Planet Crimson

Ever since Jenny developed pre-eclampsia and Riley’s birth became an “any day now” thing rather than a “on or near June 14th” thing, I’ve been putting Jenny and Riley at a pretty high priority. Anything that isn’t time-sensitive has been put on the back burner. Since I am only working two nights a week now (more on that later), I thought it would be simple to find time to hang out at Jenny’s place while she was on bed rest and then go see the baby. I was wrong, but I’m trying really hard. If she lived like 10-20 minutes away, it wouldn’t be a big deal to pop over for a few hours or an hour, but since they live an hour away, we’re talking a two-hour round trip, so you pretty much have to plan to be there at least 2-3 hours for it to be worth the drive time.

So, since Jenny hasn’t blogged about the birth yet and Jeramiah skipped most of the labor story, I figured since I was there for like 50-60% of it, I would tell the story from my point of view in the hopes that later on they will appreciate that I took the time to write down my memories. I don’t blame them, of course… they have both been busy learning how to care for a baby, and I think Jeramiah skipped most of the labor story so he could get to the “good stuff”, which is everything AFTER Riley finally exited the womb and entered oxygen-land.

Jenny, Jeramiah, and Mom went to the hospital some time around 4am last Wednesday, May 27th to start her induction. Jenny made it to 37 weeks and a few days, which is more than enough time “in the oven” for a healthy baby. I had to conduct a meeting with my employees at 5:30pm so I was hoping that Riley would at least wait that long so that I could get to the hospital by the time the family got to meet her. I, um, got my wish, and then some.

By the time I got to my meeting and it ended, Jenny hadn’t made much progress on the Pitocin and they switched her to an insert called Cervidil which would have to stay “up there” for 12 hours. They put that in around 2pm. So, I knew I had plenty of time to wrap up my meeting stuff and chat with people before I needed to leave. Plus, I already knew that Jenny can’t sleep in hospital beds and there are no “visiting hours” in maternity, so I didn’t rush. I left work around 9pm, changed my clothes to something more comfy, grabbed dinner, and got to the hospital around 10pm. Little did I know that I wasn’t going to leave again for another 24 hours!

When I got to Jenny’s room, she had pain in her back (I brought her a back massager but it didn’t end up doing much good) and she was getting up to pee every 30-45 minutes. Peeing was an ordeal. Since the induction medicines have additional risks to the uterus and the baby, and they were making sure her pre-eclampsia didn’t get worse, she was on constant monitoring for blood pressure, heart rate, and blood oxygen saturation, as well as the strength of her contractions and Riley’s heart rate. When she needed to pee, some monitors had to be removed from her and some that were harder to position right had to be unplugged from the machines, and her whole IV stand had to be unplugged and come along too. Then, when she was done, everything had to be hooked up correctly again. It was also a struggle to keep the line untangled so that bad things didn’t happen (like her IV getting yanked out).

For some reason, the computer screen in the rooms shows the heart rates of mother and baby and the contractions for all the rooms in the vicinity of hers. This led her to post on Twitter “Everyone is having contractions but me”.

Jenny, on the other hand, between getting up to pee all the time, was very uncomfortable. The bed was really hard and it kept digging into her hip. She tried the rocking chair for a while as well, but the evil device didn’t lean back very far so it wasn’t very relaxing. She blamed this on the Cervidil because the pain in her back didn’t start until after it was inserted. However, now, I don’t think it was.

At 2am they pulled the Cervidil out and started the Pitocin back up and kept increasing the dose bit by bit every half hour or so.

By this time, Jeramiah and Mom were exhausted and tried to find a comfortable place to nap. However, this was not to be. The chair that looked like the intended nap place appeared to have been constructed by Satan himself. The back was too low to lean your head against, and the foot rest wasn’t long enough to lay your body across, so Mom ended up kinda wedged on it with her head against the hard arm rest. Jeramiah tried to sleep on the rocking chair but it couldn’t lean back far enough. He also tried laying his head on a table. In the end, he put everything soft he could find on the floor and declared it “comfortable” because he could stretch out. I’m pretty sure he was in a delirium brought on by sleep deprivation. I stayed awake (since I had only been up since like 4pm) and took my turn at helping Jenny go to the bathroom. She did catch some small naps and I ran down the battery on my phone playing all the games that I have.

Zip forward to 7am. (27 hours in) We get a new nurse who is Awesome. Just before she came in I had spent some time examining Satan’s chair and decided that it had the necessary hingework to recline fully, so I asked her if she knew how to do it. Sure enough, apparently you lift the seat somehow and the damn thing flops out to an almost full-length resting place! Yay! Nurse Awesome spent some time getting to know all of us and what was going on. Shortly afterwards, her doctor arrived to check on how she had done during the night. Since we still couldn’t see any contractions on the monitor, she inserted an IUPC (Intra-Uterine Pressure Catheter, yeah huh!) to measure the exact force of the contractions of her uterus. Behold! Jenny was actually having contractions! They were very small but they came over and over in waves, with no break in between, which explained the back pain she had been having for the last oh, 12 hours or so! Jenny was also dilated to “3 or 4 centimeters” and was offered an epidural, which we convinced her to accept.

Mom and I went to get some breakfast, and I tell you what… you just can’t get a good dose of runny scrambled eggs and seriously greasy sausage anywhere but a hospital or an airplane. But, hey, we were starving and it was edible. We were going to eat in Jenny’s room, but we were rejected at the door because the anesthesiologist was sticking a needle into Jenny’s spine. Yay! Mom and I were very glad she decided to get the epidural because we hated seeing her so miserable.

Jenny was, in fact, much happier with the epidural. The stress had left her face and her mood was much better. I was getting pretty tired and we now had a “real bed” to sleep on, so I made sure Mom and Jeramiah didn’t want the bed thing, then claimed it. Jenny was given a catheter since she wouldn’t be able to walk with the epidural so the potty runs were at an end as well. By the time I fell asleep, it was probably 10 or 11am. Jenny woke me up once because I was snoring and she was really jealous at how easily I could sleep compared to her. She did manage to get a better nap in since she couldn’t feel half her body and her pee was taken care of. I think Jeramiah got a little rocking chair nap in as well, but I was so out of it I can’t remember.

So, I woke up around 2 (ok, I was woken up) and Mom and I went to get some lunch. Lunch was much better than breakfast, but it’s hard to screw up a grilled cheese. Jenny was not allowed to eat so of course she said it smelled like the best grilled cheese ever made on the planet.

Around 3-ish, Nurse Awesome was replaced by Nurse Great because Nurse Awesome was with another woman who was pushing. She checked in on us and a little later, while Jeramiah ran down to the cafeteria, Jenny was complaining that the epidural wasn’t working right because she could still feel pain on one side and switching sides was no longer helping. She was using the “demand dosage” on the PCA pump as often as she could but it just wasn’t helping anymore. Mom asked her if she felt pressure like she needed to, uh, go #2, and she said that she did. Mom knew that meant the baby was probably ready to come out! We got Nurse Great back in and she gloved-n-lubed up to see how it was going and she was surprised to hit Riley’s head with her fingers a lot sooner than she had expected. Jenny was dilated to 10cm and the baby was at +2! Holy crap, it’s Riley time, after about 36 hours!

Mom called Jeramiah and he thought she was joking about Jenny being ready to push, but we managed to convince him that this wasn’t a joke this time and he hurried back upstairs. Not that I blame him. We had “cried wolf” to each other a couple of times, such as if someone would wake up or come back from the bathroom, we’d ask if they wanted to hold Riley.

Nurse Great got Jenny started with her pushing. She instructed Jenny on how often she would be doing it and which muscles to use to do it. I think she must have been coaching her for 30-45 minutes before her doctor got there. I remember that her doctor was supposed to be “off” at 5pm, so we barely made it in time because I think Jenny wanted her to be the one to deliver.

Time flew by, and Riley’s progress was really slow. Her heart rate stayed strong and there were no signs of distress, so we kept pushing. Now, I say “we”, because Mom had a leg and Jeramiah had a leg and I was just watching with the camera ready, but we all felt like a part of the “work”. That’s just silly talk, though, because Jenny was using every bit of strength and resolve she had to propel Riley out of her womb! The doctor had her switch positions a couple of times while Riley made slow progress out. It was the most frustrating thing to watch… ever. You could see the top of Riley’s poor little head… so close and yet so far. Finally, she seemed out enough that *one more contraction* would do it. The doctor (who had been joined by another doctor who I think was the baby’s doctor and a little blonde med student who was observing) broke down the bed and started preparing to finalize the delivery process. It still took like 4 or 5 more contractions until finally Riley’s head was out and she was here! All of us starting crying like little girls, of course.

So, I was trying to text Katelyn so she could let the family out in the waiting room know that Riley had finally come out and somehow I missed the picture taking opportunity of Jeramiah cutting the cord. Maybe I’ve watched too much TV or something but I thought you had more than 2 seconds after birth to get that picture! The damn thing was cut and Riley was dropped on Jenny’s chest before I could even drop the phone mid-text and aim the camera! So, instead, I took some pictures of that (like 2 pictures, maybe) before Mom’s memory card was full (something she obviously forgot to check!), and while she was deleting pictures, Riley was moved over to the warmer. I went over to that (which was a complex maneuver of slinking around medical equipment and medical personnel) and took more pictures of Riley on his camera before its battery died. (argh)

Time has just flown by since then. I went down there Tuesday evening and made dinner and did the dishes (ok, I ordered pizza and we ate it on paper plates) and I got to hold her quite a bit. That’s pretty much all there is to do with her right now but it’s still awesome to do. I’m looking forward to being the aunt who spoils her rotten, though this little girl has more aunts and uncles than she can count. I’m so grateful to have been allowed to be in the room while she was born, because there was definitely no way the whole family could have been in there. I’m looking forward to watching her grow up to be a pretty and smart girl.

I love you, little Riley, and I apologize to all of you who actually sat and read this whole long thing!

Business is boooooming at Poker Nation! We continue to outdo the previous months. On Saturday, April 4th, we had an article in the Arizona Republic (front page, below the fold) centered on us, and today’s New Times’ featured story (front cover ad for it) has a rather long article with several pictures, mostly of Poker Nation, which should bring in another slew of new visitors.

So, to summarize, I set a major milestone every month this year.

* January – work less hours. Yes, that seems like “haha wouldn’t we all like to do that” but seriously, working “the grind” being the hospitable hostess nearly every day was taking a serious toll on everything. So, I made arrangements and trained and whatnot so that I would only have to work Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. I achieved this goal and yet it still feels like I don’t have enough time. I am still running all sorts of errands, doing a little relaxing, and still can’t seem to get enough done. So, goal accomplished.

* February – streamline some processes. This mostly involved securing my back room better and getting a desk back there so I could have some semblance of solitude without being asked what I’m doing and whatnot every 5 minutes. It seemed to help at first but I need to be more proactive in hiding back there and not letting my employees bug me unless necessary.

* March – I didn’t set a goal for March because it started with me being sick and also into the relationship between Colonel Sanders and I disintegrating into oblivion. These two events are not separate, however, since as I said before part of the reason I wasn’t able to deal with it properly before it got to the point of a bridge being burnt was because I was on my death bed. So by the time he’s at the point where he’s meeting my demands, he’s already come to my business and caused a huge disturbance which required us to call the police, after which I realized that I can’t work with him anymore.

* April – April is my renewal month. My goal for this month is to have all the tables replaced. Now that I’m free of the shackles of Colonel Sanders (minus a pesky little civil court case that my lawyer is pretty confident about winning), and the business is bringing in a steady, reliable income, I can invest some of the money into replacing the tables. They are, by far, the worst thing about the business right now. I don’t think anyone realized what a difference having new tables would make until we got the first one in. My dealers have a much easier time doing their jobs on the new table. Now, we realize just how bad the original tables are and I’ve accelerated my replacement plans and I should have them all done by the end of the month. I’m picking up another table this afternoon (if all goes right – fingers crossed!) and should have the last two in a week or so.

* May – May is going to be about developing. The website, that is. I have a lot of improvements planned to make the site (even) more interactive and some things that will help in running the card room operations as well. I’m also probably going to replace my shopping cart/CMS software with something I don’t have to pay for and can upgrade. There are some things broken with Pinnacle Cart that I don’t want to pay to upgrade/fix. Granted, I do make money from my website in a way, but why spend money that doesn’t need to be spent?

I have other smaller goals that I’m constantly working on as well. I have some employee issues on various levels to deal with. But, of course, discussing those here wouldn’t be appropriate.

Also, still in the works is expansion. I’m hoping to get into a bigger location “one of these days” but it will most likely be in the same complex that I’m in now. Considering that we’re still losing tenants left and right, I hope that my landlords are going to be willing to cooperate on a deal that benefits us both. I do bring a lot of traffic into the parking lot at night.

Even though I sliced a little chunk out of one of my fingers, I’m going to attempt to bring you up to speed with all the random goings-on in my life.

First off, I am making this post on my new netbook. It’s basically a miniature laptop with wireless internet capabilities. This thing weighs less than 2 pounds. Charles bought it for me and I really like it. It’s so much easier to pull this thing out whenever I need to surf the web for a minute. This weekend, I passed it around the table so everyone could place an order for Italian food. It also came in handy for one of my players to use to enter all my member applications into an Excel spreadsheet.

So, I’m not partnered with Colonel Sanders anymore. He went psycho a few weeks ago because he came sniffing around my checkbook and I didn’t have an extra grand to give him at the moment because I have to put quite a bit of money in the ATM for the weekend, and since I had just paid the rent, I barely had enough for that. I ended up giving half of it from my personal account to get him through whatever personal crisis he had to deal with. Maybe he just bought half the normal amount of weed he usually buys.

Nothing was the same after that. I started receiving silly demands. It started with “get someone else to fill your ATM or I’ll pull your license”. Then it went to “you must let this dealer guy from California run your business and you can be a shift manager”. Then, if that wasn’t enough, he came into Poker Nation on a Saturday night making loud demands and got into an argument with a couple of my customers. The incident led to us having to call the police on him just to get him to leave the premises! Once I could see what poor business sense he had and what a greedy son-of-a-bitch he was, contrary to his previous protestations of “It’s not about the money!”, I knew that I had to start taking steps to protect myself and my business from his lunacy. Backed up by some of the people who work for me, I knew I would be a complete idiot to continue to work with a man who thinks that sort of behavior is OK.

So, he “pulled my license” a couple weeks ago. He made it impossible to even negotiate with him, because he would do his most aggressive pushing on the days that I work, even though I told him several times that I couldn’t deal with that stuff from Thursday – Sunday. Then, I got super-sick, as I posted before, and I did a LOT of sleeping and not so much working. He also posted a thoroughly slanderous diatribe on his website which was recently replaced with a lengthy description of why he wants to take me to court. (Flash back to him telling me “I won’t take you to court – I hate courts!”)

This dude does so much baitin’ and switchin’ that I’m surprised he’s not a car salesman! Seriously, our contract was SO swayed in his favor, giving him full reign to decide what “good standing” means… but my lawyer found a loophole. Not even really a loophole. It’s a term on the contract that he blatantly breached almost from the beginning. A term that can easily be proven in court.

So, basically, my lawyer (who I met through this place – he plays poker here) has good ways to get me out of everything and keep my business and players intact.

My next obstacle potentially is the media. I was visited recently by a reporter from the New Times who hung out on a Friday night, and Colonel Sanders has tried to use him to get negative things about me in print. I think, however, that this reporter is smarter than he thinks. I was also recently contacted by the reporter who did the article about my place in June for the Arizona Republic. Apparently he’s doing a follow-up story. He interviewed a few of my players and I think he’s also planning to send a photographer on Friday or Saturday to take pictures of the action.

Which reminds me, I *wish* my new table would be in by then!! (UGH!) I ordered a new table, to replace them all one-by-one as I can afford it, but it won’t be done until next Wednesday, if not a little sooner.

So, inevitably, with everything we do right, there’s still stuff we’re doing wrong that needs serious help, but it’s getting there. I’m super-tired now so I’m going to try and take a short nap to get through the night.. *sigh*

Normally I would type up a long post about how sick I am and how long I’ve been sick and how much I wish I wasn’t sick and how being sick is affecting my life and work. But, pretty much every I know is sick so I don’t think I will get any sympathy. So, let’s just pretend I typed all about my stuffy head, my runny nose, mucus, mucus, mucus…

Alex and I (Alex’s skills and hard work, my company’s money) have been working a lot lately on making this small space more efficient. We are also trying to find room to put a 5th table when needed. The plan is to have the 5th table available so we can roll the retail racks out of the way and put it in on nights like Fridays when we’re super-busy. There were some phases to this project.

Phase 1 was to get a more secure cabinet to store the chips and money while the games were going on. It was long overdue. Moving that stuff into the cabinet freed up more shelf space for candy and sodas to keep the main floor area of the back room clear. We are also now holding the dealers accountable for their own trays rather than them all sharing the same tray and leaving the potential for money to go missing. I trust everyone who works for me, or they wouldn’t work for me, but mistakes can happen and it does help them be more careful to prevent errors.

Phase 2 took longer than I thought but it’s worth it. We added a simple desk to the backroom, as well as some wall cabinets. We were completely wasting the wall space on the North wall before. The wall cabinets are from the same product line as the cabinet so they “go together”, and we bought a piece of white melamine and cut some 4×4’s into legs. It’s real simple, but I don’t need much. Just room for my wonderful big monitor, my laptop, keyboard, and mouse. We also put the server, printer, and house sound system on the desk as well.

Before this, I found it really difficult to use my laptop while games were going on. I couldn’t go 5 minutes without someone coming over and making comments or asking questions about what I was doing. Some days I just didn’t even plug the thing in because I knew I wasn’t going to be able to do anything. I am really far behind on putting together some open/close checklists and I’ve been meaning to have a meeting with all my dealers but I haven’t been able to type up my meeting notes because of a lack of privacy as well.

Also, having 4 days off a week is awesome. I have regulated my sleep schedule so that I am up during the day on my days off so I can get things done when I need to. I use Sundays to catch up on sleep and I’m usually out for most of the day because our Saturday games run well into the morning and I don’t usually get to bed until after noon, and then I catch up on lost sleep from my 3 working days and wake up at like 4 or 5 in the morning on Monday. Since 24 hours doesn’t really work well for me, I go to bed at like 7 or 8pm on Monday and wake Tuesday at 7 or 8. (Yeah, my natural sleep schedule is more like 14-16 awake, 12 asleep) That time drifts forward until Thursday when I wake up anywhere from 2-4pm and then go to work before 7pm and start my 3-day work week. 3 days sounds really lazy but I still end up with like 40-50 hours here all together, and they are usually our busiest days.

Of course, I still technically work on my days off. I keep an eye on the store cameras to make sure everything is going OK and my dealers get there on time and start the tournament on time. I also get various calls and text messages about changing shifts and when-am-I-scheduled and random questions which is part of the territory.

OK, so basically, I am in a really nice rhythm right now and I hope it can go on like this for a while. I feel like I have my life back.