Pregnancy Update

Well, since my mom is wanting to see pictures of me, I'll be brave and post a few.

Here's me at 17 weeks:

From Baby

Me at 19 weeks:

From Baby

And me at 24 weeks at the Ren Fair:

From Baby

I really don't feel like I have much of a bump yet. Just a very thick midsection. Oh well.

Yes, I'm wearing the same clothes. I don't have a whole lot of clothes I can wear right now. And I just ordered some new warmer clothes for the winter, such as we have here in Texas. Ordered them from Old Navy online. They have free returns, so if I don't like them, not a problem to send them back. I'm buying more and more stuff online these days. It's getting very easy. And ordering from Amazon is just way too freakin' easy.

Just for Carolyn, here's a picture of the baby quilt I made years ago:

From Baby

I'm working on my baby registry. I'll post the link to it soon, I promise. I'm trying to figure out what we really need. I know I don't want a lot of plastic, and no soft plastic toys he can put in his mouth. Mostly organic, when I can, but if it's too pricy, I'm not going to sweat it.

Happy Thanksgiving Weekend

Hope everyone had a good time. I did.

Took off early on Wednesday, just because. Thursday was quiet for us. It always is, since there's only the 2 of us, and we're not into football. Had a nice quiet dinner. It always seems strange to me, how you can spend hours preparing for dinner, and then eat it in 15 minutes.

Friday, we went to the Texas Renaissance Festival, north of Houston. Had a good time. Here's a link to the library with some of the pictures there.

Texas Ren Fair 2008

Mainly I got pictures of the parade at noon. I wanted to ride an elephant, but I wasn't thinking, and I work a skirt that day. Couldn't ride an elephant in that! We saw a bird show that showcased lots of different raptors, owls and vultures. The hawks were free flying around the stage, attacking a leather bag they used as a training prop. We also saw a carillion show. It's a 4.5 ton instrument made of cast bronze bells. The player would ring the bells using a sort of piano set up. He'd hit the keys and it would ring the bells. He played "Ring, Silver Bells" (Can't remember the name of the song, but it's one of my favorites), Carmina Burana, and one other I didn't recognize. It was very, very cool, but it was amazingly loud. It woke up the baby, and he started kicking.

I didn't find much I wanted to buy there, but it was fun looking at all the shops. At the end of the day, there was one shop I wanted to go back to, a candle shop in Polonia. He was selling hand-made beeswax candles. Next door was a rock and jewelry shop that I had missed the first time through. How did I miss that!? So we wandered through, and I found some amazing deals. I got a huge piece of mahogany obsidian for $24! I also found a nice large emerald crystal for $3. It's not clear, but I bet I could make a nice cab out of it.

On Saturday, I took the obsidian into the Houston gem workshop and showed it off. Everyone said I got a fantastic deal. Rusty said he'd have happily paid $100 for the piece, and we was salivating all day long asking if he could buy some of it from me. I told him he could when I was done slabbing what I wanted. I spent hours slabbing the thing and only got about a quarter of the way through it.

I had a very productive day at the shop. Ended up finishing 6 cabs, and Rusty gave me one he had done, but didn't like. I had taken a bunch of stuff to the shop with me, so I'd have a lot of options, and I ended up coming home with twice as much as I started with, because Rusty kept giving me extra slabs of stuff he had. Some very nice plume agate and west George (?) petrified wood.

Still not used to tropical winters

Such a nice morning that I'm wearing shorts and a t-shirt and have the windows open. There's lots of things I don't like about Texas, but winters ain't one of them.

I was so productive at the gem shop yesterday. Cut and polished 3 cabs completely: tear-drop sodalite, large oval moss agate, and a diamond blue tigers eye. They came out very nice, especially the moss agate. Then I spent about an hour and a half working on a Boulder opal. It's so soft, I was worried about chipping it. Actually, I was worried about ruining it. I've had this piece for probably 2 or 3 years, and never really did anything with it. Finally decided it wasn't worth anything just sitting in my closet, so started to play with it. Another guy was working on Boulder opal yesterday too, so we compared notes. Still not finished with it. I'll have to take it back next Saturday to see if I can get anything out of it.

I hope I'm doing peeling from my misadventure with the sun last weekend. Bleah. Bad enough to have a burn and peel, but for it to be on your face is the worst.

Today is a nice day to stay at home and do stuff around the house. And work some more on my baby registry. I did manage to convince Daniel to go with me to Babies-R-Us to look at car seats and strollers. I had to bribe him by taking him to dinner afterward, because he said it was too early to worry about that sort of stuff. I don't care. I'm trying to figure all this stuff out. I never knew strollers and car seats were so complicated. Sheesh.

We also had a nice get-together at work on Friday. Someone brought it a copy of Wall-E, and we had a potluck lunch. I volunteered to bring a salad because I knew everyone else would bring desserts. Yep, mine was the only green thing on the table. Everyone loved it though. I made that and a blueberry oatmeal cake, both from my Eating Well When You're Expecting book, and they were both great.

Quantum of Solace Rocks!

I believe that Daniel Craig is the best Bond ever. He's even better than Sean Connery. I loved QoS, although I thought the plot was a little shaky and difficult to follow. I like how Craig makes you feel every single hit and punch. He doesn't shrug them off, and it really feels like a spy movie for the 21st century.

Now, I still like the old Bond movies; they have their charm. But I'm definitely loving this new direction for the series.

Such a successful recycling event!

On Saturday, my work hosted an e-waste recycling event for the south Houston area. We were one of 5 locations around Houston, and we thought it would be a big turnout. Wow, we had no idea!

The morning got off to a hectic start. The forklifts were an hour late showing up, so we couldn't unload the supplies from the trucks. The guys finally resorted to pulling out pallets by hand.

The event didn't officially start until 9:00 am, and by 9, we already had 66 cars come through. By the time it ended at 4, we had to turn cars away, and we had about 1,500 cars come through to drop off stuff. The wait was about an hour long, so kudos to everyone who waited. We ended up filling 12 tractor trailers full of e-waste, with an estimated weight of 400,000 pounds. Absolutely amazing.

The weather was good, too. It was sunny, but chilly and very windy. Unfortunately, that meant I got a bad sunburn. I was up before dawn and forgot about sunscreen, then it was so cool that I didn't realize I was getting burned. Daniel called me raccoon girl all weekend because my face was red except around my eyes where my sunglasses had been.

Overall though, it was great. I hope we can do it again next year.

Link to Countdown To Victory

I was wandering through CNN's site and came across a link to Countdown To Victory. The first video is of Grant Park at 11:00 Eastern Time when the crowd was counting down the seconds until the polls on the west coast closed. They start cheering, and you can hear the second that the crowd realizes Obama won, and the cheering changes from normal to Hell, yeah, our guy just won!!

Watching it, that moment still makes me smile and even still bring a tear to my eye. How sappy is that? Maybe I can blame pregnancy hormones.

A collection of miscellaneous thoughts

On Barack Obama:
Yeah, I know I'm a week late on this, but I have to say something about Barack Obama's win. I got so tired of hearing about him being black. Yes, it's historic, but I didn't vote for him because he was black. I voted for him because I thought he was the best candidate for the job and because he stood for the things I believe in. If there are other reasons to be happy, so be it. But that's why I voted for Obama.

On other politics:
How the hell is Alaska's Ted Stevens even still close to being reelected as Senator after being convicted of multiple felonies? How???? What is wrong with the voters in Alaska?

PS: It sucks living in Texas and knowing your vote never counts. Not even at the local level.

On Fallout 3:
I knew I was resisting Daniel getting me to try his new video game. He kept raving about it, so I finally tried it Sunday. I was right. It ate my brain. I played it most of the day on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday. There went my 4 day weekend, but I don't care. I had fun. Besides, it rained all day on Monday and Tuesday. 5 inches total.

On Whole Foods:
That's such a fun store. Shame it's so very expensive to shop there. We went there Saturday and had fun wandering around. I picked up a bag of apples for a good price. Too good to be true. Turned out most of the apples were soft and couldn't wait for my to eat them over the week. So I ended up making cinnamon applesauce, and then I canned most of it. It wasn't as hard as I thought it would be. I got out my preserving cookbook, and I had all the equipment ready to go. Had all the jars and lids and had bought a nice big canning pot last year. So now I have 5 jars of homemade cinnamon (very yummy) applesauce in my pantry. That was fun. I may have to experiment with other recipes in that book.

On lapidary:
I learned to use the rock saw at the mineral shop on Saturday. Ended up cutting a whole bunch of slabs of tiger's eye and a couple of slabs of malachite. People can be so funny and nice there. Everyone just trades around extra raw stones. Guy gave me a piece of blue tiger's eye, and then someone else gave me a piece of Botswana agate. I traded them some of my tiger's eye, since I had so much.

On new vacuum cleaners:
We finally broke down and bought a new vacuum cleaner. Found a great deal on a bagless from amazon.com. $80 and free shipping. We used it today, and holy cow. We had to empty the container after every room because it was filled (FILLED!) with cat hair. I can't believe there was so much crap still in the carpet. Either this is really good, or our old one was really, really bad. Maybe both.

My great debate tonight: Fallout 3 or make a carrot cake. A healthy version from my Eating Well When You're Expecting book. Full of very yummy recipes.

Obama Wins!!!!!!!!

Hurray!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I'm so, so happy. Finally, I feel like anyone really can grow up to be President.

Halloween is awesome

I love Halloween. I love all the kids coming to the door and handing candy out to them. We live in a great neighborhood for that. Lots of kids, most of them still little and having lots of fun. We gave out at least 9 bags of candy, and we only gave each kid 2 pieces: a piece of chocolate and a sugary candy like Smarties or Twizzlers. My poor scaredy cat was hiding all night in the couch because the doorbell kept ringing. I think she finally reappeared around midnight.

I'm not much for costumes for myself. I wanted to get a t-shirt with a pumpkin painted on the belly and with a logo that says Pumpkin Smuggler, but ran out of time.