Still Here (sort of)

(About a month ago, I drove MH to school and we were EARLY. She asked to "drive" while we waited and then demanded that I take her picture. Yes ma'am.)

I haven't been blogging because I literally have nothing to say. Well, that's not entirely true. I am deep into a Fringe marathon, so I can talk about that. And I can complain about pregnancy ENDLESSLY. Oh, and I can do both at the same time: Faux-livia only had to be pregnant for like ONE DAY. Of course, she had to give birth on the floor of a crappy dollar store and then her baby ended up getting erased when the time line reset, but still. Almost worth it.

Anyway, there's not much else going on. Maybe next week I'll have something interesting to talk about.

Peeing Fast or Peeing Comfy

Fun fact: last time I checked my blog stats, more than half of the Google search terms that led to my blog were about peeing and pooping. To stay true to this tradition, can I just say that I love that my office has these things? 

(Yes, this is an actual picture of the dispenser. So I was the perv who brought her phone into the public bathroom TO TAKE A PICTURE.)

What are these things called, paper toilet seat cover thingies? Yeah, that's probably the technical term. Anyway, I never used them before because I never needed them. It reminds me of my favorite King of the Hill moment where Hank is having trouble peeing (probably due to his narrow urethra) and Peggy says, "Well, sit down if you have to. I sit down. When I have to." (You know, I was tempted to make a meme of this but then I realized that I was about to waste a ridiculous amount of time doing something truly stupid, so instead I just watched three episodes of Fringe and pretended to fill out a spreadsheet. WORK.)

Fact is, I always prided myself on being really fast at peeing. Like if we both have to go to the bathroom at the same time, I always have to wait for Jonathan. Take that, gender stereotypes!

But with this pregnancy, I've gotten progressively lazy and have come to fully embrace sitting down. And sure I'll eat food off the floor, but I'm not completely disgusting, so these paper toilet seat cover thingies are awesome.

Oh, and one more thing: the other day I was changing MH's really shitty diaper and she goes, "Poop is yuck. It's nothing like ice cream." You think a kid with so much potty wisdom would stop shitting her pants, but no such luck.

Randoms

What can I say? I've been sick, pregnant, and grading. If I'd blogged at all last week, it would have just been me bitching about swollen feet or the audacity of my students (who are all grown ups, by the way) or how the weather is too hot and then too cold--sometimes, you just feel like bitching, right?

Anyway, I'm feeling a lot better. My cold has subsided (a day in bed watching Fringe on the iPad was just the thing). I am 32 weeks pregnant. Huh. That seems like a lot until I realize that I have 8 weeks left--possibly more--and I already feel pregnant up to my eyeballs. Doesn't it already seem like I've been pregnant for a really long time? I have. And it's not just me. I complained about being pregnant on Facebook, and one of my friend's moms commented about how she couldn't believe I was having my third already. Because she just assumed that I must have had my second already because didn't I get pregnant a long time ago? Yes. LAST YEAR. How do elephants do it? I bet that's why they all go crazy in the zoo because they are already unhinged by their ridiculously long pregnancies.

So that this isn't only a post about being pregnant and hating it (seriously, any woman who tells you she loved being pregnant probably also loved high school), we woke up this weekend with a bird flying around in our room. I'm sure there's some hillbilly wisdom about how that is terrible luck, but it was kind of cool. Oh, and MH announced one night at dinner: "I pooped a lot! Like a dolphin!" And when I asked her what she meant, she said, "Splashing in the water!"

Hitting Home

MH's new favorite thing is to hit something/body while screaming "High ya!"

(I tried to tell her that hitting wasn't nice and she responded, "Mama, I'm gonna bite you!" Which is what I get when trying to reason with a toddler dressed as a tiger.)

The first time she did it, I was all indignant, like, "What boy at school taught you how to do that? Was it Carson?" Because where else would my child have learned such behavior?

Later, MH and I were watching a few episodes of Adventure Time and seriously, there was Finn, hitting and screaming "High ya!" for five full minutes.

Huh. So I guess I owe Carson an apology.

Could be worse. With all the 1960s Disney movies we've been watching lately, she could be doing racist impressions or acting drunk.

(PS- Yay Mickey Rooney for famously doing both!)

Kinda Sorta After Pictures

I wouldn't call these "after" shots. But at least you can see the paint job, which is actually much more silver than it looks in this poor lighting/shitty iPhone pics. 

I still need to "style" these shelves, but as you can see, X-Files is on. When I want to be distracted from Anabeth Gish's terrible acting, I look up at the empty shelves and try to imagine what I should put up there. I'm gonna do my best impression of an Apartment Therapy house tour and vignette the shit out of those shelves. I even bought a couple of baskets and everything. 

As you can see, the paint job didn't solve the biggest problem, which is that I'm still a lazy slob. BUT, I think it solved the next biggest problem, which is my ugly couch. I find it way less offensive now and might even spend some money on a couple of throw pillows, which is the couch version of when the Bachelor gives out roses to the lucky ladies.

Anyway, I'm slowly working on this, but my inability to lift heavy things/bend over/climb ladders really hampers my progress. You should have seen me trying to garden the other day. Even my toddler was laughing at me.

April 16

(Amherst, summer of 2001.)

It's hard to write about the Boston Marathon. Just like everybody else, I'm filled with sadness and fear and anger. I'm also selfishly thankful. My brother-in-law usually watches the race from the finish line and for some reason he decided not to this year. He always was a lucky sonofabitch. 

The Boston Marathon was actually our first date. Today is twelve years that we've been together. The Marathon is a lot like Derby. People take the day off from work, school. It's an excuse for a whole city to shut down and get drunk on the street. I met Jonathan in Kenmore Square and we walked up Beacon to go "watch" the Marathon at my friends apartment. This involved eating burgers and drinking a lot of beer. 

It just so  happened that Easter had been the day before, and my cousin (the Venture Capitalist) had been in town from Ithaca, forcing me to go to church, etc. Anyway, so everybody knew that my cousin had been in town and when I introduced Jonathan, most just assumed that he was my cousin.

Let's just say, things got a little confusing when Jonathan and me started kissing on the couch. 

I hate what happened yesterday. How an asshole with a bomb (or a gun) can rip away our illusion of safety, make us scared of going out into the world. But seriously, fuck those assholes. I hope twice as many people show up to the Marathon next year, as drunk and happy as if the Red Sox just won the World Series. And meanwhile, I'm gonna try to remember a better Marathon, the one where I started falling in love with the future father of my babies. 

I'm a terrible employee some more!

(Maybe if I worked with these bitches I'd be much more inclined to socialize.) 

Yesterday, I showed a bit about my work ("work") flow. Today, I'll talk about how I'm an awful employee some more. I'm also a bitch!

I don't socialize. It's kind of like how I don't wish people Happy Birthday on Facebook. I know I'll forget to wish everybody a happy birthday--and some people aren't really my friends but just people I like to spy on occasionally, so I really don't care if they have a happy birthday or not. But the issue is, where do you draw the line? Do you only wish people you know in real life happy birthday? (In which case, can't you just tell them next time you see them?) People you like? It soon becomes obvious, if one were to pay attention to these things, that there is a definite hierarchy of affection going on. So I just choose to not ever do it. Ever. The closest I'll come is if somebody else wishes a person happy birthday, I'll Like that comment.

Anyway, this is my approach to socializing at work, except times a thousand because it's in the real world. First of all, I never go out to lunch. If there is a birthday lunch or something, I never go. I actually like many of my coworkers, and I like going out to eat, enough to almost make the chit chat worth while, but since I've already gone ten months without attending a single work outing, I feel like it's almost rude if I start going now. Will the people who had their birthdays last month be resentful that I'm going to the birthday lunch this month? Better to just shun everybody equally.

I also don't engage anybody in small talk. I don't ask about people's babies. I don't care where you went on vacation and if you had fun. And I'm obviously not friends with anybody I work with on Facebook. I mean, I'm not rude. If somebody starts a conversation, I converse right back. I've lived in Kentucky for most of my life, so I can small talk with the best of them. "How about this weather!" "Is your offspring really that old! My, does time fly!" And then I quickly walk back to my desk and resume the episode of Bones I was watching.

Oh, and one more thing: when people bring in cookies or cakes or things--especially when they are homemade--I don't eat them. This is for two reasons:

1. I feel like if I'm not going to play along with the whole socializing at work thing, then I don't deserve the rewards that go with it. (Especially since it would never ever occur to me to bake a cake just to bring to work.)
2. I imagine people's dirty kitchens and suddenly all of the treats seem disgusting. Which is totally ridiculous. I am a person who will eat something that fell on the floor. In public.

The one thing I will do is go to the office baby showers and knit something for the baby. But that's just because I really like knitting and will inflict my hand knits upon any half willing schmo.

Anyway, I don't know if it's this particular office, or just working in an office in general, but at my previous jobs, I was always very social. The catch was that almost all extracurricular work events involved booze. Knitting too, but mostly booze. I don't think this current crop of coworkers are really the drinky types, and I doubt these birthday lunches are drinking affairs. Not to mention I'm knocked up. Whatever, it's their loss.

Now I'm going to go mingle with my REAL coworkers, Special Agents Mulder and Scully.