They tell me there will be unicorns.

I'm being productive! Like, I can actually produce valuable work on a time scale shorter than your typical ice age! Incredible!

This is especially astounding, considering the crazy day I've had. I had expected to lose my morning to a training session, and was surprised by an additional 4 hour afternoon session. For those who are counting, that's 3 + 4 = no nap for Kate.

Not the best setup for a narco pregnant lady.

Did you know that narcolepsy is categorized as a disability under the ADA? Neither did I, until recently. And let me tell ya, I understand why.

Narcolepsy is nothing like normal fatigue (and I've had plenty of that, believe me...both as a pregnant lady, and as a first year graduate student). No, narcolepsy is in a category of it's own. When I'm narco-ed out, the tiredness is unbearable. I cannot function, because I'm stuck in that never-never-land of waking REM sleep. It is almost painful, and if it were possible, I feel sure that I would DIE OF TIRED.

The only thing that relieves that feeling is a nap, which was not seeming likely when I crashed around 1 pm this afternoon. Out of desperation (in all seriousness, I was going to DIE) I took a nap in the auditorium, during the afternoon's introductory speeches, and woke up to find one of the panelists staring at me disapprovingly. Sorry lady, but otherwise, you'd have a corpse on your hands.

Anyway, I'm getting work done! At 10:30 at night! After a full day of back-to-back shenanigans!

Granted, I had a good nap on Ross's office couch after sneaking out of the training early (ironically, the session I had to skip was on accommodating student disabilities).

But still! Dare I hope? Is this the turning point on the road towards the gilded-promised-land of (gasp) The Second Trimester?

God, I hope so.

Maybe I'm gestating a truck driver...

I'm trying to eat good for the goober. I really am. But sometimes he/she makes it SO HARD. For example, take a look at the current good list/bad list.

Good Food (eat more! EAAAAT!)

*Cheez-its (what I am currently eating)

*Barbecue ribs (what I ate last night)

*Egg salad

*Frozen yogurt

*Boston baked beans

*Watermelon

*Pot pie (WANT)

Bad Food (booooooo!)

*Non-frozen yogurt

*Juice

*Most cheese

*Tomatoes (weren't these just on the good list last week?!)

*Carrots

*Basil

*Vitamins

Detecting a pattern here? Watch, next week it'll be corn dogs and oatmeal cream pies. Seriously.

Pregnancy posting

Ross and I were delaying our announcement until we saw the Goober and were sure that everything was ok. So I've been blogging all the way, and keeping the posts unpublished. They are now up and publicly viewable. So have at it.

So it turns out I'm preggers...

Pregnancy is hard, yo

Goober angry! Goober SMASH!

A pleasant surprise...

Any day, I expect to find out my biceps can make smoothies

If only I had a large, gummy-armed robot to signal these things for me

Hormone Soup

As if it weren't obvious hormones rule my life

9-1/2 weeks

9-1/2 weeks

There are advantages to having a good friend as our OB. She got us in for an early ultrasound! So let me introduce you to...the Goober!!

It's an active little goober, dancing and bopping around the whole time!

The Goober: a whole lotta boogie, not a lotta butt.

As if it weren't obvious that hormones rule my life...

I'm currently crying while watching the end of Overboard.

Hormone soup

I'm feeling really low today.

Yes, I know--it's hormones. But knowing that doesn't really help, eh?

I'm really tired of being sick--it just drags on and on. I had this naive belief that since morning sickness feels more or less like food poisoning, that it would behave like food poisoning, showing up one day without warning and then disappearing equally quickly.

But Kate (you say), morning sickness isn't anything like food poisoning.

Yes, I know. I'M IN THE FUTURE TOO!

The truth is, morning sickness doesn't just get better overnight--it kind of drags along, getting gradually (oh so gradually) better--then unexpectedly, dramatically worse--then better again. It wouldn't be so bad, except that my tolerance for nausea is way lower than my tolerance for pain.

Needless to say, I'm not getting a whole helluva lot done right now. This is a bummer, because these few remaining weeks of summer are my last chance to get some work done before I start teaching in the fall. Combine that pressure with the aforementioned hormones and a whopping dose of inborn work-ethic guilt, and I'm bound to start crying into Ross's beard at the drop of a hat, wailing something about how I'm never going to get a job and Ross, the goober and I are going to end up sleeping in a cardboard box, and then we'll all get TB and die.

I'm basically a mess.

Anybody out there had morning sickness at a really bad time? Were any of you visibly pregnant while on the job market (academic or otherwise)? Any coping mechanisms?

A post as scattered as my brain

I'm starting to feel the end of the summer looming. This sucks for several reasons.

1) I hate Michigan winters!
2) Thanks to a particularly cool summer, I have ~4000 green tomatoes on the vine, and have gotten exactly 4 ripe ones.

3) The end of the summer means the end of my high productivity and the start of job-market madness.

4) I have a grant proposal due in two weeks...a grant proposal that is in its twinkle-in-my-eye stage.

5) Did I mention how much I hate Michigan winters?

I still don't know what I'm teaching this coming semester. Good thing classes start late this year--Sept 8th.

On a related note, I have no idea how much I'll be making next semester. I could be teaching

.25 (8-12 hrs/wk)

.5 (18-25 hrs/wk)

or

.75 (35-45 hrs/wk).

Needless to say, this uncertainty (and the associated income uncertainty) scares me a little bit.

We spent this past weekend moving everything out of Ross's apartment (we're hopefully renting it out this fall). It now looks like something exploded in our living room.

The cats have an ongoing battle over a chair we brought from Ross's place--a chair that will forevermore be known as The Best Chair On The Planet.

We've started training Roxy to be less of a little shit. We're using something we've decided to call "ham therapy".

Ham Therapy:

Step 1: pet cat

Step 2: feed her chunks of ham

Step 3: repeat

She's responding quite well.

Did you know that a package of ham chunks costs less than a similar-sized package of cat treats, and is approximately 1 zillion times better (according to the average cat polled in our living room).

My brain is working about 1/4 speed right now. Could you tell?