things about people

mikey’s banjo is giving him a rash.

all of my friends are beautiful.

also, a book by someone that i know just came up as one of my three main amazon recommendations! mikey did the (subject) index for this book. i have no idea why it’s in my recommendations (except that i have probably bought similar things for him via amazon), but brian had what was perhaps one of my most favorite pregnancy reactions: he scooped me into his arms, planted a giant kiss on my cheek, and loudly exclaimed “i heard the bugger knocked you up!!” in the middle of a roomful of composed academics.

in 72 hours i will be home

mikey and i have talked some, even pre-pregnancy, about the extent to which we will (or won’t) try to keep overly commercialized characters out of our home. spiderman/batman, starwars, gi joes, classic peanuts, and few others don’t enter my brain when i mull it over - just scarier things. it started when all of my friends started having babies and i saw how often they were lavished with disney and pooh and baby elmo and precious moments, and it hit fever pitch when i worked in the toystore from hell and saw kids reaching critical mass over spongebob and hello kitty and nemo and bratz and dora and the backyardigans and and and. i know hello kitty has been around forever - *i* had hello kitty stuff when i was a kid. i have laughed at spongebob and eaten his fruit snacks. i’ve never seen finding nemo but i would probably be amused and that fish has a soft spot in my heart because of the scene from lost. there is just something about the characters that you can plaster on EVERYTHING in your kid’s life - toys, clothes, eating utensils, bedding, shower curtains, food, diapers, probably freaking toilet paper - that i cannot stand. superheroes are my exception to this for some reason - they don’t make me mad. i would like for photos of family members to be more prominent in our house, and more recognizable, than some yellow sponge with arms and legs.

anyway, i think i have added another exception to my list (not that i WANT superheroes or yoda or charlie brown or harry potter all over my house & children in every possible incarnation, but they are welcome in any reasonable book/toy/movie form): thomas. i was still young enough to watch shining time station a little bit when it first came to the states and was on pbs along with the other wholesome after school stuff & george carlin had taken over for ringo starr. it’s a good show. the wooden toys are quality (um, aside from the ones with the deadly paint) and even some of the plastic accessories are really really cool (i wanted the water tower for myself). i can’t say i’m a fan of the million other thomas things you can get since he’s become so popular, but it’s not as over the top as a lot of other things. and somehow, i never saw a kid lose it over thomas. one time i saw a kid and parent arguing over whether or not the little boy had a certain engine. he was probably four, insisting that yes he had gordon, he wanted another one instead. they ended up with gordon - no, you definitely don’t have him. sheepishly returned it two days later because the little boy was right.

ok, i need to stop looking at toys online and go to bed. other parents: what do you welcome into / try to keep out of your house?

i would like to have…

1.) a dining room that faces west.
2.) one brown sheep.

you’re in the shade, i’m in the sun, why don’t you go away lazy john

23 weeks - one day early since tomorrow at the usually belly-photo time i will be in michigan.

i still have some stuff to get done before mikey & i can watch the original house on haunted hill, which has to happen before i can go to bed, which has to happen before i can get up and leave in the morning. so instead of blogging i will leave you with the funniest story you’ll hear all day, via jenn:

There has been a very amusing mix-up with your target registry that I must tell you about.This morning, as I was leaving for work my 21 year old cousin and next door neighbor Jessica yelled “Jennifer!”

*jenn, you are not the only one to make this request. i’ll try to make it happen later on. 

up here in the city, it feels like things are closin’ in

good things happened on day two without mikey:

1.) i found out that our hard drive is perfectly fine and no data was lost - it’s just the motherboard. so we still need a new computer, but at least we didn’t lose all of mikey’s recording software. i’m seeing a pattern here: our stereo has been on its deathbed for a few months now - a complicated series of power-cycling, random button pressing, and hitting is sometimes required to get it to work. you have to get violent with our tv remote every time you use it. i think i killed our vcr last night - i was half way through stand by me when mikey called (he’s alive!), so i paused it, and after two minutes the vcr and tv both turned off. now the tape won’t come out and a mysterious light is blinking very rapidly. our dvd player will not play any of our millenium dvds and occasionally will not let us turn off the spanish subtitles. i guess when you never buy electronics things start to break.

2.) i logged into my amazon baby registry to find an amazing deal: between july 1st and september 31st, if $750.00 worth of stuff is purchased from a new or existing baby registry by whoever, the registrant gets “six months” of seventh generation diapers (read: really really good diapers… that probably won’t actually last six months - amazon underestimates baby poop). SEVEN HUNDRED AND FIFTY DOLLARS??? you ask: yes, but considering the fact that between now and september we will buy our pack n’ play, carseat, stroller (which we don’t need yet, but will get now just for the deal), and a toddler bike seat for kelly’s bike (which i will put on my registry just so she can buy it for herself from my registry) all from amazon, that doesn’t leave much. need any books? cds? groceries in the mail? let me know - i’ll add them to my registry so the money can go in the diaper fund. but aren’t you doing cloth??? you ask: yes, but i have a sil who will be thrilled to get $250 worth of diapers for free. i got four mint green snappis in the mail today and stuck them all to my shirt and vowed to not give up on cloth even when my apartment is all strung with diapers drying on clothesline and i want to just go buy something that i can throw away.

3.) cleaning up my etsy shop paid off - i’m emailing back & forth with a previous wholesale customer who wants more for her store in florida (florida? i think florida), and her order will probably pay for the new brakes that i’m pretty sure we’ll have to have put on our car next week when we go home and get them checked. she miraculously wants stuff that i already have made - even better.

4.) earlier i had paisley outside sitting up on this huge slab of stone that’s supposed to function as a bench in a mini not-really-a-park-really-just-a-place-where-dogs-poop. i was furminating her and she was sitting nice and still and pretty and someone complimented me on how calm my dog was. i almost fell over. no one in paisley’s life has ever told her she’s calm.

tomorrow is the day before mikey comes home. i can do this. after examining my calendar today i determined that between his trip home for a conference a couple of months ago, this conference, my staff retreat, my trip to michigan this weekend, and another weekend he has away in august for another conference… this year has contained more apart days than the rest of our relationship combined, except for that year that we lived an hour apart. not fun. i also determined that between trips home and two holidays, i only have six more five-day workweeks before i go on mat leave. i think that justifies a woohoo!

i’m so hyper. i’m excited about free diapers. i have to keep myself awake until i get to talk to michael john.

listening: ryan adams

and when i go, don’t you follow

destash was successful. this heap looks half as big as it actually was because of the angle… it was piled SO high. i’m proud of myself. i went with four full boxes, and only came back with 6 or 7 good shirts, a wee bottle of tea tree oil, a yankee candle that smells like my parents’ house at christmas, two photo frames to redo, and this a&e series for mikey. we watched an episode last night - it’s disturbing. everyone else managed the same restraint, and now alex’s car is FULL of stuff to have some nice YSM employee unload at double take tomorrow.

mikey left this morning and i’m anxiously awaiting his “we did not die on the way” phonecall. paisley has been curled up against the front door most of the day waiting for him to come back (she doesn’t understand the word “wednesday”), and even the baby has been less active. i’ve spent almost the entire day - minus about 45 minutes lusting after various cookware online and over an hour of dog walks - working on etsy stuff. my shop needed some serious updates and reorganization, and there was a whole mess of stuff on my table that needed sorted. i got a whole bunch of packaging materials ready and restocked, and sorted through the photos on our extra harddrive and the data recovered from our computer (yep, it’s toast - but the nice guy from work who looked at it managed to get three dvds full of stuff off of the hard drive). i filled a whole jar with stuff to give away as freebies in orders because i’m just sick of looking at it, and now i’m going to sit through as many movies as it takes to inventory everything i’ve got and sort out what needs to be photographed to replace what i lost. hopefully i can get the pictures taken this week, all of that put away, and by the time we get back from home i’ll be ready to start making things again and get back to putting up things from the box that is already packed with new & unlisted stuff. i think i have enough second-trimester energy to get lots and lots and lots of stuff made and photographed before the baby is born, which will get me through the christmas craziness this fall. i can spend whatever time and energy i have working on gifts (i already have some done or in progress since i’m all over christmas this year) and NOT making stuff for etsy. that’s how i got so burned out on crafting by january and february of this year. hopefully we can figure out a way to afford a reasonable new CPU by fall - i’ll go nuts if i have to do all of my etsy stuff from mikey’s laptop, not to mention that he’ll be using it all the time for school. how did we get ourselves into the kind of life where we do practically NEED two computers? ugh. (answer: we are doing a phd, running an online business, and using a computer for all home recording.)

time for movie-watching and jewelry counting.

listening: elliott smith

take a little while to grow your brother’s hair

- mikey is leaving me tomorrow… going to chicago for ekklesia and won’t be back until late late on wednesday. i do not like when he’s away, and i’m jealous that i can’t go.
+ scott and andrew are going with him, so at least he has someone to split gas with and to help him navigate.
- i just found out that our bank has been over-charging us for our banking fees since january. this is partially my fault for not paying attention & just skipping over when i saw a debit for our plan without actually checking the amount, and partially their fault for upping our fee without notification.
+ instead of walking mikey’s visa over to the bank to prove that he’s still a student and we still should get the discount and waiting half an hour for them to search all of our old statements and put the money back in our account, the nice branch manager just believed me and put $51.00 back into our account while i waited on the phone.
+ i stopped in the freestore when i ran down to put laundry in the dryer (i NEVER remember to go down there the few hours a week that it’s open - i have to just happen by on my way to the laundry room) and found two pairs of split-crotch baby pants. these will be awesome when i give EC a try, and they can be pricey/hard to find in north america. yay for it being the norm in asian countries an having lots of asian people in our building destashing their baby pants. i’m really excited to try EC. i’m really excited that i have family members who have done it/are doing it and friends who plan to, so not everyone will think i’m weird… for doing something that is totally normal for most of the world. just not north america, where you can’t find little kid underwear smaller than 2T and people can afford to spend several thousand dollars to exclusively diaper a kid forever.
+ tonight alex, ella, julia, erin, kelly and myself are doing another DESTASH - yay!! this time dumping all of our unwanted belongings all over the middle of alex’s livingroom floor instead of mine, trading around, then loading the leftovers into her car to be taken to our work’s thrift store. last time we did this - which was about two weeks after i got pregnant and didn’t yet know i was pregnant and couldn’t understand why wine didn’t taste good and i could only drink half a glass - i got rid of tons of stuff and ONLY acquired two shirts, a scarf, and a teeny bit of craft supplies. even mikey unloaded some books. this time i have four more boxes full. i love taking apart my nest. this time no areas of our belongings remained untouched - kitchenware, cookbooks, clothes, accessories, craft supplies, headscarves/headbands/etc., books… i even took a clock off the wall.
- paisley has gas, and as usual must be laying within four inches of me since mikey is not home.

++++++++++++ home in less than two weeks!!!!
- - - - - - - - - - -  must go fold laundry.

listening: nick drake

i rode a long way to be away from you

22 weeks looks less fat that 21… although this photo was taken pre-supper for once.

no one wished me a happy fourth of july today. prime chance for all of the jokes about my americanism that my coworkers love to dump on me, but no one said a word. after dating letters all morning it finally occured to me at lunchtime that my family is all home from work, getting ready for a cookout, probably having fun with cheap explosives and hoping that all ten of my dad’s fingers will survive one more year. the canadian will someday be very impressed when (s)he watches grandpa let lit rockets go from his bare hands.

i know we aren’t the only ones wrecking the planet and offing its inhabitants like it’s this year’s pogs, but we’re definitely the dumbest branch of the family tree and anything celebrating america just makes me pretty sad. even sadder that THIS is what’s being handed over to the hundred and forty-seven babies that everyone i know is popping out this year.

What will they say - assuming there are any left to be saying - in five centuries about us nice folks who managed to bequeath the solar system a second Mercury where a green and fertile planet once stood, just so we could party a little longer?  I’m not sure, but I don’t think it will be pretty.  And I don’t think it will be, “Well, sure, they weren’t perfect.  And, true, they wrecked the whole planet.  But at least they kept boys from marrying other boys.”

well hey, i think i settled on the stroller that we don’t even need to get until next spring, so that’s something productive.

listening: andrew in my head
reading: b is for bluegrass, because that is where uncle andy lives and we found a brand new copy for one dollar and ninety cents; before that (on wednesday, on our anniversary) we found our new favorite toronto indian restaurant, which is better than my favorite place in little india, neither of which is as good as the indian place in motown… which i will never not find ironic

in two weeks i will be home, in two weeks i will be home

in two weeks i will be home, in two weeks i will be home. i will hopefully have snuggled little baby nadia abigail, born on monday evening just in time for jeopardy (i think, or just in time for when jeopardy used to come on), snuggled the little baby horse, and eaten some mister bee’s. and then i will fall asleep listening to nothing but the aquarium gurgling downstairs and paisley’s little dreaming woofs.

on the way home from work i stopped in a random dollarstore to buy hair elastics and dog poop bags, and i got two chunky kit kat bars. the things that end up in north american dollarstores are very weird. this particular kit kat wrapper specifies that it’s an “international recipe” made with cocoa beans from ghana, and it’s manufactured in malaysia. it has things written in some language that looks like arabic but i’m pretty sure it isn’t, and it advises you to eat it in an air-conditioned environment.

here is my life:

ice cream bowl stake-out.

cutest birds flown in from portland. thanks, maggie!

mikey’s spanish notes.

on swaptree tonight i traded conspiracy theory for billy bragg & wilco’s mermaid avenue. we were listening to this album the first time i ever drove into toronto, which was the second time we collectively arrived in toronto. we were singing along to “california stars” while we drove up university avenue, interrupting the lyrics to remark about how easy it is to drive in this city. unlike driving into chicago, when mikey was driving and had a meltdown, or driving through manhattan, where i was driving and he was having a meltdown.

all day i’ve wanted hot chocolate, macaroni and cheese, and the last third of no country for old men whilst laying on the couch. and then after macaroni i will redo the five rows of blanket that i had to unravel last night. you can visibly see the baby moving around a lot when i lay on the couch and knit. it’s good times, but i want him/her to come out so we can cuddle. i’m getting impatient.

listening: now i have billy bragg in my head
reading: just finished the diaper free baby

our desire to see the world become a place in which our children can grow free and strong

in the midst of two hours of club music there was one james taylor song and i can’t get it out of my head. pride parade x about 100 photos.