Archive for March, 2006

Sadly, we will have to wait a bit for pictures…

Published by theiowan March 23rd, 2006 in Pregnancy. 1 Comment

My apologies to those of you hoping for pictures of our progress on Thomas’ room and on our larger odyssey of household organization. Despite the fact that we put in many hours on both Thomas’ room and our other spare bedroom/office, we’re in no position to take any pictures yet. The office will hopefully be in a state of readiness fairly soon. But the nursery still has a long way to go. Good thing we’ve got three months left!

I promise to keep you posted and to try to think of other interesting things to post about in the meantime…

Latest uses for my bulging belly:

Published by theiowan March 21st, 2006 in Otto and Pregnancy. 2 Comments
  1. crumb catcher
  2. book holder
  3. schnauzer pillow

Rage

Published by theiowan March 16th, 2006 in Irritating and Pregnancy. 3 Comments

Two groups of people have been the target of my rage this week:

To the people who built our house:
Thanks a lot for building a guest-room closet that is more than two inches wider at the front than it is at the back. Nevermind that the closet itself is only 26 inches deep, which means that you gained nearly an inch horizontally for every foot of vertical space. I’m sure it was going to be a pain in the ass to go back out to the truck and grab your level or carpenter’s square, which would have made this mistake obvious and easy to fix.

Why do I care about this fact that my closet isn’t square? Well, it makes it a hell of a lot harder to install a closet system custom-built for a 54-inch wide closet in a closet that is only 52 inches wide at the back. I know, I know. I should’ve measured both front and back. But you know what? It’s a closet. It was full of stuff that is meant to be stored in a closet, and I didn’t think it necessary to remove all of that stuff because I assumed that you dumbasses had built a square closet!!! Lucky for you, I have a husband who is very handy with a saw and was able to cut off enough of the metal mounting strip to make it fit. Otherwise I would’ve been out there hunting down your octogenarian asses and demanding that you pay me back for the (fairly expensive) inoperable closet system.

To the people who decided it would be a good idea to remodel our grocery store:
Thanks a lot for making my recent shopping experience as hellish as possible. It was a really great idea to tear up the entire store, displacing all of the items I need in a completely illogical way. I’m sure it makes a lot of sense to you to move the organic granola cereals out of the organic foods section and into the aisle containing (not the rest of the cereal, which might have made sense, but instead the one containing) the canned vegetables. Also a good move was to transfer the peanut butter from its regular place to the “Oriental and Mexican” aisle. And your idea to make the space between the check-out lanes and the ends of the aisles several feet narrower so that it’s impossible either to stand in line at the checkouts (if the line is longer than 1 person) or to move through the front of the store. Finally, I thought I’d let you know what a nice touch it was to have to navigate my cart simultaneously over a series of extension chords and under the 20-foot ladder of a construction worker drilling something into the ceiling as I entered the store.

I’m sure you’re thinking that the store will be so much better when it’s finished that I will be happy to have had to suffer through the construction. But actually, the only reason I shopped at your stupid store in the first place was that I knew where everything was. But not only have you moved everything around, you’ve moved it around each time I’ve been to the store in the last three weeks, causing me to experience a very unpleasant form of grocery-store vertigo each time I walk through your doors. But never fear! I’ve found the solution: Copps, you are dead to me. Sentry, here I come.

This is awesome.

Published by theiowan March 9th, 2006 in Random. 1 Comment

Sometimes, after I’ve read all of my usual blogs, I click over to cnn.com to see what the news industry wants me to think is important that day. I usually skip over all the “serious” stuff (which I hear enough about listening to the radio and/or reading rants on the grad list) and look for some “wacky” material that might entertain me for a few minutes. Today’s front page did not disappoint:

Cubicles: The great mistake
Even the designer of the cubicle thinks they were maybe a bad idea, as millions of ‘Dilberts’ would agree.

You can visit the article in its entirety here. Here’s the opening:

NEW YORK (FORTUNE Magazine) – Robert Oppenheimer agonized over building the A-bomb. Alfred Nobel got queasy about creating dynamite. Robert Propst invented nothing so destructive. Yet before he died in 2000, he lamented his unwitting contribution to what he called “monolithic insanity.”

Propst is the father of the cubicle. More than 30 years after he unleashed it on the world, we are still trying to get out of the box. The cubicle has been called many things in its long and terrible reign. But what it has lacked in beauty and amenity, it has made up for in crabgrass-like persistence.

Reviled by workers, demonized by designers, disowned by its very creator, it still claims the largest share of office furniture sales–$3 billion or so a year–and has outlived every “office of the future” meant to replace it. It is the Fidel Castro of office furniture.

The cubicle as A-bomb, dynamite, and Fidel — I love it!

I also love it that this writer is kicking her co-workers’ asses. I’m imagining her in the morning meeting, watching her colleagues receive the serious assignments (Enron, Wal-Mart, Mortgage rates, and GM are all on the main page of cnnmoney today) and then getting stuck with the cubicle story. This morning, however, that cubicle story made the front page of cnn, while the rest of these stories were only accessible by clicking through to cnnmoney. (Nevermind that it has since been bumped by this story.)

Random Observations

Published by theiowan March 8th, 2006 in Pregnancy and Random. 0 Comments

Last week, Will started Weightwatchers, inspired to get healthy before the arrival of little W. Thomas. (He doesn’t really want to talk about it on his website, but said I could here.) Two tidbits from the two meetings he’s attended so far:

  • At the first meeting, the leader (like all WW leaders, a member herself) admonished attendees to “beware of lick, bites, and tastes.” When I asked Will if she seemed aware of this slogan’s double entendre, he said “absolutely not.”
  • When he got back from his second meeting yesterday, I asked if it was less weird, more weird, or equally as weird as the first one. He said, “Weirder. There were poems.” But we had to rush off and I haven’t heard any more about this.

It may sound like I’m making fun of weightwatchers, but in fact I think it’s fantastic, and so does Will, especially after weighing in and discovering that he’d lost 8.6 pounds in his first week, despite the (modest) excesses he enjoyed at his birthday celebration this weekend.

***

Listening to the radio and browsing the internet this week, I’ve developed a hypothesis that I’m submitting for your consideration: Every person who calls in to a radio talk show or posts comments on the high-traffic blogs of people he/she (usually he) doesn’t personally know is either a sycophant, an asshole, or both. (If you’d like me to provide examples, I can.)

***

Two more observations about pregnancy this week:

  • It is getting harder and harder for me to put on my shoes and socks.
  • As I already noted over at ivorynotes, I’ve noticed that my partying experience hasn’t actually changed that much from prepregnancy, except that lots more people at the parties want to (and in most cases actually do) touch my belly. (So far I don’t mind the belly-touching at all. And so far no total strangers have touched it. I’ll keep you posted.)

Crazy things are going on in there.

Published by theiowan March 2nd, 2006 in Pregnancy. 3 Comments

Today is one of those bizzare pregnancy days.

I am very lucky to be able to say that I haven’t had very many such days. For the most part, and especially since the middle of December, I’ve been feeling pretty normal. I’ve been able to work, get stuff done around the house, hang out with friends, and even exercise. Many days, if I couldn’t see the evidence in the mirror, I wouldn’t really be able to tell I’m pregnant.

But today, I feel like some alien life force has taken control of my body (and I guess in some ways that’s true). I slept for close to 10 hours last night, and slept very soundly all that time without even moving, I don’t think. I didn’t wake up until almost 8:45 (very late for me). I got up, got myself into campus in time for a 10:00 meeting, and then came home to work for the rest of the day.

But once I got home, I was unspeakably exhausted. So I thought I would just lie down for half an hour before starting work. The next thing I knew it was 2.5 hours later, and I was completely disoriented. When I finally realized where I was and what was going on, I realized that I was also unspeakably hungry, but not for just anything. I was hungry for chocolate. I bet I’ve had about 6 or 7 pieces of chocolate total since I’ve been pregnant, but this afternoon I ate an entire bar of chocolate in about 10 minutes. I don’t even really like chocolate that much. Weird.

What with the crazy sleep and the crazy chocolate, I figure all kinds of things are happening inside this body of mine. I just read that during this week of pregnancy the baby’s brain is growing rapidly, so I’ll just chalk it up to Thomas’ intellectual development.

In other news, the conference I attended and presented at last week went surprisingly well. My paper was actually finished before I left Madison (though only because it was first on the program so I couldn’t leave the finishing touches until I had arrived, like I usually do), and it went pretty well, in that people seemed to react vaguely positively and I was able to answer all of the questions they posed. I even had an answer for the one question that was a (very politely phrased) serious challenge to the assumptions underlying my argument. Phew.

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