Absent

I have been absent for a variety of reasons. Things have been a little up and down here, but, on a positive note, at least I can officially declare that God decided to skip winter this year entirely. Every year, I feel March is the great disappointment. You feel like it should be spring already, but usually March spends its time clinging to February's cold weather while throwing in unending rain. But here we are, March 5 and it has been sunny and beautiful since late February.

I haven't even been up to much of anything, besides working and then working and then doing some more work. I am finally getting towards the end of the web project for my job. It's tough because it requires some pretty tricky stuff, and I don't really have anybody I can turn to for instruction or help besides The Boy. Luckily, he has been an absolute angel about it. Secretly, I think he enjoys being able to strut his stuff (in php). So it will be finished soon, and I will have a whole slew of new web design tidbits in my brain that weren't there a few months ago. Not a bad thing. It was slow-going, but the end is in sight.

I also got a new crappy sewing machine to replace the sewing machine I fried. It's nothing fancy, but it works. On Saturday, I learned how to thread it and sew my first few stitches using the terribly confusing owner's manuel. It is a French course and a sewing course in one! "Presser foot" and "spool" -- both words I did not know before. Also, the manuel is very poorly translated from German, so there are a few points where the syntax is just a little off. I am going to try to buy some material this week and work on a very simple pattern my mom bought me a few months ago. I'll post the results, however catastrophic they may be.

Finances are super tight right now because my old landlord owes me a significant chunk of money and has yet to pay me back. I was sort of depending on that cash, but she technically has until the end of the month to give it to me. Once she does, I am thinking of enrolling in a 60-euro sewing class I found that's right around the corner from my work. It's a 3-hour class where they give you all the materials and everything, and at the end of the class you walk away with either a baby dress or a baby button-down shirt. A little guidance, plus the satisfaction of having successfully made something (anything) seems worthwhile to me.

Otherwise, I am going to self-teach my way through the sewing in the same way as I did with all this web stuff. It's good to have a new hobby. I remember when I first started learning web design, I felt totally overwhelmed and confused, but I also felt a very calm sense of determination. If I just picked one thing, I would start to dissect it and see where it led me. I spent hours and hours learning .css -- it was so confusing at the beginning. But it was very rewarding to see where concentration, time, and effort could get me, and six years later it's pretty crazy where I've ended up. So I am hoping to employ a similar technique to learning to sew. Pretty soon, I'll have plenty of time on my hands, too...

I met with a midwife last week who I pray will NOT be delivering Romulus. It's not that she was mean or cruel or anything, but she just rubbed me the wrong way. I like hippies as much as the next guy, but there's a certain type of hippie -- the kind that talks with that overly-"soothing" voice -- that I have a difficult time with.

Granted, I was a little edgy going into the office. I was absolutely exhausted as the appointment was at six and I had spent the morning running a bunch of errands and the afternoon at work. I kept drifting off in the waiting room, so I had a bit of a time getting oriented once in her office.

But what really bothered me was that she asked me to take off my shoes so she could weigh me (yay! weight is on track now!) and then, without thinking, I started putting my shoes back on. She had said something about how she was going to examine me, but she had told me to keep my clothes on, and I guess I just put the shoes on as a reflex. As she saw me doing it, she said, "No, I said you need to get on the table. Keep your clothes, but you need to not have your shoes on..."

A little flustered, I said, "Sorry, I don't know why I was putting them back on."

And she walked over to me, put a "supportive" hand on my shoulders and said, "We're just going to take a deep breath. Is everything ok? Slllooooooowwwww down. Am I talking too fast for you, maybe?"

I can't explain why it aggravated me so much. Maybe because I was tired and just didn't think about the shoes, and I didn't appreciate her making me feel like I was a stress basket who needed to take deep breaths. Maybe it was because I really didn't want her to be "comforting" me when really I just hadn't thought about what I was doing. Or maybe it was because, although I had just spent 20 minutes telling her my life story in French, she seemed to think I couldn't understand the language. Not sure.

Anyway. I see a different midwife in a few weeks and let's hope we get along.

So that's it. A very calm week spent mostly working with an occasional foray into the wild world of sewing. Clearly, things are out of control around here.