All I'm Saying there's a joke in here somewhere

Margie tagged me with this meme, and since she's one of my most loyal readers and commenters, I certainly can't just blow it off. Here goes:

Seven Things I Plan to do Before I Die:
1. Visit Italy
2. Visit Africa
3. Learn to knit
4. See my estranged niece & nephew again
5. Retire early
6. Meet Sting
7. Not make an idiot out of myself if/when I meet Sting

Seven Things I Can Do
1. Type 75 wpm
2. Split firewood (sorry, Margie--I'll give you lessons)
3. Drive a manual transmission
4. Put snow chains on a logging truck
5. Read a map
6. Install a tongue-and-groove hardwood floor
7. Dance a mean western swing, complete with flips

Seven Things I Cannot Do
1. Whistle worth a damn
2. Turn a cartwheel
3. The Hustle (Erica needs to teach me)
4. Make myself like watching sports
5. Remember if the word is "gazebo" or "gabezo"
6. Believe in one god
7. Stand on my head

Seven Things that Attract Me to the Opposite Sex
1. Height
2. Intellect
3. A great smile
4. A cute butt
5. Sense of humor
6. A big moustache
7. Strength of character

Seven Things I Say Most Often
1. Fuck
2. Shit
3. Ooooooo-kay...
4. Whaddup, dawg?
5. Jumping Jesus!
6. Operations, this is Casey
7. Move! (To the dogs, who lay in the traffic lanes of the house)

Seven Celebrity Crushes
1. Angelina Jolie
2. Sam Elliott
3. Sting (duh)
4. Pat Monahan
5. Tom Selleck
6. Karl Urban
7. Jude Law

Seven People I Want to Do This
1. Erica
2. Sherri 3. Malia
4. Badger
5. Jessica
6. Ginny
7. Sweety

Will whoever stole my sweet, pleasant husband and replaced him with this cranky S.O.B. please provide me with a list of your demands ASAP?

I have spent all but about 20 minutes since I got home in my husband's company, and I have yet to hear him say one genuinely pleasant thing about anything at all in the last four hours. The nicest thing out of his mouth so far has been, "Look out, buddy," to one of the dogs. I begged him earlier to say something positive and the best he could come up with was, "Your new sleeping bag is nice." Uh, thanks?

He's got some reason to be a bit off, I suppose. He and a bunch of the other guys helped one of his co-workers move today, and it was a terrible experience. Less than 10% of this family's stuff was even boxed up, the entire house was really filthy, and the whole experience was disgusting and upsetting.

However, he's home now. In a clean house. He doesn't have to carry anything heavy. I'd sure like my husband back. This guy is a real crank.

I'm a little dry for content tonight. So here's a joke for you:

A farmer had five female pigs. Times were hard, so he decided to take them to the county fair and sell them. At the fair, he met another farmer who owned five male pigs.

After talking a bit, they decided to mate the pigs and split everything 50/50. The farmers lived sixty miles apart. So they agreed to drive thirty miles each, and find a field in which to let the pigs mate.

The first morning, the farmer with the female pigs got up at 5 a.m., loaded the pigs into the family station wagon, which was the only vehicle he had, and drove the thirty miles.

While the pigs were mating, he asked the other farmer, "How will I know if they are pregnant?"

The other farmer replied, "If they're in the grass in the morning, they're pregnant, if they're in the mud, they're not."

The next morning the pigs were rolling in the mud. So he hosed them off, loaded them into the family station wagon again and proceeded to try again. This continued each morning for more than a week.

One morning the farmer was so tired, he couldn't get out of bed. He called to his wife, "Honey, please look outside and tell me whether the pigs are in the mud or in the grass."

"Neither," yelled his wife, "they're in the station wagon and one of them is honking the horn."

Matt and I went camping along the Imnaha River in Oregon yesterday. I've blogged about the area before--it's between Hells Canyon and Enterprise, Oregon. It's our preferred place to camp, since it's pretty uncrowded, the fishing is good, and it has great scenery.

This weekend's trip was similar to our others, with one small exception.

I was sitting along the riverbank reading while Matt was fishing. He'd probably been at it a couple of hours in this particular spot downstream from our camp, and we decided to hop in the truck and head up the river a ways to see some new country and to try some new stretches of water. As we got back to camp, we noticed a person upstream from our site by maybe 100 yards or so. Not sure if he saw us or not, but we saw him. ALL of him. As in, he was nudie-frootie on the streambank, just kind of hanging out in all his bare glory.

I looked at Matt, he looked at me. I said, "Where's the digital camera?" He said, "WHAT?! I didn't bring it--WHY?"

"Because I am so blogging this."

Sorry there weren't naked pictures of a random guy for you. For the record, I'd like to mention that being publicly nude on Federal lands usually results in a $100 fine. I was going to offer the guy $50 to keep my mouth shut from telling the Forest Service, but Matt doesn't let me make deals with naked people. He'd make a horrible pimp.

Tonight was a big night for me. We'd noticed that the movie, "Hero" was on sale in the Best Buy ad earlier this week, so we stopped by to pick it up. It's my personal favorite martial arts movie. (Though I must admit I only like the artsy-fartsy ones like that and "Crouching Tiger...".)

As soon as I pulled into the parking lot, I started to cackle with glee. Matt couldn't figure out what the laughter and excitement was about. Until I pulled up, right in front of the store, and parked my car in a choice Reserved for Expectant Mothers parking spot.

Oh, it was so sweet. So, so sweet.

As if my hairy trucker belly didn't look good enough, Mother Nature has continued to accessorize me! Now I have linea nigra, which is a darkly pigmented line that starts at my navel and travels to points south. No one knows why it happens, but I guess it goes away when you quit being pregnant. Eventually.

Have I mentioned how badly the hairy trucker belly itches? Because it is slowly expanding, the skin is stretching. (No stretch marks yet, knock wood, sacrifice a goat to BabyJesus.) And as it sloooowly stretches, a mind-shattering itch sets in. And of course, this is the exact location where the elastic waistband of all the maternity pants and skirts sit. *shudder*

I had a friend ask me last night if I enjoyed pregnancy. I looked at her like she'd lost her mind. (She'd missed the whole bout of vomiting and reliance on constant Zofran supplementation.) Internet, I do not believe that I will ever, EVER be one of those mothers who looks back through a fog and says, "Pregnancy was so greeeeat!" No. That's why I'm documenting all the weird, bad stuff. That, and the fact that no one told me about HTB or a lot of other things. I want you people, especially you young people headed to Homecoming next month who aren't sure if they should take some form of birth control or not, that pregnancy is so not all it is cracked up to be. Not even close. It is real. It often sucks. There are times that you may pray for death to strike you down.

Other times, like yesterday morning when Roscoe burst into sudden Riverdance-style high kicking, it seems sort of nifty. But call me a pragmatist: I still have to get Roscoe out before the visible cute stuff commences. Out. Through my hoo-ha. This is where one of those artificial ones might come in handy...

I don't know if anyone has noticed or not, but lately I have been getting lots of comment spam. That's good, if you're in the market for an artificial vagina, because someone on the internet is evidently selling them and using my site for promotion. However, I have found those who are specifically in the market for prosthetic body parts usually don't come looking to me for information.

So thanks to Mel of Bona Fide Style for putting in a comment filtering device. You'll note, should you choose to comment, that you are requested to enter a brief code in another box on the comment screen to verify that you are a real, thinking person, as opposed to a cyborg peddling faux hoo-has. Thanks a ton, Mel!

Okay, not really. But I would like to point out that a couple of my good blogger pals are pregnant right now.

Sweety and I are due within days of each other. We're not due within thousands of miles of each other, but it's still a bonding thing.

Jessica and I just had dinner together a few weeks back, along with her husband, Mark. I am so contagious!

Dee is having her second baby, and is barfing like a house on fire. Maybe that's not a good simile. But I feel very sympathetic about the whole thing.

Am I missing anyone?

I really want to get a t-shirt. Okay, I really want to get seven of them--one for every day of the week. And I want it to say something to the effect of, "If you touch my belly, I'll break your arm."

Only friends have touched my stomach so far. But it's getting more prominent all the time, and I know that there are weirdos out there who will be tempted. Weirdos I know, and weirdos I don't know. I am so not down with strangers touching me. It's only been within the last 10 years or so that I let people I know touch me. So I find the possibility of getting belly-groped quite disturbing.

And I know I should post belly pictures, but for some reason, I can't get too worked up about taking a picture of my stomach. It's the first time since puberty that I've felt like I can let it stick out however damn much I want to, which is nice. And I don't have any stretch marks yet--knock wood. But I just...feel some hesitancy about taking a photo of the whole thing.

So any suggestions as to where a girl can find cute pregnancy t-shirts that get the point across?

We're really not the kind of people who look forward all week to going to the Sizzler on Friday night. In fact, if we go to Sizzler a couple of times a year, I'd be amazed. But my husband said that he was feeling like salad bar, and I've got to admit that Sizzler has a good one. I wasn't really thinking about the fact that it was Friday, and that's Date Night in Cooterville. And what finer steak house could you take your prettiest cousin to than Sizzler?

As I was looking around me, I decided that if I ever found myself working at Sizzler waiting tables or something, I'd create a little bingo game that I'd play with the other employees. Feel free to take this and run with it if you want, or add other potential scoring ideas in the comments.

One point for each square filled with the following:

An iron lung
A wig
A mullet
Someone putting gravy on their salad
A toothless person (bonus square if they're trying to eat corn on the cob)
An "I *heart* Billy Ray" t-shirt
A butt crack
A pack of cigarettes rolled up in a shirt sleeve
Someone sneaking breadsticks into her purse
Nose-picking
A dowager's hump

Okay, your turn. What would you add to the Sizzler Bingo card?

Tomorrow is Friday, and on Saturday I am attending a bridal shower for a girl whose wedding I am not even invited to. (If I was, I wouldn't go because it's too far and I just don't care, so not an issue.) I'm going because my friend/next-door neighbor is hosting it, and I told her I would provide strawberry margaritas. No, I won't be drinking, and it's a bridal shower at 11:00 in the morning, so strawberry margaritas are a weird thing for me to be dealing with. But that's what the bride wanted to drink and if she feels like getting trashed at her shower, that's her prerogative. Does anyone have a good strawberry margarita recipe? I was hoping to use either fresh or frozen berries...

Sometimes other bloggers tell me things in private conversations that they have not blogged about. And I don't even really feel the need to blog about them myself (which is such a turnaround for The Woman With the World's Biggest Mouth) in anything but an extremely oblique fashion such as this. I just think it's pretty cool when your internet friends tell you things that are classified and trust you not to open your big, fat yapper about them.

The baby birdies did not survive the night. Sorry to ruin any illusions any of you might have had. I think they were already pretty far gone when the kids brought them over last night.

The pregnancy hormones are putting me on the close to homicidal side. I went to water aerobics after work yesterday afternoon, and before you get in the pool, you grab yourself one of those floaty styrofoam noodles and some styrofoam dumb-bells. So I did that, and put my stuff down by the side of the pool with my water bottle. I walked into the pool, and looked up to see some random woman go over and grab my noodle. Um, hi! I'm pregnant, goddammit. Do not make me bitch slap you. So I got out, grabbed another noodle, threw it down by my stuff and glared at her. I was so tempted to yell, "Would you like me to get you a soda while I'm up?" Lazy bitch. I would have happily beat her to death with the foam noodle, but I figured it would take too long.

So Matt drives his work truck home every day. It's pretty much a fixture in our driveway, and with the big Fish & Game symbols on the side, it's sort of obvious where the game warden lives.

Well, the door bell just rang, and there were these two little girls standing on the stoop with a shoebox full of straw, feathers, and three tiny little baby birds. They brought them because this is where the game warden lives, and the game warden is there to help the animals, right? There was a nest in the side wall of their camper, evidently, which was in a storage area across town. And now the camper is here, and momma bird is across town.

They're really cute. In fact, they're peeping in the box right next to me as I type this. But they are so, so little. And, um, I'm not really the chew up worms and feed the baby birds seventeen times a day kind of person.

It's sad. These things never turn out the way Walt Disney would have you believe. They're too young to live on their own without an actual momma bird to keep them going.

I'll keep you posted. In the meantime, the game warden has come back from walking the dogs and needs help solving this dilemma.

Add this item to the List of Things No One Mentions Before You Get Pregnant: you will grow a prodigious amount of hair on your stomach. It seems you produce some kind of extra growth hormone, and you sometimes hear that it causes the hair on your head to grow faster and thicker, your fingernails grow faster, yadda yadda. But I definitely don't remember hearing that my stomach would grow to resemble a peach in both roundness and general texture. I keep waiting for a leaf to sprout from my belly button.

And you know what else? I'm at 16 weeks today, well past the traditional end of the first trimester, which is when you're supposed to start feeling better. And I'm still getting morning sickness. Interesting though, because it doesn't start until 11:00 a.m. Then I get it again around 5:30 p.m. I can't account for it, but thank God the doctor keeps giving me more prescriptions for Zofran, the anti-emetic drug that is supposed to be extremely safe for pregnancy. And thank God my insurance is still picking up the tab. Because you know what it costs per pill? TWENTY-ONE DOLLARS. Per pill, folks. I take back 40% of the bad things I have said in the past about the health insurance industry.

It's a pretty common topic in the pregancy books that women seem to get very strange dreams. It is definitely true for me: I have some pretty horrific nightmares some nights, and then there are just some odd ones.

Last night, I dreamt that Matt had performed some heroic law enforcement act or another, and was being awarded a medal at the White House. We were sitting in the White House gardens, and the President called his name and told the story of whatever it was that Matt had done. Then he put a medal around Matt's neck, and Matt came back to where I was sitting. We looked at the medal, and you know what it said?

"Cracker Jack Expert Snacker"

Here's how it works: if I suggest that we all play nicely in a public forum and not call names, and you decide to tell me that you don't have to, don't come crying to me when people think you're an asshole.

I'm just saying...

Erica and Sherri continue to generate a lot of buzz with their bid to become contestants on The Amazing Race.

World Hum has them favored to get picked over the nefarious Blogger Twins (who shall go unlinked, as they aren't going to win and are therefore not worthy of linkage).

Seriously, wouldn't you rather watch two attractive internet friends and bloggers on a TV show than two amorphous twin-blobs? Ratings, people, ratings!

Back in March we sold our house in Cascade, Idaho and moved to Boise. Because of the evil ski resort that recently developed in the area, we made quite the tidy little sum on real estate. We sold an acre and a half, plus a house in town.

So that is why it pains me deeply to report that our old next-door neighbors (wonderful people, don't begrudge them a bit) have their half-acre with much smaller house listed for forty-five thousand dollars more than we sold ours for. The real estate market up there is just that crazy.

My miserly bone is aching something fierce tonight.

Erica has a lot going on lately. For one thing, she and Sherri (guest bloggers here of no little notoriety, I might point out) have auditioned for The Amazing Race recently. I am quite sure they'll be getting a callback soon.

But not only that? Erica is now in a comic strip! I can't claim to understand what exactly the comic is talking about, but it is nicely drawn and her hair looks just terrific in it.

Someday I'm going to look back and be all, "Yeah, she came to visit me in Idaho once."

I hate to think the weekend is already over, but it was a good one well spent. Among the highlights:

I went for a facial and a massage on Saturday morning to celebrate making is successfully through the first trimester. Roscoe will be starting Week 15 on Tuesday, and all continues to go well. Then I went home and had a nap. What an achiever!

On Saturday evening, I got to meet up with Jessica who was visiting family in the Boise area with her really nice husband, Mark. She was the only one of us bright enough to bring a camera, so hopefully she'll be posting some photographic evidence soon. I introduced them to the wonders of Mongolian Barbeque, and everyone (I hope) had a really good time. There were none of those awkward gaps in conversation that you sometimes have, especially considering that Jess is, by pre-Internet description, a complete stranger. It was lots of fun!

Today was an easy, lazy day. I went to my first yoga class since learning I was pregnant, and enjoyed instructor-mandated slacking. While everyone was killing themselves in plank pose, I was chilled out in a comfy child's pose. Gotta be careful with little Roscoe.

Matt took me out for a night on the town tonight. We went to see "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," which I highly recommend. I found it much less disturbing and psychedelic than the Gene Wilder version, and the musical numbers were to die for. If any of you see it and wonder where you've seen the guy that plays (all of the) Oompaloompas, he was in a commercial a while back for I think a minivan, where he was a jockey with a Shetland pony. As the minivan and trailer drive off, he cries, "My pony!" Maybe that only means something amusing to Matt and I. Then we went out to dinner, and now I'm relaxing around the house.

I hope you all had great weekends, and that we all enjoy the week ahead!

Come and have some ham! See what happens when you "pet" it. I think she likes you... Via Badger.

I had my monthly doctor's check-up yesterday, and Matt was able to get a little time off of work to go with me. We got to hear Roscoe's heartbeat for the first time--155 beats per minute, which is just right. It sounded like a little bitty choo-choo train, "Chugga-chugga, chugga-chugga." Pretty dang cute, if I do say so myself.

Things are proceeding apace, but the doctor is a little bit concerned about the headaches I have been getting. While hormone-induced headaches are pretty normal for pregnant women, mine are rather ferocious, so she is sending me to a neurologist a week from Friday to get it checked out. I guess you can get a condition called "pseudotumor cerebri" when pregnant (and at other times, according to the research I did today). Basically, the fluid in your spine and brain area increases and starts to cause a lot of pressure. There are several ways to treat it, and while she said she's 99% sure it's just hormonal, we want to make certain. So that should be fun.

In the meantime, I'd like to give a special shout-out to the charmer who sent me an e-mail regarding a post I made over a year ago about a certain Idaho politician. Forgive me, S. Howell, being a resident of Arizona, you certainly must know the person in question better than I. Also, thank you for treating me as an equal, as you saw fit to swear at me, a complete stranger, in your note. For what it is worth, you do leave a little trail of breadcrumbs when you visit people's websites. And because I know how you found my site, I would like to state for the record that I personally knew this person's recently-deceased father, and found him to be an infinitely better person than his son was or ever will be. Thanks again for the personal touch.

Is it just me, or was today one of those kind of days that you could have probably done without?

Hopefully it was just me.

Things started out okay, but then I ended up in a hormone-induced funk. I had gone to lunch with my dad and two brothers, and actually received some news that a problem one of my brothers is having health-wise isn't as serious as we had feared. That was good news. So why didn't it snap me out of things?

Some of it has to do with a message board that I have been going to recently for women whose babies are due in February of 2006. It seems like a really good place to spend time, get perspective and gather commiseration. Sadly though, one of the women there received some bad news about her baby, and it doesn't look like it is going to be able to survive much past birth due to some genetic abnormalities. I just can't tell you how badly I feel for her. I can't imagine what she is going through and I wish so much that she didn't have to be in this situation.

Sad pregnancy stories are killing me lately. I Google-search weekly for updates on Susan Torres, the woman who lies brain dead in a hospital from cancer while her 27 week-old fetus remains inside her until she can be safely delivered. Matt has forbade me from watching any shows relating to babies on the Discovery Health Channel. I am not a sentimental or mushy person. At all. But it seems like my empathy factor has been ratcheted up about a thousand percent lately.

It's a good time to solicit me for charity contributions, let me tell you.