| Woohoo! |
[May. 23rd, 2005|11:48 am] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  ecstatic | ] |
I just got the results of my CVS, and what a lovely late birthday present! The karyotype appears completely normal (big sigh of relief). The results of the cystic fibrosis carrier screening blood test I had were negative (another sigh of relief). And I'm having a boy! Actually, I'd have been just as happy to be able to say it was a girl—it's just that knowing the sex makes this little person more real. So now I can stop saying 'it' and start saying 'he'. All we have to do now is come up with a name...oh, and make it through the remaining six months of pregnancy. But things have been going well, and I'm quite optimistic. |
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| Update on pregnancy |
[May. 14th, 2005|02:05 pm] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  optimistic | ] |
I had chorionic villus sampling on Thursday. That means they took a tiny piece of the placenta, which is made by the baby and thus has the same genetic structure, and they are growing it in culture so that they can look at the chromosomes. Because I'm forty years old, there's some concern about the potential for serious chromosomal problems (the kind where the baby only rarely survives to birth, and never much longer). But the chance is relatively low, and we are certainly hoping for the best. They should know by next Friday (which is my birthday, and what better time for good news?) or early the next week at the latest. I'll also find out whether it's a boy or a girl.
The doctor took the sample with a needle stuck through my abdomen, which was not in the least fun. On the positive side, she used ultrasound to guide the procedure (the tip of the needle barely goes into the placenta and is kept well away from the baby). That means I got to see the baby moving around. A lot! It was amazing. The heart rate was 153, which I was informed is just right. And when the little arms and legs moved around, you could really tell it was a baby. The still shots ( here ) aren't quite as convincing. But the doctor did manage to get one with the arm up (top image). She said the baby was waving, but I'm not entirely certain it wasn't thumbing its nose at us.
I've had to rest after the procedure (it carries only a very small risk of miscarriage, but my OB doesn't want me take any chances). But at least I'm able to sit up and spend a bit of time at the computer now. So I thought I'd share what I know with all of the lovely people on my flist who've been so marvellously supportive. Thanks for all your thoughts and prayers; they mean so much to me. |
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| Thanks! |
[May. 4th, 2005|03:34 pm] |
I want to thank everyone for their support and good wishes. I have the most wonderful flist! I love you all. ::hugs:: I'm finally off bedrest, although I'm not supposed to do too much at this time. I'll try to catch up with ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif) allthejellies, although I'll be spending most of my vertical time trying to do actual work. Anyway, I thought you might want to see the ultrasound from last week.
( Check it out )
All right, it doesn't look like much at this point. (The 'H' on the top image indicates the end with the head; otherwise there'd be no clue.) But its heart is beating, and the doctor assures me that it is quite normal. So yay! |
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| Why I've been away |
[Apr. 27th, 2005|12:33 pm] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| | optimistic | ] |
I haven't been on LJ for some time now (I especially apologise to ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) aka_elle, as I was meant to go over community rules with her). There has been reason. Some of you are aware of my less than pleasant obstetrical history. Well, it appeared that it might be turning round, as I had made it through nine weeks of pregnancy without any problems. With only a few days to go before my ultrasound (when I hoped to have good news to share), however, I had an episode of bleeding. The bleeding was very limited, but I was immediately ordered to lie flat on my back until the ultrasound (yesterday). Fortunately, I didn't have any further bleeding. Even more fortunately, the results of the ultrasound were promising (I haven't had the official results, but I did have some things, such as the heart beating regularly, pointed out by the tech). But because of the stress of the ultrasound (especially as it included a transvaginal examination), I've been told off to bed rest again for a bit. I discovered I could use my laptop (if rather awkwardly) whilst lying on my side, so I decided to update my journal to let people know what was going on. I am quite excited by the positive development (I've never made it to this stage before), but naturally I am worried as well. I'll add more as I know it, and when I'm up and about again I'll post a copy of the ultrasound (if anyone is interested). |
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| To Susi |
[Mar. 29th, 2005|06:20 pm] |
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Happy Birthday, Susi! |
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| This absolutely must happen to Giles in somebody's fic |
[Mar. 22nd, 2005|01:16 am] |
I read the following in the opinion columns of The Times (the anecdote was at the beginning, so that's all I've kept):
Let me shake you by the hand and lead you through my etiquette crisis
LA Notebook by Chris Ayres
Greeting people isn't easy. In fact, the most embarrassing, fist-biting moment of my adult life involved a botched handshake in a Manhattan gym.
It happened when I walked past a man I recognised—a fellow English journalist—in the changing room. We had both spotted each other, but neither of us wanted to talk. Being polite, however, I half-turned to make sure my acquaintance wouldn’t be offended. He did the same. Reluctant eye contact was made, so we both said "Hey!" in faux cheery voices.
This created another problem: could the greeting be left at that? With my shoulders now at 35 degrees to my hips, I decided that it couldn't; so I turned and offered a warm, sweaty right hand. My acquaintance (the greetee) didn't notice the gesture until it was too late.
Quickly, I withdrew. By this time, however, his own hand was being extended. Panicked, I sent my palm back into the action, only to notice that its target was now retreating. Unable to rescue the situation, I went ahead with the engagement anyway, missed, and ended up grabbing on to the greetee's startled thumb.
Once the thumbshake was over, neither of us could look at each other. So we exchanged strangled niceties, then ran back to our exercise machines to work off the embarrassment. I remembered telling myself that only the English could become entangled in such an excruciating social faux pas in a place of relaxation.
I have been wary of handshakes ever since.
When I read this, I was struck by how appropriate the whole situation would be for Giles to encounter, either as the greeter or the startled greetee (I hope it was the entire greetee who was startled, and not only the thumb). In fact, I could really see this happening if Giles were to run into Wesley early during the latter's tenure with Angel. This isn't so much a challenge as a hope that someone will someday, somehow incorporate the incident into a Giles fic. |
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| Six Nations Grand Slam!!!!! |
[Mar. 21st, 2005|03:09 am] |
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That is all. |
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| Talk about damning with faint praise |
[Mar. 18th, 2005|12:38 am] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  amused | ] |
I simply have to share this quote from Gerard Baker's opinion column in today's issue of The Times:
"It might even be said to have worked, after a fashion, in a sense, for a while, maybe."
I have never before seen such a sense of dubiety conveyed in only positive—more or less—words. |
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| I ate today! |
[Mar. 7th, 2005|11:29 pm] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  drained | ] |
You may laugh, but I have been desperately ill since Friday, and nothing nutritive passed my lips for three full days. (What did pass my lips, unfortunately in both directions, was water. I am now up to fizzy drinks in the liquid department.) I really won't go into the grim specifics (I wish I didn't know them myself); suffice it to say that sitting has not been an option for me. But today at dinner I was able to eat some food, and though internal rumblings indicate a less than complete success, it was not an abject failure. More importantly, I am now able to sit at my computer for an almost normal length of time. I was able to keep up with lj only sporadically, which I regret.
I have to share something which may be of some interest, at least to jedi_penguin and her daughter Sandy. It's a letter to the Editor from the on-line edition of today's Times:
Letters to the Editor
March 08, 2005
Royal wedding
From Mr Phil Ridgway
Sir, I have assiduously been following the reports and correspondence about the forthcoming wedding of Charles and Camilla (letters, March 4, etc). I don't care about the venue, the dress or if she becomes queen. It's just that this is surely the best chance I shall ever have of seeing antidisestablishmentarianism used in earnest.
Yours faithfully,
PHIL RIDGWAY,
27 Naverne Meadows,
Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 1HU.
[e-mail address deleted out of courtesy]
March 6.
I, for one, rejoice with him. |
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| I'm back... |
[Feb. 28th, 2005|05:06 am] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  touched | ] |
...and only a little depressed. I did manage to read my flist, but I wasn't up to commenting and probably won't do. I do want to thank all the people who sent me good wishes. They really did make me feel better. I'm especially grateful to phendog, who wrote me a House/BtVS cross even though she doesn't watch House (and let me note that it was good), aka_elle, who was kind enough to repeat my crossover challenge in allthejellies, and kaymickbee, who although also not a House watcher offered to write me a drabble (and something uplifting in a happy B/G future would be splendid). All the caring was greatly appreciated, and definitely raised my spirits.
One good piece of news is that my sister managed to make it after all. I don't see her often, and it was good to see her.I also think it made my parents feel better that both of us were there. The family were all very supportive of one another, and the service was exactly what my grandmother would have wanted. It also made me feel good that the quilt my mother and I made for my grandmother—which had photographs of all six of her children both as babies and as young adults, and which she took from her house (when she was still able to live there on her own) to my uncle's house (where she lived for two years, until she needed professional care), and finally to the nursing home, where it hung on her wall—was buried with her. For me, it was rather touching that everyone apparently agreed that it was important to her. |
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| Will be gone for a time |
[Feb. 25th, 2005|04:36 am] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  depressed | ] |
My grandmother died Tuesday. She had Alzheimer disease, and she'd had a severe stroke, and she was in hospice care. So it wasn't exactly a shock. And I rarely saw her. But she was my last living grandparent, and I loved her, so I still feel awful. I really didn't want to talk about it, because, honestly, I didn't really want to think about it. But I'm going to be off lj for a bit, probably till Monday, as my husband and I will be travelling to attend the funeral. Which is not something I want to do, but I know that my father needs my support, because he's the eldest and will be supporting all his siblings instead of the other way round. And my mother is already emotionally exhausted from dealing with the details of the terminal illness. And my sister won't be able to be there. Lucky her.
As I decided to write about this after all, I decided to be selfish and beg for a fic to make me feel better. What I would really like to read is a BtVS/House crossover, with the pairings of B/G and House/Wilson. And I want it to have something to do with Monster Trucks. Maybe Buffy persuades Giles to go as a sort of tribute to Jenny. Maybe House and Wilson are in Southern California for a conference, or maybe Buffy and Giles are travelling. The details don't really matter to me. What matters is that they meet House and Wilson because of Monster Trucks, and House in his abrasive but perceptive way tells them how they really feel about each other. If someone could write this for me, even just briefly, I think it would make me feel better. |
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| Banned books |
[Feb. 24th, 2005|12:31 am] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  contemplative | ] |
Here's a meme that's definitely up my street, gakked from fannishnej:
List of the top 110 banned books (of all time). Bold the ones you've read. Italicize the ones you've read part of. Underline the ones you specifically want to read (at least some of). Read more. Convince others to read some.
#1 The Bible
#2 Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
#3 Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
#4 The Koran
#5 Arabian Nights
#6 Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
#7 Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
#8 Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
#9 Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
#10 Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
#11 The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
#12 Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
#13 Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
#14 Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
#15 Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
#16 Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
#17 Dracula by Bram Stoker
#18 Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin
#19 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
#20 Essays by Michel de Montaigne
#21 Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
#22 History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
#23 Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
#24 Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
#25 Ulysses by James Joyce
#26 Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
#27 Animal Farm by George Orwell
#28 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
#29 Candide by Voltaire
#30 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
#31 Analects by Confucius
#32 Dubliners by James Joyce
#33 Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
#34 Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
#35 Red and the Black by Stendhal
#36 Das Capital by Karl Marx
#37 Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire
#38 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
#39 Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence
#40 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
#41 Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
#42 Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
#43 Jungle by Upton Sinclair
#44 All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
#45 Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx
#46 Lord of the Flies by William Golding
#47 Diary by Samuel Pepys
#48 Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
#49 Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
#50 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury (this book being on the list has kind of a grim irony, doesn't it?)
#51 Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
#52 Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
#53 One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
#54 Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus
#55 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
#56 Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X
#57 Color Purple by Alice Walker
#59 Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke
#60 Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
#61 Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
#62 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#63 East of Eden by John Steinbeck
#64 Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
#65 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
#66 Confessions by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#67 Gargantua and Pantagruel by Francois Rabelais
#68 Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
#69 The Talmud
#70 Social Contract by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#71 Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
#72 Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
#73 American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
#74 Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
#75 Separate Peace by John Knowles
#76 Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
#77 Red Pony by John Steinbeck
#78 Popol Vuh
#79 Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith
#80 Satyricon by Petronius
#81 James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
#82 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
#83 Black Boy by Richard Wright
#84 Spirit of the Laws by Charles de Secondat Baron de Montesquieu
#85 Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
#86 Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
#87 Metaphysics by Aristotle
#88 Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder
#89 Institutes of the Christian Religion by Jean Calvin
#90 Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse
#91 Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
#92 Sanctuary by William Faulkner
#93 As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
#94 Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin
#95 Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig
#96 Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
#97 General Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud
#98 Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
#99 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Alexander Brown
#100 Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
#101 Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest J. Gaines
#102 Emile Jean by Jacques Rousseau
#103 Nana by Emile Zola
#104 Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
#105 Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
#106 Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#107 Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
#108 Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck
#109 Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark #110 Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
I appear to be rather fond of banned books. |
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| ♥ Return of the Meme ♥ |
[Feb. 14th, 2005|10:55 pm] |
I had to do something to celebrate Valentine's Day on lj, so here's a meme I gakked from phendog:
♥♥♥♥♥ Happy Valentine's Day, you lot! ♥♥♥♥♥ |
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| The Return of Sick and Twisted |
[Feb. 14th, 2005|04:22 am] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  weird | ] |
A long time ago, I visited the then-newest feature at The Shrine of Insanity and created a sick and twisted little B/G (well, kinda sorta B/G, in a partners-in-crime sense) vignette. (This is only one of the many fun effects you can achieve by putting Buffy characters into these lunatics' story generators. The interactive porn can be, well, interesting, to say the least. I highly recommend this website as a work avoidance tool.) I posted the results at allthejellies. The lovely and talented phendog, abetted by malnpudl, convinced me (all right, it took very litle convincing) that it was worth repeating in my own lj for those on my flist who aren't members of allthejellies (or at least weren't back when I first posted). So here it is in all its glory (and no, I didn't play with it until it came out the way I wanted, although I did clean up the punctuation and such). If you're interested, check out:
( Assassinate a Celebrity )
But it didn't end there. No, the good (?) people at the Shrine were not done with their pogrom against celebrities. (And who can blame them?) So I returned to the Shrine for the inevitable sequel. Remembering that some people castigated me for slaying the beloved [sic] Whedon rather than the notorious arch-Spikolator Marti Noxon, I decided to remedy the situation. I fired up the sequel and plugged in Giles's name as the POV character, with Buffy listed as the accomplice friend. I then answered the remaining questions (there were quite a few, mainly about weapons) cold, with no foreknowledge of the story. This is what came out, changed only with respect to punctuation/proofreading:
( Check it out... )
My only disappointment was that Giles's name never was used in the sequel (why'd they bother having me give it, I wonder?) But if you read the story knowing that Giles is the POV character, it all makes sense. The weapons, the action; everything seems so apt. Buffy even dusted off her hands after a henchman was killed, so they were obviously vampires. It's spooky. Although I don't know why I thought Marti Noxon would drive a Reliant Robin. Then again, perhaps I'm best off without that much insight into my psyche.
Be sure to visit The Shrine of Insanity and play around a bit. It's strangely addictive. And if this wasted five minutes of your life and precious space on your friends page you'll never get back, blame phendog. ::grins:: I'm sure she won't mind. |
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| Leave for just a little while... |
[Jan. 8th, 2005|08:55 pm] |
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...and your flist is impossible to get through. Yikes! And I had a really good reason; I had LASIK done and am just now able to use the computer again. (And my vision has been corrected to 20/15. Woohoo! I've worn glasses almost my entire life, so this is simply amazing for me.) And I've probably overdone it just trying to catch up on my flist (which is fairly small, but prolix). So if anyone has received oddly tardy replies from me, or been surprised not to have me reply to something that would usually be up my street, now you know why. I think I'll go rest my eyes now... |
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| As a cat, I had to do this one |
[Dec. 7th, 2004|05:11 pm] |
Gakked from phendog:
 | You scored as Love Machine Cat. Look out! The love machine is on the loose. You might want to take off a night of permiscuity and go get your junk checked out. Nothing sadder than a cat with herpes.
Love Machine Cat | | 67% | Nerd Cat | | 58% | Ninja Cat | | 50% | Pissed at the World Cat | | 33% | Couch Potato Cat | | 33% | Derranged Cat | | 33% | Drunk Cat | | 25% | </td>
Which Absurd Cat are you?
created with QuizFarm.com |
That picture is too cute for words! |
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