secondhand gods

in the garden

 

In my mind, the house is full of the scent of lilacs. I say "in my mind" because I'm sure this is just the power of the purple suggestion that is just outside our window rather than reality. In reality, I'm sure our house smells like the quesadillas we had for lunch. But I still only smell the lilacs.

Blood test taken yesterday -- arm bruised but otherwise went smoothly. Got a lot of knitting done in the waiting room, observed the preponderance of freaks who show up on Fridays for blood tests. The other girl there for the 3-hour test flagged about an hour and a half in, turned pale as milk, and had to be taken to a mysterious back room to lie down. I didn't see her again. I knitted on, undeterred.

Crib purchased today. GB put it together in a flash, bless his engineer heart. It is nice but ENORMOUS. I think I could probably sleep in that sucker, in a pinch.

Thai food has just arrived and we have "Juno" and "There Will Be Blood" to watch tonight -- so I bid you Happy Weekend and adieu.

good news & bad news

The good news?

The nursery closet is now empty; I have seven bags of clothes to take to the Salvos; I have baby hangers & closet dividers and wicker baskets en route from Baby Supe R Store.

The bad news?

There's nothing else in the nursery.

The good news?

I get to eat a full-size candy bar every day for the next three days under orders from my doctor!

The bad news?

This is because I flunked my last glucose test and have to go back in for the three-hour version, and the candy bars are part of the 'special diet' to prepare for that.

Oh well. It's still a candy bar a day, right?

task for the week

I am a little panicked that we are coming into the third trimester home stretch and I feel completely unprepared for Miss Snoop. The nursery is painted and the trimwork done, except for replacing the old pink closet door with a nice new one, but we have not acquired any baby-specific furniture as of yet. And the closet is still jam-packed with miscellaneous gar-bahj that needs to be sorted, stored, or simply given or thrown away.

In the meantime, our living room and guest room have become receptacles for the steady flow of baby-related items coming into the house. And this is no doubt causing my panic to swell. It's amazing to be on the receiving end of such an outpouring of generosity, but right now there's nowhere to put it. I am a (fairly) organized person and right now we are completely not organized where the Little Miss is concerned.

We went to visit new Nephew 'Beans' this weekend. The little chap is thriving and despite a fervent reluctance to be anywhere except sleeping on my sister-in-law S.'s chest, he seems very happy and everyone is adjusting well. There was cake AND pie. There was much rejoicing. In addition, S. gave us the following:

A veritable treasure trove of beautiful baby girl clothes. Two laundry baskets stuffed full to teetering, and a garbage bag bursting at the seams. Her family on the East Coast brought about seven suitcases of baby clothes from S.'s sisters the last time they came to visit -- some boy, some girl. S. promised me all the girl clothes if she had a boy, and well, let's just say I hit the jackpot. Her family has wonderful taste in children's clothes and a staggering amount of it is brand new with tags still on.

Look at these little dresses!

The problem is that as of yet, I have nowhere to put it, so it sits in a grand glorious heap in our living room, right in front of the grandfather clock, patiently waiting our little girl's debut.

So my task for the week, while GB is away on yet another business trip, will be to start making headway on that nursery closet, get it cleared out, and get some hangers, dividers, and some baskets or bins for storage. Then I can start to sift through Miss Snoop's luxurious new wardrobe and get it properly categorized, hung up, or folded!

*sigh*

I went to the doctor earlier this week and during the course of my appointment, discussed the periodic back pain I've been experiencing lately. This is always located in the upper left quadrant of my back, near my shoulder blade, and feels like a cramp that I can't quite work out. I thought this might be some symptom of the extra weight I'm carrying, some slight strain or something, and the doctor might recommend something homeopathic and soothing, like massage, or acupuncture.

"Try eating less," she said.

Turns out my back pain is not muscle aches, it's my STOMACH. Apparently I am a hog, and when I eat too much at one sitting, with all my organs + plus Snoopette all smushed in there together, my stomach has nowhere go expand, and thus makes my back hurt.

No massage, no acupuncture?...

"You can still get those things if you want them, of course," she shrugged. "But try eating more frequently during the day, but less at a sitting. Grazing. I think you'll find that clears up your problem."

And thus the final deadly sin that I'm even vaguely interested in, that I was able to indulge in during pregnancy -- gluttony -- is snatched from my grasp.

*sigh*

4 happy years

...and still going strong.

happiness is...

A brand new baby nephew!

"Beans" was born last night at 10.59 PM and is a serene and owlish 6 lbs 6 oz. He is absolutely beautiful and sleepy and solemn...and snuzzly...and he smells good...and he has made me SO EXCITED for Miss Snoop to arrive in three months' time. I am sure that they will be fast and lifelong friends.

Congratulations to my heroic brother and his even-more-heroic wife (who endured basically a 20-hour labor and today is as cheerful as a lark!)

off the needles

In between chapters of a perplexing but somehow still-satisfying science fiction novel by Iain Banks, and when I am not holding down the fort at the increasingly hysterical Widget Central, I have actually been doing some knitting. I'm not sure how much more productive I'll be with the needles this week, though, as I have a stack of books on the bedside table that includes Joyce Carol Oates' Wild Nights! With the cast of characters she's drawing from -- Poe, Hemingway, Dickinson -- it beckons me like a hefty, turn of the century 'Us Weekly' gossip magazine. But I digress.

Exhibit 1: Beanie and bootie set. The beanie is Leslie's design and the booties are from the Knitting to Go deck by Kris Percival. I used US 6 dpns for both and the yarn is the ever-delicious Debbie Bliss Cashmerino in sage and dusty lavender.

Exhibit 2: Baby kimono from Mason-Dixon Knitting, done in Cleckheaton Fiddle Dee Dee. This yarn is 100% cotton, originally purchased at Wool Baa in Albert Park, Melbourne. This is probably the nicest cotton yarn I've ever found -- it's incredibly soft and nubbly with none of that "dishcloth cotton" feel that some cotton yarn has. I bought two skeins of it when we lived in Melbourne and it sat in my stash for a long time. I finally used it last year, and immediately wished I'd stocked up before we moved back to the US. I had a tough time finding more online when I wanted to knit Snoop something, and paid a mint for it to be shipped from Australia, where it's made. I'm not sure if it's been discontinued, but if we ever go back to Australia for a visit, I'm taking one empty suitcase just for Cleckheaton Fiddle Dee Dee and Tim Tams!

I also have a Baby Yoda jacket in a state of near-completion, with one mere sleeve left to knit and the other pieces on stitch holders. I originally saw this pattern on Sooz's website in a larger size, and on her rave recommendation I just had to knit one too. However, I started it well before I knew Snoopy was a girl, and selected a more coarse, natural colored cotton that I thought would be perfect for the little boy I assumed Snoopy was. It has a very granola, Whole Foods kind of feel to it.

I'm not someone who will select all pink for a little girl, by any means, but I might have to crochet a little flower or something for the lapel just in case she is as bald as I was, and people mistake her for a little boy! (My own mother admits to Scotch-taping bows to my head.)

sunday

 

...from an actual Widget Central memorandum...

"Just want to remind everyone that if you have any packaging peanuts take
them back to shipping don't put them in the Styrofoam recycle container
because they need to be kept separate.

The recycle container labeled toner is also for ink
cartridges, I have ordered more labels to apply to the containers.

We are working on reducing the electrical usage but still there
is a lot of waste going on, so please if you leave a meeting room
shut the lights off. If it's the middle of the day do you really need your
desk light on. Do you use everything that is plugged in to your power strip
all the time? If you are the first one in early in the morning do you
really need to turn every light on?

Also Chef Ralf wants me to let everyone know he switched to Dill pickles."

I'm not sure if everyone in the company found this funny, or if it was just me, but quite frankly it was the best email I got all day.

randoms

• "The Monsters of Templeton" is really very good (thank you NY Times Book Review!)
• Reddi Whip makes any kind of bland dessert even better.
• When confronted with the prospect of a hard frost in April, red squirrels are capable of making incredible leaps from amazingly distant pieces of lawn furniture onto tempting bird feeders.
• My lesson for the day at Widget Central was: write your name on your Lean Cuisine before trustingly storing it in the second-floor town hall freezer. I walked in at lunchtime today, rummaged through the freezer, and found my meal GONE. There were several other frozen entrees there, but all of them contained meat and I do not tend to purchase anything except the vegetable ones, because I find the meat in any kind of frozen meal to be "Smeat" and horrid and gristly and gag-worthy. I immediately uttered some foul oaths and proclaimed to the two startled bystanders using the microwaves, "SOMEONE STOLE MY LUNCH!" There was a moment of shocked silence and then one of them politely said, "REALLY? What was it?" I advised him as to the type of Lean Cuisine it had been. The other bystander gave a guilty start and said, "Oh, I'm microwaving that right now!" I fixed her with a gimlet eye and she said hastily that her HUSBAND had packed her Lean Cuisine for her that morning and she hadn't known what kind it was, so she had just pulled one out of the Widget Central freezer that "seemed right." She surrendered it without a fight and then went over to the freezer and blithely pulled another meal out without reading the box. I was on the verge of asking, "Meathead, if you don't know what kind he packed you -- EVEN THOUGH YOU ARE THE ONE WHO TOOK IT OUT OF YOUR LUNCH BAG AND PUT IT IN THE WIDGET CENTRAL FREEZER AT SOME POINT -- then how do you know THAT is yours?" But since I had recovered my lunch, it was not my job to safeguard some other poor sap's Sesame Chicken from the slavering wolfpack who exist on the second floor of Widget Central. Write your name on things. To her credit, she did seem properly horrified that she had practically taken food out of the mouth of a six-month-pregnant woman. I shudder to think what might have happened if I'd arrived at the freezer a few minutes later.