What I've been up to

Buying soap from althaea at http://www.althaea.biz . I highly recommend both her LJ and her soap. She also has a salon.com blog worth visiting, although if you read the LJ you get most of the same stuff, if not more.

Getting checked out by the Dr. My blood sugar is good -- no gestational diabetes! But my iron is low, so I'm taking supplements now. Not the ones the Dr. wants me to take, but the ones I want to take. I have 4 weeks til they test my blood again. If I feel better with the ones I'm taking (and so far I am) I'll stick with those. If, after 2 weeks, I have doubts that what I'm taking is doing enough for me, I'll switch to the ones the Dr. suggested. My diet is quite iron-poor, especially since getting pregnant, so I think a combo of moderate-dosage supplements plus eating more greens, nuts, and blackstrap molasses should take care of the problem. Recipes for molasses cookies or pie are welcome!

I've also been napping a bit. Maybe the iron will help me require less napping.

Growing larger and larger. I've gotten two "wow!"s from people in the past couple of days. I'm carrying little miss entirely up front -- from behind you really can't tell I'm pregnant (29 weeks tomorrow!) My three-quarter profile, though, is kinda shocking. And for those of you not "in the know" about these things, I've still got almost three months to keep growing. Scary.

Choosing an exterminator. We picked Orkin despite the fact that Terminix has a very cool web page. The Orkin guy just tried a lot harder for our business. Hope he's as good at follow-up service.

Preparing, sorta, for my parents' arrival on Thursday. The house is getting cleaned up, although the guest room still needs work. The complicated part is my brother's arrival Friday. We need to figure out where he can sleep. Ideally, we'd clean out my office and get a futon in there. Hard to imagine that will happen in the next 6 days, though.

Monday morning writing practice with Portland buddies. Most of the writing I do in a week happens in 2 hours on Monday morning. It's really great, and this week was particularly good, I've been meaning to post one of the pieces I wrote, but I just haven't gotten around to it yet. I even got a compliment from a stranger afterward. (We write in a coffee shop, so like it or not it can be a bit like open mic time.) Any interested Portlanders out there can ask me for details. We'll meet again this week, but probably not next due to Memorial Day/my parents visiting.

What I've been reading:
The Complete Peanuts: 1950-1952 My brother and I were lucky enough as kids to have access to my uncle's collection of very early Peanuts cartoon books -- selected cartoons, of course. This book contains every Peanuts strip published between October, 1950, when the cartoon started, and the end of 1952. There will be a series of 12 of these books covering all 50 years of Peanuts cartoons. I'm in hog heaven.

I just found this beautiful piece of writing about landscape space in last Sunday's New York Times magazine, which I hate to admit I didn't get to until today. Many Times links expire after a week; I hope this one doesn't, because I'd like for you all to have a chance to read it. The entire magazine for last Sunday is devoted to lanscape architecture issues. I plan to spend part of today crunching through it.

Movies:
Hayao Miyazaki's "Spirited Away"
The Oscar winner for Best Animated film of 2002. I'm not one to watch movies repeatedly, but I swear I could watch nothing but "Spirited Away" for a week and still be in love with it.

"The Cat's Meow", with Edward Herrmann and Kirsten Dunst. I'd heard good things about it, but thought it was just okay. Something seemed to be missing.

Hm, seems like there have been more movies we've seen lately, but I can't think of them just now.

Anyway, that's some idea of how my week was. :-) Still feeling like I'm way behind on a lot of things, but doing pretty well overall.