Got a little more news. As at around 8:30pm tonight, Louise’s blood pressure has stablised a little. The little man with the little hammer came in and hammered her legs again, which she finds particularly amusing since she’s never had her legs hammered before in her life. They’ll watch her overnight, and hopefully she’ll come back to normal by the morning.

Another day of not much happening. The renal specialist came past this morning and just reiterated pretty much what we already knew, they’re still monitoring the fluids and blood pressure. This evening Louise got down to 110/80, but as normal for her, she’s gone up at night to around 140/90 as at 8pm, which is much better than last night.

At this stage, no news is good news. We’re waiting to see how things pan out, and we’ll hopefully have some idea of where we are by Monday. Yes, she’ll be in until then. Baby is doing excellently and cooking well at 34 weeks and 2 days and counting. At this point every single day inside counts.

Louise’s blood pressure dropped over night, and is now the best it’s been since going in. She has a heart monitor on the baby, and is otherwise doing very well. They’re going to give us a tour of the neonatal unit later today, just in case we need it at some point.

Louise and I have been counting the days to the birth of our baby. Due on 8th August, or 8/8/8, the same day as the 2008 Olympics, the number 8 is of course good luck in Chinese, and media are nicely telling us over and over how many days to go, which is nice of them to care about us and little bubby.

In What a crazy year, part 1, I was in Canberra, and had just managed to get my passport and Visa application in on time. Jump to lunchtime Thursday at the end of that week, I’m still in Canberra, and I get a call from Louise “Look, there’s nothing to worry about, but I’ve just xxxxxx, and I called the hospital just to check, and they suggested I come in so they can just do a routine check, so I’m going to head over there after lunch”

So I was just a little on edge that afternoon, with a few critical meetings that I had to do before taking the four hour drive back to Sydney. Then around 5pm, as I’m packing my car to leave, I get another call “I’m just sitting here, they ran some tests, but no real news, I’m hoping they’ll let me go soon, but I’m not sure. I have some urgent work to do at home so…”

10 minutes later I get the call that they want her in over night just to monitor her. Fine, let’s do that, better safe than sorry. I started driving. I’m half way back and the phone calls from Louise are getting more panicy. Louise has never been in hospital before as a patient, and has rarely visited one to see someone else, so the whole experience was fairly confronting.

I arrived around 8:30pm, and then we heard the word we didn’t want to hear, Pre-eclampsia.

It’s now Saturday, and for friends and family reading this, this is what’s happening. Both baby and Louise are great, no problems. Louise has fairly high blood pressure at the moment, so they’re monitoring that to see how it goes. Over the next day or so they will then make a call on whether the baby should be delivered (we’re five weeks from the due date) or not, just to be safe. Apart from that, we know little else.

We’ve both had to shed as many appointments and deadlines as possible, amongst mine being two big shows that I was supposed to Stage Manage and tech, and of course the inevitably jinxed Vietnam trip, so much for that.

But yeah, we’re all doing fine, we just really don’t know what’s going to happen from hour to hour.

Special thanks to Cale, Lyn, John, Peter and Cindy for allowing me to cancel a bunch of stuff at the last minute. I’ll make it up to you. Right, back to the hospital…

There must be something about impending fatherhood that mellows you out. It’s not something I’m particularly used to, except when dealing with people in my work life, but for some reason I’ve started taking everything in my stride, whereas previously I’d probably either hide from the world.

At Ludic Creative we recently landed some conference work in Vietnam, which is timed about a month before my first baby is due. Working back from the conference date, our facilitators (including myself) needed to get our passports to the Vietnamese Embassy at least 10 working days before the trip, for Visa processing.

Unfortunately my passport had expired 14 months ago, which meant I needed to apply for a new one. You can simply renew it if it’s up to 12 months, so I just missed the cut off. Fine, I was happy to re-apply.

Filling in the application involves having someone you’re not related to, and not partnered to, signing the application and the back of a photograph of the applicant. So I arranged to have that done, and then took it to the GPO, figuring short of the actual Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the GPO would be the next best thing.

So the GPO lady looked through the form and got the photo, and said that the back of the photo needed to be signed in black ink. I pointed out that nowhere did it say this, and she pointed to the text on the form that said “the form” must be completed in black ink. She failed to see the difference between the form and the photo, and said that the photo was part of the form, which it clearly wasn’t as part of my filling it in, and anyway how was I to know. Anyway, I agreed to get another photo signed, but asked her to check the application to make sure nothing else was wrong. It wasn’t.

So I spent the next 3 days hooking up with my photo signing person, and returned to the GPO, all the while wary of the clock rapidly approaching the Visa deadline.

Surprise, the address on my application form didn’t match the address on the back of my license. I’ve just moved, and hadn’t had the chance to do that. I had the lady check the rest of the form and she said it was fine. So I spent the next week applying for the address on my license to be changed and have it mailed to me. Eventually it arrived, so I headed back to the GPO.

Now on the back of the photo, the photo signing person is supposed to write “This is a true photo of Name Of Person” and then their signature. I now had it in black ink, but because my name is quite long, the letter were fairly close together, and the GPO lady said “It looks too much like RichardBF, not Richard BF. You’re going to have to get it resigned.” I would have punched her in the face then and there if it wasn’t for the fact that she was pregnant.

A week later, I manage to get yet another photo signed, and as I was leaving he said “You better check with them soon though, because I’m flying to Europe tomorrow night.” So I got to the GPO, everything was thankfully correct and I said back to wait for the application to be processed.

At this point there was about 3 weeks to go before I needed to get the Visa application in, and passports these days tend to take about 10 working days, so I was cutting it fine, but certainly doable.

Ten days passed, and I heard nothing. Eleven days, nothing. I called, “any ideas on how long it will take, because I need it for my Visa application”, “let us take a look and get back to you, someone will call you.”. OK.

Twelve days. “Any ideas where my passport is?” “We’re not sure, someone will call you back.”

Thirteen days. “Any ideas where my passport is, because I need it in the next 5 days or I’m not going to Vietnam?” “We’re not sure, someone will call you back.” “Can you mention that while I’m going away on 8th July, I actually need it earlier for the Visa?”, “You have enough time sir, someone will call you.”

Thus I came to Friday afternoon. The following week I would be out of town in Canberra on work, and I needed my passport by that Friday in order to get the Visa. I was starting to panic. I was driving to my weekly radio show, where we had planned to do a world wide live link up of my photo signing person for the show, not related to the photo signing of course, and I had stopped to pick up my P.O. box mail when I got a call from the passport office. “We’re sorry, but your passport application never actually arrived. We have no record of it. It’s most likely still at the GPO. I see you’re going in 3 weeks, just put in a new application and you’ll be fine.”

Once I’d explained the real deadline, we came up with a plan, I would resubmit my application to DFAT in Canberra, Monday lunchtime, which was the soonest possible because I was supposed to be running a training course. They would electronically transfer it to Sydney, process it, and have it ready for my girlfriend to pick up on Tuesday afternoon, so we could then rush it to the Visa people. I was already going insane.

I hung up the phone, realising that the next few weeks were going to be a rollercoaster, but at least I had a fun live radio show to do, which I suddenly realised was in 5 minutes. I jumped out of the car to go grab the mail, and… I’d locked my keys in the car…

Suffice to say, this was a week ago, we did cancel the radio show, but I also did get my passport, and the Visa application did go in on time. I’ve been pretty relaxed, when in the past I’d normally be close to a break down. I’ve been flat out working non-stop for the last month, and Vietnam is going to be the last big thing to do before the baby drops, if only I can get to mid-July.

Step 1, bore your audience away.

I hate resolutions, particularly new years’ ones. If I want to change something, I should have the psychological strength to do so when I want to, instead of only when the year clicks over from 2007 to 2008. Anyway, I made this resolution around new years, so I guess it’s technically a new years’ resolution.

Since we started Bonny & Clyde, I’ve pretty much stopped all my blogging, especially my videoblogging. Well, part of the reason was B&C, but I think some of it was also a concern about the effect on my consulting clients at the time, with the general language and outlook of my blog and some of the shit I’d openly blogged about from some idiots in the videoblogging space. There see, I’m still doing it. Doh!

In conjunction with Phoebe growing up, moving house again back to where I used to video heaps of stray cats, the end of B&C, and a bunch of other secret news over the next few months, I figure it’s time to begin videoblogging again.

Yeah right, we’ll see if that happens.

Well, we’re back up again. Apologies to any TVTonic users, we’ve temporarily blocked you for now. But we definitely want you back with us, and we will get it sorted out soon, so please hang in there.

If you’re wondering what happened to Bonny & Clyde, our server got a kind of DOS (Denial Of Service attack) from TVTonic. Well, not really a DOS, but it had the same effect, hundreds of TVTonic clients trying to suck down Bonny & Clyde episodes, all at the same time, over and over again. Joy!

We thought we’d addressed the problem earlier in the week, by banning the buggy TVTonic clients, but it seems that even the newer versions have a problem in this area as well.

Meanwhile, yes the site is down temporarily. When will it be back up? I’m not too sure. The guys at Dreamhost need to make a few patches for me before I can get back in and try to fix it.

So for now, we wait patiently…

It’s an odd feeling sitting here amongst the ruins of a collapsed media project. There’s no way we’re going to pick up all the old traffic we had once we get up and running again, because people won’t bother. So it makes me wonder whether it’s worth even continuing. The annoying thing is that I’m sitting here with no way to fix the problem, watching it crumble around us, yet it wasn’t even my fault! Grrrr!

We’re also now looking for an alternate hosting provider for our free high volume sites. If you have any recommendations on someone cheap who can support high bandwidth for media file downloads and fast turn around on tech support, then please let us know.

No dissent in the chicken coop – and that’s an order