Dinner tonight was a green salad and cous cous with chicken.
In the salad: mixed summer greens from the farmers market, grown here in town; carrots from my garden; cucumber; radishes; homemade vinaigrette.
In the cous cous: sugar snap peas and mint from my garden; cherry tomatoes; toasted pine nuts; golden raisins; sauteed chicken breast; chicken stock; multicolored cous cous; zucchini; plain yogurt.
Healthy and nice for a very hot evening.
Now I need a shower.
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I think everyone on my friends list stopped blogging. Oh well, I am still here, keeping livejournal afloat.
For the next ten days, we are supposed to have highs above 80 degrees. I wonder if this means my tomatoes will begin to blush.
Sometimes when the baby is squirming around inside me, I am able to discern actual limbs. I think. I mean, I feel like, a “long thing” kind of sliding along my tummy, like a lower leg perhaps. Sorry if that sounds gross. She still has enough room in there do do all kinds of tricks. Pretty soon it will get a little more crowded and she won’t be able to stretch out as far.
I think I felt a contraction last night. Of course I was half asleep at the time, but I just felt this dull crampy pain along my abdomen for a minute or two. Totally normal, don’t worry. The uterus has to practice for labor, too.
Brian’s in SF and Kona misses him a lot. Probably even more than I do since I know where he is and can talk to him on the phone. She was all mopey last night and when I went to bed she lay down at the top of the stairs for a while. Then this morning after she had breakfast she ran upstairs and peered at the empty bed, hoping she would see him. Pobrecito!!
Should I buy a full-sized watermelon? They are like 58 cents a pound, but of course weigh ten-plus pounds. Then I would have to lift it onto the cutting board and chop it up. Oh but I love watermelon. Kona loves it too. It’s her favorite treat.
I think dinner tonight will be open faced tuna on rosemary toast. Or spaghetti and garlic bread. When Brian goes out of town I totally bust out the garlic (he is allergic to it).
Okay time for a noon meeting. How dumb is that.
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Today I paid for a pedicure. I can no longer comfortably reach my toes, and it was nice to get a pampering foot soak/scrub/massage. I brought in a polish I just bought, it’s a new Chanel color that is best described as red wine with subtle sparkle. I love it. And their polish has the tendency to be indestructible, so I’ll be able to leave this on for a month or so.
I’m so tan right now and I hate it.
I made red mashed potatoes with dinner tonight. It was actually super easy. Though next time I’ll try with the ricer instead of the hand masher. We ate dinner out on the back deck.
This afternoon we went to see “Away We Go” and both loved it. The main character is six months pregnant, so am I. Though she looked much larger in the belly than me. But hey, every bump is different. And it was doubtlessly a prosthetic. Brian and I really identified with much of the movie. Mainly the pregnancy stuff I guess, and nervousness over imminent parenthood. The baby kicked me frequently during the film, I think she heard the music. I put Brian’s hand on my belly once so he could feel.
Brian just finished building a string cage around the voluminous tomato plants. Hopefully that will contain them for the rest of the season.
Here are some carrots I pulled a couple days ago. They were very sweet.
I am going to hire a doula for the baby’s birth. I get the feeling this will be an invaluable service for us, especially as first-timers.
Tomorrow I kind of want to relax around the house and do not very much. I just started reading The Brothers K and so far I like it. It has lots of baseball talk. Maybe I’ll just read in the afternoon when it starts getting really hot.
Here is an awesome photo:
Oh and I went to Sephora a couple days ago and got a bunch of Boscia samples. So far I really like them. Nice smell, sinks into my skin, not reacting poorly. Hmmm. This could be a very good discovery.
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Last night after dinner, as the sun was setting, we took Kona on a little walk. We ended up at this run-down old quarter mile track that lies well behind the middle school. In the center of the oval, Brian unclipped Kona from her leash, which always makes me nervous, and they ran about for a while.
The field was teeming with evening bugs, so a few swallows were taking turns skimming the surface of the grass, chasing insects. Kona, who is always excited by birds, zeroed in on one of them and gave chase. She made a wide arc across the field, stretching out to a full gallop. It was impressive; she is a very fast dog. She made it all the way to the edge of the oval, which I considered too far, so we called her back. It was good to see that even with that big distraction, she still came running toward us.
She really is quite an amazing dog.
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I think I am going to give Boscia skincare a try. It’s cheaper than the stuff I usually use, and on our new budget I will no longer be able to splurge on face cream. Right now I use a Clinique day moisturizer, and La Prairie cleanser and night cream and toner. I’ve been using the LP for years but can no longer justify it. Plus I am leery of the long long list of chemical ingredients in both lines.
I read some good feedback about Boscia on Makeupalley.com, on sephora.com, and on some other beauty communities. The line is “all natural”, with no parabens, no sulfates, no phthalates, and no artificial fragrances or colors. Plus the reviews seem to overwhelmingly suggest that it does what it claims to do. I have fairly oily skin, prone to breakouts, though not as badly as it once did. My main goal is something that will keep my skin smooth and not give me zits. That’s it. Kind of a tall order though.
When the baby comes I can go back to using my Retin-A Micro. That stuff was actually starting to work, right when I found out I was pregnant. It’s on the no-no list, though, so back in the cupboard it went. I’ll rely on that mainly to keep my skin clear, so I’ll just need a good moisturizer for day and night beyond that.
Have any of you used Boscia, or have another similar recommendation? I am pretty much over all drugstore brands, my preference is for things in the mid-range price point ($30-$50), emphasis on simple and natural ingredients, and of course efficacy.
Okay now I am going to the library for real. Budget means no more book buying, either!
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Mandatory unpaid day off today. Fortunately the weather is perfect, and my cough has slightly diminished. I started my day by going to the OB clinic to do the blood draw for my glucose test. Do I have gestational diabetes? Probably not, but it seems that the test they do for this condition is notorious for lots of false positives. I don’t look forward to that.
I went to the mall following my appt and just wandered around for a while. Eventually I found a lightweight nightgown that actually fits my giant tummy. I also picked up another couple of bras, these with no underwires. 40D, bitches. I really do not feel like they are that big. But I have always been a small C. I also don’t feel like I have gained over thirty pounds, but apparently I have. Sigh. What I get for being small and skinny to begin with, I guess. And my body’s proclivity for hanging on tightly to every single calorie. Not to mention that fact that I simply cannot do cardio exercise anymore. It’s an effort just to climb the stairs.
I went home and watered the garden. Our tomato plants are ridiculous. They are now as tall as me, and the branches are starting to droop with clusters of green fruit. There seem to be hundreds more yellow flowers waiting to turn into tomatoes. We’ll need to bring in a structural engineer to figure out how to prop these things up; there seems to be no end in sight to their fecundity. They are casting a shadow over my two little pepper plants.
The cucumbers are also flourishing wildly. At their base, they have sprouted big flowers and a few prickly baby cukes. The leaves are wide and green, and long viney tendrils are climbing from the garden wall.
Same for the acorn squash, my only fall plant so far, which is also extremely healthy. I’m actually a bit worried this one will start to take over. Fortunately it’s right next to the radish bed, and I have decided to stop planting radishes to make more room for the squash.
Last year’s tomatoes were pitiful. I blame the cold spring/early summer, the amount of daylight they received on the front of the house, and the fact that they were planted in crappy, small pots.
This year’s crop has a lot going for it. I began with good (and cheap) starters from the farmer’s market. I planted them in May in a raised garden bed — on the sunniest side of the house — that had been fortified with our home-cooked compost. June was extremely hot, and I watered the garden almost daily. I’ve given the plants a couple of epsom salt treatments. Now it seems I may need to prune some of the fruitless branches back, just to take some weight off. I am so excited for these babies to start to turn red.
Need to pick the sugar snap peas again, too. And I harvested six carrots the other night. They were awesome. I peeled them and ate them with some hummus. These two crops I just planted from seed packets. Very easy and cheap to grow. Though I wish I had sown the carrots in continual two-week phases. I won’t have any new ones for a while after I pick my first row.
I guess that’s it for my garden update.
I should update this thing more often. I know hardly anyone reads it, but it is nice to have a little record to look back on, for my own personal use.
Baby has been kicking a lot, in fact she is right now as I type. She’s having a great time in there.
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A nice thing about being home sick: laying on the couch watching the MLB Network (in HD!). They spend the entire evening “peeking” into live game broadcasts all around the country, so I got to watch a White Sox grand slam happen live, and a grand slam being taken away from A-Rod, also live. All while lounging on the couch in my jammies with my doggie. And a mug of hot cocoa and my kleenex. Ahhh. Naturally I took a half dozen catnaps throughout.
I think I am getting a little better, though I won’t be 100% for several more days at least. But alas, I’ll be “good enough” to go to work tomorrow, where I will get to sniffle and cough at my desk and feel like poo all day long. Yay America, continuing to give its citizenry no choice but to take their sickness into the workplace. Great for productivity, I’m sure.
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My lovely sunny three-day weekend was pretty much ruined by the cold I developed starting Saturday morning and continuing until right now and probably into tomorrow. Lots of violent coughing, aches, a low but very real fever, etc etc. Last night I kind of freaked out as the fever climbed over 100 degrees and I started worrying about the baby, who was kicking me as energetically as ever. She’s fine.
Saturday night was hell, as it is every 4th of July here — pretty much sounded like a war outside, non-stop very loud explosions until 1am. I was ill and miserable in bed, failing to sleep through it, wondering how much the baby could hear. It should be no surprise that this happens since there are about a dozen gigantic fireworks stands in place all around my town starting in early May. I have never gotten the appeal of blowing things up. Maybe it’s my lack of a penis. Anyway.
I hate being sick. I didn’t even leave the house Saturday — a glorious hot sunny 4th, I’ve been told. Friday was nice though, that was when my sickness was still a teeny sore spot on the left side of my throat. My dad came over and helped us plant some juniper trees in boxes along the front porch. It’s starting to look a lot nicer out front. And of course our pretty new kitchen sink was finally finished. We went to my dad’s to grill hot dogs, and the Mariners beat the Red Sox.
That’s all for now. I really need a shower.
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