Quote of the Day

"Heene believes the world is going to end in 2012. Because of that, he wanted to make money quickly, become rich enough to build a bunker or something underground, where he can be safe from the sun exploding."

- Robert "I sold Balloon Boy hoax evidence to Gawker" Thomas' attorney, Linda Lee, gives Heene's supposed motive, demonstrating extreme credulity on someone's part.

Crazy calligraphy!

So my 'teach yourself calligraphy' saga continues. I think I'm at the point where I'm considering picking up real ink and pens, because I think it's going to affect how I do some of the letters. (I realized early that, although I could take certain shortcuts with my felt-tip pen and the letters would look fine, the required push/pull would probably not work with a metal nib.)

I've decided to learn three hands: square capitals, uncial and insular minuscule. That's pretty much the 8th cen. English version of MS Word's Heading 1, Heading 2 and Normal styles. You'd do your title in square caps, the first couple of lines in uncial, and then the bulk of the work in insular minuscule. Like the Word styles, that's not the only way to do it, but it looks like it was probably pretty common.

ZOMG square caps make me pull my hair! Many of the letters are just dead easy. Working my way through the first half of the alphabet, I felt like a pro. OK, "C" was a little tricky. But "B" was easy. So were D, E, F, H, I...

"M" is about the hardest thing I've tried to write yet, in all three hands. It's just awful! "N" is a little better, but then there's "W", which usually looks mutated when I'm done with it.

Yeesh.

On the other hand, the insular minuscule looked much harder than it was. I'm a long way from being good at it, but all the little ornaments and clubs on the letters weren't so hard to make. It's very Tolkienesque, too, which is neat.

Four to six weeks til delivery

Tomorrow, I'll be 36 weeks pregnant. This is almost exactly the time I gave birth to Spud.

However, then my blood pressure was something like 140/90. My feet were swollen and I saw spots randomly. As of yesterday, my blood pressure was still 116/70, which is about where it's been the whole pregnancy. No swelling, no spots. Heck, I even have less heartburn this time around.

The midwife declared that I have a "two-headed baby," by which you should infer that the baby's butt is as hard as its head and she couldn't tell which was uppermost, not that the ultrasound tech made some critical error. So I'm to go for another ultrasound on Monday to determine if the baby is breech or not.

My coworkers keep asking me when I'm leaving. Like I know. Um, when I go into labor or get too uncomfortable to come to work, whichever comes first? The baby has so far refused to pencil in a date on my calendar for our kickoff meeting.

Spud wants "Up!" a lot more and has taken up repeating "bay-bee" at random intervals. I finally asked him if he was the baby. "Yes!" (Not that this is a definite indication of an actual functioning question/answer pair.) We're telling him he's our boy, our big boy, and that the new baby is coming soon, and that we love him and we'll love the baby. It's gonna be a rough time for the poor guy regardless.

Them? They're not with us.

My Dear Spouse is a political blogger. I've started reading blogs in the fat acceptance community, which (at least recently) sometimes bleed over into general feminist issues. And something keeps bugging me.

"We," whoever "we" are, are reasonable people. Sometimes we have uncompromising views on a topic, but we're never (or rarely) vicious about it. We're here to say our piece, maybe have some intelligent debate. Honestly, we allow for dissenting viewpoints, although we won't tolerate trolls. We don't automatically think you're an evil person if you disagree with us.

Well, yes, there is Bob. Bob's... well. He thinks he's part of our movement, but really, he's missing the point somewhat. He's not respectful, he trolls other blogs, he uses ad hominem attacks and posts incoherent screeds. But Bob's not really with us. Even if he says he is.

The Other Side? Oh, they're just full of Bobs. Gadzooks, I can hardly read one of their rants without tearing out my hair. Always eager to point a finger, no tactic is too low to stoop to. I can provide you with URLs if you don't believe me! Geeze Lousie, those people are crazy.

I mean, they even think Bob represents most of us!