Monthly Archives: January 2008

Lizard update

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I haven’t said much in detail about the Lizard since November. I figure it’s ok for me to bring up again. 🙂

Pregnancy has gotten much much better. I guess that I did hit the second trimester honeymoon, or at least as much of one as I am getting. I still don’t feel great, but I feel ok most days. I’m still really exhausted and I’m not handling stress well. At least I feel less pukey. I keep reading pregnancy boards and wanting to get involved in discussions but I can’t get past my, “People–for the love of GOD, LEARN HOW TO SPELL!!!” I know I make typos occasionally and once in a while I even out-and-out spell something wrong, but it’s not constant and pervasive. I do know basic words. And I find myself resistant to getting on any board that has a lot of active teenage parents. It squicks me. I probably shouldn’t be so judgmental, but I can’t handle it. Those are my students, not my peers.

I’m feeling the baby frequently and sometimes really intensely. I think I’ve figured out what the occasional crampy bits are–Braxton Hicks contractions. Oh goody! I’ve been having them for a couple of weeks and they are bizarre. I had gotten up to one pound above my pre-pregnancy weight! Then Francesca died. Uhm, now I’m back to a couple of pounds below. Eating is so not my friend. I just can’t swing enough bulk. This is a bizarre change in my life. Some of my students from last year are commenting that my face and arms are actually looking thinner, which I find kind of funny.

At this point probably the biggest irritation I still have is that I feel useless when it comes to doing a lot of things. Not being allowed to lift more than 25 pounds puts a serious crimp in my life. 🙁 That said, Noah is being so wonderfully cheerful about doing things that I can’t even complain much about that. I would like to take this moment and bow down to the gods of pregnancy and say that if my time for seriously feeling crappy is over that I am deeply grateful. So far this stage has been really easy compared to the last stage. 🙂

I think that is most of what I haven’t squeed about lately.

Shit.

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And apparently I am still the only teacher they have for my classes. The person who was going to cover for me fell through. They are interviewing three people tomorrow. I’m going to cross my fingers.

I’m also going to guilt trip myself into making lesson plans for the next two-three weeks so that a new teacher can hit the ground running.

Shit. I don’t need this.

Yay for the Noah

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Last night I was being very angsty and fussy. My Noah was awesome about listening to me fuss. He patted me on the head. He told me stuff I’m doing well. He validated my feelings. And he helped me type up the stoopid review questions. And did I mention that he did all of this after running around the house finishing up the stuff that needed to happen before staging today?

Have I mentioned that I married the best boy ever? Cause I did. Best. Boy. Ever.

What the hell.

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The kids are coming. By this I mean that my (now former) students are going to be allowed to read my blog. I’m not the teacher as of Friday and there isn’t jack-diddly-squat anyone can do to me if the kidlets see something dirty.

That said–ya’ll don’t get filters. Nuh uh. 😛

I guess I need to be more careful about filtering for a while. They’ll all turn 18 eventually and then I won’t care anymore.

This is kind of creepy. It’s like they are walking in on me in the bathroom.

Drained

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I feel so empty. I have very little emotion right now. I’m tired.

Getting through today sucks. Then I have to get through tomorrow. I have a lot of typing to do after school to catch up with finals creation. Ugh. It’ll be ok though. I’ll get through.

Noah is amazing. He did an incredible amount of work this weekend and then after being incredibly productive he was still willing to find some extra energy and baby me. I have the best husband ever.

Next weekend we have a laundry list of chores that need to get done. Things like washing windows, sandpapering doors to get the paint off, cutting the front bushes, and cleaning cobwebs off the outside of the house. Anyone who wants to come help is welcome. 🙂 We can probably do it all ourselves, but what the heck.

Next Saturday is also a gathering at a friend’s house and the TNG volunteer fair. I am not sure how I feel about attending either. So tired.

Tired.

Tired.
Tired.

Drowning

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I will be flying to Portland tomorrow evening. I will be staying with a friend. I’m willing to bet I will not be terribly easy to get a hold of. All sorts of things (I’m looking at you Jon) will just have to wait.

Let’s look at the next few weeks, shall we? Tomorrow I need to continue to frantically get my classroom closer to being ready for a sub on Friday and get the kids through another day of finals prep. In the evening I get on a plane and go rent a car by myself for the first time in my life. Kind of spooky. I will most likely go straight to Dad’s house and goodness knows how much sleep I will end up getting. I also need to arrange getting a key for the place where I am crashing somehow. Friday and Saturday will be spent with Dad in some capacity. Sunday morning will likely be spent either with Dad or with the friend I am staying with.

While I am gone Noah needs to finish packing up all of the stuff in the house that is over carpet. Most of it is packed already, at this point we mostly need to get boxes to storage and get furniture out of here. Looks like it is he and I trying to move it with most of it falling on him. 🙁 Whatever I don’t help him with tonight and tomorrow he has to do on his own. The carpet is being replaced on Saturday. I get back on Sunday to help put things back and finish up the last baby steps of touching up paint (there are about a dozen specific spots that need to be touched up). I should also continue packing stuff in the kitchen/bathroom because we want most things out of sight for the showing. The house is being “staged” on Tuesday which means that some pushy-ass woman is coming over and insulting the hell out of my/our taste and telling us how we can make our house look less crappy. I’m looking forward to it.

I need to completely clean out my classroom and get all of my stuff packed and off the walls within nine days, preferably sooner so the next teacher can start moving in. I also need to finish grading all the late work that is still pouring in. I need to continue typing up the questions the kids are submitting for the finals. I need to create the finals. I need to grade the finals. This probably represents about 40 hours of work I need to do sometime in the next nine days while out of town for several of them. I have a mandatory IEP meeting next week where I get to go deal with a horrible parent and her horrible child. Luckily her case manager is pretty cool and is backing me up. Thank goodness for small favors. I have a hysterical family who keeps breathing down my neck about how I am persecuting their child by giving him a bad grade despite the fact that his grade in my class is higher than his grade in any other class. Cheers.

And after getting the house on the market next week we get to go to Pittsburgh from the 25-28th so I can see how I feel about the cold. I think this is the most traveling I have done in this short of a time period in my life. (I will be out of town for like 15 days out of a five week period. And this is on three separate trips.)

And I have an ever increasing flow of email traffic from con stuff, most of it extremely demanding and resulting in someone getting pissy if they aren’t responded to RIGHT NOW.

So, if I don’t get back to you or if I have a fairly short temper or I’m not cheerful, by all means feel free to take it personally.

Francesca is gone

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Francesca Bennet was one of my adopted moms. I’ve been blessed to have several. Although I never actually called Francesca mom. She and I discussed how she has never been an actual mother and she didn’t feel she needed that distinction at this stage of life because it didn’t have the same meaning for her. But she mentored me. She was one of my closer friends. I didn’t call her enough. I didn’t try hard enough to see her more often and now it is too late.

I’m going to miss her so much. She is the closest to me death I have had as an adult and this is going to be very hard.

Probably too late, but worth asking…

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Is anyone available to come help Noah move some furniture tomorrow? We are having carpeting installed soon and we need to get most of the furniture out of the house and I can’t do much of it. We are also trying to get some stuff taken to the dump (oops leaving it in the rain) and boxes taken to storage. I assume our friends have lives and stuff, but maybe someone will take pity?

(Hey Michael–any possibility you could come get the bookshelf sometime before Saturday?)

Squeeeeeeeeee

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Heartbeat! Discernable heartbeat! The Lizard has a heartbeat of 160 bpm. Apparently there is a wives tale that says this means kiddo is a girl. The funny thing is–I don’t want to find out for certain, but thinking of the Lizard as a girl makes me giddy. I’m pretty sure I would feel the same way about a boy. Have I mentioned that I really want this child? I’m ‘measuring’ at 21 cm which is pretty much perfect considering that I am at 20 weeks 4 days. (From the 20th week usually you can measure the belly and the centimeters will match the week you are in.) Lizard was hanging out in the very lower right hand part of my uterus. I think that is so neat. It makes sense because so much of the kicking is really low. 🙂 Baby! I’m having a baby!!!!

Ok, I’ll stop now. 🙂

*bounce*

{insecurity} Disappointment

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It’s probably not “lately” or “for a while now” but more just right now I feel really frustrated and caught up in small disappointments. I’m tired of trying and failing. I’m tired of being unable to make my commitments. I’m tired of other people not making their commitments to me.

Tonight I physically feel worse than I have in almost a month. Why is that? Oh. I went back to my job. I went back to people being demanding and fussy and having no interest in anyone other than themselves. I’m not really even talking about the kids. The pissy emails from parents hit me really hard. The attitude that I am failing my students because I hold them to standards is really hard. Right now I feel more guilty than normal because I believe I have let my students down this semester. I didn’t coax them through every single step this time. I didn’t baby them through doing all of their work. I didn’t keep them in after school repeatedly until I had a freakishly high passing rate. So I feel like I failed them. On some level I believe that I didn’t fail them, they failed themselves. But I can’t help feeling like I disappointed them.

I have nine more days at my job and I’m not sure how I will get through them. 🙁

The danger of teenagers

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They didn’t do their homework earlier in vacation. So they can’t help paint. Looks like me, Noah, and my coworker will be painting today. Much suckiness. I have to be careful because the last time I stretched my arm over my head I pulled a muscle that hurt for days. God damnit. Luckily, my coworker is about 6’4″ so I think he can handle the high stuff. 🙂

This being a grown up shit is totally over rated. I keep telling myself that the house goes on the market in the next two weeks. No more time for procrastinating. 🙁 It doesn’t matter how I feel. Suck it the freak up.

In other news I came back from vacation at 181 (My pre-pregnancy weight–see why I’ve been saying I was heavy?! I gained over 20 freakin pounds in the first year of living with Noah. He’s a feeder.) and was really excited. I’ve gone down to 179 again. I think the soda helped keep my weight up. Hm.

In other news

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Tonight marks the first time that the Lizard has kicked hard enough so that I could be absolutely definite that I was feeling it and Noah could feel it too. This is so wonderful.

Have I mentioned that I’m really happy about having a family with Noah? I can’t imagine this being so wonderful in any other circumstance.

{the short list} Frustration.

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I am not an event promoter. Let me say this again, I am not an event promoter. I have been saying for over a year that if I am involved in this con I cannot be one of the people promoting it. I have been saying this because I have a pretty good grasp of my frustration levels and the things that will make me angry and I will no longer be helpful. However, due to massive flaking on the parts of several people I am now doing event promotion during the last six weeks of the con. I’m doing it while trying to prepare for my last two weeks of teaching professionally. I’m doing it while trying to pack my house so it can be “staged”. I’m doing it while trying to move. I’m doing it while trying to figure out where in the fuck in Pittsburgh will I not drown in the mid-western white mentality. (I love that people on message boards try to explain how culturally diverse their childhoods were by saying, “Well, my parents were upset when Martin Luther King Jr. died…”) I’m doing it while going through a fairly difficult pregnancy.

I’m having to suck it up and deal with people and things I don’t want to deal with right now. I’m tired of being complained at. I’m tired of having to “be nice” when I would really like to punch some people in the face. I was willing to handle arranging the classes and dealing with presenters. I have done that. I actually kind of enjoyed that. It was really neat to get such a broad array of presenters and classes when I was told it couldn’t be done. Go freakin me. But that is all I signed on to do for many and myriad reasons. Now it doesn’t matter what I signed on to do. Either I help do stuff that is way beyond the scope of what I agreed to do or it gets dumped on someone who is turning around and freaking out at me 20 times a day and making my stress level go through the roof. I think when this is over I’m going to avoid talking to him for a year or so. Of course, this will make me one more evil person who has abandoned him. Right now, I don’t care. The pressure he is putting on me is making me crazy. And now we have another pushy person on board who might actually get some work done, but I have to put up with public admonishments to be nice in order to get that help. I really want to say fuck everyone and just walk away.

Where your humble blog host throws herself on your mercy.

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So I’m helping to run this con. At this point it seems as though people don’t know it is happening and therefore aren’t registering. Here is information on it. Because this is my private blog and you are probably someone I like and consider a friend I will say rather bluntly: please dear god come to the event. We need to have at least 40 people in order to break even. That’s not much. And dude, I have some totally fucking awesome classes lined up.

Please forward the below information to anyone you think might be vaguely interested.

TNG4 – Bound for the Bay
Feb 15 – 18 2008 — President’s Day Weekend
@ Edges, the Silicon Valley Dungeon
http://tngcon.org/

Come join us this Presidents Day weekend for TNG4 – Bound for the Bay, a gathering for younger pervs ages 18-35 and their partners, when it comes to the Bay Area.

Whether you identify with BDSM, SM, Leather, Poly, Kink, Fetish, some other term altogether or no label at all, we invite you to join us and some 200 other younger pervs both from across the country as well as locally from the Bay Area for three days and three nights of learning, socializing, connecting, and fun at Edges, The Silicon Valley Dungeon.

Registration is now open!

We have a number of presenters and speakers lined up including:

Lee Harrington – Sir Michael – Zuchtiger – Shamara –
Coral Mallow, Ms. Oregon State Leather and her boy Ryan
Boymeat – Ryan aka Psychokitty – Michael Delaney
Rita Seagrave- Tim (BR) – Arielle – Rae Goldman – Pepper Mint – Lark Ellison

We have tried to keep costs low for you, so registration will be $125 up to the beginning of February when it goes up to $150, and we have arranged a rate of $89/night (plus tax) at the Hawthorn Suites in Santa Clara.

We also plan on having fun, with three nights of parties and socials so you can get more familiar with all those new friendly faces that you met during the day.

Still reading? We will have a volunteer fair in early January to help fill out our volunteer staff needs, but in the meanwhile, if you want to help out, contact our Volunteer Coordinator at <volunteer@tngcon.org>

We will also be putting out a call for proposals for panel discussions in the next few weeks once we figure out how many we can add to the schedule. You can keep with these and other announcements by checking out our site and joining the announcement and chat lists from there.

Interested in advertising with us? Sponsoring? Let us know with an email to <sponsor@tngcon.org>, and check out the website!

Monogamy

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One year ago today I had sex with someone other than Noah. There has been absolutely no sexual contact with anyone but him since that. In thinking about my history I realize that previous to this I had a period of “girls don’t count” monogamy with Tom that lasted three years, but as a few women reading this can attest… I certainly had sex with people other than Tom during that period. This is the longest period of my life I have actually been completely and totally monogamous. It’s kind of funny that I describe my relationship history as being “basically monogamous” but when I’m honest I notice that I’m not actually good at real and true complete monogamy. So this is interesting to me. There are a wide variety of reasons for this stretch of one-on-one attention and I’m not unhappy about it. I am very likely to continue this trend for quite some time to come. I’m curious how long this will last for me.

Noah’s history is not that different from mine. He has had longer stretches of monogamy than I have had, but it looks like he won’t beat his previous record with me. I’ve never had a partner break monogamy before just because they wanted to. In the four years I was with Tom he had sex with someone else exactly one time when I pushed it. Neither Stephen nor Phil would have broken monogamy. It’s weird having a partner who is as voracious, maybe more so, about sex.

I wonder what monogamy/non-monogamy is going to look like for us throughout our lives. I wonder if I will be monogamous during the whole breeding period. I am pretty certain he won’t be. It’s weird to think about being the monogamous one.