Cat-ventures

Earlier this week, I had a meeting with my advisor, and I arrived feeling more than a little run down, in large part because of the mile long walk from the parking lot to her building. Apparently, my run down-ness showed because approximately 12 seconds into the meeting, she suggested that perhaps it's time I started thinking about working from home more. Since most of my current work involves making final touches to the thesis document, I decided to take her advice and have spent three days this week working from home.

Yesterday, I went in to the office for the sole purpose of getting some books and articles that I need to continue my work, but found this morning that I had left them still sitting in the car. So after trying (and failing, miserably) to put my feet into flip-flops, I decided that house slippers would work just fine, and opened the door...only to notice a yellow streak go running past me. My first reaction was to yell for the Dog, because he's usually the one who's most likely to plan an escape, but as it turned out, this time, it was Yellow Cat.

Up until now, any time Yellow Cat has gotten out of the apartment, he has sat confusedly outside the door and screams. Today, of course, he ran straight for the stairs and headed downstairs. Which made it necessary for me to waddle-run down the stairs while hissing at him to "Get back here this INSTANT!" My hissing was completely useless, as it turned out, because Yellow Cat made it all the way downstairs and out to the parking lot, where he promptly CLIMBED A TREE, and then proceeded to FREAK OUT about the fact that he was in a tree. So there I am, 8 months pregnant, in my house slippers, standing on my tip-toes and doing my best to speak in calming tones while trying to catch a screaming, angry cat. Meanwhile, the neighbor's teenage kids and their friends are all watching me and trying not to laugh.

After about 5 minutes of this, it finally occurred to one of the kids that hey! Maybe we should go offer to help! So one of the taller ones came over and 15 seconds later, a very grumpy Yellow Cat was returned to my possession. He has spent the past two hours "recovering" from his adventures and I have spent the past two hours trying to get the mud out of my slippers and wondering what possessed me to get the demon-cat in the first place.

...I might not be cut out for this "working from home" stuff after all...

35 weeks

It astounds me that I'm just 5 weeks away from my due date. On the one hand, it seems so close, yet on the other, each day feels like it has suddenly grown twice as long. This might have something to do with the fact that I'm spending more and more of my "sleeping" hours awake, in part because The Bug practices his Jazzercize at approximately 3 a.m., and in part because McMoose has recently taken to talking (incoherently) in his sleep. Awesome timing, McMoose.

In any case, here's a recent picture of the belly:
My hair has gotten considerably shorter since the last time I posted one of these, thanks to a heavily tattooed woman at the salon in the mall. In exchange, my feet have gotten much larger. I don't know which I'm more excited about: getting to meet The Bug in 5 weeks or getting to wear shoes again.

The Bug continues to spend his days and nights trying to wedge different body parts into my ribs, but on the plus side, he's far more entertaining since his legs have gotten strong enough to kick various things off my belly. So far, we've been working mainly with pencils, coasters, and drinking glasses. I'm thinking this will come in handy when he grows up to be a professional trampoline-ist.

When Dreaming Ends

Just before I woke up this morning, I had a dream that it was 5 AM and I couldn't sleep, so instead, I got up, walked and fed The Dog, and then worked on some of the final edits for my thesis, before going back to bed. So when I actually woke up, I was thoroughly confused because I didn't know whether the dream had really been a dream, or whether I had truly woken up at 5:30 and done all of those things. After thinking about it for a while, I realized that it would have been completely uncharacteristic of me to walk The Dog that early in the morning. Plus, The Dog was acting like a complete fool and he usually only does that when (a) he hasn't been fed yet and (b) he hasn't been walked yet.

Feeling confident that the dream had, in fact, been just a dream, I proceeded to feed The Dog and since McMoose was working from home today, asked him to take The Dog out. And then, I meandered here and there, did some crosswords, answered some emails, and generally puttered around with the idea of doing some work. Finally, after lunch, I decided that it was time to get serious, so I opened up my thesis document...only to find that the edits I had planned on making today had already been made.

So. Did I actually wake up at 5 and do all the things I thought I had dreamt about (in which case, The Dog made out like a bandit today)? Or did I make the edits yesterday and forget? Or did I just edit the thesis and then dream about doing the rest? I'm so confused!

A Day for Close Calls

I was late for a meeting this morning because of a doctor's visit, and a trip to the pharmacy, and the fact that it was raining and the thought of being late sent me into a mild panic. So I drove a little bit faster than I should have, a little bit faster than I was comfortable with, especially given the rain and the slick roads. And during that drive, I knew that one skid, one tap of my brakes at the wrong moment, one miscalculation about the depth of a puddle could have had disastrous results, but still, I didn't slow down. Instead, I crossed my fingers, hoped for the best, and didn't relax until I pulled safely into my parking spot.

This afternoon, it was bright and sunny, and all traces of the storms of this morning had passed. Even the roads had dried up fairly well, so I was much more relaxed on the drive home, adjusting the temperature controls, singing along with the radio, admiring the purple blossoms on the trees by the side of the road. So the crunch of metal that was loud enough to be heard over the Three Doors Down song playing on the radio came as a surprise, when an oncoming van and pickup truck collided with each other. The sight of the van pushing the pickup towards my car was thoroughly unexpected. The feeling of dread in my stomach as I watched the bumper of the pickup come flying through the air towards my already-damaged windshield was a shock. And as I stepped on my brakes, hard, the sight in the rear view mirror of the SUV that was going too fast to stop in time was terrifying.

And somehow, as I sat there in my car, bracing myself for the blow, the bumper flew off to the left, missing my car by inches and falling harmlessly to the ground beside me instead. The driver of the SUV realized, as I did, that he wouldn't have time to stop, so instead, he swerved to the right, into the grass, and came to a stop on the other side of me. And there I was, in what seemed to be the eye of the storm, completely untouched.

The what-ifs of the situation left me breathless. If this had happened this morning, when I was driving faster and my brakes would have been less effective because of the rain, when the SUV wouldn't have been able to swerve off the road without hydroplaning, when the pickup truck would probably have slid farther than it did, the results could have been drastically different. If the driver of the SUV had made the more logical choice and swerved into the left lane to avoid me instead of into the grass, he would have hit the oncoming bumper, and then he probably would have hit me. If the driver of the van had realized the fact that there was a pickup truck following close behind him, he probably wouldn't have attempted the u-turn that he was in the middle of making when the accident happened, and then we all would have passed each other in a completely harmless interaction. Instead, there are now two people who are suddenly having a wonderful day, feeling lucky to have escaped this accident, and two others whose days have gotten much more hectic, as they deal with insurance companies and police reports.

I'm grateful to count myself among the first two.

Under the Weather, Part Deux

After feeling icky all day yesterday, the perfectly normal, harmless contractions that I've been experiencing for the majority of this pregnancy suddenly decided to kick into high gear, which prompted me to tentatively call the after-hours line of my OB practice and the midwife who returned my call promptly instructed me to go to the hospital for a check-up. As it turned out, everything was fine and although the contractions were annoying, they were not doing anything crazy or dangerous like, say, putting me into labor, so really, the worst part of that whole experience was the open-in-the-back hospital gown, which is to say that it wasn't bad at all.

But. As un-bad as the whole thing was, the fact remains that I'm still having more contractions that I'm used to, and I understand that they're not doing anything harmful, but...that doesn't really stop them from sucking. Apparently, all this is attributable to a urinary tract infection, for which I am now on antibiotics, but until those start to work, I'm in this weird limbo state of not-in-labor-but-incapable-of-functioning-like-a-normal-person because:
(a) the contractions are strong enough to wake me up when I'm asleep.
(b) they're strong enough that when I have one, I lose track of whatever conversational thread I was trying to follow, so I sit there staring blankly at whoever I'm talking to.
(c) when I have them while I'm driving, I totally lose my focus on the road, as I found out this morning when I almost rear-ended a cement mixer.
(d) they make me shiver in a kind of uncontrollable way, which doesn't really bother me, but it seems to freak out other people in the room.

Plus, I feel pretty idiotic right now because I've had these infections many a time in the past, so I should have been fully able to recognize the symptoms before it got as bad as it did, but instead, I thought, "Oh, that's just The Bug kicking my bladder in a strange way, that's all."

Under the Weather

I was thrilled when I passed the morning sickness phase of this pregnancy because even though I didn't have a particularly bad case of it (i.e.- I can count the number of times I actually threw up on one hand), it still wasn't pleasant to be constantly nauseous. And maybe even worse than the nausea was the ridiculous oversensitivity to the smell of being indoors, which came as a complete surprise because no one had ever warned me about that. If someone had tried to tell me that "Hey, you're going to wish you lived in a box because every time you enter a building, that building will smell like stale bacon and there is NOTHING worse than the smell of stale bacon," I would probably have thought that person was crazy.

Imagine my great surprise when I woke up this morning feeling nauseous. And somewhat shaky. And somewhat like I used to during the first 13 weeks of this pregnancy. Except that right now, instead of smelling like stale bacon, the world smells like the inside of an airplane--a little bit metallic, a little bit like the alcohol wipes they give you, a little bit like over-purified air. And although this is better than stale bacon, it still leaves a lot to be desired. Here's hoping this is a temporary situation and that it will resolve itself soon because I am not feeling this whole regression-to-an-earlier-stage-of-pregnancy thing that seems to be going on here.

April Foolishness

I'm not big on the April Fool's thing because (a) I'm never together enough to plot and carry out a really good joke (b) when you habitually forget what day it is and people walk around playing pranks on you and YOU CAN NEVER RETALIATE because you're a terrible prankster, it's not so much fun. This is also why I've never been fond of the whole pinch-the-person-who's-not-wearing-green tradition on St. Patrick's day. But for the past couple of years, I really haven't been pranked because other people in grad school suffer the same issues as me and either don't remember the date or just don't care enough to put in any real effort. This year, however, the world seems to be full of pranks.

-My alarm pranked me this morning by ringing at 8:03, 8:18, 8:33, 8:48, 8:49, and 8:51. The times that I had actually set it for were 8, 8:15, 8:30, and 8:45. It's entirely possible that there's actually a problem with the alarm and that it wasn't just a diabolical plan to confuse me first thing in the morning, but then again, it's also possible that the thing is possessed by the spirit of a prankster.

-The weather people pranked me by saying it was supposed to be cold and rainy, but in reality, it was actually pretty warm and pretty dry (for the most part). So I got to walk around looking foolish in my raincoat, while everyone else (who apparently got the RIGHT forecast) was walking around in t-shirts.

-My computer at work pranked me by telling me that it had saved the changes to a document I was working on, but not actually saving them. Granted, this is the kind of thing that computer might do any day of the year, but still...

-When I get home, The Dog usually jumps around in his cage and generally acts crazy. Today, for the first time EVER, not only was he not jumping, he actually stayed asleep. Even when I went into the room and called his name. Which of course, led me to the conclusion that he was dead or dying because that's just completely abnormal behavior for him. The minute I opened the cage door, however, he got up and dashed out of the room in one quick flash, and then spent the next 15 minutes running around the apartment, crashing into the walls, and trying to eat the cats. So...I'm pretty sure he's not dying. Unless one of the cats decides to kill him, which judging by their reaction to his little rampage, they very well might.