Catching Up

Goodness. Looks like I left the Christmas tree up a little late this year. How embarrassing.

I hope you all had a great holiday, however you chose to celebrate -- or not celebrate -- it, and that your new year has proved satisfactory, at the very least, so far. Mine was pretty good, and the new year seems A-OK so far. I don't have any resolutions or anything, other than, you know, popping out another baby and trying not to go batshit crazy. Those seem attainable, I think.

Since I feel like some catch-up is in order, a few life events of note:

• Our cat Lulu had to be put down a couple of days after Christmas. She was sixteen years old, blind, mostly deaf, incontinent, and suffered from high blood pressure and lymphoma. She started to fail noticeably before Christmas and things went downhill quickly one day. We were sad, and yeah, the timing sure sucked, but we were glad that at least we were all at home for the holidays so that we could monitor her closely and then say goodbye properly. She was the sweetest cat you could imagine, and she was sweet all the way up to the end. I was worried that she'd be afraid, but she went peacefully. Rusty gave her a proper Dickensian burial in the backyard in the cold, sleeting, dark-grey late afternoon.
  
  
• On a more upbeat note, gestation continues apace. We're counting down the final ten weeks, which is kind of shocking, all the more so because we haven't done anything to get ready. We figure we'll pick up some diapers in early March.
  
  
• Oh, but get this: my doctor, whom I've been seeing for ten years and I really like, forgot to tell me that she's no longer doing deliveries. I just found this out two weeks ago. Argh, right? Fortunately, I've always been interested in the idea of midwifery, and even more fortunately, my good friend Anne-Marie happens to work for an excellent midwifery clinic and got me in the door quickly, and now I'm all set to go. Nonplussed? Moi? Bah! My midwife also permanently endeared herself to me, via my sense of medical vanity, by looking at my records and exclaiming about my unbelievably awesome hemaglobin. Everyone has to be good at something, right? In my case it would seem to be absorbing iron. You can't tell it to look at me, but I'm socking away minerals like a mofo over here.
  
  
• I've been freelancing since September, when I landed a big contract for a website for the Discovery Channel, which launched a month ago. I'm the solo site editor, which has been awesome and challenging and again awesome (because dude, it's the DISCOVERY CHANNEL, yo). It's probably the perfect project for me to cut my freelance teeth on, and the timing couldn't have been better, as it wraps up about three weeks before my due date. (If you're wondering, yes, I do occasionally find it uncomfortable to sit with this horseshoe up my ass.)
  
  
• Despite the fact that both Rusty and I have been gunned, work-wise, we've been doing a LOT of work around the house for the past month... cleaning, purging, organizing, painting, and getting really familiar with the floorplan of the nearest IKEA. One of the highlights of all our work is that we finally -- FINALLY! -- got new bookshelves in the kitchen, replacing our crappy old utility shelves with a much nicer set of Billy shelves (with the height extender, which I highly recommend for that authentic library look). To jog your memory, here are the old shelves. And here are the new ones:

• Despite all this other stuff, I don't know how but I've actually managed to read a lot of books. I'll get around to recapping my remaining books from 2007 one of these days. Who knows, I may even throw in a top ten list or something like that. And then, man, I've got to nail the ones I've read so far in 2008, or else they're going to totally get on top of me.

Am I the only person who's ever looked forward to her maternity leave so that she'll finally get a chance to friggin' relax?