Asking 100 bucks, or best offer. Mostly I want it out of my basement, so best offer may mean "whichever can get here first with a couple of strapping men to carry it off".
Then, write 10 things that you love starting with that letter.
Post the list in your journal.
Give out letters to your commenters in return.
1) Orchids
2) Olives (esp. Kalamata... mmmmm...)
3) Olive (The band. Something of a guilty pleasure, I admit.)
4) Ovid (When I first started grad school, I thought I would study Ovid. Then I decided I liked him too much - making him an object of research would ruin the fun.)
5) "Ocean of Lust" (fantastic Devotchka song)
6) Orff, Karl
7) OK Computer
8) Orange Blossom scent
9) October
10) Orlando Bloom (I usually don't like 'em young and pretty. But I make an exception in this case.)
- But dang, am I exhausted. The baby has dropped a wee bit, which is good on the one hand (yay! I can BREEAATHE!!!) and bad on the other - I have to pee every. 5. Minutes. Including overnight. I'm waking up 3 times a night, and at least one of those times the last 3 nights it has taken me a significant amount of time to fall back asleep. So I think I just need to start planning on going to bed a bit earlier and sleeping a bit later for the next few weeks. The final chapter I'm planning on writing before Alexandra gets here should be much less research intensive, so that means working from home most of the time, which is also a good.
- There is one very big thing to look forward to: anniversary cake! I picked up our anniversary cake from Craig's this afternoon, and now I'm trying to forget it's even there as I wait for Kevin to get home from work. It's chocolate, vanilla, and chocolate mousse with creme de menthe drizzled over the chocolate cake. *whimper*
- Right, must fight slack and make dinner...
Meanwhile, there are several new GC scents up, so an imp pack is definitely in order...
Mmmm... smellies...
Things are good here, if msotly uninteresting. Still working on the diss: 41 pages on chapter 3 and counting. Woohoo! Still on track to finish this chapter and the next by the end of August. Even better, I'm almost to page 100. Which I frankly wouldn't give a good damn about, but a certain Irish prof (who isn't even my supervisor, but what can ya do?) has decided that all dissertations must be 200 pages.
(My advisor? She claims she doesn't care - as long as it's complete, she doesn't care about the page count. i'm trying not to stress it at all, and hoping that in the end, if it *does* fall short of 200, she'll talk him into relaxing. But that having been said, it may not even be an issue by the time the whole thing is done.)
Meanwhile, we finished redoing the bathroom. Tiling is surpisingly, well, fun. Add a few coats of fresh paint and my bathroom? Is no longer scary. I lurve it, as a matter of fact. I will post piccies later.
On the baby front, things are progressing as one would expect. I did the 1 hour glucose screen today, and decided that it could prolly pass as a form of "enhanced interrogation". I drank that gunk at 8 this morning and I still feel like crap and can't get the taste of "orange" out of my mouth. Good news? I passed. Bad news? Still anemic, if even a little more so. I've been eating red meat once a day and upping my legume intake, so I don't think diet alone is going to cut it. Won't stop me from trying - I'll make up a big batch of hummus this weekend, and a few other high iron snacks to munch on.
Bebe is very active now. I wish she'd get out of my liver, but otherwise it's pretty darn cool. I've been spending a lot of time in the basement this week, avoiding the heat, but otherwise...
Like I said. Life is pretty good.
Eh. We'll see. A lot of it may slide. I still want to run to the library to make sure I have the books I need to be productive TOMORROW.
And maybe grab some Rilke while I'm there.
I also want to get some tacos to recompense today for sucking. I was going to scrub the bathroom down, but that may get the 15 minute treatment instead since we'll be demoing the shower this weekend anyways so... why spend the energy to get a perfectly clean bathroom when it'll be covered in dust in 3 days?
Which reminds me: HEY! Does anyone have a tile cutter / tile saw I can borrow on Friday? Or experience with tiling to offer advice?
Right. Off to salvage what can be of the day...
I have a Gocco B6 screen printer for sale. it comes with enough supplies to make a good 15 masters for printing, as well as several tubes of ink. It's in great condition, only been used a few times. Make me an offer: I'm asking around 200 for it, but I'm more interested in getting rid of it than anything, so who knows what could happen.
* L'il bro and sis-in-law left early this morning. It was really, really wonderful to have them here. We did state street on Saturday, and went to New Glarus on Sunday. Well, 3 of us did. L'il bro got taken out by Das Boot and spent Sunday recovering. Heh. Amateur. But he was able to make it for dinner last night, so it's all good.
Now, I'm spending the day recovering myself. Two days of running all over Madison and South Central Wisconsin have sucked just about all the extra energy out of me. Tie that to the fact that I'm pretty sure the bebe is about to hit a growth spurt (I've spent all day munching, with no end to the appetite in sight) and it just seems most wise to me to spend a day doing small tasks that require little physical or mental energy. A little bit of baking, some light reading... luckily we have leftovers that will make for awesome dinner, so all in all, I can slack and feel little guilt about it.
*Although I do need to make up for it tomorrow by spending lots o' time working on the diss, just to get some momentum back up. I've gotten about ten pages written since school got out: not terrible, but I need to pick up the pace, a nd get into a routine. I'm quickly hitting the "Oh, Lord, just get the damn thing DONE already!" point, too, which helps. If I can write ten pages a week from now until the baby's born, I can have the blood thing completely drafted. Barring that, which may not be possible, I at least want to finish the Libya chapter (Underway with 15 pages so far) and the Cato chapter (which is far, far less research intensive than the Libya chapter, and will be easier to do at home as my mobility decreases with my girth). That's ALL the new material at least *drafted*. If I can get those two done by the end of July / beginning of August, all I'll have left is a chapter on Roman approaches to anger (which is all Lit review with only minor new stuff by me about ethnicity), an introduction and conclusion, and then revisions. The intro and conclusion may, in fact, get written between the end of July and whenever the bebe comes, with revisions beginning in December / January. In other words, it's all really, really do-able, I just need to get into a groove wit' it.
It's also been an ongoing writing process for me in ways that I'm just coming to understand. That is, I've often thought of my academic writing as separate from the "Real" or "Artistic" writing that I wanted to do. But now that I'm able to work solely on my own projects, I'm finding it energizing in ways I didn't expect. When I stop procrastinating and get down to it, I love the work. It may be academic writing, but it is every bit as artistic, a creative enterprise just as much as the short stories I have on the back burner. When I treat it as such, as the Holy Thing that creating always is, it becomes transformative. Not to mention considerably more pleasant.
* The porch garden is doing ridiculously well. In fact, I may never dig in the dirt again.
Ok, I'm lying. But with as shady a yard as we have, the container garden is turning out to be such a good option I wish I had thought of it two years ago. So far we have green bush beans started, as well as 3 beefsteak tomato plants, two windowboxes full of strawberries, a pot of violas, pansies, hot peppers, and a whiskey barrel that is half full of kitchen herbs. The other half will go in this week. Meanwhile, I think I'll turn the bed in front of the picture window into a larger herb bed, with basil and giant dill, since those are the two we just most often.
* Meanwhile, I'll have to post a belly-pic soon. I caught my reflection in a shop window on Saturday and almost jumped. Oy, do I look like a pregnant lady now! I feel really good, all in all: my energy is almost back up to normal, although as I said above, I do have to watch myself lest I get overtired. Which can be really hard to do, because the "nesting" thing has kicked in and the urge to clean, scrub, and organize everything in sight is starting to take over. Yowza.
Which reminds me: if anyone in Madison wants a rose bush or 4, let me know.
* Right. off to make banana bread. With chocolate chips in it. Mmmmmmm...
So far I've tried a library run, Madeleine L'engle, piano practice, guitar practice, donut therapy, house cleaning... I think I'm just stuck in pissy mode for a bit.
Pull together all the bib on Polybius & ethnography I can
Go to the library
Pull the actual Polybius
Read a bunch
Write a couple of pages
What I WANT to do:
Stay home and play Okami
Hmmm...
The verdict so far?
I'm deeply, powerfully sad to say, "Meh." Let me be clear: to me, cake is a frosting delivery system. The popularity of the cupcake is due in part to the high frosting to cake ratio. Sadly, I do not like what they've done with the frosting here. I think it's too high on the fat: eating it leaves you with a filmy mouth, and it's about the texture and consistency of butter. The flavor is good, but incredibly muted: my tastebuds were getting coated with fat before the berry flavor could get to them properly.
That having been said, it's only their first week, and things may still get some tweaking. the lunch and breakfast menus look really, really good, so we'll be heading there at some point soon in order to eat Real Food. I'll report back then.
We're going to register this weekend, so I had a question for the Mama's on the list.
Any recommendations on a pump? I saw an overwhelming array when I scoped out the scene this morning, and had no idea where to begin.
* In other news, Thursday is my last day of teaching as a grad student at UW - Madison. That makes me really sad, actually. In fact, now that I think about it, it may explain a lot of my mood this week. And then there's the fear: I don't know when I'll be teaching again. Hopefull Fall of 2010, but I won't know for a long time. That's kinda terrifying.
But back to the present...
Classes being done means I'm more or less on maternity leave. But I still have lots ta do, so if anyone wants to hang out at Java Cat and work together, let me know!
* And then the big news last, for those who aren't on twitter or facebook: it's a girl!
~Aliera, who plans on breastfeeding for 12 months but is deeply irritated by people who get over-involved in other people's life choices.
If they don't want people to panic about the flu, maybe they should stop, ya know, bringing it up?
Camping
Driving
The Water
AND I'm only 3 episodes in.

