the pieces of my life

It’s Peter’s birthday. And he’s being grumpy about it. Give the birthday bunny a break, and have a good birthday.

Yesterday we were released from work early because of the fine work our department has done. So with the beautiful weather and the 3:30 quitting time, I headed to a nursery to pick up something for the yard. I never got around to planting bulbs last fall so our garden is nonexistent. After being told by many people that planting now is futile (it may be 68 degrees today, but it’s supposed to snow on Tuesday), I went to Mahoney’s to find out if there was anything I could plant. The woman working there was a no-nonsense sort of woman who reluctantly admitted that I could plant some of the hardier perennials now as well as the bulbs that had been forced (such as the daffodils). “But really,” she kept saying, “you just want to be planning out where you want to put things now. Make a design. You should prepare the land now–mulch it, fertilize it, prepare your beds–so you’re all ready to plant in a month or two.” Um, excuse me? Design? Mulch? Fertilize? Beds? I figure I’ll use the same planting method I’ve always used–dig a whole in the ground, stick something in, and hope it lives. Always worked before.

Adam and I decided to go to the movies today. The Hours and Chicago are playing in Lexington. Old School is playing at Fresh Pond. I let Adam pick what we saw. I bet you’re struggling to figure out what he picked. Sigh.

After the movie, we went to Toys R Us, because I needed a teddy bear for reasons I shall not yet disclose (and it’s not for the baby. Well, not directly). I felt bad for the salesman, a grown man, who I heard say with a straight face to someone looking for a toy, “Just head down to the end of Animal Alley and take a left.” We quickly found the teddy bear but decided to wander a bit. It’s alarming how much we’ll have to get (although we’re buying nothing just yet. I figure we have a few more months before I’ll feel okay by baby gear). Adam pointed out that many of the strollers looked like off-road vehicles. We did get a little stuck in the Imaginarium section, trying out the toys. I remember the days when a globe was just a round map. Now it’s an “interactive learning tool.” Adam stared with rapt glee at the Home Depot toy section. Remind me to never send him in there by himself. Who knows what he’ll walk out with. For himself, I mean.

Well, I finally made it out of the house and managed to stay up past 9 p.m. I think I may be turning a corner. After work, Hannah and I went to Johnny D’s in Somerville before going to a reading where our coworker Midge was reading her Improper Bostonian short-story-contest winner. Her reading was great, although the others were a bit of a mixed bag. I think the whole thing would have been better had it been a shorter reading–too many readers made for a long night. I had one of those ridiculous moments where if you saw it in a movie you’d think, “That’s too stupid to really happen,” when I went to look at my watch, not even paying attention to the fact that I had a cup of orange juice in my hand, which splattered everywhere as I turned my wrist (and the cup) to see the time. Luckily, the cup was pretty much empty. After the event, I met Shannon at the Cambridgeport Saloon, but I got there just as her crowd was breaking up, so I didn’t stay for very long.

Adam’s out tonight at a boy’s night for his section. Now, before you think anything sexist is going on, the girl’s are having their night too. I know because they very kindly invited the wives and girlfriends of their male sectionmates. (I’m willing to bet anyone reading this ten bucks that it never occurred to the boys to invite the male partners of their female sectionmates.) Had I not had the reading I had promised to go to, I may have actually gone. However, I did notice a slight inequality in the events planned. The girl’s were having a “girl’s night in” with wine, DVDs, girly things. And the boys? Could they do anything sensible like that? No, they’re going to a $50 a plate dinner at the Capital Grille and that doesn’t include drinks. As our bank account is, as it is always wont to do at the end of the month, dwindling, we watch what we spend until my payday. However, that didn’t stop Adam from requiring $100 for a single night out. On a Wednesday. For no good reason other than apparently some of his classmates have money to burn. What is it with boys that they can’t just enjoy their own company, that there must always be large amounts of money spent or copious amounts of entertainment (c’mon, when was the last time that you saw guys get together to just “hang out” that didn’t involve a. a bar, b. Nintendo or c. a sporting event). Can you picture all the cool HBS boys just getting together to gab and watch a flick at someone’s house? Me neither.

~I’m not sure how interested all the folks back home are in the pregnancy updates (I can see Eugene and Sang’s eyes glazing over), so I’ll try to label them so they can skip these sections. It’s only fair. I skip all the sport sections in Eugene’s blog.

~Last Friday at the doctor’s office we heard (as opposed to see) the heartbeat for the first time (yes, you can see a heartbeat. It’s a pulsating white blip on an ultrasound). The baby is indeed still there and his/her heart is beating at 150 bpms. The average is 120 to 160 bpms, so I said to Adam, “Would you look at that? Our baby is already above average. S/he is gifted!” And he said, “Either that or just spastic. Maybe you should cut down on the sugar.”

~Doc said we could do our ultrasound at our next appointment or schedule it separately. I said, “If we do it separately then that’s twice the reassurance that I am indeed still pregnant, isn’t it?” She understood me. (She said it’s common. Women are reassured and then two weeks after their doctor’s appointments, they’re convinced again that they aren’t really pregnant.) Adam laughed at me, thinking I was kidding, and then called me crazy when I went ahead and made two separate appointments. Although, it does mean we get to find out the sex two weeks earlier (and of course, we want to know).

~How is it possible I’ve only gained four pounds (three by the doctor’s scale, which I think is due to the fact that I wore jeans to the earlier appointments. Now, I can’t button those jeans up, so I’m wearing light stretchy pants, which weigh less than the jeans). My tummy is making its presence known in a most uncomfortable way. I don’t look pregnant at all–I just look like I’ve drank a lot of beer in my life.

~Clothing is annoying. None of my old clothes fit, and I’m not big enough yet for maternity clothes. Yuckola. And why does no one make none control-top tights or panty hose anymore? When did they decide that all women want to be tightly constricted around the waist?

Those who know me and my animal-disliking ways well may be surprised to know that I once owned a cat. While I think it’s kind of obnoxious to put your own creative writing in a blog, I’m going to quote from an essay I wrote many years back (published awhile back in Under the Sun) about my cat Motorhead because it’s easier than writing about her from scratch (get it, scratch? well, you will after reading this):

Apparently, no one told the mice that the landlord was trying to make the building a little nicer, and they began coming in droves, hiding in the closet, at the head of my futon, in back of the non-working fireplace. At the base of our building was a small storefront from which the smell of reefer and Jamaican food always floated. Often times, a tall black man with a multi-colored crocheted hat sat outside, keeping an eye on the street. We always said hello, but I never entered that tiny storefront, unsure of whether there really was a restaurant operating inside or not. But the roaches and mice took the scent, and the moment the temperature began to dip below forty, up they’d skitter, to the warmth and comfort of my home. So when the friend of a friend begged me to take his cat, I did. I should have known that no one is that desperate to get rid of an animal without good reason. This cat was psychotic. Why her name, Motorhead, didn’t give me the clue, I don’t know. I guess I was just desperate to get rid of the mice. My mother remains convinced to this day that the only reason I got the cat was because she’s deathly allergic to them. This, of course, wasn’t true. That was just an added bonus.

I will say, Motorhead did her job. An underweight, solid black cat, she’d lunge for the rodents with none of the gracefulness attributed to her kind. She’d tease them, batting them between her paws like a tennis ball, nudging them with her tiny nose, tossing them playfully into the air until those mice finally croaked from a heart attack. Then, when she ran out of mice, she’d go for legs, feet, hair, or whatever she could find. I’d lie in bed at night, listening to the couple next door fighting or the sounds of my roommate Flower and her boyfriend Alex making love as Motorhead carefully shredded my calves.

Motorhead was previously owned by some guys I knew in film school. My roommate and I suspected that the guys had fed Motorhead a lot of drugs. It was pretty obvious when she was having an acid flashback. At first I had to keep a squirt bottle in my loft bed, because at night, she’d start to claw the screen trying to get out, so I’d squeeze a little water on her. When she became more determined after a while, I’d end up just pouring a glass of water on top of her. I have lots of Motorhead stories, mostly involving dead and almost-dead mice and me hiding in my loft bed, waiting for the Tweedle Twirp to let herself into my apartment to rescue me from the dead rodents. I would try to coo, “Good cat, good cat,” but it always came out as a maniacal shriek as I shifted the loft ladder around so as to keep the cat from climbing it. There were also the bird incidents and the squirrel incident, among others. Let’s just say this cat had energy to spare.

When I left New York for Seattle, I traveled for three months across the country in the tiny Mazda RX-7 that had belonged to my father but that he had given me because he was afraid if left to my own devices that I’d buy something that would break down in the middle of nowhere. With no place to live in Seattle and three months of hostels, cheap motels, and a tent ahead of me, I knew I couldn’t bring Motorhead with me, so I gave her to my then-boyfriend Ken, who at the time was moving from New York to North Carolina. Ken kept Motorhead for many years until a girlfriend (many years after we broke up) fell in love with Motorhead. Ken called me one day and asked if Cathy could keep the cat. I said fine, and I joked with my friends that I was such a ’90s gal that my cat was now living with my ex-boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend and I was cool with it. Cathy doted on Motorhead, and Ken would periodically send me pictures. She had grown fat and content and she now sat on people’s laps and purred. I was always sorry I hadn’t taken her with me, but what are you going to do.

Anyway, Motorhead recently began to have kidney problems, and she was put to sleep this morning. I hope there are lots of mice where ever you are, Moo.

For those who come here and wonder why I don’t discuss the serious stuff, it’s because I’m getting it everywhere else, so I see no need to blog about it here. I follow the New York Times coverage and I read the BBC’s War Diaries and I get more than my share in other blogs and on the news. I assume the same of you. You don’t come here for my political opinions. You come here for my snarky attitude. Which you shall get. In abundance.

Just because I’m pregnant, it doesn’t mean that when I say, “Gee, I’m gaining weight,” that the correct answer is ever, “Yeah, I know.”

He may have bad politics, but he’s still the best husband ever. Look what I found waiting for me when I got home:

My very own Peeps ration book! So I get to enjoy my Peeps without the “oh, why did you let me eat the entire box?” feeling! Wow, Peeps and no stomach ache. Who woulda thunk it possible? Although, I do hope he hid those Peeps really, really well. If I find them, the ration book is going out the window.

At work (I know, I know, I’m not writing about work, but I have to mention this), I recieved a press release for a film-in-progress being shown at BU’s School of Education. They discuss the filmmaker’s credits, and it says, “Her past works include A Jumpin’ Night in the Garden of Eden and Umm Kulthum: A Voice Like Egypt (narrated by Omar Sharif), which Amazon.com refers to as a ‘beautifully styled documentary.'” (This part is printed in bold.) Which, I will give you, it is. But I just find it so bizarre, because who do you think wrote that Amazon.com review?

Bread and Circus is a local grocery store owned by Whole Foods, which of course means that it is filled with expensive yet wholesome foods. So we can call it a lapse due to pregnancy brain, because I told Adam that on my way home, I’d stop by Bread and Circus and grab something for dinner. I walked into the grocery store thinking, “Sucker! I’m hungry and I’m pregnant and I’m going to clean this store out!” I could just see Adam’s face as I walked in with the four bags of junk food I was going to buy. Mmmmm. Double Stuf Oreos. Peeps. Nutella. Of course, this is a Whole Foods Market. No Oreos, no peeps, no nutella. The closest I could get was those stupid fruit-sweetened cookies that won’t come close to making me happy. I came home with nothing but a bag of cheese and olives. It was a sad day in my life. You can be sure I won’t be going to Bread and Circus again.

Warm weather has begun at last. The weekend was decidedly springlike, although it has nothing on today, when at lunch, it was a whopping 58 degrees, which of course felt downright hot. Large patches of brown dirt are now finally making their way through the piles of snow in our front yard, making for tempting mud puddles. I had to strip off my tights midday because I was sweatin’ (and, of course, because they cut off all circulation because of my ever-expanding tummy, but that doesn’t sound nearly as pleasant, does it). But you didn’t come here to read about the weather, did you? So here are the highlights from my weekend:

~Breakfast on Saturday at Renee’s Cafe with Adam’s brother Jon and his maybe-she-is, maybe-she-isn’t girlfriend. Classic moment came when pointing out Jon’s odd t-shirt, I asked if his mother had bought for him. “No way!” he said. “Not only is she not allowed to buy my clothes, but she’s barely allowed to do my laundry anymore.” I bet his mother lives in fear for the day he won’t let her do his wash. It’s a heart-wrenching moment. Did I mention that Jon just turned 27?

~Adam will be moving his office into the basement. The basement windows need some sort of curtains so prying eyes won’t just peer down and see a lonely computer those fifteen minutes a day when Adam is not compulsively checking his e-mail. Adam agrees curtains are needed. I now have the sewing skills: I shall make the curtains. “Shall I just pick out the fabric?” I ask. “No,” he barks. (Okay, not exactly a bark. More like the snip of a disgruntled husband.) “Okay, so we’ll go to Joann Fabrics and you’ll pick something out.” “I don’ wanna go.” “Then I’ll pick them out.” “No!”

Later that day in the parking lot of the fabric store, Adam does not want to enter. “We’ll just get blinds,” Adam says. Except that these windows are twenty-eight inches tall. “We don’t need custom blinds. We’ll just put in normal blinds and just not unroll them all the way.” Except that there’s nowhere to put the blinds on the outside of the windows (the top abuts the ceiling). “We’ll put them on the inside,” which of course leaves plenty of room for daylight. And we’re already at the fabric store. “Don’t tell anyone I’m doing this,” Adam says. Of course not, honey. “Hurry up,” he says. “We’re in and out fast as we can.”

Inside the store, Adam doesn’t do much better as I hold up bolts of fabric for him. “Do you like these?” “No.” “Do you like these?” “No.” “Do you like these?” “No.” Finally I send him off to pick out fabric himself. “I don’t know what to get.” There is an unmistakable whine in his voice. He finally picks a heavy canvas that I point out won’t let in a shred of light. He finally agrees on a calico. At this point, he’s hopping from foot to foot anxious to get out of there. But I’m not done. Finally, frustrated, I send him to Starbucks and tell him to come back for me in fifteen minutes. You’ve never seen this boy move so fast. Of course, after fifteen minutes, I’m roaming the store killing time, waiting for his return. Finally I give up and go to pay and he enters. He asks, “What’s taking you so long?” “I’ve been waiting for you.” “Oh, I was waiting outside.” God forbid he be seen in the store twice. You would think I sent him to the store for a pregnancy test or tampons (which, I should mention, I have done and he’s managed quite well). I swear, the entire experience was straight out of Blondie comic strip. (Hey, you can make your own Blondie comic strip.)

By the way, for those tracking my Martha tendencies, I got everything I need and I’ll report back on whether I actually successfully made the curtains or not. Because there really is not a top window sill, we’ll have to put it up in a makeshift hooks kind of manner. I’ll take pictures when I’m done so you can see what I mean.

~A Sports Night marathon. Every time I attempted to get up to clean my office closet out, I found my butt squarely glued to the couch. So Adam and I had a few major Sports Night binge sessions in which we finished the series. That was a great series. Sigh.

~And I did, in fact, finally clean out my closet. Didn’t quite finish, but I have a better idea where things are. Of course, a few things in our house are still MIA from the move. I will find them one of these days soon!