Tuesday, August 28, 2007

Trip blog

If you want to follow our adventures in Newfoundland, here's a link to the trip blog:

http://realtravel.com/canada-trips-i5411009.html

We'll try to update it as often as we can!

Friday, August 24, 2007

Discoveries

On the plus side, I've discovered this week that a big belly makes one's legs look nice and slim. Yay! On the minus side, I am discovering that having your boobs reach your belly (only when bending over!) is not a fun feeling. So there you have it, you win some and you lose some :)

Today is my last work day before the holidays. Two whole weeks with no pager, no meetings, no worries about deadlines or things that need to be fixed yesterday... I really do like my job, like anything involving people it's got it's ups and downs, but I am definitely ready for a break.

We packed most of our stuff last night, just the cooler left to pack this afternoon, and getting everything loaded into the car, and then the adventure begins! We're stopping over at my parents' house tonight, and over the next two days we need to get all the way to North Sydney in Cape Breton, NS. Shouldn't be too bad of a drive, especially since it's the weekend we shouldn't get caught in any rush hour traffic in the bigger cities. I'll try to blog from the road, we're bringing the laptop, so it will all depend on connectivity. Hopefully we can find a few hot spots here and there...

Next update from the road :)

Saturday, August 18, 2007

Busy, long but fun day

Wow, what a day! DH is at the ballgame tonight, so I am sitting at the computer writing updates to the blog. A nice quiet finish to a busy day!

We started the day going for a test drive at one of the dealerships in town. The dealership is at the other end of the city, but it was early in the morning, so it didn't take too long. We wanted to test drive a 2003 Audi TT just to get a feel for the car (in case you're wondering- drives VERY nicely). It was quite a bit of fun, although the salesman that came along for the ride was a little annoying. The first thing he told me, before I even sat down in the driver's seat, was that I was going to stall the car. Not that I might, or that it's easy to, but that I would stall it (I didn't in the end). To be fair, he apparently said the same thing to DH... Then he proceeded to tell me how to drive, commenting on my driving style, that I was shifting too early, that I wasn't speeding up quickly enough etc. But I did get a good feel for the car, and I guess that's what matters most :)

After the test drive, we made a quick stop at CAA to get all sorts of maps and other goodies about Newfoundland. Then, DH had a doctor's appointment, to check out his finger. See, the last time my family was in town (around 6 weeks ago), my little sister brought a football, and we played a bit in the yard. DH hit his finger while playing, and it bruised and swelled. He had injured that finger playing football before, so he figured it was a sprain again, just like last time. So he iced it and the swelling went down, and then he left it alone to heal. Well, after all this time, the finger still didn't feel quite right, so he wanted to go get it checked out. Well, he got a referral for x-rays, and they confirmed that his knuckle was broken :( And it doesn't seem to be healing well :( Not sure what the next step is yet, we will have to wait until the x-ray results make it back to our doctor...

When we got to the doctor's office, we realized that DH had left his driver's license at the dealership... So after the appointment he dropped me off at home, and went back to get his license back. In the meantime, I frantically cleaned the house, because my family was arriving in less than 2 hours. It'd been a while since we'd seen them, so I was really looking forward to the visit. T'was a short one but a good one. They only stayed for around 5 hours, but we had a divine barbeque (steaks, sausage, tons of vegetables: zucchini, beans, broccoli, peppers, tomatoes, all accompanied by a delicious salad and an assortment of yummy breads). My little sis cut up some veggies and made a dip, which was an amazing accomplishment, given that we had close to no dip ingredients available. She improvised pretty much every ingredient, but the result was delicious. We will never be able to properly reproduce it, and the list of ingredients sounds a little odd (cream cheese, mayo, Dijon mustard, pickle juice, garlic, onion, fresh oregano and thyme, salt and pepper, and I'm probably forgetting a few), but everyone agreed that it was unbelievably good, with any vegetables, even kohlrabi :O

Unfortunately the feast and the visit had to end. My folks are departing on a 3 week trip to Europe next week, and need to pack and prepare, and my sister is working all day tomorrow. So the fun had to end :( But it was a great visit, and my stomach is still full and grateful ;)

Tomorrow afternoon I am going to drop by a friend's place for a get together, and then in the evening we're going over to some other friends' for a barbeque. Talk about a social weekend. And we should really be packing for the trip... I guess that will have to happen on the weeknights :)

Lemon tree


This picture is a picture of the lemon tree I am trying to grow. When we found out I was pregnant, I planted a few lemon seeds, just for the heck of it. I found somewhere on the internet that you should put them in very wet soil, seal it in a plastic bag (to keep the moisture in), and put it on top of the fridge. I followed the instructions on a whim, not really having much hope that it would work (Ottawa spring is not really the ideal place for lemon trees...). I went to check on it over the next few weeks, and it didn't seem to work too well. The water seemed to evaporate, and it didn't seem to be warm enough on top of the fridge. I added some more water, and promptly forgot about the whole thing. Turns out I don't look at the top of our fridge very often :)

Then, a few weeks ago, I stumbled upon my little planter over the fridge again. It had been there for a few months now, had fallen over on its side, and was looking quite pitiful. But when I looked closer, I noticed something green... Turns out my lemon seeds had germinated! So now I have a lemon plant that I have to take good care of. Chances are, given my not-so-green thumbs, that it will not survive even until the baby's arrival, but it's made it so far, and I'm going to try my best to keep it alive and green. We'll see :)

Friday, August 17, 2007

Half way point

Well, I am now officially at the half-way point of the pregnancy. Week 20! Ok, so that's only according to the weird math of pregnancy (40 weeks in a pregnancy, but the first two are really before conception, so they barely count). Believe it or not, I am still having a hard time really believing I am truly pregnant. Even though I can only fit in 2 pairs of my pre-pregnancy pants, and it's getting pretty hard to ignore the bulge growing in front of me.My guess is that until I hold my baby in my hands, I won't be fully convinced that this is really happening to me. It's been such a long road...

Because of my ever-expanding belly, this week I have made my first pregnancy pants purchase. They're actually capri pants (got them cheap at an end-of-season sale: 11$+tax!), and I suspect I will be wearing them a lot over the next few weeks. Especially the last week of August, first week of September, when we will be going to visit the beautiful island of Newfoundland. We've had our holidays booked at work for months, but never got around to actually planning the holiday. Finally this week we booked the ferry, and we're starting to book a few places to stay. Only one week of work left, and then we hit the open road. I'm really looking forward to it, it's been such a busy year at work, I need a lot of rest and doing nothing :)

In other news, we finally have power in our garage. Not sure if I mentioned it in the blog, but around February, the garage lights and outlets started misbehaving, and it turned out we had a problem with the underground wires buried between the barn and the garage. We had to wait for a thaw to get at the cables, and then we had to get the schedules lined up between us and the electrician, and then we had torrential rains when they were supposed to come (no digging in the flood), then they had a big job scheduled, then they found a bee's nest in between the barn walls (had to call pest control to get rid of them), but in the end, today they were able to show up and finish the job. And now we have power in the garage. It's about time, it's been half a year now... Of course it's a lot more important to have power in the garage in the winter, to have the lights come on when we get home from work, and to be able to plug in the block heaters.

In other fun news, the kitchen table and chairs we ordered a few months back have shown up, so we now have an official kitchen breakfast nook. We'd been using a convertible poker table (with the felt out and the glass top in) as our kitchen table with the dining room chairs. Now we have an actual set for the kitchen :) It's really a small set of a round table (with two extension leaves) in varnished maple, and found chairs in birch with soft cushions covered in some kind of dark green vinyl-type material that seems to be very easy to clean (especially important with a spitting baby). Now we just have to wait for the couch we ordered a few weeks ago, and I think we won't need any more furniture for another decade (well, except for the baby's room I guess). Our old couches have been slowly moving downstairs into the movie theatre room :)

In automotive news, DH is getting more serious about looking for the right second vehicle for us. He's currenly leaning towards a 2000-ish BMW Z3 coupe, or an Audi TT coupe from the same era. He's even considering importing one from the US, as the prices are a lot more competitive there. I guess our lives just aren't complicated enough, so we keep looking for more challenges ;) I have the feeling that is about to end, though maybe babies are not quite as challenging as I remember it from my youth :)

Next time, there will be some pictures, I promise. I just discovered that our camera batteries are completely drained, but as soon as they are recharged, I will go trigger happy!

Happy trails!

Thursday, August 09, 2007

Cute?

Or creepy? You decide ;) I think it's kind of neat to see the ultrasound pics of our little munchkin, but I know a lot of people find it disconcerting. I don't think it's the best shot they got, but I guess they were holding on to the best shots to send them to the people that can actually interpret them (this clinic was kind of old-style, we got a print of the picture, nothing electronic).

From what we could tell, the kid's got all the important organs (kidneys - check, heart with all four chambers - check, stomach - check, umbilical cord - check, toes and fingers - check, full spine - check). The cheeky monkey insisted on facing away from us, stubbornly staring at my back for pretty much the whole half hour of the examination. As a result, I was asked to move around to give the technician a better view. In the end, I still don't think he was able to determine the sex. We weren't going to ask anyway :)

The baby does have a good sense of humour, though. Despite facing away from us, it let us know it knew exactly what was going on by kicking fervently and waving around the tiny little hands with long fingers. Even the technician had to laugh at that!

So I think that's it for the ultrasound pictures for a long while. No more tests or examinations scheduled for the next few months. I'll have to post some pictures of my expanding belly, though :)