Cooking up something good

Blechh. I have eaten too much dinner. It's good dinner--I actually cooked, which isn't happening as much lately as it ought--but there were too many carrots and, um, mint M&Ms while I was waiting. I had my first appointment with the new doctor (midwives actually) today and if their scale is calibrated the same as the old one, I really need to knock off the M&Ms (the carrots are probably fine).

I was supposed to go clothes shopping today while Eric's up in Ann Arbor at gaming night, but I didn't feel like going anywhere--and there was nothing quick to grab for dinner, anyway, hence the cooking. Instead I'm reading. I also need to write and to quilt. I was contemplating switching out Here, Fishy Fishy for the next quilt for my cousin (Balloon Flight, I think) because her due date is nearing and HFF was all finished, but now I've got a reasonably firm date to see the recipient of HFF so I've got to have both quilts finished within ten days anyway, so it doesn't really make sense to switch. So there must be quilting tonight, because I'm going to be gone next week on a business trip which will make getting to my sewing machine difficult.

I'm taking part in a writing workshop at Penguicon the first weekend in May, and as part of it I'm supposed to critique the other participants' stories. I've finished two, and finding that a thorough critique really does take a lot of time and concentration. I'm enjoying it, though. I also find it helps me want to write more myself. I'm not sure whether part of it is to reassure myself that I write better than they do; I peeked at the third story and I think it's going to be much better than these two, so we'll see how I feel when I'm through that one. Either way, I may want to give some thought to joining a writer's group, because I think just doing the critiques is helping me--that's why I applied to be part of the workshop in the first place.

Various weirdness

I woke up crying this morning. I'm pretty sure my hormones shifted during the night, causing me to have a sad dream; I don't know whether the crying was from the dream or the sadness itself, since the urge to cry wouldn't go away for quite a while. This pregnancy thing is weird.

I'm also having an urge to share the dream itself, even though I keep tearing up again when I think about it, and I didn't with Eric because it was about him and he didn't ask when I told him why I was sad and solicited a hug. So here it is:

Eric was dead. The circumstances were confusing, in typical dream-fashion, involving the placement of eight long wooden rods over a monkey-bars-like frame, but it had killed him and I knew that it had been either an accident or suicide, but I wasn't sure which, and not knowing was torturing me. I was then given an opportunity to step into a parallel universe for a short time to try to find out. (Do people who don't read SF have these kinds of SF elements in their dreams?)

I accepted the opportunity and found Eric. He was very happy to see me because in his universe we'd had a big misunderstanding (similar to the one we actually had at the beginning of our relationship) and had just figured things out. In the course of talking about this he mentioned the accident he had almost had, so I knew he hadn't been trying to kill himself. He kept apologizing for the time we'd lost during the misunderstanding and saying that now we had so much ahead of us, and I didn't say otherwise because I didn't want to disrupt his happiness, but I knew that soon I'd have to go back to my own universe where he was dead.

It sounds tame, but it was horrible--though much more coherent than a lot of my dreams, I notice, and I could probably make a good story out of it if I were a different kind of writer. I think I'd like to just try to forget it, however, except maybe to note that while I'm quite sure that I love Eric, it tends to hit me most viscerally when I'm feeling I've lost him (as before during The Situation, when I once told him I was severing communications--I meant to do it for six months but didn't get farther than twenty-four hours). This love thing is weird, too.

A little birdhouse in your soul

I find that I don't have any pictures of the Here, Fishy Fishy quilt. I still have the quilt (sadly, we've canceled three attempts to go see the recipient), so that's okay, but since I still have it and the recipient doesn't, I shan't show it yet. But that's not the case for 2009 baby quilt #2, which has the extremely cumbersome name Build a Little Birdhouse in Your Soul, after a song I've never heard the original artists (They Might Be Giants) play but which Eric sings to me every once in a while for no reason at all.


The background fabric was a bear to work with but I'm very pleased with how it turned out, and my fear of applique is a bit lessened. I'm in the pre-sewing stages of 2009 baby quilt #3, meaning I have the templates ready but haven't sat down and cut things out to try a block yet. It's a fairly simple quilt, nine blocks of the same pattern and simple sashing, so my delay in starting it shouldn't be disastrous, even though the baby that quilt is destined for is due in less than a month. I hope. It depends on how long the delay goes.

I must say I'm loving all these baby quilt projects though. They go so fast! They're so easy to manipulate in the machine! They're only going to get drooled on so intricate detailing is foolish anyway!

Every day an opportunity

My current job has been great for me, skill-development-wise. I'm talking to someone about a potential editing/proofreading gig (my information was posted on the AMA website ages ago when I was doing a lot of editing and proofreading for my job at the time, and it's still up there, and I get occasional queries) and they want some sort of official document mentioning intellectual property rights, and I know exactly what to do--send a prework agreement with their and my contact information and the necessary verbiage, make them sign it before I start work, and issue an invoice afterward. I'm not afraid to talk on the phone anymore, and I know how to sound like I know what I'm talking about without actually giving any information. (Maybe that last one isn't unadulteratedly positive, but it's come in handy before and I bet it will again.)

This week

This week shall be Home Improvement week. We went to Home Depot to kick it off and got a tub refinishing kit, shelves for the craft room (so that the spare bed can go in there instead of in the nursery), new shelves for the bathtub (because the old one was utter garbage), and foam insulation and screening to, along with plaster we already have, patch up the mouse hole. We shall Improve our House, or at least Keep It From Falling to Bits.

We shall also visit hospitals--my doctor would have us go to Toledo Hospital, which would be fine except Eric's mom got all in a lather about Toledo and got Eric worried about it, so we're touring them, and Bay Park, and Flower (though Eric has to call that one because it's far away and has an annoying name and I wanted him to do at least part of the work since I would have been happy to stick with Toledo Hospital, especially since that means being able to stick with my current doctor). And Eric has a bunch of doctor's appointments that all somehow ended up being this week. It shall be a busy week. Maybe it'll be good for us for a change.