At home

I look forward so much to being at home it’s almost embarrassing.  What do I do there? I watch TV, read mysteries, knit a three-foot square blanket that I hope will be done in early Jan.  I have spent close to 5 hours knitting over the past couple of days. It can’t last–my shoulder will give out soon. But I’m happy with my progress.

I was telling a colleague yesterday that while I’ve always liked sofa-lying, pregnancy has magnified that behavior. It seems like Nirvana to be lying on the couch. I love it. It’s better than eating, though I’m pleased that I don’t have to choose.

Not that I’m not eating–I’m still eating my way through the lasagna and over the weekend I bought Pigs in Blankets from trader J’s. I LOVE pigs!  When I told my co-workers today they gave me a TON of shit for eating PIB when just last week, when a co-worker offered to have her husband cook me something post-baby, I graciously said, “please, no white-trash food.”  He makes weird things like tuna casserole.  Hot tuna?  Not food.

I have all things baby on the brain. I am obsessing about changing tables this week. The ones I like are too expensive…I need to talk with normal people to get the low-down. There’s no justification for spending $300 on something that I use a few times a day (ok, 8 times a day) for 2-3 years. 

I can see that I’ll be contending with the “champagne taste, beer pocketbook” syndrome for the next umpteen years.  Me and all my friends.

Belly!

This just kills me.  What kind of crazy cat sleeps in this position?  She’s been in this position most of the evening except when she’s been cuddling up next to me and slapping my hand every time I stopping petting her. What a weird animal.

She does get awfully stiff and she also chews herself viciously–either she’s neurotic, has fleas, Parkinson’s or all of the above.  What a beast.

 

Sneezy or Grumpy?

Ive been knitting on the subway lately. I’m making a blanket that started at with a few cast on stitches and increased by one stitch per row over the last 200 or so rows.  Soon it’ll be time to start reducing the stitches. 

But the fun thing about knitting on public transportation is that other knitters want to talk with you about your (or their) projects.  Yesterday a woman cornered me near the train door to ask what stitch I was using and whether I have ever knit anything with a double ball of yarn (no).   She very earnestly told me about what a great stress-reliever knitting is for her and that she just wishes she could do it more often.

My plumbing situation is going from bad to horrendous (my 10 minute shower takes over an hour to drain out) and I don’t want to call the landlord because of the washing machine situation.  I need to take off the overflow plate and see if I can snake out the drain through there.  It smells a little like sewage in there, which is not the greatest feeling.

But the worst feeling is that my home allergies to the cat or the litter or both are overwhelming and Claritin has no effect.  I don’t know how I’m going to last through the next few months.  I need to buy a vacuum and use it.  The air filter is not in my budget right now–I can’t justify spending a fortune on a fancy air purifier, especially since I probably need 2 or 3 of them.  I can look at Craigslist and hope someone sells one for a reasonable price. 

My mom keeps reminding me that she can take Frannie home with her after Tgiving.  I’m not sold on that idea–I think Banana would be fine, but I think I would miss her and her Sally F1eld behavior (“Cranky, you like me, you really like me!”)  Poor cat–she’s already had so much upheaval…I hate to give her the heave-ho so soon.

My Halloween

On Halloween, I am thrilled not to be a parent. I don’t like H’ween and it wasn’t a huge deal where I grew up.  I hope to not have to deal with it for at least 3 more years. In my neighborhood, kids and parents come from miles around to beg the businesses for candy. I have no problem with this when they are families who patronize these businesses year-round. But many, many of the beggars aren’t.  I am obviously undemocratic–I like the idea of something like a beach permit to be entitled to come trick or treat where I live.  But that isn’t gonna happen.

I avoided the local Halloween parade by traveling underground to see the movie “An Education,” which I enjoyed very much and recommend highly.  But there are people who seem to have major objections to this film.  Without giving away too much, the objections from the NYT online seem to be: 1)The “seducer” in the movie is Jewish and therefore the movie is anti-semitic and 2)Many parents of young girls felt that not enough bad bad things happened to the protagonist as a result of her affair with an older man.

To number 1 I have nothing to say except there are weak, opportunistic people of all races and religions and this movie is based on a real-life event.  Get over it.  To number 2 I say that according to the author of the memoir on which the movie is based, she suffered many consequences of this time in her life.  True, she didn’t die or get a dread disease, so maybe your 16 year old will want to go out and do the same as the protagonist…but I doubt it.  If you think your kid is dim enough to think there weeren’t consequences, you have bigger problems than having brought her to see this movie.

 

Yay, book. Yay, marathon

As some of you know, I had a scare a couple of days ago which turned out just to be a bleeding cervical polyp which was duly removed.  I’m feeling fine–just a little glum about having to cancel my trip to California this weekend.  Fat, pregnant, glum–very attractive. 

But very relieved to still be pregnant given that when the bleeding started on Wednesday, I was convinced that I was miscarrying.  I had an echo of this last night when I dreamed that I had lost the baby. In the dream I was trying to figure out what to do because I don’t have the energy of wherewithal to start from scratch.  When the cat woke me up with her howling, I was extremely relieved. 

I need to gather my energy.  I think that Pilates tomorrow will help with that.  I bought a new book and if I can get myself further into it that will help with the gloom also. 

Sunday is the marathon and though none of my friends are running this year, I’m excited to go out and cheer on the people who ARE running.  They are supposed to have a beautiful day for it–sunny and warm.  The belly and I will be on the sidelines cheering.  YAY!

Bits and pieces

The other day on the subway I was watching in fascination as a grown man picked his ear. Was the wax brown? Was it red? After picking for a while, the guy examined his fingernail as if to check for gold bouillon. Maybe it looked like food…because he began chewing and licking that finger nail. Yum.

 Apparently one of the advantages of being pregnant for me is that I’m not able to lean as far forward as I do normally. My little lump of a belly is in the way. Yesterday I had a doctor’s appointment for the lump, but the doctor was running so far behind that I didn’t bother staying. I had called in advance, but the phone seemed to be broken. As it stands, I’m not due for another appointment for over a month. Wow.

 A couple of nights ago, I dreamed that I was in labor. A friend/co-worker was there. In the dream (and in life) I had to make a poo and with the pushing in labor was worried about the poo-potential. So in “real life” I spoke to my colleague and she reminded me that she had taken a poo during the birth of her son. Yuck. Note to self: ask doctors about late-term enemas or many prunes to try to avoid the poop.

Also, I found a card that Harriet sent me the August after we graduated. In the same place, I found a letter that my grandmother sent me in 1986 and some Visa papers in Russian from the American Embassy in the USSR addressed to my grandfather from 1945–immediately after WWII. I’m hoping to get a friend of my mother’s to look at the papers.

Not Strychnine, but too close for comfort

I rushed home early on Friday in anticipation of the arrival of my new appliance—the beautiful, albeit small, washer/dryer combination.

The delivery arrived in the early part of the timeframe.  I had confirmed in advance that the men would be ready and able to move my refrigerator across the room. I was there with the broom to sweep when they moved the fridge, but instead I jumped back and screamed because they were dozens of roaches crawling around having a party under there.  So while I escaped in disgust and horror to the living room to move a bookcase, one of the guys stepped in and, at my request, put down “a little” Boric Acid. 

But it wasn’t a little.  Once they moved the washer into place and left, I realized that he had put down the entire large canister of boric acid.  I didn’t want Frannie to get it on her paws and die, so I started to vacuum it up with my Dust Buster, which promptly kicked it up into my nose.

SO I stopped.  I stopped in the certainty that I would start to foam at the mouth and have a seizure.  I imagined myself walking into the ER foaming like a dog.  They would examine me and say, “You’re having a miscarriage, what did you do?” 

And I would have to say, “Boric Acid got up my nose while I was vacuuming.”

Then they would shake their heads at my ExtremeStupidity(TM) and wonder how people like me could even think to reproduce.  Then they would do the D and C to finish up the miscarriage.

But since the seizures hadn’t started yet, I called my neighbor, who has a good canister vacuum, which she brought up so I could get as much of the Boric Acid up as possible. 

Since I was still alive on Saturday, the plumber came to hook up the machine and yesterday I used it.  It works!  The drying cycle takes over 3 hours, but it works and I was wearing a pair of cords that I washed in the machine yesterday—it’s very exciting.

I’m still nervous about the Boric Acid ingestion. I remind myself that people smoke, drink, snort cocaine and do all kinds of things and manage to give birth anyway.  I tell myself that the little hairs in the nose are meant to keep particulates from entering the blood-stream.  But I guess I’ll just have to be worried for now. That’s what I do.

Revisionist

from http://www.courthousenews.com/2009/10/14/Stalin_s_Grandson_Loses_Defamation_Claim.htm

A court in Moscow on Tuesday refused to grant Josef Stalin’s grandson the $340,000 he demanded in a defamation lawsuit against Novaya Gazeta newspaper. Yevgeny Dzugashvili claimed the Gazeta had hurt his family’s reputation by calling his grandfather a “bloodthirsty cannibal.”

This looks like a great start to a Harold and Kumar (or Bill and Ted) movie.  Bill and Ted go to Moscow:

GS (sounding like Boris and Natasha):  They say my grandfather was a bloodthirsty cannibal, but they never knew him like I did!

Ted: Duuudde, Bummer!

Bill:  Yeah, man…have some weed!

Instant classic

I think dr phil is an abomination. But I am so glad that TV turned on to that channel as I was getting ready to watch an ER rerun.  Dr. P apparently sent a guy in to a bar to pretend he’s married to see how many chicks would fall for him.  Some did indeed give their number to the undercover ass.  Dr p asked the self-satisfied schmuck whether some of the targets had rejected him.

Schmuck:  Yes, some of them upheld the sanctimony of marriage.

I laughed so hard that I’m lucky that pee didn’t run down my leg.

Yo me llamo

Last night the Pilates instructor asked me to remind her of my name.  She’s a lovely Japanese woman who has a lot of difficulty with English pronunciation.  So when I told her my name, she winced a little.  “Is there another name I could call you,” she asked sounding hopeful and a little apologetic. 

I said, “Sure—you can call me ‘Bobbi’,” which is a name I campaigned against at the ripe old age of 4 because it sounded too boyish to me.

She was pleased.  During the class, though, Bobbi morphed into something else.  So now, on Thursday nights, I will be formally known as ‘Babu.’  As if I needed my life to resemble a Seinfeld episode. 

But it doesn’t bother me—there are so many permutations of wrong names that I get called, that Babu is a nice change.  And it makes me smile.