illogical mind by Sean Kimmel is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at http://www.seankimmel.com.
Please feel free to share the link but contact me for any other uses or publication. Thanks.

Year 1 Anniversary Trip

Often these days life gets in the way of me writing. It use to be a way of decompressing and something I enjoyed in my free time. These days with more responsibilities at my paying job/career and more attention needed for my growing family; writing and updates to these blog often get put off to the side.
So I pulled up the site for the first time in quite awhile to notice an entry from last year that was never posted.

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It's our one year anniversary and time to get away. As I've stated before my job as allowed me to travel all over the United States over the last twenty years. I have seen a lot of this country and been most major cities. Pam has only been to a few places in her short time here. So we planned a trip for our one year anniversary. We did the Mid Atlantic swing, as I like to call it, with stops in North Carolina, Virginia, and Washington DC.

Pam doesn't have a whole lot of relatives in the US. One of her cousins lives in the small town of Jefferson, North Carolina which is nestled up in the Blue Ridge Mountains. We made plans to spend the weekend with them.

The first night of our trip we stopped in downtown Charleston, West Virginia. The city had some charm and a fairly bustling scene for a Friday evening in July. We walked around for awhile, stretching out from a long day of driving. We ate at a local pizza and beer joint before retiring back to the hotel for the evening. The next morning it was a four hour drive up through the mountains to our destination. We lost cell phone service and I certain the only way we found their house was because Steve was standing near the road and we saw him on our third pass. After settling in and having a late lunch; they took us on a tour of Jefferson. The next day we got a scenic tour of the mountain and surrounding areas and ate a great meal at a BBQ restaurant. Early the next morning we headed out as Leah and Steve both had to work. It was a short but fun stay with breathtaking views. Now it was onto our real vacation... Virginia Beach!

After a few hours of driving we arrived at Virginia Beach and our first stop was Jollibee of course! Pam had to get her Chicken Joy craving out of the way. Then it was three days of sunny beaches and relaxing and exploring the city. We kept it low key, staying near the Boardwalk Area of the beach most of the days. We did head over the Virginia Beach Aquarium one morning followed by a stop at a Filipino resto. After three days of fun, sun, good eats, and beer it was time to head to the next destination.

For a change of scenery we headed to Ocean City, Maryland for a day. We checked in the hotel and walked to the beach. This time we didn't stick around the beach. Instead we cooled off at the Ocean City Brewing Company for awhile where I sampled a couple of local flavors before eating delicious crabs from down the street.

Now it was off to Washington DC to spend the weekend with my friends Chris and Teri. On the way we made a tour Dogfish Head Brewery. Pam always puts up with my side trips to these places. We arrived at my friends apartment late in the afternoon. There was nothing too exciting on night one as we just was catching up with one of my best friends. Saturday came and we headed downtown to see some sites like The White House, Capitol Building, Mint, and Washington Monument. Smithsonian Natural History Museum and American History Museum were also on the agenda. All fun stops. We made them Filipino dinner that night and cooled off from morning. Sunday morning we decided to hit up the National Zoo. Once again the rest of the day was spend cooling off and hanging out. Early Monday morning came and once again we hit the road so our friends could get to work. Another short weekend stop but it's always good to see those two.

Eventually we got back home and decompressed for a day before I had to head back to work. It was a good vacation. My goal was to always take Pam places.To see places and parts of the US. On our trips, I am seeing old roads and places through a new set of eyes. It puts a new spin on it all for me. Plus it is a hell of a lot more interesting traveling with my lovely wife than the days I traveled alone in a box truck full of AV equipment.



Observation of An Illogical mind by Sean Kimmel is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at http://www.seankimmel.com.
Please feel free to share the link but contact me for any other uses or publication. Thanks.

Angry Face

There will always be disagreements in a relationship. Add in being raised in completely different cultures and there can be even more work to done.

Luckily my wife and I haven't had too many squabbles in our first year of marriage. And only one that I deemed fairly serious. At least the serious one helped us realize we both need to do work on communication and common ground.

Honestly most of our spats are because of miscommunication and differences in our cultural upbringing. When it happens I don't really know what we are arguing or why she is mad mainly because I view it as nothing to get mad about. Of course that's not really the root of the problem so it takes some detective work to figure it out. Most of time I end up apologizing and we move on.

Tampo is a Filipina way of handling problems and it's a very foreign concept to many Westerners. The woman get angry and wont speak (sometimes not talking for several hours or days) until the issue fades away. The core of the problem is never really discussed but the man and woman both save face.

In my mind it comes off as the woman pouting. I would rather talk about it. How else are we to know what the real issue might be.

My guess is I will always be dealing with tampo in some form or another. At least my wife normally only gives me that familiar angry face to let me I messed up in one form or another and is silent for a minimal amount of time.

Like I said earlier; we are both still learning, growing, and adapting.



Observation of An Illogical mind by Sean Kimmel is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at http://www.seankimmel.com.
Please feel free to share the link but contact me for any other uses or publication. Thanks.