What’s Doing?
It’s 5 am, or it was 5 am when I woke up, thanks to the stupid cat. I’m really ready to kick him out the window.
No NaNoWriMo winner badge for me! C’est La Vie! I’m not too torn up about it because like I said, I think I have a workable short story on my hands. I’ll be submitting for feedback at some point at the iAnthology, the NWP ning set up by Kevin Hodgson from the Western Massachusetts Writing Project.
In other news, I’m starting doula training this month! I’m super excited about this even though I have lots of work to do in the next few years. I’m attending my first workshop on the 13th, in the city, and I’ve arranged to observe my own doula’s childbirth classes, to fulfill that requirement. The certification process involves a lot of reading, observation, attending a 16 hour workshop, attending births, taking a lactation/breastfeeding course and writing essays.
And yes, I’m still pursuing copyediting training in the meantime. The self-paced online course has been slow going for me, mostly because I’m not making the time. I finally realized that I need to treat it like an actual class that I’m taking, a night class, if you will. So, starting tonight, I’ll be escaping the house after dinner to do my coursework.
Our apartment is on the market, finally, but we still have lots of work to do before the place is presentable enough to take pictures for the listing. We tore up the lineoleum in the bedroom only to discover there was only plywood underneath, not hardwood like we expected/hoped. So, we’re in search of a carpet remnant (the room is only 10×9!). Once that gets installed, we can stage the bedroom, and get started on clearing out the rest of the apartment. A lot of it will go into storage, some of it will get thrown out or given away. We’re not in any particular hurry to move but we know that the longer our apartment sits on the market, the more stale our listing will get. We have a six month contract with the broker, so we’ll see how it goes.
Winter is coming, my belly is getting bigger by the day, and I’m excited for the holidays but also for what the new year will bring. I have an anatomy scan later today but we aren’t finding out the sex this time around, so they’ll just do the usual nuchal fold check and the other measurements, nothing too exciting. In a lot of ways, this pregnancy feels like old hat, but it’s different in that I’m chasing around a toddler. It’s getting harder and harder to carry Alice on my hip, and the littlest things wipe out my energy, like changing a diaper! (She very rarely lies still for her diaper to be changed… it takes some strength and cajoling to get the job done.)
On our way home from Albany this past Thanksgiving weekend, we stopped to visit friends who have a farm about 20 minutes outside of Albany. It’s a small farm, similar to what we have in mind for our own farm one day, so it was good for us to see it! They have tons of chickens, some goats and some pigs. I think we’ve decided to stick with goats and chickens, and growing produce because the whole pig thing seems too messy and quite frankly, in my pregnant state, the stench of the pigsty made me more than a little queasy. We bought bagels with us, and had a nice lunch before hitting the road again. Our friends didn’t let us leave empty-handed! We came home with eggs fresh from the coop, a lamb shoulder, ground buffalo meat and a pork loin. Our freezer is happy, and soon our bellies will be, too!
