Pitter Patter Pitter Patter... Choo Choo!

So, I'll have to make this short, as I'm supposed to be doing homework right now and have to pick up Amber from an interpreting job in less than an hour.

This afternoon, Amber and I went for her first doctor appointment since the pregnancy. We're actually a little behind schedule, but today was the first day they could get us in, as they only take new patients at certain times of the day. We even saw another couple from our church there who are a couple months ahead of us in the process! So, they did some tests, asked us questions about our family health history, and gave us a bunch of stuff to read through. AND, we got to hear our little baby's heartbeat for the first time. Craziness. This is REALLY going to happen. Someone's not playing a cruel trick on us! Anyways, it took a while for the midwife to find the baby and get a good read on the heartbeat - with the magnified heart monitor doo-hicky thing-a-ma-jig. He's already learning to play hide and seek! But when she finally got it in the right place, the heartbeat sounded like a freight train. Seriously! Perhaps it was because it was beating at around 155 beats a minute, which apparently is normal and healthy.

Also, in today's news, I've discovered that my laptop had a virus on it and kindly passed it on to my flash drive whenever I stuck it in. This happened a couple times before I realized what was going on (when I stuck my flash drive in our desktop, the virus was immediately found and discarded and I just went on my merry way). Well, for some reason, the virus basically made my flash drive unreadable. Every time I plugged it into a computer, it wouldn't let me open the drive. I started panicking - all my work would be lost and I hadn't backed it up since I started working on a recent paper. Thankfully, I was able to do a virus check on the flash drive - only on my laptop, ironically (although I still couldn't access the drive) - and was able to delete the virus and then open the flash drive. I created a back up folder immediately. Whew!

And finally, a quote for the week (i have a lot of these saved up but I don't have the time to post it seems when they come to my mind!). If you haven't heard (since the news has been focused on only on two topics this week), there has been an ongoing meeting at the UN discussing the Milennium Development Goals and the various creative ways people and governments are helping to make poverty history. Jeffrey Sachs and Bono have been blogging about it at http://blogs.ft.com/mdg/. Below is a quote from Jeffrey Sachs (if you don't know who he is, you should) regarding the possibility of the $700 billion bailout that (he wrote this a week ago before it was shot down in the House):

"Many countries were at the table yesterday, but some big ones were exceptionally quiet. The US, Japan, Germany, France, Italy, and Canada, think that the MDGs are a spectator sport. Yes, the U.S. has stepped up its financing of disease control, but its overall aid level of 0.16 per cent of national income is the lowest of all rich countries (and compared with far more than 4 per cent of national income for the military). Why aren’t successes being scaled up? Not for lack of solutions and strategy, but for lack of follow through by the rich countries that promised (and promised and promised) to help.

"The UN meetings were abuzz that the US could find $700 billion for a bailout of its corrupt and errant banks but couldn’t find a small fraction of that for the world’s poor and dying. It didn’t make sense to the world community. The puzzlement was all the greater since the very banks being bailed out so generously had awarded themselves more than $30 billion in bonuses early this year, roughly the world’s entire aid budget for 800 million people in sub-Saharan Africa."

Hm...It certainly makes you wonder. John McCain is focused on spreading American ideals through Iraq, while Barack Obama has called America "the world's last great hope." And yet, when the rubber meets the road, both of them are more committed to an isolationist view after all, valuing our economy (by making it less free) and the protection of our precious Wall Street (by opting to go into more debt to China...) when we should be leading the way in ending poverty.