pics of my primary cause of insomnia these days

An added bonus, lovely friend/delivering doctor rang me to read me poem by Robert Browning, shortly after baby was born:

The year's at the spring,

And day's at the morn;

Morning's at seven;

The hillside's dew-pearl'd;

The lark's on the wing;

The snail's on the thorn;

God's in His heaven-

All's right with the world!

Fashion fascism

I read recently that many high-end fashion houses refuse on principle to make their ready-to-wear clothes in large sizes, on the grounds that they don't want fat people wearing their stuff, thus presumably making the brand-name clothes more desirable. I am tickled therefore by the fact that many of these same high-end fashion houses make baby clothes - including snaps down at the bottom end of the clothes expressly for ease of nappy-changing: what does it say about high fashion when being fat is considered less attractive than being incontinent? I think I'd rather be fat...

random thoughts about pregnancy and philandering artistic husbands

the countdown is getting scarily close to D-day. a week left before my due-date. there are still conflicting parts of my brain which fervently believe that a) there's not really a baby in there or b) that i will be pregnant forever (which would be OK, really, as long as i didn't get any bigger. every week i think, nah, i can't possibly get more enormous, and then poof! i get more enormous...)

projects remaining to be completed prior to arrival of parasite (apart from the metaphysical ones, like "acquire large amounts of patience and wisdom" and "reconcile self to complete mindfuck of having children") are to spray my fruit trees with horticultural oil in the vain hope that that will protect them from next summer's onslaught of evil buggies, finish painting mural in the bebe's room, and finish the bebe quilt. oh, and probably getting another little pedal bin for bebe's room would be a good idea too. "nesting" is such a euphemism; it sounds so cosy, when actually it means things like "buy a pedal bin into which you will be chucking your kid's smelly crap-stained nappy wipes." hmm.

the last two nights have been a cinematic lesson in the artistic value of having a philandering husband: last night we watched a biography of frida kahlo, and tonight i watched "sylvia," gwyneth paltrow/daniel craig film about sylvia plath and ted hughes. i have to say, if i was going to be made miserable (and by extension, more tortured and creative) by one of the two philandering husbands, i'd so go for ted hughes/daniel craig any day. diego rivera looked like an obese toad. he must have had one impressively charming personality, is all i can say, to be such a successful seducer of women. (whereas frida kahlo really was quite lovely, i think; she totally overexaggerated the unibrow in her self-portraits and in the photos at least had very delicate features). plus ted hughes had his whole sexy working class northern lad accent thing going as well. i don't know about the whole being-married-to-a-poet business, though; that sounds kind of exhausting. that said, i really, really don't buy the myth that an artist must be unhappy and/or alcoholic in order to be productive, and i wonder what the relative proportion of mental illness among professional artists to the general population is.

ok time to frapper le sac; i only had one two hour nap today so am completely wiped :)

ooh la la chez panisse

tonight was reminiscent of some of my french bloggy entries, so i thought to commemorate the historic occasion of my First Ever Dinner at Chez Panisse, i would add another one to the archives. so so so good.

i should also add that today was historic for the additional reason that it was my first day of maternity leave. so far i am a big fan of maternity leave. it's like being on regular holiday, except because you are pregnant you feel entirely justified in taking as many naps as you feel like. today i had three. being very pregnant is not, i think, unlike being a newborn; so much of your time is taken up with sleeping, eating, and going to the loo that you really can't be expected to do much more. anyway. i did achieve greatness in the form of clearing the shower drain (hoorah!) and nearly finishing the weatherproofing of the back deck (hoorah number two) and getting my car headlight fixed (hoorah number three) and that is enough greatness for anyone for one day, really.

having achieved daytime greatness, i then headed down to berkeley to meet kim d., gourmande extraordinaire, for dinner at chez panisse (with a brief and surreal stop off at the petaluma factory outlet mall along the way to return a couple of the pinker, more cartoon-infested baby outfits that we acquired along the way.) kim is a regular at chez panisse and gets total movie start treatment there, and i basked in the reflected glow of her celebrity; while going to chez panisse as a regular joe citizen i am sure is still pretty great, it was extra great getting to go with her. after every hunky italian/french waiter type person had come up to give her a hug and greet her by name, we got a tour of the kitchens; so so so cool - big walk in fridge with enormous cuts of meat hanging on hooks - usually you don't think of raw meat as smelling delicious, but it really did. pastry chef person doing arty things with tiramisu towers at one counter, another person arranging beautiful radiccio leaves on plates with drizzles of olive oily something yummo, big bins of freshly delivered mushrooms, greens, etc. fun. then we sat down and started to Eat.

first mini mini item were little cherry tomatoes fresh off someone's vine which you had to be very careful that your mouth really was all the way closed before you bit into them or juice would hit the people at the next table over. then first course proper was artichoke and radiccio thingy, accompanied by rioja rose wine that if i were more articulate & knowledgeable and if it were not 1 a.m. i might be able to come up with an actual description of, but as it is i can only say yum yum and it was quite unusual tasting. then the main dish - pork with winter veggies and broccolini mmmmmmmmmmmmmm and b/c kim is a rockstar they also brought us some roast ribs as well to go with. and some red wine what i don't remember what it was but it is written down on the menu so i can look it up tomorrow when i am properly awake.

pudding was tiramisu - intensely caffeinated - followed by little turkish delighty things and little chocolatey things and a mint tisane. oobh and apples and fresh DATES what i had never had before. super good.

oh oh oh it is way too late and i need to go sleep. love to all.

new years' rezzies revisited

I don't think it counts as insomnia when it's only 9:30 at night, but I definitely have sleep pattern wonkiness at the moment, having had a three-hour-long attack of gestational narcolepsy starting at 3:30 this afternoon, and I have terrible horrible premonitions of a sleepless night tonight as a result. Being on call is also massively unrestful, even though the pager gods have overall been astonishingly kind this entire weekend (rest assured that if they leave me alone tonight I will absolutely arrange a goat sacrifice in their honour tomorrow, complete with dancing and ululating around a bonfire in the backyard, possibly naked except for bright blue body paint, depending on the weather and how many mosquitoes are out).

I have resumed my New Year's resolution list (a bit late in the game, and there are, I have to admit, some items on it that will not get attended to this year, but I was heartened by the completion of my master copy of the Van Eyck Arnolfini marriage portrait, so I am feeling more energized about the rest.) I am happy to report that I can check off with varying degrees of good conscience the following items:

- looking into adult literacy programs locally to volunteer for (I looked; there's only one, and they're only open during times when I'm at work)

- making two new friends (both named Michelle - what are the chances?)

- exercising (up until this week I have been a paragon of regimented virtue with regard to my half-marathon training schedule. I did fall off the wagon a few days ago, however, partly out of sheer laziness, partly out of worry for the meeplet, who was measuring small at her last doctor's visit, but who has been confirmed to be exactly the right size on ultrasound as of Thursday, good girl, and thank you to Tara for coming with me for moral support)

- more portraits (we are, we are pleased to report, working on an actual commission at the moment.)

- learning a Schubert sonata (the first one in the book. haven't learnt it all the way yet but I'm getting much better).

So, the remaining items, if memory serves, are 1) another master copy (Sargent or Vermeer, I think I said) 2) a tango workshop or cello lessons and 3) polishing essays to send off to my friend Emily's agent so that I can get rejection letters from publishers. I might transmogrify 1) into painting a mural for meeplet's room, if I get permission from babydaddy (permission more likely if it's painted on removable canvas and is of, say, the Amalfi coastline. I was kind of thinking a view of Lake Ullswater. Meh, it can be another thing to argue over. I need to learn my mother's technique of not asking permission first. Like Emo Phillips says, "When I was a kid, I prayed to God every day for a bicycle, but He never gave me one. Then one day I realized, that's not how God works. So I stole a bike and asked Him to forgive me.") With regard to tango workshops - I have been keeping half an eye on the website for La Rogaia, a villa in Tuscany where they do tango holidays, which looks divine and delicious and decadent and not really feasible due to budgetary and obstetrical limitations. But we will continue to fantasize. and look for options closer to home. It just feels wrong to be learning to tango in a non-Latin country, somehow. oh dear, speaking of Latin countries, I just remembered the resolution re: my Spanish cookbook. That got put on the back burner (nice metaphor for a cookbook...). I will have to revisit that one as well.

The baby is kicking all over the place at the moment; belly-watching has become something of a pastime for me in my current low-ambition state. It's like the puppy channel on public access TV - restful and contemplative with small peaks of excitement. Oh look, that was a big kick on the left side! Wow, that's the first time I've felt a sweep across the belly as opposed to just random thumps! I wonder what body part that was?! It's a good thing there's not actually a clear window through into my uterus, or I would never get off the sofa. I do worry that she listens to all my conversations (I should complain/swear less) and that she might be getting sick of my taste in music/propensity for very loud farts/the graceless joggling around when I run.

is it time for a change in career?

I remembered tonight (in the midst of ER chaos, sitting next to Dr. D. at the desk as he wrote out a prescription for Percocet while muttering, "idiots, they're all fucking idiots, all of them, and all they want is narcotics") that my ideal, when I started medical school, was to be one of those enviably flexible brilliant people who switch careers every ten years or so, and move on once they have achieved greatness in one field to achieving greatness in a totally different field. i graduated from medical school in 2002, which means that if i am going to pull this off, a) i have to achieve greatness in medicine in fairly short order and b) that I should start thinking now about what career number two is going to be. Having sent two people with appendicitis home from the ER in the last twenty four hours, my track record is not looking so good for the former, and i am completely blanking on my options for the latter. What I really need is something that I can be good at that doesn't require much additional formal training, because the very idea of going back to school makes my eyeballs ache. Mural painting sounds like fun. If someone wanted to pay me to be a tango dancing student, I'd totally go for that. The pisser about medicine is that just when you have an inkling of confidence in your own competence, you have a disaster, or a patient that you don't know what to do with, and your professional self-worth is knocked right back down to zero again. and it's not like there's even a good correlation between your mistakes/triumphs and the public recognition of your mistakes/triumphs; one of the nurses was really impressed with me last night for being able to instantly find fetal heart tones on a woman who was sixteen weeks' pregnant, after the nurse had been searching all over this woman's abdomen, and kept saying, wow, that's amazing, you just found them, just like that, (when in fact the truth is that there's really only one place you're ever going to find fetal heart tones on a sixteen-weeker, and i just stuck the doppler there). on the flip side, i got a lot of shit for sending home a guy with an appendicitis, when i don't think i actually did anything _wrong_: he looked completely fine, his pain had resolved by the time he came back from the CT scanner, he didn't have a fever, and (this is the kicker) i talked to the surgeon and the surgeon said, send him home and have him come back for a recheck in the morning. and yet everyone's rolling their eyes at what an idiot _i_ was. urgh. you win some, you lose some, but it's never the ones that you think you are going to win or lose.

anyway. c'est time for bed. tomorrow is my first four mile run in the half-marathon training program. we'll see if i can run four miles without falling over.

recovered from terrible horrible no good very bad day

The days after the terrible horrible etc etc were actually OK - I finished off my week of being hospital rounder in reasonably intact fashion, and even got to send nearly all the patients happily home to their nearest and dearest.

I had a quite lovely day yesterday - I was scheduled to be in baby resuscitation class all day, which means that even though I'm technically working I am allowed to wear jeans, which is always good for a surreptitious thrill (wow, my life must be really boring if wearing jeans to work is exciting). When I arrived, I was pleased/terrified to see that the teacher slated for my group was the hospital's most legendarily ferocious neonatologist, a man who strikes terror into the heart of any resident who has the misfortune to ask a stupid question in front of him (I ran afoul of him many times as a resident) BUT here's the thing - he is ferocious because he really really really wants to scare everyone around him into being competent, and if you work hard and pay attention he is disarmingly sweet. So even though having him put you through your plastic-baby-resuscitating paces is bowel-looseningly scary, he also makes sure that you think about every single tiny little thing. Most of the instructors just make you go through the algorithm - baby not breathing? use the ventilator mask. heart rate under 60? start chest compressions - which 99% of the time is all you might need to know. This guy makes sure you know how to do things like recognize when your suction tubing is broken and the oxygen tank has a leak in it and someone's accidentally turned the valve off and the heater on the table isn't working properly and you blew a hole in the baby's lung by ventilating too hard and the baby's still zonked from the heroin that the mother used right before arriving on the labor and delivery floor that she didn't tell you about and oh by the way it's a baby who's three months premature and you are the only person there with no help - god forbid that ever happens to me, but if it does I will (I hope) be slightly more prepared to deal with it as a result.

Then, in addition to having the terrifying teacher whom I actually really like, we were done by 10:30 a.m.!! so I got to go home early and prune my wisteria and put the cardboard down in the back garden in preparation for the arrival of more mulch (this is a vain and desperate attempt to eradicate the crabgrass from my back garden in an eco-friendly sort of a way. The gardening guy thinks I am mad for not just soaking the whole place in Roundup, but I have a vision of my little organic food-producing Eden that I am loath to let go of yet.) Ooh, speaking of the garden, I harvested another crop of raspberries off the raspberry bush... there were three! (don't laugh. they were delicious). I am definitely buying more raspberry bushes next year.

After garden maintenance and lunch, I went up to nice friend's house to take the babies for a walk around Spring Lake, which was lovely (and hot, I think nearly 90 degrees yesterday). Afterwards we sat and fed them and chatted and it was so cosy and comfortable and I nearly fell asleep with one of the twins on my chest so so so sweet.

In the evening, I went with other nice friend to a documentary about Christo & Jeanne Claude that the brother of a friend of hers had just made that was being screened at the Charles Schulz museum, about the Running Fence project that Christo did in Sonoma County for two weeks in 1976. The documentary was cool - they interviewed all the crusty old-time ranchers whom he persuaded to allow this slightly loony project to be built on their land - and there was some BEAUTIFUL aerial footage of Sonoma county, which really made me think, wow, I live in a really magically beautiful place. (On a totally unrelated note, there was a lot of talk by the people who introduced the film about what an artistic visionary Charles Schulz was, which always puzzles me. For those not in the know, Charles Schulz (creator of the 'Peanuts' comic strip) was from Santa Rosa, and there is this perception here that he is a major cultural icon responsible for singlehandedly revolutionizing pop art in the twentieth century and that his work is deep and profound and meaningful etc etc etc and I am always like, er, idongeddit. I think Peanuts is stoopid. But anyway.)

OK, hi ho hi ho, it's off to work I go...