pregnancy 4 Comments

It’s Thursday

It’s been a few days since I wrote, so I figured I should spout off a few paragraphs before I turn in.

There’s this woman at work who’s pregnant — hold on, let me stop there. First off: is anyone else weirded out by calling your peers “women”? I mean, yeah, that’s what they are. Late 20’s, early 30’s… you’re not a girl anymore. You’re a woman. I’d rather call my female peers “chicks,” but some of them might not take kindly to that. And using the term “lady” is kind of weird, too. “Lady” always has the connotation of “bitch” somewhere in my mind. Like, “Hey, lady, get outta the way!” You know.

ANYway. There’s a chick at work who’s pregnant. There are a lot of them, actually, but I’m thinking of one in particular who’s got a personality that jives with mine. Irreverent, cool, blunt, and totally floored that she got knocked up by her boyfriend. I mean, no one thought of her as the motherly type before — not even herself.

She had her first ultrasound this week, and brought in the “baby pictures” for us to see. Thankfully, the printouts were labeled with body parts, to give us a frame of reference. One was a full-body shot, with the head and arm labeled, and one was an image of the head, with the eyes labeled. What’s really weird? This 21-week old fetus has teeth! Really visible teeth, obviously still in the gums, but still. I hadn’t thought of such things before. It was kind of cool, seeing an ultrasound photo where I didn’t feel all self-conscious about saying, “What IS that? What am I looking at?” Usually I feel kind of awkward about the whole thing.

At the ultrasound, she found out that her child is a girl. She told us all about how her unborn was doing friggin’ backflips, and the nice ultrasound technician was having a bitch of a time getting all the images she needed. One that she did manage to get, though, was a total spread-eagle of the kid with her feet up by her ears. We all had fun with that — I made some sort of comment that we’d have to get her daughter some big hoop earrings.

The more pregnant people I deal with on a regular basis, the more comfortable I get with the concept of *being* one of those people someday. I mean, you guys know me. Candlemaking and wearing the occasional pink shirt is as girly and frilly as I get. Something about pregnancy just harks back to my days in church, where there was always someone pregnant, and all the womenfolk could make perfect pie crusts and sew their kids’ halloween costumes and their favorite paint color was mauve. I’m not like that. But I guess moms don’t necessarily have to be.

I’m really tempted to share too much about my private time with Aaron… but I’m not going to. There are some things that, although really fucking funny, are just a little too personal and weird to share with the entire internets. If, however, you want to know what Aaron says after unprotected sex now, feel free to ask privately. 😉

randomness 2 Comments

Bored.

I’m having one of those weird, bored evenings.

I managed to write out an outline for podcast episode #21, but am not enthused enough to actually record it tonight. Not feeling creative enough to write on the NaNo. Not into testing out my Christmas Cookie candle scent. Don’t want to watch a DVD or read. Don’t even want to play Civilization, although that’s probably what I’ll end up doing. Seems to be my default “I’m bored” activity.

I’m just kind of tired. Not really depressed or anything, just tired. I think I ate too little during the day and too much in the evening, and that might have messed with my blood sugar / energy levels or something. I dunno. Also tired of coughing and clearing my throat ALL FUCKING DAY. It was especially helpful that today was my day to help answer the phones. Good times.

Hey, ladies? Ever had ovulation cramps? This is a new experience for me, and I must say that I don’t care for it. It’s not bad enough that I have to have cramps once a month — now I get them twice? WTF.

So, yeah. I guess I’m just having a weird, funky evening. Nothing a little Civ IV won’t cure.

crafty 1 Comment

Crunching Numbers

Listen. I know everybody who reads this isn’t all excited about candlemaking. I know this isn’t a candle blog. However: this is where I write everything I’d normally write in a journal — well, almost everything. I do have a private file for potentially embarrassing dreams and rants about people who might read my blog and things like that.

But I digress. My point is that I know you’re not all keen on my candling exploits. So, if you’d care to read my stream-of-consciousness number-crunching, continue reading beyond the cut. If not, simply enjoy a picture of my 3.75oz hexagonal votives:

Continue reading →

crafty 8 Comments

More Candle Crap

Well. I’m finally getting some income to balance out the $100+ expenditure on candle supplies in the past couple of months. It’s slow going, but I have faith that Gena will singlehandedly pimp my candles to the entire building where I work.

Sight unseen — or, rather, scent unsmelled — Gena decided that she wanted four, count ’em, four eggnog candles in the quilted cups like I made a few years back. She also told me that she’s a total nut about Christmastime, and has something like seven trees up in her house during the holidays. She sets up an annual gingerbread-themed display, she said, which got me thinking about making gingerbread candles, too.

So, I ordered eggnog and gingerbread scents, among other fragrance oils, from my new favorite scent supplier. I also hit the local Goodwill for more cups, as I only had two. Good thing that the quilted cups are among the glassware you will *always* find at Goodwill; I ended up buying four matching cups out of the 20 or so they had. All matching.

Made two eggnog candles Monday evening, and brought one to work on Tuesday for Gena’s approval. When she drooled her OK (and it *did* smell pretty damned good), I made two more, plus a votive jar for me. Or for selling later, whatever. Brought those to work today, all wrapped up in tissue paper and packed into a gift bag. Got paid in cash. Good deal. Fun times were had by all.

Later in the day, someone else in our department happened to be hobnobbing in Gena’s cube, and saw the candle she had sitting on her desk. Gena gladly volunteered that I made the candle, and that I sell candles, and sent Julie over to my cube to smell my wares. Now, my tealights’ scents have faded from being in such close proximity to other scents, so most of my tealights had just kind of mushed together into a generic soy candle smell… but the cranberry tealight was apparently strong enough and fresh enough to spark Julie’s interest. She requested a cranberry candle, once I told her how much I charge for various sizes. (Four bucks for a four-ounce large votive, BTW.)

In making Julie’s candle (and one for me) this evening, I have officially used up all of my cranberry scent. If this is a hit, I’ll be needing to make another candle supply order, even though I had told myself that I wouldn’t buy more supplies until I absolutely had to. But, shit, if cranberry sells for the holidays, I’m gonna buy more cranberry.

Maybe tomorrow night, I can finally get around to testing that gingerbread… God, I’ve turned into a craft geek.