Following a conversation with my sister over Christmas, I’ve decided to compile a list of the books I read this year so I can try to beat that number for next year. Ah, always in the pursuit of something.

In no particular order-

1. Twilight – Stephenie Meyer
2. New Moon – Stephenie Meyer
3. Eclipse – Stephenie Meyer
4. Breaking Dawn – Stephenie Meyer
5. When you are Engulfed in Flames – David Sedaris
6. Dead until Dark – Charlaine Harris
7. Living Dead in Dallas – Charlaine Harris
8. Club Dead – Charlaine Harris
9. Dead to the World – Charlaine Harris
10. Jitterbug Perfume – Tom Robbins
11. Pillars of the Earth – Ken Follett
12. Prey – Michael Crichton
13. The Ice Station – Matthew Reilly
14. Next – Michael Crichton
15. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
16. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies – Seth Grahame-Smith
17. High Fidelity – Nick Hornby
18. Area 7 – Matthew Reilly (didn’t finish it before midnight 31.12.09)

I’m not counting any of the clinical genetics books that I read recently, or the law texts for uni because I didn’t read them “cover to cover”. And I know that I’m missing one or two books from early in the year but right now I just can’t recall them.

I found a website that lets you combine the mummy and the daddy’s faces to see what your future baby might look like.

This is what Nudge might look like if he’s a boy:

And this is what Nudge might look like if he’s a girl:

And this is what Nudge might look like if Johnny Depp was the father:

I think it’s probably time I went back to work, don’t you?!

I’m still around but you probably wouldn’t know that given that my last few entries have been set to private.

Bullet points, because they’re cool…

• The new uni semester has started and I’m all about Administrative Law these days.
• We hired a new full-time admin officer but are still waiting for recruitment to run the necessary child protection and criminal record checks. It took six weeks last time to get a start date. Le sigh.
• I actually left the house last weekend. Twice! It was my SIL’s birthday so we headed over there on Saturday for a BBQ lunch, some adorable niece time (I taught her to say ‘faster’ while pushing her on the swing set) and a game of Risk. On Sunday we went out on a friend’s boat for a few hours then back to his house for a quick lunch. It was a very long and tiring day but lots of fun too.
• We both have Monday rostered as a day off. I’m suppose to get one each month but this will only be the second one I’ve had all year. I cannot wait!

I stopped in at the local supermarket on my way home from work to get a few things for dinner.

Teenage Check-out Chick: Is this celery?

Me: Erm, no it’s shallots.

A moment later…

TC-oC: Are these Lebanese Cucumbers or umm… normal ones?

Me: That’s zucchini.

Honestly, what does her mother feed her????

I did a quick pregnancy test on Friday morning and got a big fat positive almost immediately. The line was very dark, even for a cheap ebay pregnancy test. The husband has been sick so he wasn’t getting up to go to work but that didn’t stop me from barging in, flicking on the light and showing him the test strip. Needless to say, he is very very happy.

I was very reserved with my last pregnancy and although it didn’t end the way we’d hoped, I’ve decided to really enjoy every day of this pregnancy. On Saturday morning we drove out of the city to Cobbity which is a little town south-west of Sydney and walked around their markets in the early winter morning chill. It was very country; there was a lot of fresh produce (carts full of pumpkins, cauliflowers, spinach, etc) and lots of knitting, crochet, quilting, paintings, etc. I bought a circular quilted play mat that has a hidden drawstring around the outer edge so it pulls up into a storage bag for the baby toys. Perfect for a quick pack up when visiting friends and family. :)

I had to go back to the IVF clinic this morning to have my levels tested. The results came back this afternoon: the beta hcg was 3936 and progesterone was 189! I thought I was about 15dpo but I guess I’m further along than I thought. I have another appointment to see the professor in three weeks and he’ll do an u/s then. No wonder that line was so dark! I mentioned my numbers on a preggo forum that I frequent and the general consensus was multiples but I’m trying very hard not to freak the fuck out think about it. LMP was 2 June, I had a blood test on 22 June which showed I’d ovulated but a couple hours after the blood was drawn I had the telltale CM so I don’t think ovulation could’ve occurred all that long before. The betas were done on 6 July. Based on that, I don’t think I was more than 15dpo but I’ve been wrong before so who knows. My previous doctors didn’t order betas before so I didn’t know what was high. The clinic nurse only said that they want to see numbers higher than 100. Based on LMP, EDD is 8 March. I’ll just have to be patient until the ultrasound in a few weeks.

Inevitably I’ve caught a cold and given that I work in public health, I was sent to the influenza clinic to be swabbed and sent home. Apparently there’s a blanket directive to give all health workers Tamiflu on development of flu symptoms. The clinic doctors decided against giving me Tamiflu because I’m pregnant and while they are generally saying that it is safe in pregnancy, there’s not a lot of research to support that claim. I’ll stay home tomorrow again and wait for my stupid swab result.

I stopped by the haberdashery store on my way home and bought some extra green thread so I can use some of my sick days to finish my quilt. Now that I’m pregnant it seems that I’ve got such a short amount of time left to knit all the stuff I want to make for the baby. And uni starts up again in a couple of weeks. Must get cracking!

Once upon a time (about twelve years ago) there was a girl (me). She signed up for an evening college course to learn the ancient and magical art of quilting. Unfortunately for the girl, the weekly class was filled with older (old) women all of whom were members of the quilters’ guild. They took the art of quilting very seriously and stitched the entire quilt together by hand. The girl was a little surprised and disappointed by this. She was very much of the opinion that if there is an easier and faster way of doing something, then by all means it is better to do it that way. However, she perservered with the tedium of cutting out the quilt pattern pieces and hand-stitching each one together. Unfortunately, time as always was relentless and the weeks flew by but she had made precious little progress on her quilt. With two weeks of the course remaining, she spent the weekend hunched over her vintage Waltons Celestial sewing machine (circa 1976) until all of the quilt pieces were joined together. The girl was enjoying working on the quilt and would have loved to continue assembling it but she needed further instruction from the instructor so she packed it away until the next class. On the evening of the class, she hurried in to the room and excitedly unpacked her work-in-progress and waited for the others to arrive. Eventually the other women arrived for the class and the instructor visited each table to comment and give further instructions… until she reached the girl’s table. What happened next would stay with the poor girl for years and years to come. The teacher sucked in her breath quickly and hissed something about her having MACHINE SEWN the quilt instead of using the traditional hand stitching method. Two women at the next table over heard the teacher’s exclamation, their heads turning and gasping in shock. This gasp was also over heard by the women at the following table and they too gasped in disbelief. A wave of gasps and hisses moved through the room until all eyes were fixed on the girl. The teacher declared that the girl would unpick the offending stitches immediately and left the girl to stare dumbly at her beautiful quilt and fight back tears of humiliation. She never returned to the class and the quilt remained in the back of the cupboard until several years later she gave it to a friend of a friend to finish. She never saw it again.

As for the Waltons Celestial sewing machine, it eventually developed a nasty case of incurably bad tension and given its age, it was deemed not worth repairing. The girl’s husband gave her a wonderful new Pfaff sewing machine for her birthday; a special sewing machine that came with all kinds of fancy quilting extras, not that she ever expected to use them. She brought the sewing machine out occasionally, though it was usually to fix a fallen hem.

Fast forward to modern day (last Monday night to be exact). The girl is a little older now (just a little) and a little wiser (what am I saying, she knows everything; just ask her!) and had felt like doing a little creating, or nesting, or maybe just something a little different from her usual knitting. This desire coincided with a 20% off everything sale at her local haberdashery store. After an hour of dragging bolts of fabric around the store to compare colours and patterns, she settled on a selection of quilting fabrics in greens and browns and matching thread. The fabric sat on her dining room table for much of the week while she considered the possible patterns for her future quilt. On Saturday she prewashed, dried, trimmed and ironed all of the fabric and then today she spent the morning carefully cutting many (oh so many) five inch squared umm squares. Next she arranged the squares in various patterns until she settled on one that she really liked. It was almost lunch time and the girl decided to take a break from her quilt to make some pikelets for lunch (her husband’s favourite). After lunch she started sewing all of the squares together and was having such a great time using the fantastic quilting features on her near-new sewing machine until, incredibly, she ran out of green thread! She vowed to buy more thread during her lunch break tomorrow and will finish sewing the last row of squares together, before sewing a brown frame and then a slightly wider green frame around the assembled squares. Then she’ll just have to sandwich the quilt front, batting and backing fabric (a tasty green paisley) and free-motion stitch them together, then sew on the binding and it should be finished!

The end.

Another bullet point post, because that’s how I roll.

• Having a new car to drive is wonderful. It is so comfortable and easy to drive that sometimes I feel kinda guilty for not missing the old car. We went past the dealer last week and saw they had the Golf in their used car lot for $8999! That’s more than double the trade in price they gave us. Ouch!
• Speaking of the new car; I’ve had my heart in my throat several times when random and unexpected objects have come dangerously close to hitting the car. The first item was a full beer keg. I had just dropped the husband off at the train station one morning when a beer keg that was being rolled along the footpath from the delivery truck to a pub’s cellar door got away from the toothless gimp delivery guy and bounced off the kerb then rolled merrily within half a foot of the driver’s door before the delivery guy stopped it. Gah! Then the next morning I was most of the way to work when a delivery truck fully laden with empty blue wheelie bins rounded the corner some three or four cars ahead of me. Foolishly some idiot had elected to ride in the back of the uncovered truck so as to attempt to hold the tall stacks of bins steady. Inevitably as the truck rounded the corner two stacks of bins fell off and bounced along the road. Myself and the other drivers had to take evasive action to avoid hitting them. The last item to nearly hit the car was a moron attached to a leaf blower. Again I was on my way to work and there had been a car accident earlier on that had just been cleared. For whatever reason, the Road and Traffic Authority Guy was walking along the median strip with a leaf blower in his hand. I was just a few car lengths from him when he changed the angle of his grip and the length of the leaf blower stuck out well into my lane. I braked and just as I was about to pass him (and go *clunk*), he suddenly changed the angle of his grip again so the leaf blower was pointed in front of him. Emergency diverted!
• I’ve been really stressed these last few weeks with work and uni but the final exams were this week and now that it’s all over (at least the study part is, the work part hasn’t changed) I feel like a new person. The biggest weight has been lifted from my shoulders. The exam itself wasn’t particularly hard, there was just one question that I wasn’t sure about but when I went back to it after answering the rest of the paper, I had an answer for it.
• Speaking of work, we’re gearing up to do another round of interviews. There were 41 applicants that I’ve culled down to seven. Two look really worthwhile, one looks interesting and four aren’t suitable but met the criteria so therefore we’re obliged to interview them. I really can’t wait until we’re fully staffed again. I’ve got mountains of paperwork piling up and while my assistant does try very hard, she just doesn’t have an eye for detail. The sooner we can get someone else on, the sooner I can get my assistant onto tasks that better match her skill set and the happier I will be! The husband and I are even toying with the idea of taking a holiday. It’s not far off first wedding anniversary and with losing the baby shortly there after, it really feels as though it’s been many years since our last break. I guess ultimately it will depend on how long it takes to appoint and train up the new recruit as well as any developments with the swine flu hamdemic. Good times.
• Babies. The (in)fertility treatment doesn’t appear to be doing much. Meh.
• My sister inlaw is pregnant and due to give birth in August so to help prepare my little niece for the arrival of her little brother, the husband and I gave her a newborn Cabbage Patch Doll. She instantly fell in love with it and delighted everyone by giving it cuddles, drinks from its little plastic bottle and naps in its little plastic capsule. Adorable! She even had a mini-tantrum when my girlfriend’s ten month old daughter picked up the CPK’s bottle to play with. Hilarious! I was so happy that I could give my niece her first CPK. I have found memories of my own and while she’s far too little to remember receiving it, it’s still kinda special. :)
• I celebrated another birthday a few weeks ago and can honestly say it was one of the best. The husband asked me what I would like for my birthday dinner and I decided to have my favourite meal — Christmas dinner. Turkey, baked vegetables, cranberry sauce. Lovely! The girls at work had a morning tea for me and gave me a variey of birthday cards (and a gift voucher for the local department store). The husband, bless him, turned the event into an extended celebration by giving me a little gift each day for a few days either side of my birthday. One of the gifts he gave me was House of the Dead 2&3 for the Wii — it was my favourite game on the Dreamcast (remember that thing??) and I loved reliving the zombie blasting fun so much that I couldn’t grip a pen properly for a day or so afterwards. Stupid trigger finger. Heh. He also gave me Call of Duty 4 which I’ve been loving. For a day or so I tried to convince the husband that I really was Soap MacTavish, SAS and awesome. He wasn’t buying it.  I finished the single player campaign very quickly; in what seemed to be just five or six hours.  It ended just as I was really getting into it which was very disappointing.  I guess I’m just use to massive roleplaying games like Oblivion that take 200+ hours to complete.  Speaking of Oblivion, I still have the Shivering Isles expansion to finish.  I love this time between uni semesters!  Game on!
• What with it being Winter and all, I’ve made a scientific discovery. It would appear that the degree of sluttiness of the skirt plus knee length boots combo can be directly correlated to the percentage  of body fat of the wearer. It appears that the sluttier the skirt/boot combo; the greater the volume of body fat, particularly in the thigh/arse regions. I wonder if this is a local phenomenon or if it’s global? Clearly I should apply for a research grant.
• The first prize in Ozlotto is $90M this week. Lemme just spell that out for you: A$90,000,000.00 Jesus wept!

This is another bullet point blog post because anything is better than nothing, right?

• Two weeks ago we tyre-kicked a few cars before buying the new Skoda Octavia. We picked it up yesterday. Man, it kicks! We bought the 1.8L turbo with the 6 speed manual. It’s got the same motor and gearbox as the Audi A4… and it effing goes! Woo! I’ll never be late for anything ever again. Ha!
• I’m still on the no-refined sugar and low carb kick and have managed to keep it up pretty consistently with the exception of two small infringements. The first was when the husband dumped chocolate sauce over the top of my low-cal icecream without thinking and the second was last Thursday when one of the doctors bought a hot chocolate for me during a coffee run. It’s really easy to keep on track during the week; I have the same thing at the same time every day (fruit for breakfast, vegetables for lunch, Lean Cuisine or similar for dinner) but the weekends are a lot harder. I’m crazy for marmalade on toast for breakfast and lunches are normally toasted sandwiches. Dinners are often out and inevitably something like that awesome gourmet pizza that I love, or pasta, rice, Vietnamese noodles, etc. By Monday I’m feeling pretty blergh (?food coma) and then it starts over again. I have managed to lose a few kilograms with the new diet food regime and I’m feeling better than I have for a while. I’m onto the second month using Clomid and have noticed more side effects this time than I did last month. I was getting over the flu when I took it last month so I guess the side effects were probably camouflaged.
• Finals are just a few weeks away and I know I should be hitting the books in a big way but I’m really struggling to find the inspiration. I’m mostly too tired to study when I get home from work, and the weekends have been busy with car-hunting, family dramas, etc
• Speaking of work, we’ve just advertised for another full time admin. I’ll download the applications on Monday and commence the culling. I suspect there will be a lot of applications – I just hope we can find someone suitable. I can’t deal with anymore wackos!
• I’ve developed this stupid eye twitch which is infinitely worse when I’m stressed or tired, and that is basically every day. I asked Dr Google and it appears that Botox can be useful for eye twitches. Heh.
• Speaking of Botox, I’m about to turn 28. Again. I’m now younger than my younger sister. Hell, in another year I’ll be younger than my younger brother…
• The new Placebo CD was released this week. I’ve had it on repeat while cleaning the house this weekend. Big thumbs up.

I’ve just had a week of being sick with a throat/chest infection. I was so sick that I actually took two days off from work. My new (well sort of new) assistant did a stellar job of keeping everything together while I was gone. I’m so effing impressed with her that I’ve decided to bake a batch of my world famous chocolate chip cookies for her as a thank you.

We had planned on hitting the city today to visit my favourite camera store, followed by lunch at the Lindt cafe before dropping in on my sister. Those plans fell by the way side because I’m still not feeling 100% and it is so windy out today that I declared the city a no-go zone. That and I’m lazy. Heh.

So today is all about drinking tea, watching tivo and knitting. Sounds good to me!