Friends

Every day is one more day until there is a tiny person in my house for whom Husband and I are completely, 100% responsible, for at least the next eighteen years, and I can't even get it together to clean out the closet in his future room. I am kind of freaking out a little.

( Jelly Bean update! )

In all seriousness, I've been so lucky so far. JB seems to be clickin' (and kickin') along just fine in there, thank God, which is what matters.

(PS - is Ree Drummond the cutest thing who ever was cute or what?)

In case I wasn't already totally nuts about Amanda Tapping:

She and Damian Kindler are using Sanctuary and the associated fan base as a touch point to create a non-profit to accept donations and redistribute them to children's assistance organizations. Sanctuary for Kids.

Y'all, that is just AWESOME. The organizations they're currently working with are the Nepal Orphans Home and Watari’s TTIP1 and TIPPY Programs in Vancouver.

We joined a CSA yesterday! As of the 18th, we will be picking up a box of tasty veggies every two weeks in the next neighborhood over. I am so excited, I cannot even tell you. I figure bi-weekly will be good timing for us - it's just the two of us (even once the Jelly Bean gets here, he won't be eating veggies for a while). I am hoping it will press us into eating at home more and incorporating more veggies into our meals in more creative ways - i.e., we paid $30 for this box of vegetables, so we dang well better eat all of it. They also have a trade-out box in case one box is very brussels-sprouts heavy, for example (I think they are divine; Husband will not touch them with a ten-foot pole). Seriously, I can't overstate how pumped I am about this. Woo, CSA!

How many of y'all are members of one? If so, how do you manage the great CSA bounty? I'm not likely to can at this extremely busy and increasingly prego point in my life, but I can cook and freeze. :)

Hey guys! You know what is never a safe driving activity? Looking at an on-ramp about 200 feet from you and deciding that you really want to be on that on-ramp - even though you're in the right lane. To maximize unsafeness, you should also definitely not look for any cars in the lanes between you and the ramp and, instead, just start careening across three lanes of morning rush hour traffic, thus ensuring that you will almost hit at least one car on the way across to your EXTREMELY VITAL destination. I mean, this guy didn't even LOOK.

Anyway, obviously I am the car in the left lane in this scenario. I didn't get hit, but it was WAY too close and involved a lot of honking and swerving onto the shoulder on my part. And maybe some cursing. Okay, maybe a lot of cursing. I am pretty sure that being an impatient jackass and hitting a pregnant woman's car is gonna send you to hell. Not really, but do you want to make a pregnant lady angry? No, you don't. Do not endanger the Jelly Bean, dude. I will END YOU.

Man, for someone with a five-mile, ten-minute commute, I sure do run into a lot of idiot drivers. It's this one particular intersection, too, almost every time. I can see the building, I'm almost there, but I know I have to get through IDIOT DRIVER CENTRAL first. Ugh.

ANYWAY. I am fine, JB is fine, car is fine, jackass has driven on his merry, poorly-driving way. I just wanted to vent.

Sorry for the radio silence (yes, OMGLawDad, it's been like three weeks, sorry) - RL has been CRAYYYYYYZY lately. How are all of you today?

OMG, this week has been insane beyond the telling of it - I have seen the sun come up twice. BUT. It has been thrice-salvaged:

Once: Randomly driving past an old friend from high school randomly on the street and giving him a ride home, because of all the people with whom I'd like to reconnect, he's right up there on the list. Sometimes the universe is great.

Twice: My credit score is FINALLY on the mend, and the house has been refinanced at an interest rate significantly lower than where I started two years ago, which means my mortgage payment does not lead to quite the same levels of panic. (I can afford it; I just fail at finances and money panics me in the same way math does, for similar reasons: I hate wrong answers.)

Thrice and most importantly: I went with one of my dearest college friends to see Ian McKellan at the Shakespeare Theater. He did a one-night engagement after being given an award at their gala, and guys: stuff like this is why I will actually plan trips across oceans based on theater tickets. Only unlike Hamlet, this time there was no trans-Atlantic flight involved - just a trip across DC.

I don't even know how to describe it - he rambled and chatted and wandered in and out of chunks of text, playing all the parts in a scene, ambling through a monologue, reading the thesaurus, and the audience just cheered him on the whole way. I left enchanted and enthralled and with a list of like six more things I need to read.

Things he performed that were just fantastic:

The Beaufort Scale. (Yes. A set of meteorological definitions.)
The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo (Gorgeous beyond the telling of it.)
Ululate. v. (The thesaurus. Guys. I am not even kidding.)

And best of all, Sir Thomas More's lines from this page, which was incredible - doubly so in the context of his comments on being gay and coming out and working for LGBT rights in South Africa.