Reverie in Maine

Juice Cleanse, Day 3

2011-12-11T05:13:00.001-08:00

By the time we go to Day 3 of the Juice Cleanse, most of the caffeine withdrawl symptoms had subsided and in their place I was simply feeling actual hunger. Not mind-numbing, I'm getting shaky, keening hunger; just rumbling stomach hunger, which felt healthy and normal.

I proposed to Nick that we eat a massaged kale salad for dinner, but he insisted we stick it out to the bitter end. So we did. Here's what I learned:

1-I drink way too much coffee. I plan on cutting down to one cup in the morning, followed by decaf if I really need some more.

2-Nutmilks are really good. The final juice of the day was a nutmilk, made by blending raw cashews with vanilla, raw cacao nibs, agave nectar and water. It is surprisingly delicious and satisfying, and makes a good substitute for a bowl of ice cream after dinner.

3-I don't if I'll ever do a full juice cleanse again, but I would consider the milder version of "juicing until dinner." The juices really were good, and if you drink 4 or 5 of them, you don't really go hungry.

And as for the plumbing, I did add some psyllium husks to my routine, and I think they did indeed help make the juicing a true cleanse. If you know what I mean.

Juice Cleanse, Day 2

2011-12-06T17:41:00.001-08:00

I'm afraid to re-read yesterday's post, because yesterday was like having a hangover in hell. I don't want to relive it. It reminded me a lot, actually, of the days when I had horrible, devastating, terrifying menstrual cramps. I would make it through the day, but just barely.

Today was easier. The headache never really went away, but I felt less woozy and less like I was hanging on by the skin of my teeth. Hunger hasn't really been an issue, surprisingly. It's more like a nagging feeling of dissatisfaction. The grim feeling you get on the day you have to attend a funeral of someone you knew, but not that well.

My brain was still a little fuzzy. I had to bring baby C in for a check-up, and I left my keys in the ignition the whole time I was in the doctor's office (an hour!) Luckily no one noticed. I think I might have also turned left at a red light. Also, I got really short-tempered talking to my boss's boss on the phone--really unlike me be so bold as to call out a higher-up on his BS, but I just had no reserves of patience.

As for the nitty gritty details...I haven't weighed myself yet today, but last night the scale was the same. My skin does look slightly smoother, but I wouldn't call it glowing. And oddly enough, I am feeling constipated--not cleaned out. In fact, I think my stomach is pooching out more than ever as all those juices ferment in my gut. I think maybe they are....stuck?

We'll see what tomorrow, uh, brings.

Juice Cleanse, Day 1

2011-12-05T07:32:00.001-08:00

After watching the documentary Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead, Nick and I were inspired to try a juice cleanse. We started this morning, and I'm too woozy and short-tempered to write about the background, so instead, here's the play-by-play:

Day 1
7:00am. Nick puts a cucumber, 20 ounces of grapes, and 2 pears into a blender. That's breakfast. It's actually quite tasty.

8:00. Noticeable absence of coffee. I do not have to carry my to-go cup out to the car with me, along with 2 kids, 2 lunch boxes, and Sadie's naptime sleeping bag. One less thing to carry, and yet, I still forget to buckle Sadie in to her car seat. I don't realize it until I merge onto the freeway. (Immediately pull over and buckle her in.)

8:30. Arrive at daycare. Sadie doesn't want to go to school because she doesn't like her teacher's bangs. ("They go down her face!") Hustle kids inside and have trouble managing to get everyone/thing inside in one piece. In no mood for idle chit-chat with daycare teachers. Sadie and I bonk heads as I lean down to take her shoes off and I feel like I'm going to blow a gasket. I need to get out of there, pronto.

9:00am. Arrive at work parking spot on bottom of steep hill. A thick feeling has entered my head, like someone is pouring hot molasses into my brain. The molasses hurts my poor head in a vague, undefinable way. Walk up the steep hill rather slowly.

9:30am. Have much less patience for the clutter in my personal email in-box. Normally I scan the offers for things I can't afford, read about environmental news or ways to Feng Shui my home, but today I delete without opening. This is rare.

10:00am. Glance co-workers' desk and thoughts go immediately to coffee, as in, I should grab my coffee and chat with co-worker about her vacation. No coffee makes it a less enticing option.

10:30. Get some water to try to break up the thick molasses feeling in my head. See doughnuts and muffins at coffee shop near water fountain, but surprisingly don't crave them. Don't really crave coffee either, just want the day to be over. They say the first day is hardest; by Day 2, you start to feel good, euphoric even. Nick is picking me up at noon so we can go home and drink juice together for lunch.

11:00am. Can't concentrate. Nick will be here at 11:45 and it can't come soon enough.

11:11am. Get a cup of black tea. I can deal with the juices, but the caffeine withdrawl is killing me.

11:25am. A few sips in and I am feeling more human. Maybe I just need the hot liquid?

12:00pm. Home at last for "lunch." 3 carrots, 2 Granny Smith apples, and a thumb of ginger, juiced. Delicious (really). I drink very, very slowly. Feel satisfied. Re-read our juice cleanse book and realize we CAN have green tea, either regular or decaf! Yeehaw! Nick mishears me and thinks we can have either regular or decaf coffee. I have to squash his dreams.

1pm. Noticing a stiffness in my neck. Lack of caffeine? Or lack of caffeine leading to reduced jaw clenching and thus a chance for my knotted neck to relax?

2pm. Experiencing actual hunger pangs. Now? Maybe because I just went to the cafeteria for tea. Ok, time to analyze data. Maybe then I will be so bored I won't be hungry anymore.

3:30pm. Extreme feelings of hunger, coupled with temporary nausea, make me want to dig into a bag of tortilla chips I have stashed in my desk. I resist.

4:30pm. I cannot WAIT for dinner and for the final juice of the day, the nutmilk.

5:30pm. Nick and I are both cranky. Not fun to cook real food for the girls when we can't eat ourselves. I run out to Rosemont for ginger. When I return, I make a startling discovery: somehow I got it in my head that we could have 2 fruit juices, 1 green juice, and a nut milk per day, but I totally screwed it up. We are allowed 3 green juices a day in addition to the fruit and nut milk! Nick is so relieved to be allowed more juice he isn't even angry with me for being such a doofus and making this day harder than it needed to be. Meanwhile, we've subsisted on two juices all day, when by now we could have been on our sixth. Oops.

6:00pm. We drink our first "green" juice: spinach, apples, pears, and ginger. It's not bad. Nick says he wants to tear into Sadie's fish sticks. I feel like I'm on two planes--on the one hand, real food sounds like it would be too difficult. On the other, at this point I have a pounding headache and would do anything to get rid of it. If it is caffeine withdrawl, though, it's too late. Past experience tells me I need coffee by 10am or these vise-grip headaches are inevitable.

9pm. We're drinking our last meal of the day, which is actually a nut milk. Raw cashews blended with water, coconut oil, raw cacoa nibs, and some honey. Because our Cuisinart didn't blend the nuts all the way, we get to chew the leftover little nibs of cacao and cashews. We get to chew!

The idea is that the fats in the nut milk help you sleep through the night. I hope it works. I'm not feeling any of the supposed benefits of the cleanse yet, but that might be different tomorrow. I have hope that tomorrow might be easier due to 1) some of the worst of the caffeine withdrawl symptoms being over, and 2) we'll drink 5 juices instead of just 3.

Today was grim.

On Not Doing It All

2011-11-13T19:09:00.000-08:00

I realized today that perhaps I try to do too much. I just signed up for an online medical writing course. I'm also trying to launch a jewelry line made of drilled seaglass pieces. And I want to keep up this blog, and my other one, 2cats.wordpress.com

This is all in addition to working full-time and trying to be a good mother to my two young children. S is now 3-1/2, and C is 15 months. And of course I want to be a decent wifey, now that I'm officially married and all.

But my sense of time is skewed. I left work an hour early the other day, and because it was still light out I believed I would be able to do my Tracy Anderson Post-Pregnancy workout, start fixing dinner, and do a few loads of laundry, all before N came home with the kids. Obviously, little to none of this got accomplished. I might have done 10 minutes of the workout before the girls came home and C started crawling on me.

I'm trying to be more in the moment, as they say. When I try to fit too much in to one day, I don't pay attention to any of the actual moments of the day.

Do you ever get the sense that some people climb mountains just to be able to say they climbed a mountain? I don't want to say someday that I lived a good life and have two wonderful grown children. I want to live the life. Sometimes I feel like I'm forgetting to do so.

A New Direction for Reverie in Maine

2011-10-21T13:20:00.000-07:00

I've got a new gig: volunteer blogger at the Environmental Health Strategy Center. Check out my first blog post, here.

Oh, I'm still working full-time as a data analyst at Maine Medical Center, but I'm looking to expand my horizons a bit. Environmental health and sustainability are two things I think about a lot, and I'd like to revisit a former career of mine as a would-be writer.

So, in an effort to make all of the paths of my life converge in some meaningful way, I am hoping to reinvent this blog, dear reader, as a place where I can share what I learn about environmental health and show you how you can apply that knowledge to protecting your health. From little steps (not microwaving in plastic) to big ones (attempting a green renovation of our home), I'll let you know what works, what doesn't, what to be really worried about, and how much it all costs.

Stay tuned.

Port of Portland

2011-01-22T09:24:00.000-08:00

Spotted at the Portland Ocean Terminal

Books

2011-01-14T06:56:00.001-08:00

Sidewalk outside Carlson & Turner bookstore on the East End

The storm

2011-01-14T06:55:00.000-08:00

before

after

Peace in the Valley

2009-07-05T05:02:00.000-07:00

Amazing what makes some cats happy. Thumbs has been suspended in this bag for about an hour.

On another note, as promised, I've started a new blog to chronicle our new house renovation. Go to 2cats.wordpress.com to check it out.

House Blogging

2009-06-13T17:18:00.000-07:00

Big plans afoot. Our mortgage was conditionally approved (pending proof of hazard insurance, and copies of some papers), so if all goes according to plan we should close before the end of June! We're so thrilled. We've both been renting now for upwards of 15 years apiece, so having a place to call our own is going to be huge. I think it will feel really, really different to be living in our own place, that we create together, and I can't wait to experience that.

Since we thought we'd be living in our current rental for the foreseeable future, we already did a lot of little DIY improvements here and there. For example, N put dimmers in most of the rooms, we painted several rooms (or painted them halfway), and added some lighting fixtures and other little details to spruce up the place. But we always did them as cheaply as possible and in a sort of comprised way, since this was a rental. So owning a place and being able to do things the right way and just the way we want to do them is going to be huge.

And in that spirit, we plan on documenting the whole process, from soup to nuts, from ripped out, pee-stained carpet to dismantled ceiling tiles. And we'll be doing it all on a new blog. Title not yet determined, nor host (I have trouble making my photos look the way I want them to on Blogger, so I'm thinking of trying out a different blogging platform--suggestions welcome!) nor launch date, although I guess we better get going ASAP. N and I will both be contributing, so stay tuned!

It's Happening

2009-06-01T18:32:00.000-07:00

We're under contract! We walked through the house with an inspector last Friday and a contractor this morning, and the resident is already starting to move things out onto the sidewalk. Oh, which house, you ask? Oh, um, well....this one. That first one described there in that post.

Yeah, I know, I'm going to eat my words. Something compelled me to go back and look at this house, despite my initial--and, I see now in re-reading that post--overwhelming misgivings. I think part of my reluctance in thinking the single-family home could not possibly be salvageable was because I didn't think N would be on board with the renovations. But when he saw it, saw that it was in a great neighborhood (our current one), and was an actual house that we could actually afford the mortgage on, I think he got really excited. Frankly, I think he's excited to do the demolition. Ripping down the ceilings, ripping up carpet, knocking down walls. Guys love that sort of thing.

But circumstances have conspired to make this a really good time for us to buy. There is the $8,000 tax credit that Obama is giving first-time homebuyers who purchase a house before December 1, 2009. The low, low interest rate our mortgage broker locked in for us last Friday, even before we had a signed contract, because our realtor assured him we would definitely be going under contract (4.5% people!!!). And because this house does need so much work, we got it for a low, low price. We figure our sweat equity over the next 5 years will be like our second job, making the house pay off down the line if we decide to sell and move into something larger (or something with a yard). Our broker thinks that with the location we're in, we'll probably be able to sell for double the purchase price in 5-7 years. And, no matter how you slice it, the mortgage, even with property taxes and hazard insurance added in, will be less than what we're currently paying in rent. So, I think financially, we're making a wise move, despite the many, many weekends of home improvement we have coming up.

And yes, I realize I'll be trying to live down that blog post for months to come.

Second Thoughts

2009-05-16T18:08:00.000-07:00

Okay, I just read this and now I'm feeling really nervous about buying a home. If this economics writer for the New York Times can screw up, what does that portend for me and N???

Poking Around

2009-05-13T18:57:00.000-07:00

I looked at three houses today in my neighborhood. One, which was going for all of $124,900, smelled so badly of cat piss, I could almost taste it on my tongue 3 hours later. I'm all for DIY renovations, but there's no way I could salvage that place. Not only was the stench unbearable (and I am totally a cat person), but the layout was all wrong: a tiny, disjointed, dark kitchen; a rabbit's warren of bedrooms upstairs, a deck only accessible by pushing out the bottom part of the window. But the good thing about looking at that place was meeting the neighbor from across the street, a kitchen renovator who handed me his card with a sweet smile. He and his wife lived across the street from the house for sale, next door to his sister. He also thought the house was a good deal, and said houses for that price rarely came for sale in the neighborhood.

One of the other houses I looked at was much nicer, but was also 3x the price of the first. This one was a two-unit with a single-family house feel. An elderly woman lived there, and the decor reflected the occupant. I could see past that; what I couldn't deal with was the vague sound of Interstate 295 that hummed in the distance. There were views from the upstairs window, but I didn't want a view of the highway, even if Back Cove and New Hampshire could also be seen. When I lived in New York, I spent 5 years within spitting distance of the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, and to this day, the sound of highway noise stresses me out and reminds of waking up at 4am to the sound of massive semi-trucks downshifting in traffic outside my window.

Finally (well, not so finally, this was the first house I looked at, but I after I saw the other two I went back and looked at the first with a different mindset) I saw a two-unit on corner of one really nice quaint street and one sketchy not-so-great street. Besides the location, there isn't much to recommend it. The broker and I counted five layers of peeling linoleum flooring in the kitchen, there was fake wood parquet floors elsewhere, wood paneling in most of the rooms, vertical vinyl blinds, dropped ceilings, and on and on. But there was also decent light, some nice molding around the window frames, and the potential to create a really nice open concept kitchen/eating area. If we got a tenant for the downstairs, our mortgage would be eminently affordabel. But, to give you an idea of what we'd have to do to the place to get it rent-worth, here's the living room.

A Dream Deferred?

2009-05-11T10:36:00.000-07:00

I did this preliminary mortgage application online with my bank, and the message I got said they didn't have any loans to suit my needs at this time. What does that mean? Am I screwed? I'm waiting to hear back from the loan officer I spoke with on the phone to see if he can give me any more insight.

Feeling Homey

2009-05-10T06:20:00.000-07:00

Sadie is now 13 months old. Every day she amazes me with some new word or skill, some little something that she wasn't able to do just the day before. And with her growing independence, and the comfort of knowing that yes, she really is here to stay, I'm feeling freer to turn my attention to other things. Like--dare I use the word?--homemaking.

Right now, I am utterly obsessed with all things home-related. I dream of real estate. I'm constantly looking at blogs like apartmenttherapy.com, designspongeonline.com, and decor8blog.com. I love how spaces can make you feel a certain way--unencumbered, claustrophobic, relaxed, energized. It fascinates me to see people on those home design shows freak out and cry when their home makeovers are "revealed," because it proves just what power good design and a well-thought out space can have on the psyche. I've lived in numerous apartments through the years, in San Francisco, New York, Seville and Barcelona in Spain, in Prague, and now--in just three years--three different apartments in Portland, Maine. Some of them were special, some were just bit players in my life, some held starring roles. I wanted to dress each of them up to set the stage for the life I fancied myself living, but limited finances, uninvested roommates, and/or the knowledge that I wouldn't be staying long always seemed to conspire against me.

Well, no more! Now that N and I are settled in Portland for the foreseeable future, and now that we have a little youngun' we want to make a happy home for, I'm constantly thinking up ways to spruce up our rental apartment. And in the last few weeks, I've even been dreaming about buying something. We are madly in love with our neighborhood, the East End. Our current apartment sits across the street from an Olmstead-designed park that runs downhill to Casco Bay. We have park and water views from our bay windows. We can walk to an excellent coffee shop, a gourmet food shop, a down-n-dirty deli, three great restaurants, a playground, a dock, and a beach. Oh, and my work is a 10-minute bike ride away (45 minutes by foot). Could I ask for anything more?

Unfortunately, we're not the only people who know how great the neighborhood is. Homes here will cost you a pretty penny. Don't get me started on how some of them, that are now in the $350,000 range, were selling for closer to $100k in 1998. I know, because I've checked the tax assessor's website. So in order to get a toehold in the neighborhood, N and I have begun to think about buying a multi-unit. A place where the mortgage would be affordable with the help of a tenant. I'm on the hunt.

On Having a Baby (Excerpt From an Email I Sent to a Friend in September)

2008-12-04T12:58:00.001-08:00

You know, I think about Sadie a lot, and she has changed my life for the better, but contrary to what I expected I don't think about her ALL the time, nor has she become the sole focus of my life. For example, I just bought a sewing machine, and am looking forward to learning how to make things and setting up my sewing space, etc. I just mention this because I thought your life essentially ended when you had children, that you loved them so much and became so wrapped up in them that you had no time to do or even think about anything else. But it's not quite like that after all--it's more like they cast your life with a different shade, or color, but they don't transform it as completely as I would have imagined. Which is a good thing!! And doesn't lessen the love or joy I feel for her and with her.

Pity Party is Over

2008-10-23T05:44:00.001-07:00

Okay, I was definitely feeling sorry for myself in that last post. Maybe I wasn't yet ready to accept how much work--like, manual labor type of work, on your feet, getting up and down, dealing with smells and trash and junk work--goes into having a child and animals and a "house." Okay, Mom and Dad, I get it now.

But I must say that having Nick around more has made it all a lot easier. He works 40 hours now, instead of 70, and twice this week he even brought Sadie to daycare while I sat around in my pajamas drinking coffee making myself late for work. Like right now. But it's blissful. And I can't seem to get my butt off this big, red cozy chair...

A Day in the Life

2008-09-24T04:15:00.000-07:00

With Nick working over 60 hours a week at his new job, I'm finding myself a bit overwhelmed by the day-to-day routine of working and caring for a baby and three animals, and trying to keep the house somewhat clean and presentable. Here's a snapshot of yesterday:

Come home from work.
Change into jeans and get stroller out.
Attach Ting Tong's recently recovered collar to her leash (the collar had been buried in my mom's couch for the last two months until it was found this weekend).
Take Sadie and Ting Tong for a walk around the neighborhood; Ting Tong hasn't been out in days.
Come home from walk, park stroller, put TT in downstairs entryway and close door.
Go back outside, gather things out of car that I couldn't carry up when I first got home from work: diaper genie inserts, a tray for Sadie's Bumbo, my breastmilk pump.
Put car seat and Sadie in downstairs entryway.
Go back outside, wheel stroller to door, collapse stroller and put in downstairs entryway.
Take Sadie out of car seat, gather up bags from car, walk up narrow, winding stairs, implore TT to follow. She doesn't.
Put stuff down all over kitchen, put Sadie in her Bumbo, wash off new Bumbo tray, prepare Sadie's cereal.
Realize I'm trembling from hunger and rip open box of crackers and start dipping them into peanut butter. The box of crackers falls on the floor but I'm too weak to pick them up.
Drink an Emergen-C.
Make Sadie's cereal.
Feed Sadie--her cute, cereal-strewn smile makes me happy.
Hear TT whimpering in the downstairs entryway because she doesn't think she make it up the stairs, even though she can.
Finish feeding Sadie and gather her up for a bath.
Hear TT barking at neighbors coming home.
Put Sadie in Bumbo on floor and go downstairs to get TT.
Push TT up first two steps then watch her bound easily up the rest.
Feed TT.
Give Sadie a bath.
Take Sadie upstairs to get her ready for bed.
Dry, dress, cuddle, read books to Sadie, nurse Sadie, and put her in her crib.
Hear Sadie cry as I walk back downstairs. She can't fall asleep without crying first.
Realize tomorrow is garbage day.
Put kitchen trash into bigger Portland City trash bag.
Empty cat litter. It hasn't been changed in days, and we have two cats.
Turn on Wet/Dry Vac to vacuum up scattered kitty litter and get sprayed with water sucked up a few days earlier during kitchen flood (requires another entry to explain)
Wipe off walls now sprayed with dirty flood water.
Tie up garbage bag and bring downstairs. Don't bother with recycling.
Walk outside and inhale the sweet, clean Maine air. The water in the bay is still and the sky is darkening.
Walk back inside, up the stairs into kitchen, and clean out pot used to heat up can of soup the night before.
Heat up another can of soup for dinner.
Play fetch with TT while eating dinner and reading story in "American Baby" magazine about how to "get it all done."
Notice that Sadie has stopped crying.
Go to bathroom and see that TT has peed on the bath mat. Rinse off bath mat.
Put dishes in dishwasher and forget to run it.
Sit down in big, red chair, intending to do freelance editing work.
Stare at big pile of unfolded laundry on the couch, and realize I'm too tired to either edit or fold laundry.
Go upstairs to bed. It's 8:30.
Wake up 1am, 3am, 4:30am. Sadie is gassy and fussy.
Wake up Nick and have him try to comfort Sadie when nursing doesn't work.
Have Nick put Sadie in her swing.
Talk to Nick about his day, since I never see him anymore during daylight hours.
Get out of bed at 6:30 and reheat yesterday's coffee in the microwave.
Start writing this post.
Sadie wakes up.
Keep writing while she fusses.
Go get Sadie out of swing.

Welcome to the Johnsons

2008-09-15T18:16:00.000-07:00

There is a bar on the Lower East Side called Welcome to the Johnsons. From what I can remember, it's got faux-wood paneling on the walls, 70s-era couches, and maybe even a Ms. Pac-Man game. It is, of course, a totally ironic homage to the childhood homes of many 30- and 40-something hipsters, with its quintessential middle-America orange and brown 1970s decor, notable for its utter blandness. Hipsters go there to remind themselves of how far they've come since leaving the mid-West and moving to Manhattan. That they do this by hanging out in a bar that looks and feels exactly like the sort of space they killed time in back when they were still in Minnesota and dreaming of being anywhere but there is not an irony lost on anyone; in fact, it is the whole point of going to Welcome to the Johnson. I enjoyed a beer or two there in my day.

So I thought it was pretty darn funny when we got this in the mail today:

[photo to come]

A completely un-ironic welcome to the neighborhood: an envelope emblazoned with "Welcome Johnsons!", stuffed with coupons to places we'll probably never go, it's a reminder of how far we've come since leaving New York City and moving to Maine.

Another sign that you're moving in a different orbit than your younger self? Going to see your friend's babysitter's band. Happened Saturday afternoon, right here in Portland, ME.

Or getting called ma'am in the supermarket checkout line.

And not getting carded anymore. Ever.

Prolonged Absence

2008-09-11T17:48:00.001-07:00

Wow. I haven't written in two months?? Really?

Okay, since I tend to put off blogging when I don't think I have the energy to write anything substantial, from now on I'm just going to log on and blog whatever is on my mind, without worrying about whether it makes a full blog post or not. How's that for a deal?

Today's thought:

On being a mom who works and takes her child to daycare:

I miss riding my bike through town and stopping at the local coffee shop for a Jamaican Me Crazy to go. It's harder being green when you're a working parent, I think. The other day, I drove my child to Falmouth, and because I was in such a rush and hungry from no breakfast yet not able to think clearly because I hadn't had any coffee, I went to the Dunkin' Donuts drive-through at 9am and got a coffee and some kind of egg white omelet on a panini. In my station wagon. Then I drove on the highway to get to work. And parked in a big parking lot and took the shuttle bus up to my office. Very un-bohemian and un-environmentally friendly. And a little soul-crushing.

So the other day, I drove Sadie to daycare, then came home, parked the car, and got on my bike and rode to work! It takes about the same amount of time as driving. Then I rode my bike back home, and would have gotten in the car to pick up Sadie, but it just so happens that my sister-in-law offered to drop off Sadie on her way to her parents' house in South Portland (just one of the benefits of having your sis-in-law be the assistant director at your kids' daycare). So I was sort of semi-environmental and hip that day. But really, am I going to do that when it gets colder? When it's raining? No, it'll be highway driving while dunking donuts.

Speaking of daycare, Sadie loves it! She is like, the hit of the infant room! This little kid Anthony did a dance for her while she sat in her Bumpo! Her teacher Cate says that Sadie just smiles and laughs all day. She even painted on Monday! My heart almost melted when I saw her "painting." I finally understood why mothers have put their kids' artwork up on their refrigerator doors. Sadie's painting was brilliant!

A Play Date

2008-07-09T13:11:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I took Sadie to our first infant play group. I say "our" because I now realize these things are as much for the mother as for the child. The babies can't talk, after all, so the mothers do. I was unprepared for it. I guess I've been at home so long, socializing only with Nick or with my family, that I wasn't ready for chatting with people in the "real" world.

To begin with, I showed up with sweat dripping in rivulets down my face from pushing Sadie's stroller up the hill to get to the place. Maybe I was dehydrated and unfocused, but I felt overwhelmed by having to present myself to these other mothers. Perhaps it was because their babies were 8 months or older, and they seemed more comfortable with their roles as mothers. Or maybe it was the competitive side of me, feeling that I needed to be the BEST mother there with the CUTEST and most advanced baby--nothing less would do. (Actually, I don't know if that's a competitive thing or a psychologically weird thing.) There is, of course, room for all sorts of babies and different kinds of moms, but something about the play group left me feeling....depressed? Alienated? Chagrined? I'm not sure what it was.

I do know that there is a real disconnect between watching someone else care for their child and the act of caring for my own. When I watch other parents with their children, the tedium of it overwhelms me, makes me feel sad. But with my own daughter, it really is different. My mom always said it's different when they're your own, and I see now that she is right. It's not that I think Sadie is more fascinating than other kids (though of course, she is), it's that the seemingly inconsequential things she does have context. Yesterday, Nick told me that she opened her mouth when he held the pacifier in front of her. A more mundane action you probably could not script, but the fact that she'd never done this before is what made it interesting to us.

Back at the play group, Sadie watched the other kids with a mix of awe and curiosity. She saw a little boy up close for the first time--the only other children she's played with are her cousins, all six of them girls. I, in turn, was fascinated watching her being fascinated. But I was self-conscious, too. What would the other mothers think of the way I held her? Of how I played with her? At one point, I put her down on the mat for some tummy time, and she squirmed and struggled to lift her head, leaving a huge wet spot of saliva where her mouth had been. I sensed the mothers looking on with horror at my having put her down on an unclean mat. Ooops. (My own personal germ theory is to expose her to things now so she grows up with a healthy immune system, but maybe the mat was too much?)

I can only imagine what it would be like to join a play group in Manhattan or gentrified Brooklyn. My experience of New York was that most people liked to tell you how wonderful whatever it is they were doing was. And I always took the bait, assuming that whatever someone told me was the literal truth and that whatever I was doing wasn't nearly as glamorous or cool or worthy. When it came to children, I imagine it would only get worse. It would be like a yoga class all over again, with me spending more time wondering how my downward facing dog stacked up to everyone else's than actually relaxing.

I don't know--is this healthy competition, or intense self-consciousness?

Community Agriculture

2008-06-24T15:23:00.000-07:00

Nick and Sadie and I haven't moved too far from our last place (we're on the same street even, just around the bend and several houses east), but the new apartment feels more cozy, homey, and relaxed. Now that we aren't presiding over the view from a third floor loft-like one bedroom, but are safely ensconced in a second floor Victorian, I feel, somehow, like we're more a part of the neighborhood.

Yesterday, while walking home from a neighborhood party we sort of crashed (after being invited by Nick's friend, David), we struck up a conversation with a woman working in her raised bed garden two blocks from here on Vesper Street. Turns out she had more kale and Swiss chard than she knew what to do with, so she gave us a big bunch of both. When we got home, Nick created a delicious pasta dish with the greens, some grape tomatoes we had in the fridge, and some sheep's milk pecorino cheese. Yum. I'm going to try to replicate the meal tonight, while he's out of town, but I don't suspect I'll have much luck. He's really the chef of this relationship.

Baby Got Back

2008-05-14T08:40:00.001-07:00

According to Nick, my backside is returning to its former shape. Since I haven't really been able to see it, I'll have to take his word for it (when I was pregnant I was too large to look over my shoulder, and now that the baby is born, I don't have time to brush my teeth, never mind examine my figure).

To be honest, I was never that worried about my potential weight gain during pregnancy. I figured my body would do what it needed to do, and I wasn't going to try to mess with it. As it turns out, because of my gestational diabetes, which required me to monitor my diet very closely, I probably ate better during my pregnancy than at any other time of my life, outside of early childhood. Limiting carbohydrates meant I had to resist mightily the cravings I had for chocolate cupcakes, though luckily small servings of ice cream were actually acceptable due to the protein content. So I ate a lot of chicken, fish, vegetables and fruit, and rarely ate bread, rice, or cereal. As a result, I gained about 30 pounds during my pregnancy; I lost 20 of those pounds in the first two weeks post-partum. I'm convinced that most of that "weight" was primarily just the retention of fluids, because I sweated buckets at night those first two weeks. Oh, what a time it was: back labor and massive tearing left me completely sore and hobbling around, I woke up covered in sweat every morning, and nursing left me blistered and bloody.

But it's truly amazing what our bodies can do. Each day gets easier, both in terms of how I feel physically, and in how I am able to care for Sadie. I remember the relief I felt the first time I got into bed, when Sadie was 2 weeks old or so, and didn't feel total dread and anxiety about how I'd get through the night. I've learned to nurse Sadie while laying on my side in bed, which makes getting some real rest easier, and emotionally have come to accept that my life will slow down as I transition to caring for a newborn. Though at times I'm still overwhelmed with the reality of caring for Sadie, and how intense it can be at times, I think I'm adjusting pretty well.

And, as Nick pointed out, my butt is getting smaller.

Say What?

2008-05-09T15:04:00.000-07:00

I think being pregnant and giving birth have decreased both my memory and my hearing ability. Or else having my mom stay with us for a week has caused me to pick up some of her habits. Or else certain traits that I associate with my mom in particular are actually traits that befall women in our family once they spend nine months bathed in pregnancy hormones. I can't tell if I am simply mimicking my mom's speech patterns, or if part of my brain has been forever suppressed and won't ever re-emerge under the weight of me thinking and worrying about my child. Here is a sample of a typical conversation with my mother:

Mom: "Can you hand me the um….[long pause]….the um…."
Me: "The what mom?"
Mom: "The uh….the phone."

And this is a sample of what my conversations with Nick have been like ever since we had the baby:

Me: "Babe, when you go out can you pick up some….um…."
Nick: Waiting patiently for me to finish….
Me: "Some uh…what's it called…some yogurt?"

Besides forgetting very basic vocabulary words, I've also had to ask Nick to repeat himself a lot more often than I ever did before the baby, something my mom also does (to an alarming degree). And, paradoxically, I find myself turning down our music, just like my mom always did when I was a teenager. I think I'm just so tired that any noise over a murmur sets me on edge. Yet I can't hear anyone when they speak at a normal volume.
Is this motherhood?

Sadie Marisa

2008-04-26T07:47:00.000-07:00

Sadie Marisa has arrived!

She was born two weeks early, on April 10, at 2:18pm. I haven't had the time to sit down and write until now.

My labor began, in dramatic movie-style fashion, with my water breaking while I lay in bed one night reading at about 10:30pm. Nick and I quickly packed a bag and drove to the hospital, where I labored until 9am, when I was fully dilated, then began to push. But because I'd had an epidural at about 3am (my contractions had me gripping the bed rails and cursing like a sailor), I wasn't able to push very effectively at all. What followed was 5 hours of lowering my epidural dose, adding pitocin, and assuming various positions to try to better push.

Sadie was face-up, and as a result having trouble making her way through my pelvic region. She spent about 3 hours at +1 station. Most babies start out face-up, then turn as they enter the birth canal, but Sadie stayed sunny-side up. This is sometimes known as back labor, and is supposed to be especially painful. But in order for me to be able to feel enough to effectively push, they had to turn down my epidural drip, first to 5, then eventually to 0. They also gave me some pitocin to increase the frequency and intensity of the contractions. So, essentially, despite being in great pain and asking for an epidural without a second thought, I ended up having a "natural" childbirth after all.

At one point, Sadie's heart rate slowed down to a dangerous level, and I had to be consented for the anesthesiology for a C-section. For an hour or so I stopped pushing, until Sadie's heart rate came back up on its own. For the last hour of labor I pushed like champ. Once Nick saw her head and told me she had dark hair, I knew there was no going back. I pushed through the ring of fire with everything I had in me. When I finally gave that last push and saw the doctors guiding Sadie out of me, I laid back on the bed and let everyone else in the room take over.

The doctor said the umbilical cord (which was wrapped twice around Sadie's neck) was the longest he'd ever seen. I like to take that as an omen that as Sadie grows and our relationship as mother and daughter deepens, we will maintain a close and nurturing bond, but with a healthy distance between us.

Lovely Day

2008-04-06T11:44:00.000-07:00

I took this photo a few days ago. Wish I could lounge around at home everyday with the animals.

The other day, when Nick had taken the car down to Boston to visit a friend and do some work, I took the bus to my job. This is the view from the bus stop:The photo really doesn't do justice to the fact that from the bus stop, you can see both Portland Harbor and the open ocean. It's a far cry from waiting for the bus at the Fulton Street Mall to get to Red Hook.

Actually, I feel guilty for not taking the bus more often. Nick drives me the two miles to work every day, then keeps the car so he can go out on tech service jobs in and outside of town. Our old Volvo uses up so much gas it's ridiculous--I think we go through something like 1-2 tanks of gas per week, and gas is SO expensive right now. My excuse this winter was, well, it was icy and cold and winter, and I was pregnant, and now that's it's warming up a bit, my excuse is that I'm even more pregnant, which means standing and/or walking for any length of time makes me feel like my bladder is going to implode and my baby is going to fall out from between my legs. So we continue to use our gas-guzzling car every day, even though in a city this size, it's not entirely necessary. My mom just bought a Toyota Prius, and I would love one of those. I think what we might do is try to sell the Volvo and take over my mom's old (but newer than the Volvo) Toyota Corolla. It's in decent shape, and I think the gas mileage will be much better. Last summer, I rode my bike to work most days, which took about 10 minutes. I'd like to do that again when I return to work at the end of the summer, but maybe with a baby at home I'll need a car close by for emergencies. Any working moms have any thoughts?

These are such mundane thoughts for the weeks before a new baby is coming into our lives, but unfortunately, reality doesn't seem to take a break, even in the face of an upcoming miracle.

Ninth month!

2008-04-03T15:29:00.000-07:00

Preggo me

2008-03-30T14:08:00.000-07:00

Here are Nick, Thumbs, and Wiley, just chilling on the couch. These lazy days will be over soon.

Here I am in my eighth month of pregnancy. This photo was taken about two weeks ago, before Nick and I went to our friend Lucinda's house for an evening of great food and meeting new friends. Just two weeks later, and I'm already bigger, rounder, and waddling more--amazing how quickly and significantly the pregnancy progresses at this stage.

Nesting, Part 2

2008-03-29T07:14:00.000-07:00

Nick and I went on another Ikea run last weekend. I think we are now officially done setting up our nursery. My three brothers and their wives generously combined forces to gift us the funds to buy a comfortable nursing chair, which they all insisted we would want once baby arrives. I'm so glad we found this comfy, happy-looking overstuffed chair. It even came with a matching storage ottoman, which is key, because space is at such a premium in our one-closet apartment.

We also got the "Gulliver" crib, which was one of the least expensive cribs I'd seen out there, but also feels perfectly solid and desn't overwhelm the nursery, or become a syrupy-sweet centerpiece, like so many cribs out there have the potential to be.

Before I post the final photos, I'll give you a preview of the set-up phase. Note our weary faces. And that's Ting Tong sipping up the beer we spilled, again, just like the last time we put a baby thing together.

Compartmentalizing

2008-03-28T18:54:00.000-07:00

Today, after... oh, only about 15 years of working in the world, I finally got my own office, complete with nameplate, a door, privacy, etc. And wouldn't you know that I moved into this enclave of workplace serenity a mere three weeks before I am scheduled to go out on maternity leave for at least three months. I'm flattered that my boss has enough faith in me to grant me an office right before my leave, but I can't help but feel sort of Alanis Morrisette about the whole thing (isn't it ironic?). I plan on returning to work at the end of the summer, out of necessity more than anything else, but I can't help but feel conflicted about the fact that I've finally landed a decent-paying job where I'm given lots of respect and leeway, only to to have it coincide with a time in my life when I'd be just as content to turn my attention entirely to staying home and raising my child.

I've always been perfectly happy staying at home, fussing around the house. As a kid, I'd frequently feign illnesses so that I could take a break from school. It wasn't the schoolwork that wore me down, it was the incessant socializing that school requires. I've always felt the same way about jobs. The work itself has never stressed me out as much as the people one inevitably has to deal with on any job. Of course, that's just the way the world works--life, and especially business, doesn't happen in a vacuum. I think that's a lesson I didn't pick up on in school--that it wasn't just spelling words correctly or solving equations that mattered, but knowing how to interact with the other people working on those same problems that really counted.

Virginia Woolf famously said--actually wrote a book about the idea--that a woman needs a room of one's own in order to successfully write fiction. I'd argue that a woman--at least this woman--needs a room of one's own to get just about anything done. When I was sitting in cube-land, I couldn't seem to gather my wits about me and focus on what I was doing. I don't know if it's just me, or if it's the distinctly feminine side of me, but when other people are in a room with me, I can't turn off the compulsion to be tuned in to what they're saying, their moods...and am easily affected by both. It could be some form of ADD, or some womanly habit of being tuned in to others' needs (whether I responded to them or not). But I often found that I got most of my work done only after the other women in cube-land had gone home, when I felt freed to pull in those hyper-sensitive external feelers and focus internally.

So it strikes me as almost absurd that now that I'm finally hitting my stride, career-wise, and realizing just how essential it is for me to have privacy and solitude in the workplace, I'm also coming to the time in my life when I'll be having a child, a time when my old habits of tuning into others needs and moods are going to serve me better than at any other time of my life. I've certainly wasted years of my mothering instincts on a string of men who didn't deserve my patience and attention, and spent years in my career inadvertently allowing those same instincts to get in the way of reaching my goals. And now I find myself at a place in my life where I'll need to cultivate and nurture those instincts more than ever before, for the reasons that nature intended. So I've learned to muzzle--or at least delay--my biological impulses, yet I also have to learn to recall them at a moment's notice. Is modern life just a training ground for learning how to compartmentalize our natural instincts in such a way? Is this how evolutionary biology works?

The Calm Before the Stork*

2008-03-15T12:08:00.000-07:00

Only five weeks to go. Before I have a baby. What a strange state of anticipation to be in. It’s different than waiting to graduate from college, or to start a new job. Because I had some idea of what life after college would be like, and some idea of what most of my new jobs would be like. But this, this is completely different. A total transformation. For me, for Nick, for me and Nick as a couple. Sometimes I can’t even believe what I’ve gotten myself into. Other times I wonder why I’ve waited so long.

Leaving work today I decided to walk home. I took my time, stopping in shops along the way. I got some buttons at the yarn store on Congress St., looked for a pack of thank-you cards at Ferdinand ($15 for 6? No way, even if they are Graham & Snow), and finally, when I realized I was too exhausted to walk the rest of the way home, stopped at Homegrown for some sniffle-kicking tea. Nick met me there, and then we decided to go out for Thai food.

When the stork finally delivers, will I ever be able to have such a non-planned, carefree Friday evening again? Probably not until the baby is 16 years old! A night like this (which was pretty tame to begin with), will, post-partum, probably require multiple arrangements with baby-sitters, Nick, me, daycare providers, and, on some level, the baby herself. They say that when the baby’s still young (like, under 6 months or so) you can pretty much take her anywhere. But once she starts to get a mind of her own, the baby’s mood, temperament, and sleep schedules are going to have a much larger say in our evening plans than whether we’re in the mood for Thai or Indian food.

I’m sure we will love spending evenings in, doing nothing but ogling our adorable baby girl. And I’m really looking forward to it. It’s just shocking to me that our old, boring, predictable life is going to change so much by bringing another life into the world. I can’t wait!

* I have to credit Nick with this heading. It's become our mantra.

Circle of Life, Part 2

2008-03-03T17:09:00.000-08:00

Sorry for the cheesy heading, but in this case it's really apropos. My Aunt Nancy held a baby shower for me this weekend in Rhode Island, in the house next door to the one I grew up in. Her very same living room was also the site of my mom's own baby shower (for my younger brother Jay) 32 years ago. There were probably a half dozen guests at my shower who were also at my mom's shower, as was I, at 3 years old. How cool is that?
At least three of the women pictured above were at my mom's baby shower 32 years ago.

The shower was especially poignant for me because the neighborhood I grew up in has had such a deep influence on my sensibilities as I've grown from child to teenager to adult. When my parents divorced while I was in college and later decided to sell the house while I was living in San Francisco, I was heartbroken. I'd always imagined getting married there. There was a long expanse of grass with a canopy of trees that led down to the waterfront, and I pictured myself walking through the trees as if they were a church aisle, then standing at the concrete pier with my beloved and the sun setting behind me as the ceremony was performed. Alas, the house was sold, the land parceled off and built on, and the trees cut down.
A Google maps screenshot of the old neighborhood. The house in the top center of the photo is my Aunt Nancy's; the house on the far right is the one I grew up in. Laura Lane, named after my dad's mom, leads right down to a small rocky beach we swam and sailed from.

But to be able to return to the same special spot for my baby shower was just as wonderful. My cousin's girlfriend, Kate, who drove down from Boston for the shower (with my cousin Emily, of course) recognized what a special place it was right away, and I told her the story of how, at age 13, I pretended to be a mermaid swimming in the water for Emily, then aged 3. Emily was too smart to fall for it, and I remember feeling disappointed that she hadn't fallen under the same imaginary spell I was under.

A recent article in the New York Times magazine about whether kids have enough free time for unstructured play in this day and age makes me wonder if my own daughter will have the same luxury of time and resources that I did to let her mind grow with her own unsupervised, undirected thoughts. I want her to learn piano, and take dance lessons, or even play soccer
if that's what she's interested in. But I don't want her to be denied the free time to imagine herself in worlds other than the real one we're all so cruelly thrust into, whether we want to be or not.

Nesting, Part 1

2008-03-03T15:49:00.000-08:00

Last night, after a looong day of driving back from Rhode Island and spending 2 dazed hours wandering around the Stoughton, MA Ikea, Nick and I returned home to spend another 2 hours assembling our Ikea purchase. Nick said he felt like we were in one of those movie montages where the happy couple gets the baby's room ready. It was sort of like that, except I spilled Nick's beer all over the new baby shelf-thingy we bought. The baby's not even born, and I'm already making her nursery smell like a frat-house! What kind of mother will I be?!?! Once I cleaned up the spill sage-scented cleaning fluid, the final result was heart-breakingly sweet. Only 7 weeks to go!

Nick reading the Ikea instructions. Note the precariously placed beer bottle, next to the big plywood board that was resting against the bag of baby clothes I was organizing into the Ikea bins.
Two hours later, the proud papa shows off his work.

The final result! We're going back to Ikea in a few weeks for their Gulliver crib. The changing table is in the bathroom--photo to come.

Seeing the space that will soon be where our baby lives and grows up made us both feel a little awestruck. As if seeing her baby knees and elbows transform my stomach into a bulging mass of flesh wasn't enough of a reality check, seeing an actual space that will soon be occupied by our little soon-to-be-person gave us a better sense of how our home will no longer be just ours, but will a place for our whole family, baby, pets, and all.

Let Them Eat Cake

2008-02-25T17:37:00.000-08:00

I feel I've been remiss in not mentioning what an amazing cook Nick is. He's been especially great with this whole gestational diabetes thing, helping me stay on track with my meals and thinking up great dinners. Tonight he made us broiled mahi-mahi with Clementine oranges, butter, garlic, and rosemary, with sides of avocado, rice and broccoli. It was a delicious meal, met my current low-carb guidelines, and made me feel (for a moment) as if I were in Hawaii, not Maine, in February.

I always hoped I'd end up with a man who could cook (and liked to do so), because if mealtimes were entirely up to me, it'd be beans and rice every night for life, with the occasional plate of pasta thrown in for good measure. My poor child would grow up not knowing what properly salted food tasted like, thinking that dinner always came wrapped in a tortilla or smothered in tomato sauce. She would also think that chocolate cake was a legitimate food group, since I do like to bake, and do so pretty well upon occasion. (I also make killer pancakes, which shot my blood sugar up much too high last weekend.) But when it comes to the workaday meals that one needs to, like, survive, and get nutrients from, I'd rather someone who can actually improvise in the kitchen be the one preparing my meals. Thanks Nick! I'll gladly do the dishes.

My Growing Belly

2008-02-21T18:31:00.001-08:00

3 months

4 months. I thought I looked big at this stage. Ha hahahahahaahahah ahahahahaha!!!!!!

5 months

6 months
7 months--taken February 20, 2008

Pics

2008-02-19T18:26:00.000-08:00

Penney Ugland in a new light; a representative tableau of weekend days.

Tired

2008-02-19T17:52:00.000-08:00

I'm soooooo tired. Last week, I fell asleep three times at my desk. Nick saw these on Gizmodo.com and suggested I get myself a pair. I wasn't being lazy--I swear--I am just so overcome with sleepiness that it's a struggle to keep my eyes open most days. When I met with my boss to go over an analysis I need to do to determine whether it's worth sinking a half-billion dollars into renovating the hospital, my eyes kept fluttering closed, like I was at home on the couch watching late-night television. This was while I was sipping deeply from a cup of coffee, as if it were a well run dry.

My OB says it's normal to be this tired at 7 months, so I was feeling encouraged that maybe there was a timeline on this drowsiness that permeates my life lately, but then my brother told me I could expect to feel like this for the rest of my life, once the baby was born. Please say it isn't so.

My dear Aunt Becky came to visit this weekend, and she, Nick, Ting-Tong and I went on a 2 mile walk, which probably should have been invigorating, but instead just made me want to take a nap. I yawned all through dinner at Katahdin later that night. She left Sunday, and on Monday, I slept in until noon.

My blood sugar levels have been, for the most part, in the normal range, so I don't think it has anything to do with the gestational diabetes. I think it has to do with carrying around something the size of Ting-Tong in my womb all day and night. The ultrasound today said the baby was about 4.5 pounds. Hard to believe she will be here in just 9 weeks!

Prognosis: good

2008-02-09T09:35:00.001-08:00

I met yesterday with my diabetes educator. I’ve been checking my blood four times a day for the last 14 days, and logging every meal or snack I’ve eaten during that time. Because I’m a nerd (and work as a data analyst), I even graphed my fluctuating blood levels, and created a color-coded chart that showed when my blood levels were high and the corresponding meal that made them so. To my great relief, my counselor said my diet looked very healthy, and said my blood levels were really pretty good, even those times when they went over the 120 limit. She even suggested that some of the unusually high readings (like those times after eating plain yogurt, oatmeal, and herbal tea for breakfast) might have been caused not by high blood sugar levels, but by residue on my fingertips that the glucose monitor picked up on. Overall, she said I was doing great, and didn’t anticipate any problems with the pregnancy, or suggest that I would need to control my sugar levels with insulin injections. Thank goodness!

Counting Carbs

2008-01-27T09:21:00.000-08:00

On Thursday afternoon I had my first consultation at the Diabetes/Endocrinology Center in Scarborough. Nick came with me, to make sure I paid attention to the dietary recommendations, and because he’s really the better cook between the two of us, so we thought it important that he be there to know what I should be eating. There were only two other women in the class with us. Both were rather large women, and had they not been in a gestational diabetes class, I would not have realized that they were six months pregnant. Neither had a discernable baby bump. One of the women came to the class late, scraping the bottom of a cup of chili from Wendy’s.

The class was much more informative than either Nick or I were expecting. The instructors gave very specific guidelines as to how many grams of carbohydrates can be consumed at each meal (45gm) and snack (15gm). I was also given a glucose testing meter, and have been instructed to check my blood four times per day. Testing my blood consists of pricking my finger with a tiny needle, called a lancet, then placing the blood drop on a small plastic receptor strip that is inserted into a glucose meter. I check my blood upon waking (the fasting level) and two hours after every meal. My first reading, two hours after my usual breakfast of whole grain cereal and soy milk, was too high. Every other reading of the past four days so far has been normal.

I stopped eating cereal, and replaced it with a breakfast of yogurt and frozen blueberries, and a fried egg and cheese on a sprouted wheat English muffin. Delicious and filling, and seems to keep my post-breakfast levels lower. The meal plan they recommend is really not so different from what I usually eat—I just have to watch my carbohydrate intake, and limit sweets. Last night for dinner, I made whole wheat penne with chicken, broccoli, and parmesan, and two hours later for dessert had an organic ice cream bar dipped in chocolate with almonds. Both are perfectly acceptable on the meal plan. Neither spiked my blood sugar levels. The trick is to count carbs and space out meals and snacks every two to three hours so that my blood sugar never has a chance to dip too low or get too high.

I’m feeling less guilty about how this happened. I realize now it’s less a problem of my diet than the fact that my body simply isn’t producing enough insulin during this period of pregnancy. The placenta blocks the absorption of insulin into the bloodstream, meaning there is more glucose traveling through my blood, and not getting into my cells, where it belongs. All I can do to counteract that fact is watch my intake of carbohydrates, so my glucose levels don’t get too high, and exercise more to burn off whatever extra glucose is leftover. Between counting carbs and walking more (I walked for two hours yesterday while doing errands), I think I’ll get this under control.

Owning Up

2008-01-23T18:29:00.000-08:00

I thought I was reasonably healthy. I read labels, scrupulously avoid high-fructose corn syrup, and whenever possible try to eat minimally processed foods. I eat organic, whole-grain cereal with soy milk every morning. I eat red meat sparingly (once or twice a month), and I snack on things like oranges, almonds and yogurt.

But I have some bad habits. I crave chocolate almost every day at 3pm (strangely, this only happens during the workweek, not on weekends), and indulge my sweet tooth with a chocolate or two, or a few cookies. I love French fries, and would get the fries at Duck Fat at least once a week if I could, but tend to resist so that I have them only once or twice a month. And if I have chocolate ice cream in the house, I will eat it. But then again--I can buy a pint of Haagen Dasz and make it last for a week--and I am pregnant, people! So I think my dietary habits, while by no means perfect, are not horrible.

Yet, last week, I was diagnosed with gestational diabetes. The good thing is that by making changes now, in the next two weeks, there should be no ill effects on the baby. What can happen is that babies can grow excessively large when the mother has gestational diabetes, necessitating a C-section. The babies can also have problems with their own blood sugar, and they are more likely to grow up to be obese and to develop Type II diabetes themselves. (Type II is also called adult onset, or late-onset diabetes.) Gestational diabetes usually disappears in the mother about 6 weeks after giving birth, unless the tests in pregnancy merely caught a previously undiagnosed case or the disease.

The frightening thing is that I THOUGHT I was being healthy, until I got the results of this test back. I know I ate a lot of extra treats over the holidays—homemade toffee, chocolates, cakes, pies, cookies, etc. etc.—and compounding the effects of this candied cornucopia was my lapse into a completely sedentary lifestyle beginning about two weeks before Christmas. I generally like to walk, whenever feasible, but with all the snow we got here in Portland, walking around outside was extremely difficult. There is no city ordinance enforcing people to shovel their sidewalks, so a day or two after a snowfall, the sidewalks in our East End neighborhood would be about three inches of treacherous ice thick. Forget about the beautiful walking paths along the Eastern Prom—they were still buried in snow. Those conditions, plus the early darkening of the sky, relegated my walks with Nick and Ting-Tong to weekends only. And even then, I’d find myself exhausted after short routes around the neighborhood.

I also stopped doing any stretches or formal yoga routines. The reason for that wasn’t clear to me, until I found out (also last week) that I’m also anemic, which explains my low energy and motivation for doing any exercise in the first place. So put the two together—the exhaustion and worn-out feeling of anemia, and the high blood sugar levels—and I have been feeling completely tired, overwhelmed, and exhausted lately. Sometimes my exhaustion manifests itself in uncontrollable crying jags that seem to come out of nowhere. Other times I feel weighed down by inertia.

Last night, Nick made me a healthy meal of broiled salmon, brown rice, and corn-crab chowder. It was delicious, and there’s no doubt it meets the requirements of my new healthy diet. But I wonder about the rest—the bean and cheese and rice burritos, vanilla yogurt, and even the soy milk I drink every day. Are they too high in sugars and carbs? Tomorrow I go for a consultation at a diabetes center, where I will be put on a meal and exercise plan. I never would have thought I’d need to be told how to take care of myself, and I feel both embarrassed and guilty. But I also feel indignant: Eighty to 90% of cases of Type II diabetes are found in people who are overweight or obese. At 6 months pregnant, I’ve gained 20 pounds, which my doctor assures me is right on target. I do have a family history of diabetes, which I only just learned about last summer, so that might explain some of this. As soon as I found out that I had gestational diabetes, I stopped eating anything with sugar in it, and was disappointed to find that three days later I’m still as tired and drawn out as I was before.

I guess this is just one more thing I can’t control with a few days’ notice, along with my growing belly and breasts, my decreasing bladder capacity, and my lessening ability to get a good night’s sleep. I think one of the hard things about having a baby later in life is that as an adult you get so set in your ways (especially as a formerly single New Yorker who did whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted) that it’s hard to relinquish the control I’ve so carefully cultivated over my life and body during this last decade of being single, footloose, and fancy-free. The baby’s not even born yet, and already I have to account for my actions, even as I’m still navigating the in and outs of learning how to live with a man I’m also accountable to.

This is all new to me, and it’s all happening at once.

Week in pictures

2008-01-12T06:02:00.001-08:00

Not a lot has been happening around here. The first full week back at the office in a while was slightly tortuous, so much so that I couldn't even drag myself in by the time Friday rolled around. Luckily, I'd brought home some files and was able to work from home before my afternoon doctor's appointment. I probably got just as much done in a morning of intense concentration as I usually do in a whole day in cube-land trying to fend off unwanted conversations from Chatty Cathy and trying to ignore the feet stomping and sighing and shouting over the top of my cubicle that comes from my neighbor, CB.

CB drinks nothing but diet soda (she claims to get her water from the ice that melts in her giant igloo/thermos that she keeps filled with Diet Coke all day). She just spent an entire week home with some sort of illness that left her dehydrated and vomiting. By Thursday, we began to notice a strong odor in cube-land. The financial manager who directs the other women I share space with had them call maintenance. I wasn't there for this part, but apparently the maintenance crew pulled open vents and looked behind every nook and cranny, expecting to find a dead rodent. Ultimately, it was Kathy from California who found the offender: a chicken sandwich, sitting in a bag under CB's desk. It had been there for a full week, including the previous weekend. Just, please, get me out of there, now.

Ok, now for the pictures. I don't know if you can tell from this first one, but we had some cold weather recently:
Wiley tried to bundle up in my maternity sweater:
I FINALLY finished my mom's scarf, and even mailed it off to her the same day:
The Penney Ugland came to visit:
And Thumbs got comfortable in her new pad:
Do NOT try to rouse her:

Practice Run

2008-01-01T12:17:00.000-08:00

My nearly two-year-old niece Eve came over early on Sunday morning for a visit while her parents were busy with other obligations. Nick and I took her on a walk to the coffee shop, where we got her a cup of hot chocolate and shared a bagel with her. I think she felt really cool, hanging out with the big kids. Afterward, as we waited outside the shop for Nick, I rested my foot on a snowbank, and Evie did the same. Her foot was at a really awkward angle, and it couldn't have been very comfortable, but I think she just was just getting in the spirit of being a big kid.

My bump

2007-12-27T19:30:00.000-08:00

It's getting bigger all the time! Actually, it looks sort of lumpy here.

Oh, and it's not an it--it's a girl!!!

Photo taken December 13th.

Holidays on Ice

2007-12-27T18:10:00.001-08:00

It's been 3 weeks since I've updated the blog, but I've got some good excuses. A flurry of excuses, in fact.

First, of course, that perennial excuse: "It was the holidays." This year I made all my own gifts, which included a knitted scarf for my year-old niece, three "sleeping bags" for my 3 to 4 year-old nieces' dolls, a doll "diaper" bag for my toddler niece, a large batch of shortbread cookies for everyone in my department at work, candied nuts for the women I live with every day in cube-land, and this, which isn't even done yet, and yes, it's after Christmas:

This damn thing is my first foray into lace knitting, and while technically the stitches are easy enough to create, what's hard is following the pattern. At first, I was following the written instructions, which go something like "k3, ssk, yo, ssk, k1, [k2tog, yo] 2 times," etc. Once I got the gist of it, I started using the charted pattern instead, which looks something like notes on a musical staff, with five different lace rows, each followed by a simple purl row. As I said, the stitches themselves aren't hard, but I'm having a hell of a time not losing my place as I go along. Whether this is due to mild ADD or just a matter of being an inexperienced knitter, I don't know. When it's going well, I feel like a virtuoso, knitting in an imagined rhythm that corresponds to the charted "notes" on the page. But then I get to the end of a row and discover that I'm one stitch short, so I end up going back and counting and counting again, only to end up ripping out 5, 6, 7 rows at a time just to get back to a neutral place where I can start over.

So each night, for every 20 rows I knit, I probably rip out 7 of them. It's kind of like paying down my credit cards: for every payment I make, the finance charges end up eating a good portion of whatever I just paid, and the progress I make in paying down my debt seems to crawl along at a snail's pace, just like this scarf. But unlike paying down my credit card, the yarn I'm working with is a tactile dream: it's 50/50 silk/wool, hefty yet smooth and soft, with a beautiful, subtle sheen. The scarf is for my mom. I showed her the work-in-progress, and she loves it. Phew.

I guess I don't have any other excuses. But here are some pics of the general white-out conditions we've been experiencing up here in Maine.

Thumbs losing her footing during the season's first snow:
After that, the sun came out, and we had some gorgeous days with the sun glinting off fresh, smooth snow. The calm before the storm:
The storm:
Nick running outside to move our car after the two cars in front of us cleared a path. We don't even have a shovel yet, so without using their tire tracks to guide us out, we would have gotten plowed under by the next snow plow, for sure:
And then, the calm once again after the storm, early one morning. It was as cold and early as I look.
I posted more cute animal photos under the weekly photos link.

Knitwit

2007-12-09T19:36:00.000-08:00

Around this time last year, I was probably at some bar on the Lower East Side, drinking a cocktail while wearing some cleaner, smaller clothes than the outfit I have on now: a pilly gray maternity sweater, and corduroys with a wide elastic waistband to accommodate my growing belly. Now, a year later, no longer single or living in New York City, my nights revolve around knitting, sewing and cooking with my boyfriend. Life has changed drastically, and yet it feels totally natural to be living in this apartment with the ocean nearby, our three pets, and my comparatively mundane routine.

Tomorrow we find out if I’m carrying a boy or girl, and our lives will change all over again.

Here is a picture of a sleeping bag I made for one of my niece's dolls for Christmas this year. Nick hasn't found a full-time job yet, so we're on a seriously tight budget for the foreseeable future. As it turns out, I'm actually quite pleased with the gifts I've been able to make. And it's lovely to have the luxury of time to be able to do so. Without social obligations or the extra money to spend on going out for dinner or movies, I'm finding that I really enjoy this forced domesticity. I don't know if I could find as much satisfaction in it were I still living in New York, with the city buzzing outside my window, a constant reminder of what I was missing.

Animal Update

2007-12-02T09:27:00.001-08:00

Soon enough, this blog will be filled with photos of the baby. But for now, it's the animals that keep us amused.

The animals seem to be coming to an uneasy truce. Thumbs and Wiley have been spotted sharing a couch cushion; Ting Tong reluctantly ceded her bed to Wiley. And Thumbs figured out a strategy for taking over the apartment: she paws on the deck door to be let out, and Wiley inevitably follows. Then she climbs over the rooftop and down again and peers in at us through the front bank of windows until we notice her and let her in. Then she can take over the living room for a while, without worrying about getting ambushed by Wiley. It's a bit treacherous on the sloped roof outside our front windows, so it's lucky she has those big paws and extra thumbs, for better traction. I'm afraid she'll still try to do it even when the roof is icy and frozen.

Speaking of, we're supposed to get our first big snowstorm tonight! I'll post photos of the first winter storm coming in off the ocean. But first, photos of the animalz.

My Growing Belly

2007-11-28T19:22:00.000-08:00

Here I am, a little over four months pregnant. After three months of queasiness and uncertainty, and one month of the unexpected relief of having that queasiness lift, I am now solidly, squarely, heavily waddling into what feels like Pregnancy, with a capital P. No longer can I hide my growing belly under loose clothes. No more can I quickly bend over to pick up a dropped pen from under my desk at work. I'm almost having trouble getting up off the couch. And I'm not even that big yet.

I'm a little nervous about the physical discomforts awaiting me. I've always been a bendable, flexible, small person. Always the one who had to sit on the hump on car rides. The one who would sit on someone else's lap in a crowded space. The one my (younger) brother used to bench press, as a joke. I've been carrying a little extra weight for the last few years, but to have what I can only describe as a whole new organ suddenly sprung up around my middle is a foreign feeling altogether. There's this thing there. A compressible ball of some sort, that lets itself be known whenever I try to move too quickly, or bend over too deeply, or even when I sit on the toilet, for crissakes. I'm trying to get used to it, but so far it just keeps surprising me, like walking into your kitchen to find a stranger standing there, after forgetting that you invited him over in the first place.

I guess it's good training for the little bundle that will make its presence known, in oh so many ways, a mere five months from now.

Finished!

2007-11-28T19:02:00.000-08:00

I thought I was just going to hand sew this curtain. What was I thinking? It took me about 10 minutes, when all was said and done, to stitch the hems with my Shark mini-sewing machine. Nick and I held a ceremonious deveiling of the shower curtain he had so ingeniously rigged up in the meantime.

Getting crafty

2007-11-27T17:48:00.000-08:00

It's my birthday today, so yesterday I drove to Target in the rain and bought myself a $20 sewing machine. It only sews one stitch, at two speeds, but I'm having a blast with it. At least with the one hem I've sewn so far. I'm making a curtain for our bedroom door window. Currently, we're using an old shower curtain bunched up on a tension rod. Pretty unsightly.

There's a little shop called Z Fabrics just down Congress St., and I fell in love with this great fabric (top row, middle). I plan to hem all sides, make a little pocket for the curtain rod, and get rid of our old vinyl makeshift curtain:
The current curtain.

The work-in-progress.

Stay tuned for the final product!

Leftovers

2007-11-25T11:48:00.000-08:00

I'm sitting on my couch feeling almost as full as I did three days ago. I used the leftover glazed carrots from our Thanksgiving feast to make some ginger-carrot soup. My friend Soo, who is the best cook I know, gave me some pointers on how to modify a recipe I found online. I had all the ingredients I needed except for vegetable stock. Following is the text of our IM (please ignore the typos--we type fast). From reading it, you can glean my total ignorance about cooking (parsley?) and Soo's expertise:

Soo: what ingredients does the recepie call for?

me: * 1 diced medium red onion
* 1-2 Tbsp olive oil
* 4 Tbsp of minced fresh ginger
* 2-3 cloves finely minced garlic
* 1½ c. chopped carrots
* 3 c. vegetable broth
* ¼ c. orange juice
* salt and pepper to taste
* ¼-½ c cream or milk (optional)

1:15 PM Soo: ok. yes. yo ucan add water but i would add milk or soy milk definitely otherwise, it won't be rich enough

me: ok

thankx

1:16 PM Soo: in fact, i would add two cups water instead of 3 cp broth they are talking about and add an entire cup milk instead

just salt and pepper more than usual. also , do you have dry bay leaves?

1:17 PM me: unfortunately, no

parsley?

Soo: no parsley is for granish and aftertaste

me: oh ok

Soo: bay leaves gives it that veggie broth taste. no probl

i would also add a little cinanmon powder - just a tad. it'll give it a nice flavor.

I keep telling Soo she should start a cooking blog or website of some sort, where people can ask her advice on how to doctor up recipes or cook from scratch based on nothing except what's in their kitchens.

Now that I'm pregnant, and don't drink anymore, eating good food has become a major pleasure and indulgence, even more so than before. Thanksgiving was such a great time to be reminded of the joy and pleasure of cooking from scratch, of feeding a big crowd, of sharing others' recipes and contributions to the meal. I wish the U.S. celebrated more holidays that were unaffiliated with religion and that simply centered around being with family and loved ones, and eating.

Giving Thanks

2007-11-12T16:43:00.000-08:00

First freeze—an orange leaf in the cats’ outdoor water bowl.

Thanksgiving is coming up soon, and for the first time, I will be hosting Thanksgiving dinner at my place. This feels like some sort of rite of passage. My mom is already worried that I’ll forget to order the turkey. I’m not worried, but maybe that’s because I don’t know what I’m getting myself into. Ten adults and two kids doesn’t sound like a lot. We’ll have turkey, stuffing, roasted squash, glazed carrots, Brussells sprouts, mashed potatoes, creamed onions, cranberry sauce, and of course, pies—apple, pecan, and pumpkin. My brother and his wife are contributing a few of the dishes I mentioned, and my mom is baking the apple pie. How hard can it be? Especially since Nick and I will be doing it together, and he is a great cook.

My mom told me that the other day she went to a casual dinner party at the home of an old friend, and she brought store-bought meatballs. The way she told the story, it seemed like she felt totally liberated yet almost guilty about bringing something she didn’t make in her own kitchen, as if she was cheating or shirking her duties. But when she got to the party, she wasn’t the only one to bring something pre-made, and she and her friends had a laugh about how much easier it is “these days” not to have to make everything yourself.

I feel lucky that as a grown woman I have never felt obligated to “make something” myself rather than just picking it up at a store or bakery, as I guess my mom and her peers may have felt as mothers from a different generation. It’s strange to think those days weren’t so long ago. When I make cupcakes or a lasagna, it feels like a novelty, a cool thing to do on a Sunday afternoon. I wonder if that will change when I have children, or if we’ve come a long enough way that I’ll continue to be able to choose when I bake for pleasure, and to opt out and run to Whole Foods when it feels like a chore.

Bussing it

2007-11-06T15:47:00.000-08:00

The car battery was dead this morning. Of course, we were parked on the street-cleaning side of the street, and the weather was blustery, cold and rainy. Normally, being late to work is not something I worry too much about, but I had a 9am meeting I needed to make. Luckily, one of the cross-town buses stops right in front of our apartment, so I was able to scramble on while leaving Nick to deal with the car.

Taking the bus was kind of fun. I got to people watch, look out the windows, see what was going on in town. A mildly disabled man got on the bus and scolded the driver, who was apparently named Ronnie, for being late. He kept up a loud running commentary:

"Ronnie, you're late."

"Ronnie, I've been studying the Ft. Lauderdale phone book."

"Ho-hum."

Last night I walked home from work, and that was fun, too. I think what I really miss the most about New York is the street life. Just getting from one place to another is, in itself, something to do. There are people out on the street in Portland, but most of the people I saw last night (on Congress St., pretty much the business artery of town), were generally unkempt middle-aged males or young art school kids-- people who seemed to not have access to a car. Even though Portland does a great job with its urban planning/renewal projects, and is by any measure an extremely walkable city, the reality is that once the weather turns, most people who have the means are probably driving (save the hard-core bikers, who I admire greatly, but who I will just never be). My sense is that I'm seeing only a narrow cross-section of the population when I'm out on the street, and that makes me feel like it will take me that much longer to really get to know this city.

A friend from L.A. was visiting me in New York once after a 2-year hiatus, and he was stunned at how many "hot" girls he saw walking around. I was surprised, because I figured there were tons of good-looking women in L.A., but his response was that he just didn't see anybody in L.A., because EVERYbody there drives EVERYwhere. Depressing. And yet, I'm becoming one of them....

Weekly Photos of Ting-Tong, Wiley, and Thumbelina

2007-11-04T18:46:00.000-08:00

Wiley as seen through the kitchen skylight.

Ting Tong and Wiley making some progress at becoming friends.

The cats bonding over the Cosmic Catnip Alpine Scratcher.

Ting Tong in Rhode Island
Ting Tong at the peak of some mountain my pregnant brain can't remember the name of.
Smart kitty!
I think Thumbs looks like a little Japanimation cat here, next to her lucky bamboo.

Happy Halloween!

2007-10-31T15:44:00.001-07:00

Circle of Life

2007-10-29T17:11:00.000-07:00

Faithful Reverie in Maine readers may remember this post, from way back in April, just a few weeks after I left New York for Maine. Who knew the last line of the second paragraph would be so prescient?

I left New York and moved to Maine because I wanted a change. In leaving New York, I felt I was moving towards something, not away from something. And now I know what that something is.

In August, Nick, the man I'd met just six weeks before leaving New York in March, moved up to Maine to be with me. And on the very day we moved into our lovely apartment, we discovered that I was pregnant. Am pregnant.

I'm pregnant! Our baby is due in late April.

My first reaction to this was sheer, unfettered joy, the likes of which I've never felt before. My second, and more lingering reaction, was one of fear and trepidation, nausea and uncertainty. I knew Nick loved me, and was committed to me, and I him, but we hadn't even known each other for a year. And though we had discussed having children in the near future, neither of us thought it would happen so quickly. So the first month of being pregnant, of living with a man for the first time, of helping him adjust to a new way of life even as I was still grappling with my own return to my New England roots, was hard. Not as hard as it could have been, but still, there was a lot of uncertainty, nervousness, fear--not to mention that sheer physical exhaustion and constant queasiness had overtaken my life.

But now, a week or so into my second trimester, with all signs indicating that the baby is healthy, and my own body returning to a feeling of normalcy, I'm starting to get really, really excited about having this baby. I've wanted kids for as long as I can remember--more than I've wanted anything else, really. I just wanted to make sure I did a lot of other things first. And I have: I've lived in other countries, I earned a master's degree, I've lived in the greatest city in the world, and I've dated enough men to know that I've finally found what I need in a partner.

I'm more than ready to take the focus of my life off of me.

April seems a long way off, until I remember that I only have six months left in my life of not being a parent. It's both terrifying and thrilling. Sometimes I wonder why I waited so long.

All Thumbs on Deck!

2007-10-22T15:27:00.000-07:00

I hope everyone's Sunday was as enjoyable as Thumbelina's.

That's Wiley. You can tell by his "shark" eyes.

Up on Blocks

2007-10-16T16:19:00.000-07:00

There were times in New York--when stocking up at Trader Joe's, or longing for an Ikea run, or waiting for the train at midnight in the middle of January--that I really wished I had a car. Now that I do have a car, those days of taking trains everywhere seem almost quaint. Like old-fashioned, convivial times, when my exasperation with a long, inconvenient wait could be tacitly shared with my fellow commuters. Because the reality of owning a car means spending $40 or so a week on gas, cleaning out the accumulated water bottles and dirty coffee cups on a regular basis, washing the windows, and getting it fixed.

Currently, my old Volvo is up on a gurney somewhere awaiting more than a month's salary worth of repairs. More like a month and a half. There's no one to roll eyes at now, no subway conductor to silently curse then forget all about the minute I'm finally home in my cozy, warm apartment. I'll be thinking about this ride for several months now, as I slowly, slowly pay off the loan I've had to take out to pay off Alan at the Volvo shop to fix my car. Those $24 weekly metro cards that let you make as many stops as you want, from Queens to Staten Island, from the Lower East Side to East Harlem, seem like a relic from a more carefree time.

Interior shots!

2007-10-08T17:41:00.000-07:00

Thumbs in repose, before the grand re-design.

A dining nook with a view.

Some groovy artwork...A seating area. But where is Thumbs now?

Trapped in the coffee table! Better than this kind of bondage, perhaps:

That's Wiley, back in Brooklyn, before he even knew what a lobster was.
And then there are those who refuse to be contained.

Views of the outside

2007-10-08T17:40:00.001-07:00

On a recent misty morning.

N and R around the East End

2007-10-08T16:54:00.000-07:00

Me and Ting Tong in front of our house.
Nick and I on a walk sometime in August.
And from a walk a few days ago. It didn't really get this cold until today. This photo was taken in the bow of an old war ship that's set up in the Eastern Prom park.

Working late

2007-09-25T18:08:00.001-07:00

Today was the first day I felt really stressed at my job. I have to give a presentation at 7am tomorrow morning to a group of pediatricians (7am! Damn these hardy New Englanders, up with the sun and all that) and have been wrestling with a massive data set that simply refuses to make any sense. I was at work until 7pm--though that's much easier to palate, knowing I have a 15-minute drive home, not a 1-hour subway commute--and was feeling completely frazzled and overwhelmed when I left. But I noticed that I'm able to unwind a lot more quickly here. It was warm tonight, almost 80 degrees, and I when I got home I changed into shorts and sat on the deck with the animals, took in the color of the moon from behind some clouds, and within minutes I was feeling so appreciative of our view and the soft air that I realized that I'd been spending years not knowing how to unwind from one day to the next.

On the other hand, this has also been the week that my I-miss-New-York feeling has truly kicked in for the first time. Six months ago I was single, living in one of the largest cities in the world, and had only myself and the occasional Rufus snuggles to answer to. Now I'm coupled off, with three animals to feed and pick up after, and I can't even drop my garbage down the hallway chute anymore. I have to carry it downstairs and to the curb, like a responsible adult. I have a "drinks" date Thursday, the first one in weeks, which feels like a special treat rather than yet another obligation, like they so often did in New York, when I had so many more of them.

But everything is fine. It's just a period of adjustment. It's just a whole new world, is all.

Pea Soup

2007-09-23T09:48:00.001-07:00

When we woke up yesterday morning, the fog was so thick we could barely see across the street. The day before, it had been completely sunny on the West End, while I was at work, and I almost didn't believe Nick when he said he couldn't see the water from our apartment on the East End. He picked me up at work a few hours later, and sure enough, as soon as we crossed Franklin Arterial, in the middle of the city, we went from pure sunshine to a wall of fog. By Saturday morning, the fog still hadn't lifted. We woke up, Nick made coffee, then we fed the animals. Foghorns sounded every so often, and we wrapped ourselves in blankets to drink hot coffee on the deck. If it was sunny across town, I didn't want to know about it. I wanted to stay in our cocoon, oblivious to the outside world.

Zoo

2007-09-20T17:02:00.000-07:00

You'd think that moving into a nice, big apartment with your boyfriend and joining your animal families together would be peaceful and joyous. Well, I've found that a bigger apartment plus three animals equals a lot more cleaning and a lot more drama.

To start, Wiley (Nick's cat) terrorizes Thumbelina (Thumbs for short, my cat). He stalks her, attacks her when he can, and I think he's even trying to prevent her from using the litter box (someone has been going outside the box, and neither of them ever did when they lived separately). Ting-Tong (Nick's chihuahua) has learned to defend herself already, but even still, Wiley still likes to get in her business. He'll sometimes stretch out on the floor near TT's food bowl and casually drape a long paw right into the food as if to lay claim to it. He's a terror! One night, swift as a shark attack, he pounced on poor Thumbs, leaving behind a whole puddle of blood. We called the emergency animal clinic and got a busy signal, but luckily Thumbs was okay. The next day at the vet's office we were told to just keep an eye out for the formation of an abcess, which luckily never occurred.

Another time Thumbs climbed up our roof and then got too scared to come back down. So I had to rescue her myself. (Pic above.) Another time, Ting Tong started making a weird huffing sound, and after a frantic web search for "pet Heimlich maneuver" and some well-placed squeezes on her tiny ribcage, she calmed down, though we suspect she wasn't actually choking. This all happened while Nick was still scraping poop out of his slipper soles from his early morning "surprise." It never ends around here with these guys. But, we figure it will be good preparation for child-rearing, when that day comes.

Photos!

2007-09-18T18:21:00.000-07:00

Moonrise from front windows
The Portland Head Light--far right twinkling light
The living room, unpacked
The kitchen.

Here are a few pictures taken over the last few weeks. Some are of the apartment just a few days after we moved in. We hope to post photos of our tricked-out place once we get it all set up. I would write more, but Nick needs to get up at 4am to catch an early flight to New York tomorrow and we're both already tired just thinking about it.

August hiatus

2007-09-06T16:19:00.000-07:00

August passed by both incredibly slowly and much too fast. Slowly, as I was waiting for N to move up here permanently and once and for all. And too fast because August always slips by without enough long days at the beach.

Much has changed. I moved out of the apartment with the turquoise floors on Waterville Street, and N and I moved into "thee" apartment on the Eastern Promenade, which is as lovely as it sounds. We are completely in love with the new place, though I'm sure we'll love it even more when we finally unpack everything. (Photos to come.) The story of our moving is not a pretty one. It was a long, arduous process that still feels unfinished. I didn't realize that moving two people out of their apartments in the same week (especially a week in August, in New York City) would be so complicated, tiring, and stressful. The day we moved N out, it was 95 degrees and humid. Actually, the entire weekend was nothing but tiring and stressful.

I drove a rented cargo van to New York on a Friday, saw a dying woman splayed out on the side of the highway in Massachusetts, having just been ejected from her speeding car, got lost in White Plains (somehow) on the way, and got pulled over by bridge cops on the Triborough for having commercial plates. The drive was harrowing--especially since I was driving a huge rental van, don't forget--but the interaction I had with the cop on the bridge reminded me of an aspect of New York I've always appreciated and now miss, and that is the succinctness with which New Yorkers communicate. After driving for hours and finding I didn't have enough money for the bridge toll, I plaintively wailed to the cop who was about to write me a ticket, "Just tell me how to get to freakin' Brooklyn!" In about 9 words he matter-of-factly gave me the best, most easy to follow directions I've ever gotten from anyone, as if answering a crazed woman was something he did every day (and in fact it I guess it probably is). I miss that about New York--the ease with which people talk to each other, get what they want, and get it over with. There's a lack of pomp and circumstance there that you don't find as often in New England. To the New Englander's ear, that kind of mainlining conversation might come across as curt, but anyone who lives in New York knows that this style of communicating is the opposite of rude: it's a kind of shorthand that signals that you understand the rules of engagement in the city, and that you won't waste someone else's time if they don't waste yours.

Here in Maine, people just kind of move a lot slower, though I think it's like that pretty much anywhere outside of New York. I would bet that ordering a coffee in the morning in Maine takes an average of 4 times longer than in New York, though I do remember feeling really impatient almost every time I left the city to go anywhere else. I'll never forget the utter disbelief I felt when I stayed at a hotel in North Carolina for a wedding, and discovered that they'd stop serving brunch by 10am on a Sunday. There was no food to be had for miles, so I couldn't even walk down the street for coffee or a bagel. One of the things I love about Portland is that I would never be similarly stuck (as long as you're on the peninsula, you're most likely no more than 5 minutes from a cup of coffee.) And of course, if I completed all my transactions as quickly in Portland as I did in New York, people would think I was rude, stressed out. Which, come to think of it, is pretty much how I felt a lot of the time in the city.

Simultaneous Photo blogging

2007-07-26T19:09:00.000-07:00

So, just try to envision a man and woman's face in dark silhouette, one on either side of your screen, sputtering out the first few and last few letters of a word: one half from the silhouette mouth on the left, the other from the right. The halves move towards each other, slowly, and eventually come together in the middle to make a word. (You know, like from The Electric Company, and that skit, Get It Together?)

That's kind of what I'm thinking of when I post these photos, taken simultaneously in both New York and Portland. Because one day N and I are going to take one photo together! From the same spot!

Nick: West Village, 7:45pm, Thursday, July 26 Me: East End park, 7:45 pm, Thursday, July 26
Sorry it's sideways, again. And that this text is blue and underlined.

The Avon Lady

2007-07-24T15:46:00.000-07:00

There were a few resolutions I made before moving to Maine. I swore I would not start wearing Tevas, or begin buying my clothes at L.L. Bean. (Well, at least not regular clothes. Outdoor stuff, maybe.) I also might have resolved not to drink microbrew beer exclusively. But there was one danger I didn’t foresee. The Avon Lady.

When I started my new job, I was supposed to get an office. But, ironically (and I think I’m using that word correctly here, not Alanically), even though I work for the planning department--no, because I work for the planning department—my boss, (the VP of Planning) didn’t want to give the appearance that he was pulling rank by giving me, his new hire, my own office in a building that was short on space. So instead I got stuck in a little outcropping of cubicles. Two other women share this no-man’s land with me. (And there really are no men in there. Just us three women.)

The two women who share space with me are middle-aged suburbanites with husbands and children. Lord, spare me from their fate. The main topics of discussion revolve around amusement park rides, chores, and how expensive or not expensive things are. One of the women, who moved up from central Massachusetts for the job she has as a cost accountant, constantly puts down Portland, and can’t understand why I ever would have left New York City for Portland, Maine. One of her chief complaints about Portland is that she never wins the scratch ticket lottery up here. In Springfield she won “all the time—$50 here, $10 there.”

The other woman in my office (I’ll try not to give any identifying details here) is much less of an overt Debbie Downer, but she’s got her own crosses to bear. Like, calling her 12-year old son twice a day to ask if he’s done his “chores.” Just the word “chores” gives me the creeps. When co-worker #2 found out that I’d moved up from New York, her first question was whether I’d had “any trouble down there.” She’s got a southern and/or mid-western accent that’s so strong, I sometimes wonder if she’s imitating a hick accent just so her words will have emphasis.

They’re both very nice people (I think), but try as I might, I just can’t find anything to talk about with them. Given their somewhat envious, somewhat snide tones when they ask about it, I think they think it’s completely extravagant that I fly down to New York every month. And they both looked perplexed when I said I walked up the hill from the somewhat distant parking lot rather than wait for the shuttle provided by the hospital.

So when the Avon Lady showed up one day, and Debbie Downer helpfully offered me a catalog, I figured the least I could do was browse through it. I remembered something about how several years ago Avon customers realized that their Skin-So-Soft lotion happened to work really well as a natural bug repellent, and it became a runaway hit product. Since then they’ve reformulated the lotion into actual bug sprays. So, I bought two bottles. Two weeks later, a tall, tanned and leathery woman, with a raspy, loud voice delivered my little bottles in a paper bag. Co-worker #2 bought some press-on nail polish. Debbie Downer bought bug spray for her daughter. And for once, we had something to talk about.

"The" apartment

2007-07-18T16:09:00.000-07:00

I looked at the apartment again today.

“The” apartment is a beautiful, large one-bedroom with cathedral ceilings, skylights, a spa tub, a huge bedroom, a deck, and, last but not least, a panoramic view of Casco Bay, the Portland Head lighthouse, and the ocean. N and I LOVE this place and want to live there. I’m able to go back again and again because the key to the place is under the mat outside the door.

The rent on this gorgeous place is less than what N pays now for a 1BR in Brooklyn a bus ride away from the nearest subway. If we lived there, my half of the rent would be the same as what I’m paying now for my 1BR just a few blocks away in the same East End neighborhood. Yet I hesitate somewhat, because it’s a lot of money for around these parts. Compared to New York, sure, it’s a bargain. But up here in Portland, for less than what we’d pay for this rental, we could get a 2 or 3BR in the same neighborhood. Scratch that, we could be paying a mortgage.

Yet so far we haven’t seen anything that even comes close to matching this place in terms of space, light and views. And neither of us is planning on putting a down payment on anything anytime soon. So fingers crossed that this place will be ours come September.

Summer Breeze, Makes Me Feel Fine

2007-07-11T20:03:00.000-07:00

I’m writing out on my deck in the cool, foggy air of a Maine summer. God, I feel content. I spend more time alone now than I did in New York, but somehow I feel less lonely. I think I just love being near the ocean. All the sounds and smells make me feel like I’m in the right place.

N is moving up to Portland in two short months. (Apologies to anyone who hasn’t heard this from me in person.) It will be such a change to live with someone for the first time in my adult life—I’ve been living on my own or with roommates for nearly 15 years. I’m sure there will be an adjustment period. For one thing, how do women carry out their beauty routines when they live with a guy who’s not their husband (i.e., not pledged to stick with them no matter what)? Can I wear my raw Hawaiian sugar cane mask to bed, or will N start to resent the sweet smell on the pillow cases? Can I leave the dishes in the sink for days on end? What about those times when I spend 25 minutes in the bathroom with my head swathed in Saran wrap while I try to “blend away the grays”? Speaking of the bathroom….okay, I won’t even go there, but I mean, am I going to end up more constipated than I already am?

I’m sure we’ll work all these things out. More importantly, what will happen when I have everything I want? The ocean, an adoring and adorable boyfriend, a fulfilling job, no more weekends alone? I almost feel guilty about it ahead of time.

Hot Town, Summer in the City

2007-07-09T17:01:00.000-07:00

Went to New York for a quick visit this weekend. Saw lots of friends, which was great. Friends from college (i.e., friends from 17 or so years ago), friends from my first job in New York (friends from 9 or so years ago), and some ever-so-slightly newer friends. In fact, N and I had dinner Saturday night with a soon-to-be-married couple, one of each introduced to me by someone in each of the aforementioned groups of friends—and I, in turn, introduced the two of them. (Okay, so it was rather indirectly, and sprang from some initial Internet sleuthing on the part of the interested party. I just made the “real-world” introductions—but come to think of it, even that was by email). Anyway, now they are together, to be married in September. Friends of friends of friends, breeding little ones who will form their own tangled web of friends of friends of friends, and on and on it will go.

Photo lifted from nywatertaxi.com

One of my goals for the weekend was to do some much-needed shopping, specifically on the Lower East Side, at Dolce Vita, my favorite shoe store. I got two great pairs of shoes, but man, I was reminded why I wanted to move out of the city in the first place. There is nothing fun about trying to get around the city on a hot, muggy summer afternoon when the subways aren’t running the way they should be. If I were rich, and/or lived in Manhattan, that might not be such a problem. But since I don’t take long-distance cab rides, as a general rule, and since N and I needed to get back to Red Hook from Orchard Street on a Sunday afternoon, we had to walk through muggy air and across stinky, sticky tracts of blacktop under a hot and hazy sun to get to a train that wasn’t running on the normal route, just so we could wait for a connecting bus at the Fulton Street Mall in downtown Brooklyn. Ugh. When people talk about the good old days, or how wonderful New York is, I don’t think they’re thinking of 90-minute commutes with a stopover at the Fulton Mall in the middle of a 90-degree summer day.

(We took the Water Taxi from Red Hook to the Seaport, just to avoid the first leg of the trip by bus, but that cost $10 each for a five-minute ride. We joked that we could have swum it (swam it? Someone help.) And I sort of forgot that I get seasick really easily, especially when forced to sit down inside a boat, and not up on deck.)

But my shoes (both pairs) sure are cute.

And I got to see this mullet on the bus. (Unfortunately, I can't rotate these damn cellphone photos. N is on the case....)

We Love That Dirty Water!

2007-06-28T17:37:00.000-07:00

N sang that song about Boston the night we met at Hope & Anchor in Red Hook. The song choice is what it gave me the courage to go up and talk to him, thinking he might be a nice New England boy. Instead, he turned out to be a nice Midwestern boy who had never even set foot in New England (my, how that has changed). And now he's moving to Portland with me. Maine, Minnesota--they're both cold, what's the difference!

Last weekend we decided we should check out the city that brought us together. After taking in the Wilco show at the Bank of America Pavillion (a name which absolutely no one in New England seems to recognize--they must all call it by it's former name--possibly the bandshell? Over by the aquarium?) we stayed at a hotel near Fanueil Hall. The next day, I showed N where I played a French horn recital in 8th grade outside of Fanueil Hall, and then we walked all around the wharves. N said Boston reminded him of Minneapolis. Ting-Tong liked the dolphins. (turn your head sideways)

Heat Wave

2007-06-26T18:08:00.000-07:00

Ha. Everyone keeps talking about how hot it is here today in Portland. Puh-leeze. I still remember returning to my apartment at 329 E. 14th St. in Manhattan the weekend after July 4th in the summer of 1999 (shout-out to Sue F!). We lived (then-roommate Sue F. and I) on the fifth floor of an old tenement-type building in the East Village. To this day, almost 9 years later, friends and family still talk about that apartment, and how hard it was to climb up the stairs.

That weekend was so hot the Amtrak train I was on from Rhode Island apparently melted onto its tracks and was delayed for hours. After finally making it to Penn Station, I'm sure it was a relief to get on the subway (in the early years in New York, I almost never took cabs). After getting out at Union Square, wading through the sticky soup-like air of summer on 14th Street, and walking up 5 flights of stairs, I was greeted with a "Welcome to Hell!" by Sue F. We didn't have air-conditioning, and the apartment was so hot the sheets on my bed were actually retaining heat. The old cordless phone was warm to the touch. The only way to even try to get to sleep was to take a cold shower and stand naked in front of a fan right before bed. I was so broke then (working at Penguin Books) that when I did finally buy an air-conditioner, I brought it home myself and rolled it up the five flights of stairs. Why I could afford an A/C but not the delivery fee, I do not know. It was my own weird form of economics I guess.

That is what I call hot. This, with the Maine breezes still blowing through the 90 degree air, is just a warm summer evening.

Writers write!

2007-06-24T13:25:00.000-07:00

I am going to write a few words today, even if it kills me. Yesterday I was reading my friend Sarah’s wonderfully written and brutally honest blog about motherhood and marriage (Quality-of-light.blogspot.com), and was shamed to realize how little I write in my blog, especially considering I don’t have a child or husband to distract me.

It’s shameful to think how little I write at all, really. I studied creative writing in college (both fiction and non-fiction), worked as a writer for a little while, aspired to write novels and articles and children’s stories, and still, at 35, have not produced anything that I wasn’t contracted to write on deadline.

I think about writing a lot. I outline articles and novels and short stories in my head, and occasionally even on paper. I sometimes even write a few paragraphs. But I complete nothing.

I also start a lot of sentences with “I.”

I remember being given an assignment in elementary school, in which we had to write 10 sentences, or something similar. Every single one of my sentences started with “I.” My teacher (Mrs. Bowlus, a family friend to this day, actually) gently suggested I try mixing things up a bit, try starting some sentences with a word other than “I.” I think I did then, but apparently the lesson didn’t stick.

Or, possibly, when I sit down to write after a hiatus of any length, I revert, blindly almost, to that early, solipsistic mode of writing. Maybe writing really is a practice, as every book about writing and every writing instructor will tell you, and in not practicing it enough, I get rusty, and do this, spew out nothing but “I” sentences.

Once I get going, I really enjoy writing. It’s like exercise—you know it will make you feel great when all is said and done, but it’s so hard to motivate to do it in the first place. Perversely, it feels more fun to procrastinate. To lie on the couch, clean the bathroom, run an errand. But when I really do it, when I write something coherent and cohesive, I feel great.

And yet so often I choose not to. What is up with that?

I have a few writerly friends, a woman who was once an aunt by marriage, and some friends from my publishing days, who all claim to feel completely relieved because they gave themselves permission to no longer feel compelled to write. All of them have published works of varying lengths and/or are/were successful editors. All of them are talented and ambitious. Yet they all say they felt a huge weight was lifted when they decided to allow themselves to stop feeling guilty about not writing. I’ve tried to do the same thing. But I suspect that they, like me, probably still have that niggling feeling in the back of their minds, come a lazy Sunday afternoon or free evening, that there is some task they are avoiding. It’s probably a bit like dropping out of school—it feels great at the time to let go of all the responsibility, but deep down you kind of know you’ve copped out.

Last Hour of the Longest Day of the Year

2007-06-21T18:05:00.000-07:00

Maritime photos

2007-06-18T13:26:00.000-07:00

I took these photos last weekend. And no, they're not of Portland! They were taken in Red Hook, Brooklyn, the neighborhood where I met N and where he lives, and which I often fantasized about moving to. It seemed a sort of last-resort-compromise on moving away from Manhattan and other parts of Brooklyn, to a more tame part of the city that reminded me a lot of small New England coastal towns--like the one I live in now. The reality of living there is a bit different, as the commute into Manhattan requires a bus-to-subway transfer, or a car. But New Englanders will be able to see why I love the neighborhood so much--it practically looks like Maine! (Sorry they're sideways.)

Spy Cat

2007-06-11T18:59:00.001-07:00

Thumbelina checking out the action at my neighbors' place.

Inside Out

2007-06-11T18:53:00.000-07:00

I always seem to do things backwards. Honestly.

I just moved to Maine, one of the most naturally beautiful parts of the country. My intention was to take advantage of the beautiful outdoors, and run more, bike more, breathe in more fresh air. Instead, I’m finding myself becoming more and more addicted to exercise classes at a yoga studio above an Enterprise rental car place.

You would think I would have done this more in New York, where you can take an exercise class of any sort at pretty much any time of day. But in New York, I ran back and forth across the Williamsburg Bridge, along the Brooklyn Heights Promenade and through the industrial streets of DUMBO, and even rode my bike from the Lower East Side to East Harlem for work upon occasion. (My most recent housemate will no doubt dispute me on that last one.) My tendency to run or bike rather than take a class was partly due to not feeling up to spending $15 on an exercise class (that was money better spent on going out for drinks! God.). But since I am so much less mobile here, thanks to my newfound reliance on my car, I am forcing myself to take classes, because I keep wimping out on my jogs along the Eastern Promenade. Beautiful as it is, I find myself lacking the motivation to run very far or fast.

What else do I do backwards? Well, now that I’ve moved to a city with excellent microbrew beer, one of my favorite beverages, I’m finding myself more inclined to drink wine, now that I know which ones are less likely to stuff up my sinuses.

And, I’m probably one of the few people in the world who could move to Maine without a job, then end up getting one two months later in my chosen field that pays more than I was making in New York City. In a flash, the fifth-floor walk-ups and apartments shares with people I met on the Internet are gone. I’m living much more comfortably now than I have since I left Tiverton when I was 18 years old. I know I’ve given up a lot by leaving New York, access to culture and the excitement of the street and my friends and the interesting people you meet and the stories you hear and the things you see. Maybe I’m just getting old, or maybe I’ve always been a homebody and tried to deny it, but I think I really like my creature comforts. Like, a couch I can call my own, and let my cat slowly claw to pieces. A separate office to put all my electronics in so I don’t have to sleep in a sea of digital lights in my bedroom at night. And a nice little deck that gets lots of sun in the morning and smells like salt air. Does coveting all this stuff more than proximity to Manhattan mean I’m totally lame?

I don’t want to jinx myself, but things have been so much more comfortable since I moved to Portland, in ways both big and small. I have a real bed, not just mattresses on a floor or futon frame, for the first time in 15 years. It only takes me 15 minutes to get to work. I buy paper towels instead of using random leftover take-out napkins. I actually care about home décor.

I’m not sure why I always felt like I was hanging on by a thread when I lived in New York. Was it because I was so economically strapped? Or did I just perceive the risks to be greater, since I was there on my own? Did I not give the city a chance, because I never really intended to stay there forever anyway? Was I just using the city, without any intention of ever committing?

Pics

2007-06-11T18:04:00.000-07:00

The big, gothic-looking building is my new office. It’s the original portion of the hospital that was founded over 100 years ago.

I also took a shot of a rainbow that appeared while I was in the Whole Foods parking lot after my Cardiolates® class tonight. If you look closely, you can see the end of the rainbow shining on the Portland Observatory, just feet away from my apartment! Seriously. I think that’s a good omen.

Yoga, Portland style

2007-06-01T16:17:00.001-07:00

I went to my first Portland yoga class last night. The first thing that distinguished it from yoga classes I've taken in New York was the fact that I drove there. It felt like it sort of defeated the purpose, to go somewhere to get exercise, but to drive there? I know I should ride my bike, but the forecast called for rain and I was pressed for time and blah blah excuses.

The second weird thing was that there were more men than women in my class (3 men, 2 women, including myself). That never happened in New York. Also, the other woman in class was not super skinny and beautiful. She was in good shape, and attractive, but not like the uber-flexible, thin, toned and somehow tanned women of your average New York yoga class. I felt less competitive than I usually do, which is probably a good thing, since yoga is meant to relax you, probably not to make you feel bad about yourself for not being able to touch your head to the floor while pointing your right leg towards the ceiling.

My teacher was great, as dynamic and knowledgable as any teacher I've had in New York. And the studio was clean, spacious, and smelled good. The only odd thing was that it was located right above an Enterprise car rental place. It was also strange to look out the windows and see so many trees. But really kind of nice!

Caught

2007-05-21T17:57:00.000-07:00

When I moved into this new apartment, I wanted to furnish it with "modern" furniture. I'll admit that I was influenced by the taste of my former housemate, Noah, whose Lower East Side co-op was a veritable shrine to mid-century modern design. I loved living with the clean, spare lines of his aesthetic. But since moving in here and looking around, I've learned that that stuff is not cheap, and until I start banking some paychecks, I really can't be spending my non-existent discretionary funds on furniture. Even the good-looking IKEA stuff costs several clams! So my enthusiasm for the modern mandate--at least for now--is waning. Or on hold. I still want a cream-colored shag rug, though!

But, speaking of clams, while trolling my favorite used furniture shop here in Portland (the one nearest me, whose name I don't even know) I came across this wonderfully weird lobster pot-cum-coffee table. Actually, I saw this at Tiny Tim's moving company, next to the used furniture store. I think the moving company collects stuff that people either don't want or leave behind. There's all kinds of furniture interspersed around what looks kind of like a Brooklyn real estate broker's office. A TV blares off to the side while a small Asian woman, who might actually be Tiny Tim, answers phone inquiries about moving jobs. It's a weird place, and it carries a lot of funky weird things. I know it is incredibly kitschy to move to Maine and use a lobster pot as the central focus point of the living room, but....for $40....I just kind of loved it! Have I totally lost it? I had to remove the lobster netting that was nailed inside, in case Thumbelina got caught up in it and got trapped. Then I used some Murphy's Oil Soap to really clean it off. Before and after photos are below. The first two were taken out on my deck; the second two show the final product, inside:

Am I Blue?

2007-05-20T19:40:00.000-07:00

Feeling sort of down today. Next weekend is a long weekend, and I get to spend 4 whole days with N in New York. So I should be happy and looking forward to that. And I am. But on the following Tuesday, I start my new job. I don't know if it's more anxiety-producing to start this new job, or to continue to live off my credit cards. Neither course of action is very appealing. Working again means I won't be able to spend 4-5 days at a time with N. It also means I'm really living here, in another city, with responsibilities and a brand new life. Wow, major reality check. I am looking forward to having a routine here, cash flow, to going to yoga again after work and to meeting friends for drinks after work, all the things I used to do and know how to do. And of course to the job itself, learning about a whole new aspect of the healthcare system, and being challenged again. But it will also be hard to say goodbye to this easy life I've been living, one of excessive coffee consumption, conjugal visits to my boyfriend in New York, and apartment fixing-upping. Ah well. It was fun while it lasted!

Thumbelina pics!

2007-05-16T12:32:00.000-07:00

The Maine Mall

2007-05-16T11:30:00.000-07:00

I left my cell phone charger in New York, so had to find a new one today. In New York, there's a cell phone store of some sort on every corner. Here, I didn't know where to start. So I started at the Staples in South Portland. They didn't have one, so on I went to a (relatively) cute little T-Mobile kiosk--by that I mean a freestanding store that wasn't shimmied into the middle of a strip mall. The store was out of my brand of charger, so I was forced to ENTER THE MALL. Like giant supermarkets, giant malls scare me. First, they involve lots of walking under fluorescent lights. Second, I don't know where to find things, and that frustrates me. I'm terrible with directions in general, can't really read those maps they put up in malls, and I like to get in and out of places as quickly as possible. So I did not really want to go to the mall, but I had to, or my cell phone was going to keep bleating all day about how its battery was low.

The mall was just like any other mall, and as it turns out, I was in and out of there rather quickly, (mostly because the guy at the T-Mobile store tipped me off that I should enter through the Best Buy in order to find the Global Cellular, where they sold all manner of cell phone accoutrements (neon plastic cell phone holders and the like, along with a charger that works for my phone, thank God!)). But since I was in my car, I couldn't help but stop at some other stores at other, smaller malls. (The Maine Mall seems to have spawned a brood of mini-malls lining the routes and frontage roads around South Portland.) I stopped at the Christmas Tree Shops, a discount close-out type of place that sells a lot of household stuff you don't really need, until you see that some tchotchke costs only $1.29 and suddenly it seems like a great deal. (Didn't buy anything.) I also stopped at some unfinished pine furniture shop. Then I made an accidental detour onto 95 south, which was totally not where I wanted to be going. But I couldn't get off of it, and I was even forced to pay the toll I'd paid last night while driving up from New York, drive a mile or two, then turn off at the first exit and drive up a frontage road. Argh. I need to get a GPS chip implanted in my brain.

It's a gray, rainy day here, and driving around the strip malls of South Portland, listening to Lite FM because I still can't figure out where the good radio stations are, and hearing Muzak in big box stores, was depressing. I thought of N and missed him so much, wishing we were in Red Hook scoping out used furniture stores or getting coffee at Baked. Or wishing he was here, and that we lived in a nicely furnished apartment somewhere close to downtown and our lives were in full swing, that we ate out 3 nights a week at Fore St. and Duckfat and Local 188, and cooked delicious healthy meals from ingredients purchased at Whole Foods the rest of the time.

Ah, food. Today I am "fasting," sort of. Well, actually, for breakfast I had tea and aloe juice. And a small glass of soy milk. And for lunch I ate an apple. For dinner tonight, I'll have nothing but brown rice, broccoli and avocado. Ok, it's not a fast, technically, but more of a cleanse. It's still a lot less than I usually eat. If you know me, you know that I used to be the sort of skinny person who could eat bagels and burritos every day without gaining a pound. I was skinny, like Olive Oyl skinny. At one point, I was even trying out those protein powders that bodybuilders use to put on weight. And then, at some point in the last few years, I started to like food. Really started to like food. I even started to eat everything on my plate. This would be a coup for my parents if I were still 7 years old, but unfortunately, as an adult eating out 2-3 times a week, this means I'm about 10 pounds heavier than I ever used to be. I think about food almost all day--about what I'll have for lunch all morning, and what I'll have for dinner all afternoon. I never used to be like this, and have never had to limit calories or pass on dessert, and in fact used to disdain people who did so, and now, as karma would have it, I am one of those people. Thus, today's "cleanse." I'll let you know if I wake up tomorrow with clearer skin and sense of "lightness," and more energy. (That's what they promise you when you do these things.)

Scene of the Crime

2007-05-15T17:39:00.000-07:00

This is what happens to your bathroom when you leave a cat younger than a year old alone for more than a day. My brother and his wife checked in on T while I was in New York, but I didn't hear about this. Maybe she waited until they were gone to get to work!

Last Lazy Trip to NYC

2007-05-15T05:51:00.000-07:00

I'm writing now from N's apartment in Red Hook on a Tuesday morning, probably the last time I'll do so on a weekday for some time. In some ways that's a good thing, because the reason for it is that I was offered a job with the Maine Medical Center, working as a data analyst in their planning department. This is great news for my bank account, which has been mightily depleted these last two months. Working in town will also, hopefully, help me get in the swing of life in Portland, might bring some new friends into my life, and will help me establish a routine as a Mainer.

I will also, I hope, be able to FLY down to New York from now on, instead of making the 6-7 hour trip by car. After not driving for nearly a decade, getting back on the road as a driver has been stressful and alienating. More to come on this topic.

Pictures!

2007-05-08T10:22:00.000-07:00

When words fail me, and they often do, I have pictures. Lucky for me, N left me his amazing digital camera with the Leica lens. (The less sharp pics were taken with my cell phone.) I'll try to figure out how to get the captions near the photos.

Higgins Beach and nearby (photos by N)

Portland Architectural Salvage
View from my window (facing West towards downtown Portland):

Cat Update

2007-05-03T13:57:00.000-07:00

Estrella-Rufasina-Lil' D has a new name: Thumbelina! Thanks to N, who thought of it. A shout-0ut to her big paws!

I did some research and discovered that cats with extra toes (she has them on her front AND back paws, which is even rarer) are thought by sailors to be good luck! Who knew? Here's some more info about polydactyls, from messybeast.com:

A correspondent to the New Scientist noted that the innermost extra toes on the front paws are often opposable and some cats use them with quite startling proficiency to manipulate small objects with almost human dexterity. Some owners of polydactyl cats joke that their cats are more intelligent because of this and represent the next stage in feline evolution - the ability to open cartons and cans unaided.

And this...

Polydactyl cats are known by various names - "mitten cats", "thumb cats", "six-finger cats" and "Hemingway cats". The latter is because of writer Ernest Hemingway who made his home on the small island of Key West, Florida. He shared the island with nearly 50 cats, including a 6-toed polydactyl given to him by a ship captain; the cats bred and the polydactyl trait became common, hence polydactyls are often known as "Hemingway Cats". Hemingway's colony of cats was free-breeding with the local cat population and the ratio of polydactyl cats to normal-toes cats was about 50/50. Another story suggests that the cat given to Hemingway was a female double-pawed cat and that the polydactyl cats on the island came from 19^th Century ships' cats. The high rate of polydactyl cats in Boston, USA has also led to the nickname "Boston Thumb Cats". The nickname "double-pawed" cats is a misnomer since there is a specific double paw condition.

For those interested (Betsy and Noah), there's more info here, including a picture of a "thumb cat" named Rufus!!!

Introducing Estrella Rufasina...aka Lil' D

2007-05-02T13:35:00.000-07:00

So, a few weeks ago, I went to the animal shelter in Westbrook. I was in love with a cat named Little Debbie, whose photo was up on their website. But when I got there, I was told she'd been adopted! I was crestfallen. I'd foolishy already made plans for her, how I'd call her Lil' D. I looked at a few of the other cats, but none of them were as cute as Little Debbie.

Cut to a few weeks later, when I'd returned from a few trips to NYC, and was planning on being in my apartment for an indefinite period of time and I could really help a new cat settle in. I went back to the shelter with N, thinking I'd just be looking, and lo and behold, there was Little D! I guess she never was adopted. Now she's mine, all mine, and you can just how cute she is from these pics. As for her name, Lil' D isn't really sticking. Neither is Rufasina, an homage to Rufus Wildman, my step-cat of the last year. So now I'm trying out Estrella, Spanish for "star," which also sounds a bit like Stray, which is what Lil' D/Rufasina/Estrella was until Monday! Note her double paws, front and back!

Brick by Brick

2007-05-02T13:16:00.000-07:00

I've been remiss in updating my blog, I know, I know. I want to write about everything, but that seems so daunting, so then I don't write anything. But I have a new philosophy now: a little bit at a time. Isn't that the great thing about this day and age anyway? Technology is totally supportive of people with ADD. I can write a little bit at a time, not have to bother fleshing out an idea, and you, dear reader, don't mind, because you're reading something on a website, which was specificially designed to appeal to all of our short attention spans. Perfect!

So my musing for today is this:

The other day, while passing a wall being built in Red Hook, I told N that sometimes I wished I was a bricklayer. I think it would be nice to work on something so tangible. To spread the cement, lay down the brick just so, add more cement, another brick, and so on until you have a wall. Wouldn't it be great to spend a day working on something and be able to see something so (literally) concrete when you're done? To turn around as you're walking to the subway and see your wall? The wall you built? I'm sure it would be hard, physically demanding work, but it's got to be satisfying.

So, I said all this to N. I think he thought I was a bit strange, though he himself has often talked about wanting a job that was fundamentally about craft more than anything else. Then, a few days later, I was reading an interview with a novelist who happens to be the daughter of David McCullough, the historian, and she said that he told her that being a writer was a lot like being a bricklayer--each day you lay down a few words, and before you know it you have a wall. (Am I mixing metaphors?)

Anyway, I took that as a sign, that I would announce one day I wanted to be a bricklayer, and then read a few days later that a prolific, Pulitzer-prize-winning author compared his own craft to bricklaying. So from now on, this blog is my wall, and hopefully it will get me in practice for building other walls, like chick-lit walls, and health policy walls, and other walls that I've been building in my head for years but have never had the discipline, or stamina, or focus, or....whatever it is....to get down on paper.

Two jobs and bike rides

2007-04-20T09:09:00.000-07:00

Last night I went out on the town in Portland (finally). I started off at a lecture series at the Portland Museum of Art (the Architalx series; last night the speakers were Nieto-Sobejano, an architect team from Madrid). An old friend who lives here in Portland invited me, and through him I met lots of new people, and I learned just how small this city is.

When my brother was over yesterday morning helping me set up the couch, we looked out my window and saw, for the first time, a group of people at the top of the Portland Observatory (see photo for view from my apartment, and see this link for more info http://www.portlandlandmarks.org/portland_observatory/observatory.shtml). We figured they must have been on the first tour of the season. Last night, the first person I was introduced me to was someone who worked for Greater Portland Landmarks. I asked if he happened to have been in the Observatory that morning, and sure enough, it was him I saw through my window that morning, teaching new docents how to give tours. Small town.

Nightlife here is certainly different from that on New York, in so many ways. First, there's the fact that you are bound to see at least one person you know when you're out on the town. I've only been "out" in Portland twice, and both times I've seen one of the young city council members, who both my brother and my friend know. (A true politician, he remembered meeting me, that J was my brother, and where we met the first time.) Second, at least three people I talked to mentioned that they were planning on going for a bike ride today (Friday). I don't recall every being out on a weeknight in NYC and hearing people making such laid-back plans for the next day (besides Noah, my old housemate, a bike-riding aficionado!).

Some similarities: attractive, accomplished women complaining about how hard it is to meet men. Through my friend, who as I said knows everybody, I also met this beautiful, funny woman last night--she literally looked like Julia Roberts, or Juliette Binoche--who was talking about how hard it was to meet a man. Now that I finally have one of my own, I almost feel like a traitor when I talk to women about this, even though I know exactly where they're coming from. I always thought it was a NYC thing: men there are so focussed on their careers, or they're too metrosexual, or they're fixated on meeting a model. Apparently not. The difference here though is not that the men are just elusive in these ways, they're just actually unavailable, as in married. Though I was surrounded by many more married couples in my last year or so in NYC, it still wasn't a given that a man in his mid-thirties as most likely married, the way I assume it is in the rest of the country...

A Place to Sit

2007-04-20T09:00:00.000-07:00

The exciting news in my life is...I bought a couch! Last week while in NYC I went to the Bo Concept warehouse sale in New Jersey (so great to have a car) and fell in love with a cream-colored micro-suede couch. It was a floor sample, so was on sale for like 1/4 of the original price. Alas, someone had already staked their claim to it, so I left the NJ warehouse empty-handed. But as soon as I got back to N's Red Hook pad, I got on craigslist and found a similar one! We drove the Volvo uptown and picked it up from a nice girl on the Upper East Side who was moving to Queens. N disassembled it for me (Bo Concept is like the fancy older cousin to Ikea), we brought it down the five flights (so easy and lightweight!) and then I drove it back up to Maine on Tuesday morning. My brother helped me reassemble it, and now, finally, I have a couch! My living room is turning into a room, instead of a giant entryway strewn with crap that I walk through to get to my kitchen. Ahhh....

Portland Head Lighthouse

2007-04-06T10:31:00.000-07:00

N and I visited the historic Portland Head Lighthouse. It was as cold and foggy as it looks in these pics! Poor Ting-Tong was freezing.

Monday night in Maine

2007-04-06T06:35:00.000-07:00

Shoes

2007-04-04T15:30:00.000-07:00

So, I woke up today for my first “real” day in Maine. My plan was to update this blog, do my taxes online, catch up on emails, and look for work. But then my brother Jay called, wondering if I could pick up my niece Eliza early from daycare. Happy to have an excuse not to look for a job and to watch the Little Mermaid again, I agreed to pick her up and take her to their house in Brunswick.

So that’s where I am now, sans Internet connection, writing this in a Word document for later posting. I’m still grappling with my total lifestyle overhaul. One day, I’m riding the 6 train uptown, eating lunch on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, meeting friends for drinks downtown on the Lower East Side, walking home to my apartment decorated with mid-century modern furniture and hooked up with 500 cable channels and wireless Internet. The next I’m putting my garbage out on the curb and driving a Volvo station wagon with a 3-yr old (albeit a beloved one) strapped into her car seat in the back. These are not minor changes! It’s as if I moved out of the city and took on family life—only I don’t have a family. No husband, no kids—I feel like I’m living some phantom life, driven to it by the inexorable ticking of my biological clock. No kids—no problem! I’ll still get the station wagon and live in the suburbs! If I build it, they will come!

It’s confusing, because plenty of my friends have had babies while living in the city and maintaining an urban life. Certainly I could have, also, but maybe I compartmentalize things too much: city living is for being young, single, footloose and fancy-free. Maybe deep in the recesses of my mind I believe that city life is incompatible with child-rearing, given that I was raised in a pretty rural environment, with a big yard, unrestricted access to the beach, trees to climb, hills to sled down, an ocean to swim in, woods to explore—all of this with no limits. Our cat didn’t even have a litter box because he just went outside when he wanted to, and on occasion even brought us home a mouse or baby rabbit from the field in front of our house. Our dog never had to be walked; she, too, just pawed at the screen door when she wanted out. Our mailbox was far enough away that sometimes we drove to the top of the driveway to pick up mail; otherwise, you could walk there and make an afternoon of it, stopping at the willow tree, examining the goldfish pond at Mr. Abiri’s (he bought the house my dad was raised in), sneaking onto someone else’s property to check out the fort the Sylvester boys had built in the woods.

I always felt like a bit of an imposter in the city. It seemed that other people had more of a right to be there—people who had grown up in Westchester, or New Jersey, people whose parents held jobs in the city, or used to. For me New York wasn’t a natural progression, from suburb to city; it was a fantasy city, a place where a bigger, glittering life—the life I saw on TV and read about in magazines—was happening. I imagined myself like one of those girls in the Mademoiselle fashion spreads, wearing “career” clothes and working in a shiny office, high above the city streets. I don’t know what I thought I’d be doing, but it would be something important, and glamorous, and I’d always wear great skirts and tops and high heels that didn’t hurt my feet. (I didn’t even know heels could hurt your feet so much until I actually moved to New York and tried to wear them while walking across town to work then after work to meet friends for drinks. There were days I would barely be able to stand up in the subway, my feet hurt so badly. Of course, that could have also been because I bought such cheap shoes when I first moved to the city. There was a time when spending more than $50 on a pair of shoes seemed like an extravagance only other people would be self-indulgent enough to grant themselves—it certainly wasn’t for me. My, how things have changed!)

In my first few months in New York, I actually wore these hideous black platform shoes with two rubberish straps across the top that cost about $10 from Payless, I think. I wore them to work at Viking Books every day, because I didn’t have anything else. From my apartment on Mulberry Street, I’d walk across Soho to Penguin on Hudson Street, not having any idea how fortunate I was to live and work downtown and not have to commute on the dreaded subway. As the years went on, the distance between my place of work and residence slowly expanded: from E. 14 to Hudson St.; from 28th St. to Park Slope; from 19th St. to Williamsburg (this was actually an easy commute); and then, the commute that pushed me over the edge and prompted my thinking of moving out of the city, from Brooklyn Heights to East Harlem. Not nearly as much fun as walking from Mulberry to the lower West Village, and seeing movie stars and models on my walk to and from work!

The Pillow

2007-04-04T06:30:00.000-07:00

Today is, in some ways, my first “real” day living in Maine. I’m certainly having conflicting feelings about my move. On the one hand, I’m sleeping better….and a lot more. N and I took a nap every day this weekend. I don’t know if it’s the fresh air or what, but something about Maine makes me tired. Could be that I’m so much less stimulated that I’m also a lot more relaxed. Or the feeling that a major milestone in my life has passed, and I’m letting that sink in. I don’t know. I feel like my life is going in slo-mo. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

N flew back to New York last night, after spending the weekend and Monday and Tuesday helping me settle in. It’s really amazing how many people have helped me out in this move. My brother Rick and my dad arranged to have me take over Rick’s old Volvo, so now I have a car. My aunt Ingrid gave me my cousin’s bed frame, so now, actually for the first time in a decade, I’m sleeping on more than just a mattress and box spring. She also gave me a microwave and a couple of good pans. (She is in the process of moving to Portland, OR, where her husband will be working at a green architecture firm, so was more than happy to offload some stuff.) Soo’s boyfriend gave me a large color TV—I just had to scrape his kids’ finger paint off the screen. Amazing how things come together sometimes. And such generosity and helpfulness on the part of my family and friends.

Anyway, N and I drove to Maine Saturday. We stopped in Providence, to pick up the bed frame, then drove down to Westport, MA, to my dad’s house to pick up my old IKEA desk and thrift store kitchen table. We finally made it to Portland at about 11:30 that night, after taking a wrong turn in the final stretch (when it comes to directions, the two heads of N and I are not better than one).

We unloaded the car that night. Since it was so late, and the street I live on is so quiet, we didn’t worry too much about leaving the back of the car open while we brought stuff upstairs. But the next day, we looked around and noticed that the long pillow my aunt gave me that went with the headboard of the bed was nowhere to be found. We checked the car, checked under and around all of my still unpacked boxes. Nowhere. And then I remembered that there was this one group of people walking up the hill, making some noise, while we were unloading. A group of 20-somethings, it seemed, who sounded like they’d been out drinking. Though it seemed improbable, we surmised that in a fit of drunken chicanery, they must have thought it would be funny to take the pillow.

For the next two days, we were still puzzling over whether this was the correct explanation for the mysterious disappearance of the pillow. Then, on the following cold and rainy Monday morning, on our way back home from the Hilltop Coffee Shop, we saw the pillow draped over a chain link fence in someone’s front yard, wet from the rain, its distinctive floral pillow case still intact. We took the wet pillow home, washed it off and put it in the dryer, and put it in its rightful place on the bed. It was as if it had never left us. I don’t know if it’s comforting or not to have something stolen and then recover it. But it was some sort of welcome to the neighborhood.

I’m adding a picture of my Monday night. N and I played Scrabble by the light of the ship’s lantern he bought me at New York Nautical in Tribeca. Fun!

Laundry

2007-03-21T15:09:00.000-07:00

This is probably the most mundane topic one could blog about, but for anyone who's lived in any city, you can understand my pleasure: I just put in a load of laundry, without using any coins, plastic cards, or other payment devices! I just put the clothes in the machine, added detergent, and came back upstairs! I even left my phosphate-free detergent on a little wooden shelf in the basement, without fear that someone will steal it!

When I told my friend S over IM that I was doing laundry, NO COINS, she, New Yorker that she is, suggested I just run out to the deli and buy something to get some change. I had to explain that what I meant by "no coins" was that I didn't need any money at all to wash my clothes. I'm not sure she understood.

Ah, life's little luxuries. There was a time I had to haul my dirty laundry down five flights of stairs, then choose between sitting in a cold laundromat blaring a rerun of Hogan's Heroes or something similarly depressing, or hiking up the five flights of stairs again, only to have to come back down in 30 minutes. If I did go back to my apartment, I ran the risk of having some stranger take my wet clothes out of the machine so he could start his own load. If I stayed, I risked subjecting myself to the peculiar ennui that is specific to laundromats everywhere, no matter the city, state or country. I usually left the laundry there and went back upstairs.

At least I was in great shape back then.

Lost highway

2007-03-21T13:10:00.000-07:00

I told everyone that I didn't need a car in Portland. I'd spent nearly 9 years walking my groceries home, why would I suddenly need a car to take home my two bags' worth of groceries?

Yesterday, I walked the mile or so to the new Whole Foods in Bayside. The walk itself wasn't so hard, but Portland is much more hilly (hillier?) than New York, so that was a bit of a challenge. Factor in the lack of sidewalks along some of the major streets, and I understood why it isn't just distance that can make a walk difficult. Going downhill on the snow-covered no-man's land along the side of the Franklin Arterial and through the massive parking lot of the looming, freestanding Whole Foods isn't exactly the same thing as walking along the sidewalks of the Lower East Side to Earth Matters to pick up some soy milk and cereal. And with my wonderful sense of direction, I of course made a wrong turn, and ended up walking through the "projects," which in Portland look like some ski chalets I stayed in on a family skiing trip to New Hampshire when I was in 7th grade. I'm sure I looked like a nut walking down the front sidewalk of someone's home, only to end up on the side of Marginal Way, which is basically the frontage road for I-295. Ever wonder who those weirdos are who walk along the shoulder of a frontage road? Now you know! They're people new to a city with a bad sense of direction, like me! Nothing like walking along the highway and through a parking lot to get some groceries to remind you that you're not in New York anymore.

The neighborhood

2007-03-20T16:00:00.002-07:00

I live on the East End of Portland, in Munjoy Hill. Pictured are the Portland Observatory and N, in the Hilltop Coffee Shop, the day after I moved in. He likes Portland, so far. The seagull is perched on one of those viewer things that looks out over Casco Bay, and the ocean. This is along the Eastern Promenade, this beautiful stretch of biking and running paths that wind along the coast. I can't wait for the snow to melt so I can get out there.

The apartment!, cont.

2007-03-20T15:53:00.000-07:00

So, you can see here the kitchen, off of which is my tiny, cold, but very cute bathroom. Stepping out of the kitchen, you enter the bedroom, followed by the office. Of course, all my stuff is still unpacked and a mess, so look for new pics when everything is all set up.

The apartment!

2007-03-20T15:39:00.000-07:00

The living room, from the front door. My poor plants died in the back of the truck. This big one smells like a root vegetable in boiling water. The smell reminds me of something my Chinese neighbors used to cook in the apartment above me on Mulberry Street in New York.