For Mother's Day, Rob gave me a lovely little potted mum, with yellow flowers and many buds not yet open. Because it's still growing, he said.

He's good like that sometimes. :)

(I did make him promise that he wouldn't take it as terribly symbolic if I managed to let the mum die before the rest of the flowers opened. He assured me that he wouldn't.)

I am feeling very thankful for my life, today.

I am grateful that this pregnancy was planned and wanted, and that we were able to conceive after only six months of trying.

I am grateful that both bratling and I are excited about the coming baby, and feeling positive about the change coming to our lives.

I am grateful that both of us come from functional families, with parents who have maintained basically healthy marriages to this day.

I am grateful for the support of my friends and family members, and for the many and varied examples of parenting that we can find among them.

I am grateful that my pregnancy has been easy so far, and that my baby seems healthy and vigorous.

I am grateful for healthcare, and for the opportunity to choose the type of care I will receive.

I am grateful that we are financially stable enough to afford, if with difficulty, for me to stay home with the baby for the first year.

...

I've been reading When Partners Become Parents today. It's a sobering read, but also a useful one. I am keenly aware that the first years of parenting are hard times for many couples, and it scares me a little. I know that even partners who ultimately thrive in parenthood face real challenges in getting through the transition, and I worry about how we will handle those challenges. I am deeply frightened of the isolation that can come to stay-at-home parents, and I'm not sure how I can ease it.

But as I read the early chapters of this book, I am also reminded of what extra challenges we don't face--unresolved ambivalence about parenthood, unplanned pregnancy, tumultuous family histories, true financial hardship, and so much more. That realization bolsters my hopefulness, and leaves me feeling very thankful for the life that I am living.

I was just dancing around my slippery kitchen floor in sock-feet, drinking a glass of orange juice. In my enthusiasm, my feet slipped out from under me, and I fell on my hip and slid across the kitchen in fairly spectacular fashion. I did not, however, spill a drop of orange juice. I am entirely proud of this.

(Yes, I'm fine. So is the baby. And so is the orange juice.)

I find it very funny that I'm suddenly getting much more flattering pants by breaking into my stock of maternity clothes.

I've made it to 16 weeks still wearing my usual pants, despite a visibly growing belly, for the simple reason that most of my pants started out too large for me. I had managed to lose some weight before I got pregnant, enough to make my jeans pretty baggy, and buying new ones seemed silly once I found out I was due for nine months of significant growth. So I've just been wearing the same ones, still baggy through the butt and thighs even as they stretch around my belly. They have the effect of blurring out my silhouette and making me look mostly like I've gained weight.

But they're starting to strain a bit over my belly, so now I'm trying on some of the maternity clothes my sister passed on to me... and, woah. Suddenly, I look distinctly pregnant, and way more attractive. Not the effect I was expecting from maternity clothes!

Groovy.

So, wow, it has been a long time since I posted here. I haven't been feeling very verbose in print this year... though I do have a small collection of half-written entries I never finished. But in the meantime, life has happened.

Specifically: I'm some 15 weeks pregnant.

I'm really very excited about this, and have been ever since I stopped quivering in terror (which I did for about the first 48 hours after I found out). Yes, this is planned, but I expected it to take much longer! But it's a good thing. The baby is due in July, which works out absurdly well for my work schedule, as a teacher. I'll get to finish out this school year, let my students see me go through almost the whole pregnancy, and then hopefully have enough time to rest a bit in the last month.

After some soul-searching (and spreadsheet-pondering), I've decided to take next year off of work, and stay home with the baby. That has always been my preference in theory, but I wasn't sure if it would be financially feasible. It certainly will be tight, but bratling and I feel like it's worth it, at least for the first year or two. I'm also hoping to use the time to try making some salable artwork--mostly pagan-oriented sculpture, with a solid historical eye. I'm looking forward to that challenge; it's a project that appeals me on a number of levels. I don't know if it will generate any income to speak of--and I'm open to the possibility that new-motherhood will override the project altogether--but it would be nice to try, at least.

Other details that might be of interest:

* I feel great! A little nausea first trimester, but almost nothing compared to what some folks experience. And now, even that's gone.

* No, I'm not going to find out the baby's sex in advance. I'm not going near an ultrasound machine, unless something is evidently wrong. I am content to be curious.

* Yes, we have some names in mind. No, I'm not telling. :)

* I'm planning a home birth, with as little outside intervention as possible (where "outside" means "outside my body"). I feel very fortunate to have found a midwife who seems to be of a similar mind as me in that regard--willing to sit back (like, in the other room) and let me do this myself, and genuinely willing to honor my decisions even when they're unorthodox. I didn't think I would be able to find a midwife whose style meshed with mine so well, and I'm ecstatic about it. She's awesome, and she even lives in my town! *does the happy dance*

I suspect I'll have more to say about this as things go on! I might even get as far as typing it in...

I have just made myself an egg scramble with onions and mushrooms and asparagus, and Armenian string cheese melted on top, and oh my goodness, it is an orgy of yum. I managed to get the onions just right and they're so sweet and the string cheese and the asparagus are a seriously awesome combination.

Having time to make proper meals is one of the best things about being on vacation.

Last June, I posted a video of an interesting call to action on the climate change issue. The maker of that video, Greg Craven (aka wonderingmind42), then posted a few more videos trying to patch holes in the first one, in a rather frazzled tone.

Apparently, he then took a step back, regrouped, and made a new video summarizing his argument for taking action. It's tighter than the first one by a good margin, and I dig it:



There's even an expansion pack: A comprehensive response to every question and objection he could think of, in the form of 6+ hours worth of 10-minute videos. It's intimidating in size, but there's a handy index and menu, so it's possible to skip to the critical bits.

Craven got slammed in the responses to his first video, but he says that the response to this one has been vastly more positive, and there have been more people helping him to field the critiques. There's been some mainstream press coverage, and there are now two websites dedicated to spreading the word, neither started by Craven. (One of them offers the whole 7-hour series on DVD, at cost (and in higher resolution than YouTube can provide).) And Perigee has offered him a book contract.

The phenomenon definitely gives me pause. This guy is just a high school science teacher, and he made these videos at home, on a very low budget. He's fired up, reasonably cute, and definitely articulate, but other than that, he really is just some guy. But he's gotten an awful lot of people to listen, if only for 10 minutes, and a decent number of people to act. That's like my life dream, right there. It's nice to know it's possible.

Right now, I am listening to Hooked on Classics for the first time in over a decade, and it's almost embarrassing how much I'm enjoying it.

For those who have not encountered it: it's a series of medleys, taking the most stirring bits of various famous classical orchestral pieces and stringing them together over a pop beat. It's cheesy. I'm sure that as someone who generally appreciates classical music in its more dignified form, I'm supposed to think it's cheesy.

But I completely adore it.

My parents had it on vinyl when I was growing up, and it was one of my favorite records to listen to. It was energetic and interesting and more complex than most rock music, and I loved it. The cover features a shiny silver G clef on a staff of multi-colored neon, and as a child, I always thought the neon lines looked like toothpaste; I have vivid memories of rolling around on the carpet frantically rubbing my teeth with my finger as I listened to some of the more boisterous medleys. And it did stand me in good stead later--it gave me familiarity with the themes of lots of major classical pieces, and when I met the full pieces later, I immediately recognized them as something I liked, and wanted to hear more of.

I mostly stopped listening to it after we got a CD player, and the record collection fell into disuse. And somewhere along the line, when I was still young enough to absorb such comments uncritically, someone made comments that implied that it was Stupid and thoroughly Uncool, and so I put it out of my mind. But a few weeks ago, I looked online and found a copy of it on CD, and it just arrived today. And now I am listening to it, and discovering that it's still enormously entertaining, and that I still remember it as though I'd listened to it last week. I was cheerfully bouncing around my living room conducting, and it startled me when the CD failed to skip where the record always used to.

Apparently, there are more albums where this one came from, and I may have to go look them up...

Tonight, I am enjoying the peace of my house. It is a house that, between the changes made to it during the mad preparations for hosting family Christmas, and the warmth brought to it by being full to bursting with my family for a few days, now feels more like a home than it ever has before.

I am sitting now in my dark quiet dining room, watching the snow fall outside and feeling Violet purring in my lap. I am drinking in the gently colorful glow of the Christmas tree, so perfect, so evocative of warm memories that it brings tears to my eyes. I look around, and I see the lights one brother hung playfully on the shelves, the poinsettias my other brother set here and there to brighten the rooms, the silver candlesticks my mother polished up, and all the many little signs that people I love were here.

I have spent this evening painting, the largest painting I have done in many years, a broad snow-covered landscape that I will hang in my classroom to help children learn what animals do in winter. In a few moments, I will go and curl into bed and snuggle in close to my husband, and Angel will come purring to sleep in the crook of my knees. Tomorrow, I will welcome the new year in the company of dear friends, and I am sorry only that I cannot be in four places at once to celebrate with more of them.

Tonight, I am happy.

I hope that you are happy, too.

May you be blessed, and may you know yourself to be blessed.
May you be loved, and may you know yourself to be loved.
May you find what your heart yearns for, and may it burn brightly in your keeping.
May you find that which you most need, and that which will lead you forward.
Peace be with you.

There's an article in the NY Times about the Black List, a list of top Hollywood screenplays currently in the pipeline. It's just a little thing, but... in the second paragraph, we find the following text:

Atop the 2007 list of 130 screenplays, which the list’s author, Franklin Leonard issued on Friday : "Recount," by Danny Strong, about the 2000 election battle in Florida; "Farragut North," a political drama by Beau Willimon; and "Passengers," by Jon Spaihts. HBO and Warner Brothers are already making the first two. The third, by a new writer, about a spaceship passenger prematurely thawed from a cryogenic slumber a century before anyone else, is available to studios or financiers, with Keanu Reeves attached to produce and star.

That's "Passengers" in the #3 slot, "with Keanu Reeves attached to produce and star"--a screenplay by "new writer" Jon Spaihts.

Whose butt I am currently trying to kick in an online game of Scrabble.



That's my brother.



I may eventually get used to this sort of thing, but at the moment, it still makes me stop short and then cackle with glee, every time.

And if (I hope it's "when"!) one of his screenplays gets made into a movie, I will be dragging just about everyone I know out to see it with me. You have now been forewarned.

bratling has posted his photos from Connecticut Faire, taken third weekend. Includes images from Court, the first street dance set, and the Winnifred/Eyah fight, as well as some miscellaneous street shots.

It also includes possibly my favorite photo of Morgan to date, in which unpleasant mojo seems moments away:

Alright all,

I am seriously jonesing for a new music fix, and I have no leads.

Help!

What is the coolest music you know, that I might not know already?

(Assume that all genres are fair game. Weird stuff is welcome, but so is mainstream, and everything in between.)

Earlier, kaige_of_ct posted this, and the more I look at it, the more fun it is. It's an optical illusion featuring a silhouette of a woman spinning in circles, and the question is, which way is she spinning?

The blurb below the image posits that which way you see her spinning depends on which hemisphere of your brain is currently dominant; logical left-brain activity leads to perceived counterclockwise spinning, while creative right-brain activity leads to perceived clockwise spinning. I was initially very skeptical of this claim, but it's now seeming strangely plausible.

When I first looked at it this morning, in the course of planning my day, she was definitively spinning counter-clockwise, and I couldn't convince my brain to reverse it. I looked back at the page when I got back from work (after 45 minutes of singing in the car), and she was spinning clockwise, and again, I couldn't convince my brain to reverse it.

Just a few minutes ago, I checked again after dancing around my living room for 20 minutes--still clockwise--then got curious and started analyzing the illusion. In the process of said analysis, I glanced away from the screen for a fraction of a second, and when I glanced back, darned if she wasn't spinning counterclockwise. So I started playing with phrasing for a fluffier post on the subject. I clicked on the url to copy it; clicking paused the image for a fraction of a second, and when it started moving again, it looked like it was moving clockwise.

Somewhere in the midst of writing up this sequence, I glanced up, and she's back to spinning counter-clockwise. And I still can't make the image reverse through sheer concentration, like I can with most two-way optical illusions.

Is it tracking this way for anyone else?

I have just discovered Bobby McFerrin.

Apparently, I'm a little slow on the uptake, since he's been around for quite some time, and seems to be fairly quiet these days. At this moment, I cannot fathom why I have not been listening to his music obsessively for many years already, it is such a very great goodness, and so very much unlike anything else I can think of. Except, of course, that all I ever new of Bobby McFerrin was "Don't Worry, Be Happy," which, while highly entertaining and technically impressive, never really drove me to seek out more of the like. Apparently, it was only the goofiest representation of the artist's offerings, most of which are entirely more sublime.

Now I know, and now I have evangelized.

Just now I discovered, in the process of playing through one of those memes that passes by sometimes, that "Zanne needs" is a successful Googlewhack (two words that return exactly one result on Google). I am highly amused.

For the curious, the phrase I found was "Zanne needs to stop and smell the roses." Which is true, always and as a matter of principle.


(Edit: Except, of course, that in the nature of Googlewhacks, I ruined it by blogging it. Le sigh.)

Apparently, years after the first time I waxed rhapsodic about it, listening to the dance remix of the Hamster Dance can still pull me straight from a mild vegetative state into 3 minutes and 33 seconds of ecstatic cardio.

This is the wonderful and terrible power of "Cotton-Eyed Joe" in the hands of small electronic rodents.

(Edit: ...Or, the power of "Whistle Stop" in the hands of small electronic rodents. As the case may be.)

J.K. Rowling has said a few words in follow-up to the final Harry Potter book. I am foolishly relieved about this, because I was pretty disappointed to think we'd never get the answers to these last questions. Apparently, I wasn't the only one.

Click this link only if you have already finished reading The Book.

Now that I've been made aware of it, I keep noticing more evidence of people's complicated relationship with monkeys.

EDIT: I suppose the complication here isn't evident unless you think of it from the perspective of whoever is dropping things on the monkeys.

And now, just for the sake of follow-up, and because I find the saga amusing:

The public response to the previously mentioned global warming YouTube video was sufficiently vehement that it drove the maker into donning silly hats out of sheer frustration:



Then follows a second follow-up video, in which he attempts to respond to the two-thousand-some comments in less than ten minutes, which is actually pretty entertaining to watch, if a little short on eye-contact. (I particularly like his closing bit, wherein he points out that the US government got slammed for having forewarning of 9/11, but not taking sufficient action on it; how much more should we expect when the stakes are this much higher, and the evidence this much stronger?)



And then, just to finish matters off, he posts a third follow-up, which ends up being a fairly lucid summary of the "Why are we even still arguing about this?" angle, complete with little explosions:



But what ultimately stands out to me, is that the original video got over a hundred thousand hits (plus another six thousand on a different copy of the video), and at this point, there's value to anything that keeps this issue at the forefront of people's minds and gets them to think about the possibilities.

I think this is the most candid and to-the-point argument on climate change that I've heard. It's well worth ten minutes of your time; heck, it's worth watching just out of appreciation for good logic, all apart from its social relevance.