Week-ish in Review

[kate_nepveu]

We spent Tuesday through Friday in D.C.; I was there for a workshop (which was great), and Chad came with to make it a bit of a vacation. He wrote up the cultural part of the trip over at his blog—visiting the Sackler & Freer Museums, wandering the mall, and going to the Zoo. He also has a picture of the imperturbable mandarin ducks, and will be posting a few more. (When I have time, I'll go through my museum pictures and the rest of the zoo pictures and put them up, but I took a lot, so it won't be for a while. That's really the revolutionary thing about digital cameras, I think, the number of pictures you can take conveniently.)

Anyway, great trip, even though my brain refused to get out of post-vacation mode yesterday when I could really have used it.

In other news, we've picked a contractor to turn our garage into a library/office, thereby allowing us to use the current spare bedroom as a nursery and Chad's current office as a new spare bedroom. Floor-to-ceiling bookcases on two walls! And I've been feeling fetal movement for the last couple weeks, which is reassuring though occasionally weird—I never expected anything that feels like a water cooler sounds when it's refilling: "blurp, blurp." We have daycare visits and a fetal echocardiogram scheduled for this week.

Some more discussion sparked by those culturally-appropriating fake memoirs: rachelmanija on Memoir, Fiction, and Truth, and rushthatspeaks on Memoir and Honesty.

And some more links behind the cut, mostly food and cute:

• Recipe of the Day: Fast Roast Chicken - Bitten - Dining & Wine - New York Times Blog
  (tags: chicken)
• How People Count Cash? :: Interesting video, though I wonder if the same method is really used all throughout Africa.
  (tags: videos travel)
• Cute Overload! -- teeeeeny hamster between paws of huge dog
  (tags: animals pictures)
• jonquil: Indiana Pound Cake
  (tags: desserts)
• I Need a Virtual Break. No, Really. :: Something I want to get better at.
  (tags: technology productivity)
• Feedback: Back in the saddle again :: Matthew Jarpe is working on a novel partly inspired by Chad's talk on quantum teleportation at Boskone. How cool is that?
  (tags: physics sff)
• Parmesan-Crusted Chicken Cutlets Recipe - Cook's Illustrated 3/2007
  (tags: chicken)
• Antarctica, Gentoo Penguins, Photo of the Day - National Geographic :: "Poised to plunge belly-first into the ocean, a colony of gentoo penguins lines up for a dip."
  (tags: animals pictures)
• The weirdest legal pleading ever. - By Bonnie Goldstein - Slate Magazine :: Actually, the pornographic filings are probably weirder, but not as easy for Slate to post on the web . . .
  (tags: law wrongness)
• Cute Overload! -- The most cruel person ever did this
  (tags: animals pictures)

Comments

[missysedai.livejournal.com]

I never expected anything that feels like a water cooler sounds when it's refilling: "blurp, blurp."

This gave me the giggles. Because it's TRUE.

Unlike the "Oh! It feels like butterfly kisses!" horseshit so many pregnant women spit out. Pregnancy IS weird. Weird can be fun.

[kate_nepveu]

No-one gave me that, but the topic hasn't come up that much.

Someone did say, "well, everyone says it's kind of like butterflies . . . but not really." And yeah, that's about right; for me, nervous butterflies in the stomach are fast and soft, whereas the first signs of fetal movement were like taking that, slowing it way down, and increasing the intensity (I'd say reduced frequency and increased amplitude, but I'm not sure I'm using the terms right).