And now, an even bigger surprise.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.