Wednesday, May 28, 2008

Maybe I should get a GPS...

So, our Wednesday night crew are coming to our new place tonight, and I decided that I wanted to make sushi. I remembered, about a year and a half ago, stumbling upon an asian grocery with a friend while we were on our way back from somewhere. I couldn't remember exactly where we were on our way back from, but I had a general idea of the direction, and I was about 80% sure of the road that it was on. So far so good. I can usually find my way back to somewhere I've been to before with some amount of trial and error. As long as I'm coming from the same direction.

But then I decided that I needed an oil change. And the closest Jiffy Lube was about five miles away, and not at all in the same direction as where I imagined the asian grocery to be. But not in the opposite direction, either, that would have made things too easy. They were three corners of a triangle, and I decided that I could cut across the top of the triangle and save myself some time. I was even a good little girl and tried to look the directions up in my map book, but unfortunately, we live on the top edge of the map book, and I had traveled even further north, out of map range. So I just started driving.

Then I passed a Goodwill, so I decided, on a whim, to stop and see if I could find any decent maternity clothes. Or a decent table for the new place. I generally consider a trip to a thrift store a success if I find one thing worth buying, and I'm ecstatic if I find more than two or three things. Today, I found a total of nine items of maternity clothing that fit me and I liked. Pretty awesome. I figured, at this point, I had probably used up all of my good thrift store karma, but decided to check out the furniture anyhow. And I found a gorgeous dining room table, in nice heavy wood, with two leaf inserts to make it big enough to seat about 12, and with only a few scratches on the finish that could easily be refinished away, but would be covered by a tablecloth most of the time anyhow, so were not a big concern to me. There were no chairs I liked, but my karma had to run out at some point. Best of all, I got out of there spending only $50 on everything together. Take that, Ikea.

I also caved at this point and called Jeremy to see if he could get directions for me online, and I carefully wrote down the route he gave to me. Then I missed a turn somewhere along the line, and ended up about 5 miles north of where I wanted to be. So, I called him again, and got fresh directions from my new location.

As I was driving along, still not 100% sure of where I was going, I passed Big Lots. Then I remembered where I had been coming back from with my friend when we found the Asian grocery. Big Lots! So, I stopped in to see if I could pick up a few of those random household things that you always seem to need to get when you move. Like a broom and a dustpan and a kitchen trash can and an ice cream sandwich (okay, fine, that last one had more to do with being pregnant than moving). I even managed to pick up a remanufactured Hoover vacuum cleaner for about 1/5 of the normal retail price. Score.

And, believe it or not, I even found the asian grocery after that. It was right where I had thought it was, and I probably would have saved myself a lot of time and energy if I had just driven home first and gone there "the long way". But then I wouldn't have found so many awesome things on my random shopping stops. I managed to find everything I wanted at the grocery (which, for my later reference more than anything else, was called "Assi" and is just north-west of 202 on 63). I even found some things I wasn't looking for, like red bean mochi. Yum. I had also forgotten that this particular asian grocery was also, for some reason obviously not related to geography, a hispanic grocery. So now I know where to go to get maseca and queso fresco the next time I have a hankering for pupusas. Mmmm... pupusas...

Tuesday, May 20, 2008

You should try soft pretzels with ranch dressing. Yum.

So, I disappeared for another month. This is starting to become a bit of a habit. Maybe I should just change the by-line of the website to, "Now with monthly updates!" Then we will all know what to expect.

Speaking of expecting, Auggie is doing well. She (and yes, I am using the feminine pronoun in a gender-uncertain context; I blame going to law school in Canada for that tendency) has become extraordinarily active in the past month. She remains almost completely quiet the entire time I am at work, and then as soon as I am at rest, she likes to disturb my rest with pokes and prods and kicks and jabs that cause me no end of amusement. Except when I am trying to sleep. Then they are less amusing.

I learned an important lesson this Sunday in church: Don't wear shirts that are skin-tight across your six-month pregnant belly if you want to be able to pay attention to the sermon. Auggie loves music, and whenever I sit down after singing or drumming, she decides to keep the beat going for a while. This week, "for a while" lasted throughout the entire service. I kept laughing, because you could actually see my belly bounce up every time she kicked it. And, of course, the other people in my row kept looking at me to see why I was laughing, and then they would see the little kicks, and laugh, too. I really hope the pastor was trying to be funny, because an entire section of the church was suppressing giggles for the entire sermon.

My mom turned sixty this year, and I turned thirty, so we decided that we should do something special to celebrate this once-in-a-lifetime "I am half your age and both our ages end in zero" event. So, we went to see a Broadway show with my sister and her mother-in-law. Believe it or not, this was my first Broadway show. I saw "Phantom of the Opera" in Toronto when I was 11, but this was my first New York City Broadway with a Capital 'B' Broadway show. It was awesome. We had coal oven baked pizza for lunch, and saw a matinee so that my sister could get back in time to feed her baby before bedtime. I snuck my baby into the show without buying her a ticket (shhhh....) but I'm glad I did, because I think I have a Broadway baby. Easily the most active Auggie has ever been was during the big choral numbers of the show. I wonder how young is too young to start your child in tap lessons?

The show was Curtains, with David Hyde Pierce (and a couple of other people from "Frasier," too), and it was amazing. But then again, I am no Broadway critic. I probably would have been starstruck and impressed by anything.

My sister sent me a picture of the four of us outside after the show. I'm the fat one in the purple shirt.

Broadway

So, let's see, what else has been going on in my life in the past month or so? I spent most of the month of April quite sick. I even went to my doctor because I thought I had something serious like mono (and, if you know me at all, you'll know that it takes a lot to get me to believe that I am sick enough to go to the doctor). Fortunately, I did not have mono. Unfortunately, I did not have anything treatable, so I just had to stick it out until the pollens changed and my allergies died down a bit. Yeah, allergies. I spent a whole month sick from allergies, and there is not a single blooming drug that you can take for allergies while you're pregnant. I've never had allergies like this before though, so I can only hope that it was just some kind of fluke combination of a bad pollen season and being pregnant and having no immune system, and that I won't ever get them like this again.

Meanwhile, I have still been working full-time at the store, which has left me completely drained. Eight hour days on your feet the entire time is pretty exhausting when you're simultaneously building a human being. The paperwork hasn't gone through yet, but hopefully, by the end of the month, I will be down to part-time hours. Then I might just maybe have time to blog more than once a month again. And get that daily nap that I was supposed to stop needing about 13 weeks ago when I entered the second trimester.

Oh yeah, and we also moved. See? This is what happens when I only blog once a month. I forget to mention big things like moving all the way back to the opposite side of the city, to a lovely townhouse that we have yet to move all of our crap into, so it still looks nice. Or at least, it still looks new and empty, which is nice in its own right.

This just proves to me that I need to blog more often. I still don't think I wrote about my trip to Florida in March. I definitely didn't get to write about the lovely day I spent in Princeton with Katie and Mike and Isla (and Squidgy), who were down from Canada for a conference. Nor did I write about the fantastic weekend, albeit cold, that I spent in a Virginia forest with a bunch of story-gamers playing all sorts of fun games. Jeremy even learned how to make boffer weapons out of PVC and duct tape.

Jeremy's weapons

But, when you're always either working or sleeping, and you manage to squeeze in a day (or even a weekend) to do something fun for yourself, you pay for it afterwards with extra working and sleeping. Hence the infrequent blog posts. I've been told that now is the time to do things for myself, to go on trips and have fun, because it's the last chance I'll have to do those things without having to figure out how to include or make alternate arrangements for the baby. I'm not 100% convinced by this argument, because I'm truly looking forward to sharing camping trips and, one day down the road, games and Broadway shows, with Auggie. But I do understand that, in just a few short months, my life will be changed irrevocably, and if there is something I really want to do now, I should do it now, before my life and priorities are turned completely upside down.

That said, I am making it my goal to thoroughly enjoy my third trimester. And yes, all of you mothers out there, I heard that snigger you just made. But really, I have been so tired and overworked for the first two trimesters, I have had very little chance to enjoy myself and my pregnancy. But I'll be dropping to part-time hours, I have several trips planned, and, always subject to providence throwing me a curve ball, I want to make the most of this. I might even (wait for it...) blog more often! I have a few ideas for the third trimester, including a weight/date pool and featured guest belly artists. Wow, I don't think I've ever done a "coming attractions" thing on this blog before. I guess I'm stuck with it, now!