I walked past a mirror and noticed that my neck/face look way thinner than they used to. So I measured my neck. My neck is an inch a quarter smaller around than it used to be. Wow. That’s a big difference. And I think my upper arms are a lot smaller than they used to be as well.
So after childbirth I just need to figure out how to get my thighs to decrease in size and I’ll be totally freakin set. 🙂
For some stupid reason we have been staying awake later and later at night. Last night I noticed that it was 1:30. So we went to bed. I’ve had two nights out of the last week where my bladder has made it to a six hour stretch, usually I get four hours of sleep then two, then one, then one, then get up. This morning I woke up at 6 am so hungry that my stomach ached. So I went and ate. Then couldn’t get back to sleep till 7. Then woke up for good around 9 because that’s when Noah got up. I’m tired and brain dead. Everything feels wonky.
And what do I do about it? Whine on lj.
Although, to be fair, other than being really tired I’m actually in fairly good spirits. 🙂 I keep feeling like I should get up and “get busy” and then I think… naw…. 🙂
Today I managed to get multiple errands done. I went to close out the storage unit and found out that if I waited until tomorrow I would have been charged an extra month. w00t. Glad I caught that. I went to Home Desperate and got stuff for the Noah. Then I wandered through REI and found a neat messenger bag that will function quite nicely as a diaper bag. Then I noticed that it was on sale. Then I went to the register and found out that the sale price was less than half of my dividend for the year; so I didn’t even have to spend real money. w00t again!
I find that if I do a lot of housework/moving around in a day I tend to spend the next whole day sitting on the couch kind of wasted. I moved around a lot yesterday. Books are in the locations I want them to be in. Yay! And fiction is alphabetized. Not that I’m neurotic or anything. *cough* Most of what is left to unpack is clothing and glassware, neither of which I’m stressing over.
And I did all this today in a Twisted Monk “Trust Me” tanktop. It’s the only tanktop that still fits. It makes me smile. Children, don’t follow that link or your parents will get upset. No really.
but this question interests me: If it were possible, would you want to know the day you were going to die?
I would. I am quite the control freak. I would like to have everything in my life arranged so that the people around me would suffer as little as possible from my passing. I would get all of the people I love to come spend time with me in the week or so before the time. I would be less afraid to do “dangerous” things in advance. I would love to be able to know how important it was to show people that I loved them constantly. The problem with not knowing when you will die is that you put things off until “later.” Knowing would change that.
More belly pictures!
Continue reading
I got this as an email forward. I don’t know much about it and I can’t vouch for the veracity, but it is worth reading if you did the HPV vaccine.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
There are thousands of young girls and women around the world who had the so-called ‘cervical cancer’ shots and got very sick. WE NEED TO HEAR THEIR STORIES. PLEASE HELP US BY SHARING THIS MESSAGE WITH YOUR NETWORKS INCLUDING (YOUNG) WOMEN AND GIRLS YOU KNOW.
FIRST: DID YOU HAVE A BAD REACTION after Gardasil or Cervarix injections (the so-called Cervical Cancer vaccines)?
* Did you get sick: seriously or just a bit; are you better now?
* Were you told about potential side effects?
* Do you now believe you won’t get cervical cancer?
WE WANT TO HEAR FROM YOU! CHECK THE BLOG
_http://womenhurtbymedicine.wordpress.com/
Check PAGES for background info and submission details and e-mail your story to _gertrudegreen@hotmail.com
_
SECOND: DO YOU KNOW OF ANY REPORTING OF BAD REACTIONS?
* If you are (or know) a journalist who has written critical stories about the vaccines, please send then to us for the background pages;
* If you are (or know) a health practitioner and have seen girls and women suffering adverse effects after Gardasil (or Cervarix) injections, please write to us.
* Concerned parents: if you daughter doesn’t want to write – you can.
YOUR STORY COULD HELP SAVE OTHERS:
* With 11 deaths already allegedly linked to Gardasil (9 in the US and 2 in Europe) and thousands of adverse health reports, we hope that girls and women speaking out about their own experiences will help us pressuring health authorities to review the current mass experimentation on (young) women.
* It will not be known for at least another 10 to 20 years whether the anti-HPV vaccines will indeed lower the incidence of cervical cancer or whether they were a gigantic waste of (public) money and an extraordinary money raiser for the pharmaceuticals involved (Merck, CSL, GlaxoSmithKline). Meanwhile lots of women will suffer. Send us their stories!
PLEASE POST AS WIDELY AND INTERNATIONALLY AS YOU CAN AND LINK YOUR WEBSITES TO OUR BLOG (and tell us about it).
Renate Klein and Bonnie Bickel
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*Recently published: Marti Kheel, /Nature Ethics: An Ecofeminist
Perspective/. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008*.
This is going to feel like I am slamming some people and I’m sorry for that. I’m not trying to. I am trying to express my feelings about something that is quite prevalent in my social circles.
Today has been hard for me in a couple of different ways. The day started out so well. Angela showed up and made breakfast and that was awesome. Then we were all highly productive for a couple of hours. Then stuff started going down hill triggering a lot of trust issues for me. Punctuality issues. Frustration with people. I spent a lot of the later part of today being alternately very angry and very sad. Couple of times I started crying and couldn’t sit down for a good long cry for various reasons. I’m sure it was partially hormonal, but it really wasn’t all about being pregnant. It was about disconnect between how I see the world and obligations and how other people see the world and obligations.
Noah said something today that is making me think: “You treat manners/etiquette as a second rate way of enforcing boundaries.” He’s right. I treat things as being about basic manners when they are really about my personal boundaries. I did something risky for me this weekend and it went really badly in general. I’m not going to take that risk again anytime soon. The potential payoff isn’t worth the consequences of things not going well. Not 100% badly, but bad enough that I am going to remember this for a long time.
I guess learning is an important part of living and all.
I forgot about a class this afternoon. Damnit! People finally agree to come help and we can’t stay all day. We’ve been working since this morning (when Angela came over and made us French toast!) but we won’t be able to work solidly through the afternoon today. Given that one of the people who was willing to help was going to come over around noon and we need to leave the house by 12:30… looks like Angela may be our only help today and only for a few hours. We’ll survive. We managed to get about 1/3 of the stuff out of storage (by ‘we’ I mean Noah and Angela) and unpack all of those boxes already. There is some vague possibility that we will get everything out of storage today but it looks like I am going to be slowly unpacking for a while because I’m going to stick to my agreement with Noah–he’s done after today. If you make promises you need to keep them, even if it becomes inconvenient.
It’ll be ok. We’ll get through and if we are mostly done with what I wanted done it will be ok. Several of the things on the list can technically wait almost indefinitely so I suppose I will have to close my eyes and say “lalalala” and just ignore those things for a few more months. Somehow I will manage. It’ll be ok. The inside of the house will get to a place where I am happy with it. 🙂
Right now I am waiting for them to come back with more boxes to unpack. It’s hard to wait!
We’re still having a games night in the evening tomorrow and getting the games, books and stuff from storage during the day tomorrow. We’d love help for both 🙂 We’ll be around all day, though if it’s just me and the girl boy then you might need to call first to make sure somebody’s around when you arrive.
I won’t promise what specific games we play — again, it depends how many show up. But I’ll hint in passing that we’re both big fans of “Give Me the Brain” 🙂
We have all of the bookshelves now! Which means that putting them together will be the first big move of the day. Then getting boxes! It’ll be great! Really! 🙂
(Thanks Ethan!)
Sometimes. At the class on Wednesday someone I had a week long fling with a few years ago gave me a hug, which was fine, then put his hand in to touch my belly. I grabbed it and smacked it the way you do with a little kid. He then pulled back and looked upset so I thought I should send him an email afterwards. The thread hasn’t gone how I expected.
Every so often Noah goes through and rereads my archive. I think this is a bit frightening as I know how much I have written. When I notice that he is doing this I tend to copycat. Honestly, I shouldn’t. I should simply smile and nod and let him read because he gets something out of it. I don’t get good things out of it. I get weird and insecure. I find things he said years ago and I want to point at them and say, “See! You said that! That’s why I get upset!” But that is an awful thing to do. Noah is allowed to change his mind and grow as a person and do different things now. I don’t need to take previous statements about “poly is non-negotiable” (dude has actually said it. I could point at dates.) and treat them as currently true. Because it isn’t currently true. Noah doesn’t feel that way at this point. Given how his life worked then I can see why it wasn’t negotiable then, but a lot has changed. I need to trust him.
Not quite two years ago Noah and I went through a rough patch. I was really awful to him. I did some things I’m not very proud of. If a good friend of mine came to me and said they were being treated the way I was treating Noah I would tell them to run, not walk, to get out of the relationship. But he trusted me and he let me try to change things. He trusted that I loved him enough to work through what I was doing and stop hurting him. I hope his trust was well placed, I have certainly worked very hard at stopping that behavior. He trusts me.
Trust is hard and scary. In a relationship it’s so multilayered. I have to trust him and he has to trust me and we both have to be able to trust ourselves. Noah has certainly done everything possible to earn my trust. I don’t know that I have done as much to earn his trust, but he gives it anyway. I think the hardest part is trusting myself. Part of being able to trust myself has to come from knowing myself well. Right now in order to behave in the way that Noah deserves I’m going to stop reading his old lj stuff. There is nothing wrong with anything he wrote and I’m glad that record of his life exists. But I internalize things that are not about me and then create problems around that. That is something that *I* do that is not his fault or really about anything he has said. I’m not going to do it this time. I’m going to trust that I made the right decision in having a relationship with him and that he is completely telling me the truth because that is what he does. He tells me the truth when it will make me angry, when it hurts me, and when I would really rather he lie. So I have every reason to trust him and to trust my faith in him.
I picked a good man. I picked a man who is willing to work through just about any level of hardness to stay with me. It doesn’t matter what was said five years ago or three years ago. What matters is what he has said consistently since the day we got married. He has lived up to his promises. Ok. Breathe. And no being a buggy weird bitch when he gets home.
Last weekend Noah and I put together two dressers for the baby’s room. (Not that the kid will sleep or do much of anything in there for years…) Now the baby clothes can actually be sorted by size and I will be able to find various blankets and diapers and so on. Yay!
Then yesterday Miss Jenny came over early in the day and helped us with an Ikea run. We bought dressers for our bedroom and one bookshelf. At this point we expect to need three more bookshelves but we were out of room in the vehicle on that run. 🙂 I’m not 100% certain how/when the other three sets will be purchased because one set would fill our car and three runs to EPA would a pain in the ass. *grrrr* Hm. Must ponder. So Miss Jenny helped put together the first dresser. Then James arrived! He put almost all of the second dresser together by himself as Miss Jenny helped with other assorted box stuff and putting together drawers. Yay! So excited.
Then we went to the Laura Antoniou class on Protocol in Relationships. She is a very entertaining speaker. 🙂 We are going to try to get to her class tonight on Edge play. 🙂
Last night I talked to a guy I have known in the scene for years and years and he is going to come help us move stuff this weekend. Yay! So far it looks like just Cyrano is coming over on Sunday (we have tons of boxes, no really). With luck we will get all the heavy lifting stuff done. *cross fingers* Yes, Mo! I will probably delighted to have you come over on Tuesday (Monday is my class day) and help if you are able.
I have told Noah that whatever we get done as of Sunday is the end of what he needs to do for big stuff. My baby (uhm, the big one) is getting pretty badly wore out trying to keep up with his job, basic house chores, and doing the projecty stuff that I am focused on doing. It’s not very fair to him. Soon the Lizard will be here and we will both be wore out as we focus on that. I need to give him time to rest up.
Which means that progress next week is going to be very very slow as I move at a snail’s pace. 🙂
We have this list of things that needs to get done. It could all easily get done in a weekend or two if I was able to do it myself. If several people came over and helped Noah (because I can’t do basically any of it right now) it could probably get done in a few hours. Asking for help is hard. Really hard. But people keep telling me that there are actually people out there who would help me if I let them, so here I go.
These are the things that are driving me absolutely batshit because I can’t do them:
Get rid of garbage out of shed
Move empty boxes into shed (Anyone need boxes?)
Rearrange garage
Go get boxes out of storage and stop freaking paying for something that turned out to be a bad idea
Buy and set up furniture (bookshelves)
Unpack boxes from storage
Given how close we are to running out of time probably next weekend would be best. We would quite cheerfully provide food and alcohol and games to play afterwards. If people agreed in advance we could probably even fill and turn on the hot tub so people can soak after working hard.
So uhm, would uhm anyone be willing to come help?
What we have here is the top 106 books most often marked as “unread” by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you’ve read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish.
Here’s the twist: add (*) beside the ones you liked and would (or did) read again or recommend. Even if you read ’em for school in the first place. I’m also going to add (**) to books that I do actually want to read but I haven’t had time to read yet due to time crunches.
All those people who tell me that salad is good for me? Liars. Liars. Liars. When I eat salad my stomach hurts. I feel really hungry still even though there is no more room in my stomach for food matter. Salad = bad. Hate salad.
See picture? That is what I should eat. That doesn’t make my tummy hurt.
I just can’t get my head going to write these papers. I know I need to. I know that the earlier I do it the better because who knows when the Lizard will be arriving. I just can’t find focus. I’ve done the research. I’ve done more fucking research (as a procrastinating method) than I have done on any paper ever. I just cn’t figure out how to say what I want to say. I write so much better when I’m under pressure and that is terrible of me. 🙁
This is why I didn’t come down on students too hard for last minute papers unless they were obviously bad. If you can write well at the last minute, go you. If you can’t then you need the lead time for planning and editing. Me, I write best at the last minute. But it increases my stress way more than is good. Erf. Fuck it. I’m taking a bath.
I get to think about things a lot. In the past week theferrett wrote about the Open Source Boob Project. I will confess that I am not completely done with all the comments (dude–there are 1300+ of them…) but I’m a fair way into them. And I’m having a lot of thoughts about it. I think I am starting to bore Noah, so I’ll share with lj instead.
I will even cut it because it got long and I don’t want capnkjb to get mad at me. 🙂
So I’ve been feeling boring lately because all I write about is complaining about boredom. So I’ve been thinking about things.
This is what it feels like to have everything I always wanted. I have the best husband ever in the history of the world. He is supportive, communicative, willing to do anything I ask, and he’s the best sex partner I’ve ever had. That’s not a combination I thought existed. I win.
I’ve wanted to have a baby for a long time. Ok, so I haven’t had the easiest pregnancy in the history of the world–but by and large it’s not so bad. I’ve actually been aware of the bedrest risk since before I got pregnant. I have Menieres and it’s super common to end up on bedrest. It gets increasingly common as you get older which is why I needed to start having babies fairly young. (I don’t actually think that my preterm labor was related to the Menieres, but the risk was present for me anyway so I’m not as shocked as I could be.) And for all that my pregnancy isn’t the easiest it hasn’t actually been that hard. Given the prize I have at the end of the journey it’s been worth absolutely all the difficulty.
I may not live in the house of my absolute dreams, but I live in a comfortable house. We own this house and can afford the mortgage. We have all the financial safety I ever frantically aspired to. Sure, as soon as my ability to eat settles down we need to go back to cooking and stop eating out all the time, but I won’t want to go out with a baby anyway. 🙂 For now I am getting to eat out as much as my poverty-stricken-inner-little-girl wants to. This is cool.
I have amazing friends. They are supportive and awesome. When I put up a message asking to borrow DVDs within 24 hours I had more than 50 of them delivered to my house. If I were up for being social I could see people seven days a week and have good quality time with each person if I wanted. That’s really amazing to me.
So yeah. I’m happy. My life is really great. Yeah, I get angsty sometimes but that’s becoming a lower a lower percentage of my time because when I stop to think about what I have I am blown away by how awesome my life is.
And now I go snuggle my Noah.