Sweet Deal

Posted on 05/21/2009 by chick

It should not go unmentioned that we modified our mortgage loan yesterday. I know it sounds crazy. We just started payments on it late last year and it seems too soon to be making changes. But interest rates are lower now, and we felt like we were overpaying. Our credit union has a deal where you give them $500 and they give you the current rate while leaving all other terms of the mortgage alone. How could we resist? This small change will lower our monthly payments and save us about $20,000 over the life of the loan. Sweet, huh?

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Chocolate Limericks

Posted on 05/20/2009 by chick

Spam is dumb. When it tries to incorporate phrases from your blog, the results seldom make sense. There are fun exceptions, though. The spam I received today asked, “Have you seen a good chocolate limericks?” If you ignore the bad grammar, it’s a good question.

I have never seen a good chocolate limerick and I didn’t realize the lack until I was asked. My life would definitely be improved by a chocolate limerick. I shall have to write one.

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Mystery Flower #8

Posted on 05/17/2009 by chick

My attention to the poison ivy did not prevent me from finding a new mystery flower in the woods Friday, though the abundance of bugs almost stopped me from getting a photograph. The bugs usually ignore me as long as I keep moving.  The second I stop, they’re all in my face looking for a snack. I had only enough time to take a couple of serendipity shots and then skedaddle.

A “serendipity shot” is what I call it when I put the camera near something, let the auto focus do its thing, and then snap the shot without any idea of how it’s going to come out. Sometimes this method produces beautiful pictures and sometimes not. This time, I shot upward, which allowed me to take advantage of the light still in the sky. This is the best of the three shots that I took.

mystery-flower-81

The focus isn’t perfect, but you can see that the plant has clusters of yellow flowers and in the center of each flower there are radiating orange parts or lines. It also appears to have a woody stem, which seems likely, since the plant looked shrublike to me. Whatever it is, it’s pretty. But what is it called? My best guess is in the comments.

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Pregnant Lady Walking

Posted on 05/16/2009 by chick

I went for another walk yesterday. It was hard to force myself to get out there, but at least I was rewarded with a few floral favorites, like buttercups, violets, and wild geranium. The wild strawberry flowers were already gone. I wanted to poke around in the plants to see how the berries were coming along, but I didn’t dare. They were surrounded by poison ivy. Berries are yummy, but not worth the itchy rash, or the wrath of my Faithful Reader.

Faithful Reader goes on the path for poison ivy. The WARpath, that is. He really hates that plant. If I were to bring home any of the oil, whether as a rash on my skin or a residue on my clothes, he’d probably divorce me.

For myself, I don’t worry about poison ivy much. I’m not the only one. I chitchatted with a dog walker for a while yesterday. She kept walking along the very edge of the path, rubbing right up against the poison ivy leaves, so I warned her to be careful. She claimed to be one of the lucky 1/50 people who has no allergy to it. I hope she’s right, because from what I’ve heard, everyone’s allergic but some people need to be exposed multiple times before their skin reacts.

Though I don’t worry much about getting poison ivy rash, Faithful Reader’s obsession has caused me to be overly aware of the plant. Sometimes all I see as I walk are those shiny leaves, whereas once upon a time I hardly noticed them. It also keeps me from setting foot off the path, so I don’t get to explore as much as I’d like.

I suppose sticking to the path right now is all for the best. Pregnant women who are nearing their due dates shouldn’t be roaming too far afield. I often wonder, though, as I pass by other walkers,  if they think that I shouldn’t be out there at all. What am I supposed to do, sit around like a blob? It’s good to be outside and enjoying normal activities. I always bring my cell phone and the path never strays far from civilization. Just don’t tell my mother-in-law that I’ve been walking by myself. She doesn’t even seem to think I should drive a car by myself right now!

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Can’t Sleep

Posted on 05/15/2009 by chick

It is 4:30 in the morning as I start to write this. Zoulie woke me at about 3:00 with her ceaseless yowling. I don’t understand how she can be so stupid that she hasn’t yet realized yowling doesn’t work. It just makes me angry and then I yell at her. Now I can’t go back to sleep. I tried. I tried for well over an hour, but there comes a point when you just have to give up and get up.

So here I am, up and about before dawn, and it’s not Christmas morning. That’s just so wrong.

I had a small snack and now I’m drinking a cup of decaf tea. I hope it will soothe me enough that I can go back to sleep in 15 minutes or so. There’s still plenty of time left for sleeping. I just need to get there.

If I can’t go back to sleep, then 7:00 a.m. will perhaps see me at one of our local restaurants which opens for breakfast at that time. 8:00 might see me taking a walk and 9:00 could see me making photocopies at the library. It’s good to have a back-up plan.

I’m not feeling any sleepier, so let me tell you more about what’s going on in our lives.

Faithful Reader finished the kitchen last week. Well, there are still some details left to do, like the backsplash, but all the major stuff is now in working order. I’ve been unpacking boxes since then, going through the long task of finding, sorting, and placing that is required every time you move into a new house. I feel the burden of my possessions sitting on my shoulders again. We have too much stuff.

Pregnancy and kitchen-arranging do not go hand-in-hand, by the way. There’s no escaping the belly. It is there every time I step to the counter, every time I reach for something, every time I try to bend over. Remind me never to do this again. Whether “this” is pregnancy or kitchen-arranging, I’m not sure. Probably both.

The birds are starting to sing. Bastards.

There is an occasional time when I feel like I’m escaping the belly. Sometimes when I’m lying in bed and the baby isn’t kicking, I can forget that I’m pregnant for a while. When nothing reminds me of my baby belly, I can still imagine the contours of my pre-pregnancy body and feel like my old self. Sometimes it’s almost a surprise when I pull off the covers and see the ginormous hump that has grown on my stomach.

I went to the doctor’s office yesterday for a routine check-up. The baby and I are both fine, if a mite heavy. She said I shouldn’t gain any more weight. How exactly does one control one’s weight when pregnant? I’m not supposed to diet, nor should I let myself go hungry and thereby deprive the baby. Plus, the baby is putting on weight, which means I’m going to weigh more, too. We’re attached, you see. There’s really no escaping the belly.

The doctor also said that as of Saturday, when I reach the official 34-week mark, if the baby decides to pop out, she won’t try to stop him. He’s big enough, she says, to survive. I’m not ready yet, though, so he had better stay where he is for now.

And now I will end this very long post because I can’t think straight anymore. If you have them to spare, send me sleepy wishes.

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33 Weeks

Posted on 05/14/2009 by chick

Tired. I have been so tired lately. I wake up just before dawn, usually to pee, and then I can’t get back to sleep. Whether it’s the birds with their dawn chorus, the sunlight sneaking around the edges of the window shade, a thousand thoughts competing for brain time, or my bouncing baby belly boy, I toss and turn for hours. Or I fall into a light doze and then wake up again when I hear myself snoring.

Yeah, I snore now. As impossible as it sounds, pregnancy must be turning me into a man. Think about it. I snore, burp audibly, scratch myself in public, eat like a pig, etc. Those are not ladylike behaviors!

😉

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Mystery Flower #7

Posted on 05/03/2009 by chick

I may not have done much running lately, but I have at least done some walking. Yesterday I went to the old path and walked my usual route. I had to take it slower, especially on the inclines, but I made it all the way around. There are some pretty flowers out right now, some of which I recognized, like wild strawberry, and some which I didn’t, like Mystery Flower #7.

mystery-flower-7

I know I’ve seen this flower around before, but it’s name is a mystery. See the comments for my best guess at its identity.

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It’s a Joke

Posted on 05/02/2009 by chick

Isn’t it interesting how many running jokes we have and how little running we actually do?

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32 Weeks

Posted on 05/01/2009 by chick

People sometimes ask us if we have taken any classes to prepare for childbirth, so I tell them about the all-day childbirth class we attended a couple of weeks ago. They want to know if it was helpful, and I tell them it was because it forced Faithful Reader to give me back massages and it also taught him more respect for the physical difficulties arising from pregnancy. One of the things the teacher said is that the cardiovascular strain of pregnancy is equivalent to climbing a small mountain every day. It has become a running joke in our house. Any time I feel tired or don’t want to do something, I say, “Hey, I climbed a mountain today!”

This is not to say Faithful Reader hasn’t been a supportive hubby. He has been, but he has a terrible fear of encouraging my laziness. He also has an inherent dislike for babying me. I think it’s because he doesn’t want to set up expectations. I can understand that, but I do deserve a little babying from time to time, especially now, when I’m starting to experience some of the real downsides to having a baby.

Yup, I’m now well and truly into the third trimester. The once cute little beach-ball belly has grown to more of a boulder size and it weighs on me. I feel tired, hot, swollen. The warming temperatures haven’t helped. We went from brutally cold temperatures to sadistically hot ones, all within the same month.  According to our weather monitor, the temperature topped 95 degrees this week. I fear that Spring will once again give us the slip and her sister, Summer, will visit early and hit hard.

To take my mind off the discomfort, I sometimes try to imagine how the baby looks as he floats around in my belly. There’s a website that does week-by-week pregnancy descriptions and they like to use fruits and veggies as comparisons to give you an idea of how big your baby is. Some of them are quite funny. My favorite was 26 weeks, when our baby was supposedly the length of an English hothouse cucumber. Last week, he was as heavy as 4 navel oranges. Isn’t that sweet? This week he’s jicama-sized. Yeah, my son is like a jicama. Anyone know what a jicama is?

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Car Talk

Posted on 04/30/2009 by chick

I am grateful for my car.

There hasn’t been a lot of gratitude around here lately and I’ve been really feeling the lack. My life has changed so much over the last year and I’m not entirely comfortable yet with all the changes. Sometimes I second-guess my decisions. That’s bad. Some grateful thoughts ought to cure it, though, don’t you think?

The car is a recent decision that I’m happy about. I ought to regret the purchase. It’s bigger than my old car and I sometimes have a little trouble with the dimensions, particularly while parking. It requires a more expensive grade of gas, not to mention more of it. And, of course, there is the cash we had to cough up to bring it home with us. I’m so cheap that I still don’t know how I talked myself into spending so much money.

Yet I love the car. It is both comfortable and attractive, two things that my old car was not. We got a great deal on it and I still can’t believe how lucky we were to find it at that price. I think I may have to start driving it more often, just to remind myself of how happy it makes me.

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