Barefoot and Pregnant

I have figured out where this saying came from...if you've never seen a pregnant woman's feet up close, it's not pretty. At least not for about 75% of us (and of course I'm in that 75%). For at least the last two full months, maybe a little longer, my feet have been swelling. And not just a little. Normally if I flex my foot I can see the bones across the top of my foot...haven't seen those in weeks. I also have cankles. Besides being unattractive (at least I think my feet are unattractive right now, but my well-meaning friends say they look fine), it's pretty uncomfortable. It also makes wearing shoes a less than pleasant thing to do...thus the saying "barefoot and pregnant". (Disclaimer: I did not research this, I'm just saying, seems like the most likely explanation - with feet like this, who'd WANT to wear shoes???)

So, yesterday, I found my new favorite thing:

These are my Chacos. I used to have a pair back when I worked on the ropes course (because that's what all the cool kids did) and somewhere along the way lost or gave them away. BIG mistake. I had forgotten how comfy they are. But the absolute best feature about these shoes (well, right behind the good arch support) is that the straps are adjustable so they accommodate fat feet (and in my case, my feet are fat as in puffy on top). Really, they're ideal because they'll fit now AND after Baby A makes his appearance and my feet return to their normal state (yes, I realize they may be a little longer but they certainly should not be puffier). Yay!

If you want some and live in the area, go see Nathan's cousin at Backwoods and she'll get you fitted. If you don't live in the area, I'm pretty sure my last pair came from Zappos.

(Is it sad that I just dedicated an entire post to sport sandals? I will try to post more this weekend - I have some crafting I'll post pics of and we will also be working on the baby's room so at some point I will get some pics of that up as well.

Thanks...I think

A break from the picture updates for a poll.

Twice in the last week, I have had something happen that was a bit confusing. I thought maybe some of you have encountered this and have thought it through more than me. It's really no big deal, but for some reason it bugged me when it happened.

As I was walking out the main door of the office building I work in, there was a young man walking about 20 yards or so in front of me. He opened the door manually for himself, then reached around to the outside handicapped access button - you know, the one that makes the door stay open for a minute or so. Like I said, this happened twice in one week. It almost seems lazy to me on the part of those two people. I mean, if you want to hold the door open for me, that's nice, hold the door open. But for some reason it seems really lazy to me for them to reach around and bang the automatic door button as they're running past it. It also seems wasteful, especially here where we have such extreme temperatures and buildings like that are really hard to heat and cool effectively. Maybe I'm just being silly. Who knows. Tell me what you think - there's a poll over on the right hand side of the blog. Comments are always welcome too.

New Moon on Monday

I chose the song title (it’s by Duran Duran if anyone was wondering) first of all, because the story that follows happened last night (Monday night). A second reason is that I actually noticed that it’s a new moon right now. The one and only reason I noticed is because Kdog was chasing his tail this morning and he has been known to engage in that particular activity frequently during a full moon so I had to look at the atomic clock and see if there was one…there was not.

So, I woke up to a BIZARRE dream this morning. I generally don’t dream (because I don’t sleep hard enough/long enough for that to happen) so when I do, I most always remember them. Here’s the thing though - when they are particularly weird, 99.9999% of the time, I can trace them back to what I ate the day before. Peanut products. Usually it’s peanut butter. When I was in college, my friend Jama and I were somehow discussing weird dreams (probably something we were talking about on a train in Europe while we weren’t sleeping) and she mentioned that she thought she had read somewhere that peanut butter caused people to have strange dreams. I thought that was interesting and when I thought about it, I kind of agreed based on my personal experience. The 10 years since that time have only served to make me agree even more. Sometimes it’s peanut butter that I ate on a piece of toast or with an apple but it can be as little as a handful of peanut butter M&Ms that will cause it. This most recent case is no exception. At first I couldn’t place it because I’ve been out of peanut butter for about a week now so I didn’t know what the deal was and thought maybe this was just an anomaly. But no. Last night when I had some girls over I had snacks: brownies, Triscuits and cheese and olives, and a snack mix of candy corn and….PEANUTS. I had a couple of handfuls of that right before bedtime. My bad.

Anyway, just thought I’d throw that out there and see if anyone else has had similar experiences. Feel free to tell me I’m crazy - I won’t be offended.

Wave on Wave

When I worked on the ropes course at OSU, I had a friend named Josh. He was from Washington State and always had some interesting insight into things he was seeing in Oklahoma. One particular day as we were sitting around on our lunch break, he explained to us the finer points of waving at someone on a country road in Oklahoma.

The appropriate way to wave at a person that you pass on the road is this: First, your left arm is ALWAYS resting on the door beside (elbow hanging out the open window) you so you will always wave with your right hand which of course is resting atop the steering wheel. Second, you don’t wave with your whole hand because you need to maintain control of the vehicle HOWEVER you certainly don’t want to wave with only one finger because it could be mistaken as being the “wrong” finger so, you raise your index and middle fingers in tandem as a “howdy partener” type of greeting, while leaving the thumb and other two fingers to control the vehicle. Failure to acknowledge the people you pass on such roads will immediately identify you as “stuck up city folk”.

Now you know.