still no kittens

I keep taking pictures of Lilu, but none of them succeeds in showing just how golompulous her belly is getting. See?

She spends a lot of time sprawling on the floor like this, and if you look really close, you can see that her eyes aren’t even closed. She’s not sleeping, she’s just lying around waiting for it to be over. She sits oddly, has trouble jumping, falls over while bathing, can’t reach around her belly to scratch her chin, she’s almost wider than she is long at this point, and we keep telling eachother it can’t be much longer, but days drag by and there she is, still pregnant. She weighs a ton, too – she makes almost as much noise clomping down the stairs as Ignatz does.

When, oh when will this madness end?

Song du jour of the day: I Can’t Wait, by Stevie Nicks.

scurvy

Okay, not really. But this is a tough time of year for fruit at Casa Alala. Apples and oranges are SO over. Grapes and kiwis still have to be flown in from Chile. The only things really ripe and semi-local at this time of year (um, Israel’s still in Europe, by Eurovision reckoning – but then, so is Algeria. What can I say, they do pop songs, not geography) are berries, and they sell for like a dollar each. And even though I haven’t actually lived in the Pacific Northwest for over ten years, I still think of it as home, and back home, berry bushes are basically weeds. I can’t bring myself to buy berries, anymore than I could plunk down $12 for a bunch of dandelions at a florist.

Song du jour of the day: Malta. They’ve never won, but they come in second a lot. They seem to have noticed that Russia tends to do well (its former satellite countries give it high points, so even when the Russian entry sucks, it comes in like third), so they name-check Gorky Park and call it Vodka, in a bid for the bloc vote. Psht. Get in line, sweetie.

Surpassed

Well, it’s happened. We went shoe-shopping for Ignatz yesterday (why, black Converse Chuck Taylor All-Stars, of course. Whatever else?), and we were unable to buy them in my size, so I could have them when he outgrows them. My son, my offspring, the child of my womb, has bigger feet than I do.

surrender

Kinda giving up on the whole Blog365 thing. I’m sorry, I thought I could do it, I thought making myself write would keep my skills sharp through regular practice, and also sometimes things happen that I should document, but I don’t because I just don’t feel like dealing with them, and I thought daily posting would force some of those out, you know? But the only practice I’m getting is in writing slapdash whatever just to get it over with, and if I don’t feel like tackling something big, I still don’t, I just do some pointless navel-gazing and hit publish. Meh.

Also, I’m not really sick anymore, but I’m not all-the-way better. Life is back to normal, but I do tend to tank right around 10 pm, and oh look, it’s 10:15zzzz…

privatize this

I will concede this about privatization: it puts more than one company in a particular market, forcing those companies to compete on price or quality or service, which is ultimately good for the customer. Remember when the government broke up AT&T’s monopoly in the 1980s and you started getting all those annoying telemarketers from Sprint and MCI trying to get you to switch (if you lived in the U.S. at the time)? Yeah, it was a pain in the ass, but now you have cheaper long-distance, or more frequent-flyer miles, or the chance to do some good when you pay your phone bill. There’s something for every market, pretty much. This is good.

I am going to lose my voice

I’m already croaky and weird-sounding. I feel better, though. Not all the way better, and very very sad whenever I do something stupid like, oh, climb a zillion stairs – did I mention that my job is on the third floor of a building with no elevator? Or walk a mile to the train station.

snicker

Okay, it’s not funny really, it’s probably quite illegal and I’m sure I’d be miffed if it happened to me, but still. Because it happened to people who have just re-elected Silvio Berlusconi again, even though he owns the media and is a first-class dickhead, I get to snicker.

From the Guardian: Every Italian’s income posted on internet

I should be nicer to Italy. They make the world’s best coffee, and anybody who knows my coffee-habits will know that that is anything but faint praise.

I’ll come back tomorrow and paste in the food and music stuff, because for the food? I took pictures! Ha!