Mulan is my new guilty pleasure.

I just dreamed Leif fell off the Coronado Bridge. They had these damn Barney and Baby Bopp statues along the edge, and when he ran to see a gust of wind blew him over.

I really like the blackberry. Part of it is just finally having a phone with a working address book. Our old phones (Nokia 9290s, I think) which we got in late 2004 were these big old 80's style bricks, which was ok, since they had good PDA functionality. Except that the OS wasn't that great to begin with, and the PDA functionality broke on my phone within a few months of purchase (the joys of having a toddler...). And everything except for basic phone functionality, including the phone book, was part of the PDA.

I was a little hesitant about getting another PDA phone, but the blackberries are known to be pretty sturdy and don't have moving parts, so hopefully it will hold up for a while, especially if I get a decent case really soon.

I'm happy. It does enough of what my Palm does (ebook reading! Yay!) that I can stop carrying it around. One less thing taking up space in my bag, one less thing to potentially be lost or stolen.

OMG. Someone on my flist just mentioned having a smoothie with lavendar/vanilla ice cream in it. I WANT DESPERATELY! And I have no clue how to go about doing so. I suppose there's something lavendar flavored at the co-op which could be used.

I finally finished Quicksilver last night, only three years after I started it! It's the ideal ebook - you can read it without having to carry around a huge tome for months.

I am getting very irritated with my clothing situation. Most of my shirts that used to look ok don't fit over my belly anymore, so I'm down to one t-shirt that isn't a tent, a few that are tents, and some similarly tent-like men's button down shirts. Must really try to make clothes shopping a priority soon.

koyote says I should just let my belly stick out. Yeah right. I don't care if *he* likes seeing my skin - the rest of the world does not need to.

*fidgetfidgetfidget*

It's too hot, and it's 20 degrees cooler than it will be all summer.

On the good side, these shorts should fit through the whole summer. I am not sure whether to feel amused or old after realizing that they're older than silkensteel's oldest daughter, who is a teenager. How the heck did I get old enough to own clothing that I can still wear that is older than a teenager?

Actually, they may be a few years younger than her, but not much.


I was just reading through my old journal and found this:
http://therealocelot.livejournal.com/76869.html

"You know you're pregnant when you want yogurt, and get upset at the idea of having ice cream as an alternative, since there is no yogurt in the house."

This time around, it's black bean soup instead of ice cream.

It makes me feel a little better about the lack of symptoms I'm experiencing right now. Some stuff that I thought happened at around this point last time (such as not being able to lie on my stomach comfortably) actually happened about a month later.

My hormones need to CALM THE FUCK DOWN AND LEAVE ME ALONE FOR 5 MINUTES!!!!!!

I don't think I was this bad until about 7 months or so last time around.

I'm not looking forward to this summer.

I am, however, looking forward to X-Men 3.

I woke up hearing someone messing around with our stuff outside. Turned out to be the neighbor's cat, who wanted in out of the rain. But now I can't get back to sleep.

I'm tempted to give the doula program a piece of my mind. I sign up for two days a week. On those two days, I can't go further from home than the library (and even then I'm unlikely to get there within the 30 minute response time if they call - I basically have to be sitting at home ready to go for that to happen) and have to be ready to drop everything at any moment, pack Leif off to friends, and rush to the hospital. This means that my friend is also on call on these days.

I haven't been in since November. It's disheartening, especially since I'm the only person on the schedule those two days. I get no feedback, so I don't know if there's something I'm doing wrong that's causing me not to get called. I did get called once, but it was randomly on a day I wasn't actually on the schedule, and they found someone else before I could arrange care for Leif.

Looking at the tentative schedule for the next two weeks the coordinator just sent out, I don't think it's just me. Only four people (out of 50 or so on the mailing list) responded for her first request for availability information, and there are lots of slots open. I'm sure some will come out of the woodwork (like I did) now that she's basically sent the final reminder, but still, it looks like people are losing interest. Only 2 people other than me attended the last group meeting.

I have a friend who was in the program a few years back who eventually quit because she was never being called in.

I know the coordinator can't force the midwives and nurses to call doulas, and maybe there just truly isn't the demand. Not everyone wants a random stranger to come in and sit with them during labor.

Still, it seems like something needs to change if they want the program to work. The current coordinator is moving on to a new project (making the hospital into an official baby friendly hospital, meaning basically that they provide exceptional breastfeeding support), so perhaps the new coordinator will be able to push the program a bit more.

A funny LJ coincidence happened yesterday. In the morning, someone posted in ucdavis about seeing a cop staking out a local bank with a rifle, and mentioned seeing some people across the street taking about it and taking pictures. In the evening, I saw a post while reading friendsfriends from the person who had been taking the pictures. The really odd part - she's was just visiting Davis for the weekend, and our mutual friend lives on the other side of the country and has no connection to Davis. She was, however, with a local friend who is on the friends list of my former roommate. Small world.

Leif is in love with the Babar movie. It's cute, but I find I really don't like the colonialist, materialist message it has. Yes, the elephants are of course oh so much happier wearing clothing and living in a city than they were frolicking in the wild. And then there's the mommy-death, which, if I'd thought about it in advance, probably would have had me avoiding it entirely. The inconsistancies between the movie and the bonus episode on the DVD bug me, too. In the movie, he clearly becomes king as an adult. In the bonus episode, he's a child king. Ah well, continuity is for wimps.

I should try to get more sleep. 5 hours really isn't enough.

My inner 13 year old is very much enjoying Phantom Of The Opera.

If only Christine were less annoying. I'd probably be terribly annoyed with the Phantom too, except anyone is an improvement over the horribly nasal one I saw when I was 13. And Raoul, while possessing some amount of charm, isn't nearly as cute as that one was. I had a ridiculous crush on him.

So much fun seeing movies a year after the rest of the world.

Our thermostat is broken, at least for the heat side of things. Last time I tried with the AC, it worked properly, but the heater just stays on all the time, no matter how low we set it.

I don't like this. I worry that it's a fire hazard, and I don't like running up our landpeople's utility bill (our utilities are included in our rent). It's also not comfortable physically - not because it's too hot, but because it makes the air dry. We all sleep badly, and Leif and I sleep in too late because it's harder to wake up when you're dehydrated.

We might be able to get away with one of the small area heaters we had on the boat, especially for nighttime. I can't imagine it would use more electricity, and the thermostat would work so we wouldn't have to run it constantly.

Saw Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire today. It was good, but I was MST3King it the whole way through. Perhaps I'm just getting too old. Want to see RENT now. koyote said many times that he had no interest in going, but then said the other day that he didn't want me to tell him anything about it because, if I did, he probably would be interested, and it's more likely that I'll get to go on my own than that we'll be able to go together. But I don't want to go alone *pout*.

Anyone local want to go see it (and if you're reading this entry, yes, this means you), probably next Friday night or Saturday?

I feel like begging for attention. Comment here (about whatever you want, not necessarily the entry content).

I'm so close to creating a children's TV community where parents can slash the characters, or pick on Dora's Spanish grammar, or whatnot.

The latest: the intro song to Barney says something about Barney teaching kids how to play pretend. No, he doesn't. Playing pretend is a normal developmental stage, and you don't need an idiotic purple dinosaur to tell you how to do it.

I think Leif and I ended up on national TV today. Our 5 seconds of fame.

We went into DC and stopped at Barnes&Noble where John Gibson just happened to be talking about his new book - Hating America: The New World Sport. I guess he's a right-wing conspiracy theorist who has a show on FOX.

C-SPAN was taping the talk. As I walked back from changing Leif, a lady at the back of the crowd asked a question, and all the cameras focused on her. At least one of them would have caught Leif and I, too.

I hope not. I would have looked like a troglodyte.

I miss Davis.

The weather here has been strange. It was in the 80's earlier this week. Today we had rain, but it was still quite warm. This weekend the highs are supposed to be in the 40's.

Leif liked the first 5 minutes of Matrix:Revolutions so much that I had to feed him until he fell asleep so he wouldn't disturb the other 10 people in the theater with his shrieks of joy. Perhaps I'll start taking him to matinee showings of kids movies, where such behaviour is acceptable.

Now I feel like a bad parent.

I'm falling asleep sitting here. I should go to bed, especially since I have to be up early for yoga tomorrow. So much to be done, though. I need several extra hours in the day, preferably with Leif sleeping through all of them.

He's currently demanding pretty much constant attention. Even when he's sleeping he wants to be held. If I try to put him down, at best he'll stay asleep for ten minutes and then wake up, and at worst he'll immediately wake up and start crying. It's enough to make me want to buy a TV and put on teletubbies.

Not sure how I'm going to get my contacts out. Perhaps he'll stay asleep long enough for me to do that.

*grump*