Nails

Three of the four sentient beings* in this household bite their nails. The fourth uses her scratching post. The Goddess cat always seems a little angry at us when she scratches her post, but our reaction is happiness that she is using it at all. The Princess cat is afraid of her scratching post, preferring to destroy the furniture or the carpet or bite her nails. Maybe my husband and I should try to cure our own nail-biting bad habits by appropriating her post.

I don’t suppose there is any chance that this is genetic, and that the Chocolate Chip will bite off his own nails, sparing us the need for stealth baby-nail-clipping attacks.

*Using the term in my mother’s Buddhist sense.

Waking

Things that wake me, but not my husband:

Heavy rainfall.

The cat throwing up, even when she is doing so next to his side of the bed.

Stomach aches. Being pregnant.

His alarm clock (well, he got up, walked across the room,  and turned it off, but had no memory of doing so).

Weeks and Years

One of the prenatal yoga teachers has been having us tell everyone our names and how far along we are. Listening to the other students, it occurred to me that, if I deliver at 40 weeks, I’ll have one week gestation for each year of my life. (Then I reminded myself that I will actually be 41 on my due date, but still.) I felt like I should be taking the opportunity to engage in some sort of meditation on my past, and that I have missed 20-odd weeks worth of said contemplation.

So, age 22:

I graduated from college. I got drunk enough to embarrass myself at reunions, which is notable because I’ve only been that drunk two times in my life (as in, I talked a lot, acted silly, told a guy I’d had a crush on him all year, but didn’t get sick except for losing my voice for a while afterwards. That’s what one or two strong rum and cokes will do to me).

I took my first Chinese class (2 weeks, intensive) and was given the name Luo Lin.

I finally learned to drive a standard transmission that summer, because I had to.

I moved to Old Colony and started teaching English at the university there. Aside from being a native speaker of English, I was woefully underprepared, but I muddled through. Two of my students from that year (that I know of) are now faculty members at Old Colony University.

I visited China for the first, second, and third times.

It took me a while to settle in and get to know people, but I was happier in Old Colony than I had been most of the time in college. I was at Old Colony University on a one-year internship, but I signed on for a two more years as a faculty member.

Going to Old Colony changed my life. Not just because I was happy there, although that was important. It has also shaped my research, even though the area of the world I primarily study is on a completely different continent. (I also think it made me a much more interesting candidate when I applied to graduate school than I would have been as a college senior.)

When I finished college, I felt like I wanted a year to sleep, a year to read, and a year for something else (work? travel? I don’t remember what the third thing was!).

I got that in Old Colony. After four years of undergraduate sleep deprivation, I got the chance to get enough sleep, and I realized how important it was for my sanity. This was good knowledge to have when I went to graduate school–I knew not only that no reading assignment or paper was worth an all-nighter, but that sleep deprivation would make it a lot harder for me to read or write intelligently.

I also got to read a lot, especially before I got to be friends with people and started spending more time socializing. I read all of Shakespeare’s plays. I read some novels from my undergraduate reading list that I had neglected. I read Chinese books in translation, including a lot of Cultural Revolution memoirs. A lot of travel writing. And whatever English-language books I found for sale in New Colony or while I was travelling.

I got a chance to see the world from another angle that was not centered on the United States, but from where the influence of the U.S. on the rest of world was clear. The U.S. was not the colonizer of either Old or New Colony, but the currencies there were pegged to the U.S. dollar, the U.S. was an important trade partner, and U.S. policies affected the region in all sorts of ways.

I spent a lot of time in the minority, but I was a privileged minority: I got a university teaching job armed only with a Bachelor’s degree, making enough money to travel and live comfortably and save a bit. I could get by in Old Colony with very limited proficiency in the local languages. Even when I was in places where nobody spoke English (mostly in China, that first year-I was sometimes the only American, or only caucasian people had ever seen), people were willing to try to communicate with me somehow. I used to wonder if the employees in an American post office in the middle of nowhere would be as patient with someone who came in speaking Chinese, or Swahili.

All this about Old Colony means I am really talking about ages 22-25, but since I don’t know whether I’ll keep up this week-by-week contemplation, that’s fine.

21w5d

Ultrasound today (rescheduled from last week): all is well. That means that from now on I will be completely calm and optimistic about the pregnancy, right?

They gave us a videotape last time to bring back for all the ultrasounds. It always makes me think of the alien baby storyline on The X Files.

Before showing us the whole fetus in profile, the sonographer did a head to toe survey. Just about everything looked like a head to me in that view.

For some reason, it surprised me that she could look at the internal organs of the fetus, even though I know the ultrasounds work to see my internal organs. When I thought about it, it made perfect sense-change the depth and there you are–but it seemed strange initially.

We already knew the baby was a boy, from the amnio results, but she showed us the visual. She had a little trouble getting a good “it’s a boy” shot to print out, though, because his hand was in the way.

21w0d

I have to reschedule the anatomical scan ultrasound because everything including my ob-gyn’s office will still be closed tomorrow due to the weather.(It snowed yesterday! It never snows enough here to cause many problems. It’s the ice and threat of same that is the issue.) This is a little nerve-wracking, because I have turned this scan into the latest milestone after which I am sure I will worry a lot less and feel secure telling people about the pregnancy.

I am getting closer to deciding that the things I feel are the fetus bumping around.

Other current symptoms:

Still tired. It’s not nearly as bad as first trimester, but I do not feel like I am having any kind of second trimester surge of energy.

Mood swings. Irritability. I hate it when I have to admit the problem is my mood and not (hypothetically speaking) the fact that Mr. Luo makes too much noise when he chews/puts a glass on the table/closes the kitchen cabinet door.

Also, signing up for the gym left me in tears (but that happened the last time I signed up for a gym, just not as many tears).

Vivid dreams.

Insomnia, though not too bad.

Allergies, unrelated to pregnancy except for the whole issue of stress urinary incontinence when coughing/sneezing. The allergies make me cough so much it’s like choking. I’m hoping the cold weather will freeze all the mold spores, but all the precipitation is probably just breeding more of them.

In other words, I feel like I am getting off easy so far, physically.

I still fit in my clothes, partly because I’ve lost weight over the last year and a half and haven’t gained it all back yet, and partly because they were probably too big to start with. I’m wearing my jeans all the time, since I figure they are the first thing I’ll grow out of.

Movements

So, hypothetically speaking, when one starts to feel the fetus move, it is obvious, or is it possible to wonder whether that’s just a muscle twitch or gas in the digestive system or maybe just the pulse in one’s own hand on top of the belly?

In Honor of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day

…I refer you to a post written on a completely different day (hey, it mentions MLK) by the recently retired-from-blogging Michael Bérubé.

Here in our fair city, all the MLK events scheduled for today have been cancelled due to bad weather. Part of me is thinking, “ha! Would this even count as wintry weather in Grad School Town? I think not!” but I walked most places in Grad School Town, so I didn’t have to worry so much about driving on ice or other people driving on ice. Also, the climate here is such that ice storms are much more common than in GST.

The last time we had a big ice storm…I won’t tell that story, since I’ve complained enough about it in real life that it would make me too easily identifiable. Let’s just say that I am glad I don’t have to worry about tomorrow’s first day of classes and whether the university will close if conditions are dangerous and / or announce delays or closures before faculty, staff, and students actually leave home in the morning.

I’ve Been Reviewing the Situation

…on our credit reports.

In case we do decide to enter into the wacky world of home ownership, which seems unlikely, given the difficulty we have had the past couple of days just trying to change gym memberships and figure out the best deal.

In case you didn’t know, you should all check your credit reports once a year, because it is free. Remember that the website to go to is www.annualcreditreport.com, not that other site that has advertisements on the radio (I wish Air America the best in getting out of bankruptcy, but I’m getting tired of the combination of annoying PSAs and ads for exploitative companies). The idea is to fix things now, and not when you are in the middle of trying to get a loan.

You can get one free report per year from each of the three big credit reporting companies. Some people recommend staggering the requests throughout the year, so you can keep tabs on any new problems. I did it all at once this time so we could clear up all the errors before setting any mortgage companies loose into our finances.

Fortunately, there were no major problems with our reports, and so far, the minor stuff has been corrected within a couple days of filing the disputes.

For what it’s worth, here are my impressions of the credit reporting companies:

Equifax: by far the most complicated process for disputing anything on the report. You have to register with a whole new username and password with CSC credit in order to get to the dispute form. On the other hand, CSC actually has rules about passwords to get you to choose a good one, so it is probably more secure. (See Bruce Schneier’s recent post on choosing secure passwords.)

Experian: by far the longest list of past addresses, in my case, every address I’ve used (including university addresses) since at least 1991.

Neither Experian nor TransUnion will allow you to correct mistakes within an address, only to dispute whether it is your current address (TU) or whether you ever lived there (Exp). Equifax only had our current addresses, and somehow managed to spell it all correctly, so I don’t know what their correction policy is. Supposedly the credit report companies get the addresses from creditors, but based on some of the errors, it looks more like they were trying to read scrawled writing on return addresses or they have some very bad data entry people. They made similar mistakes with the names our our employers (imagine you worked for “Univ CA” and they had “Univ XA”).

TransUnion did not have my old student loan accounts (paid off) listed, but the other two did.

Equifax and Experian both had old, closed credit card accounts listed as open (for each of us).

Equifax has “too new to rate” listed as the current status of a couple of accounts that were closed or paid off years ago, even though the account details show that it is closed or paid.

This post is putting even me to sleep, so I’ll spare you any further comments.

Helm’s Deep

First, I felt guilty that, unlike other academic bloggers, I didn’t feel guilty about taking it easy over the holidays.

Now, I feel bad that I didn’t manage to accomplish any projects like this candy model of the Battle of Helm’s Deep from The Two Towers.

It’s appropriate that I just found the link on Pharyngula, because Mr. Luo and I spent the evening watching some of the documentary features on our new Lord of the Rings dvd set.

Thanks to nasty weather (so long, warm and sunny, hello 40 degrees and rainy and flooded roads, colder temps and ice possibly to come), we stayed home instead of going out to the music fest today, or even to the gym. My early morning quest for yoga yielded a cancelled class and detours around (different) flooded low points coming and going.

Another One Gone

Michael Bérubé has stopped blogging. I didn’t include him in my previous post on blogs going up and down because I was in denial, hoping that he was just contemplating stopping, not actually planning it.

Now I can no longer read “Theory Tuesday” and pretend I am engaging in professional reading rather than blog procrastination. Of course, I am currently using the time thus freed to read Bérubé’s  What’s Liberal about the Liberal Arts rather than reading new articles in my field.