why do i always want to look at webcomics when i’m ready to go to bed?

work all day in the noonday sun, fifteen cents when saturday comes

i have become really, really awkwardly pregnant this week - awkwardly sleeping, reaching to get things, moving in general, won’t be able to fit in the bathroom stalls at the local in two more weeks. if i bend over to get something it’s so obvious that i’m squishing a baby. not that i’m hurting him/her, but it feels weird. and i want weird food all the time. and i’m super tired all over again. mikey has been very good to me. brown:

paisley has never taken anything off the kitchen counter in her life. never. it took me quite awhile to be certain that i had, in fact, made six pieces of bruschetta. not four. a single guilty tail thump and big brown eyes gave her away, but since i’d awoken that morning crying from a dream where we accidentally left her at a gas station in the middle of a blizzard, i could not be mad. it was way worse than any baby-leaving dreams, and i gave her treats and extra lovin’ all day, and i guess she just thought the bruschetta was for her, too.

a coworker’s wife looked at me yesterday, without asking if i knew the baby’s sex, and matter-of-factly informed me that i’m carrying a girl.

listening: tony allen in my head
reading: rereading the lovely bones, which i bought for fifty cents to replace the one that a high school friend borrowed from my mom and never returned :)

either way we could drive all night

i’m waiting for mikey to get home. i thought he was supposed to be here about now, but he hasn’t yet called to say that he’s left and he’s two hours away. i want to go to sleep but i hate going to sleep if he’s not here, because what if he’s still not here when i wake up. i spaced out looking at the bulletin boards hanging above my sewing table and wondered how i’m going to take them apart when we leave. solution: i won’t. i’ll just put all the flat stuff in a new poster frame and hang it in my future craft room. it’s taken two years to compile the following top layer - it’s hard to tell what’s underneath (it’s like my bedroom door in high school, and how my mom took a hundred photos before i stripped it all off, and then we carefully x-acto knifed everything apart and put it in a binder… it was like an archealogical dig):

a “keep from freezing” label from something - a penguin inside a no smoking symbol - from manda. card made by maggie. xmas photo of jaxson & logan. paint chip that’s the color emm painted her old bedroom. really old photo of m & i. imperfect button: a thistle. business card from alwaysamy.etsy.com. photo of mikey playing at 123. birthday card envelope from janet - lost quote & drawing of island. photo of josh & amanda. clint & kelly. luke & rachel. manda & emm. “take the handmade pledge” postcard. some foggies promo card from bar table. store hours of art supply shop in town. really old photo of me / jk / ginny / danielle. canada flag postcard. giant cardboard pickle. cardboard pack from “mountaineer gum”. metal leaf from mario & jenn’s wedding tables. card with e.e. cummings bit. harry potter glasses hanging from paisley’s baby collar. piece of notepaper with ABCs written by cana. postcard with penguins. scrap of wrapping paper with a penguin and a manda-drawn-word-bubble (can’t tell what it says). fuzzy penguin pez dispenser keychain. “no one makes you shop at walmart” postcard. wv highlands conservancy bumper sticker. scrap of paper with one of mikey’s paisley songs written on it. photo of angie / janet / me. eric & colleen. lomo photo of ryan jumping off a little cliff into bluehole. pj & kelly’s xmas photo-collage-card from last year. etsy postcard. bryn-drawn show flyer. another metal leaf. a few buttons that were given to me - can’t tell what they are. mom-drawn/painted crucifix. handwritten instructions for a ironing on a patch that marybeth made. two penguin postcards. etsy sticker. strip from contact sheet - sequence photos of danielle falling down. 1950s-looking postcard (housewife, old television, calder mobile). a half-covered xmas card. little high lonesome wednesdays flyer. two rubber bands. photo of andy. tiny sketch from envelope of a card or letter from claire. a hilarious note that elisa taped to the ice dispenser at panera three years ago. a photo of a vegetable-person that my uncle made & sent to us. photo of andy. vintage saddle brooch. bumper sticker (the “5% of the world’s people consume a third of it’s resources…” fact). honeymoon photo. package of pencil top erasers (eraser dancing shoes, to me). photo of parents’ house in the winter. tiny engraved metal thing on chain - “live with intention”. mandatory business meeting memo from dallas & rosie’s xmas card last year. polaroid of rusty something or other that’s round and has ivy growing on it (from an abandoned idea to take lots of square polaroids of round things - i think i took three). wedding photo. black bear sticker. really awful, hugely printed grammatical error from a rolling stone ad a few years ago, and the corrected, but otherwise identical line from the next month taped underneath. photo of mag / em / erin. em / danielle / toni / amber. “one by one the penguins steal my sanity” postcard. imperfect button: map of somewhere. my name written in arabic, guava postage stamp stuck to this. imperfect button: horse. photo of mario & jenn. mikey’s half of the best friend neckalces that he has with cana (i just realized there should also be a rosary hanging here and it’s gone). some canada buttons that someone gave me. old photo of manda. penguin keychain. budweiser coaster shaped like wv (i have no idea where this came from, but there’s another one in our kitchenshit drawer). lebowskifest bumper sticker (the dude is not in). eat locally bumper sticker. little row of other people’s etsy promo buttons. cardboard carrot that i think advertises an organic grocery store on the back. some guitar picks stuck in the frame. six or so feet of holographic penguins strung across the top. prototype of felt bowtie pasta. itty bitty oval piece of cardstock that’s a template for something and that’s the only place i can put it where it won’t get lost, and a little charm that someone gave me hanging from the t-pin that’s keeping this from going astray. i don’t know where the t-pin came from.

and feed them on your dreams, the one they pick’s the one you’ll know by

this morning i cut off a bunch of my hair for entertainment - the longest parts were six inches. i don’t think i could give myself a super-short haircut or i would have. i only care what my hair looks like about 35% (and most of that is “does it look clean enough or do i HAVE to shower?”), but i would probably seriously butcher myself and feel stupid. i might have to break down and get a proper paid-for haircut for the first time in… almost three years? there’s an aveda school nearby that gives $16 haircuts. but i’d need a $16 haircut every month if i went really short again… i’m talking freshman-in-college short. i’m talking look like a boy in a winter hat, although maybe having boobs full of milk will make me look less like a guy. a $16 haircut every month for total ease of care with a baby around, no need to buy conditioner, and no need to blowdry my hair in the winter (i almost passed out today - i don’t think i’ve used a hairdryer during this entire pregnancy)? i don’t knowwwwwwww. i’ve been agonizing over this since the beginning of summer at least. i thought this morning’s scissor fest might make it go away for awhile, but it only made it worse. i spent 45 minutes this evening looking at short haircuts on flickr. i suppose this is better than the 45 minutes i spent last night looking at kitchen canister sets. just kitchen canister sets.

after that i spent a few hours hanging out with this little beauty, and her mama (due five days after us!) contribued a bag of american coinage to my pisatchio mixer fund!

and then i ate the following things all in a row: sushi, rice pudding, three waffles, two oranges, a bowl of cereal, and half a box of hot tamales. the past couple of weeks my food wants have been out of control, as are my hormones. good thing i’m still walking three miles a day or i’d come out of this thing looking like a whale instead of just a deflated sneetch. i sent manda the whiniest email ever one day - about 24873829347 different things, none of which were very important/worth whining about - and she replied with “ok, now i believe that you’re pregnant”. after my pigout i cried so hard for the last half hour of the notebook that paisley hid in the bathroom, and then got up, still crying really hard, and cleaned the kitchen for half an hour. wheee!! who needs six flags??

mikey and my tripod are gone at a conference so i tried to take my own belly photo. it’s not very effective at all. sorry. next weekend, i promise.

there is no bluegrass until the wednesday after labor day - boo. at least they will be replaced with other good bluegrass while they do their workshop-teaching out west, and tomorrow morning we are going to the bluegrass brunch at the dakota tavern to see our friend rob’s new band. this week was our one-year bluegrassaversary. *tear* we collectively missed one wednesday at christmas (not sure that they even played - it was boxing day), and have each missed one other wednesday because we were out of town. that’s committment. we’ve definitely been laughed at and had drinks bought for us for some of the winter nights that we ventured out when there were like, four people there. i don’t know what i’m going to do when the babe arrives and i can’t go anymore (cry), but the occasional times that i pawn The Kid off on mikey for a few hours so i can go out with my girls… i suppose that will make all the missing worth it.

listening: crosby, stills, nash & young
reading: harry potter

only two things:

1.) i am almost done with the book. today i was so tired i felt like my head was going to fall off. kelly, when i move home can we have horse shows in our moms’ yards and give each other blue ribbons? i’m seriously not horse show material, but this book makes me want to be. we already have plenty of fancy cowboy shirts that we can borrow in our immediate circle of life-people. our backyard horse shows could happen in conjunction with the mutt-dog show.

2.) andy drew this for mikey & it makes me so happy. it’s his “beast-niece”… as are the kiddens. he has three beast-nieces and one niecephew. i particularly love how andy will automatically adopt any nonsense name that mikey has for our animals as if it’s the most logical thing in the world. he quickly picked up on “dordy” and “padle-badel” (as in padel-badel 1-2-3 has to pee, wee wee wee). i can hardly wait to see what they come up with for The Kid…

the fairest love i ever had now sleeps beneath the clay

mikey just taught himself a song on banjo while i took a bath. he can play a recording over and over a few times and then just… do it. he just kind of brushes this off as no big deal, but boasts loudly from the kitchen when he figures out an efficient way to rinse out a salad dressing bottle before throwing it in the recycling.

fetus is going nuts lately. i can feel knees or elbows or feet poking out sometimes and can almost always tell where the head is. (s)he is awake a lot more of the day than when i first started noticing a pattern in movements, and i’m pretty sure uterus-danceparty is what kept waking me up last night. we’re T-75 days to due date (for whatever that is worth) and i think mikey is more terrified than ever, even though we’ve enlisted the presence of a priest at the birth. yay for friends who are not afraid of blood & placenta.

kelly lent me this book when we were home and i finally got around to starting it tonight. i sat in a bath reading until i was frigid. tonight’s impending sleep deprivation brought to you by kelly strauttmann, smooth belly by jenn kellner, and this blog entry sponsored by jan iafrate.

i also keep meaning to endorse the pit crystal. i’ve been using one for the whole summer and it’s fabulous - it has survived hikes at home and many sweltering-pregnant walks to and from work and some definite three day stretches of no showering (it only works on already-clean pits). tryin’ to keep chemicals out of the canadian’s blood supply, ya’ know, plus the thing is apparently going to last for twenty years because it doesn’t seem to have diminished at all.

listening: husband banjo
reading: kelly book

suppose you see a face in a toyota one day

i just had an update written and when i tried to post it the internet fell apart and now it’s gone. this is all you get:

that, and if anyone can finish that poem that would be good, because all i can remember is the line about the toyota. manda can, i’m sure.

also, you should go buy some jewelry from my etsy shop so i can pay my $7.00 website fee without having to wait days and days for money to come out of our bank account.  :)

welp.

even as someone who is completely unable to handle dog deaths (it takes me about five seconds to cry if i think about one of my dogs dying, zero seconds when they actually do die, i’m getting a lump in my throat now), i don’t even know what to think about this. i want to know: is she keeping all five boogers?

after an hour of reading about the manitoba bus decapitation - i do this every day, i can’t make myself stop - i finally went in search of “real” news. that was what i found.

andy’s flight was delayed so they aren’t back from the airport yet. ella is coming over but she’s not here yet, either.

oh good, paisley is mooing to be taken outside. something to do.

edit: so weird

talked about nothin’, how it might snow

today we went grocery shopping and cleaned to get ready for andy’s vis’tin (tomorrow!!!), and the whole time i was thinking about kelly’s blog post about their return to wv, and how mikey and i may compare when we move back. we have been here two years, and my feelings are still mixed. i love this city, but i do not love living in it. we have made lots of great friends and have a community that i will happily bring a child into, but the majority of our like-minded friends are still the ones from home (and the ones in our own families - how did we get so lucky?). i know that we will be leaving behind lots of irreplacable people and things when we move back home, but i also know that the kind of life that we want is just… not possible here. literally not possible. i’m sure there are people living simple, slow, sustainable lives in the middle of every big city in the world, but i don’t know how to do it, and i’m not going to break my brain trying to wrap it around city living as long as i know we’re leaving someday soon. i just carry on my country mentality from the 17th floor in a city of 2.5 million humans and half a million dogs. there are a hundred things happening on any given night and we rarely do any of them because we don’t need to be entertained. i love nothing more than to run into someone that i know and i wish all the time that i could porch-sit. i’m really happy that we’ll be spending the begining of our child’s life here, since living in canada/the city offers so much to new parents that america/rural living just couldn’t, and i think it will be a lot easier here even though we will be hours from our closest friends and all of our family. but i will be happy to leave. i will tattoo a maple leaf somewhere (because my mother is always right) and cry every wednesday night for months and happily embrace the turmoil of feeling shocked and displaced all over again… in the one place that i want to stay forever, and the only place that will ever be home.

so anyway, since i made myself really homesick and citysick with all of that thinking, i counted my pistachio mixer fund. i’ve been saving american change for two years and i’m at $60.00. don’t think i’m gonna make it, although mikey has never contributed his own american change and said he would do so from now on after promptly dropping fifty-five cents from his pocket into the giant whiskey bottle, and my mom has a joint fund in my bedroom at home with some unknown amount of money in it. maybe i should start fining myself two dollars into the fund every time i am too lazy/tired to cook and we get takeout… although this doesn’t happen very often.

paisley was on a hunger strike for two and a half days - all she ate between friday morning and yesterday evening was beggin strips and peanut butter toast crusts. she finally ate a little bit of food at dinnertime, and today she seems normal again. i think city depression hit her full force after mildly sulking since we got back - she layed around pouting and did NOTHING until yesterday. i was getting worried. maybe she needs prozac. today she was her normal self, taking things out of the trash can and gutting a new toy and wiggling all over whenever we saw a security guard outside (she loves our security guards).

yesterday i made kool-aid for the first time since i lived with mary (who has nothing to do with my former kool-aid consumption, i just know that’s the last time i made it)… i don’t know why i wanted it. i promptly chugged three glasses and the canadian went NUTS about half an hour later and then got the hiccups for the first time that we could feel. i hope i didn’t damage his/her brain with all that sugar. i don’t know why that doesn’t happen when i drink coke, which is about the only other sugary thing i consume. i’ve let myself drink a few a week in this deathly-summer-heat, because freezy mugs of coke are the only cure, and that has never happened.

back hurts - time for bed & book. or chips-salsa-hubby-couch.

listening: gillian in my head
reading: rereading the half-blood prince

weeks 25 and 26