How do people keep their pregnancies a secret for so long? I just spent 2 hours with Mike McInturff and every now and then I would have the random thought that he had no idea that he was sitting next to 2 people. I think Heidi was 5 months pregnant when she told WHM she was expecting....how in the world did she wait that long!!!???!!!
I'm looking forward to telling Elizabeth tomorrow and the rest of the family on Friday. I'm not sure how I'm going to approach it with work since I have no clear idea of what kind of home life I want. I'm fairly certain I'll tell them the following week since we'll be doing staff reviews.
I just had to delete 8 spam comments from my blog. EIGHT! Since yesterday, I got EIGHT comment spams. Thank God for Stepan and the blacklist utility he installed on my site! 6 of the spams came from 1 IP address...I have now discovered "IP banning" available through the "Weblog Config" tool on Moveable Type.
All spammers suck...may they suffer low band-width and slow connectivity :-p
The saddest thing I've seen in a long time is my poor dog in an Elizabethan collar. I suppose it could be worse; the ones I've seen in the past were opaque. But when he has it on, he kinda hangs his head as if it were really heavy and not only does his tail not wag, but he keeps it down and droopy. It's very sad.
I took Homer to the vet yesterday because the cut on the bottom of his ear from the incident at Dad's just wasn't healing very well. They ended up keeping him all day so they could put him under sedation, clean up the wound, and stitch closed. When I picked him up at the end of the day, he was wearing his new collar and his ear was all bandaged up. He looked very happy to see me, but with the collar on, he kept bumping into walls and furniture, and he hit the door frame when he tried to exit the examination room. It was just very sad.
This afternoon we took off the bandage. The wound looks much better, even with the stitches in place. Unfortunately, Home has to wear the Elizabethan collar at night and when he is home alone until we have the sutures removed in about 10 days. Very, very sad :-(
Today I had a meeting with Mike, Heidi, and Lynn. I was nervous telling them my news, but they all were very excited about it. Afterwards, we convened an impromptu staff meeting and shared the news with the whole office. I'm mostly relieved that I don't have to keep it a secret anymore, but I'm also going to miss keeping this news to myself. On the other hand, the more people who know about it makes it seem more and more real...and I can't deny that the fact of this pregnancy has seemed mostly unreal up to this point. Even seeing the sonogram and hearing the heart beat only provided brief moments of belief...relief...excitement.
After 24 years of quality reporting and over 20,000 interviews, Bob Edwards is being replaced as the host of NPR's Morning Edition. His voice is such an integral part of so many people's morning routine, I can't imagine what the news management team is thinking.
We had a good Saturday yesterday. Though I didn't get what I wanted accomplished I did manage to strike some long overdue items from my personal Honey Do list...not the least of which is all of my laundry, including a couple of loads of sheets and towels and finally installing iTunes on my computer.
While I was slaving over the washer and dryer, Stepan took the time to make some delicious baguettes for a neighborhood crawfish boil that was scheduled that afternoon. After a brief visit from Elizabeth and Jonathan, during which she was barred from my library for pointing out grammatical errors, Stepan and I took Homer with us to meet a friend and his daughter at Old Settler's Park for a wonderful afternoon of kite flying.
Addie, our friend, has a sweet little kite similar in style to the one I got Stepan for his birthday but smaller and faster. Addie has obviously had his longer than Stepan has. I was amazed at how well he could handle the kite...it was especially amazing to see him send the kite into a screaming dive bomb to the ground only to halt it mere inches from the ground in a perfectly calm hover. Stepan got progressively better at handling his kite through the 2.5 hours we were at the park. I can definitely see the appeal in owning, controlling, flying expensive kites better now than when I bought the kite. I also got to fly the kite, but decided not to push my luck too much:
The first time I flew it I broke the leading edge spar in a hard crash landing against a hidden rock. If not for Addie's spares, our kite flying adventure would have only lasted about 30 minutes. The next time I took the controls, through no fault of my own, one of the support spars went flying and we had to spend 5-10 minutes looking for it. At least I didn't fly it into a thorn tree like Step did :-) (the kite is fine). Sometime next week, Stepan is going back to World Wind Kites and will purchase some spare spars of our own.
Homer got to chase around with other off-leash dogs, went swimming in the lake, and barked like a mad dog after the stunt kites that were dive-bombing him. He didn't seem to like the noise they made as they swooped through the strong afternoon breeze. And unlike some dogs who actually attack kites (I've seen it happen), once the kites stopped making noise, Homer would happily turn his back on them and trot away...perhaps content in the knowledge they had succumbed to his will ceased all their incessant flapping.
Once we returned home, Stepan headed straight out to the crawfish boil with our baguettes. I needed to take care of some of my laundry so I didn't go with him. I swear I was no more than 5 minutes behind him, but by the time I got to the park all of our bread had completely disappeared. Next time we attend a neighborhood crawfish boil, I fear we'll have to forego the kite flying and spend the entire day making bread for it. It was a great party. The host has connections in Louisiana and had a friend bring over about 70 pounds of live crawfish. After releasing about half a dozen in the creek, we managed to eat all but maybe 10 pounds of it. The cook/host would boil 15-20 pounds at a time with carrots, potatoes, sweet potatoes, sausage, corn, and garlic. Once a pot was ready the whole thing would be dumped on a table in the park and we would gather for the feast...no plates, no silverware, just our fingers and a trashcan. It was great...does anybody not see why we love living where we do?
Last night we enjoyed the final opera of the 2003-2004 Austin Lyric Opera season. It was The Flying Dutchman by Wagner. I enjoyed it quite alot. I really like Wagner's music. I find it easier to understand than some other composers.
The first act went fairly quickly. It moved the story line along quite nicely. But as always, in the second act, the main characters take way too long to fall in love (this part usually puts me to sleep...last night was no exception). From what I gather from Stepan, the blocking wasn't very exciting and didn't help much at all. However the third act went surprisingly quick. It felt like it lasted at most 20 minutes. And the heroine didn't draw out her death scene as happens in most operas. She just declared her love and faithfulness unto death and jumped off the cliff.
All in all a great show. I'm glad we didn't miss it which was a near thing. I had remembered last week that it was coming up on Monday, but failed to remember on Monday morning. Stepan had to come home during lunch to grab some suitable clothes and shoes for me to change into after work.
I'm not sure if I was hungry because I needed something to eat or if I was hungry because I knew I didn't have anything available to eat. Whatever the case, I had to take a 30 minute break from work this afternoon to run to the local grocery and grab some snack food. While I was good and bought some apples, grapes, and cheese, I also succomb to the lure of chocolate and bought a bag of Hershey's Kisses. By the time I got back to the office I was so hungry I was shaking...though I also had to go to the bathroom, so I might have been shaking over a full bladder. I know Stepan makes fun of me when I write about what I eat, but I just wanted to reassure everybody that I assuaged my hunger with an apple, a serving of cheese, and a handful of grapes. I'm saving the kisses for later :-)