Drowning

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I will be flying to Portland tomorrow evening. I will be staying with a friend. I’m willing to bet I will not be terribly easy to get a hold of. All sorts of things (I’m looking at you Jon) will just have to wait.

Let’s look at the next few weeks, shall we? Tomorrow I need to continue to frantically get my classroom closer to being ready for a sub on Friday and get the kids through another day of finals prep. In the evening I get on a plane and go rent a car by myself for the first time in my life. Kind of spooky. I will most likely go straight to Dad’s house and goodness knows how much sleep I will end up getting. I also need to arrange getting a key for the place where I am crashing somehow. Friday and Saturday will be spent with Dad in some capacity. Sunday morning will likely be spent either with Dad or with the friend I am staying with.

While I am gone Noah needs to finish packing up all of the stuff in the house that is over carpet. Most of it is packed already, at this point we mostly need to get boxes to storage and get furniture out of here. Looks like it is he and I trying to move it with most of it falling on him. 🙁 Whatever I don’t help him with tonight and tomorrow he has to do on his own. The carpet is being replaced on Saturday. I get back on Sunday to help put things back and finish up the last baby steps of touching up paint (there are about a dozen specific spots that need to be touched up). I should also continue packing stuff in the kitchen/bathroom because we want most things out of sight for the showing. The house is being “staged” on Tuesday which means that some pushy-ass woman is coming over and insulting the hell out of my/our taste and telling us how we can make our house look less crappy. I’m looking forward to it.

I need to completely clean out my classroom and get all of my stuff packed and off the walls within nine days, preferably sooner so the next teacher can start moving in. I also need to finish grading all the late work that is still pouring in. I need to continue typing up the questions the kids are submitting for the finals. I need to create the finals. I need to grade the finals. This probably represents about 40 hours of work I need to do sometime in the next nine days while out of town for several of them. I have a mandatory IEP meeting next week where I get to go deal with a horrible parent and her horrible child. Luckily her case manager is pretty cool and is backing me up. Thank goodness for small favors. I have a hysterical family who keeps breathing down my neck about how I am persecuting their child by giving him a bad grade despite the fact that his grade in my class is higher than his grade in any other class. Cheers.

And after getting the house on the market next week we get to go to Pittsburgh from the 25-28th so I can see how I feel about the cold. I think this is the most traveling I have done in this short of a time period in my life. (I will be out of town for like 15 days out of a five week period. And this is on three separate trips.)

And I have an ever increasing flow of email traffic from con stuff, most of it extremely demanding and resulting in someone getting pissy if they aren’t responded to RIGHT NOW.

So, if I don’t get back to you or if I have a fairly short temper or I’m not cheerful, by all means feel free to take it personally.

Francesca is gone

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Francesca Bennet was one of my adopted moms. I’ve been blessed to have several. Although I never actually called Francesca mom. She and I discussed how she has never been an actual mother and she didn’t feel she needed that distinction at this stage of life because it didn’t have the same meaning for her. But she mentored me. She was one of my closer friends. I didn’t call her enough. I didn’t try hard enough to see her more often and now it is too late.

I’m going to miss her so much. She is the closest to me death I have had as an adult and this is going to be very hard.

Probably too late, but worth asking…

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Is anyone available to come help Noah move some furniture tomorrow? We are having carpeting installed soon and we need to get most of the furniture out of the house and I can’t do much of it. We are also trying to get some stuff taken to the dump (oops leaving it in the rain) and boxes taken to storage. I assume our friends have lives and stuff, but maybe someone will take pity?

(Hey Michael–any possibility you could come get the bookshelf sometime before Saturday?)

Squeeeeeeeeee

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Heartbeat! Discernable heartbeat! The Lizard has a heartbeat of 160 bpm. Apparently there is a wives tale that says this means kiddo is a girl. The funny thing is–I don’t want to find out for certain, but thinking of the Lizard as a girl makes me giddy. I’m pretty sure I would feel the same way about a boy. Have I mentioned that I really want this child? I’m ‘measuring’ at 21 cm which is pretty much perfect considering that I am at 20 weeks 4 days. (From the 20th week usually you can measure the belly and the centimeters will match the week you are in.) Lizard was hanging out in the very lower right hand part of my uterus. I think that is so neat. It makes sense because so much of the kicking is really low. 🙂 Baby! I’m having a baby!!!!

Ok, I’ll stop now. 🙂

*bounce*

{insecurity} Disappointment

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It’s probably not “lately” or “for a while now” but more just right now I feel really frustrated and caught up in small disappointments. I’m tired of trying and failing. I’m tired of being unable to make my commitments. I’m tired of other people not making their commitments to me.

Tonight I physically feel worse than I have in almost a month. Why is that? Oh. I went back to my job. I went back to people being demanding and fussy and having no interest in anyone other than themselves. I’m not really even talking about the kids. The pissy emails from parents hit me really hard. The attitude that I am failing my students because I hold them to standards is really hard. Right now I feel more guilty than normal because I believe I have let my students down this semester. I didn’t coax them through every single step this time. I didn’t baby them through doing all of their work. I didn’t keep them in after school repeatedly until I had a freakishly high passing rate. So I feel like I failed them. On some level I believe that I didn’t fail them, they failed themselves. But I can’t help feeling like I disappointed them.

I have nine more days at my job and I’m not sure how I will get through them. 🙁

The danger of teenagers

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They didn’t do their homework earlier in vacation. So they can’t help paint. Looks like me, Noah, and my coworker will be painting today. Much suckiness. I have to be careful because the last time I stretched my arm over my head I pulled a muscle that hurt for days. God damnit. Luckily, my coworker is about 6’4″ so I think he can handle the high stuff. 🙂

This being a grown up shit is totally over rated. I keep telling myself that the house goes on the market in the next two weeks. No more time for procrastinating. 🙁 It doesn’t matter how I feel. Suck it the freak up.

In other news I came back from vacation at 181 (My pre-pregnancy weight–see why I’ve been saying I was heavy?! I gained over 20 freakin pounds in the first year of living with Noah. He’s a feeder.) and was really excited. I’ve gone down to 179 again. I think the soda helped keep my weight up. Hm.

In other news

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Tonight marks the first time that the Lizard has kicked hard enough so that I could be absolutely definite that I was feeling it and Noah could feel it too. This is so wonderful.

Have I mentioned that I’m really happy about having a family with Noah? I can’t imagine this being so wonderful in any other circumstance.

{the short list} Frustration.

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I am not an event promoter. Let me say this again, I am not an event promoter. I have been saying for over a year that if I am involved in this con I cannot be one of the people promoting it. I have been saying this because I have a pretty good grasp of my frustration levels and the things that will make me angry and I will no longer be helpful. However, due to massive flaking on the parts of several people I am now doing event promotion during the last six weeks of the con. I’m doing it while trying to prepare for my last two weeks of teaching professionally. I’m doing it while trying to pack my house so it can be “staged”. I’m doing it while trying to move. I’m doing it while trying to figure out where in the fuck in Pittsburgh will I not drown in the mid-western white mentality. (I love that people on message boards try to explain how culturally diverse their childhoods were by saying, “Well, my parents were upset when Martin Luther King Jr. died…”) I’m doing it while going through a fairly difficult pregnancy.

I’m having to suck it up and deal with people and things I don’t want to deal with right now. I’m tired of being complained at. I’m tired of having to “be nice” when I would really like to punch some people in the face. I was willing to handle arranging the classes and dealing with presenters. I have done that. I actually kind of enjoyed that. It was really neat to get such a broad array of presenters and classes when I was told it couldn’t be done. Go freakin me. But that is all I signed on to do for many and myriad reasons. Now it doesn’t matter what I signed on to do. Either I help do stuff that is way beyond the scope of what I agreed to do or it gets dumped on someone who is turning around and freaking out at me 20 times a day and making my stress level go through the roof. I think when this is over I’m going to avoid talking to him for a year or so. Of course, this will make me one more evil person who has abandoned him. Right now, I don’t care. The pressure he is putting on me is making me crazy. And now we have another pushy person on board who might actually get some work done, but I have to put up with public admonishments to be nice in order to get that help. I really want to say fuck everyone and just walk away.

Where your humble blog host throws herself on your mercy.

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So I’m helping to run this con. At this point it seems as though people don’t know it is happening and therefore aren’t registering. Here is information on it. Because this is my private blog and you are probably someone I like and consider a friend I will say rather bluntly: please dear god come to the event. We need to have at least 40 people in order to break even. That’s not much. And dude, I have some totally fucking awesome classes lined up.

Please forward the below information to anyone you think might be vaguely interested.

TNG4 – Bound for the Bay
Feb 15 – 18 2008 — President’s Day Weekend
@ Edges, the Silicon Valley Dungeon
http://tngcon.org/

Come join us this Presidents Day weekend for TNG4 – Bound for the Bay, a gathering for younger pervs ages 18-35 and their partners, when it comes to the Bay Area.

Whether you identify with BDSM, SM, Leather, Poly, Kink, Fetish, some other term altogether or no label at all, we invite you to join us and some 200 other younger pervs both from across the country as well as locally from the Bay Area for three days and three nights of learning, socializing, connecting, and fun at Edges, The Silicon Valley Dungeon.

Registration is now open!

We have a number of presenters and speakers lined up including:

Lee Harrington – Sir Michael – Zuchtiger – Shamara –
Coral Mallow, Ms. Oregon State Leather and her boy Ryan
Boymeat – Ryan aka Psychokitty – Michael Delaney
Rita Seagrave- Tim (BR) – Arielle – Rae Goldman – Pepper Mint – Lark Ellison

We have tried to keep costs low for you, so registration will be $125 up to the beginning of February when it goes up to $150, and we have arranged a rate of $89/night (plus tax) at the Hawthorn Suites in Santa Clara.

We also plan on having fun, with three nights of parties and socials so you can get more familiar with all those new friendly faces that you met during the day.

Still reading? We will have a volunteer fair in early January to help fill out our volunteer staff needs, but in the meanwhile, if you want to help out, contact our Volunteer Coordinator at <volunteer@tngcon.org>

We will also be putting out a call for proposals for panel discussions in the next few weeks once we figure out how many we can add to the schedule. You can keep with these and other announcements by checking out our site and joining the announcement and chat lists from there.

Interested in advertising with us? Sponsoring? Let us know with an email to <sponsor@tngcon.org>, and check out the website!

Monogamy

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One year ago today I had sex with someone other than Noah. There has been absolutely no sexual contact with anyone but him since that. In thinking about my history I realize that previous to this I had a period of “girls don’t count” monogamy with Tom that lasted three years, but as a few women reading this can attest… I certainly had sex with people other than Tom during that period. This is the longest period of my life I have actually been completely and totally monogamous. It’s kind of funny that I describe my relationship history as being “basically monogamous” but when I’m honest I notice that I’m not actually good at real and true complete monogamy. So this is interesting to me. There are a wide variety of reasons for this stretch of one-on-one attention and I’m not unhappy about it. I am very likely to continue this trend for quite some time to come. I’m curious how long this will last for me.

Noah’s history is not that different from mine. He has had longer stretches of monogamy than I have had, but it looks like he won’t beat his previous record with me. I’ve never had a partner break monogamy before just because they wanted to. In the four years I was with Tom he had sex with someone else exactly one time when I pushed it. Neither Stephen nor Phil would have broken monogamy. It’s weird having a partner who is as voracious, maybe more so, about sex.

I wonder what monogamy/non-monogamy is going to look like for us throughout our lives. I wonder if I will be monogamous during the whole breeding period. I am pretty certain he won’t be. It’s weird to think about being the monogamous one.

New Years Perspective

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In 2006 I reflected. For 2007 the five most memorable moments are:

1. Looking down and seeing a positive pregnancy test. I went into the other room and picked up Noah’s hand and pulled him bodily into the bathroom to look with me without saying anything. It was overwhelming.
2. Looking at the ultrasound screen and seeing the alien growing inside my belly for the first time. Now that’s proof.
3. Watching a gorgeous sunrise on a boat with my favorite person in the world.
4. Snuggling with Crystal and sharing all of the deep down scary stuff.
5. Camp Everytown was more than a moment, but it is a time of my life I will never forget.

And to copy what happened in 2005 Post a New Year’s resolution that you think I should do. Then post this in your own LJ, and see what resolutions people think you should do.

I think I am going to crack open a bottle of sparkling cider soon. If I make it till 9pm I will be shocked.

Home!

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Been home for not quite 12 hours so far. Laundry is going. I dumped the contents of the two (enormously overstuffed) suitcases on the floor and now I need to deal with actually putting stuff away.

Disney World was… interesting. Loved Epcot and Animal Kingdom seemed neat (we didn’t actually do much there because of sleep needs). I wasn’t that impressed with MGM Studios and Magic Kingdom was noticeably inferior to Disney Land. It was pretty neat being in this All Disney All The Time world for a little while. I started to have a little bit of a hard time with the eternally plucky staff at times. Amusingly, I didn’t like the waiter who acted like we were impositions much more so I guess there is just no pleasing me. Luckily I had more good-body days than bad-body days. I think I need to invest in serious black out curtains because both of the rooms we had on the trip could be completely pitch black during the day and we slept 9-12 hours each day. I suspect that we might both be more-sleep-is-good people.

Andrew–we went to the slavery museum in Nassau and it was just as interesting as you said it would be. Thanks for the recommendation. 🙂 The visit to the warm was nice, but I’m really glad I don’t live there. If it is this warm in the winter I would die in the summer. I got my hair braided on Nassau–just shy of 100 braids and it looks neat. I was probably overcharged, but I think that given how much money I make and how much money the braiders need to live on… I’m ok with that.

Noah had maybe two hours of cumulative grump on the whole trip and I probably clocked in four or five hours of cumulative grump on the whole trip. All things considered that is bloody amazing. Spending time with him continues to be the most wonderful way to spend time I have ever experienced. He is freakin awesome to travel with. I love my easy-going baby. I scored big time on my Christmas presents to him. I got jammies this year. 🙂 And a trip to Disney World and a cruise. So I can’t really complain. Dude we shopped. Went more than a little nuts. I’m surprised we got it all home… The funny part is: a lot of it is just getting put directly into boxes for storage for the next 8-9 months. I’ll get to feel like Christmas is coming early next year when I unpack. 🙂

Speaking of which: I need to get off the computer and start packing. The folks are coming to measure for carpeting in a bit. We need to get a bunch more stuff packed before the kids come over to finish up the painting touch-ups later this week. (I love my aides. I love them. I love them. The kids who painted this summer are coming back because they love me so much. 🙂 We have about two weeks to finish emptying the house out for the staging. I’m trying to get a bunch of the stuff packed and in storage so I won’t have to worry about it for moving. I also need to respond to a bunch of TNG emails today. I am going to wait until after the carpet people come because I need to get stuff off the floor…

I doubt we will make it out to any of the NYE festivities tonight. Love you all, but my body is terribly confused right now as to what time it is. We are going to have apple cider around 9 and call it a Disney World New Years. 🙂

Maybe more later. Maybe not. 🙂

Acupuncture leads to food.

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I think that is an amusing headline. 🙂 And it did! This is fabulous. I’m not going to say that acupuncture is the most AMAING THING EVAR, but uhm… it’s pretty damn neat. I managed to eat solid food on two separate occasions today. I haven’t managed that in almost a week. The second meal was tiny, but that’s ok. It’s something. The neato chica sticking me with sharp things also seemed amused at my attempts at silly jokes. She can stay. Which is probably good seeing as Joe kinda likes her. 😉

And today involved some incredibly hot sex. If I was feeling good enough for food *and* sex after acupuncture I am totally going back. Best $100 I have spent in months.

Not to mention that I got a great phone call from one of the most awesomest people I know. My day so rocked.

Stolen from my Sarah

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I know very little about some of the people on my friends list. Some people I know relatively well. I read your journals, or we have something else in common, and we chat occasionally. Some of you I hardly know at all. Perhaps you lurk, for whatever reason. But you friended me, and I thank you for your interest in my words.

But here’s a thought: why not take this opportunity to tell me a little something about yourself. Any old thing at all. Just so the next time I see your name I can say: “Ah, there’s so and so…they enjoy the savory aroma of monkey brains a la mode.”

I’d love it if every single person who friended me would do this. Yes, even you people who I know really well. Then, if you like, post this in your own journal and see what gems of knowledge appear.

Awwww

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I sent out email to my kidlets and parents explaining that I am still pretty sick and I don’t know when/if I am getting back to school. I’m really tired of not being able to keep down a reasonable amount of solid food. I’m dropping weight again. 🙁 I also gave instructions as to what the kids should do between now and Friday. I told them that I miss my daily dose of kidlets and I hope to get back soon.

The return emails are making me smile. They miss the water bottle. They miss my snark. They miss the class being “more fun”. I feel so loved. 🙂

{inner circle} Thank god that is over.

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Maybe the best thing about moving is I will never have to deal with a DHP again. It was lovely seeing the 25 or so people I liked a lot. It was less thrilling seeing the 60 or so people I don’t know at all. Even less thrilling to see the 10 or so people I knew and don’t like. And the 3 or 4 people I don’t know who were specifically rude to me basically ended all fun for the party. Some bitch asked a question about the house or the party or something and I was sitting nearby so I answered. She turned to me and said, “And who the fuck are you?” I responded, “I live here.” She turned her back and ignored me. I think that part of the reason I get so mad when people lecture me telling me to be nice is that when she did this I got up quietly and walked away. That is actually what I generally what I do in those sorts of situations. I really wanted to say, “Get the fuck out of my house you stupid cunt.” But I didn’t want to ruin Noah’s party. 🙁

So I mostly hid back in my bedroom and declared it an invitation only space. Amusingly, for most of the time there were people standing in the door blocking entrance entirely unintentionally. That *won*.

And I tried to go to sleep around 11 with a little bit of success. I woke up around 1 needing to go to the bathroom and with a stomach ache. I’ve been up since then and not happy about it. 🙁 I don’t feel good and I can’t seem to calm down. I’m frustrated and angry and my back hurts and my stomach hurts and my head hurts and… And I didn’t find out till about 2am that Noah invited people to come back at 10 for breakfast. I’m torn between wanting to stay so that if that cunt comes back I can tell her to leave and leaving so I don’t have to deal with more stupid people. At the rate I’m going I wonder if I will sleep at all and that will distinctly lower my patience in general.

On the plus side, I think Noah and I just had the best sex we have had in a month. heh

Wow.

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Putting all of our alcohol on a table is quite daunting. I’m really hoping a lot of people come because I so don’t want to move this crap.

Come drink our alcohol! We have various and sundry really neat alcohols! Really and truly! We have shit you have never even heard of before! 🙂

Hell, come take a bottle home with you if you don’t want to drink it here….