lucky 13

photos to come...

E's out for the weekend on a retreat with kids from the clinic.

As I used to do quite often in my teen years...I read. I started a book yesterday. It was one of those experiences when into the second page, I was filled with the anticipation of a good read. I was disciplined enough to stop reading at midnight because I knew I hadn't gotten enough sleep the night before. I woke up early (again) because it's sooo bright in our room (note to self, get one of those eye shade/masks) and started reading at 7am. It was just such a pleasurable thing to get sucked into its story. Halfway through I started to look at the pages I had left and started to mourn that it would over all too soon. I finished the book around 10:30am. The book? The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield. Alas, unless when you discover an author who is only new to you, there are no other novels to read as this is her first.


I started to make buttermilk pancakes this morning for breakfast when I discovered I didn't have quite enough buttermilk. Fortunately, my cookbook has substitute suggestions for that. But then I remembered I was also out of eggs. Not so easy to substitute. I was too lazy to go out so I ate something else for breakfast, but did make it out to the store and had a "breakfast" burrito for lunch. This afternoon I'm off to Central Park to meet my sister and her friend and then it's dinner and The Lives of Others (Oscar for best foreign film this year) with another friend.

Just two more weeks of teaching classes! I'm trying to think of a good way to wrap-up my psychology class. The very last class we'll have a party and play psychology bingo, but I'd like to have a good capstone the class before.

Yesterday was the first time I noticed the baby moving. I guess there's a bright side to waking up early and lying in bed. Like a colleague said, it did kind of feel like bubbles popping in your abdomen. We're going to make another sonogram attempt this Thursday. I dreamed last night that it was a boy. But I feel like really early on I dreamed that the baby was a girl. So this mother's intuition is confused.

Recent happenings:

- It was great to see our Seattle friends and meet their son. It was nice to be able to hang out though schedules didn't really allow for much painting the town.

- We like The Year of Magical Thinking, a play based on the book of the same name by Joan Didion and played by Vanessa Redgrave. The latter part, a postscript of the book lost me a bit when it tried to get philosophical, but I look forward to reading the original material (which E said he liked even better). We stopped by Junior's afterwards for dessert. A nice date.

- The associate pastor of EPC who also heads up the Mercy Team came with me to the monthly meeting for the public housing project across the street. We just wanted to get a pulse of what is going on in the community....lots of maintenance problems from the sound of it. :)

- The brunch I held for 2007 Moms went well. There is something to not going through this stage of life alone. It was a little stressful getting ready for it. I had planned to make food the night before but we got back late from the clan dinner, partly because E's niece had to stop by her campus to pick up her computer so she could back it up. It's interesting to hear from her parents how she is very me-centered and not as family-centered as they would like as she's gone off for her first year of college. I'm sure this isn't an unusual tension.

- Our friend successfully defended this past Wednesday and is getting ready to move to Texas for a tenure track job! It was exactly one year after my own defense...brought back lots of memories.

In the news:

The increase in allergies/asthma may partly be due to greenhouse effects, particularly in the city, with the rise of CO2 and trees/pollen.

NBA refs show a bias in their calls on players, partly based on race among other things (the NBA refutes this with their own "experts"). Not surprising...one of the articles I'm bringing in to my psych class to show psychology in the news.