electra310

We had our first ultrasound on Tuesday morning, the newest Davis is a boy! Mike is already planning on having me hold a speaker up to my tummy so he can play historical documentaries and get the kid on the right track. The kidling is very easy to see on the ultrasound pictures because we waited so long (unintentionally) to get the pictures taken. We're at 21 weeks and 1 day today, and looking towards a go-date of January 6.


You can see the rest of the set at My Flickr page.

It's been a very busy ten days here, since I'm not working and Mike's still a student, we haven't really got any money or space or anything to spare. The clinic we're going to has been really helpful though, and helped me get my medical card and an EBT card so we can afford things that aren't ramen, and today I have a WIC appointment as well. This is really not the way I had planned to have a baby eventually (for one thing, I sort of thought I'd be in my thirties and working,) but even if I can't have that cozy home birth or be closer to my family, things will turn out all right. We're both educated adults, we both have very supportive families, we're in a better position that many people who have babies. And I missed the whole first trimester, so that's much less time to panic over all the weird things that could happen, and more time to concentrate on all the weird things that actually are happening! Like kicking. This kid likes drums, a lot.

It's been ages since I last updated, and it's a week after I actually intended to update, but better late than never! This month marked Mike and my fifth wedding anniversary. It's sort of hard to believe, isn't it? Five years since graduation, five years since everything else got started. It seems like forever ago, but at the same time, I sometimes feel like I'm barely an adult. I still go back and look at the pictures of the wedding, and it sometimes seems as vivid as if it were just yesterday.

It is good to know that after five years, even when some things in my life are really not going the way I want them to, this is as strong as it has ever been, or maybe even stronger. I was a little bit worried when we got married, all those years ago now. We'd dated for four years, been engaged for two, known each other nearly six, but we'd never spent more than two weeks in close contact. I was confident that we knew each others' hearts, but would we be able to live together? That first year had some rough spots and a few weird times, as we adapted to living on our own and together for the first time. We spent more money than we should have, and argued about a few things that didn't need arguments. We never should've even tried to live with only one internet connection. ;-) But we survived that year, and the next, and three more after that, and now I can't imagine living any other way.

Happy anniversary, sweetheart! Five years down, here's to fifty-five more.

Eight weeks since I last updated, and four more weeks before that. I haven't been keeping up well. I think it's probably because this is a strange and sere time in my life, and I don't know if I want it in the chronicles I look back on later. Days run together here, turn into weeks and then months, with only grocery shopping and bills coming due to mark the time. It's been ten months since I did anything productive with myself, and I feel I've lost my identity. I'm not a law student anymore. I'm not a lawyer, though technically I am because I am licensed. I'm not a homemaker because I'm a shitty cleaner and too goddamned lazy to do more than cook and wash dishes. Reading books and writing stories, watching movies, playing video games and following politics, I can live a thousand people's lives effortlessly in this blank void. But when I look back on the story of my own life, this will be a blank page, dead time, wasted.

Right! Well, now that I've poured that self-pitying pile of shit onto the page, maybe I can write an actual update. Just a little one, mind you. It's the end of February, and it's damned cold here in Kentucky. We got snow today, though not much that's stuck. Funny how two weeks ago today Mike and I walked to the library because it was so nice out, and today he took our books back in the car because it's so cold. We have a new foster cat now, Pookah, who is a big hefty cat, but very shy. She's gotten to the point where she's out from under our bed more than she is underneath it, which is good progress. We're taking her to Saturday adoption events now. It was funny, our first post-Bellamonte foster was Heidi, who was supposed to be shy but really wasn't. She was only shy in the cage at Petsmart. I wrote her a brag sheet telling people what she was like, and she was adopted at her first event. We were surprised, especially after the four month Bellamonte ordeal. I think Pookah will be somewhere in between, and think she'll be at a few more events before she finds a home. Mike is very taken with her, but we can't afford another cat right now.

Mike's doing very well at school. He's delivered a bunch of lectures now, to widespread acclaim, and will be teaching a class on his own this summer. The people in his department are nice, and he's making a lot of friends. Tonight we went to an Oscar party and had a good time. Victoria was getting sick earlier this month, but we switched her from Wellness to Newman's Own Organic Cat Food. She really seems to like it and she's stopped puking. The birds are doing well, loud and feisty as always. They need new toys, but it's not in the budget right now so I'm compromising by switching up their food and hiding it around their cage so they're stimulated by having to look for it.

I'm actually doing a more daily sort of blog, a new thing, but the mundanity of it makes it a poor fit for a Livejournal that mainly measures in broad strokes. This one is for me to look at what I'm doing every day in terms of what I'm cooking and what I'm spending money on. It's also a good way to mark time, and there's a tangible reminder of each day's accomplishments. I like it so far. It's at electra310.blogspot.com. Feel free to stop by and have a look if you want to see pictures of what I've been cooking and read my shopping list.

Something will change soon, because it has to. I shall report back when it does.

Okay, it's late and I've been spending all night, for the past four nights, reading political news and blogs. Not that I wasn't reading them before, but this was the big eight-hour-at-a-time pushes. Everything from Daily KOS to FoxNews to Andrew Sullivan to Savage Blog to "Oh No They Didn't!-The Politics Edition, peppered with lots of CNN and several episodes each of the Daily Show and The Colbert Report. In some ways, it's been a search for entertainment. My unemployment continues unabated, and when my shitty job-hunting skills combine with an economic meltdown, that may not be changing for awhile. The election is, right now, the hottest thing going. From Lolitics to the daily gaffe roundup, there are many lulz to be had. Sarah Palin is God's gift to anyone trying to get a giggle out of politics, if only a horrified "this isn't really happening" nervous chuckle.

( Cori discusses politics. And abortion. And gets really long about the whole thing. )

Everyone must read this now, especially if you have been following American politics at all the past, oh, two years or so. Or if you are a gamer. If you are both, it is possibly the best thing ever.

Adventuring Party Politics

I passed the bar exam! I'm a lawyer! p433r m333!

Now I need a job!

Okay, so maybe the updating regularly thing hasn't gone so well, but it's been less than a month this time, so I claim victory! Not too much has been happening, so that's probably why I haven't felt compelled to note it down. Mike starts school again this week though, so that's important and exciting! He's got a workshop tomorrow, and then we're both going to a get-to-know-you barbeque for the department. Probably not going to be as much fun as, say, Pumphandle, but there will be food, and when we visited in the spring, we liked these people pretty well. They gave us good pizza. And hey, Mike's spent the past three years "and spouse"-ing it at this kind of event, I'm sure I'll get by.

No new news on the job front, I'm afraid. Only a couple more weeks till I know my bar exam results, at which point I can stride forward boldly without the nagging fear that I'm going to do all this work, land a job, and then lose it because I didn't pass the bar. Until then, I am half in job hunting mode, half in the familiar "Well, you could always chuck it all and ride the rails" mode that regular readers will probably remember from every time law school exams rolled around. I managed to pull off a cum laude there, so maybe if I just worry about it enough, that will somehow influence my bar exam score. October 3 is the big reveal, so stay tuned! You should probably assume, if I don't update that day, that I've run off to pursue dreams of hobodom.

We survived the big power outage here mostly unscathed, aside from some food in our fridge that was not so good after the better part of two days without electricity. It was one of those times when I blessed my fondness for candles, but was also glad that the Yankee candles were balanced out by the bag of approximately one million teeny unscented tealights I bought for my wax tart warmer. Get about twenty of those suckers burning on a mirror tile and you've got some light! Unscented was very good, since at the end of the night my house already smelled like cucumber-melon-lilac-lavender-lemon-clean-cotton-midnight-seranade-whatever-thats-supposed-to-smell-like-vanilla. It was sort of an odd mixture. Our oven still worked, at least, so I made a homemade chicken, bacon and artichoke pizza that was very nice, and also some spaghetti with cheese and pepperoni. Not terribly good for the old Weight Watchers, but all the ingredients were low fat, and we wanted to use some stuff up in case the power stayed out for too long. We got lucky, the power went up the next day, then down for a blown transformer, then up again by evening. Not bad, considering that the gusts were up to 74 miles an hour, not very usual for Northern Kentucky.

Bellamonte the Loudcat is doing much better than she was last month; she's finally settling in and getting less afraid of people. She's still astoundingly vocal, but now she will also approach to be petted, up to and including walking over my chest when I'm laying down and reading. She and Victoria still don't get along at all, and there's at least one instance of hissing and chasing every night, but at least they can exist in the same room for hours at a time. No word from the foster organization yet on possible placements for her. Kitten season is finally winding down, though, so she won't have quite so much competition. If we could just find a way to get potential adopters to see the good side of her, and not the freakshow performance she puts on when she's in a cage or carrier, I think they could fall in love. I may suck it up and clean the house if it means we can get people over here to see her in a place where she feels comfortable.

Other than that, not too much going on here. Live plant count is down by one, the mystery plant with orange flowers didn't like our front yard, apparently. The others are all good. I can go three miles on the elliptical machine, and gas is below 4 dollars a gallon again. Life is not too bad, overall.

Wow, it's really been five weeks since I updated? Oops! Five very busy weeks too, in which many things have happened! This looks like a job for an 88 Lines About 44 Topics post!

( 88 Lines About 44 Topics )

The funeral was lovely, I've been editing and uploading videos for my family to see. It was good to get home, even if that's another four days down the tubes. I'm trying to stay on schedule, but it's hard, and it feels like I just keep taking punches. Today I found out that I apparently owe 722 dollars on the laptop that I was supposed to have finished paying for a year ago through my student account. Some kind of accounting mistake at the school, not my fault but apparently now it's my problem. Because the sixty thousand dollars they've bled from me in three years isn't enough, they have to go in for the coup de grace right at the end. Right when I can't get any more loans, right when I'm already looking at living off credit cards for most of the summer. Maybe I can just give them the computer back. I doubt it's even worth 722 dollars right now, it was an overpriced piece of crap to begin with and now it's three years old.

Why can't the world just cut me a fucking break and stand back to let me get through the next four weeks with the problems I already have on my plate? I'm not even asking for a reduction in current problems, though they are many, just how about a fair chance to get by?

I found out just a few minutes ago that my grandmother died early this morning. It was very peaceful, and not unexpected. She was in the late stages of Alzheimer's Disease, and had stopped eating or taking her medicine, so we knew it was any time now. Though I felt like shit about it, I was praying earlier this week that she would go at least a few more days because I have this paper due. Life and death never coexist easily, I guess. I know she's feeling much better now, the fog is gone, the pain and helpless debility are gone. We're going to go up this weekend for the funeral on Monday. I have penciled in some time for grieving before then, but really, this is much less intense than when my grandpa died a few years ago. We've been mourning Grandma in small increments for years now. I think I said goodbye when I could look at her and know she didn't know who I was anymore. This just marks the end of her purgatory and the beginning of everything new.