This was going to be a post griping about the current state of children’s books, but I shall instead write about how my system got hosed by the latest Apple update.

Thursday night I was offered the latest Tiger update via Software Update. I accepted without much worry after perusing the details, as I usually do. I know that this is probably not the best way of going about things, but it’s the way I do it. When I was finished with my work, I let the system reboot and went downstairs for dinner. An hour or two later I returned to the office to see a pretty blue screen. The cursor was alive and moved around the screen, but the finder was not loading. I forced the computer to restart and watched it freeze in mid-boot.

Every 4 months or so my system crashes in some way and I reinstall everything from scratch. This time, I think there was some preference in my Library that didn’t agree with the update. I probably could have experimented, tossing plists and cache files until the system smiled at me again, but there is something nice about wiping the slate and starting afresh. I rename the hard drive. I give everything new icons. I reorganize my work files and archive what I don’t need anymore. I can tell you the dates of all my crashes over the past few years by looking at the dates of my rescue CDs and DVDs.

So, my hard drive is now “Lazarus” (I think I’ve used that before), the reincarnation of the former “Valiant.” My desktop is a generic blue Apple pattern, which still looks surprisingly fresh and sexy. All my work files are in neat little rows, and I’m working on getting all my apps up and running with all of their previous settings (hopefully not the settings that hosed me in the first place!).

We’re jumping the gun a bit, but The Wife and I went to Barnes and Noble today to get some children’s books. The thing is, and this warrants its own blog entry, we’re going back to live in Japan and we want to stock up on English language children’s books while they’re handy. We’re going to try to raise our child in a bilingual household, so The Wife’s going to take care of the Japanese, and I’ll be speaking the English in the home (what we’ll speak to each other is beyond me. Probably the same pidgin Japlish we speak to each other right now). Better still, we want to read to our baby while it’s still in the womb, to get used to the cadence of our voices. Of course, I could read anything to her belly right now, it doesn’t need to be a child’s book, but I’ve been wanting to get something for baby, and this seemed the most fun and practical.

So, back to the books. Maybe I was spoiled being raised by an elementary school librarian, but I was really diappointed by the quality of the books I saw. To be fair, I was astounded by some books, but overall the quality of the illustrations was horrible, and most of the books had either an embarrassingly didactic tone with a very P.C. message, or they were trying far too hard to be whacky and out there. The books I remembered from my childhood were, well, memorable. They had rich illustrations that, each time you saw them, revealed something new. They weren’t afraid to show a male fireman, or a woman in a nurse’s uniform. They weren’t all about sharing, or how to handle yourself when you get cranky (or at least not so obviously so).

And what in God’s name has happened to Clifford?

We’re having a baby! Today we went to the Nadeshiko Clinic for our second group prenatal exam and got to hear the baby’s heartbeat. Our doctor slid the doppler wand across my wife’s tummy and every click of the amplifier stopped my own heart in anticipation. It took a little while, but finally there it was, clear as day. It was the first big affirmation of “we’re going to have a baby” since we passed the pregnancy test back in the beginning of March. Yes, there has been The Wife’s expanding belly and her on-again off-again morning sickness, but somewhere in my irrational mind those could be chalked up to gas or a stomach flu. There was no denying that there is a baby happening in there. WAHbuh-WAHbuh-WAHbuh-WAHbuh. Even The Wife’s little rabbit heart doesn’t beat the fast.

Now that we’ve entered the 2nd trimester, and I know that at least some heart production is happening in there, I can feel some of my unstoppable images of tragedy begin to quell. I got in the habit of “knocking on wood” everytime I had an unthinkinkable thought, and let me tell you my knuckles are getting sore.

I will not go on and on about the miracle of life here. I’ll try to save that for The Wife, since she has the patience for my repetitive babbling. I’ll just say, we’re having a baby. There. It’s out there.