shadows of echoes of memories of songs

This is a bit of a silly meme (though juggzy managed to give it some good answers!) but, er, it was either this or do something useful, so.

( some silly questions )

38 weeks yesterday; Friday was my last day at work. ( finishing work, parental visits, garden, house, and how I'm doing generally... long rambly diary entry )

36 weeks today; 4 weeks to my due date, 2 more weeks of work to go, 1 more week until Sprocket is officially at term (not to be confused with 'term' in the Oxford sense, though I think it is 8th week) -- any time before 37 weeks she'd be considered 'premature'.

( Long ramble about how I'm feeling, the latest ultrasound scan, my big baby, homebirth assessment, work... as much for my own record as anything else )

I had my 34 weeks appointment with the midwife on Monday. ( Nothing seriously wrong but some niggles )

A couple of days before I saw the midwife, addedentry and I had an antenatal session from Lynn Banerji (TalkBabyTalk) -- four hours of talking through everything about birth, labour and breastfeeding. Quite an intense morning but she was really good -- friendly and confident and sensible, and she did a great job of demystifying the whole process and making me feel more positive and confident about it. She also said I had a great attitude and she was sure everything would go really well and she wished she could be there at the birth. :-) (Of course then a couple of days after that things turned out to be going not so perfectly smoothly, as described above, which unfortunately has kind of undone some of my positivity ... but I am still hoping that I can sort myself and baby out in time to be able to do things the way I want to.)

O & I are booked on the NHS antenatal course in a couple of weeks' time, too -- always good to have a couple of sources of information to compare (and the NHS one is free anyway). I've heard very mixed reports of them but apparently it all depends which midwife happens to be running the session you go to -- there's no fixed 'curriculum' or anything.

We're also making some small progress on getting the house in order -- with two superfluous desks out of the way we're halfway to having an actual room for baby (there is at least now space for a cot), and in a couple of weeks we're getting shelves built in the front room which will allow us to make lots more space and, crucially, not have so many free-standing bookcases which could easily and dangerously be pulled over by an inquisitive toddler. If we carry on with this kind of efficiency we may even manage to get curtains put up in the bedroom eventually (only 18 months after moving in!), though the first two attempts at that have been stymied by the presence of an infuriatingly un-drillable concrete lintel over the window.

I realise, with... well, with mixed feelings, that I've only got another 3 full weeks left at work (and about 3 months' worth of stuff to do in them). ( Thoughts about work )

So that's where things are at the moment -- sorry this has been a bit of a long and rambly update. I just wish I could stay awake long enough to think more clearly about things and write more eloquently about them!

I finally got talked into selling my Morris Minor, after having her for almost exactly 8 years (here's what I said when I bought her - I got her her own LJ account for her 50th birthday). I'd been feeling guilty about not looking after her well enough for several years, I hadn't driven her for over a year, but selling a car is an effort, and I didn't really want to see her go... so it's probably just as well someone turned up out of nowhere and prodded me into action.

A couple of weeks ago a man knocked on the door, completely out of the blue, and asked me about the car -- he'd recently got into Morris Minors, he'd been passing by and had seen mine and thought it looked great, and he'd noticed that the tax disc was out of date so inferred that I wasn't using it much, and consequently wondered if I was interested in selling it. He seemed like a decent enough chap (as far as it's possible to tell these things from a long doorstep conversation about cars), he gave me his card, and I agreed to let him come and have a look at the car in daylight, with a view to buying. So last Sunday he came back with a box of tools and a spare battery, we got the car started eventually, he poked and prodded and noted a few things that would probably need fixing, and I got all nostalgic again at the smell of petrol and the sound of the engine... by the time it came to talking about a price I felt like I really didn't want to let her go at all! But I'd been feeling for ages that it was a waste of a good car to leave it sitting outside doing nothing, and I knew that even if I'd suddenly been seized with the energy to start doing car maintenance (and the money to keep getting things fixed) I wouldn't be able to take the baby in the car for years and years (no seatbelts, hence no attachment points for a car seat) so the chances of us really using it any time soon were extremely limited... and after 5 years of sitting around outside it'd just be in an even worse condition, more expensive to fix if I decided to get it running again, and worth less if I decided to sell it then. Yes, I'm still trying to convince myself now, as you can tell. :-}

Anyway, after some rather protracted and awkward negotiations (which kept turning back into a much less awkward and more friendly conversation -- both of us admitted we were no good at haggling) we agreed on a price of £800 (quite a bit less than I paid in the first place, but didn't seem unreasonable given the work needed, lack of MOT, general neglect over the last year, etc). He handed over the cash and said he'd organise the insurance and book an MOT test first thing next morning, and come over and pick up the car once that was all sorted. So on Monday morning I set off for work knowing that the driveway would be empty when I came back. I took a last couple of photos, patted her on the bonnet and said goodbye (hoping nobody was watching), just about managed not to burst into tears, and cycled off to work. And indeed, when I got home, there was nothing there but a couple of small patches of oil.

I do think she's gone to a better home now, with someone who'll look after her properly -- the guy who bought her seemed to know what he was doing, was even willing to do small bits of welding and other things that were way beyond my car-maintenance capabilities -- and he didn't just want a show car, he wanted something he could actually drive around in, so I might even see her around Oxford from time to time. Still sad to see her go, though.

The real answer to "how did you spend Christmas?" in the previous post's year-review meme should have been "clearing things out" -- I've spent a lot of the holidays sorting through heaps of clutter (both here and at my parents' house -- don't worry, camellia_uk, I didn't throw away anything of yours, but I did clear enough space in the 'playroom'[1] that you can walk all the way round the dolls' house!) and trying to reduce the sheer quantity of stuff that's hanging around, or at least sort it into different types of thing and maximise the chances of ever finding that interesting article or that useful-looking bit of plastic again.

[1] Note for people who have never been to my parents' house, i.e. most of you: the 'playroom' is a kind of dust-encrusted graveyard for toys, games, books, boxes full of newspaper articles, posters, yarn, coathangers, videos, hats, and other assorted detritus; the central mound of junk has accreted around the dolls' house (which is big enough that I could actually get in it when I was tiny) and a big white toy-chest (containing approximately 1 grillion balls of wool which my mum is slowly turning into hats for smoothies). This room was last used for 'playing' in about 1987. The most interesting thing it contains is a small "one-armed bandit" fruit-machine which takes 1d coins.

While going through the boxes of mostly-paper souvenir-type-things at our place I found some interesting bits and bobs, but all rather miscellaneous: these rather excellent Waterstones ads which I saved (I've saved a lot of interesting/clever adverts over the years but don't really have anything much to do with them except look at them occasionally and think "that's really clever"); an Interflora badge which probably belonged to my great-grandma who ran a flower shop in Macclesfield; a photograph of Peterhouse Choir (now helpfully tagged by emperor!); stickers, letters, postcards, menus, and heaps of tickets, programmes, etc -- I had plans once to make an enormous collage of all my gig tickets (under the glass top of the dressing-table in my teenage bedroom!) but never got round to it. addedentry is faithfully adding all my theatre programmes (even the one-page photocopies handed out at student amdram productions) to Theatricalia, but it's a slow process. I also found a paper copy of the Independent's "Lost in Cyberspace" supplement (sorry, rhodri!) and a classic issue of Matters Lofty, the IMSoc fanzine, ably edited by invisiblechoir and with contributions from indie luminaries such as barnacle. Both the Indy and the Indie have been filed in a folder marked "clever friends".

I'm mainly just posting all these things here so that they're a bit more useful to the world than if they remained buried in a box in the corner of our house. (I tweeted about the Waterstones ads a few minutes ago and am alarmed to find that I'm already on the first page of google hits for "Waterstones power of books" -- so hopefully the next person who searches for them as I did will at least find something.)

In amongst the cards I also found two Christmas cards which still contained their Christmas gift in the form of a £20 note -- no longer legal tender but fortunately still exchangeable (or pay-in-able) at a bank. Where there's clutter, there's cash!

Still here, just about.

So anyway, I wake up to Radio 2; the radio comes on at 7am, so I get to hear the news headlines at least twice before I actually drag myself out of bed. The news this morning was bizarre. Headlines I might have expected: "Government votes to raise tuition fees" (or even "Three MPs resign as government votes to raise tuition fees"); "Violent protests over tuition fees vote" (or, more likely, "Our boysPolice injured in protests over tuition fees vote" -- in all the bits of the rolling news that I did read/watch yesterday, the BBC never mentioned any injuries to protestors). But no: the lead on the news was "Camilla's car gets paint on it".[*]

Mind you, at least tuition fees got a tangential mention on the BBC. Nobody's reporting Cancún at all. Perhaps our children we won't have to worry about university fees after all because by then we'll all be desperately trying to build floating homes out of old tyres. Or shooting each other.

[*] ETA: Angry Mob suggests that this means the media succeeded in their hidden agenda.

I don't normally actually revise old posts in place (rather than tacking a "PS" or "ETA" on the end) but I've gone back and finished yesterday's post so it can stand as one thing.

Today's prompt is:

December 2 Writing.

What do you do each day that doesn’t contribute to your writing — and can you eliminate it?

And to be honest I think I'm going to skip that because it's starting from the assumption that everything I do should contribute to "my writing", and that's not where I'm starting from. I write when I can, not because I'm trying to produce something great but because I like it and I think it helps my thought processes; but I do lots of other things as well, and if I have to become more narrowly focused to become a Great Writer then, well, I'm never going to be a Great Writer, and I think I'm at peace with that decision.

I did the post-a-day in November because I felt as though there were lots of things I wanted to write but I never got round to them; and in practice a) lots of them turned out to be rubbish when I got there, and b) I was so fixated on posting something every day that I ended up concentrating on Just Getting Something Done which meant I was avoiding writing the potentially-better stuff because I knew I couldn't do it justice. In a way it was a success because it helped me to get rid of some of the rubbish -- getting a bit closer to 'inbox zero' on the directory full of half-written fragments -- but I don't think it did much good for "my writing". (As you can tell from the scare-quotes, I feel like talking about "my writing" like that is a bit precious given that it's not my identity or my job, it's not even a particularly fervent hobby. I don't talk about "my singing" or "my reading". I'm not criticising people who do talk about it like this -- it just feels odd to me, for me.)

Of course, having said that I'd skip this prompt I've ended up writing more as a result of it than I manage on most days. There's probably a moral there, but I'm not sure what it is.

There's feeling full of fail, and then there's feeling full of existential fail. I've spent most of today wanting to curl up under the desk in a little ball and howl like an over-tired toddler. I was working for the Department of Fail, which always saps my will to live -- they're not really inherently full of fail, but I and my colleague J. are contracted to work a few days for them and so all the problems they save up for us are the things that are either a) completely intractable and/or incomprehensible, b) sufficiently bitty and faffy that nobody has ever had a chance to sit down and really get them, or c) enormous cans of worms (these are invariably simple-looking tasks, and for all I know they may be given to us in all innocence, but they turn out to be many-headed sharp-fanged fail-hydras from the Dark Places). It doesn't help that the DoF is also located in a vast open-plan office, flickery-fluorescent-lit, and dry as a desert; being there makes me feel exhausted and drained and even more queasy than I was already starting to feel.

[Yes, I know I'm lucky to have a job at all, and I shouldn't complain. And I know I'm lucky that I'm not suffering (yet, so far) from all the horrible things that can go wrong in pregnancy, so I should be practically rejoicing at tiredness and a bit of recurring queasiness. And depression is all in the mind so it can't be that bad. And the Tories will fix everything if we just let them get on with it.]

Today was a day of cans of worms involving ( javascript and CMS horrors )

During all this fail-wrestling I was keeping a vague eye on twitter in the hope of getting some voices of sanity filtering in through all the madness, but in fact it just made things worse: it was a non-stop stream of rants and shouting, flickering away in the background like the last TV fuzzily broadcasting the apocalypse, showing the world falling apart while I was stuck inside designing better deckchairs for the Titanic. And outside it got darker and colder and I didn't want to stay in the Department of Fail but I didn't want to go out into the cold either, and every time I get home I feel like I don't ever want to go out again, but every time I look around me here I feel as though everything is a reminder of some kind of brokenness (inside or out) which I should have either fixed or got rid of, and I want to hide from it, and there's nowhere left to hide except going to bed, and even that doesn't help because I'm uncomfortable and I sleep badly, and going to sleep just means waking up into another day of fail.

And there's not enough time left before everything runs out of time. Working days, days before Christmas, days before the baby arrives ... days before the end of something, of everything. When I die they'll cut me open and find nothing inside but small charred fragments of to-do lists.