The Scritchy Nib

Introducing LitGroupie

2012-01-27T15:32:00.000-07:00

I'd like to just take a quick moment and introduce you all to my new blog project, LitGroupie. It's a place for me to geek out about books and the like and post reviews of the books I read this year. My goal is to get to at least 52 books by December 31st and so far I'm making good progress.

Please feel free to head on over, take a look around, and make a few comments. I'd love to get some sort of discussion going—I always love to talk about books!

Thanks!

2011 in review.

2012-01-18T21:29:00.004-07:00

This post is a little late because I spent the first bit of this year dealing with an exorbitant amount of poop. (Oh, come on, I'm a mommy, I'm a blogger, you had to know it was going to show up eventually.) I spent the next bit of this year recuperating from the exhaustion of the first bit. But hey, I'm still ahead of where I was for 2010 in review!

To be honest, a lot of the past year is a bit hazy for me, as a lot of it I spent in a dark place where I didn't like myself much. I was happy with things going on in my life, but there were days—many more than I like to think about—where my sense of self-worth was absolutely nil. I've started coming back out of it in the past few weeks and I'm optimistic that this will be a good year, but I have to say that on the whole, I'm glad 2011 is over. I've loved the time I've spent watching the Little Guy grow and learn, and I look forward to seeing him get even more awesome in 2012 (although really, I just don't know if the world can hold that much amazingness. Maybe that's why the world is supposed to end this year: it will spontaneously burst from trying to contain the sheer awesome that is my son).

And now it's time for 2011 in review!

*Ushered in the New Year very quietly, with just our little family of three. Celebrated later that day with Southern New Year's and the Thompsons.
*Had lots of fun using my new bread machine until it broke. Experienced much frustration on the phone with the people at the warranty office. Eventually just decided to send it back to Amazon and go with another manufacturer.
*The Little Guy started off the year with a bad cough and I had my first experience as the mother at a sick-child visit.
*Eventually did get the Christmas tree taken down about a week into the new year.
*Continued the love affair with Netflix. Notable flings included Better Off Ted, 30 Rock, Monk, Psych, Word World, Mythbusters and lots of fun movies.
*Had my first experience flying on a plane with a small child (3.5 months old). The Little Guy was a champ and pretty much slept through all the flights. On each flight, we had someone stand up at the end to get their luggage and say, "I didn't even know there was a baby on the flight!" Well done, sir.
*Visited Shallow Man's family in Alabama. Flew into Middle of Nowhere, FL, to do so, which made landing kind of weird with no other lights around other than the airport.
*The Little Guy rolled over for the first time ever on the floor in Shallow Man's grandparents' house. Fortunately he chose to do it at the exact moment that his uncle was recording him, so we caught the big moment (and the big reaction) on camera.
*Briefly took the Little Guy to the beach for the first time at the Gulf Coast, although it was too cold to swim.
*Went in for an oil change and left feeling scared to drive because of all the repairs our car needed.
*Learned how to use my beast of an inherited sewing machine to make one of those car-seat covers for the Little Guy because I didn't feel like paying $40 for one on easy. It turned out way cuter than it had any right to.
*Lots of time spent cuddling and nursing my baby. This got less fun during my bout with mastitis, but it turned out okay.
*The massive amount of time spent nursing also lead to my achieving 3 stars in every level of Angry Birds.
*Started feeding the Little Guy solids, beginning his love affair with mush and solids in general.
*Learning how to make an em-dash on my iPod. It was definitely a highlight of the year.
*Feeling smug coming back from actually visiting the dentist and not having any cavities when Shallow Man had some.
*Just Jane again, and always.
*Campaigning to help my friends' band, Fictionist, during the competition to get on the cover of Rolling Stone Magazine (they eventually came in 4th).
*Celebrating my birthday at home because we'd finally taken our car into the shop to get everything fixed.
*Walking into the Little Guy's bedroom to find him calm and happy, listening to Shallow Man hum him various themes from Zelda.
*Finally making a decision on the new bread machine model and having it arrive. It's huge and white and we call it the Monolith.
*Making cupcakes for the ward's Pinewood Derby, but mostly enjoying watching Shallow Man get ridiculously excited about helping one of the Scouts with his car.
*More Geek Night parties, although the dynamic changed with the growing number of Geeklings.
*Twilight Time 3. This one was a fun event even though it was smaller, although it wasn't quite as awesome as Twilight Times 1 or 2 for the simple reason that the movie was slightly better than the others and less compulsively mockable. But there were more cupcakes, so that was good.
*Yes, I enjoyed the season of Jimmermania.
*March Madness was both awesome and heartbreaking.
*Saw a play version of Persuasion with KEY that was eye-opening—I didn't know you could ruin such a perfect story so completely. I would have walked out except I wanted to see how they handled the ending. I'm not sure it was worth it.
*Finally had to get a high chair for the Little Guy. Was both excited and sad to see him getting so grown up. It was really nice to see him start plumping up once he started eating solids, though.
*Did a lot more experimenting in the kitchen, coming up with some new family favorites like shrimp tacos, spinach mushroom quesadillas, and chicken tikka masala.
*Bountiful Baskets. Yes.
*Girls' Night Out with my sisters and the incredibly nice person at the Arctic Circle drive-thru who rushed our order because the Little Guy was having a meltdown.
*Making the decision to move to Salt Lake and starting the whole process of finding renters and moving.
*Tea with Mint or Lemon? at USU. The most fun I've had at the theatre in a long time.
*Discovering the best cobbler recipe ever.
*The Law Gals lunch. It was great to see old friends and new babies.
*The Little Guy producing his first tooth the day before Easter, probably in hopes of getting candy. It didn't work, which is probably why he came up with tooth #2 a few days later.
*So much of my time this year has been spent listening to the Little Guy learn to babble. I love all of his crazy little noises.
*Interacting with authors over email.
*Pantruca's!
*Finally getting the postage-stamp-sized backyard into shape.
*Coming back from the birthday party for my dad, Shallow Man checked Facebook on his phone and saw the news about bin Laden.
*I won a laptop from Pixar. No, really.
*Discovering how to make rosemary focaccia with the bread machine. Oh, yes.
*Visited the Carl Bloch exhibit at BYU. Powerful, inspiring, moving, beautiful. Wrote this about it.
*Had my first Mother's Day as an actual mommy. Have to admit I loved it.
*The Little Guy celebrated Mother's Day by saying "Dada" for the first time.
*Celebrated our seventh anniversary. Crazy!
*The old faithful lappy kept having identity crises.
*Read "Speak" by Laurie Halse Anderson. Wow.
*Hosted the final Geek Night at our old place. Bittersweet.
*Packing, packing, packing. Blech. Trying to find renters. Double blech.
*Moving day made infinitely more stressful by having our car die on the freeway on the way there. Fortunately we were first in line in the caravan and were able to shuffle passengers to get things moving quickly. Also fortunately my dad and brother were able to fix it for $10. That did not help my nerves calm down at the time, though.
*Living in my grandfather's old house and getting used to calling it our house.
*The Little Guy considerately waited to start crawling in earnest until AFTER we had moved.
*Finally finding renters and having them be the best ever.
*Lots of time spent weeding and cleaning up the huge new yard.
*The summer and fall of the nightmare commute.
*Lots of time spent with my sisters and family now that we live a block away.
*Lots of walking on early summer mornings.
*Shallow Man's first Father's Day. I was kind of hoping the Little Guy would take that opportunity to say "Mama" for the first time, but it was not to be.
*Girl date with my mom and sister to IKEA and watching the Little Guy fall asleep in his stroller.
*Red Iguana. Yum.
*Finding Shelob living in my laundry room. Okay, maybe not Shelob exactly, but still a black widow.
*Watching the Little Guy's stats progress throughout the year as his weight started to catch up to his height. His head circumference was always way ahead of both of them, though.
*The Little Guy learned how to give kisses on request and also to say "bye bye" and "night-night" when he felt like it.
*Fourth of July was awesome. We went to the Army Band Concert the night before and the fireworks the night of, and the Little Guy loved them both.
*The Little Guy's makeshift hat for the band concert.
*Major geeking out upon finding that a movie was being made of one of my favorite books. (Yeah, I'm still excited about this.)
*Had to keep cutting the Little Guy's hair because it grows so fast and crazy. He still hasn't quite reconciled himself to the process, though.
*The Princess and the Frog with my sisters.
*Steadily increasing numbers of teeth.
*The week that we all caught the summer cold. Blerg.
*The arrival of a new geekling! The Little Guy was glad to have another boy in the group after all the recent girl geeklings.
*Making a birthday cake for my mom with my sisters.
*July 26, 2011: MAMA!
*Getting a new niece in July!
*Going to Lagoon for Shallow Man's work party. So much fun to have a real date day!
*The Epic Battles of trying to get the Little Guy to fall asleep on his own.
*The car transmission acting up again shortly after we'd gotten it to pass inspection and renewed the registration. D'oh! Finding out it was a relatively quick fix: *sigh of relief* I've said it before, and I'll say it again, my dad is a car wizard.
*The joy of a baby trying to learn how to walk on a hardwood floor. Luckily his skull is super-thick.
*Getting to have lots of talks with my sisters and getting to know them better.
*Discovering Niagara Falls in the basement and having to deal with the plumbers.
*Pondering the differences between editors and ghostwriters.
*Croup. I hate it so very much.
*The month of coughing which ended with the discovery that the Little Guy had a double ear infection, which made me feel like the best mom EVER. Fighting off that ear infection for the next several months didn't help that feeling much.
*Staycation 2011. So much fun. Took the Little Guy to the Zoo, This is the Place, Tracy Aviary, and Thanksgiving Point Gardens. He got to ride a train AND a pony! We also had the chance to go out on our own and see a movie, which was nice.
*Going to the fair with the Little Guy and watching his face light up as he got to touch cows and sheep and bunnies and pigs and . . .
*Getting to see Motion de Smiths again! It was a lot of fun to have them stay with us and finally introduce them to the Little Guy.
*Having our car transmission act up *again* on the way home from finally seeing Harry Potter 7.2.
*The fun of living close enough to the fairgrounds to hear part of the Weird Al concert from our backyard.
*Sibling movie nights = very yes.
*The Little Guy's first birthday was great. Loved celebrating and thinking back to a year before and all the fun stuff that had happened during those 12 months.
*Watching the Little Guy attack his cake. So very awesome.
*Took the Little Guy to the dentist and felt like a responsible parent.
*Learned how to make donuts.
*Teaching in Relief Society like, three times, because my lesson week kept getting bumped by things like Conference and Christmas and such. One of the cushiest callings ever.
*Another trip to the South, this time to Tallahassee as well as Alabama. So many adventures. Loved seeing Shallow Man's home ward and meeting people I've heard about for a long time. Swimming with the Little Guy at Wakullah Springs. Canopy roads. Visiting friends from law school. The Crepevine.
*The Little Guy maintained his "Champion Flyer" status.
*Having the airline break our less-than-three-week-old Britax carseat. *primal shriek* They did eventually replace it for us, though.
*iPhone! The angels sang. Especially because it offers an en-dash as well as the em-dash.
*The Book Exchange Party. One of the best ideas I've ever been involved with (thanks to megcellent and alli for being my partners in crime).
*The Dracula meeting of Just Jane was ridiculously fun with the husbands there. I especially loved the days leading up to it while Shallow Man was reading the book and would say things like, "Okay, seriously, I would sue Van Helsing for malpractice!" Having Kat be able to come and hang out for it was also especially great.
*Finally having the ear infections of doom clear up when we went to the specialist to see if the Little Guy needed tubes. *big sigh of relief*
*Taking the Little Guy trick-or-treating in his garden gnome costume.
*Being lawyerly from time to time.
*Coming up with fun business ideas and working towards putting them into action.
*November 3, 2011: He walks!
*Playing in the leaves with cousins.
*Taking a weekend for ourselves at the Little America, even if it did mean spending my first night away from the Little Guy.
*Winning third place in the Pioneer Woman's Princess Bride trivia challenge. Oh, yeah.
*Making new friends.
*Weaning the Little Guy the week before Thanksgiving. Both heartbreaking and liberating.
*Mice. Ick.
*Thanksgiving at our house with my family. Favorite holiday ever.
*Gourmandise and Banbury Cross.
*The Little Guy's first experience with chocolate pudding.
*Lots of editing.
*Taught myself how to knit.
*Cake Wrecks thinks I'm funny.
*The MoTab Christmas Concert, which was wonderful.
*Playdates with friends.
*Christmas with a toddler—AWESOME.
*Homemade ice cream!
*New Year's Eve with the family at our house. A great way to end the year.

A few books I loved during the year:
*The Mary Russell books by Laurie R. King, starting with The Beekeeper's Apprentice in January. Oh, my. Serious author crush. I've read through book 6 (which was nothing short of amazing) and can't wait to read more.
*The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson. This is the one I got at the Book Exchange Party and it was absolutely fascinating.
*The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows. The best words I can think of for this book are charming, sparkling, lovely, and delightful. It made me laugh and cry within the first ten pages, which takes more than you might think.
*Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. This was a great book club pick by megcellent and I loved it, especially the idea of there being a place somewhere where all our lost things end up.
*Wings, Spells, and Illusions by Aprilynne Pike. I am loving this series and looking forward to the next book being released this year.
*Warbreaker by Brandon Sanderson. One of the more inventive fantasy books I've read recently.
*Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor. Wow. Just . . . wow. This was one of the top three books of the year for me (the other two being O Jerusalem and Justice Hall from the Mary Russell series). A new release and a beautifully written and beautifully dreamed fantasy YA novel that was the only YA book to make Amazon's Top 20 books of the year, and with reason. Even if you think you don't like fantasy or YA, if you love absolutely exquisite writing, you owe it to yourself to check out this book.

If I missed listing something that I did with you that you loved, I'm sorry. I probably loved it, too, but my memory does miss some things now and then.

One of those days.

2011-12-08T20:43:00.004-07:00

When the first Lord of the Rings movie came out in 2001 I went to see it on opening night (the roommate of the guy I was dating had gotten tickets for all the guys in his apartment and their dates). I loved it, and gushed and raved about it at great length to my dad when I went home to visit the next weekend. My dad had introduced me to the books when I was in tenth grade and I could tell he was excited to see it, too.

My mom, because she loves my dad, took him to see it for one of his Christmas gifts. After their date, my dad and I joined in a mutual gush session, and at one point I turned to my mom and asked her what she thought of it.

Now, my mom is one of the cutest, sweetest, most awesome people ever. Period. She doesn't like to say bad things about people or things. She also, if given the choice, prefers to watch things like musicals and chick flicks where the swooning is more the result of hunky Mr. Darcy saying romantic things rather than because someone's head got cut off by a really ugly and probably very smelly orc. Just one of her little quirks.

So when I asked her what she thought of it, she paused for a couple of seconds and then said, "The scenery was really pretty." She thought for a moment. "And Bilbo's house was cute."

* * *

Flash forward to my day today. How was it, you ask?

Sigh.

Well, the scenery was really pretty.

And Bilbo's house was cute.

My mom once observed to me re: Viggo Mortenson: "Why does such an attractive man have to have such an ugly name?" She's got a point there. (Love you, Mom!)

Anticipation.

2011-11-18T15:26:00.000-07:00

I know my Floridian-born-and-raised husband would certainly disagree with me on this, but there are few things that I love the way I love sitting in the house with all the blinds open and all the lights off in the late afternoon of a late November day waiting for it to start snowing outside. I can smell the snow; it's right around the corner and I'm so excited for it.

I won't love it so much when I have to shovel it or drive in it or watch said husband come home and start madly searching for jobs in Florida while he mumbles angrily under (or over, occasionally) his breath about "the enemy from above."

But waiting inside, curled up with a blanket/good book/cup of hot chocolate/two snuggly kittens/the cutest toddler ever?

That's my favorite kind of snow, and I'm kind of psyched for it.

Sorry, hon. If it helps, I promise not to sing any Dean Martin songs encouraging that particular form of precipitation. Or at least not while you're in the room. Or at least not too loudly.

Ungh.

2011-11-14T15:39:00.001-07:00

I've been really lucky since the Little Guy was born in that I haven't needed to take very many "sick days," as it were. The problem with that is that when I *do* need one, it feels like several sick days all saved up at once.

Which is what today has been like. Seriously, it reminds me of the first trimester except I can absolutely guarantee that's not what's going on. But it means that all I want to do is curl up in the bed and sleep it off.

That's not exactly the Little Guy's idea of a good time, though.

He's just learned to walk and he's in the process of giving up afternoon naps and isn't exactly impressed with the brand-new-and-definitely-not-improved model of Mommy, The Lump! So I've barricaded us in the study (the smallest room in the house aside from the bathrooms, which makes it the easiest to keep warm), which incidentally has tons of books, a desk, a TV and a Love Sac, so I can sort of nap and sort of keep an eye on the Little Guy without going over the line into neglect. He loves the chance to sit on the Love Sac and eat animal crackers and watch PBS Kids (okay, seriously, Martha Speaks? THAT'S NOT HOW ANATOMY WORKS), so it's really not as rough for him as you might think.

So with any luck, we'll both survive until Daddy gets home from work. And with any more luck, tomorrow will be better.

And now, if you'll excuse me, I need to get back to solving the puzzling question of why on earth that dog is still alive if she's got alphabet soup stuck in her brain.

And here is a video for you.

2011-11-11T22:54:00.000-07:00

Don't forget to De-Lurk, please!

I was going to write about Shelob's lair today but I am ridiculously tired and kind of brain-dead, and that story deserves a better treatment than I can give it in my present state of mind, so instead I'm giving you an awesome video. This song gives me the giggles every time I hear it. There are lots of other video versions, but I have a soft spot for this one simply because of the ponies (you'll see what I mean), which double the giggles.

The song is Skullcrusher Mountain by Jonathan Coulton.

And yes, if you were wondering, this is the same man who brought you that beloved classic, the IKEA song.

De-Lurk Day 2011

2011-11-10T22:43:00.000-07:00

There's a blog I read which for a long time sported the saying "I don't hate comments" on its sidebar. I can agree with this sentiment. (Confession: I don't know if the saying was removed because the sidebar was getting crowded or because one day the author woke up and said to herself, "You know what, actually I do hate comments," but I'm going to assume it was the former, because really. Who hates comments? Not me, that's for sure.) Another blogger has explained the reasons why it's okay to be a blog stalker.

I freely admit to stalking blogs and am well aware that there are some people who stalk my blog. I know this mostly because Google Analytics—which is one of my favorite toys, just by the way—shows some regular readers in places where I do not know anyone (or at least, I'm not aware of knowing anyone from these locations).

Which I think is pretty awesome. I like the fact that I can get to know a little bit about someone I've never met, or that I'm sharing my quirky little random stories and thoughts (because, let's face it, that's about as "themed" as this blog gets) with others that I wouldn't have had the chance to share them with otherwise. I like the way the blogging world shrinks the real world in some ways.

But in other ways, I'm a little sad that it tends to be so anonymous. I've found some really cool blogs from people who comment on this and other blogs, and I wonder how many more I'm missing because people are lurking and not commenting. I admit that I frequently lurk at blogs without commenting, usually because I don't want them to freak out about the fact that I happen to be lurking. It may take months of lurkage before I post a comment.

So I don't want any of you to feel worried about this. Following the lead of yet another cool blogger, I declare today to be official De-Lurk Day at The Scritchy Nib. Please leave a comment and let me know if you're reading the blog, where you're from, your favorite dessert, any requests you have for future ~~rants~~ well-thought-out commentaries, any questions you have for me, or anything else you feel comfortable sharing.

I love comments and I love finding new blog friends. Let's make this a day to celebrate both.

(And if you are a regular commenter, please know that I already hold you in the highest esteem, and feel free to continue in that excellent vein.)

Please note: In keeping with the theme, all of today's external blog links are brought to you by blogs of people I do not personally know, and at which I have lurked and subsequently de-lurked and commented.

And yes, if this post seems familiar, it's because it mostly should.

How can you not love it?

2011-11-09T22:37:00.000-07:00

So I don't have much to say tonight, or at least not much energy to say anything worth reading.

And that means it's time for a video link!

I love this clip and have shown it to several of you throughout the years, but it's always worth revisiting. (Stick around through the opening and watch the whole thing. It's worth it, I promise.)

And that, friends, is how you make an acceptance speech.

An unforeseen benefit to having a son.

2011-11-08T21:06:00.001-07:00

As I have mentioned multiple times before, I do not like spiders. They are gross and creepy and generally all-around-bad. I mean, they do have their good points like they eat other bugs and *spoiler alert* turn Peter Parker into Spiderman and save pigs from being eaten (although I can't guarantee those were both done by the same spider).

But really, I'd just rather not have them around.

I know some people who are more humane than I am and will rescue spiders they find indoors and transfer them outside on a piece of paper or in a cup or something so they can live a free-range spidey life. And that's cool if they want to do that. I do that with grasshoppers my cats drag in to play with, and with bees that get in the house if I can catch them.

But spiders? I have put them on notice many times before—if they come into my house their eight-legged lives are forfeit.

For me, a major perk of getting married was having someone to kill my spiders for me. Don't get me wrong, I can and will kill spiders on my own if I have to (the summer Shallow Man was out of the country for an internship featured several harrowing run-ins with large arachnids, which I feel like I've blogged about before). I am adept at the shoe swat, the stomp, and the turn-the-shower-on-and-wash-the-spider-out methods. I just would prefer, if someone else is around who can do it for me, not to have to get close enough to the spider to actually kill it.

I also figured that, as the mom, I would have to be the designated spider slayer for years to come while dad's at work because the kids wouldn't want to kill spiders (GROSS!). So I've been reluctantly resigning myself to the role of spider killer, and have even whacked one or two when my husband's at home so he knows I'm not a complete wimp (remind me to tell you sometime about the times when the spider I wanted him to kill turned out to really be as big as I said it was, rendering his rolling of the eyes totally unjustified).

So this afternoon I got back from an errand and had taken off my jacket and shoes. The Little Guy was standing up by the TV stand waiting for me to get his jacket and shoes, and just as I reached for his coat zipper, I saw a spider running on the floor. I turned to put one of my shoes back on so I could stomp it, but the Little Guy took one look at that spider, gave me a glance that clearly said, "No worries, Mom; I've got this covered," and he and his sneakers proceeded to stomp the living daylights out of that trespassing arachnid.

Wow. If I'd realized this was one of the perks of having a little boy, I'd've done it *years* ago. (Oh wait. Never mind. We tried.)

And now I dream of the day when I can just relax in a lounge chair and sip a fruity drink as my army of little boys stomps away all my spider-related woes. That's not too much to ask for, right?

Maybe I should've named him Samwise the Brave. . . .

In a funk.

2011-11-07T21:43:00.002-07:00

The post title pretty much sums it up. I find myself feeling sluggish about life these days. The creative juices are flowing but seem to be trapped under a sheet of ice.

Like they're a mosquito stuck in amber and I can see them there and I know there's dino DNA to be had, I just can't get to it. And that's frustrating.

Yes, I'm a nerd. Said nerd turns around after an analogy like that and says, well, maybe it's for the best. You don't want to breed raptors, after all. That never ends well.

And I say, you know what, inner nerd? You're right. Plus it's a lot of work breeding raptors. It takes a lot of energy. I would much rather just snuggle up on the couch with a good book or with useless interwebs.

Inner nerd says, let's watch Jurassic Park instead.

But then the annoying industrious side of me pipes up and gives the rest of us a guilt trip about being unproductive, so I can't even lounge properly until the funk goes away but my veins are too full of molasses to actually get much of anything useful done, so, yeah. (In the interest of giving credit where it's due, it's not just Industrious Me's fault. The Little Guy also contributes a LOT to the preventing-me-from-lounging fund. Especially now that he's walking.)

This is all extra frustrating because it's keeping me from really enjoying November, which is usually one of my favorite times of year. (Yeah, I know that just adds to the weirdness. Whatever.)

I'd write an angry letter to someone, but I just don't have the energy.

Maybe I'll put in that Jurassic Park DVD instead.

If you see my missing get-up-and-go, please kick its wandering little trash back home to me. Much obliged.

"How Long?"

2011-11-06T20:58:00.000-07:00

This poem, by Darlene L. Young, really struck me today. She says, "I wrote this poem during a long period of chronic illness about how hard it is when you are pulled up to a stop in the path you thought you were taking in life, either through chronic illness, infertility, a crisis of faith, or something else." It was one of those moments where you read something that hits you exactly right, and expresses what you've been feeling so perfectly that it resonates in your soul. And so I'm passing it along to you.

How Long?

by Darlene L. Young, pub. Irreantum vol. 9-10

*
I find myself Lehi, encamped in a tent.
It’s pleasant enough here, with plenty to do.
Arise, retire.
Arise, retire.
Work and pray and dance.
Retire.

I could build a house here and let go the dream
of the swaying of camels, the saltwater lapping.

But I heard a voice—and its memory has me
stretching my neck at the dry desert wind.
Still I hear only whisper of sand and tent flapping.

Arise, retire, and I used to pray
at every new dawn, “Lord is it today?”
Arise and retire. I no longer ask
but remain in my tent. You know I’ll obey.

I’ll make it my work to arise and retire
and cling to the ghost of the voice in the fire.
But, Lord, there’s the ocean.
And what shall I do with this lack of motion?
*
This poem copyright 2009 by Darlene L. Young.

Thank you, Darlene, for your poetry and for being amazing in general.

Hey, remember that one time . . .

2011-11-05T23:28:00.000-06:00

. . . I wrote a blog post about my associations with Guy Fawkes Day?

Hey, me too!

Let's remember remember the fifth of November together.

I've never seen V for Vendetta; this is just pure geekery.

Just what I needed

2011-11-04T22:53:00.000-06:00

I was going to write a different post today, but then I came upon these two blog entries from two separate blogs, both written yesterday, and both exactly what I needed to hear today. So I'm going to share them with you instead. Thanks to Casey and Ashley for being in tune.

Coincidence? I think not!

So it begins.

2011-11-03T23:47:00.002-06:00

Imagine this at our house tonight, only more manly and tough, and with the Little Guy instead of pigs. And without, you know, the singing. But other than that, this is exactly what our evening was like.

Yeah, we are in soooo much trouble.

Second anniversary

2011-11-02T22:05:00.000-06:00

I've been thinking about two years ago, especially now that we're living in what was my grandparents' house, and thought it would be appropriate to post these once more.

Three for Grandpa, 1914-2009
The Secret

We have a secret, just we three:
The robin, and I, and the sweet cherry tree.
The bird told the tree, and the tree told me,
And nobody knows it but just us three.

Of course the robin knows it best,
Because she built the -- I won't say the rest --
And laid the four little --somethings-- in it.
I'm afraid I shall tell it every minute!

But if the tree and the robin don't peep,
I'll try my best the secret to keep.
But when the little somethings fly about,
Then the whole secret will be out.

- Anonymous

The Swing

How do you like to go up in a swing,
Up in the air so blue?
Oh, I do think it the pleasantest thing
Ever a child can do!

Up in the air and over the wall,
Till I can see so wide,
River and trees and cattle and all
Over the countryside --

Till I look down on the garden green,
Down on the roof so brown --
Up in the air I go flying again,
Up in the air and down!

- Robert Louis Stevenson

Icarus

A girl. Arms outstretched, swooping wildly
across the sky, returning mildly
to earth, on the end of a string
madly running, she catches the wind,
rises aloft. She holds the twine
to her ear to hear the wind sing.

A grandfather. Smiling slightly,
weathered hands grip his own string tightly
hovering steadily in the sky,
teaching her to hear the wind sing,
watching her swoop. He is remembering
the giddy new thrill of first learning to fly.

- ELE

Touched you last, Grandpa!

Germination

2011-11-01T21:57:00.000-06:00

I'm hesitant, sometimes, to talk about ideas or goals or aspirations that I have. It could be that I feel like if I don't tell anybody then nobody will be disappointed in me if I don't finish what I start. Which, let's be honest, is something that does tend to happen with me. Or it could be that I feel like the magic will be gone if I say it out loud; that something will be spoiled once it's not just my little secret thing anymore. The result is that at any given time I may have two or three dozen little seedlings of projects or plans germinating in my brain that nobody else knows about. And I think that's okay.

That doesn't really have much to do with anything except that I wanted to say something without saying anything. You know, the way it's not as fun to keep a secret if nobody knows you're keeping it? Yeah. Like that.

In other news, the weather today was lovely. Not, perhaps, in an objective sense, but it was exactly the kind of fall weather I love most. Great for snuggling with a cute toddler, curling up under a blanket, reading a good book, sipping hot chocolate, or all of the above, and giving germination a chance.

Happy November, everyone!

A to Z

2011-09-29T14:03:00.002-06:00

Lots of thoughts I've had but not blogged in the last month or so.

*Finally saw the last Harry Potter movie and waxed nostalgic about growing up with Harry.
*Also waxed nostalgic on September 11.
*Took the Little Guy to the zoo, Thanksgiving Point gardens, the aviary, and the State Fair (not all at once), and a great time was had by all.
*Watched the Little Guy grow up more every day until . . .
* . . . He had his first birthday this weekend. (WOW.)
*Made donuts for the first time ever yesterday.
*Working on starting up a small business. Yeah. I'm going to have a preneur.

But today isn't about writing those blog posts. It's about being lazy but wanting to post something, so . . . meme time! (Thanks to megcellent for this cop-out.)

A. Age? 28.
B. Bed Size? Given the choice, king. But our room is only big enough for queen.
C. Chore that you hate? Lots of them, but especially cleaning the bathtub.
D. Donuts? Yes, please. (Hey, I made some yesterday!) Love Banbury Cross donuts in Salt Lake.
E. Essential start to your day? Brush my teeth.
F. Favorite color(s)? Varies, but I do love most shades of blue.
G. Gold or silver? Silver.
H. Height? 5'5" ish.
I. Instruments you play? Piano, kazoo. I'd love to learn how to play guitar.
J. Job title? Work-at-home mom. Best description would probably be Freelancer, Independent Contractor, or, now, Entrepreneur. I guess. Also Writer.
K. Kids? One, the best Little Guy EVER.
L. Live? For theatre, yes. For TV, usually DVR.
M. Mother’s name? Ellen.
N. Netflix? Oh, yeah.
O. Overnight hospital stay(s)? I think just two. Obviously when I was born (does that really count?) and when I gave birth to the Little Guy (for five nights because of the c-section—does that count as more?).
P. Pet peeves? Improper spelling, punctuation and grammar. (I saw someone the other day write "Can you blaim them?" No, but I can and will blame them severely.) Just recently I've also picked up a new one: Bicyclists who do not follow traffic laws. I would love to share the road with you, folks. But it's a lot easier when you don't run red lights or SWERVE RIGHT IN FRONT OF MY CAR WHEN I'M DRIVING 40 MPH. Thank you.
Q. Quote from a movie? Almost always. Today let's go with "I swear she ain't using real words." -Chicken Run.
R. Right or left-handed? Right.
S. Siblings? One older brother and three younger sisters.
T. Time to wake up? About 20 minutes later than I end up actually waking up.
U. Unusual quirks/phobias/factoids? Praying mantises freak me the heck out. Also snakes and really big spiders. And calling people on the phone. My main quirk is that I have a freakishly good memory for useless facts and trivia (see Quote from a movie above).
V. Vegetable you hate? Beets and nalcas.
W. What makes you run late? *sigh* What doesn't? I'm going to say that it's because, unlike George-Michael Bluth, I don't have a really good natural sense of rhythm.
X. X-rays you’ve had? Dental and once on my ankle when it got caught in a bike spoke when I was three or so.
Y. Yummy food that you make? I make a mean enchilada. And those donuts I made yesterday were pretty tasty. And the Geek Out Crew tends to like my Brie Bread and Cherry White Chocolate Twist.
Z. Zoo animal: Gotta love the monkeys and the penguins.

It's not much, but it's something. Or at least that's what I tell myself.

The problem with blog-stalking.

2011-08-13T23:04:00.000-06:00

I stalk blogs.

Like, all the time.

I love reading blogs and stalking them. Doesn't matter whose blog. Friend, family, acquaintance, celebrity of some type, complete stranger.

I'm usually pretty comfortable with this status. I don't really feel guilty for stalking blogs.

But every now and then it causes problems.

No, not with people who stalk my blog. I don't put anything on here that I'm not willing to let other people read. Stalk away (and leave a comment, you know, if that's what your heart tells you to do. Because contrary to what you may have heard, I don't hate comments).

No, the problem is that sometimes I find a blog that I love. That I enjoy reading. That brings me amusement and fun. And so I will continue to stalk that blog. I'll add it to my list. I'll get in the habit of checking it. I'll fret when a long time goes by without an update. It becomes part of my internet routine.

And then. Yes, then.

The blog author decides to make their blog private.

Sometimes this isn't really a problem, because it'll be someone I know and they'll know I've been reading the blog and I'll get an invite and everything will be fine.

But more often it turns out to be the blog of someone who I vaguely know but they have no idea I've been reading their blog for, oh, a couple of years, and at this point it's just too awkward to ask for an invite.

Because, you know, you don't want them to THINK you're some weird blog stalking-type person. There's a certain window of time where it's okay to let them know you're reading and enjoying their blog, and if you miss it, you can't really tell them without it being awkward. ("So yeah, I was wondering if you could let me continue looking in on the part of your life you post online even though we don't really talk that much in real life and the reason you made your blog private is probably to prevent exactly this sort of situation where someone is reading about you without your knowing them very well? Because losing access to your blog is kind of messing up my standard blog-reading routine.")

It's even worse than when someone just stops posting on their blog for good. Because in that case at least I know that everyone else is missing out, too.

But here, I KNOW they're still posting things and I just can't read them (and asking them to let me read would just be WEIRD)!

It's maddening. MADDENING, I TELL YOU!

Yeah. The Blog-Stalker's Dilemma.

It's rough.

"Seriously, you won't even know I'm there! I know, because you didn't notice me doing it before."

How can you not love it?; or, The ruler of the waves.

2011-08-03T23:06:00.001-06:00

So today we took the newborn divider out of the baby tub so there was more room for the Little Guy to splash around. Seriously, I don't know why it took us so long to do it, because a funnier sight than the Little Guy reveling in the expanded size of his new watery kingdom I have rarely seen.

His first item of business was to turn around so he was facing the reclining wall of the tub, which gave him maximum splashage space. The next priority was to grab the little crab-shaped sprinkler cup that came with the tub.

And then, oh, then, he splashed.

He splashed with glee and reckless abandon and giggled and squealed and splashed and wriggled and shrieked.

And eventually he would splash enough to fill up the little cup. And then the next time he raised his hand to begin another splash, he would inadvertently hurl the contents of said cup directly into his face.

Then he would gasp and cough and splutter and blink.

Pause.

Grin.

Resume splashing/squealing/giggling/refilling the cup.

Rinse and repeat.

Poseidon had best watch himself; there's a new ruler of the waves in town.

Yeah, I love that Little Guy. And at least now I know that his nose has definitely been rinsed clean both inside and out.

Yeah, this isn't a real post.

2011-06-20T16:28:00.001-06:00

Sorry to get your hopes up (assuming anyone is still reading this these days), but this is not a real post. It is a last-minute attempt to win a trip to Paris for me.

Yeah. I've neglected you all for this long just to make you read a post that includes me saying "If you don't enter, I have a better chance of winning." But c'est la vie.

See, I'm already ready to go! I should totally win!

I plan to do some real posts soon, but these last few weeks have been a bit crazy what with packing and moving to SLC and the slow process of trying to unpack and oh yeah I still am spending a lot of time taking care of the cutest baby EVAH.

So I apologize again, but you'll have to wait a little longer for a real post, because this one, well, isn't.

A few items of note.

2011-05-07T01:07:00.000-06:00

In no particular order:

The Little Guy has his first ever real cold. I blame Shallow Man's freaky immune system. Usually the way sickness works in this house is that instead of everyone catching a bug in turn, I catch it twice and Shallow Man maybe coughs a couple times and is over it. However, this last week Shallow Man actually had to take two—count 'em, TWO—sick days. This same bug is the first thing that's actually gotten to the Little Guy. I haven't been sick at all. (Being hungover from lack of sleep after taking care of the Little Guy most of the night doesn't count.) It's not fun for LG or for me, but it is comforting to know that I won't necessarily have to catch everything three times going forward. (Have my menfolk met their own personal Cold of the Century? Only time will tell.)

The only thing LG hates more than vaccinations is having his nose wiped. Kleenexes are bad enough but heaven help you if you bring a nasal aspirator within twenty feet of him. At times like these, I think of the medical staff who debated so long whether he and his lungs needed to go to the NICU or not, and imagine how proud they'd be if they could see him now. Actually, scratch that. I'm pretty sure they could hear him from where they were. I'm pretty sure FRANCE could hear him.

When he's not about to collapse under the weight of just how mean Mommy and her evil Kleenex-weilding ways are, LG's new favorite thing is to bury his face in my neck and blow raspberries. Each time he does this, he then leans back to see if I noticed JUST HOW AWESOME HE IS, and gets the cutest smug little smirk on his face. Like, "Yeah, I just did that." (LOVE THAT LITTLE GUY.)

He's also tried to raspberry my chin, with less than satisfactory (to his way of thinking) results.

He's not quite crawling yet, although he's definitely thinking about it. With the way the cats keep taunting him by waving their tails tantalizingly close to his grasp, I give it another couple weeks at most. Heaven help us all once he's mobile.

I had another surreal I-swear-I'm-not-old-enough-for-that moment today when the pediatrician's office called today to do a survey on customer satisfaction and they asked for "the parent or guardian of Little Guy" and I answered "Yes, that's me."

Well folks, the sad little snoring and whimpering from the nursery are telling me that it's probably going to be another long night, so I'll sign off now. I've got a sad little boy to snuggle.

Yes, I may or may not be seven years old.

2011-04-25T17:42:00.000-06:00

In my heart of hearts, I still want to be a princess when I grow up.

So this website pretty much made my day.

So if I'm supposed to dress for the job I want, this is what I'll be wearing from here on out:

Admit it. Your inner seven-year-old is thrilled.

Don't you evah . . .

2011-04-24T16:42:00.002-06:00

Yeah.

This is an important message, kids. Pay attention.

Please note the appearance of one of my favorites around the 1:10 mark.

Adventures in File-Digging: A Legal Sonnet

2011-04-16T23:43:00.000-06:00

So I was going through my old files on my laptop the other evening and came across a file of things I'd done for a Creative Writing class I took in fall semester 2008. This was the first semester of my 2L year in law school and I was taking the creative writing class as a lark. During the poetry unit we had to write a sonnet. Now, I don't know about you (assuming you ever even thought about such a thing), but I can NEVER come up with good ideas for sonnet topics. So I turned to the old adage and wrote what I knew, or at least what was foremost in my mind at the time: my Wills & Estates reading.

Sonnet: Mnemonic, In re Estate of Wright
Exactly one year and four months before
his death, Lorenzo Wright set out to make
his will. Since Lo’s attorney was a bore,
in order to dispose of his Salt Lake
estate and property in Venice, he
decided that Grace Thomas from the post
office would do: she was a notary
public. Lo died. His heirs read the will. Most
got just a buck. The will was challenged (duh),
since even the will’s witnesses said Lo
was nuts. (Like how he gave his neighbor a
fish soaked in kerosene…) The court said “No.”
So: if you know your heirs, stuff and the drill,
Slight madness won’t invalidate your will.

Apologies to those who saw this on facebook already. I'm just trying to get into the habit of updating the blog more often.

The Long Over-due Story of the Under-due Birth, Part Three and final.

2011-04-15T01:23:00.000-06:00

When last we saw our heroine, she was still hooked up to several machines, on pitocin with an epidural, and still waiting for a baby to come. Kind of like the last time we saw her before that, except several hours later and much more tired.

At 7:56 a.m. Shallow Man posted on Facebook: "No news yet."

I had woken up a little bit before he had and spent some time just kind of staring out the window in the early-September-morning light, feeling grateful for our awesome view but wishing I wouldn't have to see it for too much longer. I was worn out, my lips were still chapped and dry from the oxygen mask during the night, I was hungry and my body was cramped and sore from not being able to change positions much. At some point (I can't remember now if it was during the night or that morning) they had determined that the Little Guy's heart rate did a lot better when I was lying on my left side, so I couldn't really even switch sides very much, and not for more than a couple of minutes.

The contractions were hurting, too, and I was having trouble with my epidural button. The anesthesiologist had told me that I could push the button for more relief when I needed it, but explained that it would take about 10-15 minutes to spread fully once I'd pushed the button, so it wouldn't be an instantaneous relief kind of thing. So I'd push the button and wait for the agonizing 10 minutes to pass. Only instead of getting better, the pain would worsen significantly in the interim, going from maybe a 2 to a 4 or 5. So I would push the button again when the time was up (it could only be pushed once every 15 minutes or so to make sure I didn't accidentally OD or anything) and start waiting again. By the time that waiting period was up, the pain would be at an 8 and I would be gasping and trying to hold back tears when the stronger contractions hit. So we'd hit the call button and get the anesthesiologist to come and do a quick hit directly into the IV line at my shoulder. Relief would instantly wash through me, I could relax, the world looked sunnier for a while. Until the hit wore off and I tried to push the button again. Rinse and repeat. (In retrospect it seems kind of obvious that the button was probably broken, but at the time I think I was too out of it to really put two and two together, and the anesthesiologist probably thought I was afraid to push it too much, as at one point he was telling me it was okay to just "ride that button" and push it as often as I needed to. For the record, I don't blame him at all. I know my coherency level dropped sharply as I crept higher up the pain scale.)

Around 11:00 a.m., in one of the lulls of direct-hit comfort, the doctor had come in and broken my water in an attempt to get things moving a little faster, as I still was hovering right around 4. I tell you, that is a weird sensation. But I was feeling giddy with relief from the epidural shot and was glad of ANY action tending towards forward progress. In fact, once they'd broken my water, I was feeling excited and positive again, and turned to Shallow Man and asked him to turn on the TV. He asked what I wanted to watch and I, without hesitation, asked for college football. "Because, you know, if we're watching something interesting and fun, it might encourage him to come out and see what's going on."

The BYU game wasn't starting until later that afternoon (if memory serves, it started around 4), so we just picked the first random game that came on. I think it was Iowa, but I'm not sure. At any rate, neither of the teams were ones I had any sort of stake in, which may explain why the Little Guy didn't fall for it. We ended up turning the game off once we started getting to the end of that Button of Doom cycle, anyway.

The repeated up-and-down of the pain level (especially the moments of 8s and even 9s) were really starting to get to me by mid-afternoon. I was able to take a nap at some point after a Direct Hit, but that only meant that I'd sleep through the 4/5 stage and wake up for a particularly nasty contraction in the 7/8 zone. Around this time I started getting vague thoughts about c-sections, but didn't say anything because I didn't know if it was some kind of prompting or just my pain aversion—"chickening out," in essence.

At some point during the day, they told me I couldn't have any more water; just ice. Something to do with not having too much water in the system in case of an emergency c-section or whatnot. (I honestly couldn't tell you what they told me because I was having a hard time concentrating on anything besides the stupid pain-and-button dance.) Which is all well and good, but at this point I had been in the hospital and in labor for well over 24 hours, hadn't eaten since dinner the day before, and I was THIRSTY. Ice, even flavored ice, was not cutting it.

After a particularly grueling hour, the nurse came in and checked me around 5:15. I knew she was going to say I was at least a 7, and the baby would be right around the corner.

"Well, looks like you're just above a 4 now," she said encouragingly. (All of my nurses during, as they put it, my marathon labor were amazing in this department. They walked the fine line between helpfully encouraging and disgustingly, unbearably and callously cheerful and they walked it well.)

I tried to say, "Are you sure?" but it probably came out as more of a whimper.

She thought for a moment and then asked if I'd like to have the doctor check, just to make sure. I nodded.

Once she left I stared at the ceiling, trying not to cry. Shallow Man was holding my hand, as he had been for most of the day, helping me through the worst of the contractions and being generally awesome and supportive.

Brief aside: I remember the chart describing the phases of labor in the pre-natal class we went to, and it said something to the effect of "Feelings towards partner during this time may either be of great love (leaning on them for support) or great anger, but either way are generally very strong." I had worried beforehand about the "YOU DID THIS TO ME!" route, and I had told Shallow Man in advance that if I did go that way to please forgive me in advance for any epithets I might yell at him, but it never got there for me. I was definitely a turn-to-him-for-support-er, and I have to take this moment to say that I never could have done it without him. I know he was probably freaking out, but he never let me see it. And honey, I'm sure those bones in your hand will heal eventually.

The doctor on duty was the third doctor we'd been through by now, and incidentally was the same doc I'd been scheduled to meet with the previous morning but who had been called away (I joked with him later that maybe the reason the labor took so long was because I was waiting for him to keep his appointment). He came in, checked me, and verified I was a 4, "and it shouldn't take more than another 7 or 8 hours." He was also being encouraging, but in my sheer exhaustion and pain he may have said years, not hours. I had been in labor for nearly 29 and a half hours. My rope was only so long, and I reached the end of it right then and there.

I dissolved into tears, sobbing as hard as my tired body would let me.

There was a pause as four heads snapped around to look at me—Shallow Man, the doctor, the nurse and the intern—and then the doctor slowly said, "Or, at this point, given how long you've been here and your blood pressure, a c-section would be an entirely reasonable option."

It was like that one word—reasonable—was a ray of light flung into the darkness. Yes, I am waxing cliche here, but it was as if he'd thrown me a life preserver as I was drowning in despair and exhaustion. All of a sudden, the little c-section thoughts I'd been having made sense; it wasn't chickening out, it was reasonable. Shallow Man didn't know for sure what I wanted, but was talking with the doctor about the options. I caught my breath between sobs and asked, "How long would it take for a c-section?"

The doctor replied, "Well, it'll take a little longer right now than it normally would, because the shift change is coming up—"

I panicked for a moment, visions of another hour or two swimming before my eyes.

"—but we should be able to get you in there by 6:00."

I glanced at the clock. 5:30. The waiting could all be over in half an hour. I felt confident for the first time in hours as I told him, "Let's do it."

The sense of relief was amazing for my body. I was able to calm down and relax; the pain didn't even seem as bad once the decision was made and I knew it wasn't going to take much longer. The nurses went to get things ready before they ended their shift, and Shallow Man gave me a quick blessing. Then he changed into the coveralls (let me tell you, watching him try to figure those things out was entertaining) and called our families to let them know the plan. (My mom was heading to the General Relief Society meeting, which started at 6:00. My sister told me later, "Yeah, she was there, but I don't think she heard a single word during the meeting.")

Once they wheeled me into the operating room, we were greeted by one of our nurses from the day before, as well as my favorite doctor from the clinic, who'd been called in as the secondary doctor. The room was freezing, but they put some kind of inflatable plastic thing filled with hot air on top of my chest and arms, which kept me warm and blocked my view of the proceedings. Shallow Man is a bit squeamish when it comes to that kind of thing as well, so he stayed up by my head and the anesthesiologist gave us a running commentary on what was going on.

He told me that I would feel pressure where they were operating, but that I shouldn't feel any pain, so he told me to let him know if anything started hurting. I remember feeling one small prick like being poked with a needle but that was the only pain. There was some tugging and then all of a sudden—

a baby was crying.

I looked at Shallow Man and I could tell he was thinking the same thing. Our baby was in the room. The doctor held him up to peek over the inflatable wall, but I couldn't see very well because I wasn't wearing contacts or glasses. At my urging, Shallow Man went over to the station where they were measuring the Little Guy, and I heard them noting down his statistics. 7 pounds, 6 ounces. 20 inches long. Born at 6:30 p.m. Then they wrapped him up and handed him to his daddy, and Shallow Man brought him over to me.

My arms were still secured at this point so all I could do was nuzzle his cheek with my nose. He was the most perfect baby I had ever seen, and he nuzzled me back. Someone took several pictures of the two of us and then the three of us, and then they took the Little Guy out of the room with Shallow Man in tow while I got stitched up.

The Little Guy ended up going to the NICU for about an hour because his lungs were borderline. Shallow Man told me later that he was so close to the border that the nurses spent just about as long trying to decide whether he actually needed to go to the NICU or not as he spent in the NICU itself.

In the meantime, the doctors finished on me, bundled me up in about 700 blankets and took me back to the room, where I proceeded to shiver violently for what felt like forever, and rejoiced when they told me I could have liquids again. That first drink of water was one of the most amazing things I've ever tasted.

What with the NICU and then the nursery and such, it was about three hours before I really got to meet the Little Guy, which remains my only real regret about the whole experience. Which, if you consider 30 hours in labor, is no mean feat.

Once I had my son in my arms, though, those 30 hours didn't seem so bad. Within minutes, I could no longer remember what life was like without him.

Even when everything was crazy in the following hours (when the morphine wore off and I couldn't keep any food down and STILL couldn't sleep) and days (c-section recovery is not that much fun, nursing was not much better at first, and my blood pressure took WEEKS to get back to normal but not before it sent me to the emergency room), I'd look at the Little Guy and smile. Holding him was the one thing that would always make me feel better, and I'm still completely in love with him.

I know I've probably forgotten some details, and I know it's been a ridiculously long story that was a ridiculously long time in coming, but I'm going to go ahead and end it with mush: I'd do it all over again in a heartbeat for our Little Guy.

Thanks for being so patient in waiting for this ridiculously long story to get posted. I promise to return to regularly scheduled non-birth blogging soon.

The Long Over-due Story of the Under-due Birth, Part Two.

2011-03-24T23:13:00.003-06:00

When last we saw our heroine, she was hooked up to several machines, on cytotec, and waiting for a baby to come.

In the weeks leading up to the birth, I had frequently mentioned to Shallow Man that the thing I was most looking forward to about being in Labor and Delivery was a chance to sit in the jetted tub. And now I found myself hooked up to so many machines and monitors with tubes and tape everywhere and was told that the tub was not an option. Nor was walking around. Nor was anything, really, except staying in bed.

This wouldn't have bothered me much (aside from the sadness of missing out on the tub) except my back was starting to hurt from staying in the same position for so long. But my body was reacting well to the cytotec, which was promising, and the contractions weren't too bad, so I was able to go the first several hours without needing any kind of pain medication. We set up the laptop and started working our way through "Arrested Development." I think we were on episode 4 when dinner came, which included chocolate cake for me. Once again, L&D trumped GD. Unfortunately, sometime in mid-evening they told me I couldn't eat anything more until after the baby came. I could have ice and water. The ice came in several flavors, though, which helped, considering the massive snow cone cravings I'd had all summer, so it wasn't that bad.

Except that the contractions were starting to get noticeable now. I was having a hard time paying attention to the show. The new nurses had come in at the shift change shortly after dinner and had checked to see where I was. The cytotec was working, they told me, and I was up to a little above a 2. You're doing great, they said. Just a few more hours, probably, and it'll be over. In the meantime, if I needed any pain medication, just let them know.

Around 8 I asked for some meeds but not the full epidural. I wanted to hold off on that for awhile so it would stay effective longer. (Foreshadowing here: Oy vay.) So they added another ornament to my IV tree (I couldn't keep track of what all they had hanging on my IV tree at what times, but the saline drip and the magnesium were constants, with a bunch of others coming and going. I think at the peak, I had two trees and something like 7 or 8 bags going, but I couldn't tell you what all they were). That helped the pain quite a bit and let me relax again.

While I'm thinking about IVs, a quick word about the anesthesiologist(s). The first one was Indian, I believe, and was the one who actually put the needle in my arm. I had a harder time understanding him explaining what he was doing because he had a thickish accent, but what I did understand was his excitement about my crazy veins. Apparently he had never seen veins like mine before (they moved or something while he was looking at them?) and he was going to tell all his anesthesiologist buddies down in the lab about my crazy veins. He left at the shift change with the first batch of nurses, and the second anesthesiologist took care of me for pretty much of the rest of the time I was in labor, although I did see crazy vein fan guy again the morning after the Little Guy was born.

Around 10:30 or so on Friday night, the cytotec is still working and I'm getting close to a 3 but the pain is starting to really bother me and the contractions are getting more intense. We all view this as a promising sign and after some consideration I decide to go ahead and get the epidural. The anesthesiologist came in and took care of that around 11:00 and within minutes I could tell a huge difference. Shallow Man also pointed it out. I was finally able to get a bit of sleep, even in spite of the blood pressure cuff, which was set to take my BP automatically every 15 minutes. I couldn't see the monitor from where I was, but I knew that my blood pressure was still crazy high because EVERY TIME it took my BP, the monitor would beep out an annoying alert to tell the nurse that my BP was high. (Shallow Man admitted to me, later, that he when I asked him what the monitor said, he would tell me the numbers were lower than they were because he didn't want to freak me out.) Plus my arm was starting to feel a bit sore and numb from the constant checking, but the epidural trumped it at least for a little while and I probably was able to get a couple hours' worth of sleep there. Even if it wasn't GOOD sleep, at least it was something. (Shallow Man was able to sleep a bit on the couch, although he kept dreaming about tornado sirens because one of my IV towers also kept going on the fritz and beeping and that beeping sounded just like a tornado siren. Or so he tells me. I grew up where earthquakes are the natural disaster of choice.)

I woke up briefly around 1:00, when they told me they were starting up the Pitocin, but fell back asleep until sometime in the obscenely early hours of the morning when the nurse on duty informed me that baby's heartrate was low so they needed to put me on some oxygen to see if that would help. (I'm pretty sure this revelation didn't help the blood pressure monitor feel any better about the sad state of my blood, but, as I said, I couldn't see the numbers from where I was.)

I don't know how long they kept me on that oxygen mask but it felt like years. I was tired, I'd been at the hospital for something like 16 hours, I was uncomfortable and couldn't move, the mask was parching my lips and throat something awful, and one of the nurses out in the hall had chosen this time to start making loud impressions of one of the other patients. (Yes. I eventually pressed the call button to ask my nurses, all of whom were awesome, to tell the other one to be quiet because it is way too early in the morning and I just want to sleep! and she apologized to me. I spoke to one of the supervisors the next morning and let her know, and she apologized too and said they'd talk to that nurse and let her know that wasn't appropriate. But it was still awfully aggravating at the time.)

And thus, by fits and starts and fitfulness and lack of sleep, we made our weary way towards morning. The nurses checked me and after all that night's work, I wasn't even quite a 4.

At 7:56 a.m. Shallow Man posted on Facebook: "No news yet."

Part Three coming soon. I promise it won't be such a long wait this time.

The Long Over-due Story of the Under-due Birth, Part One.

2011-02-25T00:43:00.002-07:00

This post may contain some TMI moments. Be ye therefore warned. (I won't feel offended if you skip it.)

It all began late in September. . . .

After my Monday appointment I had been told that I had mild preeclampsia and was told that I needed to be on modified bedrest. I didn't have to stay in bed all the time, but I needed to take it as easy as possible, so I arranged to borrow a computer from my place of employment so I could work at home for the foreseeable future, just as a precaution.

Thursday night we went to our prenatal class at the hospital, where we saw pictures of newborns and how they tend to look weird at first. My feet were swollen again. Still. Swollen feet was pretty much the norm in those last few weeks of pregnancy, but sitting in the hard plastic chairs in the classroom at the hospital tended to aggravate things.

Fortunately, the class got out about an hour early. The nurse who was teaching the class excused us and then said, "Next week we'll definitely take the whole time, though, because we'll be talking about breastfeeding, so be prepared." Thinking back on it now, I find this funny. Maybe if we'd been able to make it to that last class, it would have saved a lot of tears and frustration later on. Oh, well.

It was good that we got home early, though, because it meant that we had more time to set up the crib. We had originally purchased a crib from IKEA only to discover while trying to assemble it that the construction and design were sorely lacking in anything resembling common sense. The holes drilled for the pegs which attached the slats of the bottom of the bed to the frame were too small for the pegs actually to go in all the way, no matter how hard or how long we hammered away at them, so back to the store it went. We ordered a different crib off Amazon, but unfortunately cribs don't arrive in two days like all our other Prime orders do, so we had been waiting a bit for it to get there. It had finally arrived that afternoon and we were eager to get it set up so we could start getting the rest of the room ready.

I wasn't aware of it at the time, but Shallow Man told me later that he should've realized something was going on because I was acting really weird and out of it while we were putting the crib up. All I know is that it was taking longer than we thought it would (what furniture assembly doesn't?), that Shallow Man was getting grouchy (he tends to do that with furniture assembly that includes a lot of nuts and bolts in difficult-to-reach spots), and that I was tired and my feet felt like they were about to acquire their own zip code. So once we got the bed itself put together we decided that we would wait until the next evening to figure out exactly where in the room we wanted to (or could; it was a bit bigger than we'd thought) put it. This meant we also would wait until the next day to put the mattress and sheets in it. We also left all the packaging lying on the living room floor because we didn't want to haul it out to the dumpster in the dark.

The next morning, Friday, I stumbled over the boxes on my way out the door for my doctor's appointment. Shallow Man had already left for work (his co-worker drove him, as we only have the one car), and my appointment was at 8:50 so neither of us had had a chance to clean up at all.

I was scheduled for my 36-week appointment that morning and was told to arrive 10 minutes early so I could have my non-stress test before the appointment (by this point, because of the gestational diabetes I was having two NSTs a week). After waiting for about 40 minutes and seeing patient after patient arrive and get called back without my name being called, I checked with the receptionist. She explained that the doctor I was there to see had been called to the hospital to help with a c-section for a woman delivering twins, so they were a bit backed up, and would I be okay with seeing the nurse practitioner instead? I said that was fine, and sat back down to try and slog through some more of "North and South" (the miniseries is SO much better than the book). Finally my favorite nurse called me in for the NST, which went great. Everything was looking normal and the little guy was still healthy and active.

Then they took me over to the nurses' station to get my blood pressure. Based on the last few appointments and the new bedrest-ish issue, I was expecting it to be a little high, but nothing major. I was staring at the wall across from me when the monitor beeped.

"Oh, my." The nurse's eyebrows nearly hit the ceiling. I looked over at the display and then stared at the top number, which was 150. I couldn't even look at the bottom number.

"Well," the nurse said after a moment. "We'll try it again in a minute to make sure. But if it's that high, we need to send you to labor and delivery."

Of course this announcement helped my blood pressure calm down. Riiiiight. The next measurement was 161 over something like 96. Definitely panicking now, the first thought that came to me was "But I can't go to labor and delivery! I haven't packed my hospital bag yet!" (I had made a schedule to accomplish the last few tasks needed to welcome a baby with the goal of being ready by the time I hit 37 weeks. Packing the hospital bags was scheduled for Saturday. Of course.) I had to work hard to pay attention as the nurse explained that the hospital would check me and depending on their results I would either be put on full bedrest or go home with a baby. She gave me a hug and wished me luck, and I went out to the waiting room to call Shallow Man.

The next hour or so are a bit of a blur. Shallow Man's angel co-worker brought him to the doctor's office to meet me, and then we drove the four blocks to the hospital together, but it meant that I didn't have to go into Labor and Delivery alone. While I waited for him to get to the doc's office, though, I stepped into the bathroom to calm down and keep myself from crying. Then I called my mother, and then I worried. In particular, I worried about my hospital bag and the face that the new camera Shallow Man had ordered was supposed to arrive that afternoon and nobody would be there to sign for it.

A very delayed flash of inspiration hit me. I called my sister, who lived in Springville at the time. Let me just say here that of all the angels there ever were, she is the most angelic and awesome. She packed up her two children and went over to our house, where, over the course of the next few hours, she did the dishes, picked up and threw away all of the packing materials from the crib, put the mattress in the crib, washed all of the baby clothes and sheets we had, put sheets in the crib, arranged for our camera to be delivered at our neighbor's house (she was headed to the Brad Paisley concert with her husband in Salt Lake later that day and couldn't wait for the camera herself), arranged for said neighbor to bring the camera to us at the hospital, and packed up a bag each for Shallow Man and I, and brought those and the car seat to the hospital.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch . . .

Shallow Man arrived at the doc's office, we drove to the hospital, and we got me signed in. They put us in the biggest labor and delivery room they had, with a wonderful view of Mount Timpanogos (and an average view of the Macey's parking lot) out of the huge windows. I was told to put on the oh-so-attractive hospital gown and then they hooked me up with the fetal monitors and the blood pressure machine, just like a non-stress test only oddly stressful.

The doctor eventually came in and explained that if I were earlier on in my pregnancy, this is where they would do another 24-hour urine test to see if it was serious preeclampsia, but at this point, waiting that long would be a bad idea, so induction it was. He also explained that eclampsia (which comes after pre-eclampsia, go figure) involves seizures, "so we have to put you on anti-seizure medication. If I didn't you could sue me for malpractice."

So I was introduced to the lovely world of magnesium sulfate.

"And with magnesium sulfate, the way we measure how it's working is by urine output, so . . ."

And that, my friends, is how I got a catheter hours before my epidural.

I was barely at a 1 when I came in because I was so early, so they had to put me on cytotec before they could even start pitocin. It was about noon when they got me hooked up to everything and started the induction. Shortly after that, they let me have lunch, which, miraculously, included french fries and a milkshake. I felt like I was in heaven for those short minutes, and decided that if labor could pre-empt GD like that, maybe it was even worth the catheter. (It wasn't. It might have been worth it if the nursing student hadn't had trouble on the first try. . . .)

My sister brought our hospital bags over, and I had fun talking with my 3-year-old nephew for a few minutes before they left. Our neighbor brought over the camera when it arrived, and Shallow Man had fun playing with his new gadget for a bit after I made him promise not to take too many pictures of me. I had called my mom to let her know what the story was and she had passed the word around to the rest of my family. A quick post on Facebook had alerted most of our friends, and all that was left was a quick text to my good friend Megan. "Looks like I can't make it to your baby shower tomorrow after all. . . ."

And then all that was left for the moment, really, was waiting. The doctor had cheerfully predicted that while it probably wouldn't be over before his shift ended at six, it probably wouldn't take too much longer after that. "You'll have a baby before tomorrow!"

So we settled in for what we thought would be not too very long of a wait. Oh, boy, were we wrong on that one.

Stay tuned for part two, coming soon!

Do you think they have a customer loyalty program?

2011-02-12T00:32:00.000-07:00

I recently received the following email in my spam folder. My spam folder is a source of frequent amusement, and this did not disappoint:

I find several things interesting about this:

- The fact that Nigerian con artists apparently have found a way to get repeat customers. They are nothing if not resourceful!
- They are gutsy enough to put a warning at the end not to trust anyone else (but we're TOTALLY legit!).
- Judging by the total amount of money that has been set aside and the fact that "every affected victim" gets $3.4 million, only about 59 people have been affected. This is actually a lot better than my faith in the human race would have led me to believe.
- If you read the first sentence literally, it looks like the president of Nigeria is the one who rated his country the most corrupt in the world.

I think my favorite thing about this message, though, is the fact that, according to my research, the current president of Nigeria actually really and truly is named Goodluck Jonathan. Well, actually, it's Goodluck Ebele Azikiwe Jonathan, but I think that only makes it better. (Unfortunately, Dr. Silver Okoli appears to be an illegal fiction.)

This is right up there with the one where the sender claimed God had revealed my name to him as someone who was righteous enough to help him out.

In Which Books Nearly Lead to a Disaster; or, The IKEA Incident

2011-02-10T23:45:00.006-07:00

This is a story that should have made it into the 2010 in Review post the first time around, but somehow slipped my mind until now.

As you may or may not know or remember, our car broke down in November 2009. At the time we didn't have the money to fix it, so my cousin and his wife let us borrow her car (which they weren't using at the time) until we could get ours fixed in January, when we would have an influx of cash.

Along with fixing our car, we used a bit of said influx to get some badly-needed bookshelves from IKEA on which we could put our massive collection of books. And it occurred to us that Bertha (my cousin's car—I'm just going to refer to my cousin's wife as my cousin from here on out because it's so much easier and that's how I think of her anyway) was bigger than our car was, so it would make more sense to pick up said bookshelves in Bertha. Accordingly, we sallied forth to that great Swedish furniture store, which is located about half an hour away from our house.

At the store, we wandered through the showroom checking out furniture (half of which looked like someone hadn't gotten the memo that the seventies ended several decades ago), enjoyed a cinnamon roll, picked up the bookshelves we wanted from the self-serve warehouse, checked out, brought the car around to the loading zone, and started to fold down the back seat so we could load up our purchases.

It was at this point that our brilliant plan hit a major snag.

We couldn't figure out how to lower the back seat. We hadn't needed to lower it up to this point in our borrowership, and so it hadn't occurred to us to check on that prior to going to IKEA. Because of course the back seat would flip down—and it would be pretty self-evident how to do it once we started trying.

Except it wasn't. We poked and prodded and pulled and pushed (gently, as it was a borrowed car) on anything and everything that looked like it might be or contain or hide a mechanism for lowering the seat, all to no avail. So we called my cousin to see if she could tell us how it worked.

"Huh," she said when we asked her. "I don't think we've ever tried lowering the seat before in that car, so I really don't know." (Proving how amazing she is, she even offered to come pick us up in their other car, which we politely declined, as we were certain we could figure it out, and besides, IKEA, not to mention our house, is waaaaayyyy out of her way.)

The next step was, obviously, to call my brother and ask him to check up on the internet to see if he could tell us where the seat release was on the car. (Yeah, we don't have smartphones.) He said he'd look into it and call us back in the next five minutes or so.

Let me pause here for just a moment to mention that at any given moment there is a 75-ish% chance that Shallow Man has no idea where his cell phone is. Also, with the particular phone he had at the time, at any given moment there was a 90% chance that the battery was dead. I'm no statistician, but even I can tell you that this leads to a large amount of time spent looking for Shallow Man's phone with no way of finding it in the traditional way (i.e., calling it and following the ringing) because the battery has just died. This is what had happened earlier that morning, meaning we had one cell phone between us, namely mine. And right after I hung up with my brother, my cute pink phone gave out that ominous beep that puts fear and trembling into the hearts of strong men (and women): Low Battery.

I tried not to think about it too much, but as we continued poking and prodding while we waited for my brother to call back, it became increasingly apparent to me that his response would be unnecessary because I already knew what he was going to find:

This seat did not flip down.

It had never occurred to us that such a thing might happen. Bertha was a good 9 years newer than our car. Our car, even when it was new, had a definite paucity of features. Our car is not and never was (and, let's face it, never will be) the coolest, most tricked-out car on the block. So if our back seat folded down, obviously it was the most basic of features and would come standard on every car.

Apparently not on a 2005 Chevy Malibu.

My brother finally called back (I'm sure it was a much shorter time than it felt like to me) and confirmed my suspicions. I thanked him for helping us and then asked if by any chance he could bring his SUV and come help us out. I felt bad for even asking because he lives about 20 minutes away from IKEA in the opposite direction from our house. As it turned out, though, he was watching the kids and waiting for his wife to get back from grocery shopping and couldn't come right then anyway. So I called my mom and dad, who live maybe 3 minutes away from my brother.

They weren't home. My little sister, who answered, told me they had gone to see "Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs," and that the show had started maybe 15 minutes earlier so it would be a long time before they were done.

I was getting a bit nervous at this point, and tried calling my cousin back to take her up on her offer of a ride after all.

No answer.

To recap:
We are, at this point, 30 minutes away from our house, with three large Billy bookcases (say hello!) and other assorted purchases, a back seat that won't flip down, no rope or bungee cords, the only people who I know for sure have cars big enough to help us are unavailable, and our only means of communication with the outside world may die at any moment.

So we do what any self-respecting people in our situation would do:

Call for backup.

Lost in Translation and her husband live just past the halfway point between our house and IKEA and also happen to be awesome.

I took a deep breath, said a little prayer that my phone wouldn't die before they answered, and dialed.

When LiT answered, I said without thinking, "Hey, would you guys be able to come bail us out?"

Stunned pause on the other end.

I realize my mistake. "No, no, we're not in . . . I meant figuratively bail us out, not literally." I explained our plight, and she said they'd be there as soon as possible.

I thanked her profusely but tersely as my phone beeped again, and told her, "Yeah, my phone may die at any minute, so if you call and no one answers, we're just waiting in front of the store at the loading area."

It took them a little longer to arrive just because they had to clear out the trunk of his car, but they got there soon enough and then all that was left was to wrangle three bookcases and assorted other purchases (I think this was the same trip we got a new desk/table for Shallow Man's office, but I can't remember for sure) into their little-ish hatchback and our unexpandable trunk. I don't know how—maybe Mary Poppins or Hermione Granger was watching over our cars—but we managed to squeeze it all in. LiT ended up riding in our car with us because the hatchback was packed to the gills (not that a car has gills, really; maybe if it was an amphibious vehicle. . . .) with bookcases. This was harder on her, just because it meant she had to listen to our repeated thanks for the 30-minute drive to our house.

We ended up taking them to dinner at our favorite Italian place as a token of our appreciation (we're always glad of an excuse to eat there anyway), so it all turned out okay in the end. My phone had continued beeping at intervals during the entire time we were waiting in the parking lot and on the drive home. It finally died as we pulled back up to our house after dinner, and I have no idea how it lasted that long. (This actually led to another adventure, when we discovered that when Shallow Man's phone had walked off it had apparently taken the phone charger with it, so we did end up being incommunicado for the next couple of days until the charger turned up.)

So the moral of the story is: Having a back seat that flips down really should be a standard feature on all cars. Also, LiT and husband are awesome.

Or maybe it just means that there is such a thing as having too many books.

2010, at last.

2011-02-08T23:18:00.007-07:00

Yes, yes, I know I'm a month late for the year-in-review game. Just live with it.

Here are some of the awesome things that happened in 2010. As I suspected, it was a MUCH better year than 2009. (Although, let's be honest, it wasn't hard to do.) As always, if I didn't list something you thought was awesome, it doesn't mean I didn't enjoy it; I just can't remember everything.

*The new year began with what was probably the best party we've ever had or ever will have at our house. New Year's Eve: Geek Style brought awesome Jenga, lots of laughter, great conversation, and just enough craziness to ensure that none of those present will ever be elected for public office.
*Beginning the final semester of law school and feeling great about my schedule, even though it involved an 8:00 a.m. class three days a week.
*Actually making it to class on time for the first several weeks of class.
*Getting Baby (our car) repaired after she sat in the cold and snow for a month and a half after the big break-down in November '09.
*Having to repair a flat tire in the snow and gunk of our parking lot before we could actually take Baby in.
*Steve's Intermountain is the best mechanic's shop in Provo. Just sayin'. He's honest, doesn't talk down to me just because I'm a woman, and is genuinely nice.
*Staying home all day one Wednesday while feeling sick and crampy and reading.
*Aubrey's wedding with Kat and KEY.
*New red coat, yo.
*Rejoining ILMR and editing a really horrible article, but at least the head editors were much better.
*Working at WSP with an awesome team of editors and friends.
*Geek Night X. The second-best party we've ever had here.
*Making Mario cupcakes with KEY for Geek Night X. Yeah, I'm still proud of those.
*Shallow Man finding the trauco in an old box while KEY and I were decorating said cupcakes.
*Our already-decrepit fence blew halfway over in a major windstorm and we had no choice but to pull the rest of it down to avoid damaging the siding.
*More Just Jane, including the expansion to 10 members, with the inaugural meeting of the new, improved club also being the first non-Austen-themed, but still Jane [Eyre].
*Lunches with KEY, when they happened. And even when they didn't, the weekly "I'm so sorry for being a flake, but . . ." conversations.
*Starting to feel a little weird the last week of January/first week of February, but knowing it wasn't what it felt like.
*Buying cruise tickets with the Cruise Crew on Friday, Feb. 5th.
*Taking that test on the morning of Saturday, Feb. 6th, just to prove to my body that it wasn't pregnant so it could stop acting like it.
*Ten minutes later, when I could think again, wandering dazedly into the bedroom and, after staring at the ceiling for several minutes, saying to Shallow Man, "So . . . I think I'm pregnant."
*Driving to Walmart that evening to buy another test just to make sure, and having the car start acting really funny again as we drove there.
*While shopping, thinking of the most hill-free route to take home to save the car from going up any hills while it was on the fritz, then getting out to the car and finding out that it would no longer shift into reverse. This officially bumped the two days of Feb. 5th & 6th, 2010, into "Most expensive weekend yet in our family."
*Riding in a tow truck.
*Our ever-growing collection of Steve's Intermountain keychains. Finding out it was not the whole transmission, thank goodness, just the sensor. FINALLY having a functioning car, but being afraid to accelerate or go up hills for the next (okay, I'll be honest) three months.
*Walking to the Student Health Center on Monday afternoon to get the blood test and trying to figure out how far along I was.
*Getting the quantitative results back and wanting to sing.
*Feeling great until placement break (of course!) and then getting hit with morning sickness, big time.
*Working from home. A lot.
*Missing a lot of class. (My professors were all in on the secret and very supportive.)
*Going to a lot of different wards (our 9:00 a.m. meeting time didn't gel with my hours-that-I-am-not-hunched-over-the-toilet schedule).
*Julie and Julia for Valentine's.
*Telling the rest of my family (my parents already knew) at my birthday party. Much rejoicing.
*The tree in our backyard had to be cut down before the HOA would replace the fence (we at least got them to pay for the removal). It ended up being removed on the morning of my birthday.
*And thus we were introduced to the power of the pregnant sobbing. (Confession: I would have cried about the tree anyway. But I wouldn't have been reduced to blubbering.)
*Trying to make dinner for one of the pregnant sisters in the ward without looking at any of the ingredients, all of which made me sick.
*The saddest day of all: Baby decided not to let me eat bacon for the rest of the first trimester. This is especially sad when you consider that I had just discovered The Pioneer Woman's Fancy Macaroni the first week of February.
*Shallow Man took me to see 12 Angry Men performed at PTC in Salt Lake for my birthday. I snuck in trail mix and managed not to get sick during the performance. Lots of fun!
*Olympics! So much fun to watch. Also, they helped me discover the joys of pregnancy emotions (I have never cried so hard during a commercial).
*Bar applications. Yuck.
*Hire's and the Roquefort Bacon H. "Whatever that is."
*Cousin party and Rayman's Raving Rabbids. Whoa.
*Going to the first doctor's appointment in March and having everything look good. But, just in case, he scheduled a sonogram for the next week.
*Coming back to work after that appointment just to find out that the company had apparently imploded (not literally) in our absence and that all but a handful of employees were being laid off.
*We were not included in that handful. Actually, everyone from me down.
*Which meant that I got to break the news to all of my friends that they were being laid off. This included going to the homes of two of them who hadn't been in the office to let them know before they heard it from somebody else.
*Fortunately, seven horrible days later, we saw Baby for the first time, and heard the most beautiful sound ever: a strong, healthy heartbeat.
*Spilling the beans to everyone and seeing all our friends get so excited for us. (I put it on Facebook, and then it was true!)
*Viewing party for New Moon (mocking commentary mandatory!) and the Team Jacob t-shirt.
*Morning sickness escalation and the first prescription, which made it worse. Lost five pounds in one weekend alone.
*Getting the second prescription and starting to feel human again.
*Except for the only being able to eat Easy Mac part. But HEY, if that looked appetizing, it should give you an idea of the amazing effectiveness of that second prescription!
*Going to Cracker Barrel because spoiled pork chops made me cry. (Yeah, not fun.)
*SLA night II, which ended up being me, Motion deSmiths and Megan watching "She's the Man." Awesome.
*Going in for our 12-week appointment the day before my last law school classes. I had nightmares for the whole week leading up to it about the last time we went in for a 12-week appointment. But he found the heartbeat instantly. I may or may not have cried.
*Holy cow, I do not even know HOW I finished that last semester of law school. But I did.
*Last class of law school.
*Last final of law school (which is the closest I will ever get to living that nightmare where you have to take a final for a class you didn't realize you were enrolled in).
*Substantial writing, aka Major Paper (neigh!). It nearly killed me, but I did it.
*Last papers of law school, for the most useless class ever, and the professor who I'm pretty sure gave me a lower grade because I had the audacity to be pregnant while taking his class, even though I can't prove it. He was the only professor who wasn't 100% supportive and willing to work with me. He did work with me, but under protest and not without accusing me of unprofessionalism first. Blech.
*Graduation! I am so glad we got to walk in the Provo Tabernacle! We were the last class to be able to do so, as there was a fire in December and the roof collapsed.
*Partying, relaxing, and lots of sighs of relief.
*Hitting the second trimester two days before graduation, and briefly thinking that the morning sickness would stop. (It did leave me alone for graduation, thank goodness.) This turned out to be a lie—the sickness wasn't going anywhere for the next few months. But at least I could eat bacon again.
*Being re-hired by the publishing company as a part-time independent contractor.
*Mother's Day wasn't traumatic for the first time in several years.
*CRUISE!!!
*The toilet of lost souls.
*"Aw, hell."
*Balcony!
*Cruise director Gary.
*Dennis, our waiter. ("Denniiiiiiiiis!")
*I ate escargot for the first time ever.
*Only having to send one plate back because I nearly gagged just looking at it (roast beef, of all things, which I love. Weird.)
*Cruise ship entertainment. ("You can't pay money for those shows!") The big talking purple couch.
*The Land Whale. ("Freeeeennnnnncch Toooooooooast!")
*Our seven-year anniversary, spent in Grand Cayman, with the most beautiful beach I have ever been to.
*The group excursion in Honduras—snorkeling, good conversation, yellow fish, not enough sunscreen despite reapplying frequently and liberally.
*Feeling Baby kick for the first time that I could definitely say was Baby and nothing else while standing waist-deep in the beautiful blue water at the beach in Honduras.
*Banana slug blisters. Apparently my pregnant skin does NOT react well to sunburn. (I haven't blistered since I was maybe 12, and never like THAT.)
*Magic shows with lame final tricks that rely on fictional sob stories.
*Piggy banks made out of coconuts, discovering ice cream and cinnamon, and an amazingly choppy boat ride in Belize.
*Karaoke and attempted dancing.
*Delicious food in Cozumel.
*Floppy hat!
*Trying to figure out what the heck the towel animal of the evening was supposed to be, and sometimes feeling glad that we didn't know.
*Renting a van and driving around Miami.
*Horrible service at Bubba Gump's, which I didn't notice because Baby had started the first-ever round of kick the bladder.
*Worst ever TSA experience at Miami international.
*Weather delay in Miami led to missing our flight in Dallas. After a mad dash across the airport on what ultimately turned out to be a wild goose chase (more Kick the Bladder ensued), we and the Smiths were given vouchers to a surprisingly nice hotel.
*Finally getting home, and the cats gluing themselves to our sides for the next day or so. ("Never leave again!")
*Early morning Spanish.
*Helping friends move.
*The most awkward dinner visit we've ever been forced to endure. (If you're reading this, it wasn't with you.)
*So much Gloria's.
*Camping for Memorial Day with our AWESOME NEW AIR MATTRESS. Seriously, it's amazing.
*Motion deSmiths left us. How we wept, precious!
*The Ultrasound on June 3rd. Despite having a feeling that Baby was a girl the whole time, as well as having a girl's name already picked out, baby very clearly showed us that he was a boy. He also was sitting curled up like a potato bug, blocking the technician's detailed view of his heart, thus necessitating a follow-up visit six weeks later (oh, darn!).
*GIVE MY SON THE JUICE!!!
*Family camping trip. Lots of fun with Kick the Bladder and pit toilets. Wind so strong we felt like our tent was going to blow away with us in it. Being the cool hangout for our nephews because with the huge air mattress our tent was like a carnival bounce house.
*I remember we got our oil changed in June because the sticker they left on our windshield said that the date for our next oil change was the day Baby ended up being born.
*Southern Culture Night. Hands on a Hard Body. Lots of good food. Very Yes.
*I finally finished reading Great Expectations, and it was better than I had expected.
*Lots of fun trying to change our car battery. Riiiiight.
*But we got the car inspected and registered and such WAY before the end of the month. No sneaking around backroads like last year.
*Fireworks with the family for the fourth.
*Bar study all the time. Post-traumatic stress and such.
*Follow-up ultrasound, where everything still looked perfect. :)
*One year later, and thinking what a long way we'd come, and being happier on that day than I would have thought possible a year before.
*Actually getting to go to my mom's birthday party this year.
*Having to get a doctor's note in order to take food into the bar exam. ("Because not all pregnant women need to eat.")
*The Dreaded Bar. Two days of UNGH in which my feet swelled up to ridiculous sizes.
*BUT—my magic spreadsheet predicting the essay question topics was pretty much spot on. The only one I didn't predict was Property, but that was okay because it was still an MBE subject. Yeah, I felt good about that.
*IT'S OVER!!!!
*Dinner at the Mayan with Megan and Mr. G, just because it was there. It's still as cheesy as I remembered, although I was greatly angered that the chocolate pot was no longer a dessert option.
*Finding out that E was pregnant and S was adopting, and we were all having boys. Hello, three musketeers!
*Being able to say that we were now "After the Bar."
*Failing the other test I took that week. (Nasty glucose test.)
*Failing the other nasty glucose test I took the next week.
*Hello, gestational diabetes.
*Hello, sore fingertips.
*Possible pre-eclampsia (what is with these whale-sized feet?). Fun sample collecting.
*Celebratory post-bar pedicures. (So at least the whales had cute toenails.)
*Inception. Twice. Even though my feet hated me for it later.
*We bought a car seat and stroller! That felt like a major accomplishment, somehow.
*Trying to find a suitable crib.
*Trying to figure out what the heck to name the Little Guy.
*Tensions between Barrie and Joyce.
*Weekly and sometimes bi-weekly non-stress tests, as well as another couple of ultrasounds. Which do, incidentally, help ME de-stress, because I get to see the Little Guy and hear his heartbeat on a regular basis. We find out baby has a big noggin.
*Reunions and birthday parties.
*Reading The Hunger Games Trilogy and being very glad, as I hit the end of the second book, that I waited until all three were out before I started them.
*Pre-natal classes with uncomfortable chairs and videos.
*Blood pressure acting sketchy.
*Geek Nights, Just Janes, more tense moments.
*Bar results come out and WE BOTH PASSED. Holy cow.
*Baby shower!
*The crib FINALLY arrives and we start putting it together Thursday night after our class.
*Friday morning I go to my 36-week appointment, planning to run some errands afterwards and then wait at home for the delivery man to show up with the new camera we've ordered. Instead, the nurse looks at my blood pressure and sends me to labor and delivery.
*Did I mention I was planning to pack my hospital bag later that day?
*Shallow Man's wonderful co-worker brings him to the doc's office and we head to the hospital. My angel sister heads to our house and packs bags for us, arranges for a neighbor to sign for the camera and bring it to us (she was headed to a concert in SLC and couldn't wait for it herself, which only increases her angelitude in my opinion), and even cleaned up the boxes from the crib (which we were too tired to throw away the night before) and fed the cats. At some point in the next few days she even did laundry for us, and I don't know what all else. Let me take a moment again to emphasize that she is amazing and an angel. Thank you so much, sis!
*The short version here is that after 30 hours of labor, I had a c-section on Saturday night and the Little Guy made his entrance to the world. Shallow Man and I fell instantly in love with him and it's only gotten better.
*Adventures in hospital staying. I found out that morphine is awesome. And I have never been happier to eat a milkshake in my life.
*Finally made it home the next week, although I had to get a prescription for blood pressure meds because mine was still higher than they liked.
*Having a moment of panic when I had to sign the "Parent/Guardian" line on the hospital release forms.
*Near-daily visits to the hospital lab for bilirubin counts. We were nearly on a first-name basis with the nurses there.
*One night with the Little Guy on bililights and I hope I never have to do that again.
*A fun trip to the emergency room for me because my blood pressure was reading something like 201/120. Yeah. When we got there and it was only reading 175/105, they couldn't understand why that made us so happy. Meds were upped and things turned out okay.
*Tripping down the stairs one of my first days home alone with the baby. Not recommended.
*Shallow Man having to work till 11 p.m. most nights the week after we came home. Also not recommended.
*Much pain and suffering and frustration and tears (on both ends) trying to figure out the whole nursing thing. Thank goodness for the lactation clinic.
*Being sworn in as lawyers and actually getting to go to the ceremony. Wahoo!
*Oh, losing, like, 40 pounds in the first three weeks after the birth. I was back in pre-pregnancy pants two weeks after he was born. I don't know how it happened, but I'm not complaining!
*Making a Hiccup (from "How to Train Your Dragon") costume for the Little Guy for Halloween, even though he maybe should have been Mount Vesuvius.
*The arrival of two more geeklings (one before, one after the Little Guy, and both girls).
*Slowly and gradually healing.
*The Little Guy's blessing day. I've been waiting for that one for a long time. (Yes, I cried.)
*Going to the funeral for my great-aunt, the last surviving member of my grandmother's family. Losing one of the Little Guy's socks at the graveside service.
*Thanksgiving. And pie. But mostly thankfulness for being so blessed.
*The Little Guy's two-month appointment. He is a string bean—long and skinny, but very healthy and cheerful.
*Completing 30 blog posts in 30 days for NaBloPoMo.
*Going to the Christmas party for Shallow Man's work at La Caille. Delicious food, even if the atmosphere is a bit silly. Two of his team members (sitting at our table) won prizes. We enjoyed the juxtaposition of our car being brought up by the valets at the fancy restaurant.
*The failed attempt to see my sister's quartet perform, and the encore just for us.
*Getting to see Red and Harry Potter in theaters when awesome people baby-sat the Little Guy for us.
*Finally leaving the publishing company for good and all.
*Working with Shallow Man again, only this time he's my supervisor, sort of.
*Little Guy's first smile.
*Little Guy's first laugh.
*Little Guy just being awesome in general.
*Another cousins party at the end of the year, this time with three new babies. :)
*We are a three-stocking family now!
*Spending Christmas at my parent's house along with my sister and her family because they were moving out of state on Christmas afternoon. Packing up their house in the days before Christmas.
*The best Christmas ever.
*Also the most tearful as we all gave our last hugs and goodbyes and my sister and her family packed up and drove off for four years of school in the South.
*One wonderful week of having a bread maker before it died.
*First eye appointments since the beginning of law school.
*Oddly, all of our invited guests for New Year's Eve ended up having to cancel, so we rang out 2010 as a family, with just the three of us. It was a good end to a good year, and I think the vast difference between the beginning and the end of 2010 were in keeping with the other surprises and changes that came along the way.

Yeah, all in all, I think 2010 is my favorite year yet. As the Little Guy grows and develops even more of a personality and gets even cuter (if such a thing is possible), I'll be excited to see what comes next!

You're on notice, 2011. You've got a lot to live up to.

I have to say, seeing as this post is a month and a bit late, that so far 2011 has not disappointed. Onward and upward!

Yes, there's that.

2011-01-24T17:01:00.003-07:00

In times of trouble, it is a great comfort to me to reflect that, were the need to arise, the Little Guy could, in fact, kill Macbeth.

Take that, Caesar.

Best. Baby. Ever.

2011-01-20T22:58:00.003-07:00

So I know I'm way behind in the blog posts I'd like to get written. There's still the birth story, 2010 in review, and a few others that I want to get done, but haven't. (All together now: Sometimes being a good mommy makes me a bad blogger. Sigh. Rinse and repeat.)

But I did want to take a brief moment to ~~brag about my awesome child~~ share this story. We just got back from visiting Shallow Man's grandparents in Alabama (and oh, the stories I could tell you about that trip. But that's for another time). We were pretty nervous going into it because although we have flown many times, we've never flown with a not-quite-four-month-old infant before. I was worried the Little Guy would have problems with his ears or the noise or have a massive blowout on the plane (yeah, I have a few more "I'm not blogging about poop" entries, too). I dealt with this anxiety the only way a mother can: by over-packing. But we flew on Southwest which = free checked bags. Which, of course = very yes.

I needn't have worried, though. Little Guy was, as per his usual, a champ. On each leg of the flights, I would start nursing him once we got in our seats, and he was completely asleep by the time we took off. He would wake up, briefly, once or twice during the flight and then conk out again in the face of the humming of the very large engines (our boy is curiously susceptible to the lulling sound of the car, so it wasn't too surprising that an airplane has the same effect).

The best part? At the end of each flight, the passengers around us (even one sitting right next to Shallow Man!) looked around when they stood up and said in surprise, "I didn't even know there was a baby on this flight."

Yeah, I know.

Best. Baby. Ever!

Unfortunately, between holding the Little Guy and worrying, we somehow neglected to get a picture of him being angelic on his first air voyage. Hopefully he'll do a repeat performance the next time we fly anywhere.

Dear Santa.

2010-12-10T11:48:00.005-07:00

Dear Santa,

Remember last year?

Well, I just wanted to thank you for the iPod touch you sent me.

It's sure come in handy since the other gift I asked for arrived. (I forgot to mention last year that one of the perks of the iPod is that you only need one hand to use it. Same with my Kindle, even though Shallow Man, rather than you, gave that to me for our anniversary/law school graduation/Mother's Day.)

So, since I got everything on my list, I really don't have anything I want to ask you for this Christmas (at least not for myself. But I trust you'll bring something special for the Little Guy).

But don't worry, I'll still leave out milk and cookies for you. The way I figure it, the way you came through this year, you've definitely earned them.

Respectfully and very gratefully yours, & cetera.

P.S. Oh, also? Remember how I mentioned how a firstborn child was a great gift idea because you could use it for bartering?

Well, after careful consideration of the firstborn son now sleeping on my lap, I take it back.

I wouldn't trade him for anything.

On Cotton Candy, the Paranormal, and My Evil Inner Editor.

2010-12-03T13:58:00.004-07:00

I've admitted before that I enjoy the Twilight books. I don't feel too bad about this because I enjoy them for what they are and have no illusions about their literary merit.

I think of them as the book equivalent of cotton candy.

Cotton candy is awesome. It's fluffy, it's pink, it has no nutritional merit, it's fun to eat, and it reminds you of going to the amusement park with your first crush and awkwardly holding hands on the SkyRide.

You wouldn't (or shouldn't) eat it for breakfast.

You wouldn't (or shouldn't) have it as your staple food source.

But you would (and should) enjoy it on vacation days and at parties and other times when you don't want to and don't have to be a responsible grown-up who worries about things like laundry and taxes.

(Confession: the first leisure reading I did after law school graduation was the Twilight saga. Talk about cleansing your mental palate! No brain required, just fun.)

Twilight is not Pulitzer Prize material. (Yeah, I experience a nearly physical revulsion when people say this and are in earnest.) Twilight should not be the only thing you ever read. ("May I recommend a greater allowance of prose in your diet?") Twilight is not a shining example of character development or a model for how to lead a long and happy life. (Yeah, as much as I enjoy the books, it is in spite, and not because, of Bella Swan.)

I have a limited supply of patience with people who insist that the books of the Twilight saga are the Greatest. Books. Ever. Written. and that is INCLUDING Shakespeare and the Bible! Yeah, they're not. They're fun, yes. But great? No.

Stephenie Meyer is not a good writer. She is a good storyteller—she makes you want to know what happens next. But she does a less-than-adequate job of telling you about it.

And my Evil Inner Editor has a problem with this. I squirmed for most of New Moon when all the em-dashes—of which Ms. Meyer is particularly fond (and who can blame her? They're an awesome piece of punctuation)—had spaces around them. I twitched at the misspellings. I wriggled uncomfortably at the unwieldy prose. And I positively writhed in frustration after about the twelfth mention of molten-liquid-gold-topaz-smoldering-chiseled-muscles-eyes-angel-can't-breathe. Which occurred, I believe, on about the fourth page after Edward makes his entrance.

So I felt like I'd finally found what I'd been looking for when the amazing Booklicious posted a link to Reasoning with Vampires. The author of RwV has taken upon herself the task of editing the Twilight Saga. While I definitely don't hate the books like the author does, my Evil Inner Editor has been jumping up and down inside of my head yelling in triumphant vindication while my actual self has been laughing. A lot. It's absolutely worth taking a look at if you are 1) a reasonable Twilight fan, 2) a Twilight hater, 3) an editor, or 4) someone who like hilarious things.

But you don't have to take my word for it.

I know a lot of people, including fans of the series, were also furious when the last book ended happily. "It doesn't reflect real life," they said. "She just gets everything she wants with no consequences!" This didn't bother me for a couple of reasons:

1) I *like* happy endings, especially in my escapist fiction;

2) Um, it's about VAMPIRES and WEREWOLVES and you are worried about it not reflecting reality? and

3) When I eat cotton candy, I don't want it to come with a bunch of depressing life lessons attached. It's cotton candy. If I wanted nutrition, I would eat brussel sprouts (which are tasty, but not good for taking on the SkyRide).

Things I love; or, Just the facts.

2010-12-02T23:46:00.001-07:00

I love:

*The fact that I have been able to see the seasons change from late summer to autumn to winter by watching the leaves change on the tree that is visible from the nursery window while I nurse the Little Guy.

*The fact that my red-haired son has long eyelashes which are strawberry blond and not white. (And yes, he also has my invisible eyebrows. But that's another story.)

*The fact that the Little Guy took two legitimate naps today, rather than a handful of catnaps. (The fact that I got a major amount of cleaning done may or may not have anything to do with this.)

*The fact that the Little Guy is starting to enjoy bath time.

*The fact that there is, in fact, the Little Guy.

Yeah, I'm hopelessly in love.

AHA! or, It's been awhile.

2010-12-01T23:23:00.004-07:00

It's been a little while since we've talked about an important subject:

Now that Pluto may have regained its status as the largest object in the outer solar system, should astronomers consider giving it back another former title — that of full-fledged planet?

Pluto was demoted to a newly created category, "dwarf planet," in 2006, partly because of the discovery a year earlier of Eris, another icy body from Pluto's neighborhood. Eris was thought to be bigger than Pluto until Nov. 6, when astronomers got a chance to recalculate Eris' size.

Now it appears that Pluto reigns — though only by the slimmest of margins (the numbers are so close as to be nearly indistinguishable, when uncertainties are taken into account).

This came up in the news last week but I didn't get a chance to blog about it because I was busy making Thanksgiving preparations (yeah, can we just take a moment to remember how much I love Thanksgiving? *contented sigh*).

But the time has come, my friends, for me to address this issue. And what I say is:

I TOLD YOU SO.

I'm glad that some experts are on board with this:

"If you take the IAU's definition strictly, no object in the solar system is a planet," said Alan Stern, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo. "No object in the solar system has entirely cleared its zone."

The definition also sets different standards for planethood at different distances from the sun, according to Stern, who is principal investigator of NASA's New Horizons mission, which is sending a spacecraft to Pluto.

The farther away a planet is from the sun, the bigger it needs to be in order to clear its zone. If Earth circled the sun in Uranus' orbit, it wouldn't be able to clean out its neighborhood and would thus not qualify as a planet, Stern said.

"It's literally laughable," he told SPACE.com.

In Stern's view, a planet is anything that meets the IAU definition's first two criteria — the bits about orbiting the sun and having enough mass to be roughly spherical, without the "clearing your neighborhood" requirement.

So Pluto should be a planet, as should Eris and the dwarf planet Ceres (the largest body in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter), as well as many other objects.

You all know my opinion on this. Let's give some love to Pluto.

Seriously, IAU, what's with the discrimination here?

Victory Lap!!!

2010-11-30T23:52:00.008-07:00

Well, we made it! I didn't know, at the beginning of the month, if I'd be typing up my 30th post in as many days today, but it worked! Thanks to all of you who have stuck around during this undertaking.

I've realized that blogging more frequently is a lot of fun, and completely doable as long as I make time for it specifically. That being said, I've also realized that I don't necessarily have enough to say to keep blogging every day. Looking back at the last 30 days, I've done:

*A whole lot of cop-out posts, usually about how tired I am because of something the Little Guy has been up to. Don't get me wrong; I would much rather be tired and boring and have the Little Guy around than be energetic and witty and still childless. But as I have said before, being a good mommy sometimes means I have to be a bad (or at least uninteresting) blogger.

*A few posts about musicals you may not have heard of but should totally check out.

*A book review.

*A series about word nerd-age.

*Much linkage.

*A moderately successful De-Lurk Day (if you never did de-lurk, or if you thought you weren't included because you don't technically lurk, you are still more than welcome to comment now!).

*Maybe one or two actually interesting posts about random stuff from my brain.

Not too shabby, I suppose, but it also has lots of room for improvement, substance-wise. I'm thinking of some changes and organization for the blog which I hope to implement in the coming month. But I reserve the right to occasionally pop in with nothing more than a note saying I'm still a mommy, and I'm still alive. But I guess if you've made it this far with me, you'll probably understand that. And, as always, if you have any suggestions and/or requests for blog post topics, please let me know and I will do my best to oblige.

Thanks to all of you for reading, and for making me feel like there were people I shouldn't disappoint, which kept me posting here this month. I love knowing that people read this random stuff I write, and that some of you even enjoy it.

So I guess I'll see you in December!

My Amazon PayPhrase today was "Elliespen's Unstable Essays." I'm not sure what to think about that.

And, in case you didn't notice before, yes, this is DAY 30! Mission accomplished!

The Many Faces of Eileen

2010-11-29T22:02:00.003-07:00

Earlier this month, I talked about She Loves Me, a musical based on a play that has been re-adapted many times, most of which I love.

Today's featured musical has a similar adaptation record. It was originally a set of short stories, then a book, then a play, and then a 1942 movie starring Rosalind Russell, for which she was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress.

Rosalind Russell was so amazing in the role of aspiring writer Ruth Sherwood, who is overshadowed by her beautiful sister Eileen (an aspiring actress), that some other amazing people (see: Betty Comden, Adolph Green, and Leonard Bernstein, among others) decided to adapt the play-turned-movie into a Broadway musical called "Wonderful Town," just so Roz could reprise her role. Which she did, although she wasn't much of a singer beforehand. She apparently learned to sing just fine, though, because she won the Tony award for her performance.

The musical was revived in 2003 with Donna Murphy as Ruth, and I adore this particular cast recording. I know there used to be a video on YouTube of Donna Murphy (who was also nominated for a Tony) singing my favorite song from the musical, "One Hundred Easy Ways," but I couldn't find it. So I'll give you this version instead:

Other great songs include "Ohio" (I've not caught up on this season of "Glee" but I hear that this was sung as a duet with Jane Lynch and Carol Burnett), "Conversation Piece" (especially the bit about re-reading Moby Dick), "Conga," "My Darlin' Eileen," and "It's Love."

The great thing about this story, though, is that it's actually a two-for-one musical deal. In 1955 the story was again revisited, this time as a movie musical called "My Sister Eileen," but with different songs than "Wonderful Town" and a slightly tweaked plot. It featured the wonderful Betty Garrett as Ruth, Janet Leigh as Ruth, and Jack Lemmon (who sings!!!), Tommy Rall and Bob Fosse all as suitors for the sisters. Bob Fosse choreographed, which lead to this amazing dance number (dancing starts around 3:00):

I have to say that I like the 1955 version of the story best (Eileen comes off as less flaky, in my opinion, plus who doesn't love Betty Garrett? Plus Jack Lemmon in love is so sweet and adorable), but all of the versions are worth checking out, both movie and soundtrack.

(I think it was also a TV series in the 1960's—you've got to love stories that get so much mileage. Kind of like this 29-day blogging streak I'm on.)

Another cop-out post, but with food!

2010-11-28T23:33:00.000-07:00

So I have a great post half-written and a couple of others that I'm working on in my head, but no energy to actually finish any of them. I think it's a combination of a four-day weekend, another does-not-want-to-nap day, and the fact that it snowed for most of the day, which usually puts me in relaxed, hot chocolate, stay inside and do nothing much mode.

I feel okay with all of these things.

I also feel okay with this:

And the fact that I made it for Thanksgiving and again today (what else was I going to do with the leftover pumpkin puree? I mean, really). Check out the recipe here.

And now I think I'll just head to bed. Till tomorrow, then!

Day 28 = four straight weeks of blogging. This has been more intense than I thought it would be.

Really, now.

2010-11-27T23:36:00.000-07:00

If Hulu Plus is supposed to be so great, why don't they have all of the episodes for the current season of Psych?

I'm just sayin'.

Day 27 and I miss Shawn Spencer already. . . .

Insert contented sigh here.

2010-11-26T23:32:00.005-07:00

How I spent Black Friday:

*Slept in (thanks, Little Guy, for helping out with that).

*Ate leftover pie for breakfast.

*Stayed in my jammies until 11:00 a.m.

*Watched Psych.

*Ate leftover turkey and more pie.

*Read.

*Took a nap.

*Snuggled with my baby.

*Had a movie night with good friends.

*Did a wee bit of shopping online without having to deal with crowds or the cold.

And that is how Black Friday should be done.

Day 26 down. Nearly done!

Happy Thanksgiving, folks!

2010-11-25T11:18:00.004-07:00

Happy Thanksgiving!

We're heading off for a delicious Thanksgiving celebration with family, so I'll just leave you with this family favorite:

The yams did it!

Here's hoping you all enjoy day 25 as much as I plan to!

My favorite holiday.

2010-11-24T14:25:00.005-07:00

I love Thanksgiving. It's my favorite holiday. It has all the good food and relatives gathering and crisp weather and good cheer of Christmas, but doesn't involve as much stress or shopping. (I dislike shopping, unless it involves unlimited resources and lots of books.)

KEY, when I told her this, challenged my assertion that Thanksgiving is less stressful than Christmas. I told her that meant she was doing Thanksgiving wrong. (Don't worry; our friendship is awesome enough that we can tell each other things like that and not get upset. Unless it's about James Joyce. . . .)*

The key to Thanksgiving is delegation. It should be like a very, very organized potluck. Everyone has an assignment and everyone brings that item to dinner. If only one person is in charge of all the shopping and cooking for everyone else, of course that's going to be too much stress for them. If you show up to a Thanksgiving dinner that someone else cooked and you haven't contributed to at all, you haven't really joined in the point of the holiday. You might be grateful for their efforts but you haven't made yourself a full part of the communal Thanksgiving experience. Everyone cooks; everyone shares. That's how Thanksgiving should be, at least in my opinion.

One of my favorite aspects of Thanksgiving is Pie. Pie, pie and more pie.

Oh, and pie.

Which I actually need to go make now. So I will leave you with these two awesome pie-related things:

Pushing Daisies. If you haven't seen any episodes of this delightful (and, unfortunately, now-cancelled) TV show, do yourself a favor and introduce yourself to Ned (the Piemaker, who has a special power), Chuck (his alive-again sweetheart), Emerson Cod (a private investigator who knits to calm his nerves), Olive Snook (the waitress who loves Ned unrequitedly), Aunts Lily and Vivian (retired synchronized swimming duo with agoraphobic tendencies and a proclivity for waving around shotguns, at least in Lily's case), and Digby (an alive-again dog). You won't be sorry. As Ned says, "Pie is home. People always come home."

I've always liked this particular Wondermark.

Now go forth, eat pie, be thankful, and take looooong afternoon naps.

*Love you, KEY! Even if I don't love Jimmy like you do. ;)

Day 24 and I'm posting in the middle of the afternoon, yo! How's that for being on top of things!

Something about names and roses and something that smells.

2010-11-23T22:22:00.004-07:00

Yeah, I spent a long time trying to think of a good, clever name for this post and all I could come up with was that old overdone Shakespeare quote. So yeah. Whatever. (Today was another no-nap day. That may have something to do with it.)

Following up on yesterday's discussion about words that are tainted by association, I just want to take a moment to talk about names.

Everyone, I'm sure, has had the experience of a name being "ruined."

In elementary school I met a girl named Lizzie. I won't go into details, but the experience was so unpleasant that I've had issues with the name ever since. The only reason I'm still okay with Elizabeth Bennet from Pride and Prejudice is that when people call her by her nickname, it's spelled "Lizzy."

Another example is that several of the boys' names I liked growing up ended up going on to be the names of boys I dated.* So I could never use them for a child, which made our quest to find a name for the Little Guy that much harder, since most of my favorite names were now off the table. (Also, Shallow Man didn't particularly like most of the others, but that's neither here nor there.)

I'm also pretty sure I could never name a child any variation of Isabella now.

Of course, name associations don't have to be bad. Positive associations with names are what lead to namesakes. Which are pretty awesome. The Little Guy's middle name is actually in honor of one of our dear friends (who was not only Shallow Man's roommate, but also his best man, our wedding photographer, our chauffeur, our bouncer, etc.). My nephew is named after my maternal grandfather, who passed away a few months before said nephew was born, and now I have two awesome associations with that particular name.

I don't really have any grand conclusion about this. It's just something I've thought about in connection with the rest of my word musings. So if any of you has a pithy way to end this, please feel free to share it with the class.

*Oddly enough, almost all of them also had a sister named Amy, or some variation thereof, which was also one of my favorite girls' names. Go figure.

That's it for Day 23—we are now entering the final week of NaBloPoMo, yo. (Okay, sorry for that. Couldn't help myself.)

And now back to our regularly scheduled programming.

2010-11-22T23:43:00.005-07:00

Today we enter the wonderful world of malapropisms!

A malapropism, for any less-geeky readers out there, is when you mean to use a certain word, but accidentally use a similar-sounding but different word instead. The character Dogberry in Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing frequently engages in this behavior:

"Our watch, sir, have indeed comprehended two auspicious persons." (III.v.41-42)

He obviously means they have taken two shady characters into custody (apprehended two suspicious persons); what actually comes out is that he understood two favorable people.

Malapropisms can be entertaining and endearing in literary characters or as a once-in-a-while slip of the tongue; good-natured ribbing ensues. However, malapropisms as a result of someone pretentiously trying to sound ultra-intelligent can start to grate on the nerves.

What? Personal experience? Whatever gave you that idea?

If you've ever wondered about my bio information and why "quintessential" matters, it all comes back to the reason I went to law school: the Curly-Haired Boss, or CHB for short (closely related to the PHB). Leaving aside the more traumatic elements behind this situation, the CHB had an annoying malapropism habit, such as the following exchange:

CHB: We need to get the correct address, because that's quintessential in getting the letter sent out.

Me: (longish pause) Did you mean "essential"?

CHB: (even longer-ish pause) Did I?

Me: Yes, I think you did.

CHB: (longest pause yet, then continues as if nothing has happened at all) So I'll call and get the addresss....

Want to guess how he thought "prima donna" was spelled?

Anyway, I told you that story so I could tell you this one.

Okay, so it's not a story really, but thinking about word aversion made me think of the way certain words become pet peeves, not because of any aversion to the way they sound, but because of association or connotation. (Note also the difference between this kind of aversion/pet peeve and the kind related to words that are misspelled or grammatically abused.) For me it's mostly association that ruins words, and it's probably no shocker to hear that most of those bad associations are because of the CHB.

He liked to sound smart in order to impress his direct superior (who, I think, realized what a mistake he had made in promoting the CHB about a week too late to do anything to fix the situation), which included using what he (the CHB) apparently thought were intelligent words as much as he could.

These words usually tended more towards the "buzzword" category than to the "how to build a better vocabulary" side, and his tactic was to take one word, latch onto it and use it as often as possible for the next month or so until he had leeched all possible meaning out of it, then rinse and repeat with a new word. As a result, I now have almost physical reactions to the following words/usages:

Task. v. To assign. "I'm going to task you with this project."

Massage v. To tweak carefully. "We'll need to massage this letter so it doesn't sound so angry."

Robust adj. Whatever you want it to mean, as long as it's preceded by "more." "This should be more robust. I want a more robust system. Our client list should be more robust. That's the most robust sweater I've ever seen."

*shuuuuuuuuddder*

Do you have any words that are tainted by association?

22 days in and just over a week to go for NaBloPoMo!

. . . we'll be right back. But not quite yet.

2010-11-21T22:23:00.003-07:00

So I was going to continue the Words, Words, Words series today.

But that was before the Little Guy peed on me.

Four times.

In 45 minutes.

And then had a major blowout.

(Thankfully, not on me. It was pretty much contained by his onesie [which was like the sixth one for today; we've had some impressive eruptions from the other end today, too] but it was still very intense.)

So we graduated him to the next-size-up in diapers.

One hopes this will solve the problem.

Especially because I'm pretty much out of clean clothes (four changes of clothes for me today).

And my brain is kind of frazzled from all that and not really up for exploring the intricacies of vocabulary.

So we'll take this moment to celebrate the Little Guy's first, uh, graduation.

(pause for applause)

Thank you, thank you, you're too kind.

Till tomorrow, then!

Three weeks, baby!

After these messages . . .

2010-11-20T23:30:00.004-07:00

So today is kind of a cop-out post. Again. But that's okay.

I think I may have done this before, but books and book lists are always worth revisiting. (Like Brideshead, I guess, although I'm not sure since I've not read that one.) But I've definitely read more than 6.

I've seen this list go around several times and it always makes me wonder:

1) Why does the BBC thinks people have only read 6 of these books? Do they really have that low of an opinion of the reading habits of the modern adult? And who came up with the number 6? I even have my doubts that the BBC is actually involved in this at all, but that's another story.

2) Who chose these books? What was the criteria? Why do we have The Da Vinci Code but not Don Quixote? And why include the complete works of William Shakespeare as well as Hamlet, and didn't anyone notice that The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is actually part of the Chronicles of Narnia? (Another reason why I doubt the BBC's involvement. Surely they would know better.)

3) So which six of these books does the BBC expect people to have read?

4) What does this say about my book and movie habits?

The answer to these questions is a pretty firm "I have no idea." But it's still fun to look at lists of books, right?

So, without further ado, here's the actual meme with my answers.:

Have you read more than 6 of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here.

Instructions: Copy this into your NOTES.
Bold those books you've read in their entirety.
Italicize the ones you started but didn't finish or read only an excerpt.
Put an asterisk after the ones you've seen a film version of.

Tag other book nerds. Tag me as well so I can see your responses! Feel free to add comments too.

1 *Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 *The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 *Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 *Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 *To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 *The Bible
7 *Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 *Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 *Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 *Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 *Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 *Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 *The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 *Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 *The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 *David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 *Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 *Emma - Jane Austen
35 *Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 *The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 *Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 *The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 *The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 *Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 *Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 *Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 *Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov (I've only seen part of the movie, though.)
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 *Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 *Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 *Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 *Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 *The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 *Possession - AS Byatt
81 *A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 *The Remains of the Day - Kazu Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 *Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 *Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 *The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 *The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 *Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 *Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 *Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

So that makes . . .

44 I've read in their entirety,
13 more I've read excerpts or abridged versions (or just didn't finish), and
42 movie adaptations I've seen. (I've seen brief snippets of several more, but I only included movies I've seen all or nearly all of.)

Which, I guess, makes me not-completely-uncultured. Or something.

Day 20! She could . . . go . . . all . . . the . . . way!!!

Just saying it makes me sick.

2010-11-19T23:27:00.004-07:00

I hadn't really thought much about word aversion, even after reading the article I mentioned before. I know other people who hate the word "moist" but it has never bothered me; in point of fact, I rather like it. It makes me think of either chocolate cake or moist towelettes, both of which are amazing things in their own ways. (And after you've eaten particularly moist chocolate cake you could probably use a moist towelette to tidy up.)

There aren't that many words that really bug me like that (leaving aside words that are by definition offensive or used specifically to offend, but that's different than regular word aversion). I don't generally have the kind of visceral response to a word like people do to moist, so I wasn't going to really do a separate word aversion post.

But then Lost in Translation regarding her extreme aversion to the word "lecithin" and it gave me one of those rare moments of personal insight. (Well, two actually; the first one being that while I like the word "adjectival," I don't like using the word "nominal" to denote nouns. Probably because it sounds like I'm minimizing their importance. But that's not the important moment of personal insight here.)

I don't hate "lecithin." But I hate the word for what it is.

I do have a word aversion. An extreme aversion to the word—I shudder to type it . . .

. . . "emulsifier."

*ewewewewew*

Just saying it, just thinking it—nay, just typing it—gives me a serious case of the jibblies, the same way you get when you see a snake or a really gross spider or a really soggy something-that-shouldn't-be-soggy, like cake. It just sounds WRONG. And gross. And—

Okay, that's it, I need to go take a shower to get rid of the grossness.

Are there any words that you absolutely loathe? Leave 'em in the comments so we can all be grossed out together!

Day 19! Wahoo! We're nearly two-thirds of the way there!

Word Girl! But not like on PBS; or, Pick a side.

2010-11-18T23:30:00.003-07:00

I think there's a PBS show called Word Girl, isn't there? It's something like that in any case.

ANYWAY.

In looking at the lists of favorite words you've left so far (keep them coming!), I came to a realization.

I have to blame KEY mostly, but Lost in Translation helped, too.

It has to do with "serendipitous" and "pugnacious."

My lovely friends gave the adjectival forms as their favorites, but I prefer the nouns "serendipity" and "pugnacity."

I guess I could also have called this post "Are you a Shuss or a Tee?" ("shuss" being "-cious" and "tee" being "-ity" if you didn't catch that). Team Adjective vs. Team Noun. I find it interesting that some people lean more to the adjectives when I guess I like nouns more, even though it's all basically the same word but for the suffix (if my prose lacks clarity or beauty here, today was another non-nap-day).

And I wonder why that is. Is it another weird property of word attraction that some people just like the way certain forms sound or feel more? Or does it have more to do with usage?

Because Shuss is really, when you get down to it, a prettier sound than Tee is. And yet, for all my love of good sounds, I think the auditory connection is trumped by my old creative writing teacher's mantra.

No, not "Show, don't tell," although she did like that one, too.

"Use strong nouns and verbs."

The point being that if your verbs and nouns are strong, you don't need to qualify them with adjectives or adverbs, which tend to gum things up. Also, that means that when you DO whip out an adjective or adverb, it makes a stronger impact; it hasn't been diluted by superfluous words. (There are exceptions, though. For example, I like "superfluity" better but it just makes the sentence more awkward. Which brings us to another mantra, "Use good judgment." Although come to think of it, that one was my mother's mantra, not my teacher's. Huh.)

So keep your adjectives; give me a noun!

I am Elliespen, and I am a Tee.

Goooooo, Team Noun!

Also, just incidentally, gooooo Day 18! So, are you a Shuss or a Tee? Let's forget Teams Edward and Jacob (or whatever other Teams may be out there) and pay attention to much more interesting teams. I want Team Noun and Team Adjective to battle it out in the comments section. Woohoooooo!

Word lovin'.

2010-11-17T23:50:00.004-07:00

I came across this article about word attraction today and it got me thinking. (There's another article here about the opposite effect of word aversion in general and the word "moist" in particular which is also quite interesting.)

It's true that I love words. A lot. And I love coming across those dollar-vocabulary words like "ebullient" and "viscosity" (words like "thither," "felicity," "mischance"!) and sharing them with friends, family, casual acquaintances and even, occasionally, strangers on the street. I know other people have favorite words (my sister's favorite word being "perforated." Which, you have to admit, is a pretty dang cool word).

My grandpa used to have fun teaching us words that were disproportionately long for our size. Nothing quite as funny as a two-year-old trying to say "hypothetical." And given a little more time, I'm sure we'll be trying to get the Little Guy to say things like "anticipatory repudiation" or "temerity."

Probably some of the reason why I love Amazon PayPhrase suggestions so much is because they tend to include awesome words. I mean, "metallurgical?" Come on! That's good stuff right there! (Today's PayPhrase: Elliespen's Scarlet Equity. I don't know what it means, but I like it.)

But my favorite word is not a majorly complicated five-syllable word. ("Polysyllabic" is a great word, though.) It is, however, pretty much the most amazing word in the English language:

Askance.

How can you not love that word? It looks and sounds exactly like what it is. Let's take another look.

Askance.

Ahhhh. Gotta love it.

I also enjoy its cousins, "ajar" and "askew." And many, many other words, some of which are fancier and more impressive to the lay ear.

But "askance" will always be first in my heart, lexically speaking.

Let's celebrate Day 17 with awesome words! Please list some of your favorite words in the comments so we can all share the joy and beauty of vocabulary.

A Tale of Four Socks; or, Really Just Two Socks Now.

2010-11-16T23:51:00.004-07:00

The Little Guy has roughly two pairs of socks (out of the dozens that he owns) that consistently stay on his feet. As fate would have it, these are also his only two pairs of brown socks. I'm not sure why we don't have more brown socks for him when most of his wardrobe falls into the green and brown category, thus clashing with his multitude of blue socks. But so it goes.

So why is it that on the same day that half of one pair goes missing in the laundry, half of the other pair decides to fall off of his feet for the first time? And why is it that this happens in the middle of a cemetery full of fallen leaves?

Imagine looking for a light brown sock in a pile of light brown, orange and yellow leaves.

Yeah.

Farewell, sock. We hardly knew thee.

Hopefully I'll have better luck with the dark brown laundry sock. Or else infant sockbuying might be in my very near future.

Day 16! We are officially over the halfway point now. Who would like to celebrate this milestone by sending me brown baby socks?

Brief Book Review: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

2010-11-15T23:29:00.006-07:00

I have had a request for more book reviews, so here's a quickie one for another late evening.

My book club just finished reading The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë. Here are a few of my thoughts. (I apologize in advance that these thoughts do not form a coherent review.)

*I was surprised that the titular tenant is, in fact, a woman. Having heard the title of this book for some years without knowing anything of what it was about, I had always envisioned said tenant as being male for some reason. Male and brooding and probably much too old for the heroine. Not sure why.

*Oh, wait, yes I am sure why. See: the author's last name.

*I was also surprised how much I enjoyed this book given the amount of time I spent being annoyed with the two main characters.

*Seriously, not since Edmund of Mansfield Park have I wanted to slap a character upside the head so badly. This is including Katniss Everdeen, folks. (And they're supposed to be the good guys!)

*I do not include Bella Swan on that list because that goes WAYYY beyond needing a slap upside the head.

*But no, if I had been reading Tenant in paperback form instead of on my Kindle, the antics of Gilbert and Helen would have merited a session of throwing the book against the wall in disgust. (Literary characters take note: putting your fingers in your ears and saying "Lalalalalala I can't HEAR you!" is NOT an effective coping mechanism.)

*Don't worry. The bad guys need a slap upside the head, too. But you expect that in a novel.

*Brontë sisters take note: NOT EVERYTHING IN LIFE IS WEIRD AND BEYOND DEPRESSING. You need to get away from those moors, yo. And I'm not talking about Othello. Or a place to tie boats.

*I'm pretty sure Anne didn't quite know how to end the book because her characters kept being stupid and not cooperating to come to some sort of resolution for the story. (See: slap upside the head.) So she had to end the story by sheer force of will, and it kind of shows. We're not quite into deus ex machina territory here, but I bet if you'd made Anne spend one more week writing this book it would have come to that.

*Literary characters take another note: Hitting someone over the head, knocking them off their horse and leaving him on the side of the road in the rain when they (understandably) refuse your offer of assistance (remember, you're the reason they need assistance in the first place) is also NOT an effective coping mechanism. Hanging out with people who do this is also a bad plan. (Victorian heroines, are you listening?)

*Brontë sisters take note again: Seriously, have you NEVER met a normal happy couple? Wow.

*Book club members take note: This was a lot of fun. Have I mentioned how much I like you folks?

To sum up: I liked this book but it was not my favorite Brontë book ever (Jane Eyre), nor do I think it is the best-written of the Brontë books (I have to admit that award goes to Wuthering Heights, as weird and depressing as it is). But definitely worth picking up; once you start reading it you want to keep reading it until the end.

I know you're probably sick of me mentioning what day we've reached in my NaBloPoMo blogging streak. But being able to give myself a virtual high-five everyday like this is what has gotten me to day 15 (halfway there!); it's kind of like the little pick-me-up you get when you cross an item off your to-do list.

This post is not about poop.

2010-11-14T23:59:00.003-07:00

Before I became a parent, poop was not a part of my daily conversational routine. Despite the fact that everyone does it, it's not something I talked or thought about on a regular basis.

That is no longer the case now that the Little Guy is in our lives.

However, I realize that for all the folks out there who did not just become parents, the topic retains its less-than-savory nature. So out of concern for their tender sensibilities, I try not to talk about it in great detail or at great length.

But it's pretty much all that's on my mind at the moment.

Which doesn't leave me a lot to blog about.

So this post is not about poop. So sorry that it ever came up.

And, having thus exhausted my topic, this post is now finished.

I can't believe this is still going after 2 weeks. I would like to point out that today is the closest I've ever run it to the deadline and still made it on time. Procrastination for the win, I suppose.

Seven weeks!

2010-11-13T23:25:00.002-07:00

So today the Little Guy is 7 weeks old. I would just like to take this moment to say that is crazy. I cannot believe it's been both that long and that short of a time. I have loved every minute of it.

That's pretty much all I have to say today.

I'll post something better tomorrow. But I wanted to be able to gloat about my 13-day streak.

Three things that make me laugh.

2010-11-12T23:19:00.004-07:00

Courtesy of Booklicious.

I'm kind of in love with this show.

Just saw this movie and loved it. John Malkovich definitely stole the show.

12 days and counting! I could totally be a Christmas song at this point.

Oy.

2010-11-11T22:51:00.004-07:00

Days like today are why I decided to not worry about NaNoWriMo. I know the Little Guy HAS to be tired because he has not slept longer than 30 minutes at a time all day, and not for very many of those 30-minute chunks, either.

But he Will. Not. Sleep.

I've finally got him in his crib and more or less calm (no noise from the baby monitor yet) but then we're only at about minute 12 so there's about 18 minutes to go before he decides the world is ending and he must have Mommy NOW. Which I love that he likes me and needs me and all that but that's about 15 hours straight of all mommy mode all the time. (Okay, to be fair, I did get a shower while Shallow Man held the Little Guy and the Little Guy screamed because he decided right after I got in the shower that he needed to eat again NOW even though I had just finished feeding him about 10 minutes before. Oy.)

The punchline of which is: I love being a mommy, but sometimes it means I can't be a good (or at the very least, an interesting) blogger, so this is all you get today.

But at least I did manage to post today for Day 11, right? Maybe if we all cross our fingers and hope very hard, he will start sleeping again and give me a chance to do a bang-up job tomorrow for Day 12. Maybe? :)

Poor Little Bunny

2010-11-10T23:20:00.006-07:00

Thanks to all who have De-Lurked so far. I've enjoyed seeing your comments.

So the Little Guy has had a tummy ache since yesterday as he tries to come to terms with his digestive system. It's nothing serious, but it does mean he needs even more love and attention (poor little guy can't even cry real tears yet), which means less time for blogging.

Which means it's time to shamelessly lift hilarious videos from other blogs!

I laughed at this. Very hard. Because it is TRUE.

As Bridget kindly explained:

(PS - the one line in the clip that's difficult to catch is "you've not heard of LemSip?" which is like TheraFlu. And at the end he asks to watch cbeebies, which is like British Sesame Street.)

(Thanks, Bridget, and I hope your family feels better soon!)

Here's hoping that the Little Guy's tummy ache doesn't turn into a Man Cold. (Do you think it's related to the Cold of the Century?)

Till tomorrow, then!

A 10-day streak! Admit it, you didn't think I'd make it this far. (I know I sure didn't!)

A Trip to the Library; or, Thank You, Jerry Bock.

2010-11-09T15:02:00.009-07:00

Don't forget to De-Lurk, please!

Jerry Bock passed away last week. For those of you who aren't geeky enough to recognize that name without more explanation, he was the Bock half (obviously) of the duo Bock and Harnick, who wrote Broadway musicals (Sheldon Harnick, the lyricist to Bock's composer, is still alive). And if that doesn't help, maybe this will:

So let me pause here because I want to make one thing very clear. I adore Fiddler on the Roof. I think it is brilliant and quite possibly one of the best musicals ever written.

But it's not my favorite musical by Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick.

That distinction goes to the little-known 1963 gem She Loves Me.

It's the story of The Shop Around the Corner in musical format. (The movie was originally adapted from a play called Parfumerie, by Hungarian playwright Miklos Laszlo, and subsequently remade as In the Good Old Summertime and, later, You've Got Mail.) The music is sweet, the story and characters are charming, and, of course, the guy gets the girl in the end. (If you think that's a spoiler you're not paying attention.)

Unfortunately, this beautiful little musical was overshadowed by the mega-shows Funny Girl and Hello, Dolly that year, with which it couldn't compete, and so it only played for a short run, and was mostly shut out come Tony time.

Which is a real shame. It features such songs as "No More Candy" (trying to sell a musical candy box to a skeptical customer), "Tonight At Eight" (our leading man is nervous about his impending date to meet the girl of his dreams), "Perspective" (the older clerk in the store explains how to keep your job), "Romantic Atmosphere" (a frustrated maitre d' tries to impress upon a bumbling waiter the importance of setting the mood for lovers' meetings), "Tango Tragique" (a cautionary tale about anonymous pen pals), "Where's My Shoe" (leading lady gets a bit of a crazy-go-nuts scene), "Ice Cream" and "She Loves Me" (the leading lady and leading man, respectively, discover a softening of their feelings of animosity toward each other), "Grand Knowing You" (the skeezy clerk's big farewell), and several others.

Including my very favorite, "A Trip to the Library."

In this scene, when last we saw our secondary lady, (who is a bit of a floozy), she had just had her heart stomped on by the skeezy clerk for the last time, and valiantly resolved to change her ways and not be taken in by such a skeezy guy again. She comes back to work the next morning and reports on her progress to the leading man. It seems that last night, she found her feet taking her on an unexpected route . . . to the library. "You've never seen anything like that library! So many books! So much marble! So quiet!"

I chose this version out of all the many on YouTube because even though she flubs a couple of the lyrics, she sings it more closely to the way the original actress, Barbara Baxley, did. I prefer the slightly more vulnerable and sweet tone to the brassier belting featured in most of the other renditions. If you'd like to see how it plays out on stage, though, I did enjoy this version:

I ask you, how can you not love a show with a song that rhymes "respectable" and "bespectacled"? And who could resist a lyric like this:

I have to admit, in the back of my mind
I was praying he wouldn't get fresh,
And all of the while I was wondering why
An illiterate girl should attract him.
Then all of a sudden he said that I couldn't
Go wrong with the way of all flesh—
Of course it's a novel, but I didn't know
Or I certainly wouldn't have smacked him!

If you have never heard of She Loves Me, I suggest you do yourself a favor and check out the soundtrack. Or keep an eye out on your community theater notices, as this show is frequently mounted around Christmas time. Check to see if there's a production going on near you and go to see it. Take a friend and sink back into this lovely little musical. I promise you won't regret it.

Day 9! Wahoo! (When was the last time you went "wahoo"?)

De-Lurk Day 2010

2010-11-08T13:47:00.004-07:00

There's a blog I read which sports the saying "I don't hate comments" on its sidebar. I can agree with this sentiment. Another blogger has explained the reasons why it's okay to be a blog stalker.

I freely admit to stalking blogs and am well aware that there are some people who stalk my blog. I know this mostly because Google Analytics—which is one of my favorite toys, just by the way—shows some regular readers in places where I do not know anyone (or at least, I'm not aware of knowing anyone from these locations).

Which I think is pretty awesome. I like the fact that I can get to know a little bit about someone I've never met, or that I'm sharing my quirky little random stories and thoughts (because, let's face it, that's about as "themed" as this blog gets) with others that I wouldn't have had the chance to share them with otherwise. I like the way the blogging world shrinks the real world in some ways.

But in other ways, I'm a little sad that it tends to be so anonymous. I've found some really cool blogs from people who comment on this and other blogs, and I wonder how many more I'm missing because people are lurking and not commenting. I admit that I frequently lurk at blogs without commenting, usually because I don't want them to freak out about the fact that I happen to be lurking. It may take months of lurkage before I post a comment.

So I don't want any of you to feel worried about this. Following the lead of yet another cool blogger, I declare today to be official De-Lurk Day at The Scritchy Nib. Please leave a comment and let me know if you're reading the blog, where you're from, your favorite dessert, any requests you have for future ~~rants~~ well-thought-out commentaries, any questions you have for me, or anything else you feel comfortable sharing.

I love comments and I love finding new blog friends. Let's make this a day to celebrate both.

(And if you are a regular commenter, please know that I already hold you in the highest esteem, and feel free to continue in that excellent vein.)

Please note: In keeping with the theme, all of today's blog links are brought to you by blogs of people I do not personally know, and at which I have lurked and subsequently de-lurked and commented.

Wahoo! More than a week down and I'm still on track (and, I might add, posting well before midnight)! Help me stay on track with lots of awesome comments! (Yeah, okay, now I'm just shamelessly begging.)

Sunday Message

2010-11-07T23:55:00.002-07:00

We blessed the Little Guy in church today and gave him his official name. Which isn't Little Guy, or Sharkbait, or Houdini (because no swaddler can contain him!), but which also will not be featured on this blog. If you really want to know, send me an email and I'll tell you that way.

But because of that, we had family over and there was some celebrating, plus you factor in the Sunday afternoon naps and the fact that the Little Guy blew through about six diapers and four changes of clothing in just under two hours, and I think you'll cut me some slack for doing a video post.

This is from a talk by Elder Jeffrey R. Holland and I've been thinking a lot about it lately. It's what I've needed to hear many times. Enjoy!

So day 7 is cutting it pretty close, but I think it counts if I haven't gone to bed yet.

P.S. Just to give you an indication of the mush-like state of my brain at the moment, when I originally posted this it said "blew threw" instead of "blew through." Yeah. I'm embarrassed for myself.

Short and sweet: The Amazon PayPhrase.

2010-11-06T23:01:00.004-06:00

Today was rather busier than usual so we're going with the short and sweet post today.

All I really want to say is that Amazon PayPhrase is one of the joys of my life. I have not yet and never will set my Amazon PayPhrase because if I did, it would stop suggesting pay phrases for me. And I get such good ones.

Like today's gem:

"Elliespen's Austere Sofas."

Past favorites include:

"Elliespen's Sketchy Seat"
"Elliespen's Unstoppable Disco"
"Elliespen's Glowing Jewels"
"Elliespen's Unfocused Thoughts"
"Elliespen's Social Fraternity"
"Elliespen's Extreme Retention" (This was either a good omen for bar study or an apt reflection on the size of my pregnancy feet.)

A friend of mine once got "Metallurgical Episodes" and "Racy Writings." Today, Shallow Man got "Gradual Layers," and once it was "Shallow Man's Wild Missions."

Yes, an Amazon PayPhrase suggestion can brighten up a grey day or add extra zest to a happy one. What are some of your favorite past PayPhrases?

Today, mine should be something like "Elliespen's Continued Triumph." Day 6, baby!

Remember, Remember...; or, A Memory.

2010-11-05T23:14:00.005-06:00

So . . . Happy Guy Fawkes Day! I actually remembered it before midnight this year. Actually, I remembered it before three in the afternoon, which I think is making great progress.

All together now:

Remember, remember,
The fifth of November
Gunpowder treason and plot;
We see no reason
Why gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot.

Yeah, I have a confession.

I don't really actually care about Guy Fawkes Day. Not like I care about other not-really holidays, like International Talk Like a Pirate Day.

I just like to point it out every year because it reminds me of the first time I heard of Guy Fawkes Day.

Which wasn't on Guy Fawkes Day. At least, I don't think it was. At any rate, it might have been, but if it was, I didn't know it at the time and it was purely coincidental and actually has NOTHING to do with the story I am trying to tell but keep getting sidetracked from telling.

ANYWAY.

Do you remember book orders in elementary school? (YES THIS IS IMPORTANT. I am laying a foundation here, like Prof. Goldsmith would want me to do.)

(We just watched an episode of Psych in which he was in court and NO FOUNDATION was laid for anything whatsoever but the judge for some reason kept allowing stuff. That's what made me think of foundation laying. Sorry. Tangent over.)

I loved book orders. I loved getting those fliers made out of the flimsy newsprint type paper with the pictures and the blurbs and the little red-ribbon labels for the Newberry winners. I loved turning to the last page and reading down the full list of titles and then trying to find each of them in the flier, like a little game of hide and seek.

I also loved filling out the order form (Confession [and apology for yet another tangent]: I like filling out forms. Especially when it's a little stack of forms on top of each other, making it all cushiony when I fill in the blanks with a black ball-point pen. Yeah, I know I'm odd.) and cutting it out and putting it in a little envelope with the money for my order (although I always wished that it didn't ruin the rest of the flier; it was harder to re-read later if some of the entries from the other side of the form were half-cut-out and missing) (see above comment re: I know I'm odd).

Most of all I loved the day that the actual books from book orders came and the parent volunteer in charge of coordinating book orders for that year would come hand out the stacks of books and put them on the desks of their respective order-ers. And then the new book smell coming from the stack, and the anticipation. Which book would I read first? What new words and stories would I discover in these pages? Would I be able to avoid getting any papercuts from this stack of awesome on my desk?

One time I ordered a collection of short stories by Agatha Christie featuring a funny little Belgian detective. The book was called Murder in the Mews, had an oh-so-pretty cream-and-purple-and-dark-green cover with an attractive art deco design with the silhouette in red of a man with a bowler hat and a cane, and was my first introduction to M. Hercule Poirot. (I shortly thereafter made the connection that this detective was also on TV on Masterpiece Mystery. Gotta love PBS.)

I pretty much devoured the book but my favorite story was the titular case. I'm not sure why. I just really liked it. (Maybe it had something to do with the name of one of the key characters: Miss Jane Plenderleith. How could you not fall in love with such a story?)

And this story opened with Hercule Poirot and Inspector Japp walking home one evening and remarking that it would be a great night for a murder because no one would hear the sound of a shot.

Why? Because of all the fireworks going off for Guy Fawkes day.

For your benefit, here is the passage from which I gleaned my knowledge of this day.

"Rank excuse for begging, that's what Guy Fawkes day is!" said Japp.

"An interesting survival," mused Hercule Poirot. "The fireworks go up—crack—crack—long after the man they commemorate and his deed are forgotten."

The Scotland Yard man agreed.

"Don't suppose many of those kids really know who Guy Fawkes was."

"And soon doubtless there will be confusion of thought. Is it in honor or in execration that on the 5th of November the feu d'artifice are sent up? To blow up an English parliament, was it a sin or a noble deed?"

Japp chuckled.

"Some people would say undoubtedly the latter."

So, penny for the guy?

(Yeah, you were worried I wouldn't ever get back to my original point, weren't you? I totally showed you!)

(Also, happy 5th NaBlo post! Which, I think, is a much more exciting event to commemorate.)

Well, That Was Unexpected.

2010-11-04T23:47:00.004-06:00

I had my six-week checkup today (my incision is doing great; the doctor says I'm "a great healer").

Everything was normal until they called my name to head back to the checkup room and there, standing with the nurse, is an adorable 10-year-old girl, looking like she thinks she belongs there.

Apparently it was Bring Your Daughter to Work Day, or something of the sort. She was my doctor's daughter and was shadowing her father for the day as part of a school assignment. (Don't worry, she didn't come into the room to help during the actual checkup. The proprieties must be observed at all times.)

I have to say, Daughter pretty much rocks. Because not only does she have the coo-over-the-patient's-baby demeanor down pat (like I said before, Little Guy is eminently coo-overable; I'll try to do a photo post sometime soon); she also takes blood pressure like a pro.

Better than the pros, actually, because when she took my blood pressure today it has finally started creeping down towards normal levels. It was low enough, in fact, that while it's not normal yet, I don't have to take the blood pressure medication anymore.

Booyah.

I think maybe the pros were doing it wrong before. I may have to talk to them and see if they can bring Awesome Daughter in every time I go back for an appointment.

The girl's got skills, is all I'm saying.

Ooh, and I got it in just before midnight! Go me on day 4!

It's Freaking Awesome, That's What It Is.

2010-11-03T23:01:00.003-06:00

Sometimes awesome things happen.

(Like the fact that, while trying to post this blog entry, my internet service hiccupped [no, that’s not the awesome part] and while looking at my network settings I noticed that apparently some of my neighbors have named their wireless networks “BaconFace”, "Howdy :)" and “Gellin Like a Crellin.” Yup. I think maybe I need to make better friends with my neighbors now.)

(Oh, and don’t worry. My internet service came back in time to post this blog entry before the deadline. Which is why you’re reading this now. Which is another one of those awesome things that happens, although not, again, the main awesome thing in question here.)

No, sometimes awesome things happen, like what happened to me last Saturday.

I went to my cousin’s baby shower on Saturday. Okay, technically she’s my cousin’s wife, but it’s easier just to call people plain cousin; they’re all family anyway. But the in-law factor is important to this story of awesomeness because it meant that some of her other relatives who are not directly related to me were also present.

Said other relatives were sitting on the other side of the room during the main festivities but came over to coo over Little Guy during the munch-and-mingle phase. (Because, let’s face it, Little Guy is eminently coo-over-able. The dude is adorable, is all that I’m sayin’.)

One of them asked who he belonged to, and I fessed up to being the mother in question. After congratulating me, she said, “We were trying to figure out who he belonged to before, but nobody here looked like they’d just had a baby.”

Yes, my friends, sometimes awesome things happen.

(Yeah, it’s been several days and I am still floating over this one.)

(And. AND—what is also awesome? The fact that I’m still on track here after three days. Yeah, with the whole parenthood and sleep deprivation thing, I take what I can get.)

Remembering; or, One Year Later

2010-11-02T13:41:00.004-06:00

So I'm cheating a little bit again today for NaBloPoMo by re-posting an entry from last year in honor of this first anniversary. But I still think it counts. :)

Three for Grandpa, 1914-2009
The Secret

We have a secret, just we three:
The robin, and I, and the sweet cherry tree.
The bird told the tree, and the tree told me,
And nobody knows it but just us three.

Of course the robin knows it best,
Because she built the -- I won't say the rest --
And laid the four little --somethings-- in it.
I'm afraid I shall tell it every minute!

But if the tree and the robin don't peep,
I'll try my best the secret to keep.
But when the little somethings fly about,
Then the whole secret will be out.

- Anonymous

The Swing

How do you like to go up in a swing,
Up in the air so blue?
Oh, I do think it the pleasantest thing
Ever a child can do!

Up in the air and over the wall,
Till I can see so wide,
River and trees and cattle and all
Over the countryside --

Till I look down on the garden green,
Down on the roof so brown --
Up in the air I go flying again,
Up in the air and down!

- Robert Louis Stevenson

Icarus

A girl. Arms outstretched, swooping wildly
across the sky, returning mildly
to earth, on the end of a string
madly running, she catches the wind,
rises aloft. She holds the twine
to her ear to hear the wind sing.

A grandfather. Smiling slightly,
weathered hands grip his own string tightly
hovering steadily in the sky,
teaching her to hear the wind sing,
watching her swoop. He is remembering
the giddy new thrill of first learning to fly.

- ELE

Touched you last, Grandpa!

No Mo?

2010-11-01T23:50:00.001-06:00

So November is the month of Mo's. NaNoWriMo, NaNoReaMo, NaBloPoMo, etc. We'll see what happens.

As far as blog posting goes, though, I think it still counts even if it's not an exciting post and is barely squeezing in under the deadline. So there.

See you tomorrow (perhaps. It all depends on the whim of the new master of the house).

And now, an even bigger surprise.

2010-09-27T21:09:00.000-06:00

I don't have time (or energy) for a full post right now, but just wanted to let you all know that our little guy decided to make an early entrance (or it was decided for him after my blood pressure was dangerously high at my 36-week checkup). He arrived at 6:30 p.m. on Saturday night via c-section and is, quite simply, perfect. No complications for baby or for me so far. I'll share the full story later, but for now, here are my 1000 words:

Yeah, you just WISH your toes were that cute. :)

OH MY STINKING HECK I ACTUALLY PASSED.

2010-09-18T10:36:00.003-06:00

And best of all, so did Shallow Man!

WE BOTH PASSED THE BAR, YO!

(Our poor kid officially will have two lawyers for parents. Maybe you should pray for him. . . .)

Waiting. Impatiently.

2010-09-14T20:39:00.005-06:00

Yeah, we still haven't gotten our bar results yet.

But a lot of our friends in other states are getting their results. The good news posts on Facebook keep trickling in.

And my confidence is steadily being undermined.

See, going into the bar I was So. Not. Ready. As in, knew I was not going to pass. Failure was imminent.

Coming out, I at least felt cautiously optimistic, and I've managed to hold on to that feeling of cautious optimism in the intervening weeks (it helped that there have been plenty of distractions as I try to get ready for this impending baby, but that's a whole different "waiting" story).

Now that the moment of truth is creeping up on us (even though I don't know for sure when it will actually get here), that feeling is rapidly dissipating and I am not afraid to say that I am more or less terrified.

So, please, if you see me in the next few days/weeks and I haven't made a big "OH MY STINKING HECK I ACTUALLY PASSED" type of announcement, PLEASE, do not, under any circumstances, ask me any questions about the bar or bar results. Because that will mean that either 1) I still haven't heard back and am falling further into my paranoia and panic, or 2) I have heard back and have no desire to discuss it.

Thank you!

Also, please refrain from posting helpful, optimistic comments on this post, as I know you want to do because you're my friends (I assume) and are awesome and supportive like that. Because people do fail the bar regularly. And telling me you know I passed won't help my panic right now because that will only make me dread facing you later and having to confess that all your confidence was grossly misplaced. Wait to give me the "Well, duh, I KNEW you would pass" comments until I actually know that I've passed. Thanks!

Airing out.

2010-09-06T22:53:00.002-06:00

Today was perfect weather—cool and crisp but still warm enough that you wouldn't need to take a jacket. Perfect weather for opening every window in the house and letting the place air out.

We opened the windows, pulled up the blinds and pushed back the curtains to let the light in. Today's light was perfect, too, to match the weather—my favorite kind of light. It was coming from just the right angle and made our house bright and cheery and light.

During the summer we keep the windows closed most of the time because of the direction our house faces (most of our windows open either to the south or to the nearby train yard, letting in excess noise and/or heat, and letting out the cool air from the AC). The last time we really had our windows open was when the AC broke the weekend before the bar. That was NOT a good time for opening windows, because the air coming in was still too hot.

It was glorious to just let the breeze waft through the place, freshening the air and the house. It felt like it was cleansing all the stress that has bottled up this summer from the bar and the pregnancy and everything else, and blew it away like cobwebs. I was content for a good part of the afternoon to just sit on the couch, doing nothing in particular but enjoy the breeze, look out the window, and watch the cats try to decide which window to sit in first.

It's nice to have days when you can give your house and your soul a little chance to air out and feel fresh and new again.

In the interest of full disclosure; or, I am a bad person.

2010-09-04T14:02:00.005-06:00

When people post things on the internet and spell words incorrectly (especially common words like "there" vs. "their" or "they're"), I judge them.

When people post things on the internet and either blatantly misuse or eliminate punctuation altogether, I judge them.

When people post things on the internet and forgo capitalization completely, I judge them.

When people post things on the internet without proofreading, resulting in a mangled jumble of what I can only guess was supposed to be English, I judge them.

In short: I judge people for not proofreading. Seeing a post that demonstrates a less-than-minimum competency for the English language makes me jump to conclusions about the education or intelligence of the poster. And that is bad. Because I am a bad person.

But I am also an English major, an editor and a writer, and I just can't help it.

So now you know.

P.S. In the interest of further disclosure, if you are a person I know and love and make one of the above errors, I still love you and make excuses for you. If it's someone I don't know, though, their reputation sinks drastically in my estimation. Yes, it's biased and unfair. I still do it. (See supra, "I am a bad person.")

You never know what a Monday will bring.

2010-08-23T17:52:00.005-06:00

So today did not start out very promisingly. In short, things did not look good for Homestar Runner (read: the rest of my week). I got to work and found out that my little half-gallon of milk, whose sell-by date will not arrive for two more days, not only smelled rancid but had little bits of stuff floating on top. I don't know how a half-of-a-half-gallon of milk spoils that badly over a weekend (Shallow Man surmises that there was a power outage over the weekend and the fridge got turned off for a while), but it didn't make me happy in any event. This frustration was repeated when it turned out that half of my individually wrapped string cheese packets (whose best-by date is not until Oct. 30) had also started to putrify in their wrappers. This is not the way you want to start a Monday.

I'd rather not get into the story of how my boss's inability to handle looking at and sending out a 1-sentence document in less than 96 hours also started to send my blood pressure skyrocketing. Let's just say I'm not getting paid nearly enough. And that it did not bode well for the rest of my week.

Third trimester nausea is also back in full force and was really making its presence felt today, too. But I don't want to talk about that, either.

But then Shallow Man and I had an appointment for another ultrasound today, this one as a follow-up for the exciting new gestational diabetes issues going on. Baby is doing fine but was being a punk and hiding again so we couldn't see his face. But seeing the rest of him helped lower the blood pressure significantly. The technician took all his measurements and then took them out to the doctor, so the doctor saw Baby's stats before she saw us, and was a little worried about how big his head seems to be (not ginormous, but bigger than you'd expect). Then she came in and saw Shallow Man's large noggin, and heard how even I have a hard time finding a hat that isn't too small, and she was reassured. Yayy for crazy genetics rather than weird complications, I suppose. We also got a good picture of Baby's foot and determined for certain that he has what are referred to in my family as "Daddy toes." Very cute. (Can't tell yet if they're webbed like his daddy's or not, though.) So that helped make Monday feel a bit better.

And when we got home my Monday luck underwent a major change. I may or may not have mentioned in my last post that I like YA literature. And that I am anticipating the release of several awesome YA books this year.

Well, one of those books is the highly-anticipated Mockingjay, the final book in Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games series. (I must admit that this is not the number one book on my list of anticipated releases, but that's just because I haven't had a chance to actually read the first two yet. Law school managed to take up a lot of time, and then I figured I may as well just wait until the third one is out so I don't have to do the whole waiting-so-impatiently thing. But it was still number 4 on my list.)

Mockingjay is not supposed to be released until tomorrow, August 24, 2010. Or, at the very least, at midnight tonight.

Yeah, Amazon just delivered it to my door about an hour ago.

This means a few things:

1. Someone at Amazon made a shipping error.
2. This kind of shipping error would be considered lucky for the recipient.
3. I am that recipient.
4. That means something lucky happened to me, to wit, I have a copy of the year's most highly anticipated YA release in my hot little hands a full seven hours before I am supposed to.
5. This situation definitely calls for a diabolical laugh.
6. BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

This is not the kind of lucky thing that happens to me very often. I can't decide if this means that my week is not going to be as horrible as I was afraid it would be, that my overall life luck pattern is about to change for the better, or that the universe is simply giving me a small apology for a quarter-gallon of wasted milk and the fact that I had to eat my regularly scheduled peanut-butter-and-jam-on-toast with no milk to wash it down this morning.

I figure, whatever works.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a trilogy to read.

Just a quick announcement.

2010-08-18T22:34:00.004-06:00

This will be a longer post later, but sleep deprivation is kicking in and my brain is currently incapable of producing long, intelligent, interesting posts. So for now I just have a few quick bullet points:

1. I love YA literature.
2. I think YA literature is often better than many other types of literature.
3. There are YA books coming out this year which I am greatly anticipating.
4. One of them is being given away as an ARC.
5. Here is a link to the giveaway.
6. Tell your friends.
7. But don't enter. Because I would like to win.
8. That is all.

So very true.

2010-08-12T23:47:00.002-06:00

Brought to you by Allie of Hyperbole and a Half. This video is one of my new favorite things.

It's Over!

2010-07-29T23:08:00.004-06:00

We have finally reached that mythical period of which our family has been dreaming for months:

AFTER THE BAR.

(It's been said so often in our house the last few weeks that we were about to get it embroidered on our towels, like a family crest.)

And my brain is a puddle of goo which is taking its dear sweet time reconstituting, so here's a quick summary to tide you over until I can get this blog back to its regularly scheduled snark.

Taking the Bar: Icky.

Sleep schedule: Shot.

Chairs at the Bar: Eeeeeeevil! (I mean, at least they were padded, but they were still folding chairs which meant zero back support which means me=miserable after the first three hours. And then there were four and a half more hours. And seven more the next day. . . .)

Number of Pens of Mine Which Mysteriously Vanished, Possibly with the Participation of Bar Exam Proctors: Two. (One black, one blue.)

Our attitude after the essay exam: Deep relief.

Our attitude after the first half of the multiple choice exam: Cautious optimism.

Our attitude after the second half of the multiple choice exam: Exhausted. But it's over. Slightly-more-cautious-than-before optimism.

Amount of time before I have to think about this exam in any detail again: 8 to 10 weeks.

New family motto: It's Over!

Number of guilt-free naps I have taken since yesterday: Three.

Baby's take on the entire experience: KICK THE BLADDER!!!!!

Ah, well. At least some things stay consistent. (In other news, we are officially in the third trimester and now I can FINALLY start getting ready for this kid. Wahoo!)

Ho. Ly. Cow.

2010-07-27T19:04:00.003-06:00

Well, the first day of the Bar is done. And for the first time since I started studying, I feel like there is actually a chance I could pass this thing.

I've been experiencing panic attacks about this off and on for the past few weeks. (Just ask Shallow Man. Poor guy. Seriously, Bar Study + Pregnancy Hormones + The Inability to Sleep for More than a Three Hour Stretch = Me + Crippling Panic Attacks = Not Fun for Anyone.) Including one last night, which was NOT helpful. So we sat down together and read some scriptures and I just said a prayer to the effect of, "I'm putting it all in Your hands now, God." And I stopped worrying.

And the miraculous occurred. I had something to write (maybe not something, you know, intelligent, but at least something) for every question. The big, hive-inducing, oh-please-oh-please-don't-ask-me-THAT subjects were not on the essay test, and I actually got almost all of my "dream topics." I couldn't have asked for a better distribution of subjects.

I never would have predicted that I'd come out of the essay day of the Bar feeling like anything other than crap. And feeling this good, well, that's just icing on the cake.

Now all I have to do is live through the multiple choice tomorrow and it will All. Be. Over.

I'm getting a grin just thinking about it.

Thanks to all of you who have offered prayers, well wishes and any other kind of support these past few weeks and the past few days especially. It's meant a lot to both Shallow Man and myself. We love you all!

An open letter to Miguel Rivas.

2010-07-15T14:25:00.004-06:00

Dear Miguel,

To my knowledge, we've never met, although I've come to feel as though I know you.

After all, I've had conversations with so many of your acquaintances. I know many of them are probably just your bill collectors who think I'm lying when I say I don't know you—they must think I'm your overprotective girlfriend or something—but still. I've even had (very confused on my end) text conversations with some of your buddies. (By the way, what WAS so awesome about that one time you and your buddies went to Midvale? I've gotten texts about that one at least four times. "Hey man remember MIDVALE? 4REAL!" If you could fill me in on that, that would be great. I like feeling included. Also, I was unaware that there was anything that exciting going on in Midvale, and my curiosity is piqued.) And the number of Spanish calls telling me that I—sorry, I mean YOU—may already have won $10,000 has really increased my level of cultural awareness and the amount of randomness in my life. So thank you, Miguel, for that.

But Miguel, I am disappointed in you. I know it's hard to hear, but a true friend tells you stuff like that.

Seriously (and I'm just basing this off the number of times she's called and the length of time that I've had this cell phone number), you need to call your grandmother more often. We're talking four years and she still thinks you're at my number.

Shame on you, Miguel. Shame on you.

Now go and call your abuela, stat.

Regards,

Your cell number successor (that would be me)

P.S. Oh, and pay your Comcast bill. They're getting a bit testy.

Holy awesome contest, Batman!

2010-07-12T18:08:00.003-06:00

Okay. I don't usually do this but I WANT TO WIN THIS CONTEST SO BADLY IT HURTS. So go check out this amazing contest from The Undercover Book Lover for ARCs of five really awesome upcoming books. And gum. There is also gum involved. Really, how can you lose? (Other than by, you know, not winning.) So go check it out. (But don't enter, because that might diminish my chances of winning. You know, statistically speaking.)

Annnnd... back to bar study.

Frustration; or, the Story Port-a-Potty.

2010-07-05T01:22:00.003-06:00

So I have a REALLY GOOD story of something that happened today. As in, the story is really good. Not necessarily the what-happened part. Because that wasn't so great. But the story itself is one that would be great for blogging about.

And I really want to tell this story. Because, as I said, it's a really good story.

Tangent (not at all related to what happened today): I had an acquaintance a while back who pretty much hated me but loved drama and sharing juicy stories. One day I was the only person around when this acquaintance had a particularly juicy story and NEEDED to share it with someone like I need to run to the bathroom when Jr. starts playing kick the bladder. So Acquaintance shared the story with me and later told a mutual friend that we had really bonded that day. From that point on, there was no hatred Scritchy-ward from this person, because I essentially had pointed Acquaintance to a story Port-a-Potty at the necessary moment.

And yes, that metaphor was a weird one, but hey, it WORKS.

Because (and here's where the tangent comes back to the point)—

THIS IS A PORT-A-POTTY SITUATION.*

For various reasons, I can't really share this story on the internet at this time.

Even though I really, really want to.

I can't even give you the super-awesome tag line that would be the facebook version of this story.

This is probably about as frustrating to me as it is to you. Seriously, great story + not being able to tell it on my blog = ARRRGH.

However . . .

This is totally a story I can share in person.

You know, in case anyone wanted to hear it.

Or happened to ask me next time they see me.

Just sayin'.

(For all you lurkers or people who unfortunately have not had the privilege of meeting me in real life yet, I'm very sorry. All I can say is, I'll post it when I can. I just don't know when that may be.)

*Please note: the actual story has NOTHING to do with port-a-potties whatsoever.

The 'phew says hello.

2010-06-21T23:29:00.003-06:00

I admit, this is another baby post, but only incidentally.

See, I basically have the best nephews in the world (sorry, anyone with nephews, but mine are cooler). I have a pretty awesome niece, too, but tonight we're going to focus on my oldest nephew. Let's call him Cool Dude.

Cool Dude is my younger sister's son, and we are lucky enough to live within about 10 minutes of their family. Cool Dude is three, a chatterbox (like his mom), a redhead (like his great grandma), a great big brother to his little sister, and one of my best buds. Shallow Man and I have been close friends with Cool Dude since he was born. (Seriously. We were the first people to meet him besides his parents and the hospital staff.)

So this evening we stopped by my sister's place, arriving just in time for Cool Dude to notice that large portions of the popsicle he had just consumed had not, in point of fact, made their way into his mouth and thereby to his stomach, but were instead residing in large patches on his shirt and pants. He therefore requested that I take him upstairs to get him some new pants.

Before this operation could be performed, we had to make a quick stop by the bathroom sink to cleanse his face, hands, arms, shoulders, etc., from the leftover juice of the "wild berry" popsicle (that's what Cool Dude told me it was; his mom, who is probably the more reliable source, informs me that it was actually just grape). In the midst of this operation, Cool Dude paused in his story of wild berries and asked me, "Is there a baby in your tummy still?"

Side note: We'd told him about our baby a few months back, reminding him of when his little sister was in his mommy's tummy, and telling him that now Aunt Scritchy has a baby in her tummy, too, so he gets another cousin (he LOVES his cousins. Cousins are maybe the best thing ever besides wild berry popsicles). He thought this through for a minute and then said, "I have a baby in my tummy, too." (Putting one hand on his tummy and the other on his hip) "She's sleeping right now."

I told him that yes, there was still a baby in my tummy. "That's why my tummy is big right now."

CD: Oh. That's right.

Me: (scrubbing congealed grape goo off his hands) After we wash your hands, you can feel where the baby is if you want to.

CD: Okay!

(Several minutes pass; I finally emerge triumphant with a relatively-clean Cool Dude in tow, who proceeds to choose a new shirt—bright green—and pants—blue stripes—to wear [his mom looked at the ensemble and made a dry remark about how maybe he inherited his uncle's colorblindness]; finally he is clean and fully clothed again.)

I put his hand on my tummy so he could feel where baby was curled up (not kicking at the moment, an increasingly rare occurrence). His eyes got wide and he grinned at me when I told him that was where the baby was.

And then he put his face right up by my tummy, started stroking the spot with his hand, and, in the sweet voice he reserves for his little sister when he's gently telling her not to cry, said "Hi, baby!"

Whereupon I melted.

Yeah, I have awesome nephews. And my boy is going to have a good friend and cousin to help show him the ropes once he gets here. (And I'm sure his other cousins will help, too. I can hardly wait!)

Gotta love it.

2010-06-13T20:47:00.003-06:00

So I have previously mentioned how much I like a certain show. But I think that this is my favorite number so far. It's the one I find myself repeatedly revisiting on YouTube; I just hope they don't take the video down anytime soon. Enjoy!

Oh, boy.

2010-06-04T10:32:00.002-06:00

Yep, it's a boy! We're surprised but thrilled, and have NO IDEA what to call this kid. (Yeah, we thought he was a girl. Huh.)

I've posted a fuller version of the story on the other blog, so feel free to stop on over.

We've got pictures, but haven't scanned them yet. (And really, one of them is highly inappropriate. Someone needs to teach this kid the importance of modesty.)

And in the meantime, really, who voted for lizard? I know Shallow Man has mutant genes (seriously, his sixth-grade biology teacher pointed out his mutant webbed toes to the rest of the class) but, really now.

The big day; or, A Poll.

2010-06-03T09:20:00.000-06:00

So folks, today's the big day. We're getting our ultrasound this afternoon and get to find out what flavor of baby we're having. So place your bets! I'll let you all know when we find out.

Is there a doctor in the house?

2010-04-24T21:05:00.003-06:00

No, there is not a doctor in the house.

Because actually, there are now TWO doctors in the house.

That's right. Shallow Man and I have both officially graduated from law school and are the proud owners of shiny new initials after our names: J.D. Juris Doctor. (Dr. Scritchy, I presume?)

Yeah, except nobody really calls lawyers "Dr." Except right after convocation while we're all still giddy and saying "Wahoo!"

But still. Those initials are still there. And even though a juris doctor is the red-headed stepchild of the doctorate degree family, I still technically am a doctor.

Wahoo!

P.S. Also, in even-bigger-wahoo-type-news, today was the first day in longer than I care to count that I haven't had to take any anti-nausea medication. Figures that the morning sickness would ease up right as soon as I have no classes to miss. :) I've only been in the second trimester for about three days and I'm loving it already.

The current status.

2010-04-09T18:25:00.004-06:00

My classes are finished.

The Major Paper (neigh!) is finished and turned in.

I've completed all the work for 2.5 of my classes.

All that's left are 2 finals (both open book), 3 mini (and rather silly and unimportant) papers, and one book review.

I'd say we're making good progress towards that three-week mark.

Now I just need to get my house clean for Geek Night tonight. . . .

Sweet and tender

2010-04-09T01:10:00.003-06:00

I wanted to take a brief break from this last big push to finish my Major Paper (neigh!) to share this link with all y'all. I ran into it yesterday and really liked it, but haven't had a chance to put it up here until now.

Amazing what the prospect of another hour with the Major Paper (neigh!) will do to your unimportant-but-it-would-be-nice-to-do list.

At any rate, this is one of the sweetest things I have read in a while. Enjoy!

And please don't be deterred by the fact that most of what I have read in the last while is stuff related to my Major Paper (neeeeeeeiiiigh!); even if I had just finished reading Persuasion,* this would still have been a strong contender.

*This whole scene is amazing, but if you want to cut to the chase, fast forward to 2:20.

Three weeks.

2010-04-05T10:46:00.003-06:00

At a time when most of my fellow 3Ls are waxing nostalgic about this being the last week of classes, probably EVER for most of them, I'm too busy and stressed to be nostalgic. I will be nostalgic later; I'll think about it tomorrow. Whatever you like.

For right now, I'm just repeating my new mantra:

Three weeks. Three weeks. Three weeks.

Three weeks from today it will all be over. I will have my JD. I will not need to write any more papers. I will not need to read textbooks. I will not need to stress about how I keep missing class because I'm still sick the majority of the time.

I will have graduated.

And what's more, I will officially be in my second trimester, no matter which way you count it. Which means, with any luck, that I won't feel so sick anymore, either. I might even have some energy by then. (Of course, I really could use some of that energy now to get through the next few weeks, but that's another story.)

So. Three weeks. Three weeks. Three weeks.

I can do this.

Sorry, folks. Have some pictures!

2010-03-18T19:54:00.007-06:00

So. I have to apologize. I owe all y'all several stories, as evidenced by the now long-finished poll languishing on the left sidebar over there. I know it's been a ridiculously long time to wait, but you're going to have to wait a little longer.

I know, I know you're disappointed. And I'm still sorry. Here, have a free fun picture:

No threat intended! Really! You can come back!

I did start writing the story of the Epic Saga of DOOOOM in my long boring class one day a couple of weeks ago, but then an interesting guest speaker came in and I stopped writing in order to listen. Unfortunately, that's been the only real time I've had to blog because all the rest of my time has been spent doing final-semester-of-school stuff (maybe 5%), sleeping (~50%) and feeling completely sick to my stomach/ready to die (at least 172% and YES I KNOW that's ~227% OKAY?).

You scoff at my math? You think I'm engaging in melodramatics? Well, yes, probably, but that's beside the point.

Because the point is this:

And this:

And also this:

No, that's all the same baby. Not triplets (although what an excuse THAT would be, eh?).

But THE POINT IS we've got Baby Nib or Shallow Jr. on the way and arriving in October and WE FINALLY HEARD THE HEARTBEAT this morning (see picture #3 in the series above. We've never been able to do that before).

And life, as they say, is pretty darn grand.

(The other point is that I firmly believe in modern medicine and the amazing prescription they have given me that in the last two days has finally allowed me to be a human and no longer just a mass of morning sickness so bad that I may or may not have lost 10 pounds in less than a month.)

A poll; or, In the meantime . . .

2010-02-10T22:04:00.003-07:00

So I've been looking at the votes so far and I'm wondering if some of your kindergarten report cards said "Has trouble following directions." Tsk, tsk, people. The main point of the exercise was to choose what to blog about first, not just to reiterate that they're all good things to blog about. Again, tsk, tsk.

But I've fooled you. Not all of those are actually interesting stories. Some of them aren't actually stories at all. I just wanted to provide some variety for the voters. Ah-HA!

At any rate, I'm going to leave the voting open until Friday at close of business. To help encourage you folks to make my decision-making process easier, I'm putting a poll up on the sidebar. If you don't feel like submitting your votes again, don't worry, I'll factor the comments in, too.

Once a winner is determined, I'll write up a slam-bang (ish) blog post.

In the meantime, though, feel free to head on over to my other blog for the tale of a mystery encountered and then solved.

Enjoy!

Story time! And time for a VOTE!

2010-02-06T23:29:00.006-07:00

And again, this isn't a real post. But it will be, WITH YOUR HELP!

So many great and blog-worthy things have happened in the last couple of weeks. Well, some not so great, but still blog-worthy. But the upshot is that with all the time I've spent actually living through these things (and the rest of my time being spent doing ridiculous law school stuff *cough*edits*cough*), I haven't had time to actually blog about them. And now I'm just too tired to blog about them all.

So I think I'll put it to a vote. Do you want to hear about:

1. The night we did epic battle with the fence in the massive windstorm with 40 mph gusts?

2. The epic saga of Doooooooom! that is our car, beginning with a failed attempt to see my little sister's play and ending, most recently, with us being stranded at Walmart this evening?

3. A love song to mac and cheese and my newfound domesticity?

4. An ode to my car's left turn signal (not to be confused with the epic saga of Doooooooom!)?

5. A well thought-out and intelligent book review of an awesome book I just finished reading?

6. A tale of adventure on the high seas?

7. Or an introduction to a new blog?

Leave a comment with your top three votes, and I'll write a blog post on the winner, and possibly the runners-up, sometime this week.

Until then, I think I'm going to take another nap.

I think it might be love.

2010-01-28T23:15:00.004-07:00

Made these this evening for the first time.

My life will never be the same.

I urge you to go and do likewise.

Enlightenment will ensue, I promise.

(If it doesn't, that means you didn't do it right.)

But Mother, I don't WANT to edit an article about civil liability!

2010-01-25T21:23:00.004-07:00

(said in my best Wendy voice)

Argh.

I have two or three great posts I want to write up for the blog but I can't because I'm supposed to be editing an article for the law journal.

I don't LIKE editing articles for the law journal. First off, I don't think it's the editor's (namely, my) job to write your thesis sentence, roadmaps, arguments and footnotes for you if you couldn't do it yourself. Is this the way it works for all journals? Because with my limited experience in publishing, it seems like editors usually give the author ideas, suggestions and feedback about what work needs to be done and then make her do it herself. (And why is our journal accepting articles that have no discernible theses to begin with? Who knows.)

The point is, there are so many more interesting and useful things I'd like to be doing. Cleaning off the kitchen desk. Baking bread. Exercising while catching up on Gilmore Girls. Playing old-school video games. Blogging.

Come on, people! Don't you understand? There are cupcakes to decorate (a new-found love), scarves to knit (because I'm totally going to teach myself to do that now), hats to crochet, old blogs to read, new blogs to discover, recipes to try, offices to organize, houses to redecorate, numbers to paint by, and OH MY GOODNESS books to read.

SO. MANY. BOOKS. (Some of them written by highly attractive Welshmen.)

FOR THE LOVE OF PETE, THERE ARE BOOKS TO BE READ!!!!

And, unfortunately, at least one article on civil liability for misstatements in offer documents (yeah, you read that right) to edit.

With attendant threats of demerits if someone doesn't get it done in time. (Really, people? Demerits? Really?? Are we not past the elementary school stage yet?)

So the books by gorgeous Welshmen will have to wait.

And so will you, because my more interesting posts will not get written tonight.

Taking a moment

2010-01-20T23:59:00.000-07:00

I'm having a moment of silence over on the other blog today.

I promise I'll post something new and gloriously snarky soon. But not just yet.

So long, 2009!

2010-01-09T01:40:00.005-07:00

So I've been looking back at 2009 and I just can't quite muster up the same feelings of AWESOME as I did for 2008. Which is probably because 2008 was pretty darn awesome and it would probably be hard to beat by just about any year's standards. But I think it also has a bit to do with the fact that, in many respects, 2009 was just not that great. It did have some good points, but the overall backdrop for my personal year (see, e.g. the economy) helped lend a sense of doom and foreboding to the year. And I don't think it was just me.

But here are some of the things that come to mind when I think about 2009:

*Finishing up my second year of law school.
*Starting up my third year of law school and seeing the end approaching quickly.
*Geek nights galore. We have seen this thing grow from an impromptu game of Duck Hunt to a massive behemoth of multiple systems, games, tons of people, lots of good food, and networking galore.
*Making a very successful pitch to the CEO, CFO and other higher-ups of World Book, Inc.
*Helping to pull a publishing company out of the "some guy working out of the garage" mode to a more stable level. We've moved from the garage to the basement, I guess you could say, but we also have not only a consistent stream of projects each month, we've also got a cushion of projects that are already done so we're ahead of the game.
*Combining my publishing company experiences with Geek Night experiences and being able to hire several of my friends.
*Editing essays. Oh, the essays I've edited. . . .
*Trip to Alabama to visit Shallow Man's family. Love his grandparents.
*Having Shallow Man's sister drop our camera on the hard tile floor and breaking it as we were about to leave. We still haven't bothered to get it fixed, come to think of it.
*This is partly due to the fact that I have continued trying to maintain my Lemony Snicket-type existence, keeping photos to a minimum.
*SPENT and the epic-ness that was the Katamari presentation. Also the battle of the chairs and a return to junior high drama. (Good times, good times.)
*Taking a class from one of the most inspiring and all-around awesome people I ever hope to know, Michael Goldsmith.
*Getting a chance to sass back at Prof. Goldsmith and watch him enjoy it and play along.
*Yeah, I also got a pretty good one-liner off in Business Associations. (Hey, I told you the year wasn't great; I have to take what small pleasures I can get here!)
*Continuing to get to know the awesome people in my law school class. (But not the 2Ls. They are not awesome. Except for a few.)
*Getting a chance to finally read To Kill A Mockingbird for a class.
*Getting to write a paper about TKAM, A Man For All Seasons and Alice in Wonderland, of all things.
*Footnotes. Beautiful, beautiful footnotes. Lengthy, beautiful non sequiturs in footnotes.
*Trying to finish a paper while sitting in my car in the early morning waiting for the gas company to arrive because the carbon monoxide alarm had gone off and thinking we had a leak.
*Oh, the chagrin of realizing that it was just an "Lb" for "low battery" and not a "97" for "that's a lot of toxic gas floating around in your house", which we probably would have realized a lot earlier if we hadn't been so dang sleep-deprived from finals at the time.
*Ice cream after finals.
*Our fifth anniversary. (Holy crap!)
*Finally finding a great doctor who listened to ME and not to the sound of his own voice.
*Getting that positive pregnancy test back in May. Very high point of the year.
*Making lists and plans for the baby.
*Seeing my mother's face (and the faces of the rest of my family) when we told them the good news. They probably had already figured it out, anyway, though, because of the sheer number of times I had to use the bathroom during that camping trip.
*KAT CAME BACK!!!
*Just Jane. I think you girls saved my sanity this year, in so many ways.
*Being an orphan in June when Shallow Man was in DC and all of my other family members were on fun vacations without me.
*Helping to clean out my grandfather's house when he moved into my aunt's house, and seeing the family gathering spot for as long as I can remember all out of sorts and empty. Then seeing it again later after it had been remodeled and loving the new changes, and thinking that it's good that life still goes on.
*Working from home periodically through the first part of the summer when I was feeling sick.
*Seeing that motorcycle accident with the car who made the illegal u-turn over by Riverwoods with KEY and Shallow Man. Crazy.
*Sitting in the doctor's office while he tried to find the heartbeat with the doppler. Sitting downstairs while he tried to find the heartbeat on the ultrasound. Sitting in the hospital waiting for the grouchy ultrasound technician to get around to telling us the results and praying that it wouldn't be what we already knew it would be.
*The worst four hours of my life on July 16th.
*Love and support from family and friends and God.
*The other blog.
*Weddings for my cousins.
*Henry Crawford, Henry Crawford, and Henry Crawford. Did I mention Henry Crawford?
*Driving on back roads for the first few days of August because we hadn't been able to get our car repaired for inspection before July ended.
*Babysitting my nephew and taking him to church while my sister was in the hospital having my new niece.
*New niece = very yes.
*SYTYCD in the summer with KEY and my sis.
*Getting a new nephew, too.
*Baby blessings and almost having to leave my niece's because you just never know when suddenly something is going to be too much. But making it through anyway with only Shallow Man and the four-year-old sitting in front of us really noticing anything.
*Just Jane again. Did I mention you girls are amazing?
*Firing people but finally getting a working staff.
*That horrible, horrible FSU game.
*Discovering the Art City Trolley.
*Game day at the cabin at last.
*Swine flu. Very No.
*Playstation 3, yo. It has changed my life.
*Actually passing the MPRE after not getting enough time to study for it. And kind of rocking it. (Why can't I do that with finals?)
*The primary kids. And the parties. And nearly going insane some weeks.
*Going to see Ingrid Michaelson in October with Kat and KEY. Epic.
*Pink plaid shoes. Oh yes.
*SYTYCD concert with Kat and my sisters. Epic, epic, epic.
*The impromptu dance party with all those other cars stuck at that malfunctioning light.
*The passing of two great men in November within two days of each other: My grandfather and Prof. Goldsmith. A week of funerals and tears, that one, and of good reunions with friends and family. Bittersweet to say the least.
*Fixing the oven door that had been broken ALL BY MYSELF.
*Seeing "Singin' in the Rain" at Hale, even though I had a headache afterwards.
*Working at the same place as Shallow Man and how interesting that's been.
*Billy the bookcase says hello.
*Thanksgiving with my entire family -- so much fun.
*Finishing my Christmas shopping early because I actually knew, for once, what I wanted to get for Shallow Man weeks in advance, and I still managed to surprise him a little bit.
*ROCK BAND. And Lego Rock Band.
*Finishing a 20-page paper in less than 24 hours.
*Having major scares at Stake Conference.
*Baby, our car, finally breaking down. Borrowing Bertha from my cousin. (Thanks again!)
*The adventure to Temple Square and breaking Kat's screen.
*Getting surprised on Christmas with an iPod touch.
*Getting released from Primary without 1) asking for it, 2) moving out of the ward, 3) having a baby or 4) getting a new calling. I still think this might be unprecedented in our ward.
*Extreme Jenga.
*An amazing New Year's Eve party.

This, of course, is in addition to all the late nights with the Smiths, hanging out with other good friends, long conversations with KEY, getting my Kat back, hiring all my friends, great movies and good fun (I especially enjoyed "Up" and "Star Trek") and good books (mostly re-reads, though). So, all in all, not a horrible year, even though I've had better.

Now let's just hope that 2010 can beat its predecessor. I'm looking forward to it.

I'm sure I've forgotten a lot of things here. Just know that if I haven't mentioned something it doesn't necessarily mean I didn't enjoy it. I probably did, in point of fact, but my brain, while it holds an amazing number of things, still does not do everything.

Merry, merry!

2009-12-24T19:11:00.003-07:00

Happy Christmahannakwanzaadanstice to all!

As my gift to you, I present the following, which, although it has definite Christian overtones, is non-denominational in its hilarity.

Now get off the internet and go celebrate!

An update, because I promised.

2009-12-19T13:24:00.003-07:00

Well, I refused to take any guff from that take-home final.

I gave my final project what-for.

And I took my final paper out into the back field and beat it severely, like that scene with the printer in Office Space.

Yeah, this is what I did to my finals:

And now they're ~~dead~~ done. And I slept in today until 1:00 and I'm writing this in my pajamas and I'M NOT SORRY. In fact, this is the best I've felt since school started in August. So join me in a great sigh of contentment: *ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.*

And now, less than a week before Christmas, I finally have time to put up the tree. I'm looking forward to next December when I will actually be able to start the Christmas festivities at the beginning of the month, rather than three weeks in.

BOY, you WILL . . .

2009-12-15T14:47:00.002-07:00

That's how Shallow Man's theory of discipline starts out. I've decided I'm going to see how it works in semi-real life.

All right, take-home final. This is it.

You don't like me and I certainly don't like you.

But you're going to get done.

Today.

That's all there is to it.

In other words,

BOY,

you WILL

be written and printed

TODAY.

NOW STOP YOUR PRISSY WHINING AND PREPARE TO HAVE THE TRASH KICKED OUT OF YOU.

Thank you.

That will be all.

I'll let you know how it turns out, folks. Stay tuned.

Bartering; or, What I Really Want for Christmas

2009-12-03T01:36:00.001-07:00

Dear Santa,

I know I haven't written to you in a long time but this year I really, really want something, and I was hoping you could put in a good word for me.

I know, I know, when people ask me what I want for Christmas I usually tell them I want an iPod touch, or a copy of My Fair Lady, or Lego Rock Band or maybe even just a pair of fuzzy socks. Because you know how I love my fuzzy socks.

But that's not really what's at the top of my Christmas list this year.

Santa, this year I would like a firstborn child. I know it's a huge responsibility. But I'd take care of it myself. (Shallow Man would help.) And it's not just a toy, either. It's incredibly versatile. You can trade it in or sign it away for just about anything.

Or so I'm told. Because right now all I've got to barter with is that old standby, the pint of blood. Which is great and all, but I think I'd like to upgrade.

See, a lot of my friends have one. Some of them even have second-borns, you know, like as a back-up. And I want to be one of the cool kids. You know, because everybody's doing it.

I know some people might just ask for a positive pregnancy test, but I'm asking for the end product right now. Just to be safe. Because I had a whole bunch of positive tests back in May which say I should have 8/9ths of a firstborn right now. But apparently there was a recall on that particular model last July (and the same thing happened back in 2007 as well, if you remember), and I'd just rather not go through that again.

If you decide to give me an iPod touch as well, I won't complain, because it would be nice to have some tunes to listen to during all those sleepless nights, or at least to have one thing that will stop making noise at the time I designate, and where the only part that involves "changing" would be batteries.

But I'd rather have the firstborn child, if it's all the same to you. Heck, I'll even offer you a pint of blood and a . . . well, make that two pints of blood.

Respectfully and very hopefully yours, etc.

Quick Thought

2009-11-26T11:02:00.003-07:00

So I'm watching the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade (woot!) and one of the performing acts is announced as "Boys Like Girls."

And I've just gotta ask...

Is that a verb or a preposition?

Because inquiring minds want to know.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to go eat a staggering amount of good food. Trytophan, here I come!

Remember, remember; or, Not.

2009-11-13T00:38:00.008-07:00

Well, Guy Fawkes, I have failed you.

My memory + Guy Fawkes = EPIC FAIL.

What with Stump the Professor and two funerals and the midterm for my class and studying for the MPRE, and let's not under any circumstances forget Ratchet and Clank or SYTYCD and OH my old nemesis is back, I forgot Guy Fawkes Day.

So yeah, that whole

Remember, remember the fifth of November

thing? Totally not what I did.

See?

Epic. Fail.

Well, I guess there's always next year. . . .

At least my forgetfulness was not the result of getting a manicure. (Name that reference for 27 points!)

If you wish to show your sympathy and solidarity, feel free to leave a belated penny for the Guy.